The
Body Horrible
corporeality - megamorphology
- polyasexuality
Proposed outline for book, 2001>>
Snaphot
The
Body Horrible is a fluid passage through bodily
states which swell across a broad cultural terrain: bizarre
& hardcore pornography; abstract & pop art; sex
crimes & serial killers; horror & violent movies;
body-building & plastic surgery; heavy metal & hardcore
techno; pop, rock & hip-hop music videos; victim toys
& children's food; spectator sports & crowd control;
skyscrapers, cars & kitchen appliances. Envisaged as
a text book that students would read even if it wasn't on
class lists. Imagined as a manual for those wishing to re-use
and re-invent their bodies. Designed – quite literally
– to fuck with your mind.
The
Body Horrible is not an exploration of the ‘self’
in troubled times. Nor is it an exposure of ‘power’
& its effects on the politicized body. The information
and insight it contains result from many years of author
Philip Brophy's research into the hypermateriality of cultural
viscera, and his willingness to penetrate and be penetrated
by animate objects and inanimate beings. The heady text
is aimed at: (i) those who are fascinated and excited by
ponderings on the psycho-sexual ramifications of that which
surrounds us everyday; and (ii) those who are seeking ways
beyond the politically correct impasse of gender definition
and humanist desire which fails to unleash a truly liberating
means for connecting the self to all that one dreads. The
spurting text is designed to be messy, murky, moist. Directly
attacking the dry stomach rumbling and limp crotch scratching
of academic discourse, the book transmogrifies all accepted
‘ways of seeing’ into a complete re-build of
the act of seeing with one’s own eyes. You will never
distinguish a ‘phallus’ or ‘vaginal dentata’
again: in place, you will be lost in a dimension of morphic
infinity. You will become lost in your own body.
Words:
100,000
Format: text with images
10 chapters @ 10,000 words
Plus bibliography, filmography, netography
Categories: animation, cinema, music, pop culture, media,
cultural studies, sex, your mother
Pitch
Do
we really live in a liberated era? Do you laugh at middle-aged
swingers using the internet for attracting members to their
parties? Do you implicitly support the binary barracking
of gay and straight polarities? Do you bemoan the pornographic
in preference for the erotic? Do you think plastic surgery
is ‘unnatural’? How much do you know about flesh
patches, gainer/feeders, penile implants, lactation syndrome,
parafillia? Do you think a person who could fuck someone
after they have killed them is a ‘monster’?
It
is no accident that we have entered a digital age right
at a time when definitions of sexuality, gender, type and
practice are being re-coded into a series of templates,
patches and pull-down menus which save one from linking
discontinuities between that which is deemed ‘sexual’
and that which is deigned ‘beyond sex’. The
fetishization of virtuality and its logic of remote triggering
is itself a sign of sexual displacement, heightening the
power of placing obstacles, tensions, ruptures and collapses
in the way of direct physical contact. While this could
be claimed to be a liberating extenuation of jouissance
and titillation (clicking, panning, downloading, scanning,
bar-reading, decompressing – all in the name of striptease
narration), it more directly points to a yawning cavern
whose depths embody the dark abstraction and dank tactility
which clouds the mind and throbs the body in sexual action.
It is equally no accident that the greatest concern about
the territorial collapse of political economies on the internet
is centred on the viral spread of pornography – because
internet porn appears to enable transgressive consumption
while maintaining a desperate representational outpost which
feebly wires back to society: yes, sex is human.
But
maybe sex is not as human as we think. Maybe you are not
essentially human for being sexual, for engaging in sex,
for practicing its social rites – both normalized
and transgressive. Maybe sexuality is worth considering
as a small alien planet in the floating universe of ‘parafillia’:
the clinical psychological subset term for pathological
fetishes, so quaintly humanist in its Latin derivation,
‘beyond love’. Maybe indeed.
Favouring
posthuman stimulation over postmodern simulation, The
Body Horrible goes ‘back to the body’
to rewrite the cartography of sexuality which signposts
all that which is beyond sex. In doing so, it posits the
body as that which is rendered ‘horrible’ –
primed for horripilation. ‘Horripilation’ is
the contraction of the skin which tightens one’s bodily
surface when a state of dread is induced: the colloquial
‘creeping flesh’. The Body Horrible
extends notions of the socialized being as determined by
influence, subjection, attraction and identification into
a concept of the body as a quivering organism which uncontrollably
responds to all and every parafilliac stimuli. It wishes
to feel those frequencies with as much erogenous impact
as possible, and to allow their effects to shape a way of
thinking about one’s relation to cultural forces.
The concept of ‘the horrible’ thus anchors the
ideas in the book like it would a craft being tossed on
the ocean of hyper tactility which is popular culture: a
realm where no cultural studies coast guards will heed your
distress signal.
Forget
therapy. Forget analysis. In opposition to the normative
configuration "psychology - mythology - sexuality",
try "corporeality - megamorphology - polyasexuality":
the investigative triangulation from which The Body
Horrible is cast. The book’s views are more
derived from abject materialism, hyper phenomenology and
hard science fiction than determined by conventional psychological
methods. Rather than perform a direct analysis on `the body'
in relation to socio-political discourses (sex, gender,
power, control, etc.), the book outlines ways in which we
use our body as both metaphor and metonym for recognizing
and realizing the world around us. This means that in varying
instances, ‘the body’ is figured as latent or
manifest; actual or virtual; analogue or digital; molecular
or genetic; visceral or structural. Furthermore, ‘the
body’ in question might be an image, a form, an outline,
an object, a subject, a tool, a machine, a process, an icon,
a fantasy, a possibility. Anything can be a body; a body
can be anything.
This
open-ended concept of the body facilitates a site where
cosmologies are modulated – where microcosms and macrocosms
are in a state of continual flux, each becoming the other
due to vast shifts in range and scale. You will perceive
sports’ crowds as spermatozoa; skyscrapers as inverted
casts of colonic tracts; artworks as suppressed acts of
serial vivisection; children’s toys as implementations
for bodily modification; cars as wombs; breasts as asteroids;
perfume as entrails.
Now
– whether you desire it or not - you can begin to
glimpse cracks of relevance in life’s dreadful and
repulsive produce. By using The Body Horrible’s
extensive research and inquiry into a network of netherzones
and undergrounds usually avoided, ignored or presumed insignificant
by conservative cultural theory, you can navigate the ‘universe
of parafillia’ and land in some truly alien worlds.
Hopefully, you’ll stay. The greater bulk of the book’s
contents rarely has been given detailed analysis, and never
within an overall theoretical project. In no trival way,
The Body Horrible stares head-on into the
asexuality of the serial killer; declares oil painting as
excessive sperm production; rejects biological determinism
as pseudo-mystical dogma; celebrates low frequency rumbles
in rock music as spiritual; and advocates the use of unknown
drugs in sport. Drink it down, all the way.
Breakdown
Part
1:
PORN - The Body Representational
Hardcore & bizarre pornography
19th
century erotic postcards & the dawn of body objectification;
photography as bodily abstraction & the advent of pornographs;
the hunger for flesh & wartime sex curbing; postwar
pin-ups & girlie magazines; continental sex culture
& differing views of bodily function; anatomical vivisection
& sexual viscera; dismemberment & cataloguing the
body; the body in action; origins of the cum-shot; rubber/vinyl/latex/PVC
fetishism; phone sex & computer bulletin boards; air-brush
art & the mortician effect; the normalization of nude
calendars; Playstation skin patches & peeling female
flesh; the shuddering depths of parafillia.
Part
2:
ART - The Body Excretable
Abstract Art & Pop Art
Jackson
Pollock & the control of goo; Hans Arp & womb destruction;
Williem deKooning & bodily evisceration; Andy Warhol
& mortician's techniques; Francis Bacon & the liquefaction
of flesh; Luciano Fontana & graphic penetration; the
canvas as body; female nudes & feminine models as painterly
fodder; Chris Burden, Vito Acconi & performance art;
bodily waste displays; modernism & formal violence;
male creativity myths & the celebration of sperm; the
hysteria of ejaculation & the mark of man; postmodern
revisitations of theatricalized violence in David Hirst,
the Chapman Brothers, Joel Peter Witkin & Cindy Sherman.
Part
3:
MURDER - The Body Unrecognizable
Serial killers & sex crimes
Jack
The Ripper and total disfiguration; Ed Gein & the surface
of the body; John Wayne Gacy’s paintings & the
repression of being; Ted Bundy's execution & the celebration
of BBQs; nomads, vagrants, itinerants & hobo-sexuality;
the deliberate heterosexualization of serial killers in
modern fiction; dysfunctional family units & grave-beds
of sex; gun erotics & penile mechanics; reality television
& amateur news footage; snuff mythology & fundamentalist
death texts; death wishes & white light of the sex tunnel;
torture & kicks; forensic analysis & the trace of
liquids; masturbation addicts & pornoholics; life-force
and spiritual transferal through violence; sperm, urine
& DNA autographing.
Part
4:
CINEMA - The Body Imaginable
Horror movies & violent cinema
Horripilation
& the body’s tensility; sexual iconography in
non-sexual action & depiction; bodily morphology versus
social mythology; elemental forces of the earth & the
planet as body; the thickness of gore & the colour of
pus; displacement of gender through bodily abjection; the
act of seeing versus the act of showing; the sound of the
body; modern archetypal ‘horripilators’ of the
body – Jason, Leatherface, Freddy & the Shape;
the body beyond control & the body past controlling;
the bodily dimension and the space of its habitation; the
abundance of erections and their morphic continuity; approaches
to the body by David Cronenberg, David Lynch & George
Romero; inner & outer spaces; replicants & their
existential form; pain thresholds; muscle-men; disease;
cadavers; the elevation of the colon.
Part
5:
SURGERY - The Body Inventable
Body building & plastic surgery
Body-mapping
and Charles Atlas; the invention of Michael Jackson; supermodels
& the hypotheosis of bland; mega-breasts & the quest
of silicone; cellulite & the stuff of being; the machinic
craft of plastic surgeons; body art & scarification;
hormonal injections and gender-sliding; menopause mania;
pre-op transsexuals & sex change operations; science
fiction & the imagined body; body building & self-shaping;
mortician's wax & death masks; ressurectionism; cancer
& immune systems; phrenology & facial sculpture;
computer morphing & texture mapping; genetic engineering
& moral engineering; fundamentalism & the Human
Genome Project; menstruation wars: tampons versus pads;
control of hair & fear of skin pores.
Part
6:
MUSIC - The Body Vibrational
Heavy metal & hardcore techno
The
bowels of Satan & the body of Christ; transubstantiation
& indigestion; fear of the anal tract; backwards incantations
& the terror of the reversed; biblical fundamentalism
& the druid effect; The Exorcist; Judas Priest subliminals
trial & frequency hysteria; speed metal, death metal
& the subjection of pain; pseudo-androgyny & Hollywood
rock; amplification, power & spectacle; technological
stimulation & extenuation; biological pulsation &
the rhythmic core of techno; acoustic decimation & digital
deconstruction in drum’n’bass & r’n’b;
oceanic sensations of space in trance & ambient; the
club as womb & sound as water.
Part
7:
VIDEO CLIPS - The Body Transformable
Pop, rock & hip-hop music videos
Gender
war in musicalized space; inventing & designing stages
for the body performer; vocal trajectories & arcs of
sex; pubescence, hysteria & exploitation; figurines,
marionettes & ethereal beings; valleys of fans and mountains
of music; striptease narratives and bodily objectification;
multiplicity of replicant individuals in girl/boy groups;
vocal recording and mechanical auras; fallacies of ‘surrealism’
& ‘dreaming’ in music video form; the sound
of imagery & the musicalization of narrative; holes,
gaps & lack of breath in music video editing.
Part
8:
TOYS - The Body Malleable
Victim toys & children’s food
Cabbage
Patch Kids & Garbage Pail Kids; body mythology in Masters
Of The Universe; the impossibility of posable Barbie; designed
neutering in doll gendering; third world toy production
& petrochemical alchemy; dolls of the devil; child-as-victim
& child-as-vegetable; gross-out toys & victim toys;
parental fear of childhood self; identification with visage
& form in doll design; talking dolls & instructional
dolls; the marionette syndrome; lifelikeness & nearness
to death; Ed Roth & monstrous excess; love of the ugly
& the attraction of icky substances; the fallacy of
nutrition; messy food and leaking bodies; playing with food
& eating shit; the inexplicable torture of cows &
hunger for fabricated milk.
Part
9:
SPORT - The Body Excitable
Spectator sports & crowd control
Speed,
mass, density and gravity; Leni Reifenstahl, Busby Berkeley,
Glen Miller and wartime human-organization; sports narrativity
& dramatic enveloping; televisual relay & sports
casting; ovals, arenae, auditoria & other containers
of spectacle; spermoid thrusts & labial excitation in
strategic field sports; suprematism & ejaculation in
the drive to win; WWF and the unreality of wrestling; the
morality against drugs; male urination as sublimated gunfire;
the liquid grain of beer; coffee and the taste of burning
energy; elemental produce of the gods and elixirs of life;
sports foods, body fuel & physical engines.
Part
10:
DESIGN - The Body Inhabitable
Skyscrapers, cars and kitchen appliances
The
fluidity of Gaudi and the melted cities of Max Ernst; sexy
war machinery and implements for the sex-death drive; car
crash trauma & unrecoverable body-shock; the car as
mobile architecture of the internal; the home as womb; skyscrapers,
the ‘non-phallus’ & the hysteria of colonic
output; shaping negative space & carving into air; designing
knobs and buttons; the fetishization of the hand in domestic
appliances; breathing in shopping malls; the tactility of
air conditioning; shaping phantom entrails in perfume; your
last breath.
