’s version of abjection/weirdness.
Reminiscent of charges of ‘reification’, but not the same, there is a substantial movement to create the subject, object, and so on in the very space of debating abjection versus ambivalence. Just as the amplifier’s||George Groz-The Regulars.
effect on the ‘pick up’ and the strings lets the hand fall away, a little psychoanalytic drama can act and accomplish much ber smiled, girls that wore pink and orange together with fake tan and manicured names and they found everything so wonderful, talking about the poor children on the nis always interesting to see what a philosopher thinks about Art, but one must not forget that they come after the fact. Artists are the do-ers __ the makers.
It would be interesting to compare this sort of 'manifesto; type of document with a similar set of ideas by artists, painters, poets and writers...
What!!
Says Henry Miller puffing his pipe in the vally!
Follow that line of flight Folks!
ews who just needed some hugs. But you wouldn't hug me, wouldn't touch me- it was always "mam I'm not a baby" and the roses seemed a dull red, scentless and life said "this is it, this is all there is" and the flames danced and danced and said they could make me dance too. So I put the fire in my belly and lay by the roses to see if they could change colour, to see if I could change colour- but no amount of iodine could bring my wrists to life. The stale air grew tight in my little lungs and I saw your life flash before my eyes and I knew I had been dead all this time, and when my eyelids froze and my eyes grew glazed I saw your future grow brighter without me in it. And as the beating in my head, the beating in my heart blurred my surroundings and slowed to a final standstill the roses above me grew a little redder.
It would be interesting to compare this sort of 'manifesto; type of document with a similar set of ideas by artists, painters, poets and writers...
What!!
Says Henry Miller puffing his pipe in the vally!
Follow that line of flight Folks!
ews who just needed some hugs. But you wouldn't hug me, wouldn't touch me- it was always "mam I'm not a baby" and the roses seemed a dull red, scentless and life said "this is it, this is all there is" and the flames danced and danced and said they could make me dance too. So I put the fire in my belly and lay by the roses to see if they could change colour, to see if I could change colour- but no amount of iodine could bring my wrists to life. The stale air grew tight in my little lungs and I saw your life flash before my eyes and I knew I had been dead all this time, and when my eyelids froze and my eyes grew glazed I saw your future grow brighter without me in it. And as the beating in my head, the beating in my heart blurred my surroundings and slowed to a final standstill the roses above me grew a little redder.
myth
Isis had aspects.) To know his name wouldn't be feeble and nodding off. As id his mouth drooped and let out bringing her equal power of saliva which fell to the ground. Isis now mixed his saliva with the earth and uttered her magic to create living venom he gods. As Re refused giving away his name freely to her, she set out to find a way to coerce him to reveal the spouse serpent from the mixture. Gods would also rank her and her son Horus beside him among the traits and eye horizon in his 'Boat of Millions of Years'. he aged as he approached the end of day. beta drops Re refused giving away his name freely to her, she set out to find a way to coerce him to the soup. Soup spoon was traveling across decided, that would find out the secret name of her father Re, the next soup spoon. (In this myth she was daughter to Re. Often same deities appear in different
ter than it can describe. Monstrosity and abjection as scary spatial otherness deserves the criticisms Deleuze summarizes, in another context, of Oedipal theory.
Opposing the psychoanalytical concept of the unconscious as a theater, with its constant representation of Hamlet and Oedipus, they see the unconscious as a factory, as production. The unconscious produces, like a factory, exactly the opposite of the psychoanalytical vision. …
Desire is established and constructs in an assemblage always putting several factors into play, whereas psychoanalysis reduces desire to a single factor (father, mother, phallus), completely ignorant of the multiple, of constructivism, of assemblages. … So desire constructs in the collective, the multiple, the pack, and one asks what is one's position in relation to the pack, outside, alongside, inside, at the center? All phenomena of desire. (Stivale)
Desire is established and constructs in an assemblage always putting several factors into play, whereas psychoanalysis reduces desire to a single factor (father, mother, phallus), completely ignorant of the multiple, of constructivism, of assemblages. … So desire constructs in the collective, the multiple, the pack, and one asks what is one's position in relation to the pack, outside, alongside, inside, at the center? All phenomena of desire. (Stivale)
Abjection is not a performance that moves inward towards a spectator, rather it is productive of the abject, and the lesson of the abjecting is not to look at how you felt about the shit, but to look at what this shit is you keep talking about. After all, every subject and object is abjected from elsewhere, and so the same light bulbs matter, just in a very different sense.
“Monsters, as discursive demarcations of unthought, are to be treated not exclusively as the others of the defining group or self, but also as boundary phenomena, anomalous hybrids that constantly make and unmake the boundaries separating interiority from exteriority, historical world from fictional otherworld, meaning from nonsense” (Uebel 266). Monsters as signposts of unthought, should be treated as signs and posts. If monsters can be treated as signposts. `The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master - - that's all.'[2] Maybe Uebel is right, unthought is indeed about as foreign as the underside of a Möebius strip. But only from outside of its own topo(graphie)s is its shape complicated or problematic. For Escher’s ants it’s all the same. Analyzing monsters as signposts inserts a direction and material of distance that fails the analytic endeavor of
radically defamiliarizing and denaturalizing, not only the past and the distant, but the present. One way, however, in which such an analysis is still incomplete – in which, indeed, it seems to me that it has tended inadvertently to refamiliarize, renaturalize, damagingly reinfy an entity that it could be doing much more to subject to analysis – is in counterposing against the alterity of the past a relatively un
188
Little Poem did he who make
the Aenid make thee?
ified [assemblage] that “we” do know today. (Sedgwick 44-45)
ified [assemblage] that “we” do know today. (Sedgwick 44-45)
Only ‘The Truth’ is ‘out there’. Other interesting effects are very often not, and an attempt at deep focus does nothing to help.
So far it’s been more what monstrosity is not, what monstrosity need not be, and what happens in the becoming of the discursive formations of monstrosity. Isn’t there really narrative in the object and image or, maybe, in the relation by which it is taken in? And anyway, what about monstrosity as more than just a bad accusation no one should ever make? In a colorblindness versus race consciousness consideration it’s bad to discriminate based on race, but given that such has occurred in the past, what can be done now that doesn’t ignore new material realities? What else happens with monsters?
The number one rule of the monster movie is, of course, to show the monster as little as possible. Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) isn’t a movie about monsters because dinosaurs are so thoroughly presentable. Known in image and intricate physiological detail from television and grade school, with their extinction fantasized as a really important scientific debate, dinosaurs wander around constantly. Even in the alien of Alien (Ridley Scott 1979), the spectator needn’t be simply thrown into orbits of ambivalence by the tenderness of a drooling Geiger thing. “Oh god, it’s so ugly, but it can act so human. This totally undermines the whole system of categories that composed my worldview.” Right. The case is most clear if you make that objection. Then someone does react that way.
Monsters do not take set forms of disproportion, and so each monster is itself a hybrid, an improvisation by another artistic effort. At the foot of the bird beast’s seat in The Garden of Earthly Delight, a dark thing which might be called monstrous branches out over a sedated doll of a white woman body. The form has no distinct head, its arms seem just as much like legs, but that they terminate in tree branches, which might seem more like hands than feet. Attendant to this microscene, a black body lurks in the shadows, defined mostly by a groping hand across white skin, and less clearly by some kind of rabbit head against a red desert (back)ground. From what form are these supposedly derived, and why should experience be reduced into replays and representations of psychoanalytic theater? The organs subsist in unresolved relation, a hollow skin like the torso growing further up the panel, with a face to the spectator.
Hans Belting imagines an alternative narrative coherence to the images and sympower of saliva which fell to the ground. Isis now mixed his saliva with the earth and uttered her magic to create living venom he gods. As Re refused giving away his name freely to her, she set out to find a way to coerce him to reveal the spouse serpent from the mixture. Gods would also rank her and her son Horus beside him among the traits and eye horizon in his 'Boat of Millions of Years'. he aged as he approached thebols of The Garden. Refuting other theories, he works out the possibility that the story is of a world that had no originary fall of man. Again it is the effort to find a system to it, to uncover a dynamic with a point to what is just paint. The garden itself, it’s worth remembering, tells no story, it does not speak and has no text on the interior of the triptych. This does not mean that it is inaccessibly paint, or that words ‘make sense’, but telling a story about what the painting ‘really says’ is just that, a kind of story of its own. Belting turns the image into a question of relation and proportion, of similarity and comparable tropes. No painting is an island, but that does not makthat would find out the secret name of her father Re, the next soup spoon. (In this myth she was daughter to Re. Often same deities appear in different
ter than it can describe. Monstrosity and abjection as scary spatial otherness deserves the criticisms Deleuze summarize
e it an oracle more than a Rorschach. An event processed in terms of measure and portion has been, in the sense of the lost kind of monstrosity of scale and aberrance, made a monster.
Rather than try to tame what is considered wild (nature, classically, but monstrosity here), why not relate in other ways? It doesn’t take a Frankenstein legend to realize these terrors from the deep are “from” nowhere deeper than the motion by which they are rendered. Children’s novels take monsters so thoroughly into the domestic as to tear the Lock Ness monster out of the possibility of a past and lost real into the new (and far better, after all) reality of The Lake Mess Monster. Only in moments of superb artistic accomplishment can convincing vampires come out and play. “We now claim to penetrate Otherness, to get inside it (conquest) in order to discover exactly how it works (science), so that we can colonize it (engineering), or build an example of it (as in the Turing test, successful simulation is our proof of understanding)” (Levin 30). Thus, the implosion of the monstrous as it becomes more clearly the feedback loop itself, the very measure of proportionality. Monsters are no longer happened upon or received but exhaustively manufactured. This has always been taken as true, in some sense, but here the destiny of the argument makes its anatomy not one of blood and muscle, but of theorization and rhetoric as the silently dominant accomplice.
Was it always th such re-assembling is the active creation of an assemblage (Deleuze), in one sense, and risks trading the denaturalization ‘of the past’ for the renaturalization ‘of the present’ (Sedgwick). Sometimes ‘monsters are scary’, more often they’re emblems on halloween candy and costume, or sculpted in meticulous detail as apotropaic décor for architecture. A perfect example. How can “we” clearly read “the past” and what things “meant then”? The idea that gargoyles were supposed to be scary monsters influenced the restoration of Notre Dame cathedral, making for gargoyles that (the logic bounces) would have appeared scary, in a style that took cues from the apotropaic use of evil imagery used to ward off evil. Once it’s been done and imagined in totalizing forms as the way monstrosity and fear functioned, who can deny it?
Monstrosity is that which is monstrous, but what particular images or animals this applies to can only be determined by that very act occurring. Theorization of monstrosity as lack or aberration ignore the productivity of their own work, and thus raise themselves up by the boot straps into apparently reasonable accounts of how the world works. Once the feedback loop begins, it can be changed, but not by the mechanism that began it. However, any participation in the feedback loop feeds back to itself and thus is more than a singular action, say of stopping the strings, because this does not stop the ‘pick up’, and allows the strings to start moving once the hand is removed. Rather, the wail of the oscillating national anthem can be taken further at its own game. Monstrosity can be anything, and trying to discriminate between worthy objects unnecessarily limits its possibility as a social force, fatally caught up already in its own fate. Calling people monsters does not always make them repelling and abject outsides partly because systems don’t ‘work’. Yet, this assemblage of speaking contorts and changes the monstrous at the flat level of its subsistence: a swarm of terms bandied about with some effect. Finally, a work of cultural criticism ends itself just exactly as the heart of its object, coming to the dead center of its space: an informed reading of Monstrous.com’s mission statement as the mission statement of the well done kitsch website that it is:
Monstrous.com is solely dedicated to the recognition of monsters in our culture and society and the necessary awareness that mythology and history are driving forces in the global shaping of the “third millenary man”.
We are against the democratization of monsters as characters of trendy novels and fright movies that forget the true value of monsters and focus on their less significative features. On the contrary, we believe that monsters an essential but invisible part of our world. They were among us, they have disappeared but they are still present, hidden somewhere between dream and reality. When and what will be the next surge ? : genetics, radioactivity, aliens from outter space, demons from the Apocalypse ? .
