TERROR

Terror in the movies always seems to require fog, mist swirling through the landscape, highlighting some features, obscuring others, blurring outlines, threatening to merge identities in a soup of suspended particulate matter, the microscopic nattering away at the macroscopic, a chaotic Brownian stew grinding away ineffectually at the edges. limits, margins of solidity. And yet, perhaps, in a way, not so ineffectual, since isn't a horrific effect (even if based largely on expectation extruded from occultation) created out of the most diaphonous of substances? And it retains no shape, has no memory, as the shadowy figures roam through its shifting, insubstantial passageways, curling and wisping. It becomes a veritable quicksand of the air.

But note the title of this essay: "possible smoke-fog ahead", a warning found on many contemporary roadways, indicates either artificial (the intentional burning we associate with smoke) or natural sources of the particulate matter (the fog which results from climatic earth conditions--though there can be a combination of factors, e.g., the great London fogs--smog really-- of the last century, the results of intensive industrial activity--coal burning --colliding with climatic conditions). One way to proceed here might be to consider the nature of the dividing line (the dash) between the artificial and the natural: from which 'side' of the cut is the cut, the division, instituted--or discovered? (The fog of being-there--Dasein --always begins thusly in the hermeneutic circle: The answer to this question may ultimately not be resolvable since the answer appears to be determined by which presuppostion we start from--and there is no way of determining WHICH supposition we should start from since, basically, that [i.e., where should we start] is the phenomena under consideration. If we think that we always construct the position we start from, that takes us in one direction; if we consider that we are GIVEN a position that moves us into the other direction. But each position must include the other as part of its start. That is, if we take it that we are GIVEN a position to start from, we must conclude at some point that there are portions of our position that must be constructed. Similarly, if we take a constructivist position, we must at some point accede to the point that there are certain aspects of the world which are simply given, that we come into [some of which are historical, some of which seem to be beyond the historical, over which we as a species seem to have little, if any, control--a certain haunting of the helm, a position rapidly being appropriated by kybernetes, a dead helmsman... which yet still functions!].

This seems akin to the Heideggerean distinction between the coming into being "on its own" or "from itself" of phenomena and the spontaneity of the coming into being of phenomena in general. (This matter is addressed somewhat in Walter Benjamin's meditations on the object of the studies of the materialist method: "Sundering truth from falsehood is the goal of the materialist method, not its point of departure. In other words, its point of departure is the object riddled with error, with [conjecture]. The distinctions with which the materialist method, discriminative from the outset, starts are distinctions wtihin this highly mixed object, and it cannot present this object as mixed or uncritical enough. If it claimed to approach the object the it is Œin truth¹, it would greatly reduce its chances. These chances, however, are considerably augmented if the materialist method increasingly abandons such a claim, thus preparing for the insight that 'the matter in itself' is not 'in truth'." ( Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire:A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism, 103 .)

We might note the closeness of this description to the famed account of the automatic chess player and the wizened dwarf of theology. 'The object riddled with error' calls forth contemporaneously notions -- and related disciplines ranging from complexity theory to poststructuralism to psychoanalysis -- of noise, indeterminacy, rumor, abjection, prophecy and divination, and memory. We might also note the distinction between voluntary / involuntary memory which Benjamin refers to in Proust, and the evacuation of experience which the modernist loss of the involuntary memory alludes to--contact with the abyssal, the alien, the uncanny, the other--and which the 'screen' memory of technology seeks to simulate. In all these notions of the 'error-riddled object' it seems that a certain opacity is not only not avoidable but is actually necessary.) At this point the fog -- or is it smoke? -- can only get thicker. Only a breeze can save us now.