*Endo (Poetry, positionality, sound, particles, goosebumps, horror)
*
*Where objects are and the fact we know, or don’t know, or think we know where they are is what constitutes our relationship with the orbital web of one-things that surrounds us; a phenomenon I call ‘positionality’. Like an amphitheater, or more like a theater in the round, we could consider ourselves as subjects that are positioned centrally, while the one-things orbit radially. That is, if we understand ourselves as the axis, as the nucleus of the cosmic atrezzo that is suspended concentrically around us. If we were to look at all one-things as axises themselves, we’d find that we are all orbiting in tandem around various, self-constituted or personal axises; thus a choral theater in the round that we may not know how to perceive. Karen Barad quotes George Greenstein and Arthur Zajonc’s The Quantum Challenge in her essay “On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am”: “We may not notice the intimate relationships common to that level of existence, but, regardless of our blindness to them, they persist. Events that appear to us as random may, in fact, be correlated with other events occurring elsewhere. Behind the indifference of the macroscopic world, ‘passion at a distance’ knits everything together”[51].
*
*        If we knew how to listen in on these things, tune into their frequencies, we will hear a polyphonous/cacophonous glow emanating from these sources. We’ll hear e e cummings’  infrafairies, ultrawrists and flesh-mysteries, we’ll hear Mary Ann Evans’ roars and squirrel heartbeats, we’ll hear Emily Dickinson’s deathless trees, barbed syllables and ethereal blows, we’ll hear T.S. Eliot’s defunctive under sea music and insurgent gales, we’ll hear Björk’s swirling black lilies and glow in the dark threads, we’ll hear Kate Bush’s coral-filled rooms and shimmering summer mirrors[52][53][54][55][56][57]. We’ll hear the jittering poetics of the Sensual World, we’ll hear the scintillating stretches and rubbery bends and creaking growths and the vibrating kicks of the becoming, of the process. We’ll hear the choral bellows of the dollhouse, the ringing silence of the bells, the shuttering oscillation of the fiber, the hushed grunting of the metaxy, the rattling clunk of the hypokeimenon, the charging pull of potentiality. Notice how these poetically strung together creatures of poetry are composed of uncanny meshes of nature, object, human, wild, mysterious, beast, tool, that so contradictorily yet so effortlessly drift to the forest floor, like autumn leaves that drift down and collage together, becoming a choral ‘we’. If these uncanny meshes aren’t cyborgs, I don’t know what are. In Barad’s own words: “A cacophony of whispered screams, gasps, and cries, an infinite multitude of indeterminate beings diffracted through different spacetimes, the nothingness, is always already within us, or rather, it lives through us”[58]. There are cyborgs all around us, that live through and in us, that mirror us in a concatenation of fractal echoes that suggests the second hermetic principle of alchemy: as below, so above, as above, so below (an occultist’s version of the unified field theory? A metaphysical simile? ‘Like here yet also like there yet neither’). There is a great resonan
*t correspondence between all one-things, again, a shared queerness with all biological, liquid, mineral, solid and gaseous life that is often ignored, repressed, muzzled and therefore atrophied. How do we listen? What sound do silent things make?
*What does affect sound like? Let’s start with the word itself. Aaaaaaaaaaaaafffffffffffffffffffffffeeeeeeeeeeeeeccccccccccccccctttttttttttttttttttt. With the ‘a’, notice how your neck vibrates. Now notice how your esophagus rattles from your chest up. With the ‘f’, notice how your lungs empty. Notice how your nostrils warm and moisten. With the ‘e’, notice how the vibrations return to your chest. Notice how the beginning of your throat slightly closes and how the sound almost exits your ears. With the ‘c’, notice how your initial and unsustainable click hollows into an airy exhale with your tongue arched upwards or downwards. With the ’t’, notice how the air passes like a stream through your clenched teeth and pursed lips. Maybe this phonetical approximation can begin a new relationship with the concept and its myriad of associated phenomena.
*
*How do you feel about affect?
*
*To deflect the attention for a moment: ‘The objects are not what they seem.’  I’d like to analyze this statement literally. ‘To seem’ means to derive an opinion or perspective from the appearance or given/default state of something (‘given’ and ‘default’ are usually social, semiotical constructs. An owl is a nocturnal bird that looks like this: 🦉or that:      . Anything that looks like an owl is probably an owl or a visual translation/representation of an owl.) We look at something and assess it, shuffle through our archive of things we’ve seen before and their definition and come to a conclusion: ‘yes, it’s an owl’. Beyond a superficial conclusion, it’s a rational, taxonomic one that permits the human subject to label it and go about their day without existential crisis (let’s remember: 1 + 1 = 3). If looking at an object is assessing how it seems, listening to/with an object, or feeling/feeling with an object might approximate us to what the object is. But how does one listen to or with an object? How do we feel them or feel with them? ‘The objects are not what they seem’ thus comes to mean ‘the objects are more than their appearance’.
*
*A small laboratory proposal to break from reading: grab something made of cotton or polyester, grab some toilet paper, a glass, a small tchotchke, some liquid soap or any slimy liquid. Grab any small piece of something that you can lay out on a table along with the other items. Close your eyes and touch each one of them. Rub your finger pads slowly along the fibers of a shirt, maybe you’ll find a button, or the hem, or a loose thread. Maybe you’ll find a hole, maybe a stitch. Do the same with the toilet paper. Scan the outer edges of the sheet. Rub and press into the fiber with two fingers. Feel how it warms with your touch? how it responds? how you respond? how friction generates a third thing (fingertouch + paper = warmfingerpaper?). Feel how when you rub the paper between two fingers, your circles differ? Your skin’s ditches, dimples and wrinkles reacting against the papers ditches, dimples and wrinkles? Now rub the tchotchke up and down, scanning its changes. Caress it with your fingernail noticing the bends, ridges and crevices. Thump it with your fingernail. You can’t help but to hear it. Maybe it rings because it’s glass, or creates a flat sound because it’s plastic, or creates a hollow note if it’s made of wood. Go back and listen to the fabric, to the toilet paper. Rub the glass, circle around its rims. Fit your fingers into its hole. What does that sound like? feel like? remind you of? Touch over the imprinted factory stamp as if it were braille. Thump the glass. Squeeze the glass. Feel the moisture between you and the object. Listen to the sound it makes. Go back to the other objects. Tear a hole into the toilet paper maybe, or wet it with your lips. Crumple it. Crumple the shirt and listen to it. Smell the shirt, smell the glass. Take the slime. Just put a few drops on your palm. Circulate or gyrate your palm, feel how the liquid shifts, drips or drags. Now rub the slime around your palm. Smell it. Does it smell the same in the bottle as it does in your hand? 
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*Now open your eyes. How do you feel towards these objects that you’ve so intimately and dynamically gotten to know? Do you feel —oddly— more friendly towards these things? Like you know them, like they are a part of you? Maybe that shirt will, from now on, be ‘that shirt that I did those things to once’ and distinguish itself from the rest of your shirts. Maybe in the future, the smell of that soap + your hands will provoke the same feelings you had when you did this exercise. These feelings or reactions don’t have to be sensitive or poetic. They can be skeptical, weird, funny, awkward. Even if you think with a smirk, ‘that was the strangest thing I’ve ever done with toilet paper’, you’re still engaging in a dialogue with the thing, the action and the circumstance. That tchotchke will be forever marked by ‘that thing you did together’, no matter how you feel about it or how seriously you took the exercise. 
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*As we’ve explored, vessels (the object and the concept) are the unsung heroins of history. All objects, all animals, all liquids, all gasses and all minerals are vessels that contain things, that keep things from slipping out or let them slip out. But they always contain something. Even one unit of something is atomically and subatomically comprised of other things. But what about elementary particles such as electrons and quarks? They may not be made up of anything else and have no substructure, but do they carry something? A non-physical something? An impulse? An energy? An intention? A transformative history? An affectivity? To a physicist, this may have very little interest. Yet in quantum field theory, elementary particles such as gluons, photons, gravitons and bosons are called force carriers, messenger carriers or intermediate carriers. All three terms describe tasks that involve transportation towards and between things. These force carrier particles are active facilitators as they carry out the fundamental interactions of our world, such as gravity and electromagnetism. So on a macro-scale, this very project is cradled, carried and thus possibilized by elementary particles. Yes, everything is everything, the great tautological truth. My project, every letter I type, every thought I think, every feeling fomented by my environment and chemistry are all products of quarks, leptons, gluons, gravitons, electrons, photons and bosons that carry me, carry my laptop, carry my brain, carry my chair, carry my table, carry the wind, and so on. These miraculous particles are the sway and the ebb, they amalgamate to make up the great vessels and are themselves the great vessels that define how we exist and move in this world, they grant us potentiality and possibility, they make up the gelatin and the force that pushes us through that gelatin. 
*
*So why don’t we listen to these elements, big and small? Maybe we don’t know how. Yet, there is a thing called house music, and chamber music, and musique concrète, and ambient techno, and musique d’ameublement, and quite obviously, there is electronic music. These are genres and styles that use very simple syntax to denote what they are: music for the house, music of the chamber, music that is concrete, furniture music and music made of electricity. In other words, they simply are what they sound like they are (They are what they eat? Furniture-eaten music, music-eaten electricity?). Let’s take 1998, which was a big year for thing-music. Matthew Herbert weaved a magnificently cool and muted tapestry out of things around his house in Around the House. Matmos intimately plucked and tapped and struck and strummed every domestic object they could in Quasi-Objects (superb cyborg title, no?). Luke Vibert breathlessly dragged us through a landscape of fresh throats, voices and echos in Tally Ho!. Autechre rubbed metals and thumped hollow things in LP5. Pierre Bastien and Klimperei’s bouncy, ironic clicks, dissonant playthings and watery xylophones tumble about in Mécanologie Portative. Our immediate observation is the percussiveness of objects, the fact that depending on how and with what you hit them, they produce a given sound that can be recorded and programmed metrically as a beat or a sample. But the sound of the tapped object isn’t quite the object itself, nor its aura, nor its mysticism, nor its sentience, nor any other kind of esoteric or affective quality, right? Maybe, it’s when objects produce sound, they sound like us humans. Maybe, it’s when humans produce sound, we sound like objects. Maybe sound, music, is a way for us (all subjectual life) to just edge closer to each other’s different strati of existence. When we hammer our chest to make a beat, are we dialoguing affectively with the objectual world? Young children are so surprised when they learn to snap 
*their fingers. It’s as if they had an instrument within them the whole time and didn’t realize it. That sense of wonder and awe that they themselves can produce object-like sound, as if they had a mini drum set or tiny keyboard in their pocket and had only just reached in to discover it. 
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*Why are humans so captivated by ordinary things that make sound? Have we not all stopped in the subway to hear a musician conduct their symphony of found objects and awed at the quality? Like Morton says: “One object—say an oud, a lute—can be attended to, attuned to, in different ways that bring out strange hidden properties of that object. In this sense playing an oud is like doing phenomenology. You are attending to the inner structure of the object, allowing yourself to be taken over by it” which makes for another wacky equation: mouthblow + hollowobject = affective-vibration-chanty[59]. Other animals use sound and melody to determine positions of things and communicate interest, fear, longing, desperation, pain, joy (e.g. echolocation, whale and bird songs for mating and for calling attention to danger, gorillas and their battle cries). Sound helps to shape and detect other one-things’ positionality. To find a CD of recorded whale songs, bubbling rivers, bird songs of the Venezuelan jungle, is just as easy as finding a CD of music boxes, glockenspiels and Celtic harps. Humans are driven to things that produce noise, and creatures that produce noise like things do, and humans that produce noise like things and creatures do. Again, noise might be the affective bridge between all subjects. The Japanese-Argentinean duo Lolo & Sosaku use very modestly put together “motion sculptures”, an “object in contact with his surroundings and with the spectator. An object that seeks friction, and tension” that run with small motors that help them wriggle around, bob up and down[60]. They place these autonomous little bots on mangled pianos; their wriggling producing different sets of unchoreographed atonal pieces with dissonant chords and notes. This generates a kind of sonic essay, a phenomenological inquiry regarding relationships and communications between subjects through friction, contact and sound waves. 
*
*Take a break, what sounds have surprised you in your life?
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*There are those whose hearing is compromised if not completely absent such as people who are deaf or hearing impaired. And then there are coleoid cephalopods (octopi, cuttlefish and squids) and snakes which are naturally deaf. And of course objects, minerals, liquids and gasses which don’t translate sound into information at all (depending on what we mean by information. Is positionality information?). Yet, in the case of humans with hearing troubles, the body’s receptivity and responsiveness find other ways of connecting with sound. Sound waves, vibrations are, after all, physical phenomenons that affect the nervous system. In fact, bone conduction technology makes use of vibrations to help the hearing impaired connect with sound through the bones of their skull. Therefore, sound, and the things that make sound are not merely translated aurally but also corporally. Mid-high frequencies are picked up by the ear, while low frequencies are absorbed by the body. Sound is carried through the air and modifies the subjects within its grasp, therefore objects, for example, can be altered positionally and structurally by sound. My thumping speaker makes my little Swarovski figurine scoot ever so pulsatingly close to the edge of the table when I blast Holly Herndon or Aphex Twin as its solid particles are interaffected by the shuffling air molecules that are being directed toward it. In physics, this phenomenon is called resonance, in which a one-thing’s natural, or resonance frequency is matched by the frequency of sound waves, thus making it vibrate and shift and possibly shatter. 
*
*Korean artist Young-jun Tak’s project Trying to Make Some Sense, consists of a quirky dialogue between polyurethane foam and the audience who can speak whatever they want to it via a megaphone that is lodged into the pastel masses (not surprisingly, the foam is cradled by a large cylindrical glass vessel)[61]. The spoken information becomes distorted and lost within the foam, as the mass absorbs sound due to its higher density. The verb ‘absorb’ stands out immediately. Materials, objects, absorb sound waves and therefore absorb vibrations. When sound waves are emitted in a given space, they move air molecules back and forth, agitating the ambience, thus generating vibrations. Depending on the density and weight of a receiving one-thing, those oscillating air molecules are either reflected or transmitted, and thus are absorbed to varying degrees by said one-thing, causing it to vibrate. The vibration is caused by the light air molecules and the solid particles that come into contact and generate friction, thus eventually dulling the sound as the sound waves are transformed into heat. This heat, though almost completely undetectable, is the byproduct that produces silence. 
*
*Thus, sound is invisibly mechanical. Its secondary and tertiary affects demonstrate sound’s brute force: the glass shattering from a high-pitched shriek from an opera singer, the goosebumps you get from the finale of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. Sound waves traditionally have been graphed as flat sinusoidal arrows that fluctuate up and down when in fact, they exist as spherical waves that emanate towards the various subjects. These waves go through us and affect us in these mechanical and affective ways, like P. Diddy’s music video for “Tell Me” where every object from the Le Corbusier chair and Bang & Olufsen gadgets to the sheetrock of the walls is stripped away due to the hurricane-inducing frequencies pulsating out of the Beolab 8000 speakers and Christina Aguilera’s sopping sexuality which Puff Daddy is of course helpless against[62]. He and the other non-biological subjects are spatially, positionally and emotionally affected by the spherical bellows that hurdle towards them.
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*Thus, is this the sound of affect? Is sound an affect of affect? Does affect manifest itself through sound? Does affect travel through the spherical sound waves? Sound is one of the many channels that helps us dialogue with the Sensual World. Sound is a transmittance; not the physicist definition of the word but understood as a mysterious flux that is ‘sent-through-across’, as its Latin roots suggest, and comes in contact with and passes through things which then inevitably affect and change the course of any one-thing, constituting a constant phenomenological and causal correspondence between all one-things. On earth, there is no non-transmissive material: everything is affected by gravity and sound, light and electromagnetic waves. The phenomenon of attenuation shows us that sound waves or any emittance is conversely affected by the subjects around it. If not, sounds would ring on eternally, earthquakes would ripple on and obliterate the entire earth, light would directly hit the bottom of the Mariana Trench and so on. It is indeed this correspondence, this choral call and response, this ancient ebb and flow that engenders a harmony and balance on our earth. Most materials silence sound by absorbing sound waves giving aural contrast in the world, seismic waves are stunted by the tectonic plates’ density and rigidity, light is absorbed and scattered by the solid particles present in the Pacific Ocean’s water giving way for new forms of life in the deep. Because of an oscillative dialogue between materials, between particles, between phenomena, the world keeps on spinning. 
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*To further explore the affective and somatic effects of sound, I’d like to go back to music. Apart from music’s vibratory transmittance, whose waves affect us physically, music is known for its transcendent quality. The way notes are strung together, the way clashing chords evoke specific sensations, the way we feel enveloped by this sonic tapestry are all testaments to music’s fierce capacity to emote. And what is that singular thing our bodies do when we feel inspired or at awe with music? Goosebumps. Goosebumps, or piloerections, are fascinating vestigial responses that, historically in early humans and currently in hairy animals, were used to intimidate possible enemies, visually augmenting the appearance and size by lifting the hairs. The same response occurs when mammals with hair or fur experience fear, as the sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the fight-or-flight reaction that all bodies with organs share. This same system is responsible for the frisson or ‘aesthetic chills’ that we experience when we associate or dialogue affectively with music. So, an ancient response system intended for visual enhancement and intimidation in the face for fear has been rerouted. When our bodies flood with feel, the warm tingle that cradles you, that sparkly, dousing sensation of the music running inside of you actually has a physical component: the sound waves. We are literally being pelted by them as the sensation of awe and goosebumps occur. Being vibrated by sound waves dialogues greatly with the sensation of being flooded sensorially by music. We are being marinated by the sound. Our body reacts by vibrating physically because of the sound waves and also internally; Morton’s “inner-shudder”, or Einschütterung, or “little death”[63]. This vibration is a reminder. All vibrations are reminders. Those fluttering nudges, signaling for us to look elsewhere, to become aware of our fragility, of our physicality, of our relationality, of how much we are like other th
*ings. Music, sound, are reminders that we are affective vessels, carriers that affect and are affected.
*
*Yet non-biological subjects don’t relate so affectively to music, no? They don’t cry, they don’t get chills; but they do vibrate. And as we’ve explored, when they vibrate too much, when their resonance frequency is matched, they can shatter, fall off the shelf, roll into the abyss. According to quantum field theory, electrons and all elementary particles are actually energetic vibrations in a given fundamental field which updates the classic Newtonian model of little jittery balls that hop about around a nucleus. Through the discovery of the the quantum field and later the Higgs boson, physicists have come to understand that when we detect particles, we are really picking up vibrations on certain points of fundamental fields, and the exchange of energy between particles and fields is what makes up the fabric of the universe. According to American physicist Dr. Don Lincoln, “everything…is just a consequence of many infinitely-large fields vibrating. The entire universe is made of fields playing a vast, subatomic symphony. Physicists are trying to understand the melody”[64]. Vibration = detectable presence; the vibration as the basic unit, the prenatal kick of the becoming. So does our shiver in the face of fear mirror the objects’ vibration against the forces of sound waves which then mirrors the basic phenomenon that the universe is made up of? Does our feeling of awe before Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, Op. 14: II. mimic the decay of the subjectual world which mimics the fragile, subatomic shiver of particles? Does music inspire an awareness of our own decay and fragility? Does the frisson remind us of something elemental and pre-primordial, help us tap into the basic matrix field that connects all subjects? Sound waves, vibrations, music, goosebumps, shudders, fear, vulnerability, kick, beat, rhythm, flatline. 
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*Both Levi Bryant and Jacob Bard-Rosenberg in their respective works quote the same thought from Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: 
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*“Ultimately, aesthetic comportment is to be defined as the capacity to shudder, as if goose bumps were the first aesthetic image. What later came to be called subjectivity freeing itself from the blind anxiety of the shudder, is at the same time the shudder of its own development; life in the subject is nothing but what shudders, the reaction to the total spell that transcends the spell”[65].
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*Bard-Rosenberg goes on to comment: 
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*“The shudder is not the feeling of danger and sacrifice as in Kant’s sublime, but rather a specific feeling linked to the memory of the origination of the subject. But nonetheless, the experience is conditioned, absolutely, by that logic of sacrifice. The shudder is the feeling within the subject of its own deathliness, of being dead already, a recognition of the sacrifice already made, the feeling of the irrationality of one’s own life as survivor. The shudder is the feeling of escape already failed…Shudder is the afterimage of dialectical origination, as a pathetic, somatic shaking of the walls of subject who is entirely prison-like…Shudder is the broken mimesis of beauty expressed by the broken soma of history”[66].
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*May it be clear that goosebumps are not exclusive to feelings of inspiration. As I stated before, the roots of goosebumps point to a defensive use. Adorno’s shudder is an affective response to the aesthetic that makes one aware of their haecceity, their thingness, and their once-was-but-no-longer-is-ness. For Morton, “recognition of the uncanny nonhuman must by definition first consist of a terrifying glimpse of ghosts, a glimpse that makes one’s physicality resonate (suggesting the Latin horreo, I bristle)”[67]. Melancholy, nostalgia, fear and horror are all responsible for goosebumps. Like Morton points out, ‘horror’ comes from horrere in Latin which means ‘to bristle’ in English. Morton’s reflection also connects with the human’s fear of the object, and the fear of being objectified. The accusation of inanimacy thrusted onto the object implies we have disdain for said subjects which is undoubtedly rooted in fear; our deep-seated fear of being frozen, trapped, used, immobile, isolated, silenced, stripped, bound, dependant, gutted, etc. Like a vodou doll, an object that mimics or echoes a specific body, most of us are horrified (or turned on by) by the possibility of someone wielding the same violence against our flesh and tissue that one would wield against an object; like when we see torture in a movie, it’s just unbearable; the body is tied down, frozen, inanimate, helpless, and is slashed and torn up. So what is horror anyway? Why are certain beings or actions considered horrific? Why is the mesh between object and human considered monstrous, alien, bizarre, absurd, horrifying? Is this fear yet again another manifestation of our belittlement of bodies without organs? 
*Sound waves, vibrations, music, goosebumps, shudders, fear, vulnerability, kick, beat, rhythm, flatline.
*
*To pause before fading out, two poems by Emily Dickinson:
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*__________________
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*The grass so little has to do, — 
*A sphere of simple green, 
*With only butterflies to brood, 
*And bees to entertain, 
*And stir all day to pretty tunes 
*The breezes fetch along,
*And hold the sunshine in its lap 
*And bow to everything; 
*And thread the dews all night, like pearls, 
*And make itself so fine, —
*A duchess were too common
*For such a noticing. 
*And even when it dies, to pass 
*In odors so divine,
*As lowly spices gone to sleep, 
*Or amulets of pine. 
*And then to dwell in sovereign barns, 
*And dream the days away, —
*The grass so little has to do,
*I wish I were the hay! 
*[68]
*
*The body grows outside, — 
*The more convenient way, — 
*That if the spirit like to hide, 
*Its temple stands alway 
*Ajar, secure, inviting;
*It never did betray
*The soul that asked its shelter 
*In timid honesty. 
*[69]
*__________________
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*Isn’t it curious that the clues to mysteries are written like poems?
*
*‘The key is somewhere you aren’t.
*It sleeps where you sleep.
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*You’ll find the rock in a place that is sometimes wet and other times dry. 
*To get here, you have to go up to go down.
*
*A glass jar holds things. 
*What else holds things?
*Where can a secret be held?’
*
*The link between context and thing is questioned and distorted. Something is off. The answers, or better yet, the interpretations are not given to you through descriptive writing but through a series of taps and nudges. ‘It should be here, but it could be there.’ Let’s briefly revisit the Dickinson poem:
*
*“The body grows outside, — 
*The more convenient way, — 
*That if the spirit like to hide, 
*Its temple stands alway 
*Ajar, secure, inviting;
*It never did betray
*The soul that asked its shelter 
*In timid honesty.”
*
*Our curiosity is instantly piqued. What body? Outside from what and where? Where does the spirit hide? What open temple? How could it betray? Why does the soul seek shelter? From what? Again, the clues to a mystery are written with this same uncanny melody, moving, like a simile, around the subject at hand. The writing seeks not to reveal but to champion the inherent mystery to words. The questions ring out with a simple oneiricy like the ones David Lynch proposes in his film: ‘Where is the key? Where is the rock? Who is she?’
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*When I was three, my parents decided to play a mystery game on Christmas Day. They had scattered my sister and I’s gifts around the house. Through clues, we’d have to discover their location which would lead to more clues and more locations and more gifts. For an inquisitive and sensitive three year old, the exercise had an eeriness to it. The house was all of a sudden alivened by these questions. The house was hiding presents, actively working to conceal things from me. It was as if the house was shuffling things behind my back, generating new walls and holes and basements. Was the exercise activating the house or was the house activating the exercise? Like my own mini-version of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House, where the force majeure was the nooks and crannies, where our cat knew all and was confabulating with the walls and the dust, my limited blueprint of the house’s structure was about to expand itself through quotidian horror [70]. On top of all this, I had to go alone to fetch the presents once I uncovered the mystery. They were in places I was unfamiliar with: in the unlit dining room, in the broom closet, in the empty bathtub, down the barren hallway… The unbearable uncertainty, all the possible ghosts, phantoms, apparitions, silences, absences, presences whirled around me while the house itself maliciously gazed at me from a distance, deciding what was going to happen next, always one step ahead of me. 
*
*To return to a question I had earlier: is positionality information? The presents that were strangely not under the tree like they had been in previous years, were all of a sudden in closets and hidden under beds. This causes an associative and contextual crisis where things seem out of place given that our reference of what-and-where is considered law by way of probability. Going back to the Proto chapter, the black man seems out of place in a given neighborhood and is thus rendered a suspect criminal, up to no good. Fear and uncertainty stem from an imbalance in the norm. The present ‘should have been’ under the tree, the black person ‘should have been’ on the other side of town, that person ‘shouldn’t’ be wearing makeup, that person ‘should have’ two eyes pointing straight. Deviance is synonymous with misdemeanor, ‘evil conduct’, which Missy Elliot bravely de-edits to suit her whip-like candor and unapologetic disposition. 
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*Bodies are codified and often considered horrifying when they play around with probability, again challenging the past modal ‘should be’. Queer and trans* bodies are horrifying. We make many bristle. We are the improbable incarnate. We are the cyborgs, the bodies-objectified and the objects-corporized. Like the black body in the affluent, white dominated side of town, we play a game of mix-match with our genitalia and appearance which intrigues and, yes, horrifies. Like in The Crying Game, if one is seemingly ‘found out’ via an unexpected —or more precisely, decontextualized— organ, this provokes malaise, confusion, disgust, anger, fear, violence[71]. The body’s promised function was not upheld, not all of the information was disclosed, she ‘lied’. This kind of corporal ‘betrayal’, where, again, the body shape-shifts is exactly why we cower in the dark, or during Hereditary or Inland Empire. So much is ‘out of place’, decontextualized, displaced and unexpected. The mind can’t handle this amount of uncertainty, of distance from their strong anchor on reality. I like MFSB’s 1980 disco song “Mysteries of the World” for its celebration and acceptance of mystery[72]. The composers invite the swooping sensation of strangeness to come in, the swishing synths and the haunting bells, the epic and oneiric strings that drift into a vibrant and ecstatic disco beat; the mystery, once leaned into, isn’t really that bad after all. 
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*The abhorrent reaction to queer and trans* bodies parallels our childish fear of monsters. In our closets, under our beds, lurk these half-human-half-creature/object-thing that wants to take us from our caretakers and devour us. Relating this to queer and trans* bodies, the fear of being devoured would come to equal fears of having one’s masculinity or aesthetic norms questioned, fears of being symbolically castrated, fear that your children will become traumatized by seeing them, etc.; all irrational fears, just like the monster under the bed. Artists like Jenkin van Zyl and Shaye St. John (Eric Fournier) take this to a carnal extreme; they magnify the horrors of queerness and its undeterminable mystique. The use of masks, makeup, distorted rhetoric and gore is key here as they subvert identity, origin and traceability. These features directly or indirectly hint at a kind of queer folklore or science fiction; made by us, for us. Again, is positionality information? Mystery —not the mystery explored in previous chapters, the unknowable qualities of existence and sentience, but more mystery as a discursive tool or a genre of storytelling— inherently toys with positionality as it hides and reveals in non-linear ways. Just like the famous 1987 “Max Headroom hijacking incident” on two local Chicago television stations, so many questions arise due to its lack of linearity. Why that time and date? Why this content specifically? Why this angle for this discourse? Why the spanking? Why? The 20+ different items present in these videos are all decontextualized. Our brains struggle to connect the dots, to understand the why, to use the positional information given to decipher the message. Just like with the homeless person in Mulholland Dr., or my illusive house with its absconding Christmas presents, or ‘unexpected genitalia’, there’s something specifically horrific about things being out of place. Common things lit strangely seem to have (or have they really?) shape-shifted.
* Again, queer bodies actively shape-shift, our very dumbfounding appearance seems to be displacing itself right before your very eyes, never settling on a normative, static configuration but instead winding itself around its axis, throwing off its heteronormative foils’ probing eyes. The magic of queer bodies is our capacity to change, and our capacity to keep the mystery (unknowability) intact without adhering to any reductionist norm on some linear spectrum. Gender is not a spectrum, but a spectral sphere; something one taps into, calls upon, conjures up. These sentiments make the case against conservative socio-political ideologies whose founders and supporters stubbornly prefer a segregated and strictly codified experience where nothing seems out of place, nothing unexpected happens, everyone stays on their allotted side and mingles only with people that look like themselves.
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*Positionality is a kind of information because where something is helps us understand what it is; which can be deceiving. Data is collected by how commonly something-is-where: it is probable that that owl is an owl not only because of its visuality, our semiotical association with that object, but also the fact that it’s on a branch at night somewhere in Northern America making a ‘hoo-hoo’ sound. We don’t even need to see it clearly; its position informs our perception and (seemingly) reveals what the object is. Again, horror is fuelled by displacing positionality, things are suddenly where they shouldn’t be. ‘The objects are not what they seem’. I would be remiss if I weren’t to mention Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée (which I’ve only had the pleasure of getting close to through several quotes on the internet), that searingly depicts the existential horror of the everyday, the abject in the seemingly banal. He describes a very object-oriented nausea that "spread at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time, the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain”[73]. Suddenly, the protagonist’s hyper-observation of the liveliness of things, the banality of semiotics, results in a malaise that could also describe a wake-up call, like a toddler learning to walk, relating themselves differently to gravity and space, adjusting to the dynamics; or like Neo waking up after his sedated, slumbery existence in the Matrix, having to learn how to walk, eat and exist in Zion[74]. To establish new relationalities with subjects one has never come into contact with, or with subjects one had never paid any attention to, can cause this horror, nausea, discomfort, malaise. But it is a positive one, a kind of learning or rite-of-passage. Like Korean artist Mire Lee’s very suitably titled project Carriers shown at the Art Sonje Center in Seoul, she concocts a series of entities that sweat, leak, 
*goop, ooze, seep[75]. A kind of horrific disfiguration of the biological: our insides strewn out, our fluids and orifices squished and squirted, our skin wrinkled and corrugated, she embraces the inherent abject horror within our systems, tapping into something extremely mechanical yet affective: her carriers do, they breathe, they generate and produce, they are the unsung micro/meso/macro-systems that every one-thing contains. The viewers of the piece must then confront these sopping and moist systems in all of their gory glory. We become aware of our materiality and the materiality of other subjects via horror; horror understood as a simple displacement of subjects, contexts, conditions and circumstances, as a reconfiguration and distortion of positionality that, thus, perturbs the norm and opens a slit up for new passages to new possible bodies, relationships, dialogues. Horror, too, is an affective vessel.
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