#and the AFAC proposal was just the best thing

[undertalethingies]

An Offer You Can’t Refuse

Alphys liked to run away from her problems. Case in point: She’d been dodging ring related thoughts for years now. She… She was pretty sure Undyne would say yes. After all, though she couldn’t figure out quite why, Undyne clearly liked her quite a bit. Once they’d gotten together, and she’d extricated her head from her ass a bit, it had been rather obvious, in hindsight.

But the ring, what the ring symbolised was… Too much, in a way. She felt like, if she asked Undyne to be with her forever, it would break the uneasy truce she seemed to have with her poor luck. She felt like, if she told Undyne she wanted it, Undyne would finally realize how out of Alphys’ league she was, and she’d leave. 

She knew, of course, that this was the anxiety talking.

...It didn’t really help.

Undyne, of course, would probably never take the initiative to ask herself, because, while she liked to project an air of courage and daring, she had no idea what to do the second the courage was emotional, rather than asking her to suplex a mountain or something. 

It was why they’d taken so long to get together, why it had taken the intervention of both Frisk and Papyrus, plus a chance encounter in the dump. 

But Frisk and Papyrus wouldn’t intervene here. It wasn’t something they could really intervene in. 

No, if Alphys wanted to marry her favorite fish, she’d have to get up the courage and do it herself. Her therapist would be so proud.

And it had been years! It wasn’t exactly now or never, Alphys had the time to get up her courage and no secrets beneath her lab.

So she went out and bought a ring. The ring was a replica of one in one of her favorite animes, and she had to get it specially ordered, but she bought a ring.

She had to get Sans’ help for the next part, since it was something only he could do, with his highly unusual magic.

And then she was ready, and she really, really wasn’t, and her fear screamed in her ears and her insecurity turned her numb, but she was already walking with Undyne, she was already aware of Sans’ quiet presence nearby, and then they were in the dump.

“U-Undyne,” she said quietly, the serious edge to her voice stopping Undyne and her tirade against skeleton pranksters dead.

“What is it, Alph?”

“We’ve known each other for a decade, now, and we’ve been together for seven years of that,” her voice caught in her throat, but it was okay because she managed that entire sentence without stuttering.

She got down on one knee, and Undyne gasped as she pulled the ring box from her pocket.

“I-I think it’s, it’s time w-we, uhm,” She couldn’t get the rest of her carefully prepared speech around the lump in her throat, but it was okay because Undyne is grinning and hugging her, and it really was the anxiety talking, because that was not the expression of someone who was about to say no, and-

“YES! YES A THOUSAND TIMES, AND A THOUSAND MORE TIMES!” 

Alphys didn’t even complain as she was hoisted into the air and spun at a dizzying speed, because who cared if she got a little dizzy? She couldn’t very well get more dizzy than she already felt, riding the adrenaline high that came from the immediate and ecstatic answer to the question that had been plaguing her for half a decade.

Alphys like to run away from her problems, but this, she decided, was definitely worth the fear that came with facing one.

[slaaneshfic]

the revolutionary praxis of urban tumours

This is an example of the kind of thing I want to talk about, a living, organic growth within a built urban environment. This particular example is the Raleigh Sewer Monster, as shown in the video it was recorded by a sewer cam on 27th April 2009 in Raleigh North Carolina. The Raleigh Sewer Monster was quickly determined to not be a monster, but rather most likely a colony of tubifex worm. As biologist Dr Timothy S Wood suggests “they have apparently entered a pipeline somehow, and in the absence of soil they are coiling around each other. The contractions you see are the result of a single worm contracting and then stimulating all the others to do the same almost simultaneously, so it looks like a single big muscle contracting” (McClain, 2009).

I wanted to start with this image from outside of horror cinema and video games, as a way of approaching something within those media that is quite nebulous and slippery to pin down. Throughout my research I’ve thought of them as scabs, tumours, wombs, placenta, cocoons, biofilms, nests, fungus, and most often galls (which is how I will refer to them in this paper), but none of these real life forms will consistently match the overall motif. This motif should be quite familiar to most with an interest in horror. Our protagonists are travelling an urban environment, looking for something, though rarely that which they end up finding. They will travel to an area which signifies urban decay, or at least neglect and abandonment. It will likely be dirty, and also pointedly underused, “wasted” area. A storage area, ventilation system, a block scheduled for demolition. The environment is explicitly urban, an environment completely designed and theoretically controlled and sealed. Not a place where there should be wildlife, however the lack of human attention has allowed something to happen and the sterility to be lost. Our protagonists walk through concrete and metal in hard lines and almost certainly under the light of a torch they then discover the gall. A biological mass adhered to and penetrating the structure of the built space. The gall might be alive, it might have been alive previously, it might be a means to life, it might alter life, the important point is that in contrast to the built environment, it is vital in some manner. This is their first quality.

The second quality of these galls is that they are hidden, whilsts also hiding something else. As already described they are found in neglected areas, abandoned buildings, air shafts, sewers, shanty towns and ghettos. These spaces are obviously not entirely neglected, people work in such areas, often people live in them. However it is not generally the protagonist, and by extension neither the projection of the audience that lives in the inner city slum or works in the utility channels which run through the more respectable accommodation. To the protagonist, these galls are within “their” space, the world of which they have complete freedom of movement, but in a corner they have neglected and by virtue of their lifestyle and status they have not had reason to check on. When they do eventually check, they find something has grown in the interim, and this growth is hiding something. It is a living black spot.

In a 2016 book chapter entitled “Lovecraft’s Cosmic Ethics” philosopher Patricia MacCormack argues for the work of horror author H.P. Lovecraft to be used “to imagine becoming the horrors he evokes toward a vitalistic, activist, and wondrous celebration of otherness” (MacCormack, 2016). It is my position that the motif of the urban gall be used in such a way, and that this “living black spot” points towards the emancipation of difference.  

To understand the gall, it is first needed that we understand the controlled environment that is performed prior to the gall’s discover. Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish” traces the genealogy of the prison and proposes that, “If it is true that the leper [colony] gave rise to rituals of exclusion, which to a certain extent provided the model for and general form of the great Confinement, then the [quarantine techniques developed in response to the] plague gave rise to disciplinary projects” (Foucault, 1995). The methods by which which the plague was attempted to be controlled in the seventeenth century were not of simple exclusion but of strict regimes of controlled activity, observation and categorization. Subjects, and also architecture, animals and at least in the theory of time, pathogens were controlled as a model state, “The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies - this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city” (Foucault, 1995). That perfect governed city is invoked as an impossible phantom whenever an FBI agent lifts some proteinous gloop with a bic pen from a floor of Baltimore apartment. Despite our best efforts to, “be pure, be vigilant [and] behave” the chaotic cosmos found a blind spot to grow in (Mills, O’Neill, Redondo, Talbot, & Roach, 2006). Foucault again identifies our alignment of the social and biological noting that, “ Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of 'contagions', of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, and die in disorder” (Foucault, 1995). It is in fact no wonder that deviation from moral or state law, from approved expression of subjectivity is often conflated with a lack of sterile surroundings. As noted by the theorist Georges Bataille when it comes to distinguishing upper and lower classes, “the difference [is] in cleanliness” (Bataille et al., 1995).

As noted already, gall, the term I am using to describe this motif, is inadequate because the depictions in horror media rarely stay fixed to that or any other biological definition. We have things that penetrate cement like roots, or weep from cracks like plasma, embedded eggs waiting to hatch with other living material adhered to the walls around them. Frequently these forms resist classification as anything other than a chimera. Perhaps they exhibit a sensitivity and speed of growth which implies the animal and yet this combined with a rooting into the architecture and decentralised, plural mass which suggests the vegital. MacCormack states that “connectivity to the unlike is what defines Lovecraftian entities” and this is true of the galls on a number of levels (MacCormack, 2016). As noted, they often sit between categories of animals or plants, they might be using another creature, alive or dead, human or otherwise to provide food or energy, or assist in the birthing or transformation of another. Lastly it is necessary that gall sits on the threshold of architecture. It needs; within the logic of horror story, and politicised dichotomy of order/disorder, a sheer urban surface.

That sheer surface marks another contrast which must eventually collapse. The ventilation duct, lift shaft or pensioners apartment is namable and filled with clear signification for us. The thing which I am referring to as a gall, does not, at least at first have such signification. It’s multiple layers of hybridity site it in a “visceral, fleshy, corporeal, teratological, and emphatically material world is also a world where human language [...]is without power” (MacCormack, 2016). You can try and name the thing, but at best you have something that will always fall short of the sensations provoked, the functions it might perform, or the things it might become. MacCormack turns to philosopher Luce Irigaray to address this namelessness and quotes the latter “Nor will I ever see the mucous, that most intimate interior of my flesh, neither the touch of the outside of the skin of my fingers, nor the perception of the inside of these same fingers, but another threshold of the passage from outside to inside, from inside to outside, between inside and outside, between outside and inside” (Irigaray, 1993). Irigaray’s mucous, like the gall, refuses a dichotomy of self and other. The gall appears within our supposedly clean an ordered environment, it was always already here in some form of becoming. The gall is almost always hiding something, it creates a protected environment within the cold world of order. A hidden space within a blind spot. Equally, while it sits in initial contrast to the urban sheen of sterile, man made environ , it collapses this contrast by the sheer fact of its presence. The gall is within that environment, it is part of the architecture and pulls its refusal to be named into the concrete rendering the certainty of the urban a farce. Hidden, unknowable heterogenous life running through the material that we believed was pure order and death.[Deleuze and the face, the wall is aface]

While the gall pulls its vital, unknowable qualities into the wall and in doing so penetrates the bubble of order, it also pulls us, and to various degrees our FBI agent protagonist proxy, toward it. The desire produced in association with such material is not only featured in many horror narratives but within feminist discourse including that of MacCormack and Irigaray, but most notable Julia Kristeva’s theorising of Abject.

We can easily imagine our FBI agent, crawling into the cargo hold of a commercial jet, latex glove not worn but simply held in their eagerness to touch as they mutter to themselves, around the maglight they hold between teeth, “Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A "something" that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me” (Kristeva, 1984). The gall seduces characters “within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning” and “draws [them] toward the place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva, 1984). Just as it draws our agent, it draws us the audience along as well. We are seduced by its sensually qualities which are outside of language and therefor hidden from annihilation through naming and knowing. There is also often the uncanny familiarity which breaks down the certainty that this is “not me”. It could have been part of me, it could be within me in the future. This gall has already destroyed the sterility of our perceived environment and forced us to realise that it was permeable. The mere sight of the gall reminds us that permeability is essential to our very existence, no matter how much we attempt to expand the buffer zone around us through buildings and their politics. Our bodies are always spilling out over the edges of the orderly frames we insist they conform to, as philosopher Margrit Shildrick tells us “The security of categories – whether of self or non-self – is undone by a radical undecidability” (Shildrick, 2002). This is one of the calls being made by the repeated motif of the gall, it offers the chance to consider our own porosity to things which would breach the category “human”, and in doing so challenge the validity of that category at all.

The gall produces desire in combination with us, that desire is not one of lack but is created by our encounter with an unnamable which points towards various functions and various kinds of life and voracious connectivity. This is what is proposed by philosopher Gille Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari as “desiring-production”, an articulation of desire not based on lack, but on creative production, “For every organ-machine, an energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). The encounter with the gall produces new desires, new potential operations, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology we are growing organs, the “we” being us and the galls together. This creativity does not stop at the point of being eaten by, or birthed by, or radically altered by, the gall, but extends beyond just as it extends into the now obviously porus and flexible surrounds. We have to develop the organs to consider our entire reproductive system diffused across oceans if only to recoil in horror. As we fumble for meaning we connects to a multitude of other ways of being, none of which are compatible with our previous ideological category of Human.

Finally, there is emancipatory possibility offered by the repeated motif of the gall if use in this manner. The gall is presented as a constant reminder of “urban vulnerability” (Tobin, 2002), and the failures of the society to maintain complete discipline against disorder in its broadest sense. However equally it is a radically resilient call for life. The gall presents possibilities, a “voracious drive for proximity with alterity” (MacCormack, 2016). This unknowable, vital secret thing repeatedly crops up to offer hope against tyrannical order. More than this, it creates such possibilities by producing desire, this is what MacCormack refers to as “becoming Ahuman” (MacCormack, 2012).

The becoming Ahuman occurs in our encounter with art, but particularly in out encounter with horror cinema (including the horror cinema which is expressed through other forms including video games). Maccormack says “The art encounter elucidates the new horror and wonder of being in the asignifed world as a new state of constant ecstasy, a functioning expressive entity nonetheless still outside of time” (MacCormack, 2012). While we never arrive at the state of Ahumanity, our affective encounter with this thing beyond produces new desire. Or in the words of Guattari “the expressive a-signifying rupture summons forth a creative repetition that forges incorporeal objects, abstract machines and Universes of value that make their presence felt as though they had been always ' already there' , although they are entirely dependent on the existential event that brings them into play” (Guattari, 2005).

The encounter with the gall is not just reaching out mucousal suckers toward us, but us developing our own tentacles and in doing so render ourselves strange. The urban gall is revolutionary not in the sense of a sleeper cell, but as an active agent of alterity, reaching out past the protagonist and meeting the mucous of the viewer

Bataille, G., Lebel, R., Waldberg, I., Brotchie, A., White, I., & Acéphale (Secret society) (Eds.). (1995). Encyclopaedia Acephalica: comprising the Critical dictionary & related texts. London: Atlas Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison (2nd Vintage Books ed). New York: Vintage Books.

Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Guattari, F. (2005). The three ecologies. London ; New York: Continuum.

Irigaray, L. (1993). An ethics of sexual difference. Cornell University Press.

Kristeva, J. (1984). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. SubStance, 13(3/4), 140. https://doi.org/10.2307/3684782

MacCormack, P. (2010). Mucous, Monsters and Angels: Irigaray and Zulawski’s Possession. Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 1, 95–110.

MacCormack, P. (2012). Posthuman ethics: embodiment and cultural theory. Farnham, Surrey, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

MacCormack, P. (2016). Lovecaft’s Cosmic Ethics. In R. Campbell (Ed.), The Age of Lovecraft (pp. 199–214). University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1b9x1f3.15

McClain, C. (2009, June 30). Creatures from the Sewer. Retrieved 2 April 2018, from http://www.deepseanews.com/2009/06/creatures-from-the-sewer/

Meat Moss. (n.d.). Retrieved 3 April 2018, from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MeatMoss

Mills, P., O’Neill, K., Redondo, J., Talbot, B., & Roach, D. (2006). The complete Nemesis the Warlock. Oxford: Rebellion.

Shildrick, M. (2002). Embodying the monster: encounters with the vulnerable self. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE Publications.

Tobin, K. (2002). The Reduction of Urban Vulnerability: Revisiting 1950s American Suburbanization as Civil Defence. Cold War History, 2(2), 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/713999949