Monstrous Forms

O beautiful / was the werewolf

I teach a weekend workshop in the Graduate Writing Program at The New School. Below is the workshop description.

I Was a Teenage Monster Becoming-monsters, Monstering, Otherness & Hormonal Rage The New School MFA Writing Program

This course looks at representations of adolescence, growing up strange, and becoming other. How can fantastic exaggeration and conceit accurately represent coming-of-age experiences and the trials and tribulations of teenhood? How does becoming a monster map onto becoming an adult? How can we draw from cross-media representations of teenage monsters to write our own monsters? We’ll examine monstering in TV, film, comics, novels and poems, building on references students already have on hand.

Materials may include: Ginger Snaps (dir. John Fawcett) Buffy the Vampire Slayer (dir. Joss Whedon) Black Hole (Charles Burns) Autobiography of Red (Anne Carson) Half Life (Shelley Jackson) The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka) Let the Right One In (dir. Tomas Alfredson) Carrie (dir. Brian De Palma) The Rage: Carrie 2 (dir. Katt Shea) The Craft (dir. Andrew Fleming) It Follows (dir. David Robert Mitchell) X-Men (Grant Morrison version) Teeth (dir. Mitchell Lichtenstein) My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (Emil Ferris) The Orange Eats Creeps (Grace Krilanovich) Lost Boys (dir. Joel Schumacher) Wolf in White Van (John Darnielle) A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (dir. Ana Lily Amirpour) Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video Stranger Things

Yet we should beware of any architecture described as wholesome or organic, for the logic of the organism is the logic of self-enclosure, self-regulation, and self-determination. Buildings are not organisms but merely provisional structures that are already multiplicitous. Where the organic is internally consistent, the “inorganic” is internally discontinuous and capable of a multiplicity of unforeseen connections.

—Greg Lynn, “Multiplicitous and Inorganic Bodies”

We can ... offer a new terminology for thinking about this problem of the non-human world. Let us call the world in which we live the world-for-us. This is the world that we, as human beings, interpret and give meaning to, the world that we relate to or feel alienated from, the world that we are at once a part of and that is also separate from the human. But this world-for-us is not, of course, totally within the ambit of human wants and desires; the world often “bites back,” resists, or ignores our attempts to mold it into the world-for-us. Let us call this the world-in-itself. This is the world in some inaccessible, already-given state, which we then turn into the world-for-us. The world-in-itself is a paradoxical concept; the moment we think it and attempt to act on it, it ceases to be the world-in-itself and becomes the world-for-us.

...

So, while we can never experience the world-in-itself, we seem to be almost fatalistically drawn to it, perhaps as a limit that defines who we are as human beings.

Let us call this spectral and speculative world the world-without-us.

...

We can even abbreviate these three concepts further: the world-for-us is simply the World, the world-in-itself is simply the Earth, and the world-without-us is simply the Planet.

—Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet

Scientists estimate that approximate ninety percent of the cells in the human body belong to non-human organisms (bacteria, fungi, and a whole bestiary of other organisms). Why shouldn’t this also be the case for human thought as well?

—Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet

If ecology and performance often seems to return us to a metanarrative of Nature versus Culture, it can also provide for projections of alternative, inhuman dramas that our actions effect and which we are affected by but often either choose to ignore or cannot directly experiences. Natural objects and processes are real and exceed us, but as such they do not articulate in themselves; the objects and transformations of Culture are just as real, but their articulations do not simply turn everything into the mere projection of humanity.

...

[Latour] argued that even as modern thought categorically separated and purified Nature and Culture, the practices of modernity continually produce concepts, objects, and phenomena that exceed any such dualisms. An example Latour provides is “global warming”; the empirical reality and effect of global warming is not diminished by its equally real social and political reality and affect. Indeed, he argued in a rather resilient way, that what distinguishes modernity is not a rupture with a stable culture or natural order but its unprecedented proliferation of hybrid assemblages that traverse the categories of Nature and Culture. These are not “intermediaries” between natural forces and cultural value, but “mediators” through which configurations are produced and then reconfigured, “actors endowed with the capacity to translate what they transport, to redefine it, redeploy it, and also to betray it.”

—Christopher Hight, Designing Ecologies 99

[W]hile there is an objective material reality, the environment of one organism would be rather different and perhaps incommensurable from an organism with differently organized bodies and sensoria. Uexküll tried to demonstrate the strangeness of other organisms’ life-worlds through evocative prose that described the world of a tick, for example. Such accounts mediated between the human umwelt and provided a glimpse of the manifold of life. ... (Of course we can never really know the world of the tick or the frog, but what is most significant is the recognition and sensation of our contingency.)

...

Every mind is immanent to other minds and participates in their construction, not an object set apart from its context—that is, there is not an organism and its environment. As another systems theory reiterated, “Everything that happens belongs to a system (or to many systems) and always at the same time to the environment of other systems.” Again, we see that this form of ecological thought is that of the many, of immanence and of difference. There is no singular unified umwelt but rather a plurality of umwelten and an immanent sense of alternatives. Rather than a univocal totaling of Being against a ruptured crisis, there is an immanent multiplicity, or pluriverse.

—Christopher Hight, Designing Ecologies 96-98

Monstrous Scale

One of the many monstrous forms in Twin Peaks: The Return [2017], coming way too close: the frog fly locust roach thing.

See also J. G. Ballard’s “The Voices of Time”:

“[T]he monsters in the lab were nothing more than fragmented mirrors of Whitby’s mind, like the grotesque radio-shielded frog he [Powers] had found that morning in the swimming pool.”

That ambiguous “he” could be a sleep-deprived slip on Powers’ part (in this moment of free indirect discourse), as his powers of consciousness dwindle. Perhaps Powers identifies overmuch with Whitby, the dead biologist who made the mysterious ideogram in the empty pool, and seems to be responsible for the mutant, hybrid creature-objects who appear there and in the Clinic environs. After all, the sentence above begins “Actually the comparison [by Coma] should have been made with Whitby, not himself.” And there’s another ambiguous pronoun—“himself” refers to Powers but follows Whitby, as does Powers.

Aerial view of the Runit Dome. The dome is placed in the crater created by the "Cactus" nuclear weapons test in 1958. (Wikipedia)

Dr. Seth Brundle becomes Brundle-fly through a gradual transformation sequence that Tschumi (quoted above, from “Sequences” in Architecture and Disjunction) would call a closed, exhaustive sequence. Brundle-fly wishes to reject closure, which Lyn Hejinian (cf “Against Closure”) would in theory applaud, though she might not endorse his methods. His attempt to re-open the transformation sequence involves adding new organisms to the (initially inadvertent) genetic splicing process. The introduction of non-biological material into the process proves catastrophic to his project: he/it reaches a dead end.

Music as Ambience and Space in Time

Here’s an example of sound design as film soundtrack (from David Lynch’s Eraserhead), where landscape, (often ruinous) built form, and mood are all evoked. We might say Lynch thinks of film as a hybrid of sound and image, and that he is attuned to multiple temporal consciousness (a key concept related to the picturesque). Lynch recently put it this way: