Here be Monsters.

Monsters are highly polysemic — you can use them to “mean” almost anything. And the same monster can have four or five contradictory meanings in the same film or book.

Should we not include this polysemy in our very definition of Monster? That is, part of what’s monstrous about monsters is somehow this very agglutination of significance, these uncontrolled outgrowths of meaning. There is a passage in Zizek about Spielberg’s Jaws where how remarks on how the notable plurality of the meanings given to the shark is the key to its meaning. The shark’s monstrousness is produced retroactively by the fact that none of the proffered meaning stick to it. The failure of each successive meaning to enclose it seems to delineate, by negation, the magnitude of the monster. (In Othello, Iago’s evasive answers indicate some ‘monster in [his] thoughts’ which are producing the evasions. The evasions are the ripples formed by the hidden monster.)


Monstrousness is the name we give to what both generates yet refuses our interpretations. The very plurality of interpretations appears to have been generated by the monster itself. (And speaking of ‘generation’ isn’t there a persistent link between monstrosity and birth/ procreation? ‘The sleep of reason breeds monsters..’ the suggestion is of blind propagation.)

Caliban as monster. He is ‘servant-monster’ ‘man-monster’ and ‘fish-monster’ all within the space of 50 lines. Polymorphous, then, as well as polysemic. But isn’t what makes Caliban a definitive monster the fact of his botched-humanity? Don’t we typically see the monstrous as a deformation or mutation of humanity rather than a thing in its own right? In MND, what do the mechanicals say on Bottom’s transformation into an ass - “oh monstrous’. An ass itself would not be monstrous, but the warping of humanity, the becoming-other, this animal enhancement…here lies the monstrous. The monstrous is a protrusion of the human beyond the human. An eyeball bulging from the socket like a boiled egg, a tongue growing out of a neck, or men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders – all might meet with the cry ‘oh monstrous’! ‘Nature’ has been perverted, distended, re-arranged. Some fly has entered the Natural ointment. (Indeed, one thinks of ‘The Fly’ movie, where a tiny laboratory complication, a microscopic interference, produces the utterly monstrous.)

There is also a tradition according to which a monster as portent: ie, it’s a sign, an index of a Catastrophe. It points beyond itself, it is a crack or kink in nature through which presses the Horror. The monstrous is a grimace in the surface of reality that discloses some Other Thing - not necessarily ‘under the surface’, but some Thing which at least bends the surface out of true.


R.W. Dent, researching Shakespeare’s use of ‘monstrous ingratitude’ in Lear, cites the following: 'The name of men is too good for them (i.e. those guilty of ingratitude), seeing they are monsters in nature the which hath seeded a certain sense of thankfulnesse in all creatures' (from R.Allen Oderifferous Garden of Charitie). Ingratitude is 'monstrous', because it is unnatural, it seems that nature has omitted something, and this subtraction produces monsters. Some little irregularity in nature, some minor variation in the DNA (Nature’s own Symbolic Order) allows the monstrous to appear. The monstrous, not as a thing in its own right, but a function of some slip up, bodge, omission. ‘The sleep of reason breeds monsters’: the monstrous is something against which we must be constantly vigilant – we take our foot off the peddle, we take our hand of the lid, and the monstrous emerges. The monstrous creeps into reality trough a loophole of inattention.



Why is it that deep sea fish appear monstrous? After all they are only fish. Is it not that these appear as:

1.formless, lumps of proto-matter, blind and undeveloped life.

2. they do not fit into our available grids of classification – they appear as anomalies, inexplicable lapses in nature, often from another time, surviving bizarrely into the present.

3. they appear only as the distended or abnormal form of more familiar creatures, a series of botched experiments.



Satan, who represents Evil, the utterly vicious, is yet not a monster because he also fits absolutely into a certain moral universe, a certain symbolic order. What would be monstrous would be some pathological outgrowth within that moral order.

The monstrous is always something that breaks through, distorts, or simply refuses our Symbolic ways of organising the world, our various symbolic orders – whether these be Nature, Good/ Evil, or whatever. The monstrous is the presence within these of something foreign, but a foreignness which seems to be nothing more than a mutation within the familiar.

In a certain way, the monstrous belongs to the realm of appearance. Zizek:

But Christianity, and in its own way already--maybe, I'm not sure, I don't know enough about it--Buddhism, introduce into this global balance, cosmic order, a principle totally foreign to it, a principle that, measured by the standards of the pagan cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion, the principle according to which each individual has an immediate access to the universality of nirvana, or the Holy Spirit,

From the pre-Xian point of view, xianity can only appear monstrous. The ‘monstrous’ depends on the perceiving gaze, and which symbolic system one occupies. Perhaps the birth of the new is always destined to appear monstrous.

Notes.

Still to be explored: link between creation and the monstrous.

Q: Why mythic beasts creatures like satyrs and unicorns not 'monsters'?

[nb see comments for some v. interesting links and suggestions]

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

Re-release of Debord's films - see this website. Includes clips. (thanks mc)

Abandoned MS?

Having copied it out in her own hand, she put it in a virtual casket...

Archaeologies of the Future

I'm curious to know whether anyone has looked at the new Jameson book. Your comments may influence whether I buy it. Or at least, whether wait for the paperback.


(I'm also curious, in a different way, to know whether anyone's seen this film.)

The (Sock) Puppet and the Dwarf

The following is a passage from a recent Zizek article in the LRB:

For a radical Marxist, the actual history that we live is itself the realisation of an alternative history: we have to live in it because, in the past, we failed to seize the moment. In an outstanding reading of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (which Benjamin never published), Eric Santner elaborated the notion that a present revolutionary intervention repeats/redeems failed attempts in the past. These attempts count as ‘symptoms’, and can be retroactively redeemed through the ‘miracle’ of the revolutionary act.

The accusation against Zizek (see comments thread here) is that this citation of Santner is somewhat disingenuous. Luther Blisset links to the actual Santner piece (2003, I think) which, it turns out, cites Zizek’s own Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002) as support for his argument. It would appear then that Zizek is citing as an authority/source someone who is citing as a source/authority Zizek himself. John Holbo refers to this referential circle as a ‘Munchausen’ tactic. Zizek has used Santner as a “sock puppet” another commenter states, and adds with obvious glee that this is the “killer” point against Zizek, and a suitable cue to “dismiss” him as a “clown”. Draw your own conclusions. Of course, those who are interested in Zizek are perfectly capable of recognising the lazy or ‘clownish’ elements, without seizing on these as convenient escape clauses.

But in any case, things are perhaps not quite as they seem. The offending passage, above, is basically something Zizek has cut and pasted straight from Revolution at the Gates (2002), where he is referring to an older unpublished version of Santner’s essay from 2001. We can assume that Santner’s citation of Zizek’s Desert of the Real (the offending citation) was added later. The fact that Zizek has simply pasted a 3 year old passage into his LRB essay unmodified is of course remarkable in itself. It’s lazy and frustrating, but readers of Zizek know this only too well. It’s become a signature of his journalism. Which is why, to repeat what Adam Kotsko, has been saying, those who want to engage with Zizek at his strongest are advised to look elsewhere.

ps There's a clip from the new Zizek film here.

pps Initially I thought Zizek might have been playing a little joke with the Santner citation, a la Debord in Panegyric:

Men more knowledgeable than I have explained very well the origin of what has come to pass: “Exchange-value could have formed only as an agent of use-value, but its victory by force of its own arms has created the conditions for its autonomous rule. Mobilizing all human use and seizing the monopoly on satisfaction, it has ended up directing use. The process of exchange became identified with all possible use and has reduced it to its will. Exchange-value is the condottiere of use-value, which finishes by waging war for its own advantage.”

He is of course quoting from Society of the Spectacle.

marginalia

The headless Scott has responded to some questions of mine about Foucault here at LongSunday. (also posted elsewhere in a controversial new blogging experiment). Meanwhile, the same author has a curious anecdote about Spivak. I'd say it's probably the Spivak marginalia story. Read into it what you will.

Melancholy

In an old copy of the NYRB, a long, (intentionally) rambling review by Charles Rosen of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. That certain kind of melancholy corresponding to situations where ways of life have calcified/ grown old. Cites Mme du Deffand corresponding with Horace Walpole:

Yesterday evening I admired the numerous guests who were at my house; men and women like machines with springs who came and went, spoke and laughed, without thinking, without reflecting, without feeling; each one played his role through habit: Madame the Duchess of Aiguillon burst with laughter, Mme De Forcalquier showed her disdain for everything, Mme de la Valliere jabbered about everything. The men were no better, and as for myself, I was buried in the blackest reflections; I thought that I had passed my life in illusions; that I had hollowed out for myself all the abysses into which I had fallen; that all my judgements were false and rash and always too precipitate; and finally that I had never really known anyone, that I had never been known, that perhaps I did not know myself.

Revolutionary Nostalgia?

An interview with Zizek in today's Guardian. Speaking of Zizek, here's something I posted as a comment elsewhere:

“‘Lenin’ is not the nostalgic name for old dogmatic certainty; quite the contrary, the Lenin who is to be retrieved is the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which the old co-ordinates proved useless, and who was thus compelled to re-invent Marxism – take his acerbic remark apropos of some new problem: “About this, Marx and Engels said not a word”. The idea is not to return to Lenin, but to repeat him in the Kierkegaardian sense: to retrieve the same impulse in today’s constellation. The return to Lenin aims neither at nostalgically re-enacting the “good old revolutionary times”, nor at an opportunistic-pragmatic adjustment of the old programme to “new conditions”, but at repeating, in the present worldwide conditions, the Leninist gesture of reinventing the revolutionary project in the conditions of imperialism and colonialism… “Lenin” stands for the compelling freedom to suspend the stale existing (post-)ideological co-ordinates.. in which we live.. “

In a sense (as Zizek acknowledges) he reduces Lenin to little more than the name ‘for a certain revolutionary stance’. And it is this stance, rather than the contents and costumes of the Russian Revolution, that Zizek wants to find again. His ‘nostalgia’, he would doubtless insist, is for this stance and for the space of possibilities opened up by the revolution rather than the ensuing actuality. Needless to say, many would reject this distinction.

What particularly appeals (to Z) about Lenin is his refusal to wait for the right ‘objective historical situation’ to come along for revolutionary intervention, as though revolutionary initiative lay with ‘History’. This is an illusion (the illusion of the Big Other). Instead, Lenin demonstrates how we must fully assume this initiative ourselves, and in so doing precisely transform the very ‘objective conditions’ that others passively await.

(Zizek: “such a position of the objective observer (and not of an engaged agent) is itself the main obstacle to the revolution")

notes

There are a couple of additions to Notes On Rhetoric, inc:

The Guardian A newspaper bought exclusively by people who wish to complain about the mentality of its readership and the venality of its columnists.

Now despite Charlotte Street being at a standstill, its hits have recently doubled thanks to this link:

Any ideas??????