An image of horror

It it not ‘lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.’

With Kristeva’s definition of the abject one may need to contribute accompanying images as a step towards specification as comedy also relies on what does not respect borders, positions and rules. With many categories of the abject the image is essential to determine whether the associated emotion will be one of disgust, horror or amusement. With the hotdog as the chosen image of affiliation one cannot help but react with puzzlement as the configuration of a hotdog could be read a number of ways and is diverse in its suggestions.

The droll dog

It is a fun food, cute little sausage wrapped up in a soft, fluffy bun, dressed with a dash of sweet and salty colour. A fleeting glance of Barbie’s thigh through a golden gown. A lamb in its woolly coat frolicking amidst the hills with not a care in the world. Little piggy laid to rest in its luscious, shaggy bed with cheeky head and naughty toes pouting at either end. They’ll get cold sooner than the rest and so the first to be relished. A social food, finger food fun, easy, fills the void, can be enjoyed on the go. Sausage on a stick food, sausage rolls and cucumber sandwiches. Party food; a light hearted image of cheer and delight. The abject in disguise, ‘The abject which presents with a clean, false face.’

As cheery as it is, the hotdog can appear to possess a sinister disposition. The two elements of a hot dog are the bun and the sausage. The sausage is held together by the skin. There are two types of sausage skin; natural, made from the intestines of farmed animals and artificial, made of cellulose, collagen or plastic. They bear an inescapably uncanny resemblance to our viscera and that which they egest. This is an image of the abject. Not only visually is the hotdog abject but it is an interference with the social, ‘Food becomes abject only if it is a border between two distinct entities or territories.’ Aforementioned, the hotdog plays as a threat. It is a threat to diversity. A symbol of the threat of the homogeneity that is being implemented by the reign of capitalism. ‘The virtual impurity of such food comes close to excremental abjection.’ It is the epitome of abject food with both it’s virtual impurity and it’s physical similarity to shit.

‘excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse etc) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society by its outside, life by death’

The integral shield, our physical reaction to shit. The detention of breath at an attempt to obstruct such offensive foulness in anticipation of the retching, weeping and perspiration it would induce. According to Kristeva, abjection is the rejection of oneself. Physical waste betrays the  human objective  to be ‘clean and proper’ and to be independent of such defilement is a hopeless desire never to be satisfied, ‘refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live, these bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly with difficulty, on the part of death.’  Our attention is brought to the absence of control we have over our bodies and thus we are faced with our own mortality,  a gesture indicating the predisposition which we fall helplessly toward.  

‘If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer “I” who expel, “I” is expelled. The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you - it is now here, jetted, abjected, into “my” world. Deprived of world, therefore, I fall into a faint.’

A border such as the skin that envelopes our body. A container that isolates us from what is outside of it, the world. The frailty of the container as delicate as a film of denatured milk vulnerable to rupture. Faced with this image our grasp of the concept of ‘self’ and ‘other’ is questioned and confused. Our sense of identity impaired, such bodily reactions are a desperate struggle to send the pillager of our poise into exile. ‘not only does the body rebel against grafts or artificial replacement parts, but the mind too rises up against the synergy imposed upon it by producing countless forms of allergy’. This is reinforced by Kristeva’s play on the french word ‘propre’ suggesting the ‘clean’ or ‘proper’ but also the ownership of something, of belonging to an individual, an identity. This is a development towards resolving the rationale of one’s reaction of horror, disgust or perhaps amusement to Bashir’s hotdog. The intestinal skin of the hotdog, the lining of the bowels, the shit, the reminder of what control we do not have becomes an implication to the nation of the Sudan their powerlessness. A provocation of the grasp on identity. Illustrated in this image (see fig.1) is a sausage, torn skin and seeping meat, what was once a border protecting the contents from the outside, maintaining the shape and composition, is now merely sausage skin on a plate. As much as it is taken apart, the hotdog simply remains a hotdog. As abject as the image appears to display itself, one can not help but laugh. Disgust proves itself to be but a basic response, overcome by acclimatised, postmodern merriment and mirth. To be displeased with Bashir’s mention of the hotdog would be futile. As amusing or distasteful it would appear to be is irrelevant. An American hotdog vs the merguez frites baguette would be a pointless game since ‘The instrumental value of a product becomes almost unimportant’

‘not only am I unable to decide what is beautiful or not, original or not, but the biological organism is itself at a loss to know what is good for it and what is not. In such circumstances everything becomes a bad object, and the only primitive defence is abreaction or rejection.’

A citizen of The Sudan cannot fully feel a sense of disgust when faced with the proposition that it improved from the moment it was enlightened with hotdogs. In a postmodern world,

 ‘it is true in a sense that nothing really disgusts us anymore. in our eclectic culture, which embraces the debris of all others in a promiscuous confusion, nothing is unacceptable, but for this very reason disgust is nevertheless on the increase - the desire to spew out this promiscuity, this indifference to everything no matter how bad.’

The absurd reality simply becomes amusing such as the occasional inability to contain laughter in an uncomfortable situation. There is a fine line between humour and horror. Since Kristeva both abjection and comedy entrust in ‘what does not respect borders, positions, rules’  One can also gain from Baudrillard that ‘Laughter itself is more often than not a vital abreaction to the disgust we feel for the monstrous mixing and promiscuity that confronts us.’  The hotdog is horror on the verge of humour; the allergy induced flatulence.