Final Destination

Nowhere is the human vulnerability to superstition and supernaturalism clearer than in the anxious experience of flying. On a prereflective level, we might assume that the phobia of flying extends to nothing more than a fear of objective danger. That is to say, engine failure, turbulence, terrorism, or any other contingent event in the empirical world. But as anyone who has seen the opening of the otherwise dubious “Final Destination” knows, the danger concerns less the events in the world and more the body’s ability to foresee or otherwise exert influence upon those events. To clarify this thought, consider the following points, each of which elicits the relation between uncanniness and phobia.

First, very often with any phobia, the phobic subject will slowly scan the immediate environment for cues portending to his or her fate in the world, as though that fate were already inscribed in the world and only now required deciphering. This overproduction of meaning in the environment marks a departure from everyday experience, where meaning remains tacit rather than amplified. Typically, this act of scanning for meaning takes place before the phobic has braced him or herself for the object that arouses anxiety. In this way, scanning can be seen as a mode of anticipatory anxiety, and like all anticipatory anxiety, demonstrates an urge to control one’s surroundings through a series of performed rituals.

Indeed, the eternal “what if” that accompanies anxious embodiment is at heart a need to reduce the otherness of the world into the sameness of the subject. Asking “what if the plane’s mechanical function isn’t properly checked before departure” is essentially the same as asking: what if the world departs from the meaning that I have already constructed in an inner landscape called the “self.” And it is, I think, this self-conflict and departure from a rigidly embalmed life-world that is central to phobic anxiety. If the first stage in air flight concerns an over production of meaning in the world, then what is striking is that once aboard the plane, it is not the world that exerts meaning upon the subject but the subject who yields a supernatural control of the destination of meaning.

As ever, my body has become the laboratory for a series of phenomenological experiments. On a recent flight to Poland, I became conscious about looking at the wing of the Airbus A320 that I was travelling in. Fearing that the wing might fall off if I looked at it, I immediately shut the window, hoping in the process to yield control of my newfound telekinetic powers. The anxiety is real; it is felt in the flesh. The phobic subject no longer trusts his gaze, fearing that his greatest anxieties will be materialised through an act of inverse willing. In effect, the body of the anxiety subject comes undone, while the “I” of personal identity is reduced to total passivity and loss of control.

If the example has an appeal to the irrational, then it is only because the cognitive “I” is no longer at the foreground of subjectivity. In its place, a set of primitive thoughts surfaces from a repressed world. After all, what is really occurring when I look at an airplane wing and fear my gaze will cause the wing to fall off is an anxiety around what my body is capable of. Air flight sets in place this primal anxiety over what I am: it renders me a subject with no agency, save for my own brute materiality.

Here, the uncanny rises to the surface in the midst of the plane cabin. If the phobic subject ordinarily represses a belief in providence, supernaturalism, fatalism, and the power to manipulate the world by thought alone, then all of these primitive tendencies are given space to breathe during flying, given that the sovereign rational self is surmounted by the materiality of a body that is no longer of the self but comes from beyond. As Freud writes of beliefs that have not been fully domesticated by civilization:

Yet we do not feel entirely secure in these new convictions; the old ones live on in us, on the look-out for confirmation. Now, as soon as something happens in our lives that seems to confirm these old, discarded beliefs, we experience a sense of the uncanny, and the this may be reinforced by judgements like the following: “So it’s true, then, that you can kill another man just by wishing him dead, that the dead really do go on living and manifest themselves at the scene of their former activities,” and so on.

(Freud, "The Uncanny." p. 154).

The old ones live on in us. Freud might also be talking here about a phylogenetic memory, which has outlasted the colonization of reason and primal repression. Where am I during air flight? The answer is objectively here, yet experientially absent. The absence of the active I sheds light upon a world that is only accessible in the liminal realm, whereupon the self literally takes leave of its senses, thus giving voice to a memory of being that is both immemorial, anonymous, and thus uncanny.