Hugvísindasvið

“I am an other and I always was…”

On the Weird and Eerie in Contemporary and Digital Cultures

Ritgerð til MA-prófs í menningafræði

Bob Cluness

May 2019
 Háskóli Íslands

Hugvísindad

Menningarfræði

“I am an other and I always was…”

On the Weird and Eerie in Contemporary and Digital Cultures

Ritgerð til MA-prófs í menningafræði

Bob Cluness
Kt.: 150676-2829

Tutor: Björn Þór Vilhjálmsson

May 2019
Abstract

Society today is undergoing a series of processes and changes that can be only be
described as weird. From the apocalyptic resonance of climate change and the drive to
implement increasing powerful technologies into everyday life, to the hyperreality of a
political and media landscape beset by chaos, there is the uneasy feeling that society,
culture, and even consensual reality is beginning to experience signs of disintegration.
What was considered the insanity of the margins is now experienced in the mainstream,
and there is a growing feeling of wrongness, that the previous presumptions of the self,
other, reality and knowledge are becoming untenable.

This thesis undertakes a detailed examination of the weird and eerie as both an
aesthetic register and as a critical tool in analysing the relationship between individuals
and an impersonal modern society, where agency and intention is not solely the preserve
of the human and there is a feeling not so much of being to act, and being acted upon.
Using the definitions and characteristics of the weird and eerie provided by Mark Fisher’s
critical text, The Weird and the Eerie, I set the weird and eerie in a historical context
specifically regarding both the gothic, weird fiction and with the uncanny, I then analyse
the presence of the weird and the eerie present in two cultural phenomena, the online
phenomenon of the Slender Man, and J.G. Ballard’s novels Crash (1973) and Concrete
Island 1974). By exploring the presence of the weird and eerie in contemporary texts and
online communities, I show that they are aesthetic modes that are prevalent in many levels
of cultures in society. The weird and eerie I conclude provide the elements in making new
conceptual tools for making sense of an increasingly chaotic and inhuman social world.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following people for their help, support, and advice in helping
to make this thesis a possibility.

To my wife Sigga, for her patience and love in during times of high stress and crisis. Also,
to our feline son Stalin for existing and helping to keep things in perspective.

To my friend Nikkita Hamar Patterson for her incredible help and fortitude in editing and
proofreading this thesis.

To my MA Thesis advisor Björn Þór Vilhjálmsson, for his supervision and helping to
main some form of clarity and quality control on this essay.

To Matt Colquhoun, aka Xenogothic, for the theoretical reading list, suggestions, and
online discussions that began this conceptual journey.

To Xavier Aldana Reyes for the reading list on contemporary gothic studies, as well as
Simon Sellars and Damien Patrick Williams for their advice and suggestions on a variety
of topics associated with the subject of this thesis.

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Contents

Table of Contents
Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1
Part 1: The Weird and the Eerie – Definitions and Concepts........................................................ 7
1.1: The Weird and the Eerie – The Gothic ............................................................................ 10
1.2: The Weird and the Eerie - The Uncanny.......................................................................... 17
Part 2: Slenderman and the Fictioning of the Real ...................................................................... 25
2.1: Of the Enlightenment and Romanticism – Of Objective “Reality” and Subjective
“Fiction” .................................................................................................................................. 27
2.2: Spectral Realities and Ghosts in Modern Machines......................................................... 29
2.3: More Real than the Real Itself: Baudrillard and the Image as Reality ............................. 30
2.4: Theory-Fictions, the Ccru, and Hyperstitions .................................................................. 33
2.5: On Slender Man and the Creation of the Internet’s First Folk Devil ............................... 38
2.5.1: Hyperstition Stage One - “An Element of Effective Culture that Makes Itself Real.”
............................................................................................................................................. 44
2.5.2: Hyperstition Stage 2 - “A Fictional Quantity Functioning as a Time-Traveling
Device.” ............................................................................................................................... 47
2.5.3: Stage Three of Hyperstition - “The Entity as a Coincidence Intensifier.” ................ 48
2.5.4 - Hyperstition Stage Four - “Call to the Old Ones.” .................................................. 50
2.6: Accelerated fictions and the Collapse of the Social Real................................................. 53
Part 3: Driving Beyond Death - The Eerie Thanatos of Non-Place in J.G. Ballard’s Crash and
Concrete Island ........................................................................................................................... 55
3.1: Modernism and the Uncanny ........................................................................................... 56
3.2 From Place to Non-Place, and the Seamless Landscapes of Global Capitalism ............... 59
3.3: Long Live the Autogeddon - J.G. Ballard and Crash ...................................................... 65
3.4: Set Adrift on Voided Bliss - Concrete Island .................................................................. 74
Conclusion................................................................................................................................... 82
Bibliography................................................................................................................................ 87
Filmography ................................................................................................................................ 91

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Introduction
The current social climate of the times and conditions that we are living in can be
described in various ways – scary, anxious, unreal, bizarre, absurd, etc. But one word that
would best seem to describe our ongoing social situation is weird. Whether it is the
acceleration of climate change, the hyperreality of our politics, the ever-inexorable
advances in global capitalist systems, or the advances of bleeding edge digital
technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and algorithmic machine learning, there
is an increasingly pervasive view that society’s ability to generate grand narratives of
consensual forms of social reality are starting to erode and fray at the edges. There is a
distinct vulnerability in the air, one that is full of uncertainty, unpredictability, and
instability. Nobody is sure of anything anymore.

In order to make sense of the increasingly inexplicable phenomena happening

around us, people are taking up various forms and avenues of knowledge and meaning.
There is the increased interest in the paranormal, as well as neo-pagan traditions such as
witchcraft and astrology. There has been the escalation in mainstream media and politics
of various anti-governmental “conspiracy theories” as well as the rise of the “alt-right”
movements in various online and material subcultures. Meanwhile in various fields of
popular culture, such as TV, cinema, music, art and fiction, there has been more explicit
explorations into these realms of the weird, and how they unsettle us.

In this thesis, I will analyse how the weird and the eerie as aesthetic concepts have
been defined and developed, in particular by the writer Mark Fisher in his book The Weird
and the Eerie (2016), and how they link with more historical and traditional nodes of the
cultural weird, specifically through the historical concepts and motifs provided by the
gothic and the uncanny as cultural and aesthetic forms. By analysing and exploring how
the gothic, and therefore the weird and eerie, have been present in the cultural expression
of historic periods of anxiety and uncertainty in society, I hope to show how the concept
of the weird and eerie can provide a basis not only to understand and explain inherent
anxieties that are prevalent in our digital cultures, but also how such notions of the weird
and the eerie can help fuel the social imagination, an imagination that has been stymied
and cut off in an era of neoliberal capitalist realism, to influence the invention of new
ideas, concepts and fictions that allow society to imagine possible futures and worlds
outside the one that we currently live in.

1
 From this analysis I will lay out and define the concepts of their weird and eerie
across two particular cultural texts and/or cultural phenomena to highlight how the weird
and eerie are not only present in these texts and cultural mediums, but also how such
aesthetics are bleeding into and multiplying within our everyday lives. I aim to show how
each of these texts converge in the mind, creating interferences between different types
of thinking, that materialize when science, philosophy, and art attempt to work on
differing levels of immanence, materialisation, and composition. A particular artwork, for
example, will lay out a concept onto a material plane using different registers such as
sound, text, or imagery, while also generating affects and sensations that place the viewer
directly in the realm of the concept, a realm that may have been otherwise disavowed of
repressed through the ideas of rational perception and of science. The texts and
phenomena presented in this thesis embody or contain elements of the weird and the eerie,
either deliberately or inadvertently, and in doing so help us to make sense of an
increasingly unsettling and anxious world.

In Chapter two, I explore and analyse how our forms of social and consensual
reality have become more frayed and contentious as the boundaries between “fiction” and
“reality” become increasingly blurred and permeable. Jean Baudrillard in the 1990s
coined the term “theory fiction,” to describe the shift in culture during the 1980s and
1990s towards the field of third order simulacra, thereby causing the elimination of the
distinction between fiction (particularly science fiction) and social theory. But writers like
J.G. Ballard, in his 1971 essay “Fictions of Every Kind,” already acknowledge that in a
consumerist world, society is bombarded daily by various fictions and narratives that
produced by capitalism and absorbed through mass media, as these fictions aim to alter
or change social reality in some form. As a response Ballard advocated that science fiction
and its ability to meld elements of speculation and literary fiction was “the only possible
realism in an increasingly artificialized society, but as an ingredient in its acceleration.”1
For Ballard, the author is no longer a singular artistic genius, but, in line with earlier
movements such as constructivism, is a node or cog in a much larger machine: “he is now
merely one of a huge army of people filling the environment with fictions of every kind.”2
Similarly, Fisher in many of his works and essays had laid out in depth the idea that
various forms of “fictions,” from financial capitalism, with its automated trading based

1
Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, “Introduction”, in Robin Mackay & Armen Avanessian (Eds),
#Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, (London: Urbanomic, 2014): 19.
2
J.G Ballard, “Fictions of Every Kind”, in Robin Mackay & Armen Avanessian (Eds), #Accelerate: The
Accelerationist Reader, (London: Urbanomic, 2014): 238.
2
on virtual abstractions of capital, to various political narratives that are used to shape and
mould our social and consensual reality. However, the weird and eerie as aesthetic modes,
often experienced through the gothic is increasing prevalent in our digitised worlds,
where we are required to deal with concepts such as “post-truth” and “alternative facts,”
and where the ability of society to determine what appears and occurs as “reality” at a
social level has become decidedly trickier. It is an age that is ripe for the contagions of
fiction ready to burst through from the outside and not only affect, but indeed alter the
fabric of our social reality.

Twentieth century culture has seen a ferment of the blurring of fiction and reality
from the spread of H.P Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos across various social and cultural
forms, to the paratextual blending of fact and fiction in The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo
Sánchez, Daniel Myrick, 1999). But it was in the 1990s and 2000s that artists, writers and
theorists, taking their cue not only from the likes of J.G. Ballard and Jean Baudrillard, but
also from the emergent genre of cyberpunk fiction and cybernetic theories, began to
produce hybrid texts and practices that were explicit in warping the boundaries between
the real and fiction. As Macon Holt explains:

While earlier writers, such as Bataille, Nietzsche and Sartre had attempted to use
fiction to develop a philosophical project, these works often served as illustrative,
where the fiction served the philosophical project. In the 90s, however, theory-
fiction, a practice built out of the shaky ontological foundation of postmodernism,
attempted to collapse these things into one another. Where the writing of theory
could fictionalize and produce reality. In short, this method was built from the
understanding that our ideas about reality, our theories of it, came out of fictions.
Fictions we used to act and shape reality. However, for many of theory-fiction’s
practitioners, the fictions that we lived with in the 90s and even now had not kept
pace with our strange new world.3

Such writings and modes of presentation were prevalent in the texts and academic
presentations-as-art-installations from the Ccru (Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit)
collective that was based from the University of Warwick in the late 1990s, where a group
of theorists, philosophers, writers, and artists attempted to collapse such ontological
boundaries, meshing the writing of Lovecraft and William Burroughs with various

3
Macon Holt, “The Terrifying Ambivalence of Theory-Fiction”, ArkBooks.dk, May 16 2017, accessible
from http://arkbooks.dk/the-terrifying-ambivalence-of-theory-fiction/
3
theoretical and esoteric/magic systems, electronic music bleeding edge technology, and
various narcotics and interpersonal relationships.4 Both their collective writings and the
subsequent Hyperstition blog (which grew out of the Ccru after its members left Warwick
University), went on to form much of the practical and theoretical aspects of theory-
fiction, along with various neologisms such as “hyperstition,” a concept which “names
elements of fiction that make themselves real via temporal feedback,” while the legacy
of their explorations formed the underpinning of the concept of accelerationism and
philosophical fields such as speculative realism.5

From this theoretical groundwork in exploring the weird with respect of the
intrusion of the “outside” of fiction into the “inside” of consensual reality, I focus on the
online phenomenon known as Slender Man as an example of the dissolution between the
real and the imaginary that embodies the cultural practice of narrative fictions that
threaten to invade the realities of particular social groups and audiences. Starting from
life on a subcultural internet forum, the idea of the Slenderman erupted and spread into
online cultures like a virus until it had become digital’s first folk demon. I posit that
through the shift from modes of production to that of intensified circulation and
prosumption that is inherent in online cultures, the weird fictional “outside” that is
represented in the ideas, content and text of Slenderman was able to spread, mutate, and
latch onto and inform various forms of the “inside” that is our social reality. This allowed
what was ostensibly a “fiction” created online to gain a life of its own, to become “real.”

In chapter three, I will explore the relationship of the individual towards the weird
and eerie effects and traces that are present in modern and contemporary urban spaces
through two works by the writer J.G. Ballard. The chapter opens with an exploration of
the connections between how the uncanny has been used to articulate the experiences and
feelings of the individual from the impact of modernism upon the reconstruction and
management of urban spaces and buildings in the twentieth century. The uncanny I will
argue, in the way that it has been used to describe psychological states of alienation and

4
A decent overview and profile of the history of the CCRU can be found at Simon Reynolds, (1999),
“RENEGADE ACADEMIA: The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit”, Energy Flash Blog, Nov 3 ,
accessible at http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/11/renegade-academia-cybernetic-
culture.html.
5
Simon O’Sullivan, “Futures and Fictions: A Conversation between Henriette Gunkel, Ayesha Hameed
and Simon O’Sullivan”, in Henriette Gunkel, Ayesha Hameed and Simon O’Sullivan (Eds), Futures and
Fictions, (London: Repeater Books, Kindle Edition, 2018): 5. For a more detailed definition and layout of
the concept, read “How do fictions become hyperstitions?” Hyperstition Blog, June 19 2004, Accessible at
http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003345.html.

4
anxiety regarding the modern urban space, can be aligned with that of the weird in the
way that modern architecture and design represented the shock of the new and the
effacement of history.

The evolution of urban space as metamorphic expansion of modernism into that

of what anthropologist Marc Augé terms as the logic of supermodernism. Augé
characterises supermodernism as an excess of time, space and individualism that is
embodied by the growth and proliferation of what he terms as non-places. Non-places
refer to capitalist and technological sites in modern society that, while having a human
presence through that of work or transit, are a-historical, non-relational and lack any
definitive connections with their locale. Augé sites non-places as spaces of transit or
temporary waiting and congregation - shopping malls, business parks and corporation
“campuses”, motorways, roundabouts, carparks, and hotels – all places that give a
semblance of seamless connectivity and ease of movement. From an architectural and
organizational viewpoint however, non-places are considered sterile and affectless,
exuding an overriding sameness and dispassionate negativity that is put to work under the
auspices of globalised capitalism. Through their overriding spatial conformity, and the
mechanical nature they invoke in the individual towards consumerism and social control,
non-places invoke forms of eerie alienation upon the body in that they allow the
individual to psychologically disconnect, to drift in an aesthetically impoverished
landscape and the seeming absence of presence.

The third section of the chapter will look at the how the non-place, in particular
the motorway, impacts upon the characters of two of Ballard’s novels, Crash (1973), and
Concrete Island (1974). Ballard’s works, especially from the 1970s onwards, have
become synonymous with the exploration of the inner psychologies of various
protagonists - what Ballard described as Inner Space - and their collision with the
structures and spaces associated with technological change and the logic of
supermodernism. Indeed, the term “Ballardian” has entered into the English vernacular
to describe that which is “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in
Ballard's novels and stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and
the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.”6

With Crash and Concrete Island, the incidence of specific traumas, in this case
the car crash, causes a defamiliarization in the minds of the characters towards the

6
An online definition is provided at https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/ballardian.
5
affectless vistas around them, transforming the landscape of non-place into sites of
experimental discovery that beckons them to excavate a deeper reality under the concrete
surfaces. At the same time, there is in the characters the triggering of atavistic drives from
within that compel them to suspend rational impulses and moral judgements, and to
embark upon a journey towards limit experiences of nihilistic sex and violence that mean
certain death and destruction for those involved. In a close reading of the texts and by
utilising Fisher’s concept of the eerie that exists in Thanatos, the name Sigmund Freud
associated with the death drive inherent in the human unconscious towards annihilation,
I aim to highlight the aspects and traces of the eerie in these technologically mediated
drives, that while appearing inexplicable, almost alien to rational thought, is actually
embedded deep within out very psyches.

Through the analysis provided in the three chapters, I will show that the weird and
eerie have existed in the history of art and aesthetics, especially in the sphere of the gothic,
but in many cases have been subsumed or overlooked as a synonym in the analysis for
more popular concepts such as the uncanny. However, in over a century of accelerated
technological and social change that has transformed the idea of the self and the human
with regards to our relationship with the world, the weird and the eerie are exemplary
modes in which to analyse and explore a culture and society that is at once disturbing,
almost psychotic, yet alluring and enigmatic in its unreality.

6
Part 1: The Weird and the Eerie – Definitions and Concepts

There have been a plethora of essays and articles that explore the “weird” and
“eerie” as an aesthetic with regards to being part of the literary subgenre of “weird
fiction,” with various writers and theorists seeking to define and lay out its features,
boundaries and motifs. China Miéville has expanded upon the “hybrid” nature of weird
fiction, detailing how it is “conceived of as a rather breathless and generically slippery
macabre fiction, a dark fantastic (“horror” plus “fantasy”) often featuring non-traditional
alien monsters (thus plus “science fiction”),” where “[t]he focus is on awe, and its
undermining of the quotidian.”7 Writer J.T. Joshi argues that other important aspects of
the weird tale are “its capacity for the ‘refashioning of the reader’s view of the world’.”8
Indeed, in defining the divergent varieties of the weird tale, theorists such as Benjamin
Noys and Thomas Murphy endorse taking a historical avenue in defining the weird,
creating a split between what they call the “old weird,” which “can be dated between 1880
and 1940,” and includes the likes of Clark Ashton Smith, William Hope Hodgson,
Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and the era of the Weird Tales magazine, which
began in 1927.9 Most importantly, the era of “old weird” includes the writing and tales of
the man considered the greatest and most influential exponent of weird fiction, H.P
Lovecraft.10 Meanwhile, the genre of fiction that became known as the “New Weird” was
first termed by the writer M. John Harrison, coined in 2003, to refer particularly to the
writing and literary criticism of China Miéville. However, both Noys and Murphy trace
the idea of the new weird “back further to the period from the 1980s,” including the likes
of Clive Barker and Thomas Ligotti, “to the present that gained its most explicit
articulation in the 2000s,” in the writings of the likes of Brian Evenson, M. John Harrison,
and Jeff VanderMeer as well as the aforementioned Miéville.11

While these essays and discussions aim to tie down and approach the weird as a
form of literary and genre fiction, they alas do not provide a substantive approach in being

7
China Miéville, “Weird Fiction”, In Mark Bould (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction,
(Oxford: Routledge, 2009): 510.
8
J.T. Joshi, quoted in Benjamin Noys & Timothy S. Murphy, “Introduction: Old and New Weird”, Genre,
49 (2) (2016): 118.
9
Noys & Murphy, 119.
10
In giving a description as to why he writes tales of weird fiction, Lovecraft in his essay “notes on writing
weird fiction” clearly states that it is “one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,
momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space,
and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces
beyond the radius of our sight and analysis” (See H.P. Lovecraft, “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction”,
lovecraft.com, Dec 13 2019, available from .http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/nwwf.aspx.
11
Noys & Murphy, 120.
7
able to define the weird and eerie, both as concepts in and of themselves, and how they
may relate to cultural forms outside of literary fiction.12 In response to this, it is worth
turning to the writer, critic, and theorist Mark Fisher. In his final published book, The
Weird and the Eerie, Fisher provides a compendium of critiques on a series of texts that
exhibit or develop “the weird” and/or the “eerie,” both as literary devices and as aesthetic
concepts. Fisher selects and knits together a variety of cultural texts, from the literary
gothic and weird fiction, to 1970s sci-fi television, British post punk and ambient music
of the 1980s. In his meshing of these texts, Fisher builds up a series of meanings and
iterations of where the alien fragments and slivers of the weird and eerie pop up in popular
culture.

Cutting through such wide and varied cultural reference points, Fisher aims to
show that while the “weird” and the “eerie,” as concepts of aesthetics, had their origins
in the literary and fictional novel, they have long since broken free from those boundaries
and are now residing, in various forms, in our material realities. In defining the weird,
Fisher describes it as something, “which does not belong,” and whose presence cannot be
explained or contained.13 Noting the aesthetics of art movements and practices such as
film montage to surrealism as examples, Fisher argues that they are exemplars of the
weird-in-effect in the way that they splice together “two or more things that do not belong
together and take delight in their juxtaposition.”14

In referencing that which is the “weird,” Fisher notes that what is at stake is an
eruption from the “outside,” whether it be material or aesthetic, of something that is
unexplainable, indescribable. While there is a wave of uncertainty on what it is that
confronts us, the experience registered by those who come into contact with it is not just
that of horror or dread, but also of fascination and pleasure in the form of jouissance;

12
It should be noted though that in the world of philosophy, with regards to various disciplines within the
field of phenomenology there are philosophers who are taking on the Lovecraftian concepts of the weird
and in turn resist the post-Kantian idea of privileging the human mind and its finitude at the centre of
thought and agency. These concepts include “object-oriented ontology,” a term coined by the philosopher
Graham Harman (who went onto to create the term “Weird Realism” in his book on Lovecraft and
philosophy – see Graham Harman. (2012). Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. London: Zero
Books), and the concept of “speculative realism,” that along with Graham Harman, also include the likes
of Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Quentin Meillassoux. Then there is the writing of philosopher Eugene
Thacker who uses elements of weird fiction and horror to explore the boundaries of humanist thought, as
well as the concepts of nihilism and pessimism. For a more detailed analysis of these philosophers and
these areas, read Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (eds), The Speculative Turn: Continental
Materialism and Realism (Anamnesis), London; Re:Press, 2010); Robin Mackay (Ed.), Collapse:
Philosophical Research and Development. Vol II: Speculative Realism. (London: Urbanomic, 2007);
Graham Harman, Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism, (London: Zero Books, 2013); Eugene
Thacker. The Horror of Philosophy, Vols. 1-3, (London: Zero Books, 2011-2015).
13
Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, (London: Repeater Books, 2016, Kindle version): 10-11.
14
Ibid., 13.
8
“The sense of wrongness associated with the weird — the conviction that this does not
belong — is often a sign that we are in the presence of the new. The weird here is a signal
that the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed are now obsolete.
If the encounter with the strange here is not straightforwardly pleasurable (the pleasurable
would always refer to previous forms of satisfaction), it is not simply unpleasant either.”15
Subsequently, Fisher places the weird and eerie, not as discrete boundaries, but as points
on a spectrum of affect that seem prevalent in modern society; one of uneasy angst or
anxiety, of things being “off-kilter,” that there is something wrong with what is happening
around us.

While the weird as a concept is something that is dealt with in great depth and
explored in a variety of ways, it is with the concept of the eerie that Fisher adds a new
dimension to the discourse on the weird, by presenting a distinct mode of feeling, a feeling
that is itself fleeting and ephemeral, both in conceptual rigour and as a sense of meaning
when used as an aesthetic descriptor. For Fisher, the eerie is something altogether more
abstract and strange than that of the weird in the way the eerie concerns itself with the
presence or absence of something, and such places (or non-places) are often where there
is an absence of humanity, or where there is something or some agency at work that is
just beyond our realm of understanding; “The eerie concerns the most fundamental
metaphysical questions one could pose, questions to do with existence and non-
existence.”16 As such, the eerie “is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of
presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where
there should be nothing, or is there nothing present when there should be something.”17
This becomes evident with the use “eerie” as descriptive terms, such as there being an
“eerie silence,” or an “eerie cry”; at the heart of the eerie, it talks of an absence of
something, or the presence of something, but something that is unknown and outside of
our normal frames of knowledge and reference.

On a material level, the eerie is often not located in the humanistic confines and
locales of the family and home. Often, it is located in marginal spaces, in landscapes,
sites, and structures where there is either a distinct lack of human presence, or there was
once a human activity which has since disappeared. Various ruins, such as the ancient
sites of Stonehenge, and Easter Island, to more modern locations such as abandoned

15
Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 13.
16
Ibid., 12.
17
Ibid., 61.
9
buildings and houses underline several aspects to the eerie, as the failure of presence that
is the absence of humanity almost certainly leads to various forms of speculation as to the
source of said absence. Fisher argues that while the certain sites often contain traces of
the weird, for a place to be truly eerie, there need to be an alterity in the way that said
absence or presence can’t be described or explained away. There is a circumvention that
prevents understanding.

More importantly, Fisher asserts that the eerie turns on the issues of agency in the
way that:

It is about the forces that govern our lives and the world […] In the case of the
failure of absence, the question concerns the existence of agency as such. Is there
a deliberative agent here at all? Are we being watched by an entity that has not
yet revealed itself? In the case of the failure of presence, the question concerns
the particular nature of the agent at work. We know that Stonehenge has been
erected, so the questions of whether there was an agent behind its construction or
not does not arise; what we have to reckon with are the traces of a departed agent
whose purposes are unknown.18

The eerie, then, concerns itself with the Spinozian metaphysical idea that all
around us exists agency of many and various forms, but not all of it is necessarily human.
In our technologically mediated world, there are numerous forces and agencies that
constantly nudge and direct our drives and desires, in ways that often act without a human
hand on the tiller. Such agencies may present themselves in a manner of ways and
interfaces, from the automated voices one interacts with on public transport or a self-
service check out to the suggestions provided to one via online shopping platforms based
on purchase histories.

1.1: The Weird and the Eerie – The Gothic

When thinking about the particular qualities or phenomena of events that can be
considered “weird” or “eerie,” one of the first and most readily available cultural sources
whose texts and ideas can provide a map in which to explore this terrain would almost
certainly be the “gothic.” In his essay, “Gothic Materialism,” Fisher links the idea of the
gothic with regards to examining those thinkers and theorists who have resided

18
Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 64.
10
historically as part of the radical enlightenment, and whose anti-subjectivist theories and
interests were concerned with the messy boundaries of ontology and interstitial areas of
thought. “Why Gothic, why all these Horror stories? Because, as Nietzsche warns, to
‘unlearn to pray and curse, unlearn man and god’ is to subtract all certainty, to become a
stranger to yourself - ‘Here - you could not be at home’.”19 For Fisher, gothic fiction is
the site where the edges and limits of human experience, cognition, and subjectivity are
transgressed with all manner of invasions from the “outside” that threaten the homely and
secure world of the rational and normal.

Despite investigating the areas and relations where gothic “monsters” have been
created and circulated, this thesis will not be concerned with the gothic ideas of
transgression, monstrosity and horror, but instead devotes itself to the ways in which the
gothic disrupts human boundaries and limits, creating new liminal spaces, be it material,
aesthetic or psychic. The gothic, and therefore the weird and the eerie, flourish in said
spaces, where its concepts and ideas can interrogate and prise apart the strictures and
boundaries that separate our social reality from that of the outside, real or imagined. In
his 1999 PhD thesis, Flatline Constructs, Fisher argues for the bringing together of the
gothic and philosophical concepts of materialism, thereby reconstituting what is meant
by the gothic. As such, the gothic needs to be divested of many of its cultural
connotations, leading Fisher “to disassociate the Gothic from everything supernatural,
ethereal or otherworldly.” Instead, Fisher applies the ideas of Wilhelm Worringer via
Deleuze-Guattari, to develop the concept of gothic materialism as an entity that is
“fundamentally concerned with a plane that cuts across the distinction between living and
non-living, animate and inanimate. It is this anorganic continuum, it will be maintained,
that is the province of the Gothic.”20 In The Weird and the Eerie meanwhile, Fisher notes
that the outside, as a realm of the weird and the eerie via the gothic, does not have to be
a realm of horror, monsters, or abjection:

What the weird and the eerie have in common is a preoccupation with the strange.
The strange — not the horrific. The allure that the weird and the eerie possess is
not captured by the idea that we “enjoy what scares us”. It has, rather, to do with
a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception,
cognition and experience. This fascination usually involves a certain

19
Mark Fisher, “Gothic Materialism”, Pli – The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 12 (2001): 231.
20
Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, (New York:
Exmilitary Press, 2008): 2.
11
 apprehension, perhaps even dread — but it would be wrong to say that the weird
and the eerie are necessarily terrifying. I am not here claiming that the outside is
always beneficent. There are more than enough terrors to be found there; but such
terrors are not all there is to the outside.21

Since the idea of the gothic first originated in a textual and literary form in the
eighteenth century, it’s forms, motifs, and ideas have spread through the western cultural
corpus like a benign virus. From its beginnings we can see how the gothic, its monsters,
its excesses, and its fixation with disintegration and illegitimacy, “have continued to
shadow the progress of modernity with counter-narratives displaying the underside of
enlightenment and humanist values.”22 Meanwhile in the contemporary late twentieth and
twenty first century, the gothic has proliferated into every corner of mass and global
media. This is in part due to its ability to attach itself to new and hybrid forms of mass
media, and its ability to provide life to new genres, such as horror, sci-fi, and fantasy, as
well its continuing ability to defy the efforts to provide a definitive definitions and
categorisations.23 From pulp publishing to comics, from cinema to television, from music
to various subcultures, from the internet to gaming, the gothic and its texts, motifs, and
aesthetics have been ready to infect and take advantage of new media forms and the
various anxieties and moral panics that inevitably appear.

While the gothic as a textual or literary genre contains several core aesthetic
themes that are not associated with contemporary and digital cultures (The old castle, the
storm at night, the haunted house, various monsters and bogeymen, etc.), the conceptual
and even philosophical ideas that underpin the main tenets of what we now consider as
the gothic are a ripe incubator for investigation where the weird and eerie might occur on
an ontological or epistemic basis. In particular there are three areas worthy or
examination.

The dissolution of binaries and opposites: Through life in general, social

realities are thought of in terms of binaries, and while these binaries are often contested,
in general they help to make sense of the world – Black/White, Up/Down, Good/Bad, and
so on. When it comes to the idea of the gothic, such binaries often exist at the same time
within the text’s social reality. In gothic fiction however, there is often the portrayal of

21
Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 8-9.
22
Fred Botting, Gothic, (London: Routledge, 1995); 1.
23
Justin Edwards, “Introduction: Technogothics”, In Justin Edwards (Ed.), Technogothics: Technologies
of the Gothic in Literature and Culture, (New York: Routledge, 2015): 11-12.
12
two “worlds” that are presented within the text, that of “a diurnal world and a nocturnal
one.”24 On the one hand, there is a world that is the “inside,” of the status quo, of the
“light” against the “dark,” a world of “logic and reason,” against that of “disorder and
irrationality,” the inside of “familiarity and knowledge” against the outside of “darkness
and uncertainty”. The gothic brings these two worlds together to exist in the same shared
space, and in doing so, the perceived boundaries between these two worlds are, at best,
porous and warped, or at worst, completely collapse in on themselves. This in turn causes
“the artificial layers of social behaviour, religious ritual, and familial duty repressing
instinct and intuition are stripped away, which forces both character and reader to face
their inner selves as they encounter narrative conflict.”25 This irruption of the other that
is the darkness, the “outside,” in turn questions the categories or common experience that
the characters in the text use to make sense of the world are rendered invalid and have to
be revised.

Unstable Subjectivity/Ontology: As was suggested above, the gothic seeks to

destabilise and transgress perceived norms and boundaries that prop up social binaries,
including that of the objective world of facts and reason, with the irrational subjective
world of intuition, emotion and instinct. As a result, often the characters in gothic texts
have their own sense of self, of being, and their relationship towards the world around
them put into question. From early gothic novels such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert
Louis Stevenson, 1885), and The Turn of the Screw (Henry James, 1898), to more
contemporary texts such as The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson, 1959), The
Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001), and Angel Heart (Alan Parker, 1986), the gothic has
been present in the way that the narrative and actions of the character are concerned “with
uncertainties of character positioning and instabilities of knowledge.”26 The ability of the
narrator to determine truth from fiction, and reality from fantasy, are constantly under
attack, both from an external viewpoint in space and time, and from an internal viewpoint
of memory and experience. As such, the voices and subjectivities of the narrators become
fractured and rendered unreliable as they are buffeted by various unseen, inhuman, and
excessive forces emanating from an outside they are unable to control or understand. This
inability to trust what is happening around them with any form of ontological or epistemic
certainty, leads to the creation of what Catherine Spooner calls “the radically provisional

24
Charlene Bunnell, “The Gothic: A Literary Transition to Film”, In Barry Keith Grant (ed.) Planks of
Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, (Metuchen, N.J: The Scarecrow Press, 1975): 81.
25
Ibid., 82.
26
Glennis Byron & David Putner, The Gothic, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011): 273.
13
or divided nature of the self; the construction of peoples or individuals as monstrous or
‘other’.”27 The landscape of such psychic terrains is often rendered fearful and paranoiac
as the realms of epistemology are rendered in flux, and fixed meanings to language are
split into a myriad of ways, while the subject tries their best to articulate and fill in the
gaps of reasoning.28

It should be noted that from the roots of gothic fiction to the contemporary era of
the twentieth century, the concept of fractured identity and warped subjectivity is not only
rooted in the realm of the classic gothic. With the rise of the problematic multiplicity of
the postmodern condition, there is a confluence between postmodern and gothic aesthetics
as novels such as Slaughterhouse 5 (Kurt Vonnegut, 1965), Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas
Pynchon, 1973), City of Glass (Paul Auster, 1985), The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie,
1988), and American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis, 1991) all share, according to Maria
Beville, gothic aspects in the form of “[s]pectral characters, doppelgängers, hellish
wastelands, and the demonised or possessed” along with what she calls “the deeper issue
of the lingering emotion of terror as it relates to loss of reality and self.”29 With both the
gothic and postmodernism, there is the entanglement of ideas that deal with the idea of
the “the loss of human identity and the alienation of self from both itself and the social
bearings in which a sense of reality,” where the notions of humanism are constantly under
attack from “ever threatening shapes of increasingly dehumanised environments,
machinic doubles and violent, psychotic fragmentation.”30

Technology: Since the earliest forms of gothic fiction, its rise to prominence has
coincided with the development of science, technology, and industry. The industrial
revolution and scientific advancements of the enlightenment era led to the creation of new
forms of work and social identity and the rise of the city, along with new social strata
such as the working and middle classes. The advancements in physics, chemistry,

27
Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, (London: Reaktion Books, 2006): 8.
28
While it is outside the scope of this essay, it is well worth pointing out the nature of paranoia, the gothic
and the weird when it come to the modern phenomenon of conspiracy theories. With narratives that place
an emphasis on such things as hidden agendas and meanings in objects, unseen agents, linking of
coincidences, animism, doubling, they are prime breeding grounds for the uncanny with theories that strike
at the very heart of science, truth and even epistemology. For more information on paranoia, conspiracies
and the uncanny, read Susan Lepselter, The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetic, Power, Captivity, and
UFOS in the American Uncanny, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016); Eve Sedgwick,
“Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is
About You”. In Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Ed.), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity,
(London: Duke University Press. 2004).
29
Maria Beville, (2009), Gothic Postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity, (New York:
Rodopi), 10.
30
Botting (1996), 102.
14
medicine and the natural sciences, meant that society achieved a greater understanding of
the world and its surrounding phenomena. The development of new inventions,
institutions and categorical rationalities resulted in faster, stronger, more efficient forms
of transport, industry, organisation, and society.31 Scientists and technologists were the
new promethean gods that not only strove to reach the limits of science and the human
body but wanted to go further.

In this sense, the gothic is a prime breeding ground for the weird and the eerie,
with several texts portraying the consequences of man attempting to play God with the
flesh of man and the energies of the cosmos. The early success of Frankenstein (Mary
Shelley, 1818), Heart and Science (Wilkie Collins, 1883), The Island of Dr. Moreau
(H.G. Wells, 1896), and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1889), exploit
such tensions and anxieties regarding humanity and the increasingly scientific processes
that were quantifying life and the human body. Such texts explore and provide forms of
commentary on the idea of science and technology as “the dark side of Enlightenment
rationalism,” while also showing how the technological and scientific drive, “can also
digress from the modern technological course of an imagined sense of progress.”32
Human progress, in the form of the mad scientist overwhelmed by ego and hubris in
thinking of himself as a god at the centre of the natural world, creates a series of horrifying
results despite the perceived objectivity and good intentions towards science and
technology as a cure for all ills. The antithesis of such characters is the scientific
protagonist of Dr. Van Helsing, who utilises science and technology to not only
understand, but attempts to defeat the monstrous, inhuman evil of Count Dracula.
Meanwhile fantasy and gothic tales such as William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, The
Ghost-Finder (1913), and H.P. Lovecraft’s From Beyond (1934) show scientists utilising
science and technology not only to observe, but break past the barriers of perception and
gain access to unseen yet overlapping worlds of ghosts, spirits, and alien-like creatures.

31
For the human body, there was not only the curing of diseases and the prolonging of life, but also, some
argued, there was the option to cheat death altogether, as science disrupted fundamental ideas of what it
meant to be human. For more information on the history of science and the Enlightenment, read Thomas
Munck, The Enlightenment: A comparative Social History 1721-1794, (London: Arnold Publishing, 2000);
Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008). For more background on the relationship between the human, technology,
and the cyborg in science and culture, read Charles Noble Grey (ed.), The Cyborg Handbook, (New York:
Routledge, 1995); N Katherine Hayles, How we became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1999); Daniel Dinello, Technophobia
and Posthuman Technology! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology, (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2005).
32
Edwards (2015), 1
15
 In our contemporary era, the idea of the technological gothic and its ability to
generate instances of the weird and eerie can be seen, not only in the way that in the way
that “[t]echnology has a profound impact on the productive body in terms of
manufacturing, distribution and dissemination,”33 the social human today is now more
akin to the “man-machine” or “cyborgs” popularised by Donna Haraway in her famous
essay The Cyborg Manifesto, where she notes that a cyborg is “a cybernetic organism”, a
“hybrid of machine and organism”, a “creature of social reality”, as well as being a
creature of fiction.34 The cyborg, in this respect, is a networked being that breaks down
the ontological walls between human being, machine, and nature. Although Haraway
argues that there is little to no distinction between our lived reality and our fictional
constructs, they both feed into the other: “Social reality is lived social relations, our most
important political construction, a world changing fiction.”35 Various technogothic texts
such as Bladerunner, Neuromancer (William Gibson, 1984), Tetsuo: The Iron Man
(Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989), Splice (Vincenzo Natali, 2009), and ExMachina (Alex
Garland, 2014), are replete with AI machines and Cyborgs, cloning, gender reassignment,
and body modification, along with an array of hypercapitalist systems of alienation, that
edit, rewrite and recontextualize what it means to be human.

Limit Experiences: While the above aspects of the gothic as a concept can be
seen as an incubator for weird and eerie phenomenon, another aspect they all share is the
concern for what can be called “limit experiences.” Limit experiences refers to a term
coined by philosopher Georges Bataille to denote that which takes humanity to the limits
of thought and experience and in their radical difference, make boundaries of the self-less
stable. Such limit experiences which can be found in the areas of art, eroticism, religion
and (on occasion) substance misuse are often observed and concerned with the points
where ideas regarding taboos and transgressions, pain and pleasure, and that of the sacred
and profane collapse in on each other.36

In several of the previously mentioned texts, whether it is through the utilisation

of science or the upending of given social norms, various characters explore the limits,
morals, and rules of the known world to transgress the limits of the self and the limits of

33
Edwards, 7.
34
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century”, In D. Bell and B.M. Kennedy (Eds), The Cybercultures Reader, (New York:
Routledge, 2000): 291.
35
Ibid.
36
For more detail and an elaboration on the concept of “limit experience”, read Georges Bataille, Death
and Sensuality: A Study of Erotica and the Taboo, (New York: Walker and Company, 1964).
16
experience, to move out of themselves and into new modes and registers of being. In one
of the earliest gothic novels, M.R. Lewis’ The Monk (1796), the pious and respected monk
Ambrosio succumbs to his desire for a young girl, driving him to give up his monastic
vows and commit a series of blasphemous and taboo acts such as black magic, torture,
rape, and murder. The literary gothic has followed suit with a series of transgressive
protagonists, all of whom indulge in various forms of transgressions, including various
forms of violent criminality, profane blasphemy and sexual deviance, and even death
itself.

In the realm of the gothic, and its generic children of science fiction and horror,
various texts seek to push both linguistically and imaginatively at the outer and inner
limits of self and subjectivity. As with the Bataillean idea of “limit experiences,” or the
Freudian concept of the “death drive,” the boundaries in such works and experiences
beseech us to break down the limitations of our language and thought and new forms of
ontology and being.37

1.2: The Weird and the Eerie - The Uncanny

In discussing the weird and the eerie, like Fisher I need to introduce the aesthetic
and psychological concept of the uncanny into the thesis. Although the original research
on the uncanny as a concept began in the nineteenth century, both as a form of
phenomenology and through the aesthetic notion of the sublime, and later with Ernst
Jentsch in his 1906 essay “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” the ur-text for the
uncanny as a concept of modern aesthetics remains the 1919 essay of the same name by
Sigmund Freud.38 In this essay, Freud, through a close reading of literary texts such as
E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Sandman, outlines the basic premise of the uncanny as a
psychological concept. Linking the Uncanny with the word unheimlich which exists as
the negative of “heimlich” - that which is familiar, homely - Freud declares the uncanny

37
Freud first theorized the death drive, or Thanatos, in his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920),
where he reassesses his theories regard unconscious drives that compels human behaviour. Until then Freud
argued that the main driver of behaviour was a life drive for creation, pleasure and self-fulfilment, which
he called Eros. Here, the id drives the human mind to seek pleasure and to avoid pain whenever possible.
Freud in his clinical work however, noticed that many patients were engaging in repetitive and compulsive
behaviours that derived no joy, and at times even pain. In attempting to explain this, Freud speculated that
there was a death drive, an instinct inherent in the human condition that willed the mind and body to
annihilation, right to a cellular level. This drive was in constant tension with the life drive of Eros. Although
most of the scientific rationale behind his speculations have long since been disproved, the work remains
important for the ways it attempts to explain the processes being various psychological issues, such as
PTSD.
38
See Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (Trans. by Alix Strachey), 1919, Available from
http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf
17
as un-familiar and un-homely, words that would find their synonyms with the weird and
the eerie. At the same, Freud noted that “heimlich” also meant “hidden” or furtive.”
Therefore, according to Freud, the uncanny is something that was at once familiar,
homely and in the open, is now either deliberately or inadvertently made unhomely and
unfamiliar and is rendered hidden, whether from other or from the self.

Throughout the essay, Freud refers to the E.T.A. Hoffman story The Sandman,
revealing several instances of the motifs of doubling, automatism (where inanimate
objects seem to come alive) and their links to the uncanny. Yet according to Fisher,
despite noting numerous instances in The Sandman where there is confusion between the
animate and the inanimate, Freud attempts to solve the enigma of the unheimlich by
reducing it to the fear of losing one’s eyes as a symptom of castration anxiety, which is
an outcome “that is as disappointing as any mediocre genre detective’s rote solution to a
mystery.”39 This viewpoint is shared by Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli in her analysis, where she
points out that in several instances in his essay, Freud consistently disavows the main
character’s inability to tell the difference between what is human from an automation as
the source of the uncanny. Instead, Freud attempts attribute the source as castration
society, linking Hoffman’s personal history and the childhood history of Nathaniel in the
story. Ravetto-Biagioli argues that this reading of the uncanny as a form of
psychoanalysis upon Hoffman, “is an act of rationalization, an attempt to control or certify
that which is otherwise undecidable—a gesture not unlike Kant’s attempt to subjugate the
sensible world to rational thought.”40 The emphasis on doubling, repetition, and the
indeterminacy of the ontology between subject and object in The Sandman is, according
to Fisher, what Freud misses out on, “[c]astration may be terrifying, but it is not as
disturbing as what Freud seems so keen to bury – precisely because it is a matter of terror,
or fear. Terror or fear have an object – what is feared – and a subject – he who fears –
whereas the “ominous foreboding” [...] arises from the inability to differentiate subject
from object. There is a dispersal of subjectivity onto an indifferent plane that is
simultaneously too distant and too intimate to be apprehended as anything objective.”41

In seeming agreement with Fisher and Ravetto-Biagioli, the discourse in decades

since Freud’s essay has seen the uncanny break out and exceed the confines of Freud’s

39
Fisher, Weird and Eerie, 9.
40
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, The Digital Uncanny, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Kindle Edition, 2019):
144-145.
41
Fisher, Flatline Constructs, 4.
18
psychoanalytic framework and the disciplines of literary analysis, philosophy, and
aesthetics. The uncanny today is a concept that is utilised in all manner of disciplines such
as art history, film studies, architecture theory, postcolonial studies, sociology,
anthropology, the study of religion, and more recently, computing science, AI, and
robotics. By spreading out into new areas and disciplines, “each new use adds to the
conceptual substance of the uncanny,” as well as to how it is applied to a variety of
cultural phenomena. At the same time, the word and its linguistic features remain open,
liquid, and ambivalent, allowing it to be linked to other aesthetic affects such as the
sublime, the weird and the eerie.42

As the concept of the uncanny was picked up and employed by academics,

scientists and artists in the latter half of the 20th century, it has bled out into areas of
discourse that can be read along two distinct lines. The first is to see the uncanny as that
of the “post-romantic/aesthetic” tradition that “emphasizes the semantic kernels of
transcendence, the supernatural, and the occult,” with the other line viewing the uncanny
along the lines of the “existential/post-Marxist,” a corpus of theory that deals with
“alienation, strangeness, and angst will emphasize the uncanny’s relation to society,
politics, and ethics.”43

With regards to the use of the uncanny as a concept in the “post-

romantic/aesthetic,” we see its use in cultural disciplines such as film studies as a tool to
explore styles and genres such as horror and fantasy and the powerful affects they arouse
in the audience. The uncanny, in being utilised this way, is used to show that “by
emphasizing the primitive, atavistic, and bodily roots of the uncanny […] the concepts
are often strategically used in defences of these popular or marginal genres by pointing
out how they have always been a natural and, in fact, indispensable part of culture.”44
Meanwhile, the uncanny as a concept has been used extensively in the field of gothic
studies, both as both an aesthetic tool and as a focus of historic and subcultural analysis.
Nicholas Royle, in his work on the uncanny and its association with the gothic, takes
particular interest in gothic concepts and motifs such as haunting, spectrality, and the idea
of doubling from a deconstructive perspective, where “the notion of spectrality is not only
used to theorize the blurring of the limit between the animate and the inanimate, death

42
Anneleen Masschelein, The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twentieth-Century Theory,
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011): 6.
43
Masschelein., 131.
44
Ibid., 134.
19
and life, fiction and reality but also linked to the virtual media age at the end of the
twentieth century.”45 Along with Andrew Bennett, Royle describes the uncanny in terms
of “making things uncertain: it has to do with the sense that things are not as they have
come to appear through habit and familiarity, that they may challenge all rationality and
logic.”46 Accordingly, they build upon the forms of the uncanny that occur in the Freudian
understanding of the concept to include repetition (including the doublings of déjà vu and
the Doppelgänger); coincidence and fate; animism; anthropomorphism; automatism;
uncertainty about sexual identity; fear of being buried alive; silence; telepathy; and
death.47

The “existential/post-Marxist” path of the uncanny in the late 20th century

meanwhile, takes a different rationale in the construction of the uncanny as a concept,
based on the historical tensions in 19th century discourse between the “rationalism” and
“objectivism” of the enlightenment and the “irrational” and “subjectivism” of
romanticism. In their dealing with the uncanny as a component of aesthetic practices and
theoretical discourse, thinkers such as Heidegger, Benjamin, and Derrida came to build
an conceptual framework where the source of the uncanny arose from the material forms
of the “unfamiliar” that were not supernatural, therefore giving it an “existential and
political dimension.”48 As such the uncanny was linked to “alienation as an economic,
political, psychological, and existential condition.”49

The uncanny became a conceptual tool in respect to neo-Marxist and post-colonial

theory in the way that the uncanny embodies various aspects of the alienation of the
individual subject in capitalist western society. Most famously, the uncanny is utilised by
Derrida in his book Spectres of Marx. Written in 1993 after the proclamations by Francis
Fukuyama of the “end of history” where we saw the fall of Apartheid South Africa, the
Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, the general consensus was that Communism was
defeated as a political and social ideology as was shown by the subsequent rise of
neoliberal capitalism in the West. However, Communism, according to Derrida, takes on
a new form, that of the spectre or ghost. Being neither dead nor alive, communism is able
to enter and haunt the world of the real and material where it is “a haunting that is at the

45
Ibid., 135.
46
Andrew Bennett & Nicholas Royle, quoted in Glennis Byron & David Putner, The Gothic, (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2011): 283.
47
Byron & Putner, 283.
48
Masschelein, 136.
49
Ibid.
20
same time and invocation, convocation, and exorcism.”50 As a result, the ghost of
communism interrogates the real with its presence, it’s gaze; “The uncanny as a
destabilizing concept is now taken one step further: not only does it undermine conceptual
discourse, it also disturbs the ethical and the political order.”51

To describe this situation in metaphysical terms, Derrida would go on to coin the

neologism “hauntology”. A play on the French pronunciation of the word and that of
“ontology” (where the “h” in the French pronunciation of hauntology is silent),
hauntology denotes a form of being that is not fully present, but is instead ghostly, and as
such denotes a philosophy of haunting. Being suspended between Being and non-Being,
the ghost of hauntology is at once both ephemeral and something that is unknowable and
unspeakable, yet it is always present, exerting an effect on society. Referring to
communism, for Derrida, Marx was the perfect hauntological subject in the way that he
still lingered on the margins of people perceptions, long after capitalism declared him
dead.52

50
Ibid., 138.
51
Ibid., 9.
52
The concept of Hauntology and how it applied to modern culture and politics was a major theme in the
writing and lectures that grew from his first published book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
(2009). For Fisher, Hauntology describes the cultural and socio-political impasse that is being felt in the
post-millennium west. Echoing Frederic Jameson’s “nostalgia mode” of postmodernism and the decline of
historicity, Fisher contended that the modernist project of the 20th Century, which aimed to generate a
social utopian drive for a better future, had withered as the hegemony of 21st century neoliberal capitalism
enacted a “slow cancellation of the future,” where culture is seen to reside in a continuous present, feeding
on retrospection and nostalgia. “More troublingly,” says Fisher, “the disappearance of the future meant the
deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different
from the one in which we currently live. It meant the acceptance of a situation in which culture would
continue without really changing, and where politics was reduced to the administration of an already
established (capitalist) system.” Hauntology therefore, according to Fisher, manifested itself in a
melancholia and longing for the lost futures that were depicted or promised in 20th Century modernist
culture. For more information read, Fisher, “What Is Hauntology?”, Film Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 1 (2012):
pp. 16-24; Fisher, Ghosts of my Life. Writings on depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester:
Zero Books, 2014)); “Mark Fisher : The Slow Cancellation Of The Future”, YouTube Video, 46:54, posted
by Pmilat, May 22nd 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ.
But as Matt Colquhoun, aka Xenogothic, has noted, the issue with the idea of hauntology as a melancholia
for lost futures and how it relates to the weird and eerie, is not the idea of “past” futures that haunt us, but
that of the new that represents the radically different; in this case the hauntology of a melancholia for “lost
futures” was temporal, whereas the uncanny of the weird and eerie is more ontological; “the two are
inherently related, of course, but it is worth noting their difference for the more specific potentials that each
unleashes. For starters, whilst the idea of a lost future is recursively graspable — we can only properly
make sense of that which has become obsolete — with the new we find ourselves within that which is
radically immanent. Jarringly so. We encounter something towards which all our past experiences are
obsolete, and which alerts us to the contingency and fallibility of the present, the now. In this mode, the
inside is not sufficient enough for the outside, rather than vice versa. It requires the outside be folded in and
synthesised. In its very wrongness, the weird uncovers an oversaturated present, in which there is no space
for the weird itself (or an experience of the weird). Recursion after recursion: the weird is weird in itself”
see “WEIRD IMMANENCE (PART 1)”, Xenogothic, April 15 2018, available from
https://xenogothic.com/2018/04/15/weird-immanence-part-1/.
21
 Derrida’s concept of hauntology was one that mixed the Freudian with other
articulations and definitions of the uncanny that developed separate and parallel to the
work that was done by Freud. In several essays and his book Being and Time, Martin
Heidegger links the uncanny with that of Unheimlichkeit, or uncanniness. Whereas Freud
thought of the uncanny as a realm of the psychological, Heidegger rejected both
psychology and theology, instead situating the uncanny as an existential-ontological
concept, in the way he describes the ontological description of angst and its relation as a
component of being, or Dasein; to be human he suggests, to be in-the-world, is inherently
to be uncanny: “Insofar as humans are, they stand in the no-exit of death. Thus, Being
here is the happening of un-canniness [Un-heimlichkeit] itself.”53 The Heideggerian
uncanny in effect, “is thus existential, reflecting a singular and continuous anxiety: the
anxiety caused by human beings’ consciousness of their Being and its relation to death,
which occurs in and through primordial time.”54

The uncanny, whether it be aesthetic or political, psychological or existential,

corporeal or ethereal, plays an increasingly important role in contemporary culture and
artistic production, be it in the cold and sparse gothic music of Joy Division and The Cure
and the remnant electronic productions of Burial, to the literary works of Haruki
Murakami, W. G. Sebald, Mark Z. Danielewski, and Paul Auster. The uncanny
meanwhile has been located in the way the utilisation of digital media and virtual
technologies in visual art has been able to capture the increasing immaterial and spectral
forms and modes of everyday life and experience. The uncanny has also become a valid
concept and feature in the world of robotics and artificial intelligence design with the
“The Uncanny Valley” based on Masahiro Mori’s 1970 essay in which he charts the
relationship between humans and robots, stating that humans accept and are more
appreciative to robots that have human like attributes and features. But once robots reach
a certain point of familiarity, becoming too human like, then we enter the “uncanny
valley” where such robots, due to their human-like appearance and approaches, will
arouse feelings of uneasiness and discomfort. In many ways, with his analysis of robots
that appear human like and the way they evoke fear and unease, resembles Freud’s essay,
in the way that Freud concentrates on issues of doubling and animism with respect to
dolls, machines and puppets.

53
Martin Heidegger, quoted in Isabella van Elferen, Gothic Music - The Sounds of the Uncanny, (Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 2012); 181.
54
Isabella Van Elferen, Gothic Music - The Sounds of the Uncanny, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press,
2012), 182.
22
 Although there is now a long history of discourse and usage of the uncanny in a
variety of interdisciplinary fields, why are we using the weird and eerie as qualities to
describe phenomena and events instead of the uncanny? After all, when looking up the
uncanny in the dictionary we can see both weird and eerie as easily interchangeable
synonyms, as Fisher explains; “[t]hey are all affects, but they are also modes: modes of
film and fiction, modes of perception, ultimately, you might even say, modes of being.”55
But with the uncanny, or unheimlich, there is an insistence on “the strange within the
familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange — about the way in which the
domestic world does not coincide with itself.”56 There is a tendency with the uncanny to
take that which is considered “outside” and, in a compensatory move, attempt to
rationalise it, thereby making it recognisable and legible. Fisher contends that this attempt
to flatten or fold the weird and the eerie into the reconciled realm of the uncanny, “is
symptomatic of a secular retreat from the outside. The wider predilection for the
unheimlich is commensurate with a compulsion towards a certain kind of critique, which
operates by always processing the outside through the gaps and impasses of the inside.”57
In the end, the uncanny may be concerned with various breaches and disruptions of
boundaries, but it is still concerned with that of the self.

The weird and eerie however take their approach from the opposite direction;
“they allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside [...] The weird brings
to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled
with the “homely” (even as its negation).”58 Those processes which can be described as
the truly weird and eerie in the way the rupture of the new and unknown is at once non-
subjectifying and de-subjectifying, resisting attempts to rationalise and anthropomorphize
it, and therefore provide it with a form of ontology. The weird, as pointed out earlier is
that which does not belong, due to the fact it does not correspond with agreed upon notions
and ideas that correspond to material reality. The eerie, in the clash between presence and
absence that is concurrent with it, doesn’t not have to have any form of embodiment or
ontological presence, such as the inability to place sounds to any recognisable source (e.g.
a “disembodied howl”, or a “ghostly whisper,” such sounds that come from an entity or
thing that defies simple categorisation). The weird and the eerie often defy explanation
and categorisation, such as when Lovecraft often describes many of the entities and

55
Fisher, Weird and Eerie, 9.
56
Ibid., 10.
57
Ibid.
58
Ibid. 10-11.
23
locations that populate his short stories as “The Unnamable” where the protagonist and
the end of the story attempts to describe the entity but falls short; “It was everywhere —
a gelatin — a slime; a vapor; — yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all
memory. There were eyes — and a blemish. It was the pit — the maelstrom — the
ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!”59

H.P. Lovecraft, “The Unnamable”, in The Haunter in the Dark and Other Stories, (Ware, Herts:
59

Wordsworth Editions, 2011): 98.

24
Part 2: Slenderman and the Fictioning of the Real
Linda Styles: I just like being scared. Cane's work scares me.

John Trent: What's to be scared about? It's not like it's real or anything.

Linda Styles: It's not real from your point of view… and right now reality shares your point of
view. What scares me about Cane's work…what might happen if reality shared his point of
view?

- In the Mouth of Madness (John Carpenter, 1994)

What happens when fiction (itself) propagates, contaminating the Real?

- Mark Fisher, “Flatline Constructs”

The opening quote in this chapter, from the 1994 John Carpenter horror film In
the Mouth of Madness, is an example of the weird and terrifying when the “outside” of a
fictional book begins to infest and mutate the rational world of the “real” within the film.
The titular book, written by the novelist Sutter Cane, a combined analogue of Stephen
King and H.P Lovecraft, far from being a mere tale or weird horror is revealed to be a
vessel that contains a horrifying fiction as entity from the outside, one that will ultimately
change the fabric of reality of Cane’s fans as they read it. At the film’s climax, the
protagonists find that far from being real individuals with lives and subjective identities
of their own, they are merely characters in the book itself. As they reel from this
revelation, Cane pronounces the power of an idea that has become actual reality:

For years, I thought I was making all this up. But they were telling me what to
write, giving me the power to make it all real. And now it is... All those horrible,
slimy things, trying to get back in? They're all true. Come. See the instrument of
their homecoming. What you have come looking for. The new Bible… that starts
the change, helps you see.60

While In the Mouth of Madness is merely a movie, it raises the idea of what would
happen if our world and our shared sense of consensual reality was infiltrated, and
upended by a fictional “outside,” to the point where such fictions, despite their artifice,
take root and develop a life of their own outwith the intentions and will of who, or
whatever, created it. The premise of the film, while seemingly fantastical, is not so far-
fetched in an online social world that is increasingly in flux, where circulation of ideas,

60
In the Mouth of Madness, directed by John Carpenter (1995; USA: New Line Home Video, 2000). DVD.
25
images, and narrative objects are accelerated to the point where various forms of hype
and discourse on various events and phenomena occur in real time. While human culture
has used narratives and fictions in various forms - from the mythic poem to the prose
novel - to reflect upon the experiences of consensual reality, in the “post-truth” digital
world, it is becoming harder to determine what is the realm of consensual reality and what
is fiction.

Nowhere is the idea of intensified fictions bleeding into reality more prevalent
that in the area of online conspiracy theories. Like myth making, the creation of
conspiracy theories, disinformation, and various fictions have been around for a long time
in the realm of politics and warfare. But in an era of digital cultures and social media, the
temporal periods of production, ferment, and circulation to produce and share such stories
have become intensified and condensed. What would have taken days, weeks, or even
years to spread across a sizable portion of society can now take a matter of hours. In light
of recent conspiracy theories that have reached mainstream news media, such as
#pizzagate and #Qanon, along with the rise of the “birther” movement surrounding former
US president Barack Obama, despite their complete lack of rigour and wholly constructed
nature, their intensified evolutions have resulted in such conspiracies breaking into
mainstream news media where people latch onto such theories and start acting upon
them.61

Such fictions and the social processes that allow them to spread and proliferate in
online circles are examples of what an interdisciplinary collective called the Cyber
Cultures Research Unit (Ccru) describe as hyperstitional texts, in that they deal with the
the intrusion and taking over of the familiar inside world of social reality by an entity
birthed from the outside of fiction, that uses the actions and transmission lines of culture
and digital media as a carrier to impact upon and change the social reality of our world.

61
The #QAnon conspiracy relates to a far-right conspiracy theory of a supposed secret plot by an alleged
“deep state” against U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters. For an overview, read Justin Bank,
Liam Stack and Daniel Victor, “What Is QAnon: Explaining the Internet Conspiracy Theory That Showed
Up at a Trump Rally”, NYTimes.com, August 1 2018, accessible from
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/01/us/politics/what-is-qanon.html. #Pizzagate refers to a conspiracy
theory that surfaced in 2016 that claimed that emails obtained from the hacking of John Podesta, Hillary
Clinton's campaign manager, contained coded messages about a paedophile and human trafficking ring
involving several U.S. restaurants and high-ranking officials of the Democratic Party was operating out of
Washington, D.C. For more information read BBC Trending, “The saga of 'Pizzagate': The fake story that
shows how conspiracy theories spread”, BBC.com, December 2 2016, accessible from
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-38156985. The “Birther” movement is a conspiracy theory
propagated by conservative right-wing groups the former president Barack Obama was not a natural born
US citizen and was therefore ineligible to become president as per Article 2 of the US constitution. For
more background read Lily Rothman, “This Is How the Whole Birther Thing Actually Started”, time.com,
September 16 2016, accessible from http://time.com/4496792/birther-rumor-started/.
26
In effect, those who use and are involved in the creation of hyperstitional texts see “no
difference in principle between a universe, a religion, and a hoax” and where the
engineering of the future as a fiction ensures that “it has a more intense reality than either
the present or the past.”62

In the first half of this chapter, I trace a genealogy of the concept of hyperstition,
from the emergence of gothic literary fiction as the irrational destabilising underbelly of
the enlightenment tenets of fact and reason, to the rise of the ability of mass media in the
twentieth century to substantiate and give form to the spectral ephemera of the
imagination. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s theories of simulacra and the writing practice
of theory-fiction, I posit that hyperstition and its use exists in a world where consensual
reality is not so much an immutable fact as it is endlessly produced and reworked.

In the second half of this chapter I apply the four main phases of what makes an
object hyperstitional to the online phenomenon that is the Slender Man. Slender Man was
a fictional character created in 2009 on a forum thread on the somethingawful.com
website. From its initial beginnings on the forum, Slender Man spread to several social
media platforms such as YouTube and Reddit where its mythos was developed and drew
in a number of creators and fans who, in in various forms of online vernacular, such as
the creation of videos, images and fan fictions, breathed life into the character. Slender
Man exploded into the mainstream US media consciousness when it was named as the
motive in an attempted murder case in 2014, where two teenage girls attempted to kill
their friend to gain favour with the character.63 Through my analysis I show that the
Slender Man phenomenon is a localised example of a hyperstition in operation, and that
the processes and dynamics of the Slender Man are symptomatic of how various fictional
narratives online are produced, circulated and consumed in today’s online world.

2.1: Of the Enlightenment and Romanticism – Of Objective “Reality”

and Subjective “Fiction”

Since the age of enlightenment, the dominant mode for critical thinking and
examining the world around us has been one of deductional reason, where the ideal of
empiricism, and the deployment of facts, logic and scepticism led to a questioning of long

62
Ccru, Writings 1997-2003, (Online: Time Spiral Press, Kindle Edition, 2015): 128-131.
63
For background on the incident, see Associated Press, “Slender Man Stabbing: Wisconsin Girl Sentenced
to 40 years in mental hospital”, TheGuardian.com, Feb 1 2018, accessible from
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/01/slender-man-stabbing-wisconsin-girl-sentence.
27
held belief systems, be it critiques of religion or the divine right of the monarchy. As a
result, this world of secular rationality and modernity as scientific utility introduced “a
scientific order that condemned spirits and spectres to a bygone barbaric age of
superstitious credulity or a primitive, immature stage of culture akin to childhood.”64 The
“real” was that which could be explained by the laws of science, where the value of facts
and their “truth” could be deduced by objective and replicable means. Various religious
and supernatural phenomena on the other hand was denounced as mere “fictions,” and
subsequently dismissed as the disordered ramblings of the irrational mind.

But in this age of reason and modernity, the ghosts and spectres did not go away.
Pre-figuring the modern uncanny of Freud, gothic fictions of the time conjured into being
what could be called a “supernaturalization of everyday life,” where mimetic, realist
forms used by the literary gothic took the world of reason, facts, and natural law, and
overlaid it with its spectral opposite – a world of darkness, fear and anxieties.65 What was
once knowable in the everyday workings of natural law slips between the cracks into a
world that is unknowable and ineffable, as this process of over layering creates a gothic
world that is at once unfamiliar, eerie, and unhomely (unheimlich). At the same time,
gothic fiction’s habitual foregrounding of its own stylistic excess within the text through
repetition and narration created a sense of disruption and instability within the text,
producing “a momentary position of epistemological uncertainty whose euphoria stems
from its bleeding into an ontological uncertainty.”66 This uncertainty in turn produced
what Tzvetan Todorov calls a “hesitation” on both the part of the narrator and the reader
as they try to determine the reality of what they are seeing/reading, forcing a choice on
their part as to whether what is happening before them is a new reality, or merely an
illusion. In most gothic fictions, the pervasive ambivalence and transgressions are
eventually accounted for, and the boundaries between reality and the imaginary are
restored back to normality. But the hypermediated form of gothic performativity within
the text, and its generation of weird and eerie ambivalences “leaves readers, viewers and
listeners as haunted by the ghosts of the repressed as the characters they read, see and
hear [...] its transgressions depicted so vividly that audiences can almost see, feel and
experience them.”67

64
Fred Botting, “Technospectrality: An Essay on Uncannimedia”, In Justin Edwards (Ed.), Technologies
of the Gothic in Literature and Culture, (New York: Routledge, 2015): 17.
65
Ibid. 19.
66
Van Efferen, 16.
67
Van Efferen, 18.
28
2.2: Spectral Realities and Ghosts in Modern Machines

Alongside the rise of gothic literary fiction in the nineteenth century, there was a
concurrent development of new technologies that allowed the projection of images that
were considered to be solely the remit of subjective consciousness onto a two-
dimensional screen. The inventions of proto-cinematic magic lanterns and photography
brought visual phantasmagoria into physical reality, creating a “doubleness of
modernity,” where “fantasy irrupts into reality; ghosts, death, darkness and monstrosity
cross lines of exclusion.”68 This partial manifestation of what was once confined to either
the text or our subjective imaginations allowed society to confront hitherto repressed
anxieties in a way that was at once both fearful, yet reassuring and non-threatening.

But it was the development of mass media technologies in the early twentieth
century, with the advent of cinema, television and recorded music, that created
phantasmagoria on a global and industrial scale. The possibility of creating doubles of
human subjectivity in the form of spectral images, sounds, and worlds that mirrored our
own, ushered in the uncanny as an aesthetic concept being mechanised on an industrial
scale. This spectral reproduction and replication of the Real that resided both in art and
the world was analysed by Walter Benjamin regarding the authenticity, reproduction and
spectacle of mass media in modern society. Benjamin argued that art, once the realm of
tradition and ritual of a pre-modern society, gave way to the reproduced image, one that
could be transmitted and directly beamed onto the cinema screen or played directly into
our homes. Mass media in this form could be circulated and listened to/seen by the masses
in ways never envisioned before. This new world of media, with its constant flow of
images and sounds that mirrored the shock and awe of modernity, required a new mode
of perception of the spectator to take in and absorb this mediated world of light and sound.
It is this absorption of sound and image that for Benjamin marks the true power and effect
of reproduced works of art to that of traditional art: “A man who concentrates before a
work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the
Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass
absorbs the work of art.”69

68
Van Efferen, 18.
69
Walter Benjamin, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, In Francis Francina & Jonathan Harris
(Eds.), Art in Modern culture; an Anthology of Critical Texts, (London: IconEditions, 1992): 305.
29
 As mass media ingrained itself into the very fabric of our social world, the
uncanny forces that resided within its technical assemblage also “extended its reach in
the course of the century,” as the proliferation of various media radiating from automata,
photographs, phonographs, films and toys to industry itself, meant that the uncanny was
“moving beyond the confines of individual texts or a single subjectivity and into the social
sphere: it found itself ‘generalized, diffused through a new world of spectacle and
magic’.”70 The increasing ubiquity mass media in society in the twentieth century began
to play a greater role in forming and reforming the social realities of whole populations.
The ability of mass media and the respective technologies to first mirror, then impact
upon the audience’s subjectivities, and unconsciousness became so pronounced according
to Friedrich Kittler, that mass media have supplanted our need to imagine the world
around us: “once memories and dreams, the dead and the ghosts, become technically
reproducible, readers and writers no longer need the powers of hallucination while
mechanisms of the unconscious which previously could only be found in human
experiments, abandon us in order to populate the film studios as doubles of dead souls”71

2.3: More Real than the Real Itself: Baudrillard and the Image as
Reality

Moving from the late twentieth to the early twenty first century, there has been a
historical shift in culture and society from that of the “modern,” where the representation
and logic of culture was one “of linear temporal progression, reflected in the idea of
history as a teleological and irreversible accumulation”, while its representation in culture
resulted in “an aesthetic of individual creativity, of the avant-garde, and of fashion,” to
that of the “postmodern” epoch.72 While the definitions and structures of postmodernism
are not part of the scope of this thesis, it can be summarised into three main themes.73 The

70
Botting, (2015), 21,
71
Ibid., 22.
72
Mike Gane, Baudrillard’s bestiary: Baudrillard and Culture, (London: Routledge, 1991): 92-93.
73
In terms of the history of postmodernism, what is of notes that many of the theorists who have been
labelled as “postmodernist” never did so themselves or rejected the label and term. While theorists such as
Lyotard and Baudrillard do mention postmodernism, they do so to talk about a specific social or cultural
condition, while theorist such as Mark Fisher and Frederic Jameson who provided a Marxist analysis
postmodernism as a vehicle for the propagation of late-capitalism. the key texts that are considered tenets
of postmodernism include Jacques Derrida. Of Grammatology. (London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1997), Jean-Luc Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Translated by Geoffrey
Bennington and Brian Massumi). (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1984), and Frederic
Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
1991). For an overview of Postmodernism as a theoretical concept read Stuart Sim (Ed.). The Routledge
Companion to Postmodernism (3rd Edition). (London: Routledge, 2011).
30
first is the decline and erosion of metanarratives, where the grand narratives of the pre-
modern and modern era have been challenged and subjected to scepticism, the result
being a splintering of singular worldviews/frameworks to a multitude of differing
viewpoints and histories. The second theme is the shift to a model of late-capitalism, in
which the dominant mode of capitalist production - which was centred on the
accumulation of physical commodities - undergoes a shift from the material to immaterial
as knowledge is monetized and capitalist production moves from the manufacturing of
products and commodities, to services and information. The third theme is the ubiquity
of new media, and digital technologies, where the proliferation of electronic mass media
and its facilitation has not only changed how the world is viewed and represented, it has
also allowed the acceleration of capital to the point where it has managed to both
transcend national borders and the limits of human cognition.

It is Jean Baudrillard who, through texts such as Symbolic Exchange and Death
(1976), and Simulation and Simulacra (1981), provides a poetic and prophetic analysis
of the sociological phenomena of the contemporary postmodern society and the effect of
postmodernism on what considered between the real and the imaginary in society.
Baudrillard argues that a postmodern society no longer organises itself around the
consumption of goods and commodities based on needs and wants, but instead now
concerns itself with a world of simulation and a play of images and signs, and that we
now live in a society of simulation and simulacra.

The key to this logic of simulation is the concept of what Baudrillard calls
simulacra. As the circulation and reproduction of images - facilitated by late capitalism
and transmitted by a plethora of digital and electronic media - intensifies and accelerates
across various media, these images and signs, and our consumption of them, become
increasingly untethered from any reference to that of the Real. Reality instead begins to
be modelled on images and signs that are reproduced from a continuing reproduction
other signs and images that now precede and determine for the real world. In tracing out
the progression of simulacra in culture, Baudrillard points towards three stages, or orders,
of simulacra in history; the first order, which is based on the pre-modern age, where the
image and signs provided are a mere stand in for the real representation, the second
order, where the boundaries between the real and artificial become diffuse and weaker
as the copy is so well made that it threatens to replace the actual real that it masks and is
meant to (mis)represent, and the third order of simulacra, associated with the
postmodern era, where signs, images and objects are no longer modelled towards the real.

31
Instead, “the model takes the place of the ‘real’, the referent, and becomes the ‘signifier
of reference’: the point from which internally differentiated modulations in the object are
reproduced.”74

Baudrillard here is not arguing that this order of simulacra is in and of itself
artificial, as that would denote that it mirrors towards the Real. Instead, with the third
order of simulacra, the boundaries between the real and the image effectively collapse in
on each other, creating the aforementioned hyperreal.75 In this world of hyperreality it is
not reality, but artificiality itself that is impossible to fake now.76 As Fisher notes on the
reality of the fake; “[s]imulation, as Baudrillard shows, is not dissimulation. Fakery
depends upon an authentic and authorised reality from which it can be separated, whereas
the third-order simulacra (“the simulation of simulation”) have fatally collapsed this
distinction, not epistemologically but functionally: simulations operate as (if) real.”77

In a stylistic turn from the 1990s onwards, Baudrillard subsequently became

known for the practice, or mode, of critical thinking that came to be known as “theory-
fiction” (or “simulation theory” and “anticipatory theory”). In this mode, Baudrillard
argues that the intensive pace of contemporary society is fast outstripping the academy’s
ability to analyse and grasp what is happening. Baudrillard argues that, in terms of
explaining and theorising what is going on, one should not look towards the academy, but
to art and culture for its ability to simulate and extrapolate trends and phenomena that are
occurring in society. Texts such as The Vital Illusion (2000) (where Baudrillard “presents
himself [...] as a detective searching for the perpetrator of the ‘perfect crime,’ the murder

74
Gane, 97.
75
In his analysis of spectrality in media, Fred Botting lays out four “orders” or periods of spectrality in
media that correspond with the historical turn from pre-modernism, to modernism, and finally
postmodernism, that loosely corresponds with Baudrillard’s three orders of Simulacra “ First, ghosts really
exist as manifestations of a supernatural sphere in reality; second, ghosts mask or pervert a sense of reality
and serve the interests of corrupt social or symbolic systems in inculcating superstitious or slavish credulity
(this order is particularly strong in the eighteenth-century as enlightened reason poses its radical, bourgeois
and democratic challenge to religious and feudal institutions). The third order of spectrality develops
alongside modernity’s faith in scientific empiricism and reason: its ghosts point to the absence of any secure
reality, identifying spectrality with psychological, delusional, hallucinatory effects of disordered
consciousness. That delusions or distortions of reality can be caused by technical devices, whether fictional,
theatrical or scientific (the ‘machinery’ of narrative technique, the smoke and mirrors of stage effects, the
machines of projection and electrical generation) anticipates the final order of spectrality where there is no
reference to reality whatsoever: ghostliness refers only to spectres of other images and phantoms, a move
into a realm of simulation and hyperreality in which modernity slips away” (Botting, 2015, 19).
76
Baudrillard argues how impossible it would be to truly “fake” an event such as a bank robbery - “Simulate
a robbery in a large store: how to persuade security that it is a simulated robbery? There is no ‘objective’
difference: the gestures, the signs are the same as for a real robbery” (Baudrillard, Simulation & Simulacra,
177).
77
Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, (London: Ex-
Military, 2018): 147-148.
32
of reality, or ‘the most important event of modern history’.”) are written more in the style
of social science fictions than standard academic texts.78

As a result, Baudrillard sees representation disrupted by the emergence of “a

(hyper)fictive plane in which theory is effaced by fiction (and vice versa).”79 Fisher
explains in more detail the way that “the expansion of fiction into theory [...] has an
ambivalent effect on theory. If theory can no longer be distinguished from fiction – if
fiction can perform theory and theory must perforce become fiction then map and territory
are indeed confused, but in a more complicated and interesting way than Borges’ story
suggests.”80 In effect, such fictions no longer act like traditional literature or text, but
instead “stand in for a social scene that has been thoroughly cybernetized. This is no
longer a matter of feedback, but of simulation-circuitries which have no referent beyond
themselves.”81

2.4: Theory-Fictions, the Ccru, and Hyperstitions

The idea of theory-fiction is nothing new. Baudrillard in his essay “Simulation

and Simulacra” cites, “On Exactitude in Science”, the one-paragraph short story written
in 1946 by Jorge Luis Borges. Meanwhile, philosophers such as Nietzsche, Jean Paul
Sartre, and Georges Bataille often wrote about their theoretical concepts in the form of
prose fictions and poetry, while the philosopher and critic Stanley Cavell describes the
concept of cinema as a fully realised world that not only mirrored our own but often come
to stand for our world. In their ability to mirror and stand in for our world, movies not
only lay out theoretical concepts as a narrative device, but in their world making, actively
do philosophy.

Such practices and moves, however, were merely a prelude/ferment to the rise of
artistic practices that were occurring in radical academia, art and culture in the mid to late
1990s that were explicitly located in the realm of theory-fiction. For several loosely
involved interdisciplinary communities and collectives, the idea of theory-fiction was not
merely a frivolous pseudo-artistic practice, but a concept to be taken seriously. In the
backdrop of such ideas, new emergent digital and information technologies, along with

78
“Jean Baudrillard”, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Mar 7 2007, accessible from
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/#5.
79
Fisher, Flatline Constructs, 155.
80
Ibid. Fisher also lays out a detailed taxonomy of the various iterations of what theory-fiction could
represent in his PhD thesis. See Flatline constructs, pp 155-156.
81
Ibid., 24.
33
the rise of the techno-SF literary offshoot cyberpunk, and the technologically mediated
subcultures it spawned, heralded for some the arrival of a hybrid culture where the
nominal boundaries between art, science, and culture, organic and artificial, would
collapse in on themselves and the barriers between the real and imaginary would
effectively be erased.

The collective that best embodied this new approach was the Cybernetic Culture
Research Unit (Ccru), an interdisciplinary affiliation of students, professors, artists, and
musicians based at the philosophy department of Warwick University in the mid to late
1990s.82 First headed by Sadie Plant, then, until its demise, by Nick Land, the Ccru was
initially meant to be a group that would study the nascent fields of cybernetic and internet
theory within the ideological confines of the academy. However, once Plant left in 1997
and was taken over by Land, the Ccru went spectacularly rogue from the demands and
desires of the faculty board in the late 1990s, as their bewildering “theory-fictions” - an
array of texts, missives, and conference papers and presentations as rave-art installations
- sought to harness the zeitgeist of internet-occultism and Y2K-driven apocalyptic
discourse in order to break the pre-programmed systems of thought prevalent in western
academia.

The Ccru in their work would brazenly splice the cyberpunk worlds of William
Gibson and the future shock narratives of movies such as Bladerunner (Ridley Scott,
1982), and Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983), and Terminator (James Cameron,
1984) with the weird fictions of H.P. Lovecraft and William Burroughs. In doing so, they
would course through an array of late twentieth cultural ephemera such as rave
soundsystems, synthetic drugs, jungle and drum and bass music, digital computer art,
genetic technology, and various esoteric and magical concepts, all the while infusing their
systems of thought with the inhuman philosophies of Deleuze/Guattari and Bataille. Their
work strived to achieve, according to Simon Reynolds, “a kind of nomadic thought that -
to use the Deleuzian term – ‘deterritorializes’ itself every which way: theory melded with
fiction, philosophy cross-contaminated by natural sciences (neurology, bacteriology,

82
Those who were affiliated with the Ccru during and after its time as part of the University of Warwick
Philosophy department include philosophers Iain Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier and Reza Negarestani;
cultural theorists Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun; publisher and philosopher Robin Mackay; digital media
theorists Luciana Parisi and Matthew Fuller; electronic music artist and Hyperdub label head Steve
Goodman, a.k.a. Kode9; writer and theorist Anna Greenspan; novelist Hari Kunzru; and artists Jake and
Dinos Chapman, experimental musician Russell Haswell, as well as regularly collaborating with the
experimental art collective 0[rphan]d[rift>] (Maggie Roberts and Ranu Mukherjee).
34
thermodynamics, metallurgy, chaos and complexity theory, connectionism).”83 The Ccru
texts were the practice of theory as cyberpunk fiction taken seriously, all seen through a
prism of chaos magic and other semi occultic practices, creating a gothic, labyrinthian
web of distraction, confusion and destabilisation of the world around themselves.84

One of the more infamous concepts developed by the Ccru was the idea of
hyperstition, which describes the process in which a fictional entity becomes reality. It is
a concept that in effect is a distilled form of Baudrillard’s simulacra, where “the
becoming-fiction of theory is necessarily accompanied by the becoming-real of fiction,”
arguing that it “is now no longer adequate to consider fiction to be on the side of the false,
the fake or the imaginary. It can be considered to belong to the artificial, once we
understand […] that the Real, far from being opposed to the artificial, is composed of
it.”85 There have been several working definitions of what is a hyperstition provided by
writers and theorists who have examinations of the concept and its mechanisms. Alex
Williams describes it as “narratives able to effectuate their own reality through the
workings of feedback loops, generating new socio-political attractors.”86 Meanwhile,
academic Delphi Carstens provides a more detailed overview;

Hyperstition is a neologism that combines the words ‘hyper’ and ‘superstition’ to

describe the action of successful ideas in the arena of culture. Akin to neo-
Darwinist Richard Dawkins’ concept of memes, hyperstitions work at the deeper
evolutionary level of social organisation in that they influence the course taken by
cultural evolution. Unlike memes, however, hyperstitions describe a specific
category of ideas. Coined by renegade academics, the Cybernetic Culture
Research Unit (Ccru), hyperstition describes both the effects and the mechanisms
of apocalyptic postmodern ‘phase out’ or ‘meltdown’ culture.”87

The Ccru themselves, in evoking a simpler, more esoteric description of the

concept, described hyperstition as thus:

83
Simon Reynolds, “RENEGADE ACADEMIA: THE Cybernetic Culture Research Unit”, Energy Flash,
Nov 3 1999, accessible from http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/11/renegade-
academia-cybernetic-culture.html.
84
While many of the Ccru’s actions, recordings, and writings have been dispersed into the dark and
untended areas of internet archiving, most of the posts and essays produced by the collective were salvaged
and can now be viewed over at http://Ccru.net/, while several of the most famous sections of the Ccru
narratives were collected and published in the book Ccru: Writings 1997-2003 (Online: Time Spiral Press,
2015).
85
Fisher, Flatline Constructs, 156.
86
Simon O’Sullivan, “Accelerationism, Hyperstition and Myth-Science”, CYCLOPS JOURNAL, Issue 2
(2017): 13.
87
Delphi Cartsens, “Hyperstition: 2010”, Merliquify.com, September 5 2010, accessible from
http://merliquify.com/blog/articles/hyperstition/#.XGRGmTP7TIU
35
 1. Element of effective culture that makes itself real.

2. Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device.

3. Coincidence intensifier.

4. Call to the Old Ones.88

The idea of hyperstition was itself embedded within the entire meta-narrative
body of the Ccru. In his feature on the Ccru, Simon Reynolds interviewed Derek
Benjamin from Warwick University who, in his attempts to explain the fallout with the
group in academic legalese concludes “See, there isn't such a thing as the Ccru.”89
Numerous stories and incidents of gossip surfaced of bizarre experiments to break the
boundaries of human thought, involving sleep deprivation and drug taking, leading to
such incidents as “a three-week long experiment in refusing to speak in the first person,
instead referring to the collective entity ‘Cur’.”90

On a textural level, the Ccru texts are a work of hyperstition in itself. Described
as “a peopling machine on the hyperplane,” several characters, from the ethnologist
Echidna Stillwell to cryptographer Daniel Barker to the archivist Peter Vysparov, existed
alongside the actual members of the Ccru. These academics would go on to write and
develop a series of speculative and “excavated” theories and texts that included real life
events figures such as Bill Gates, William Burroughs, and H.P. Lovecraft as well as
institutions such as MIT. They also drew in journalists who wrote about them, both real
and fabricated, into its constantly shifting web of conspiracies and research avenues.91

The ways in which the Ccru developed the concept of hyperstition itself were in
the form of weird tales that were also themselves conspiracy-tinged hyperstitions. In the
text, “Lemurian Time War,” the Ccru describe their encounter with William Kaye, an
assistant to Peter Vysparov.92 Kaye tells an alternative take on the life and work of
William Burroughs, in particular an incident in 1958 where he comes upon a copy of the
short story the Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar, a 1988 text that he had yet to compose, but
with the manuscript dated three centuries earlier. From this revelation, Kaye reveals that
for the following three decades, Burroughs has been waging a clandestine magical time

88
Ccru, (2004), “Polytics”, Hyperstition, June 07, accessible from
http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/006777.html
89
Reynolds, (1999).
90
Robin Mackay, (2013), “Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism”, Divus, February 27 2013,
accessible from http://divus.cc/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus#6.
91
Ccru, Writings 1997-2003 (Online: Time Spiral Press, Kindle Edition, 2015): 147-151.
92
The full text from “Lemurian Time War” can be found at http://Ccru.net/archive/burroughs.htm
36
war against what Burroughs refers to as the One God Universe (OGU), a clandestine
organisation responsible for the maintenance of the totalising reality systems of social
control. In this war, the creation of narrative techniques such as cut-up and the fold-in are
used as narrative weapons “whose sole purpose was to escape the bonds of the already-
written, charting a flight from destiny.”93

Within this weird tale lies the theory behind hyperstition, where the OGU stands
in for the cultural tendency in modern culture where “fiction is safely contained by a
metaphysical ‘frame’, prophylactically delimiting all contact between the fiction and
what is outside it.”94 The power of words and signs to alter our perceptions of the world
is disavowed as having the powers of the false against the true, that is, the dominant
narrative of rational thought and “common sense,” itself a narrative that masks its ability
mould and shape social reality. Postmodernism, in its creation of texts and symbols
without a referent to the Real presents itself as an aesthetic or practice that subverts
representative realism. The Ccru refutes this. Postmodernism they contend, “merely
consummates a process that representative realism had initiated. Representative realism
severs writing from any active function, surrendering it to the role of reflecting, not
intervening in, the world. It is a short step to a dimension of pristine textuality, in which
“the existence of a world independent of discourse is denied altogether.”95 In response,
practitioners of hyperstition regard reality as consisting of a series of fictions (approved
by the OGU). Through the functional or magical power of writing and art, these
practitioners attempt to “break the code” of the OGU and bring about disruptions and
changes in reality through the use/misuse of signs. “Writing operates not as a passive
representation but as an active agent of transformation and a gateway through which
entities can emerge. ‘[B]y writing a universe, the writer makes such a universe
possible’.”96

The concept of hyperstition, in its allusion towards the blending of occultic

vectors and digital technologies, may provide it as a practice with a hint of edgy novelty.
But for the Ccru, it was a serious reaction, or response, to what they saw as standardising
and oppressive models of knowledge and cultural production taking place in society. Seen
in this regard, hyperstition takes the form of a creative artistic practice that is actually part
of a line of modes and practices that sought to destabilise the audience and their ability to

93
Ccru, (2015), Kindle Locations 574-575.
94
Ibid., Kindle Locations 526-527.
95
Ibid., Kindle Locations 495-498.
96
Ibid., Kindle Locations 502-504.
37
separate the real from the imaginary. From the theory-fictions of Baudrillard and the
phantasmagoria generated by the technologies of mass media, to the gothic fictions of the
nineteenth and twentieth century, these cultural modes and practices undermine what
Burroughs would refer to as the “reality studio”, a world of reality that presents itself as
universal but where the future and therefore the past, could indeed be shaped and changed
by the introduction of new fictions and myths.

2.5: On Slender Man and the Creation of the Internet’s First Folk Devil

On May 31st, 2014, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser,
two 12-year-old girls took a third girl, their friend Payton Leutner into the local woods
near the town. Once in the woods, both Weier and Geyser inexplicably attacked Leutner,
with Geyser stabbing Leutner nineteen times while Weier looked on. After they left her
for dead, Leutner managed to survive the attempted murder, crawling to a nearby road
where she was found and taken to hospital. Both Weier and Geyser were arrested shortly
afterward.

This case, already seen by those in news media as inexplicable, took a weird turn
when both girls stated in their defence that they attempted to kill Leutner to curry favour
and gain grace with an entity that was known as Slender Man. A mysterious character
that had been created in 2009 on the internet forum site somethingawful.com, Slender
Man was a fictional creature depicted as a tall, thin, faceless man who haunts and stalks
people, especially children and young adults. Both Weier and Geyser stated that they
made the decision to become “avatars” to Slender Man, where they would do his bidding
by killing their best friend, an action that would take months of speculation and planning.
When the trial came to court, they were eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity
but were promptly given long sentences in mental institutions. Weier was given 25-years-
to-life at a mental institution, with Geyser sentenced 40-years-to-life also at a mental
institution.

This case, and the ensuing media scrum and moral panic, brought up the
prerequisite debate on the possible dangers and harms that the internet could inflict upon
children and people with mental health issues, with talk of the internet as a place that “is
full of information and wonderful sites that teach and entertain,” but that was also a

38
“sinister world,” “full of dark and wicked things.”97 Among the media discourse several
questions arose; just what was Slender Man? How did it come about? Why, as a fictional
entity, was its existence so potent that people began to imagine that it was based on
something real?

There have been several instances of crimes in recent history that have been
committed by people with mental health issues or for whom the ability to determine what
was real and fake in society was, at best, tenuous. The murder of John Lennon by Mark
Chapman in 1980 and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley
Jr. in 1981 for example, point to people who were unduly influenced by various cultural
ephemera; in the case of Mark Chapman, a fandom towards Lennon turned into a
murderous obsession after a religious conversion compounded by mental health issues,
while Hinckley Jr. had developed an obsession with Jodie Foster after seeing her in the
film Taxi Driver, with the assassination an attempt to impress her. In these cases, and
others, the blending of the real and the imaginary occurred on an individual, insular basis;
many of the antagonists created an internalised world that was not open to other people
to inhabit or participate. With Slender Man, though, while the two girls made the decision
to kill on their own, they were taking part in a narrative that was both open and shared,
one where “literally thousands of other amateur writers, filmmakers, and digital artists
have contributed the complex mythos that defines the character.”98 Through their
collective efforts, their use of ubiquitous media technologies embedded in everyday life,
and the ability to create content that can circulate easily across online platforms and social
media, thereby giving it a form of validation and affirmation, this attempted murder gave
Slender Man’s mythos a much greater level of narrative power than if it had been done
on a merely individual basis. In their response to the media panic regarding the Slender
Man stabbings, the owners of the somethingawful.com site posted a tongue in cheek
response to their blog, alluding to how the internet has often warped consensual reality,
albeit badly, on a daily basis;

We are 15 years post-Blair Witch. These girls were 12. Found footage Youtubes,
shaking cameras and bad Photoshops of people with socks on their head standing
in the woods should not be fooling anyone. Especially not 12-year olds who
should be better at the Internet and media culture than actual adults. But maybe

97
Abigail Jones, “The Girls Who Tried to Kill for Slender Man”, Newsweek.com, August 13 2014,
accessible from https://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/22/girls-who-tried-kill-slender-man-264218.html.
98
Shira Chess & Eric Newsom, Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man, (New York: Palmgrave
McMillan, 2015): 4.
39
 all these chemtrails and Art Bells are actually making people dumber. Maybe there
is a lot of lead paint being used in Waukesha. Maybe the Internet makes you
stupid.99

On one level, the phenomenon of Slender Man and the stories and images that
surrounded its genesis adhere to many of the conceptual ideas of the gothic, particularly
in the way Slender Man came to embody the nascent social anxieties and uncertainties
surrounding the internet and social interactions online. When knowledge of Slender Man
became widespread after the Wisconsin case, it became the latest bogeyman monster that
fuelled a moral panic from the public about what young people and children were
watching and listening to on various internet websites and platforms. But on another level,
Slender Man also seems to be operating in a manner that allows itself to be seen, not just
as an entity of fiction, but also as something that, though the technology it inhabited,
could generate an affect upon the realities of those who participated in digital subcultures.
As Joseph Crawford argues, “[i]s it likely that any new form of mass media technology
could fail to manifest itself in Gothic forms? Any new form of popular media, from novels
to video games, will be a somewhat Gothic object, at least at first: such forms will always
provoke some anxiety precisely because their potential is unknown, and because they do
not yet fit comfortably into any established formal hierarchy.”100

Many aspects of Slender Man’s creation, ferment, and reproduction share a strong
correlation with that of being a localised example of a hyperstition in action. From this
statement it is possible to show that the qualities inherent within Slender Man are
symptomatic of a larger trend in online and digital subcultures, where the idea of a
consensual reality has been weakened to the point where various weaponised fictions can
slip by and become embedded within the social fabric, both online and in material space.
It is the ability of weaponised narratives, of which Slender Man is symptomatic, that are
collectively willed into life from the “outside” of fiction to cause ontological confusions
within the “inside” world of consensual reality that gives the Slender Man a charge of the
weird.

Slender Man was first introduced on June 10th 2009, on a somethingawful.com

forum titled “Create Paranormal Images.” The site’s members were challenged to upload

99
Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons, Please Do Not Kill Anybody Because of Slenderman”,
Somethingawful.com, June 4 2014, accessible from https://www.somethingawful.com/news/slenderman-
not-real/.
100
Joseph Crawford, “Gothic Fiction and the Evolution of Media Technology”, in Justin Edwards (Ed.),
Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture, (New York: Routledge, 2015): 36.

40
photoshopped images and photos that had been altered to show the existence of ghosts
and other various supernatural phenomena. For the first ten days, several images were
uploaded of varying quality, but on June 10th, the user “Victor Surge” (real name Eric
Knudsen) uploaded two photoshopped images. In the first image, a group of teenagers
are walking or running, away from something. The initial attention is given to the
foregrounded figure of a teenage boy with a look of anxiety and stress, before attention
is drawn to a figure at the rear of the picture. His features are blurred to the point of non-
description, but you can tell that he is significantly taller than everyone else and that he
is wearing a black tuxedo jacket. The caption under the first image quotes:

“…we didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but it’s persistent silence
and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time...”

– 1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead.

The second image shows a children’s playground in the afternoon. Among the children
playing in the foreground, in the shadow of the tree in the background the same
mysterious tall man appears, but now with what appears to be tentacles for arms, standing
while a small group of children surround him. Below this image the following caption
states.

“One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Notable
for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred
to as “The Slender Man”. Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at
library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence.”

– 1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986.101

In response to people asking for more Slender Man images, Surge goes on to post
“Maybe I’ll do some more research. I’ve heard there may be a couple more legit ‘Slender
Man’ photographs out there. I’ll post them if I find them.”

Over the following days, Surge would go on to upload more images, whereupon
other users began contributing their own images and text, in effect creating and expanding
upon the burgeoning mythos of Slender Man. One user, “Thoreau-Up,” posted that he
found a reference to the “Slender Man” in sixteenth century German folklore and
provided a screen capture of the translated story and an image of Slender Man depicted
in a woodcut picture. User “TombsGrave” posted that he found Slender Man mentioned

Ian Vincent, “Slenderman: Tracing the birth and evolution of a modern monster”, in Greg Taylor (Ed.),
101

Darklore Vol. 6, (London: Daily Grail Publishing, 2011): 11-12.

41
in an old Romanian folk tale. Along with such posts, many users began to post their own
contributions to the forum thread, offering up numerous images, stories, illustrations, and
other forms of media. The very next comment after Surge’s original image post states, in
a note of weird prescience, “You just know a couple of the good ones are going to
eventually make it to paranormal websites and be used as genuine,”102 while the user
“Derriere” posts several days later that, “[s]omething about Slender Man just seems to
really hit a nerve with a lot of us, it seems. I love it. It’s creepy, it’s weird, and it makes
me want to expand further on it.”103

From the confines of the initial somethingawful.com forum thread, images of

Slender Man and notes from his mythos began to break into more mainstream internet
media sites and platforms such as YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter. But the most influential
and successful developments of Slender Man as an entity with a history and agency were
the Marble Hornets104, TribeTwelve105 and EverymanHYBRID106 web series, in which
YouTube storytellers “became traveling bards, taking the story from the local village to
the wider world,”107.

The most famous of the three, Marble Hornets, created by Joseph DeLage and
Troy Wagner, began when a post on the Slender Man somethingawful.com thread by the
user “Ce Gars” provided the premise of the web series. In the post Ce Gars states that his
school friend Alex was working on a student film, titled Marble Hornets where, after
several weeks of filming, Alex had become anxious, antisocial and distant, before
abandoning the project altogether. Giving him the tapes of the film and instructing him
to “burn them,” Cee Gars then says that the tapes are unnumbered and out of order but
that he will post updates on the forum as and when he received them. The first Marble
Hornets video, posted on June 20th, 2009, shows the video’s first manifestation of
Slender Man. The series then progresses as the main protagonist, “J,” attempts to solve
the mystery of what has happened to Alex, and in doing so descends into an intense,
atmospheric horror as it seems that Slender Man begins to stalk the people involved with
the making of the film.108

102
Vincent, 12.
103
Chess & Newsom, 29.
104
See Marble Hornets, https://www.youtube.com/user/MarbleHornets
105
See TribeTwelve, https://www.youtube.com/user/TribeTwelve
106
See EverymanHYBRID, https://www.youtube.com/user/EverymanHYBRID
107
Chess & Newsom, 31.
108
At the time of writing this thesis, Marble Hornets, had 509,000 subscribers on Youtube.com with the
channel receiving a total of 99.6 million viewings. See
https://www.youtube.com/user/MarbleHornets/about.
42
The other two series, TribeTwelve and EverymanHYBRID, build upon the main premise
created by Marble Hornets to provide two different takes on the Slender Man mythos.
TribeTwelve is a dedicated YouTube channel that ostensibly starts off as a series of posts
on a school assignment about the Twelve tribes of Israel. The protagonist, Noah Maxwell,
dedicates the channel to his cousin Milo, who mysterious committed suicide earlier. But
in posting videos of Milo, Noah discovers the previously unseen image of Slender Man
in the background. From here the series feels, according to Chess and Newsom, “more
like a video blog of someone who is being stalked while unravelling a mystery,” as Noah
finds himself not only being haunted by the idea of Slender Man, but he is also harassed
both online and in the flesh by a mysterious cult based on the Slender Man called “The
Order,” who provide him with various clues and threats in the hopes that they can use
him to bring the Slender Man out into the open.109 EverymanHYBRID, the most self-
knowing and reflexive of the three series, centres on three young adult men who start their
own web blog about fitness and training. After several episodes, in a nod to the popularity
of the Slender Man meme and activity, they begin to add “viewings” of Slender Man into
their videos as a joke. But as the videos progress, the tone becomes darker as the three
men tell of how they sense something that was beginning to stalk them when the cameras
were turned off. It turns out that Slender Man, on seeing them perform being stalked by
him as a joke, starts to stalk the three men for real.

From these moments, up until and beyond the time of the Wisconsin stabbing, the
Slender Man story had grown from a couple of hastily made photoshop images to that of
a “collectively created, interweaving universe of web series, novels and novellas, video
games, mobile apps, and fan fictions.”110 Slender Man became the subject of various fan-
fiction stories and communities, while the story of Slender Man was created into a series
of independent video games such as Slender: The Eight Pages (2012) and Slender: The
Arrival (2013). The Wisconsin stabbing and its ties to Slender Man became the subject
of the HBO documentary Beware the Slenderman (Irene Taylor Brodsky, 2017), while
there have been several US indie and mainstream films about Slender Man, including
Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story (James Moran, 2017) and Slender Man
(Sylvain White, 2018)

In determining what it is about the Slenderman that makes it an example of a

hyperstition in action and therein an example of the weird, the following sections will use

109
Chess & Newsom, 34.
110
Ibid., 16.
43
the four main processes provided by the Ccru’s in their initial definition of hyperstition
and apply them to the processes and actions involved in the making of Slender Man, it
can be shown that in many instances, Slender Man conforms to the Ccru’s model for
generating hyperstitions.

2.5.1: Hyperstition Stage One - “An Element of Effective Culture that

Makes Itself Real.”

According to Carstens, the first process of a hyperstition in action is where “the

fostering of cultural speculation allows a fictional entity to take on a life of its own in
effect for it to become real in the mind of many.”111 In its genesis, Slender Man is a
particular example of “a unique collective creation that applies the affordances of the
digital age to age-old storytelling processes.”112 In mapping out the Slender Man
phenomenon, Chess and Newsom attribute several themes prevalent in contemporary and
digital cultures that, when added to the age-old process of storytelling and myth-making,
creates a multi layered and dense narrative that is always shifting and changing according
to the needs to of its prosumers.

The first theme is that the Slender Man is an example of “transmedia” in effect
where transmedia is a mode of storytelling and marketing that takes a core story or text
from a specific medium and develops and expands the narrative universe of the story onto
new media forms, so as to build up new audiences and entry points to experience the core
story. The rise in transmedia narratives over the last couple of decades have coincided
with the escalation of digital media that has facilitated the transmission and continuation
of a story from beyond traditional mass media such as film, TV, and literature.113

In terms of displaying the aesthetics of transmedia, Slender Man demonstrates

the way that it’s the various actors involved, both users and creators, effectively became
one and the same, or prosumers.114 As well as viewing and sharing various images, text,

111
“Hyperstition: Delphi Carstens at TEDxTableMountain”, YouTube Video, 10:13, posted by “TEDx
Talks”, September 14 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdj9ChIRoqU.
112
Chess & Newsom, 9.
113
An example of transmedia in action is The Matrix film series, which grew out from the original film
trilogy, and expanded into anime cartoons, graphic novels, and video games, with each iteration filling in
gaps to the back story, adding and developing upon the mythos around the core text.
114
A Prosumer is the name given actives users who “create a culture of sharing, typically called a ‘culture
of participation’” (Sumiala, (2009), 258). Prosumers both consume and produce digital media content. Even
though the term has become synonymous with people who are on and consume social media, the term
originated with Philip Kotler in his 1986 article “Prosumers: A New Type of Consumer”. See Kotler, P.
“Prosumers: A New Type of Consumer”. The Futurist, 20 (1986), 24-28.
44
and videos on Slender Man, prosumers spread and deepen the mythos by breaking the
narrative out from the traditional rules and confines of traditional storytelling and having
it infest other forms of digital media. This sparked a flurry of reflexive discourse and
narrative building that highlighted “the fluidity of medium, storyteller, and process, and
also privileges a form of storytelling that is always necessarily incomplete.”115

The creators of Marble Hornets for example, once the conceit that the tapes were
real began to wear off, would continue to extend the pretence of “reality” in the way they
used social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and the comments section of
YouTube to post real time updates and converse with the audience “in character.” At the
same time the producers created “response” accounts that would then argue against “J”,
giving rational explanations as to the phenomena he was experiencing. This discourse
expanded outside of the confines of the Marble Hornets video comments section, as fans
of the series would make their own vlog responses to them, also “in character,” providing
various forms of advice and suggestions as to what “J” and the others should do. Both the
vlogger and the audiences, in the creation and participation in this online community,
created a media ecosystem containing many layers of reflexivity as various vloggers
began to acknowledge and collaborate with each other. The posting of collaborative and
cross-referential material gave a level of “proof” and authority among the audience as to
the veracity of Slender Man and the narrative of MarbleHornets, as if the characters were
actually going through these experiences for real.

In the words of the Ccru, the actions by all those involved in the online creation
of Slender Man is an example of “the collectivization of the fictional system.”116 While
examining the online nature of this collectivization, Chess and Newsom refer to the “open
sourcing” of horror and gothic storytelling conventions by online subcultures, alluding to
the discipline of open source software ethos where the code for a software product is
freely made available to the internet, whereupon users are allowed to use, add, and modify
it as they see fit. “Those who participate in the open-source process,” state Chess &
Newsom, “necessarily involve themselves in ‘the voluntary participation and voluntary
selection of tasks’ in all facets of production,”117 as various structural bugs and issues
within the code are resolved collectively. Using internet-based platforms such as social
media and forum sites such as somethingawful.com, the initial idea of Slender Man may

115
Chess and Newsom, 18.
116
CCRU, “How do Fictions Become Hyperstitions”, Hyperstition, June 19 2004, accessible from
http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003345.html
117
Chess & Newsom, 62.
45
have been made by a single individual, but the cultural production of its mythos became
a collective and sprawling affair that mirrored several aspects of the open source process,
a process that thrives on “reuse, modification, sharing of source code, an openness (and
transparency) of infrastructure, and the negotiation and collaboration of many
individuals.”118

In the early weeks after the first images of Slender Man were posted, an iterative
process of storytelling began to grow, where the images, stories, and videos being posted
started altering or adding key components of the legend, history, and actions of Slender
Man. Many of the users on the original thread, including the original poster Victor Surge,
encouraged other users to come up with their own stories and illustrations in a
collaborative effort. This process of community driven “debugging,” meant that key
aspects of the look and history of Slender Man would be discussed and agreed upon, while
other aspects that were not felt to be in keeping with the aesthetics of Slender Man were
either ignored, or users were gently encouraged towards the agreed upon aspects and
features, often providing advice on how their efforts could be improved.

From an agreed upon set of textual rules, Slender Man began to evolve and take
on a life of its own as the myriad “sightings,” stories, and images began to accumulate,
modifying and expanding the mythos in a variety of ways. Marble Hornets for example
introduced the concept of distortion and noise from electronic and digital devices
whenever Slender Man was nearby, while also introducing the idea of “proxies,” where
people who had fallen under the spell or curse of Slender Man would undertake violent
acts on its behalf, along with the idea of “slender sickness” where people would feel
nausea or have coughing fits or nosebleeds in its presence. Other texts would take this
further, with the idea of “proxies” evolving into that of actual cults and the symptoms of
slender sickness becoming more extreme, such as nosebleeds and headaches. Meanwhile
fanfiction communities on various blogging sites such as Tumblr, FanFiction.net, Reddit,
and Creepypasta Wiki, would generate various Slender Man stories and fan generated
fictions that examined aspects of the Slender Man character that were considered
marginal or outside of the main canon of texts.

118
Chess & Newsom, 64. In a move that went against the idea of shared authorship and possession,
Surge/Knudsen made moves to copyright the character of Slender Man in 2010, although in interviews he
has insisted that this was to protect the core property and integrity of the character being abused by
mainstream interests. This move “prevented mass media versions of the character, meaning that primarily,
the Slender Man has been developed in digital subcultures. While the character has slowly begun to migrate
to the mainstream, amateurs, rather than media professionals, have made many iterations (see Chess &
Newsom, 29).
46
2.5.2: Hyperstition Stage 2 - “A Fictional Quantity Functioning as a
Time-Traveling Device.”

The second part of the Hyperstition process occurs in the way a fictive entity or
element inserts itself into the cultural landscape, instigating a viral form of retconning
where, “[it] is not a matter of building the future but dismantling the past […] and
escaping the technical neurochemical deficiency conditions for linear-progressive
[narratives].”119 Explaining further, Carsten described how popular media and cinema
imagines a future that comes back to the present to alter the past: “such texts as The Matrix
and The Terminator, The Road, 12 Monkeys. These futures that they conjure into being
are so plausible precisely because they seem so very real to us.”120

From its very beginning, the plethora of submissions, images, videos, texts and
artistic illustrations attempted to conceive Slender Man within a faux-traditional history,
not only as a supernatural entity of the present, but as something that has always existed,
cropping up in various iterations in folklore with people “tracing” him back from 5000
BCE, to the 16th Century, to the 1980s.121 One of the main reasons for doing this was to
give Slender Man a heightened sense of myth and depth in its creation by breaking it free
from its origins as a post in a somethingawful.com thread.

In addition to the linking of Slender Man to various moments in history is the way
that Surge, and other users, linked Slender Man to similar pop cultural representations.
Slender Man was subsequently compared to the “Tall Man” from the Phantasm films, the
“Gentlemen” demons from the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the urban
legends of the “Men in Black” comic book and film series, The Blair Witch Project, and
Jack Skellington from the film The Nightmare Before Christmas. There were also
comparisons to other narratives such as the works of H.P. Lovecraft, in the weird,
uncategorised, yet terrifying nature of what the users on the original thread created, and
Mark Z. Danielewski’s weird tale House of Leaves (2000), though the use of a variety of
different literary and narrative forms (Diary entries, police and medical reports, news

119
Delphi Carsten, “Hyperstition: 2010”, quoting head of the Ccru Nick Land in his essay “Meltdown”,
where Land refers to a precursor from of hyperstition he terms as “K-Tactics.” See Nick Land, “Meltdown”,
in Robin MacKay and Brassier (Eds), Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings,1987-2007, (Bodmin:
Urbanomic, 2012). 441-461.
120
“Hyperstition: Delphi Carstens at TEDxTableMountain”, YouTube Video.
121
Many of these stories and images have been collected on the website The Slender Man Files.
http://www.slendermanfiles.org/
47
articles, images, drawings, photographs, etc). “By pulling in older stories from more
established media,” argue Chess and Newsom, “members of the somethingawful.com
forum were able to contextualize their story within a larger fiction (that might have
involved any, or all, of these characters), and also use these characters as part of the source
material.”122 It is this blending of the Slender Man within other forms of genre fiction and
folklore though history that gave it the ability to gain traction and become more ingrained
within the wider online social and cultural landscape as a fully established entity of its
own accord. The Slender Man, its creators would contest, has always been with us – we’ve
only just worked out who he was.

2.5.3: Stage Three of Hyperstition - “The Entity as a Coincidence

Intensifier.”

When talking about the third stage of hyperstition, Carsten refers to the cycles of
capitalism in the way that “our accelerated cultural fictions are bringing about the future
at a very rapid rate. Capitalism is an example of this. It is a zone of intensity a positive
feedback cycle that generates further and faster technological change and continuously
amplifies the scope of that changes.”123 Carsten also points to the concept of “unbelief,”
which the Ccru link with the media phenomenon of “hype” with regard to the way that
hyperstition rests upon an intensifying modes of circulation and feedback as symbols and
ideas infect the cultural sphere, whether people believe it to be true or not; “It’s not a
simple question of true or false with hyperstitions […] rather, it is a question of
transmuting fictions into truths.”124

Throughout history, forms of media communication and transmission, from the

mythic poem, and the printed word, to newspapers and television, there has been a gradual
decrease in the time scale for ideas and cultural narratives to travel in society, while there
has been concurrent increase in the geographical spread and reach of media. But with the
rise of digital networks and cheap mobile communication technology, the circulation and
intensification of information has reached the point where, on an informational level, the
world is “made out of constant flows of mediated items, ideas and actors travelling
materially and/or immaterially from one location to another, non-stop.”125

122
Chess & Newsom, 67.
123
“Hyperstition: Delphi Carstens at TEDxTableMountain”, YouTube Video.
124
Carsten, “Hyperstition: 2010”.
125
Johanna Sumiala and Minttu Tikka, “Imagining globalized fears: school shooting videos and circulation
of violence on YouTube”, Social Anthropology, 19(3) (2011): 255.
48
 With Slender Man, the circulation of images, stories and various texts across a
multiple digital media formats are an example of the concept of internet meme culture in
action. What is important here is the way that internet memes, in the process of traveling
through the internet, are consistently transformed and reconstructed as they take on other
cultural and memeific forms, be they national or site specific. When Slender Man was
first created, it was done so by a specific internet subculture of young people, in a
community that, while not hidden from public, would have required a certain amount of
inside knowledge to access and understand. In what was already a highly participatory
process of collective or “open source” fiction creation, Slender Man’s original authors
managed to construct and refine a character that “was so frightening that collaborators
confessed to being frightened of the very fiction they had created.” 126 Knowing that
Slender Man was at this time still an entirely fictional entity, they still allowed themselves
to enter into a form of suspended belief by its narrative power. Several users posted
updates on how they were now having nightmares or were experiencing moments of dread
and anxiety. The user “Phy” for example, in a post states: “Jeez. Slender Man’s been
entirely made up by this thread, but he’s already having an effect. He steals your sleep,”
while user “Death Sandwich” confesses, “Thanks to this thread I now hate trees,
windows, and tall people.”127

This desire to invest in the participatory/experiential aspect of Slender Man

despite acknowledging its fictional origins is explored by Jeffrey Tolbert who spoke to
and interviewed users who were involved in the original somethingawful.com thread.
Likening Slender Man as an example of the reverse of ostension, a concept in folkloric
studies that involves “the acting-out of narratives in reality, sometimes harmlessly,
sometimes in ways that promote deviant or even criminal behaviour,” Tolbert argues that
such posts describing experiential moments of dread and anxiety when coming into
contact with Slender Man are part of a process that not only add credence to the narrative
powers of Slender Man as a burgeoning legend, but in doing so invite more users to
undertake in discussion, circulation and direct participation, thereby adding more weight
and validation to the legend itself.128 Tolbert asserts; “[t]he metatextual function of the
text is not to enable debate about the legend’s veracity as experience or historical fact—
never in question here, since Slender Man was self-consciously created as a fiction—but

126
Chess & Newsom, 62.
127
Ibid., 73.
128
Jeffrey A. Tolbert, “The Sort of Story that has you Covering your Mirrors: The Case of Slender Man”,
Semiotic Review, Issue 2: Monsters (2013): 2.
49
its plausibility as a representative of the legend genre. To put it more succinctly, belief
in the literal content of the legend is non-existent and unproblematic; the issue is making
the legend seem like a legend.”129

This desire and willingness to invite further participation and immersion in

Slender Man’s mythos led to it spreading from beyond the confines the original SA thread
and its authors, and onto other sharing sites such as 4Chan and Reddit. Slender Man as
an entity invited participation from other communities and audiences, as it underwent an
intense level of reproduction, evolution and variation, with the boundaries between fans,
posters, and authors becoming fluid and less defined. As such, Slender Man underwent
the cycle of memeific hype alluded to by the Ccru. That is, a process of myth-making
through the suspension of belief that accompanies the creation of myths through human
history, but with the intensification and speed of circulation afforded by the internet. What
would have taken decades, even centuries to spread and become embedded into society,
was being done in real-time.

2.5.4 - Hyperstition Stage Four - “Call to the Old Ones.”

In reference to the biological history of earth in terms of mass extinctions and the
inauguration of the Anthropocene, the last incidence of hyperstition, according to
Carstens, is where:

Our vision machines, our computing devices, our electron microscopes, have
revealed to us the hidden dimensions of nature. We imagine aliens on the other
side of the historical divide are about to cross over. The old ones are the forces of
nature, immutability, and change, which humans have always innately realised
but have greatly feared are there. Science has revealed to us these old ones once
more.130

In his presentation, Carsten is talking both about the hyperobjects of financial

level capitalism, as well as the “mother earth, Gaia,” whose functions and processes
society is only just beginning to imagine. But in effect, this is about the process of
reaching the limits of experience that ties in with Fisher’s assertions that the weird creates
a fascination with that which lies beyond the agreed norms of perception, cognition and
experience.

129
Tolbert, 16.
130
“Hyperstition: Delphi Carstens at TEDxTableMountain”, YouTube Video.
50
 In the case of Slender Man there was this notion, continuing a long line of
historical moral panics associated with emergent media formats, that its creation,
reproduction and propagation across a wild and socially uncontrollable internet meant
that people, especially the young, were dabbling with and ushering in forces they did not
know about or quite understand. As Crawford notes with regard to such moral panics,
“while this narrative is hyperbolic and anti-realist, it remains a variant on fears about the
Internet expressed in the popular media; if we get involved in online media, we will
conjure up violent monsters, an exaggerated version of the widely expressed anxiety that
use of the Internet could expose vulnerable young people to the predations of deviants
and criminals.”131

According to Crawford, such anxieties around new media are consistent with the
idea of the “evil text”, be it a book, comic, video, computer game, or vlog, that
incorporates the very anxieties that often surrounding the rise of new forms of media.132
This idea of the evil text acting as a beacon for evil or having an influence on those who
watch it can be found in the likes of Marble Hornets and other productions, as the
producers associated viewing the Slender Man via technology with the idea of contagion
and virality. As the Slender Man in several instances is shown attracted to being filmed
by people on phones and cameras, while it is alluded that in watching these videos and
vlogs, “they infect those who make and watch them, exposing audiences to the predations
of evil forces.”133 The idea of virality is further extended in the way that those who make
the tapes supposedly come under the eye and power of Slender Man, compelling them to
record more footage of their daily lives, while those who watch the videos come to his
attention. When Slender Man broke into the mainstream media following the Wisconsin
stabbing, this idea of the Slender Man as a creature that could “infect” or “control” those
who spent too much time with it was picked by various news commentators and law
enforcement officials, where they likened Slender Man to that of being more akin to a
serial killer or child predators who search for young children on the internet to groom and
control,

With regards to the possibilities of Slender Man connecting to a more ineffable

mode of perception and thinking, Vincent asserts to the “occult potentialities” that lie
underneath the Slender Man mythos, in particular the way he links the Slender Man’s

131
Crawford, (2015), 45.
132
Ibid., 39.
133
Ibid., 43.
51
ability to achieve a narrative life of its own with that of the mythical Tulpa.134 Translated
as a “thought form”, or “a creature created from the imaginations of people through
magical acts,”135 the Tulpa originated from Tibetan mysticism, itself a “syncretic mix of
aspects of Buddhism, Taoism and the native pre-Buddhist Bön shamanic tradition.”136
The concept of the Tulpa was then brought over to the West by explorer and novelist
Alexandra David-Neel in her 1929 book, Magic and Mystery in Tibet, whereupon it has
since been appropriated and adopted by a variety of neo-pagan and modern magical
theories and systems. Early on in the somethingawful.com forum thread, the user “Bobby
Deluxe” already notes the parallels between the actions of the thread’s users in creating
Slender Man and the creation of a Tulpa, claiming that he knew “[o]nly enough to know
the single word booming against the back of my skull like a chant from an underground
temple - Tulpa, Tulpa, Tulpa. A creature made flesh by enough people thinking about
it.”137

The idea of Slender Man as a Tulpa of modern magick is for Vincent and
Chess/Newsom a fairly elegant one in the way that its deployment “allows a space where
the Slender Man is able to both exist and not exist,” while at the same time “implies an
inherently complicit audience, while providing reason for that audience’s inability to
control its subject.”138 This harks back to the hyperstitional idea of unbelief where, despite
the fact that it is very easy for people to go and find the faked origins of Slender Man
online and the constructed nature of its development, it is still able to provoke fear and
anxiety among those who watch the various web series or play the games based on its
mythos. The level of time, energy and imagination expended in creating Slender Man by
a particular online subculture in effect gave it a form of virtual life that allowed it to break
out into popular mainstream culture. While it may not be a “real” material being that is
able to bring physical despair, insanity and destruction upon its victims, the Slender Man
is real in the sense that:

The Internet’s construction and belief in the existence of a Slender Man has pulled
him from a small pocket of counterculture and brought him to popular mainstream
culture. One true tulpa effect is that mainstream television shows, films, and other
popular media now make references to the character. And the actions that occurred

134
Vincent, 24.
135
Chess & Newsom, 119.
136
Vincent, 26.
137
Chess & Newsom, 119.
138
Ibid., 119-20.
52
 in Wisconsin imply a kind of figurative tulpa. It does not matter that the character
is not real—what matters is that the young girls committed a crime because the
character seemed, for them, to have been brought to life.139

The lifeblood of the internet, and the content that gets created within, depends upon a mix
of unbelief and intensive immersion among the various collectives and audiences that
coalesce around various subjects. In the case of Slender Man, despite his fictional
creation, it achieved both recognition and notoriety through the internet and its
association with a grisly crime that shocked the US media. From here, Slender Man was
now being featured and referenced in various iterations in mainstream culture from
computer games such as Minecraft, to TV shows, such as Supernatural, Lost Girl and
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and even children’s animation series such as My
Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

2.6: Accelerated fictions and the Collapse of the Social Real.

The Slender Man as an online textural phenomenon is the latest iteration of a

cultural process that, from the rise of the mass culture where sounds, images and text
could be reproduced and distributed ad infinitum on a global scale, to a what Fisher calls
“the agency of the virtual” that refers to the ontology of the spectre in hauntology “not as
anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing,” before
linking it to the entity of neoliberal capitalism, a form that “is very clearly a world in
which virtualities are effective.”140 It is this idea of the virtual having agency and effect
in our material lives that show how Slender Man is symptomatic of the idea where an
increasing amount of our lives are spent in a virtual world where reality is mediated by
accelerated and weaponised fictions. Said fictions can be personalised, an example of
which can be seen in the rise the immaterial influencer economy with its development
and monetization of personal identity as a “brand.” Then there is the creation of various
memes and hoaxes that highlight the supposedly ludicrous nature of perceived truth. From
the creation of climate change “deniers” and “alternative data,” to “independent
journalists,” such fictions are often created online by various groups that involve
themselves in the Ccru’s concept of unbelief as “pragmatic scepticism or constructive
escape from integrated thinking.” These fictions are then let loose into the online world,

139
Chess & Newsom, 120.
140
Fisher, Ghosts of my Life, 18.
53
spreading into traditional mass media, only for said fictions to create a life and reality of
their own that comes back to haunt their creators.141

In engaging with Fisher’s argument regarding the generation of theory-fictions, it

is not just about making fictions more “real” and fusing the them with the power of theory;
there also has to be a reciprocal fictioning of reality to the point where “the real, far from
being opposed to the artificial, is composed of it.”142 Far from being a new phenomenon,
the fictioning of social reality has long been a project undertaken by various states and
agents to promote various ideological ideals, be it through the cultural industry’s
promotion of liberal capitalism in the US and the West, or with Soviet Russia and the
promotion of communism through the “Soviet realism” movement. The rise of Nazism
in German in the 1920s and 30s saw the aestheticization Nazi political and ideological
ideals inserted into the culture of everyday life – most famously in Leni Riefsnstahl’s
1935 documentary, Triumph of the Will.

But as politics, propaganda, and discourse have shifted first to traditional and then
digital mass media, there has been a parallel effort in the creation of weaponised fictions
created and fostered by state and private agents with various motives, be they political or
economic. From the tobacco and fossil fuel industry’s funding of fake and “alternative”
science to counter the standard narratives regarding smoking and climate change, to the
rise and funding of the anti-vaccination movement, such actions have sought to sow
distrust and undermine faith in institutions such as news media, the scientific community,
the state, and the medical profession, institutions that are relied upon by the public to
determine what was is “real” and what is “fiction” in our society.

This undermining of social institutions has allowed various “fictions” to circulate

around social media whereupon they subsequently seep into cultural and social reality.
From this point, it does not matter where these fictions are proven to be true or not; they
are out there with a life of their own, and even pointing out its artifice does not destroy it.
It is a place where perhaps it is not so much the creation of new worlds that infect the
“real” that is the problem. The systematic destruction of those institutions that provide us
with information that we use to shape our social realities is such that it has allowed the
real to become so weakened and diseased that the imaginary is able to gain a strong
foothold.

141
Ccru, “Polytics”.
142
Fisher, Flatline Constructs, 156.
54
Part 3: Driving Beyond Death - The Eerie Thanatos of Non-Place in J.G.
Ballard’s Crash and Concrete Island

Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten
to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors.

― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.

― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

This chapter will explore the weird and eerie with regards to the relationship
between people and contemporary urban spaces, and how such spaces impact not only
their actions and movements, but also social imaginations. In the first half of this chapter,
I will explore the rise of modernism in the twentieth century and how its aesthetic and
ideological principles, in the construction of buildings and spaces and its subsequent
erasure of history and traditions, moved the uncanny from the home to outside spaces.
This mix of spatial and psychological rupture and erasure, along with the social evolution
towards the logic of supermodernism, lead to contemporary urban spaces as non-places.

I will then analyse how such eerie registers of non-places are represented and
utilised in two of J.G Ballard’s novels, Crash (1973) and Concrete Island (1974). In both
novels Ballard moves behind the perceived presence of absence inherent in what he terms
the “death of affect” that exist in the planned, ordered spaces of post-WWII Britain to
reveal a series of ambiguous agencies and potentialities that trigger passionate and
uncontrollable drives in the characters. In Crash, the traumatic event of a car crash, far
from being seen as a negative impact upon the mind and flesh, opens up a new imaginary
realm that restructures the relationship of their bodies to the motorway. Compelled to
engage in a series of violent car crash and ritualistic sex acts, the characters are carried
up by mysterious unconscious drives within them, drives that that are irresistible even it
if it means their annihilation. Concrete Island, in contrast, flips the scenario where the
main protagonist, also involved in a car crash, breaks past the confines of the non-place
and finds himself marooned on a traffic island sealed on all sides by motorways and
embankments. In this situation, the non-place or the motorway encloses a non-, or
negative, space, a waste ground discarded by the incessant march of progress represented
by urban redevelopment. As the protagonist accepts his fate of being trapped in this
55
excluded space, he undergoes a form of psychic rebirth, as his unconscious mind begins
to integrate with the Island. It turns out that far from there being an absence of presence,
the island contains all forms of eerie registers hidden within its landscape.

3.1: Modernism and the Uncanny

The modes of the weird and eerie that reside in the realm of space and architecture
is neither a new discovery nor a trend, for there has long been a confluence between the
analysis of public space and the investigation of the uncanny as a concept since the
beginning of the nineteenth century. Social and economic developments in this era
coincided with the rise of the bourgeoisie as a social class during the nineteenth century
that brought with it the “historical, spatial, existential, psychological, and political
implications of the notion ‘Heim,’ understood in the double sense of bourgeois home and
the city as living environment.”143 For the newly mercantile class of the bourgeoisie, there
was the sense of not belonging within society and of being “not quite at home in its own
home.”144

The home of the nineteenth century became a paradigm where the construction of
the self could be built though the accumulation of objects and goods, as well as through
the control of space within the home that would “involv[e] decisions about how to arrange
relationships between what is already in place – the ‘original features’, the traces of
previous inhabitants, and the changing demands of everyday existence.”145 Barry Curtis
argues that the bourgeois home in the nineteenth century became a privatised area away
from the masses, as the control and partitioning of space was created along emergent
social norms, meaning that interactions between social and generational classes within
the house were kept to a minimum.146 By undergoing such actions, the home was the
locus to retain a form of patriarchal fixity and stability, enabling the repression and
disavowal of unwanted social anxieties.147

143
Masschelein, 144.
144
Vidler, 4.
145
Barry Curtis, Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film, (London: Reaktion Books, 2008): 35.
146
Ibid., 42.
147
One of the prominent narrative themes of gothic fiction during this period is the way that, despite the
attempts of their owners to impose order, and stability upon their home and their world, the eruption of
various repressed forces and trauma consistently render such spaces “unhomely.” For a more detailed
analysis of the Gothic with regards to the home, read Tamara Wagner, “Gothic and the Victorian Home”,
in Glennis Byron and Dave Townshend (Eds) The Gothic World, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014): 110-120,
“The Haunted Castle” in Glennis Byron and David Putner, The Gothic, (London Blackwell Publishing,
2004): 259-262, and “Homely Gothic” in Fred Botting, Gothic, (London: Routledge, 1996). For a more
contemporary take, read Christine Wilson, “Haunted Habitability: Wilderness and American Haunted
House Narratives”, and “Gothic Affects: Digitally Haunted Houses and the Production of Affect-Value” in
56
 But with the advent of the modernist enterprise and the evolution of urban spaces
in the nineteenth and twentieth century, there is a concurrent movement of the uncanny
as an aesthetic and psychological mode from the confines of the home to the architectural
spaces of the street and the city. The modernist movements that sprang up across Europe
and the US at the beginning of the twentieth century sought to radically alter society with
regards to time and space, that, in turn, would change the role of the individual subject
situated within them. As a practice and ideology, modernism sought to improve society
through the social engineering of space by employing technological advancements to
radically reconstruct public and private spaces, along with the development of new
architectural styles and practices. Utopian designs for the city, such as Le Corbusier’s
“Radiant City” (1925), emphasised a move away from the dirty, chaotic, and labyrinthian
landscapes of the old cities towards a formal space containing horizontal and vertical
geometries of straight lines, clean surfaces, and abstract geometric shapes in the design
of buildings and public spaces, from squares to parks.148 The proliferation of modernist
principles to urban space would lead to a radical rethinking of certain types of social
buildings and infrastructure systems - schools, hospitals, offices, roads, train stations
airports - in order to enable the smooth and easy flow of bodies in space. The individual,
far from being a discrete individual, was now a node in a vast mechanical geometric
system, an organised society en masse.

In embracing a social drive towards a technological future, modernism also sought

to move on and abandon the traditionalism and the memory of the old city, with its myriad
of social, economic, political and medical problems. The early modernist discourses of
architecture were concerned greatly with “[t]he question of transience” as well as “the
resistance to historical continuity and location in time,” which translated into architectural
designs that rejected applied ornamentation and continuation of past traditions for
buildings whose monumentalism was embodied in the functions said buildings were
created for.149 Many buildings and structures were thus “pared back to the point of
expressing very few, albeit very specific, aspects of its making.”150 Instead, buildings

María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (eds), Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture,
(New York: Continuum Books, 2010).
148
For more background information on Le Corbusier and the history of architectural modernism, read Le
Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, (Mineola, New York, Dover Publications, 1985); Alan Colquhoun,
Modern Architecture, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002); Anthony Vidler and Peter Eisenman,
Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (Mass: MIT Press, 2008).
149
Kevin Donovan, “Building Supermodernity: The Architecture of Supermodernism.”, Irish Journal of
French Studies, Volume 9 (2009): 119-120.
150
Ibid.
57
were designed to project a vision of mechanical and technological progress, “through the
mass production of components and the commodification of architectural elements.”151
The result led to aesthetically flat landscapes of relational ahistoricism and uniformity of
detail, where the function of buildings were obscured into that of an architectural
sameness that introduced a non-relational link to either locale or surrounding buildings.

Consequently, this ahistoricism and homogeneous anonymity borne out of the

relationship of the individual with these modernist urban spaces becomes a generator of
uncanny forms and modes. Anthony Vidler, in summarising the urban landscapes of
notable post-war films such as A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) and Blade
Runner, argues that their anonymity and erasure of historical hierarchies resulted in many
of the characters moving through a flat, never-ending world of repetition, devoid of the
thresholds that occur from going from a definable here to there:

In this city where suburb, strip, and urban centre have merged indistinguishably
into a series of states of mind and which is marked by no systematic map that
might be carried in the memory, we wander, like Freud in Genoa, surprised but
not shocked by the continuous repetition of the same, the continuous movement
across already vanished thresholds that leave only traces of their former status as
places. Amidst the ruins of monuments no longer significant because deprived of
the systematic status, and often of their corporeality, walking on the dust of
inscriptions no longer decipherable because lacking so many words, whether
carved in stones or shaped in neon, we cross nothing to go nowhere.152

The uncanny here, according to Vidler, is centred on the rootlessness and

unhomeliness that derives from an inability to make any connecting emotional maps or
derivés from moving through the modern city. Vidler traces a genealogy of the uncanny
with regard to architecture and space, from being that of an aesthetic affect in literature
and culture, to that of a socio-political concept, where the uncanny is used to explain and
analyse the psychological and aesthetic response to the shock of the modern in people’s
lives, a shock exasperated by the growth of capitalism and war. This shock leaves an
innate yet pervading feeling of estrangement in the individual and a lack of belonging in
the spaces around them.

Such feelings of estrangement and rootlessness were aggravated in the early

twentieth century by a growth of social migrations and an increasing economic and social

151
Donovan, 119-120.
152
Vidler, 184-185.
58
precarity of living in the west as families and individuals, in a search of better lives, were
separated from the history and connections once afforded by their traditional
communities. The situation of many people becoming strangers in a city or land that is
not their own, brought forth feelings of the uncanny in a way that their existence
destabilized “traditional notions of centre and the periphery” and “the spatial forms of the
national,” through the return of “‘the migrants, minorities, the diasporic’ to the city.”153
Through being caused by economic and political structures used in controlling the modes
of being in modern space, Vidler argues that the subjective experiences of the uncanny
that emanate from a rootless population towards the geometries of modern spaces
subsequently became linked with other ontological concepts associated with being such
as estrangement, defamiliarization, repression, and homelessness.

3.2 From Place to Non-Place, and the Seamless Landscapes of Global

Capitalism

As the modernist era of the twentieth century glided into the early twenty-first
century, there was a social and economic turn against the edicts and ethics of architectural
modernism, with architects and urban designers denouncing as having “abandoned [the]
principles of urbanism and the human dimension of outdoor space established in the urban
design of cities of the past.”154 Modernist architectural designs and associated social
buildings, they argued, had abandoned the communal activities at a street level for
housing people in vertically regimented and atomised housing blocks. At this time, the
economic structures of the west were shifting from being based on commodities and
manufacturing, to that of a service-based economy centred on finance, marketing, and
information. Advances in transport, communication and information technologies meant
that the flow of people, goods, and capital could move more easily, resulting in the
reduction of the importance of a traditional urban centre that contained the politics,
religion, business, and culture of the city and the municipality.

This shift towards a globalised form of finance capitalism resulted in a form of

posturbanism, where the erasure of categorical thresholds and boundaries in modern
urban spaces described by Vidler extended outwards from the traditional urban to the
suburban fringes. Former urban centres became the hollowed-out sites for various

153
Vidler, 10.
154
Roger Trancik, “What is Lost Space?”, in Matthew Carmona and Steve Tiesdell (Eds), The Urban
Design Reader, (Oxford: Architectural Press, 1987): 65.
59
corporate financial and service industry headquarters, while consumer, entertainment, and
other business services began to move and coalesce into an undifferentiated suburban
sprawl. This sprawl, consisting of multiple areas for consumer commerce and
entertainment (shopping malls, cinema multiplexes) and industry (business parks), were
aided by a booming infrastructure network of motorways, train lines, and even air routes.

In seeking to explain the social developments associated with the expansion of

this suburban sprawl, anthropologist Marc Augé establishes this trend to a new spatial
and temporal logic that he defines as supermodernism. While supermodernism as a term
seems to have a social and historical concurrence with postmodernism, Augé instead
likens supermodernism to that of “the face of a coin whose obverse represents
postmodernity: the positive of a negative.”155 Postmodernism, often expressed as a
lamentation for a loss of meaning in society and a subsequent looking back to the past
which, when applied to architecture results in the borrowing of various styles and motifs
from previous historical periods, thereby looking to express a standardised and vague idea
of “the past.”

With supermodernism however, the problem is not a lack of meaning but an

accelerated modernism borne through an excess of meaning and information, where the
individual is forced to make and secure a sense of meaning from a society living in a
constant present. Augé defines the characteristics of supermodernity as living in an excess
of three areas that are the cornerstones on which the anthropologist examines the notion
of place. The first, an excess of time, posits that people are deluged with “the
overabundance of events in the contemporary world,” resulting in “an excess of time,”
that creates the sensation of “history snapping at our heels.”156 The second area, an excess
of space, describes our society experiencing “an era characterized by changes of scale,”
where the ability to see and experience most of the world is now near instantaneous thanks
to media and an industry of mass tourism.157 At the same time this creates a paradox
where instantaneous access shrinks and congests our experience of the world. The third
area, an excess of ego, or individualisation, outlines the social trend of thought and
discourse regarding the individual subject, where supermodernism opens up the
individual to others, but at the same time, closes or disconnects them from communal

155
Marc Augé, Non-Place: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (Translated by John Howe),
(London: Verso Books, 1995): 30.
156
Ibid.
157
Ibid., 31.
60
practices, creating a person who wants to be “a world in himself: he intends to interpret
the information delivered to him by himself and for himself.”158

According to Augé, the logic of supermodernism in a globalised society run along

the lines of frictionless movement and flows of efficiency is embodied by the proliferation
of what he calls non-places. In describing the non-place, Augé defines it as the opposite
of the anthropological place, that of the “concrete and symbolic construction of space”
that facilitates collective gathering, social functions, and a sense of belonging. 159 Non-
places, in contrast, are spaces which “cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or
concerned with identity.”160

While the definitions of place/non-place may seem like the creation of a simple
binary, both are not necessarily discrete and separate entities as all too often they tend to
coexist in the same space. “Places,” Augé acknowledges, “reconstitute themselves in it
[the non-place]; relations are restored and resumed in it. […] Place and non-place are
rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally
completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and
relations is ceaselessly rewritten.”161 In fact according Miriam Gebauer, actual non-places
don’t actually exist, “except through human interaction with it.”162 The critical
component in thinking about how non-place operates in relation to the individual hinges
the social perception of time with respect to the historical. In general, humans need time
to establish social relations that move from being micro-events to something historical.
In other words, if one gathers at a certain place for long enough, a non-place can take up
the aspects of the place.163

But such a development can only occur if an individual is static in a single place,
and in the world of supermodernism, where society is increasingly on the move,
movement turns a place into a passage of space, and therefore non-place. Augé, in this

158
Augé, 37.
159
Ibid., 51.
160
Ibid., 77-78.
161
Ibid., 78-79.
162
Mirjam Gebauer, Helle Thorsøe Nielsen, Jan T. Schlosser, Bent Sørensen, “The Absence of Place and
Time: Non-Place and Placelessness”, In Mirjam Gebauer, Helle Thorsøe Nielsen, Jan T. Schlosser, Bent
Sørensen(Eds), Non-Place: Representing Placelessness in Literature, Media and Culture (Aalborg:
Aalborg University Press, 2015): 5.
163
Examples where such instances of non-place turning into place over time occur can be seen in the films
Clerks (Kevin Smith, 1994), The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004), or the TV show Næturvaktinn
(Ragnar Bragason, 2007), where the protagonists, either as workers or travellers, spend the majority of their
time in non-places, such as airport terminals, grocery stores, and motorway service stations. Over time,
they develop a sense of identity, attachment, and social structure beyond the mere functional,in effect
turning the non-place into an actual place.
61
respect, defines the majority of non-places as being transitional spaces, of areas of transit
and temporary waiting; airports, motorways and their services stations, car parks, hotel
or office lobbies, and shopping malls. In these non-places, the majority of individual
experiences are at best micro-historical, and all other times take on a “solitary
contractually,” of already-agreed propositions and interactions, either with agents
assigned to control and manage the flow of movement, or though proliferation of signs
and organisational boundaries.164

To facilitate the semblance of frictionless movement and exchange, the layout,

design and production of non-places tend towards a structural homogeneity as space
becomes standardized. Non-spaces therefore create a disavowal towards exhibiting any
particular cultural roots or an innate historical connection with the surrounding area.
Despite the increasing elements of surface ornamentation and allusions to place that arise
from postmodernist design, the basic layout of a shopping mall or an airport is the same
whether it is in Reykjavik or Rio de Janeiro. From this perspective, the generic layouts of
space here can be seen as a positive; even if one does not share a common language, the
generic features of these spaces mean the same, allowing one to orientate themselves
along directions and flows that have been prescribed to all airports.

As society spends an increasing amount of time in transit, becoming accustomed

to the social processes that emanate from non-places, Mirjam Gebauer and others
associate the time spent in non-places with the onset of new structures of feeling, arising
from the fragmentation and anonymity of a social life in transit. Such feelings they argue
are characterised by an “inherent dislocation of the individual from time and place – as
humans have traditionally known and understood these – and a general notion of
uneasiness, rootlessness, and otherness following the sense of dislocation.”165 These
descriptions of experiencing non-places mirror the psychological reactions of people
towards the historic spaces of modernism, spaces that were seen as the psychic engine
that generated sensations of the uncanny. The sense of alienation associated with the
shock of the modern, when applied to that of the non-place, also provokes a feeling of
disjointedness and dislocation due to the multiplication and proliferation of homogeneous
spaces.

But on closer examination there are differences in how the uncanny sits between
these historical and cultural modes. The architecture of the modern is exemplified by a

164
Augé, 79.
165
Gebauer et al, 10.
62
functional solidity and monolithic abstraction, whereas many of the buildings and
surfaces of non-place often emphasise a lack of solidity, the concrete and steel of the
modern being replaced by structures and spaces composed of undifferentiated facades of
glass and mirrored surfaces that refract and fold back on themselves. The result is a sense
of openness and never-ending space, which paradoxically splits and fragments the unity
of space, through the inability to orientate oneself to a fixed point.166

Another difference between the modern and supermodernism can be found with
regard to how these aesthetic and emotional registers to space are associated with various
psychological disorders. In the modern era, the psychological shock when being
confronted with the developments of the urban modern were associated with neurosis -
that of anxiety and assorted phobias. With non-place though there is a psychological shift
from neurosis to depression. Ballard came to term this depression as that of the “death of
affect,” a gradual numbing of sensation towards the outside world and a waning of
libidinal energies due to sensory overload arising from the automated and prescriptive
demands and desires of living in a late-capitalist world.

In pinpointing the weird and eerie in this regard, many of the uncanny registers
associated with modernism can be associated with a sense of the weird due to the
destabilizing shock of the new that was associated with modernism, with the appearance
of radical objects and entities that do not belong, and whose “exorbitant presence,” would
bring forth “a teeming which exceeds our capacity to represent it.”167 With the non-place
of supermodernism however, there may be a sensorial abundance of information, but
there is a corresponding purge of any form of presence or identity. In spaces that are
ahistorical, non-relational, and indifferent to locale, there is a freezing of agency on the
part of the individual, a nulling of affect as they are distanced from any linking to what
can be considered an authentic experience, coinciding with the ceding of agency to forces
of control that are unseen but embedded in the surfaces of non-place.

Ballard, whose novels and stories have been concerned with the psychological
effects arising various forms of social space in the UK during the twentieth century, has

166
For a detailed analysis of the architecture styles and developments associated with supermodernism and
non-place, see Donovan (2009). A good example of how the surfaces and objects of non-places can become
a labyrinthian nightmare for the individual to negotiate can be seen in the Jacques Tati film Playtime (1967),
where in several scenes the main character (played by Tati) finds himself repeatedly getting lost and
confused as he traverses the gleaming business buildings and corridors in the Parisian city centre, which
serves as a “comical critique of the frictionless environment, as what is intended to facilitate smooth
movement, in reality becomes the biggest obstacle for the individual” (Gebauer et al, 9).
167
Fisher, The Weird and Eerie, 61.
63
been described by critic Roger Luckhurst as being “concerned with the psychological
effects of non-place, these transitional places.”168 Many of Ballard’s novels and stories
are often located in, or centred on, the concept of non-place and its iterations, from the
never-ending global metropolis of The Concentration City (1957), the vast leisure resorts
and expatriate tourist enclaves of Vermillion Sands (1971), The Largest Theme Park in
the World (1990), Having a Wonderful Time (1991) and Cocaine Nights (1996), to the
business parks and campuses of Super Cannes (2001), and the shopping malls of Kingdom
Come (2007). Life for the characters in these narratives are rendered as a series of near
pre-programmed and empty responses resulting from overbearing cultural stimuli – an
abundance of war, sex, action, and consumerism, culminating in an erosion of self, a loss
of presence or stability within the world. In many of his works, Ballard is interested in
how this loss, or waning, of affect results in various psychopathologies in the lives of
their characters as they search to find some depth of meaning in places where the
homogeneous surfaces and the elements of control through regulation and self-discipline
preclude such experiences.

It is the landscapes and architecture of the motorways and their attending

structures that loom the most in the work of Ballard, especially in that of Crash and
Concrete Island. This should come as no surprise; in a world where mobility and
communication have become the organising norms in society, this has resulted in “an
urban environment in which highways, thoroughfares, and parking lots are the
predominant types of open space.”169 Ballard, in a 1971 documentary titled Crash!,
expresses his admiration for how prevalent the motorway and car culture had come to
dominate society:

I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up
everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising
and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and
desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an
elaborately signalled landscape.

We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of
driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s,
the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and

168
Roger Luckhurst, The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard, (New York: St Martin’s
Press, 1997): 130.
169
Trancik, 64.
64
 technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest
expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age;
the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.170

In the following sections, I will be analysing how both Crash and Concrete Island
display certain forms of eeriness that arise from the issues of agency, dissociation and
presence that are present in both the text and narrative. I will demonstrate that while the
automotive landscapes are seemingly sterile and regulated on the surface, the onset of
different forms of trauma form a crossing of a threshold that heralds a change in the
psychological inner spaces of the characters. This change transforms their relationship
towards the world around them, a world where there are now all sorts of inhuman agency
at play. In both novels, the characters compulsively follow what Fisher calls an “eerie
Thanatos,” a form of the death drive that despite the efforts of the characters to understand
and control it, is seemingly inexplicable and unstoppable. In the case of Crash, the
inorganic landscapes of the motorway are part of an “impersonal pilot of our desires,”
that drives the protagonists on a path towards vehicular suicide that becomes inseparable
with their rational thoughts.171 Fisher argues, “[t]here is an agency at work in us (the
unconscious, the death drive), but it is not where or what we expected it to be.” 172 With
Concrete Island the main character experiences non-place from the other side as he is
introduced to a site beyond non-place, a non-space or “lost-space” in the form of an
abandoned traffic island. Initially shown to be excluded from its surroundings and
seemingly a place of absence, on closer inspection there is the revelation of a space
teeming with agency, with what Luckhurst calls the “recalcitrant traces” of a supposedly
vanquished past.

3.3: Long Live the Autogeddon - J.G. Ballard and Crash

Crash is an exemplary novel of the non-place. The story of a man who becomes
consumed in a spiral of erotic and violent obsessions after being involved in a car crash,
the entire narrative is located in and around the network of motorways that criss-cross
and connect the west of London to Heathrow Airport, alongside car washes, multi-storey
car parks, airport hangars and terminals, motorway cafes, service stations. The “machine
landscape” of the motorway depicted by Ballard in Crash is so totalising that it takes on

170
Crash!, directed by Harley Cokliss, (1971, UK, BBC, TV),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cqn6zA1sMg.
171
Fisher, the Weird and the Eerie, 85.
172
Ibid.
65
an almost abstract form, dominating the other spaces around it. Sebastian Groes argues
that even though the first motorways originated in Europe in the 1920s and 30s, the
development of the motorways in the UK and Europe in the mid to late twentieth century
mirrored the socioeconomic structures of the US, and the move towards late-capitalism
as an ideology of management and control:173

The space we encounter in the novel is the result of the introduction of a distinctly
American form of road building in a European capital city, leading to a rupture in
the traditional way of experiencing the metropolis. The American system of
motorways is characterized by fluidity and movement and reduces space to a pure
Idea, which is the opposite of the stasis of the European city, with its mass
organized around the unity of a social centre. There is a paradox at the heart of
driving an automobile: ‘auto’, etymologically derived from ‘self’, suggests that it
is the subject who is in control of his or her mobility, but the opposite is
happening. The autonomous subject is subjected to a process, a collective
experience in which (s)he is a figure whose unconscious yields control.174

Even in a supposedly centred place, such as the newly built apartment complex
occupied by the central character James and his wife Catherine, the motorway comes to
define this domestic space and not the other way around.

Our own apartment house at Drayton Park stood a mile to the north of the airport
in a pleasant island of modern housing units, landscaped filling stations and
supermarkets, shielded from the distant bulk of London by an access spur of the
northern circular motorway which flowed past us on it elegant concrete pillars. I
gazed down at the immense motion sculpture, whose traffic deck seemed almost
higher than the balcony rail against which I leaned. I began to orientate myself
again round its reassuring bulk, its familiar perspectives of speed, purpose and
direction.175

In this London of automation, processes, and operations, both James and

Catharine are the Ballardian epitome of the new urban, professional bourgeois class
assembled by this new society of media and transit; James, for example, works as a
producer at the TV commercial studios in Shepperton, while Catherine works in the

173
J.G. Ballard, Crash, (London: Picador, Kindle Version, 1973), 44.
174
Sebastian Groes, “The Texture of Modernity in J.G. Ballard's Crash, Concrete Island and High-
Rise”, in J.G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions, by Leanette Baxter and Rowland Rymer (Eds), (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 128.
175
J.G. Ballard, Crash, (London: Picador, 1973 Kindle Version), 36.
66
foreign tours section of Pan American Airlines. But their relationships are beset by
distance, ennui, and the death of effect; Both engage in extramarital affairs, while James
points out that his and Catherine’s working lives have “separated us more and more over
the past years.”176 Their relationship is reduced to that of telegraphed emotions and
soulless interactions, such as when James is irritated by Catherine’s comments over the
death of another man as that of “bogus commiseration,” and part of a “pantomime of
regret.”177 To stave off such alienation, James and Catherine create and invest in elaborate
erotic fantasies involving the people around them, but this only results in further
emotional distancing in their lives as their fantasies “began to make all our relationships,
both between ourselves and with other people, more and more abstract.”178

This denatured world of affect collapses one night when James is involved in a
head on collision on the motorway with another car, driven by Helen Remington and her
husband. While James and the Helen survive the crash, Helen’s husband is killed. From
the outset, the rapturous, almost excruciating detail of the experience of the crash
provided by James takes on a highly artistic, almost aesthetic nature, with Helen laid out
in her crash vehicle like “a Madonna in an early Renaissance Icon” as a pool of her urine
forms “rainbows around my rescuers’ feet.”179 The crash site takes on the element of
spectacle where James imagines the gathering of emergency services and onlookers being
“the principal actors at the climax of some grim drama in an unrehearsed theatre of
technology, involving these crushed machines.”180 In this theatre of the “stylisation of
violence and rescue,” James begins to see patterns from his crashed car repeating
themselves in the objects and people around him, while also noticing the smallest
movements of those around him as a series of highly erotic and ritualised “coded
gestures.”181

While recuperating in hospital, it becomes apparent that the near-death experience

of the crash acts as a metaphorical baptism that sparks a gradual and inexplicable warping
of James’ relationship towards reality and the world around him. He becomes subsumed
in a never-ending series of bizarre and sexually graphic fantasies of car crashes, while
through his scars he sees the beginning of a merging between his body and the car, as
“the precise make and model-year of my car could have been reconstructed by an

176
Ballard, Crash, 21.
177
Ibid.
178
Ibid., 26.
179
Ibid., 13, 16.
180
Ibid., 14-15.
181
Ibid., 16.
67
automobile engineer from the pattern of my wounds.”182 On release from hospital, there
is the seeming birth of a new “James,” one that is embodied in “a new intensity and range
of erotic response, together with an impassioned interest in every aspect and extension of
the automobile.”183

Seeing both the “true nature” of the car and his surroundings in a new light, he is
beset a cycle of compulsions and repetitions surrounding his crash; He returns to the scene
of the accident on several occasions, spending his time “visualizing the possibility of a
different death and victim, a different profile of wounds.”184 He re-orders the same car
as the one he crashed in and, along with Helen, is drawn to revisiting and examining their
crashed cars held at the police impound. His former domesticated, middle-class world is
no longer able to claim primacy to “keys to the borders of identity,” and as such hold little
promise or appeal to him.185 It is here that James falls under the reptilian spell of Vaughan,
a monomaniacal narcissist and leader of a disparate group of car crash survivors who see
the motorway as a site of experimentation and profane transcendence through the
reorganising erotic potentials of the body with the automobile. Through Vaughan’s grand
vision to “induce global ‘autogeddon’, a primitive singularity uniting man and machine,”
James begins to fantasise about the transcendent and liberating potentials of death by car
crash, as his world becomes a series of increasingly brutal “rehearsals” for the ultimate
auto-collision that will finally merge their bodies and cars into a singular whole.186

This incessant, inexplicable compulsion on the part of James and the group to
mould their actions towards an annihilation through the sexualised fusion of the body,
car, and motorway points to a version of Freud’s death drive that Fisher calls an “eerie
Thanatos.” A psychological process that Fisher defines as “a transpersonal (and
transtemporal) death drive, in which the ‘psychological’ emerges as the product of forces
from the outside,”187 an eerie Thanatos occurs when a specific incident or trauma invites
an irruption of non-subjective drives and forces that, while radically alien and inhuman,
are experienced from within the subconscious. In attempting the locate the sources of
such drives, this causes an inherent destabilisation within as “an enquiry into the nature

182
Ibid., 20.
183
Gregory Stephenson, Out of the Night and into the Dream: A Thematic Study of the Fiction of J. G.
Ballard, (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991): 69.
184
Ballard, Crash, 39, 48.
185
Ibid., 42.
186
Simon Sellars, Applied Ballardianism, (Truro: Urbanomic, Kindle Version, 2018), location 139.
187
Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 82-83.
68
of what the world is like is also inevitably an unravelling of what human beings had taken
them themselves to be.”188

The key to understanding the nature of an eerie Thanatos and how it applies to
Crash, is the way Fisher explores the concepts of intention and agency with regards to
the film Quartermass and the Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1967). The discovery of alien fossils
during an archaeological dig causes an eventual rupture in the worldview of the
protagonists when it is revealed that humanity, far from being centred in the natural world,
is the result of cross breeding between proto-humans and the Martians. In Quartermass,
what is taken to be the intentionality and centrality of thought that separates humanity
from nature is flipped as our human desires emanate not from within us, but from an alien
inhumanity outside us, a Thanatos or death drive that propels us toward annihilation. For
Fisher, the eerie derives from the fact that the alien, far from being something that is
outside, inhuman, and inorganic, is something that is actually inside us and makes up part
of what makes us tick. As Fisher explains:

The conjecture implied by Freud’s positioning of Thanatos is that nothing is alive:

life is a region of death […] What is called organic life is actually, kind of folding
of the inorganic. But the inorganic is not the passive, inert counterpart to an
allegedly self-propelling life; on the contrary, it possesses its own agency. There
is a death drive, which in its most radical formulation is not a drive towards death,
but a drive of death. The inorganic is the impersonal pilot of everything, including
that which seems to be personal and organic. Seen from the perspective of
Thanatos, we ourselves become an exemplary case of the eerie.189

It becomes clear that from the outset of Crash that the apocalyptic nature of the
car crash is used by James, Vaughan and the others as a form of sexualised ritual-as-
gateway to enter into a new realm of being, a new and burgeoning transpersonal human
consciousness linked with the technological landscapes of the motorway. The idea of a
death drive looming over Crash is not new. Roger Luckhurst describes Crash as “the
literalization of the death drive, the fatal cathexis of the car crash as ambivalent symbol
of the extent of alienation in the technological landscape,”190 while Andrzej Gasiorek
(quoted by Francis) argues that the text “suggests that contemporary social existence is
powered by the death- drive” and speaks of its remorseless insistence on “the colonisation

188
Ibid.
189
Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 84-85.
190
Luckhurst, 127.
69
of the sex instinct by the death instinct.”191 But what is incredibly disturbing about Crash
is the fact that, even though pursuing this eerie Thanatos will mean almost certain death,
for James and the others this is seen not as something to be feared, or even concerned
about, but is instead something to be embraced. For the apocalyptic in this scenario is not
the end of something, but of a transformation, a transcendence into something greater.

In this respect, we see a myriad of transformations take place in Crash in the way
the self-induced pain and mutilation from repeated crashes reshapes the bodies of the
group and therefore both their identity and subjectivity as the members of the group
become defined by their indelible wounds and scars. Nowhere is this more evident than
in the most injured and mutilated of the group, Gabrielle, whose body, after several
massive car crashes, takes on a near cyborg form, clad in leg braces, callipers and spinal
supports, and whose scars and wounds are obsessively worshipped by James. But far from
being seen as “disfigured” or a “cripple”, Gabrielle’s body, her injuries, and her recovery
- extensively documented in a folder made by Vaughan - is seen as a site of rebirth that
saves her from an “increasingly abstracted despair with a series of grotesque
implements.”192 At the moment of the crash, Gabrielle is portrayed as “a conventional
young woman whose symmetrical face and unstretched skin spelled out the whole
economy of a cosy and passive life, of minor flirtations in the backs of cheap cars enjoyed
without any sense of the real possibilities of her body.”193 But later images show
Gabrielle as a woman transformed, the trauma of the crash acting as a catalyst for a new
personality, complete with an alien embodiment and sensibility towards to the world
around her: “The crushed body of the sports car had turned her into a creature of free and
perverse sexuality, releasing within its twisted bulkheads and leaking engine coolant all
the deviant possibilities of her sex. Her crippled thighs and wasted calf muscles were
models for fascinating perversities.”194

It is not just their bodies that are changed by their vehicular pursuit of this eerie
Thanatos; Their relation toward non-places also undergo a metamorphosis as the
landscapes of motorways, car parks, flyovers, and terminal buildings become an
“enchanted domain” that James, Vaughan, and the group pass through.195 The motorways
become alive with hidden depth and meaning, with the character’s cars being used as the

191
Samuel Francis, The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard, (London: Continuum Books, 2011), 111.
192
Ballard, Crash, 85.
193
Ibid., 86.
194
Ballard, Crash, 87.
195
Ibid., 38.
70
integrating technology to access them. Sites such as motorway car-parks and all-night car
washes become the profane sites for graphic and risky sexual practices and rituals.
Elements of the motorways become part of a “spinal landscape” that unfold and unfurl in
James’ mind.196 The whiteness of factory buildings fuse with the colour of Helen’s thighs,
intersecting flyovers become “copulating giants, immense legs straddling each other’s
backs,” the car roofs in a car park become a “lake of metal,” while at one point the
motorway is portrayed as “a secret airstrip from which mysterious machines would take
off into a metallized sky.197

For James and the others in the group, the Motorway, far from being seen as the
site for a flattened, passive experience, becomes a site of sacrament and worship, laden
with religious symbolism. Cars involved in car crashes resemble “bloody alter[s], while
a blood soaked scrap of fabric taken from an accident becomes a “saintly relic” that
“contained all the special magic and healing powers of a modern martyr of the super-
highways.”198 Cars are now seen to possess wings, even “wings of fire,” that are meant
to bring on “our coming passage to heaven.”199 The crowd gathering on an embankment
after a car crash look as if they are taking in a “sermon” beckoning them to imitate what
have observed as a “bloody eucharist.”200 In an LSD induced car journey with Vaughan
that becomes a “punitive expedition into my own nervous system,” James imagines
himself becoming physically integrated with the car as “[t]he bones of my forearms
formed a solid coupling with the shift of the steering column,” as the motorways around
mutate into a sublime “metallized Elysium,” populated by “an armada of angelic
creatures.”201

Throughout the novel James, Vaughan, and the others explore and escalate their
attraction to these drives through a series of ever increasingly illegal and dangerous
actions that will eventually result in their deaths. With each person James meets and
embarks on a sexual union with - Catherine, Helen, Gabrielle, Vaughan - this is another
physical and psychological boundary crossed, another level of intensity reached. Despite
the perturbing and perplexing nature of this inhuman drive that compels the group, there

196
The term “Spinal Landscape” was first used by Ballard in the essay, “The Coming of The Unconscious”,
in the July 1966 edition of New Worlds magazine, to describe the synthetic organic/inorganic landscape if
surrealist painters such as Max Ernst and Salvador Dali, where the body is fused or is absorbed by the
landscapes around it. The whole essay can be found at
https://www.jgballard.ca/non_fiction/jgb_reviews_surrealism.html
197
Ballard, Crash, 65, 11.
198
Ibid., 171.
199
Ibid, 159, 160.
200
Ballard, Crash, 142.
201
Ibid., 176, 159, 152.
71
is a mirroring compulsion to record and understand their actions. Far from being mere
puppets to the supposedly machinic and inhuman agencies that surround them, the
characters in the novel urgently crave a need to seek out and come to terms with their
place in this new world. As Fisher argues in this regard, “[t]he point here is not that we
are the blind slaves of the death drive, but, if we are not, it is because of an equally
impersonal process: science, which consists in part of discovering and analysing the very
processes that Freud calls Thanatos.”202

This utilisation of science to study, understand, and explain these drives are
embodied in the character of Vaughan, who is described by James as “a hoodlum
scientist” in the way that Vaughan conducts an almost inexhaustible amount of research
on the effect of car crashes and the body.203 In his former “life,” as a computer scientist
and media intellectual, Robert Vaughan argued for “the application of computerized
techniques to the control of all international traffic systems,” while modelling himself as
a renegade academic in looks and presentation.204 But after a crash on his motorcycle
leaves him disfigured, his “naive idealism” regarding “his strange vision of the
automobile and its real role in our lives” shifts from imposing order and structure on the
motorways to exploring its unsettling and inhuman dimensions.205 Using the veneer of
science and academic training, Vaughan disguises himself as a “white-coated doctor” or
“police photographer,” allowing him to move as an interloper through the world of
organised science and medicine.206 Subverting experimental techniques and road safety
research methodologies used by government institutions to make the roads and cars safer,
Vaughan develops “a new currency of pain and desire,” based on stolen documentary
analysis, morbid scientific questionnaires, and a swathe of photographs stolen from
medical journals and accident reports.207 On various driving expeditions, Vaughan takes
numerous close up photographs of the car accidents that occur on the motorways around
London, while he uses Helen’s new position at the Road Research Laboratory to infiltrate
and gather research information and data about car crashes and their impact on the body.
Through isolating and objectifying the car crash and the bodies of its victims to an intense
level of scrutiny and detail, Vaughan creates a perverse form of knowledge and
epistemology that opens the motorway and the geometries of the car and body to new and

202
Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 85.
203
Ballard, Crash, 11.
204
Ibid., 53.
205
Ibid.
206
Ballard, Crash, 31, 51.
207
Ibid., 120.
72
hidden details that are disavowed by the authorities that aim to control the functions of
motorway as a non-place.

In applying the pursuit of such perverse knowledge with regards to the technology
of the automobile, the novel asks disquieting questions of ambiguity about who or what
has true agency or intentionality. Is the car - and by extension all technology – merely a
tool used by a society that depresses and controls the appetite of the self for embracing
the infinite, the sublime and the spiritual? Or is the car - whether subconsciously or not –
designed and made so that it allows the individual to test their limits and aspirations
towards the limits and boundaries of infinite? Ballard himself asks this question: “Are we
just victims in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it in fact take place with our
unconscious, and even conscious, connivance?”208 While the novel is descriptive rather
than prescriptive, the idea of humanity being driven by a mass unconscious desire for its
own destruction that is embedded in the technologies is something that is distinctly
inhuman, almost alien in nature. This is captured in a moment of pure cyborg fantasy as
James imagines the wounds of car crash victims as “beacons tuned to a series of
beckoning transmitters, carrying the signals, unknown to myself, which would unlock
this immense stasis and free these drivers for the real destinations set for their vehicles,
the paradises of the electric highway.”209

In the pursuit of an endgame of vehicular fetishized sex and death, instead of

falling into a Baudrillardian hyperreality that is voided of depth, sexuality and
psychology, the characters in Crash instead use the trauma of the car crash as an
“affirmation of the survival and the persistence of forces in the psyche,”210 The purpose
is to move past the controlling and deadening surfaces of the Motorway, and gain access
to a deep form of the Real that has been sealed off from the minds of the people. As James
says himself in the aftermath of his crash, “[t]he crash was the only real experience I had
been through for years.”211 Towards the climax of Crash, temporally joined at the
beginning with the vehicular death of Vaughan, there is a foreboding sense of the
seemingly inevitable, as James, viewing the carnage of Vaughan’s crash, comes to the
unsettling realisation that despite their numerous “rehearsals,” and he and the others in
the group, in their pursuit of the eerie Thanatos, are also fated to follow in Vaughan’s
footsteps. As the remaining members of the group gather to view the remains of

208
Crash! (1971).
209
Ballard, Crash, 44.
210
Stephenson, 66.
211
Ballard, Crash, 30.
73
Vaughan’s car at the police pound, James calmly muses, “[a]lready I knew that I was
designing the elements of my own car-crash.” 212

3.4: Set Adrift on Voided Bliss - Concrete Island

A transcendence of a different sort occurs in Concrete Island, which opens with a

startling scene when Robert Maitland, a driver on the Westway Interchange in London,
suffers a blowout, causing him to crash off the motorway, down a steep embankment and
into a small, disused patch of wasteland that exists beneath the interlocking motorway
flyovers. Marooned and injured, Maitland’s attempts to escape end in failure and for the
rest of the novel he remains stranded, as the subsequent isolation on this island as urban
scrapheap causes a breakdown in Maitland's sense of self and identity, while at the same
time the Island itself begins to display an inscrutable agency and intent, a form of the
alien-eerie that never presents itself or makes itself known but is seemingly present
through its effects.

Like Crash, Concrete Island is an example of an eerie Thanatos at work, an

entropic drive that pulses through the subject towards total dissolution. In contrast to
Crash though, said drive suggests itself to the reader from a different perspective;
Whereas non-places in Crash become alive with ambiguous possibilities and meaning
through the psychic investments of the characters and the metamorphic transgression of
the car crash, in Concrete Island the threshold crossing of the car crash causes Maitland
to break beyond the source wall of the motorway into a voided space created by the
proliferation of non-places, a space that is to all intents and purposes devoid of importance
or worth.

The Westway Interchange, upon where Concrete Island is based, is itself a symbol
of the motorway transformations of London in the 1960s and 70s, and of the shift in the
textures and objects of classical modernism to the new transitional spaces of
supermodernism. Rising above the city level on vast supporting columns, the Westway is
a six-kilometre stretch of motorway built to relieve congestion between West London and
the outlying motorways. In order for its construction to be realised, a multitude of homes,
buildings, and roads were demolished to create the bulk of the space for the motorway
and connecting interchanges, in turn creating “nine hectares of fragmented and unsightly

212
Ballard, Crash, 205.
74
open space.”213 With no consideration during the planning stage of what to do with this
space, they were subsequently “left crudely by contractors after construction,” resulting
in a disused assemblage of “many small strips and islands of space under and adjacent to
the macro-scaled motorway.”214

The Westway and the displaced spaces it created in its construction are an example
of a trend in the production of voided spaces that lie on the fringes of buildings and
infrastructures associated with non-place and supermodernism, with many names and
definitions given to such spaces. Ed Wall refers to them as interstitial spaces that are
“disconnected from other spatial networks, creating unattractive isolated islands in the
city.”215 Both Groening and Trancik refer to such sites as lost spaces that are described
as a “leftover unstructured landscape” from hyper development, a succession of “no-
man’s lands” and “vacant blight-clearance sites.”216 Ignasi de Solà-Morales terms such
spaces as Terrain Vague, areas that are “interior islands void of activity, oversights […]
un-inhabited, un-safe, un-productive […] they are foreign to the urban system, mentally
exterior in the physical interior of the city, its negative image, as much a critique as a
possible alternative.”217 Groes refers to these non-spaces as Junkspace, taking the name
from the concept originally coined by designer Rem Koolhaas to describe such sites like
the Island as “the spatial fallout, or spillage, of motorway modernization, and the planned
process of decorative landscaping as a form of farcical resurrection.”218

The structure of the Island in Concrete Island contains most, if not all, of the above
descriptors. It is a triangular strip of negative space defined and bounded solely in
proportion to the converging paths of three motorways that rise vertically, meaning the
Island itself remains almost hidden from the view of the motorway. Maitland himself
muses on how the vast majority of the Island is obscured by the vegetation, noting that
“the most astute detective retracing Maitland’s route from his office would be hard put to
spot his car shielded by this sea of grass.”219 The interior itself is “literally a deserted
island,” of no discernible use or value, a place of “wild grass and abandoned cars and
builder equipment,” while beyond the fenced borders are areas used for illegal fly tipping,

213
Ed Wall, “Infrastructural Form, Interstitial Spaces and Informal Acts”, in Infrastructural Urbanism:
Addressing the In-between, Thomas Hauck, Regine Keller, and Volker Kleinekort (Eds), (Berlin: DOM
Publishers, 2011): 146.
214
Wall, 147-148.
215
Ibid., 147.
216
Trancik, 64.
217
Ignasi de Solà-Morales, “Terrain Vague”, in Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale, Manuela
Mariani and Patrick Barron (Eds), (London: Routledge, 2014): 26.
218
Groes, 129.
219
J.G. Ballard, Concrete Island, (New York: Picador, 1974, Kindle Version): 36.
75
complete with “stripped-down billboards, mounds of tyres and untreated metal refuse.”220
Even though it is nestled in between the motorways, the Island takes on a mentally
exterior position to those who drive past it. With the function of the motorway to facilitate
the constant flow of people and goods, there is an alienating distance from the motorway,
not only as a physical barrier, but also a mental one. This is demonstrated when Maitland
attempts to escape up the embankment early in the novel but is subsequently beaten back
by the force and noise of the traffic and is nearly run over by the oncoming drivers who
do not stop for him. Even though a supermarket and several high-rise flats can be seen in
clear view nearby, by being on the Island, Maitland may as well be on another planet.

Stranded, badly injured, and with no way to escape, Maitland initially looks upon
the Island as a nuisance, but eventually comes to the conclusion that he needs to stamp
his authority and identity on his surroundings, “to dominate the Island and harness its
limited resources.”221 To raise attention, he sets fire to a car to alert drivers of his
predicament, while he scrawls urgent messages of help on the concrete embankments. He
subsists on meagre provisions both from the car in the form of alcohol and water from the
radiator, and from the drivers above, such as a dirty sandwich, or a bag of half-finished
fish and chips. The deterioration in Maitland’s physical and psychic health from hunger,
thirst, fever, and pain causes a fluctuation in the surfaces and perspectives of the
surrounding spaces of the Island. These various ruptures in Maitland’s conscious cause
him to inscribe his inner emotional states upon the exterior surfaces of the Island, which
in turn becomes “an introspective palimpsest, the site of constantly renewed
psychosomatic inscriptions.”222

The Island at this point shifts from being that of a voided or negative space to
taking on a life of its own, through the traces and effects that beckon Maitland to explore
the Island’s hidden mysteries. The spatial dimensions of the Island begin to change, as
Ballard notes “the embankments seemed further away than he remembered them, slowly
receding from him on all sides.”223 The long swathes of grass take on a resurgent
sentience, moving with bizarre flows, turning into “an immense green creature eager to
protect and guide him.”224 Maitland also discovers the uncanny traces of a residual past
that have been disavowed in the construction of the non-place motorway – a pre-WWII

220
Ibid., 32, 5, 7.
221
Ballard, Concrete Island, 54.
222
Laura Colombino, “Negotiations with the System: J.G. Ballard and Geoff Ryman writing London's
architecture”, Textual Practice, 20:4 (2006): 621.
223
Ballard, Concrete Island, 104.
224
Ibid., 57.
76
churchyard, the foundations of Edwardian terraced houses, the remnants of an air-raid
shelters and the remains of a Civil Defence post, and even the ground-plan of a flea-pit
post-war cinema.225 These sites, along with the crepuscular shells of old cars and taxis,
take on what Luckhurst calls a technological uncanny in the way they are the hauntings
of “‘dead’ concepts that cannot be eliminated” by the non-places attempts to sever
themselves from the locale’s history.226 These derelict spots and remnants of symbolic
structures become sites of fecund imagination for Maitland in order to maintain the
resolve of his identity as he recalls his past, allowing his mind and body to integrate
further with his surroundings, the topography of the Island “becoming an exact model of
his head.”227 This culminates in a fantasy where he gives himself completely to the Island
taking his body apart and leaving the limbs at various spots before declaring “I am the
Island.”228

In Maitland’s ongoing psychological dissolution, the Island remains mysterious

and inscrutable. Maitland, in his explorations, comes to realise that far from being a mere
negative of the motorway and of little impact, the site of the Island itself is “far older than
the surrounding terrain, as if this triangular patch of waste ground had survived by the
exercise of a unique guile and persistence, and would continue to survive, unknown and
disregarded, long after the motorways had collapsed into dust.”229 But despite the
explorations and attempting to connect with various sites, the constantly shifting terrain
and evasive topology of the Island results in the landscape resembling a “maze” that
Maitland finds himself lost in.

Maitland’s conceit that he has fully conquered the Island turns out to be a
dangerous illusion, for that in all his attempts to dominate it, the Island remains indifferent
to Maitland’s attempts to leave some form of inscription upon its surfaces. Taking in the
waste and filth of the motorways, the Island seemingly throbs with life and intent, but the
novel never reveals the Island’s status nor its intentions or motives towards Maitland,
who never seems to ask any questions of what it wants from him. This leads to the posing
of certain forms of speculation; Is the Island exerting an intentional force on Maitland,
guiding his compulsions drive towards a much-desired annihilation? Or is the Island
neither good nor bad, but merely a neutral observer of the incidents that occur inside its

225
Ballard, Concrete Island, 57.
226
Luckhurst, 133.
227
Ballard, Concrete Island, 59.
228
Ibid.
229
Ballard, Concrete Island, 58.
77
boundaries, where the traps that occur to Maitland appear to be “metaphysical and
existential than they are physical threats”?230

The way that Ballard conveys the eerie power of the Island can be found through
the way surfaces seem to exude a sensual dream geography. The grass and vegetation,
like that of a green sea, constantly alter and change their forms and perspective, refusing
the commanding gaze of Maitland. In this situation, the old signs and linguistic symbols
of Maitland’s life outside the Island – including writing and rational thought – are
rendered unusable. The only way he is able to “read” and associate with the Island is to
rely less on the senses of sight, which requires an observable distance, and instead through
the close embodiment of touch.

Alongside the inscrutability of the Island from the ordering structures of the non-
places outside its borders, there is also the problem that while the Island comes to
represent a blank screen from which Maitland can project his inner psyche, he soon
discovers “that there is not much to project.”231 Similar to the characters in Crash,
Maitland is the quintessential Ballardian character – middle class, urbane, articulate,
professional. Yet without any real-life connection to anything substantial, or any
authentic experiences in which to speak of, Maitland comes apart as the structural ways
in which his identity is formed begin to collapse. As his mental and physical connections
to the world become untethered, the novel takes on an oneiric, trance-like quality. The
trappings of Maitland’s bourgeois life – his job, family, mistress – all fail to provide a
meaningful base upon which he can latch his sense of self. He realises that his job can
carry on without him, and he slowly begins to forget his wife and son, his mistress, and
his work partners as “together they had moved back into the dimmer light at the rear of
his mind.”232 Time, something that was once measured in close detail at the beginning of
the novel - “Maitland looked at his watch. It was three eighteen, little more than ten
minutes since the crash” - now becomes more abstract as the days and night begin to
merge into each other and become lost.233 The outside world of the motorway, with its
myriad of signs, symbols begins to lose its former definition and context as the
“illuminated route indicators rotated above his head, marked with meaningless
destinations.”234 Maitland repeatedly cries out his name “as a self-identification signal,”

230
Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 116.
231
Groes, 132.
232
Ballard, Concrete Island, 78.
233
Ibid., 5.
234
Ibid., 41.
78
while in a moment of confusion, he starts to feel “his wrists and elbows, trying to identify
himself. ‘Maitland,’ he shouted aloud ‘Robert Maitland…!’.”235 As Maitland’s body
starts to fail him, even language and various forms of cognition begin to dissolve as his
messages for help become increasingly cryptic and mysteriously disappear:

Maitland found a last rubber marker in his jacket pocket. On the drying concrete
he scrawled:

CATHERINE HELP TOO FAST

The letters wound up and down the slope. Maitland concentrated on the spelling,
but ten minutes later, when he returned after an unsuccessful attempt to reach the
Jaguar, they had been rubbed out as if by some dissatisfied examiner.

MOTHER DON’T HURT POLICE

He waited in the long grass beside the embankment, but his eyes closed. When he
opened them, the message had vanished. He gave up, unable to decipher his own
writing.236

The impulses of Maitland’s pursuit of a seemingly unconscious desire for willed

annihilation takes on a much greater aspect when it becomes apparent that Maitland may
have crashed the car deliberately in an inexplicable moment of rashness. The actual sound
of the blowing tyre for example, “seemed to detonate inside Robert Maitland’s skull,”
and not from an external source.237 When asking himself why he had driven so fast, he
rationalises it as a “rogue gene, a strain of rashness, overran the rest of his usually cautious
and clear-minded character.”238 Maitland then begins to think about the demands of his
social and professional life, before he finally concludes “that he had almost wilfully
devised the crash, perhaps as some bizarre kind of rational explanation.”239

Like the characters of Crash, this seemingly transgressive act undertaken by

Maitland is one that leads him on a course to what will surely lead to his own death. Yet
despite his dire situation and the onset of his mortality, Maitland undergoes a similar form
of transcendence as a result of being absorbed by the dynamic and compelling forces of
the Island. He begins to acquire new embodied capacities that were hidden or repressed
from him. He develops a new sense of purpose and identity as he begins to feel “a sense

235
Ibid., 23, 54.
236
Ballard, Concrete Island., 61-62.
237
Ibid., 1.
238
Ibid., 3.
239
Ibid.
79
of gathering physical strength, as if the unseen powers of his body had begun to discharge
their long-stored energies.”240 In the final passages of the novel, instead of feeling despair,
Maitland seems to embrace the fate of his new circumstances, resulting in “a mood of
quiet exaltation” that comes over him.241

Concrete Island ends with a chapter titled “Escape,” but Ballard leaves the
narrative open-ended. Having sought a path to escape for the entirety of the narrative,
Maitland now feels “no real need to leave the island,” seemingly secure in his belief that
he has dominion over it, and despite being offered a route to escape, Maitland refuses the
offer stating that he will leave the Island “in my own time.”242 Although it is never
revealed whether Maitland is truly trapped, or whether he simply refuses to leave, the
refusal of the Island to be colonised and inscribed with the signs and markers of the city
outside – thereby turning it into a form of place – ultimately seals Maitland’s fate as he is
consigned to a form of secular purgatory, a repeating loop of compulsion where he is
“forever bound to play over and over again his desire/unwillingness to escape.”243 With
this eerie denouement of a constantly repeating cycle, Maitland loses more of his older
self and is further absorbed by the secrets and enigma that is the Island.

Both Crash and Concrete are examinations of social trends at the heart of Western
society in the way how the evolution of social space in the twentieth century has mediated
social relations through the application and integration of new technologies and
ideologies. In this respect Ballard is more like a “literary anthropologist” than that of a
science-fiction author in the way he forsakes the urge to extrapolate these technologies
into a speculative future, instead pushing the relationship the individual has towards
space, place, and technology in the here and now to extreme levels.244 In doing so, Ballard
unearths and foregrounds an eerie non-subjective drive that seems to lie at the heart of
society’s relationship to what Groes calls the “textures of modernity,” where there is a
deep causal ambiguity at the heart of the historical process.245 Is Thanatos merely an
unfortunate by-product of societal acceleration, or does society subconsciously will itself
to create and accelerate technology through which Thanatos can seep through and present
itself?

240
Ibid., 155.
241
Ballard, Concrete Island, 155.
242
Ibid., 156, 154.
243
Colombino, 620.
244
Groes, 123.
245
Ibid, 224.
80
81
Conclusion
In this thesis, I have sought to analyse and open up a discussion regarding the
concepts of the weird and the eerie, first by examining their particular features and
characteristics as aesthetic modes of affect and feeling and how they linked to a broader
history of cultural theory with that of the gothic and the uncanny. For the remaining
chapters, two particular cultural texts and/or processes that take place in digital or
contemporary culture were chosen and, through an investigation into how they embody
different facets of the weird and/or eerie, demonstrate how they are symptomatic of wider
sociocultural developments and disruptions in popular western culture and politics.

In the first chapter of this thesis, I charted the ways in which the weird and eerie
have been defined and expanded upon, both through the literary subgenre of “weird
fiction” and in the wider milieu of cultural theory in the twentieth century. The weird as
a mode of aesthetics has been written and applied to a lineage of literary texts that lie in
an interstitial zone between other genres such as horror, science fiction, and the gothic.
These roots of lineage begin with writers such as Arthur Machen and H.P. Lovecraft from
the late nineteenth century up to the present day in that which has been described as the
“new weird” canon of writers of the late twentieth to early twenty first century such as
China Miéville, M. John Harrison, and Jeff Vandermeer. The weird has also been
explored in various philosophical disciplines that aim to displace the phenomenological
centrality of human experience and consciousness in favour of examining the
metaphysical agency that lies beyond the human.

Mark Fisher, in his book The Weird and the Eerie, expands upon the particular
qualities that these concepts possess, and while his analysis does not engage in its relation
to the canon of weird fiction, save for the writings of Lovecraft, he goes on to show that
these modes are present in a plethora of literary texts, music, TV serials and films. Fisher
provides several defining characteristics of the weird as that “which does not belong” and
in its existence “brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and
which cannot be reconciled with the ‘homely’ (even as its negation).” What Fisher adds
to the discourse on the weird is his introduction of the concept of the eerie, which
concerns itself with an experience that “is constituted by a failure of absence or by a
failure of presence,” that brings into question various metaphysical issues of anti-
subjective agency and intention an the ways they are experienced by the individual.

82
 This chapter looks backs how the weird and eerie have been connected to past
cultural and aesthetic modes, in particular that of the gothic and of the uncanny. The
gothic, both as a genre and as a conceptual model, provides several avenues in which the
weird and eerie can be explored, in particular the way that the gothic shares a deep
fascination for the “outside,” of that which lies just beyond agreed social norms of
comprehension, cognition, and experience. The concept of uncanny also share definite
similarities in how it has been used by artists, philosophers, and scientists to describe
particular ways of feeling. Indeed, the uncanny, weird and eerie as descriptors are often
used as interchangeable synonyms on a regular basis. But Fisher, in staking out his claim
to the weird and eerie as distinct and discrete aesthetic experiences, believes that the weird
and eerie should be thought of as different from the uncanny. The discourse around the
uncanny, he argues, is part of a greater trend in analysis and critique to explain,
rationalise, and categorise particular psychological phenomena in relation to the self, to
normalise that which falls under the uncanny’s sphere. But with the existence of the weird
and the eerie, there are the indications and traces of something that resists being placed
in a box of simple ontological categorisation.

In the second chapter, I take the concepts and definitions provided in chapter one
to analyse the inception and production of Slender Man. On a surface level, the creation
of Slender Man was an example of a small online community that came together and
created a character that fused several tropes and elements of gothic horror. By producing
a visceral thrill of being scared and enthralled by their own creation, they reproduce a
form of storytelling around a digital campfire. Slender Man however mirrors memeific
forms of cultural production that invited a high level of immersion, interaction and
sharing among those who encountered it. This in turn creates an accelerated and
intensified form of myth-making coalesced around Slender Man where it took to life on
various internet platforms in the form of text. images, video, and computer games. The
collective will and imagination of the online audience to build Slender Man in effect gave
the myth a “life” and agency of its own, generating weird effects among its audience in
the way the discourse that contextualised and built upon its myth destabilised the
boundaries of fiction and reality around its production.

The evolution of Slender Man as a fictional entity from a metaphysical outside

disrupting the inside of an online social reality is an example of a hyperstition in effect.
While hyperstition is a fairly new neologism, through its connections with subcultures
such as cyberpunk and the spread of the internet across homes and business in the 1990s,
83
it is the latest iteration in a line of artistic and philosophical practices, from Baudrillard
to H.P. Lovecraft and the literary gothic, that aim to subvert the boundaries between
reality and fiction. The Slender Man is symptomatic of an increasing prevalence of the
weird effects that occur in an online mediascape where weaponised fictions circulate and
gain traction in the social consciousness. This is exacerbated by a gradual destabilization
of various public institutions and media platforms that have been essential in helping
society form an agreed level of consensual social reality.

The third chapter is an analysis of two novels by J.G. Ballard that explores the
eerie elements contained within the texts’ themes of social and psychic alienation, present
in the characters’ experiences of contemporary urban spaces. To understand how the
weird and eerie is associated in experiencing public space, the chapter explored the
evolution from the architectural concepts and styles of modernism to the socioeconomic
flows of supermodernism through the proliferation of non-places. The evolution of the
uncanny alongside this process has seen the individual placed into a realm of distanced
alienation, a series of psychological maladies, and an increasing rootlessness arising from
a social emphasis placed on speed and mobility. While the weird has often presents itself
through the shock of new inherent in modernist art and architecture, the eerie can be found
in the numbing psychological effects that result from the informational and spatial
overload embedded in the surfaces and processes found in non-places. In such non-places
there is an ambiguity of agency in how the individual is both controlled and guided by a
technological landscape, a landscape that disavows this deployment of control through a
homogenised lack of presence and standardisation of space.

In the novels Crash and Concrete Island, there is the exploration of the quotidian
ways individuals are contained through sociological regimes of control, inducing a
stupefying effect among the characters in their social interactions and movements. The
abstract, totalising influence of non-places provoke extreme forms of psychopathology in
the characters, where their reliance on particular technologies, allow them to merge with
reactionary and eerily inhuman drives of death. The willed capacity in the characters to
obsessively discern the secret logic and sub rosa analogies within the machinic
landscapes of the motorways take on an entranced, almost dreamlike form, of
unconscious compulsion and automation. Even though their actions seem morally
reprehensible, even inexplicable, the desire on the part of the characters to break past their
finite limits and explore a new plane of possibilities is shown as liberating on their bodies
and minds. The eerie is present in the way that the Thanatic death drive, initially presented
84
as something that is alien, enigmatic, and decidedly inhuman, is shown to pulse through
the heart of humanity, as it wills those who are drawn by it to destroy what Ballard calls
the “skin of reality.” What I show from using these two examples is the way that the weird
and the eerie are pervasive and scalable, existing at different levels and locations in
contemporary and digital cultures. In the case of the Slender Man there is the feeling of
the weird that is experienced at a community level that from there spreads to mainstream
culture and news media. In Crash and Concrete Island, the weird and the eerie are
experienced on a much more personal scale, from that of the intimacy of individual
reflection, to the close social relations of a physical collective.

The subject of the weird and the eerie is a much broader and relatively unexplored
topic and as such cannot be fully summarized here. As such, this thesis barely touches the
surface of the weird and eerie with regards to cultural forms, social trends, and even
political ideologies. There has been little examination of the subgenre of weird fiction
itself and how it relates to Fisher’s delineation of the weird and eerie as a spectrum of
sensibilities. Due to space and topic limits, I have not, for example, explored the weird
and eerie that is presented in our experiences with the digitizing of our daily lives, be it
from to the prevalence of social media to our increasing dependence on artificial
intelligence and machine learning algorithms. Then there is the manner in which the weird
and eerie are found in various media forms, and their allusions to the outside presents
itself other cultural texts, forms, and genres, outwith the ones already discussed by Fisher
in his book.

The exploration of the social and political implications of the weird and the eerie
is not, at first glance, inherent in Fisher’s text. There is, for example, only one section
where Fisher talks of the immaterial agency of capitalism in our society. “Capital,” he
argues “is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless
exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.”246 However, taken within the
context of his body of work, the weird and the eerie are facets in what was a major theme
running through Fisher’s writing; The destruction of the social imagination by the forces
of neoliberalism and the culture’s inability to speculate on different futures, different
modes of thinking, different ways of existing.247 In particular, Fisher looked for ways in
which to arm people with the conceptual and aesthetic tools for what Matt Colquhoun
describes as “the creation of passageways between capitalism and its outside, extending

246
Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 11.
247
See Footnote no. 53.
85
the physical act of egress to include cognitive and speculative exits through ideological
limit-experiences.”248 In other words, reversing theorist Frederic Jameson’s famous
phrase, imagining the end of capitalism before the end of the world.

In response, to this, that have been collected texts such as Futures and Fictions
(Eds Henriette Gunkel, Ayesha Hameed, and Simon O’Sullivan, 2018), Economic
Science Fictions (Ed. William Davies, 2018) that explore speculative art projects that
bring hyperstitional practices into the political economy. These projects and installations
all attempt to reinterpret the world we live in as a living fiction, or imagine new worlds
and societies, beyond that of capitalism and in turn reigniting a utopian desire for the
future. As well as looking at fictioning the Real through art, there is the creation of
specific philosophical concepts that exude traces of the weird and eerie, such as
hyperobjects, which describes the ontology of vast and abstract entities such as global
capital and the internet, and the ways they are experienced by society, and the
Cthulhuscene, which examines the anti-subjective nature of climate change and how its
impact will fundamentally change our lives and social structures.249

There is the risk that some of the possible areas opened up by exploring the weird
and eerie runs the risk of being seemingly esoteric, even hermetical. Indeed, the ways that
the weird and the eerie can lead to various forms of speculation regarding that which lies
outside can be articulated, be it in art, politics, or philosophy, may possibly lack what
could be seen by some as academic rigour. But in dealing with that which Fisher called
the “contingencies and uncertainties of the present,” where the portrayal of ecological
and social collapse, as natural and inevitable create a mood of resignation and nihilism,
there is now an this requires an urgency on the part of writers, theorists, artists and
activists to embrace and promote different approaches, to make things weird, and to bring
out the eerie in the everyday.

248
Xenogoth, “Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and the Fisher-Function, Xenogothic, January 13 2018,
accessable from https://xenogothic.com/2018/01/13/egress-on-mourning-melancholy-and-the-fisher-
function/.
249
For more detail on the concept of hyperobjects, read Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and
Ecology After the End of the World, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2013). For more
information on the concept of the cthulhuscene, read Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking:
Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene”, E-Flux Journal, #75 - September 2016, accessible from
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/.
86
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