Internet Excreta
Death, dirt and the digital.
“Have you seen this?”, my friend says, and shoves her phone in my face. I’m looking at a dimpled surface; bile yellow chicken skin with flaky edges, coarse hairs breaking its exterior like tiny clipped wings. A blue-gloved hand peels the layer back to reveal a honeycomb web of crevices and tubing, bleached veins and flaking matter. What the fuck is that?, I say vacantly. To be honest, I’m not really thinking about what it is, I don’t really care. “A body”, they reply. “They’re trending right now– corpses”.
Abjection – as defined by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980) – is the sense of visceral revulsion when confronted with the parts of ourselves that we have banished. For example, when I see an open wound my hands go numb. In the dissolution of our sense of invincibility, we are humbled by such sights; aware of our own mortality. We conjure, at best, a sense of empathy. Without this – without an experiential sense of the abject; without proximity – how can we be empathetic?
How can I stare at this actual dead person on my screen and not retch? Isn’t it real to me? It doesn’t lookreal – it’s flushed out; hollow. Once upon a time empty spaces were filled with fluid, blood, mucus, shit. It – he/she/they – fell over in a playground and gashed its – his/her/their – knee, red blood stain on white socks. The Tiktok video creators don’t show the cadavers’ faces out of respect, they say. Maybe if we saw their faces, they wouldn’t be trending, god knows. Although perhaps nothing will stop the internet sleuths; the crime scene photo-hunters scrolling Reddit.
Ed Atkins, Safe Conduct Epidermal, 2016, (for Parkett 98), archival pigment print on rubber, two grommets, 23 5/8 x 20 x 1/8 inches (60 x 51 x 0.1 cm), edition 35, printed by Laumont, New York. Courtesy: © the artist and Gladstone Gallery
Has the internet made us numb to violence? And by we, I mean the privileged – the wealthy, the western, the white – exposed to images of the abjected so frequently that it becomes solely the territory of the other. Take trolling, which relies on distance and anonymity; on the dissolution of distinction between self and self-not-self.
To the privileged subject, the internet provides a buffer; a digitised distance; a guise of immortality. It’s an extension of the age-old abjection of minorities, Black people, women – that which enabled white patriarchal subjectivity: the casting off, the banishing of, the reducing. When Hal Foster wrote Obscene, Abject, Traumatic in 1996, he talked of the subject of the history of abjection as “not the Worker, the Woman, the Person of Color, but the Corpse”. The statement dismisses Black abjection’s effects on white subjectivity.
Foster also dismisses the abjection of women, which– through the labyrinthine nature of Western art history– has become inextricably tangled with misogyny and patriarchy. The abjection of menstrual blood and childbirth are the easiest examples to list– and ones which various female artists have confronted, in works such as Carolee Schneemann’s Blood Work Diary (1972) or Janine Antoni’s Honey Baby (2013), in which a male dancer is depicted floating in utero. A perhaps more complex example is found in the work of Marina Abramović, whose self-injury in performances such as Rhythm 0 (1974)– in which she invited audience members to do whatever they wanted to her, even providing them with a loaded pistol– provokes questions of power dynamics. Was Abramović’s self-abjection liberatory precisely because it was on her terms?
To reclaim abjection is to resist the men, and the money, and the power; those who commodify mortality, who reap strength from the bodies of others. Abjection, after all, is an essential aspect of identity development. Abjection takes us to the brink of death. In its pure form, it is visceral and corporeal and it evokes empathy. Abjection is the stench of fresh dog shit. It’s peeing yourself a little before you make it to the bathroom. It’s the beautiful merlot smear on my knickers each month and the thought of my god, I’m bleeding from the inside out. It’s reading I Love Dick on the bus and soaking up the stares.
Abjection by nature at once seems estranged from and tangled with digital experience. We’re inundated with images of extreme violence incessantly – but that’s all they are,images. Is there a way to bridge the gap? To reintroduce the experiential through the digital? I think about an artwork I saw years ago: Frederik Heyman’s Virtual Embalming (2018). By taking renderings of the living being (Isabelle Huppert, Kim Peers, Michèle Lamy) and transforming them into the corpse, life is – as Kristeva said – infected by death. Peers’s ‘wake’ is the most unsettling; her pale body is suspended in Araki bondage above a leaf-scattered bed, portraits of her two children looking on in melancholy. Behind her lies a legless cast of her partner, flowers piercing his cheeks. Still, there is something distinctly un-corporeal about the image: perhaps less false than curated; made palatable. I wonder what my own corpse would do. Since most of us aren’t embalmed, we wouldn’t be presiding above a kingdom of flowers. More likely we’d just bloat and ooze.
Hopefully, though, most of us won’t come across a corpse outside of science in our lifetimes. Instead, it’s shit which is perhaps the most accessible form of abjection. Why, for example, are we so obsessed with the shit emoji, that disconcertingly smiley face coupled with a steaming pile of faeces? In 2016, ABC news wrote that the emoji’s ability to “transcend language barriers and political differences” gives it “ineffable charm”. Does the presence of a face give shit charm? Certainly not in the case of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #190(1989), in which blue eyes and a gaping, swollen mouth look out from a pile of what seems to be vomit/viscera/poo/blood. Foster insinuated that Sherman’s work was the ultimate picture of abjection; the true dissolution between subject and object. The object is, after all, gazing back. It’s certainly disturbing. I’m looking at the artwork closely on the train and hoping nobody sees.
Transcending language barriers, though, that’s another thing, that’s a thing that shit does do. Shit is shit, after all, and everybody shits, even women. And so there it is: abjection bringing empathy; a universal recognition of mortality– that which makes us the same. It’s a quality which we strive so hard to retrieve amidst capitalism. I always feel so intimate with someone when I feel comfortable enough to tell them that I’m going for a shit.
In 2017, the artist Ed Atkins presented Old Food at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. The exhibition became somewhat infamous, mostly because of its poster, which depicted a sandwich: lettuce, tomato, cheese, a scattering of babies, and a big old dollop of shit. Babies and shit = birth and death. Or, babies and shit = love and mortality. What better to way to encapsulate love for a new-born child than by changing its soiled nappy, after all. The digital is certainly able to replicate the abject, but will it ever be able to embody it? Who knows. But as Kristeva writes, “during that course in which "I" become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit”. Amongst our own encounters with mortality (rather than the abjection of others), there is always a humbling, a connection. ♥
Published in Intra Venus, Issue One, Summer 2023