Sep 23, 2016 10:18 AM
https://aeon.co/essays/what-makes-clowns...nds-creepy
EXCERPTS: [...] When we encounter something familiar, we immediately categorise it as such-and-such a kind of thing. When we encounter something novel, we often slot it into a pre-existing category. But there are occasions when we encounter things that resist categorisation. They seem to belong to two or more mutually exclusive categories. In such circumstances, we are suspended between alternatives. We don’t know what to make of the thing, because it violates our established conceptual norms. Jentsch argued that when this occurs it elicits a distinctive and disturbing feeling – the feeling of creepiness. Call this the ‘Categorical Ambiguity Theory’ of creepiness, or CAT.
[...] Jentsch’s theory of creepiness faded into obscurity until Masahiro Mori, then a professor of engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, rediscovered it more than half a century later. [...] There is nowadays a burgeoning literature devoted to the study of monsters, but a single strand inspired by the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas – in particular, her celebrated book Purity and Danger (1966) – is relevant here. Douglas points out that every culture possesses some conception of the natural order of things – a system of categories to make sense of the world. Any such system of meaning is inevitably confronted with anomalies that don’t fit into the scheme. When anomalies appear to transgress the natural order, they are branded as abominations....
EXCERPTS: [...] When we encounter something familiar, we immediately categorise it as such-and-such a kind of thing. When we encounter something novel, we often slot it into a pre-existing category. But there are occasions when we encounter things that resist categorisation. They seem to belong to two or more mutually exclusive categories. In such circumstances, we are suspended between alternatives. We don’t know what to make of the thing, because it violates our established conceptual norms. Jentsch argued that when this occurs it elicits a distinctive and disturbing feeling – the feeling of creepiness. Call this the ‘Categorical Ambiguity Theory’ of creepiness, or CAT.
[...] Jentsch’s theory of creepiness faded into obscurity until Masahiro Mori, then a professor of engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, rediscovered it more than half a century later. [...] There is nowadays a burgeoning literature devoted to the study of monsters, but a single strand inspired by the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas – in particular, her celebrated book Purity and Danger (1966) – is relevant here. Douglas points out that every culture possesses some conception of the natural order of things – a system of categories to make sense of the world. Any such system of meaning is inevitably confronted with anomalies that don’t fit into the scheme. When anomalies appear to transgress the natural order, they are branded as abominations....
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