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2.7 Watching Monsters

In this section I am going to very briefly mention a sub-genre of theory in body theory that fits with the theories of watching I am positing; that of the monster. In this section however I am not talking about on-screen monsters in film, and the ways in which monsters are posited in certain film theory as a mode of identification for the female spectator (found in Williams’ ‘When the Woman Looks and Creed’s Monstrous Feminine). I am stating that the viewer is monster, something that is akin to pervert and also to a becoming, as well as particularly useful for a female/feminist spectator intervention (woman as already monster). This viewing monster is not a monster that is in any way identifiable with the on-screen monster. It is a monster for the reasons I have identified earlier that constitute film watching as non-stratified, perverted and hence the viewer as pervert. I have already pointed out that the desire to be perverted is positive only in so far as it resists the formation of the noun ‘pervert’ adhering one form of perversion onto the subject as the being and essence of its desire. But the term monster is used strategically and comes in through a very definite theoretical framework. Everybody knows that horror films are frequently about monsters, be they the pervert-killers [105] of giallo, or one of the four monsters to which Stephen King reduces all horror in Danse Macabre [106] . I do not claim that all horror films are about monsters but would bravely go so far as to say all horror films include monstrosities (including our own bodies) which makes them horror films. Even the most ‘subtle’ of horror films, with which I am primarily not concerned in this book, include elements of monstrosity, be they mental illness, forgetfulness or transient consciousness(es), such as Mario Bava’s Shock: Transfer, Suspense, Hypnos (Italy 1977).

What is monstrosity then? For a theoretical definition I am going to use Braidotti because not only is she concerned with theorizing the monster in western capitalist culture, but because for doing so she has been argued against. She writes: “Monsters are human beings who are born with congenital malformations of their bodily organism. They also represent the in between, the mixed, the ambivalent as implied in the ancient Greek root of the word monsters, teras, which means both horrible and wonderful, object of aberration and adoration, (my italics).” [107] Although Braidotti focuses her argument on monstrosities of the historical past versus the modern monstrosity of science, her insistence on monstrosity as a site of wonder and of horror is an important axis in any definition of monsters. Even if modern scientists are seen as monsters in their determined drive to see further, pathologize more rigidly and adhere normality to the integrity of an organism, they are themselves enough of an object of wonder for Braidotti to include them in her argument. The axis of wonder/horror is integral to monstrosity as a, if not the, primary site of ambiguity. Following from Mary Douglas [108] and Kristeva’s use of Douglas in the formation of theories of the abject, Braidotti goes so far as to suggest one of the more positive means of becoming is that of monster, something popular culture already demands of its ‘radicals’. Without wishing to utilize the specificities Braidotti offers of those monsters we could locate as the site of becoming-monster for the future (for which she has been criticized), I want to emphasize her use of wonder in ‘reading’ the monster. At the primary level of monstrosity, the very first departure from the white integrated subject is the woman. In this way, any woman is a monster to begin with, and has been for as long as can be historically traced. A body of difference, while being (especially in a compulsory hetero normative culture) an object of fascination, is simultaneously that of disgust. Like the abject the monster is that which pushes us outside symbolic integrity, either back, in psychoanalytic terms to the primary monster, the mother, or in a more Deleuzio-Guattarian sense that which pushes us away from what we think we are, subject and self. Returning for a moment to the concept of desire as urging rather than lacking, in order to really accept Braidotti’s suggestion to become monster we must desire monsters. One cannot want to become what one does not desire, something made clear in Braidotti herself writing on Deleuze. So if we read desire in this abundance mode, the desire for a monster changes both the subject desiring and the monster of desire. In a Lacanian frame, in order to desire a monster one cannot be monster. One is fulfilling the monstrous lack in the hitherto normal subject. That is why woman is the primary monster because man is the primary non-monster and desires only what he lacks. If we read desire for monstrosity without or after Lacan it is clear that there is less of an enforcement of otherness in the desire for monsters. The monster is not necessarily any longer the complete antithesis of self; rather monster simply becomes a category that willfully refuses desire within a system of normal versus monster. To become monster in Deleuzian/Guattarian terms is necessarily to begin at a point in repudiation of any anxiety about a loss through monstrosity (loss of subject, loss of power aligned with subjectivity). It is also to begin already with a certain monstrosity and politicality.

To want to become monster in itself is monstrous enough.  It is already refusing the value of an integrated or majoritarian subject. For a feminist reading of monstrosity it is vital to contextualize that if women are the first monsters, what do we lose by becoming (or embracing our already existent) monstrosity? Two problems arise here. The first is that by naming ourselves monsters women are in a way accepting the terms of their bodies given to them by phallologocentric culture.  It may be mimetic; it may be to utilize phallologocentrism’s weapons against itself. But it is still affirming a condition for women (and all subsequent monsters) that was not chosen by women or even in consultation with women. The second problem is the glamorization of conditions of subjugation in society. It is well to claim that becoming-monster is a positive way to radicalize the place to which the term monster commits such monsters. Gail Weiss takes up Braidotti on this. Weiss firmly plants her arguments against Braidotti within the context of Braidotti’s anxieties about reproductive technology and the scientist-monsters mentioned above. I do not wish to take up the arguments in the socio-political context, the ‘real’ context for want of a better term, because I am not arguing for a strategy of becoming monster within a purely socio-political framework, but instead within a frame that first deals within the minute politics of personal subjectivity and bodily experience. A redistribution of the politics involved in being such a bodily subject will be the first stage towards becoming new bodily subjects and hence valuing different bodily subjects. The formulation of a becoming body is not without negative implications, especially from a feminist perspective where a re-negotiation of subjectivity is occurring in post-structuralism before the subjectivity to be negotiated has been sanctioned for subjects of difference, such as women, non-white races and others. This flaw only emphasizes the importance of feminist intervention in new ideas about being and becoming in order that post-subjects, perverse subjects and other subjects of post-modern difference, rather than traditional difference, will be ethical as well as culturally transformative. Such a formulation of an ethics of corporeal affect-being/becoming will be most specifically addressed in the conclusion.

My project may not seem as important as a purely socio-political one, but it is nonetheless important in the primary experience of one’s own body and therefore may be useful in the future as a mode of furthering one’s experiencing of one’s own body into the world (instead of only in the lounge-room). I am using Braidotti on monsters as an intimately momentary strategy, intimate because it is relevant to a moment of cinematic viewing and momentary because I do not want to make any claims about the activity of the transformed subject once it leaves its couch. So my discussion of Weiss’ arguments against becoming monstrosity will be limited to the last two of the five she posits. These are:

4) Is this mixture of horror and fascination advantageous for those who are its objects, that is, is this a mixture of passions we want to privilege? 5) Does this fascination and horror in Braidotti’s corresponding reification of these passions, serve to intensify, in oppressive ways, the monstrosity of the monstrous? [109]

I take first Weiss’ fourth question to which she answers a resounding ‘no’. In the context of reducing monsters to those who we are while watching images of horror, I would have to argue that in order for old monsters to be replaced by new monsters there will always be a form of monstrosity devalued beyond all others.

I return momentarily to Terry’s article on the monstrosity that science is, for queer theory; both seductive in its search for embodied biological validation of queerness and simultaneously repulsive because of its claims to truth and hence a means to fix and control the gay subject, perhaps inevitably to cure it of its ‘malformation’. Terry uses the same words to describe the very discourse of science that Braidotti uses for her discussions of what constitutes a monster. While Braidotti claims science is making monsters Terry claims science itself for post-modern queer theory is a monster, somewhat of a horror film; it cannot be taken as truth but we cannot stop watching nonetheless. Terry goes on to discuss the monsters that gay biology studies: the gay ‘monster’. She states

Hence lesbian feminist [lesbians being the monsters of even gay (male) discourse] discourse took on some of the same questions raised earlier by medical and scientific discourses that conflated homosexuality with pathology. This time however these questions provided the means for explicitly generating a counter-discourse which replaced scientific authority with a new authentic thing called ‘personal experience’ in order to claim that homosexuality was healthy. Any pathology surrounding it was caused by social prejudice and homophobic and sexist hostility. [110]

If homosexuality is not so immediate as monstrosity in terms of malformations of body organism, one simply has to look at the subsequent studies Terry, among others, has made on physical anatomical readings of homosexual flesh [111] . Terry is rightfully suspicious of any claim that personal experience is somehow implicitly more valid than science but at the same time states the exact opposite, that science cannot speak for bodies in which culture has invested so much in its attempt to create the abnormal, in order to validate and fine-tune the normal. Her most useful point for this argument, however, is the importance of the ‘monster’ speaking for itself and emphasizing that one is only a monster because of a social pathology of prejudice rather than a true biological flaw in a subject’s body. If the monster articulates itself and the conditions by which it is named monster it changes the meaning of the re-appropriated term. If Weiss’ suggestions were followed perhaps monsters would remain handled with kid-gloves and go from outcast bodies to being accepted with still exoticized bodies which can only be spoken of in sympathetic terms.

What exactly constitutes a ‘real’ monster, that appropriating the term monster will harm and make light its pain? Are not women and especially lesbian-feminists already monster enough that to call themselves the new monsters will constitute an ownership of the derogatory term given them? I am reminded of possibly the most important appropriation of a monster for feminist theory, that of Cixous’ Medusa. [112] Is the re-appropriation of the Medusa a ‘safe’ monster because she was never ‘real’? The Medusa is affect-image. She exists as image in order to change the viewer to stone, which could also be to not-monster, in juxtaposition with her own image. The Medusa is visual image, not material monster. Her power is in the way she looks, both actively and reactively, not in the matter of her body. She is a visual monster, from which we are kept safe, because she is not ‘real’ in the sensuous, material sense of the word. How do we recognize a ‘real’ monster then? What would Weiss define as a real monster? What Terry says, and what Braidotti also, in different ways states, is that we are only monsters in reference to those who call us monsters. I think Braidotti juxtaposes the self-proclaimed monsters, be they culturally evident as monsters, against the monsters technology creates and names precisely because of the problem I pointed out above, that monstrosity is devalued in terms of that who names the monster ‘monsters’. There is no essential non-contingent thing named monster. Weiss discusses the use of the word monster as metaphor and the way in which metaphor devalues the meaning of terms. Monster then loses its necessary subversive potential. I do not think Braidotti is advocating using ‘monster’ as metaphor. I think she means it as a literal becoming, in the same way Deleuze does not want us to act like a dog but be a dog. And in a similar way that inspired me to read the monstrous audience rather than the represented monster on screen. Sexuality, corporeal de- and mal-formations, skin color, female and hermaphroditic genitals and even tattoos and piercings are all materially real conditions of the human body that are far more than metaphor both in their inability to be cast off and also their political definition within culture. If they were metaphor real suffering and real triumph would be irrelevant (rather than mandatory as I would suggest) when thinking monstrosity. This leads to Weiss’ final problem with becoming-monster, the importance she places on the intensification of the term monster through the passions of fascination and horror. By intensification I think she means some form of othering, the thing we call monster and the desire for it. If Braidotti is advocating a becoming-monster, or a proclamation of monster then the first desire we must have for monsters is for our own ‘monster-ization’. Weiss’ point is an important and valid one which comes from the anxiety, I think Braidotti exhibits herself in her theorization of monsters, that becoming monster is fraught with the threat of being named monster by someone else in the wrong terms, as the wrong kind of monster. But what becoming monster does successfully achieve is the emphatic refusal of phallologocentricism’s categories and boundaries that have been set up for monsters, semi-monsters and the rare normal subject. Judith Halberstam points out the place of monsters is most important to being monster, “The monster always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities and so we need monsters and we need to recognize and celebrate our own monstrosities.” [113] While I think Halberstam is advocating an un-real or temporary monster-ization different from Braidotti’s becoming-monster, which cannot be placed on and off like a mantle, her focus on the activity of monster-ization rather than the subjectivity of monster is interesting. Monster for Halberstam is an action of disruption rather than a statement of subjectivity that may or may not disrupt. Is becoming monster then entirely separate from being monster by the very fact that becoming monster is necessarily an act of disruption through transformation while being monster is simply a reaction to being named monster, a state which could change historically? The majoritarian has as much if not more need to become-monster to renegotiate his own power, than does the minoritarian to become-majoritarian, and measure up in dominant culture. The activity of monsterization is politically and ethically important, but the becoming-dominant of subjugated bodies is exactly the opposite. The status of monster is not assured historically, in the same way as the activity of monster-ing or becoming-monster always means disrupting whatever moment the becoming takes place in. When returning to the concept of character identification in horror film I see the affect of disruption as a necessary part of the pleasure in watching such films, conditional upon the activity of becoming monster over identification with a monster. Who is to say the monster in the film; killer, giant creature etcetera is not going to be a non-monster from one period in time to the next? When affect is privileged over identification in film theory then the status of the monstrosity of the film, and hence becoming-monster of the static safe subjectivity of the viewer is assured.

There is, it seems, no ‘safe’ concept of monster that does not threaten to slide back into more traditional exercises of naming as power. Whatever the joys of becoming-monster, the risks are great, both towards our expectations of what becoming-monster will mean in a ‘real’ sociological context and also the risks we take by appropriating a concept that, like woman, is dangerously linked with a degrading and power-embedded practice. This reflects a similar argument Braidotti, among other feminists, poses to Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of becoming as always having to first become-woman. In the same way that to become-monster means an appropriation of the lives of ‘monsters’ which reduces the pain of being monster to a momentary transition in order to be subversive or transformative, Deleuze and Guattari have been accused of reducing and ignoring the material lived reality of women in posing a becoming-woman as a transitory practice towards becoming a presumably better something-else. Also that woman, like monster, is a level easier to attain than higher levels of subjectivity, any man can ‘become-woman’ but no woman can become a man. The argument against becoming-woman is not one I want to go into here - it will be addressed more thoroughly in the conclusion of this book - but it is reflected in Weiss’ argument against Braidotti sufficiently for me to remain focused on monsters rather than feminism’s suspicions of becoming-woman.

There are three things that are supposed in becoming-monster. First, to become monster implies something to lose by becoming monster (in the same way that becoming-woman is something to lose for man). But what is lost? How valuable is it? Within a Deleuzian/Guattarian frame what is lost in becoming is that which anchors the subject indefinitely to the very world from which becoming is a line of flight. Wanting to become is in this instance desiring the loss of that which culture values. The restraint culture imposes on normal subjectivity is the very thing becoming disavows. By shedding these restraints, or ‘taking flight’ from them, becoming expresses a deep suspicion of them. Someone who wants to become monster could already be seen to disavow the system that has pushed monster outside of normal subjectivity. Becoming here is a means to get ‘outside’, which is perhaps what Deleuze and Guattari meant in their insistence of becoming-woman. Monster and woman are specific groups but intersectional specific groups that refuse a solid definition, in opposition to the definition of man. The terms themselves are ambivalence, in the same way as Braidotti’s passions are ambivalence and Douglas’ seminal work on the concept of purity, danger and the scripture of Leviticus are all about ambivalence. [114] Normal subjectivity is not ambivalence nor ambivalent, and its very existence is through its separation from everything it is not.

Reading becoming as actual in its aspirations toward (monsters, woman) is to suggest there is a literal, non-ambivalent definition of these ‘other’ terms. There is not. Becoming something is an actual becoming but the reason certain terms are preferred for becoming over others is their ambivalence. Most precisely their ambivalence is juxtaposed against the very non-ambivalence of the models they take flight from. In returning to the spectator it is the ambivalence of the passions inspired by horror films - the perversion of body image, of corporeal sensation - that create the viewer as monster in juxtaposition against what monster is not. It is as ambivalence that I wish to use monstrosity. Of real monsters, or historical monsters, there are real dangers in representing them as objects of horror and fascination, and where Braidotti uses real, literal historical monsters, I would prefer to use the historical definition she posits of monsters as mixed, in between and most definitely non-phallologocentricly-normal.

Two key terms are essential in my thinking becoming-monster: desire and pleasure. In the context of my argument and juxtaposed against Scott ‘s definition of perversion, included in the prefix, as anything outside genital, same age, hetero sex, all perverted sex is monstrous. All perverted desire is monstrous as well as all pleasure felt outside of acceptable structures of sex or alternatively pleasure as structured into its own binary of sexual/non-sexual pleasure (a division I, like psychoanalysis, most emphatically do not recognize). Remember that which constitutes perversion is almost everything compared to what constitutes the tiny realm of normality. The monster is the site of ambiguity, difficult perhaps because it aligns itself enough with the normal to be a monstrous version of the normal, rather than a completely alien other that holds no potential for examination (the fascination part of the repulsion/fascination duality of monstrosity). The normal in monstrous perverse desire and pleasure is the most dangerous part of normal sexuality; that everyone of age (and according to Freud, children also) is within the boundaries of ‘sexuality’. That everyone desires certain forms indicates the potential of forms to easily slip from the beautiful to the monstrous. Judith Halberstam states “monsters not only reveal certain material conditions of the production of horror, but they also make strange the categories of beauty, humanity and identity that we still cling to”. [115] This is why she claims the term monster itself is a slippery term because of its historicity rather than universality.

How are we to know if today’s desires are to be normal tomorrow? Slippages in desire, concurrent with the slippages in object choice that make beauty strange and humanity ambivalent from one historical period to the next means that whatever we avow as normal sexuality, even non-sexuality, could be tomorrow’s monstrosity. There is no such thing as asexual without it being juxtaposed against an extraordinary obsession with what it disavows; even celibacy exists only in terms of that which it refuses. All sexuality then has the potential to ‘slip’, and far more easily than other axes, those of race, sex, class. Because sexuality in my definition encompasses all desire, it is whatever is thought, whatever is felt, outside of identity and even of language. All desire is sexual but sexuality is not always or even ever genital, orgasmic or various other constitutive elements often conflated into the term sexuality. Sexuality is hyper-ambiguous not only in what it desires and what pleasures it affords, but in its very definition: what is meant by the word sexuality?

To return to Lotringer, I wish to discuss his concept of asexuality, a very different definition to that most popularly imagined - the asexual as the nonsexual. When sexuality remains in the confines of a Scottian definition then asexuality according to Lotringer is almost the same as what I call desire and pleasure. It means “experiencing sexuality in non-genital ways. Its potential is truly infinite.” [116] While Lotringer points out the dangers of asexuality, specifically the potential for asexuality to become a nihilistic form of desire rather than life-enforcing, his faith in it is as a means by which to transform or restore sexuality to a fuller form, to “fullness”. [117] But how is asexuality monstrous? Its conformity to monstrosity’s prime definer of ambiguity pushes it into the non-normal. Lotringer states:

Asexuality is a symptom of decadence [what falls away - de-cadens] and like other symptoms of decadence it is ambiguous by definition. Ambiguity is not such that it requires an elucidation - even less a critique: some elements simply need to be ‘forgotten’, others mobilized. Once the focus on genital sex is removed, a new ‘polymorphous sexuality’ comes into being. [118]

Two points about Lotringer’s suggestion must be clarified. First he does not advocate non-genital sex, only the death of the primacy of genitals over and in ignorance of all other forms of pleasure. Genitals define both the sexual act and the gender of the participants, so without a genital focus both sexuality and gender (both outside and self) are renegotiated, made polymorphous. Second, the term polymorphous is specifically the new polymorphous he mentions, not the traditional polymorphousness of Freud. The main characteristic the two have in common is that both involve a usage of a non-stratified body that has not broken into a system of primary, secondary and tertiary organs of sex and organs of pleasure. Lotringer is encouraging the use of the very body that Grosz indicates is beyond the tolerance of any given culture. The body we have is already a monster if it is not curbed into non-perverse sexuality and desire. It has immediately the potential Braidotti encourages us to utilize in order to become-monster.

Brian Massumi takes up this very idea of becoming monster as a form of desire and hence of pleasure. In ‘Normality is the Degree Zero of Monstrosity’ Massumi discusses the real effects, the material results of becoming and most importantly, he points out, that in his reading above and beyond Deleuze and Guattari, all forms of becoming are monstrous. Because a real becoming involves a transformation from the molar of two points (for instance molar man becoming molar dog) without ever attaining the molarity of the second point, the resulting transformations are always monsters, freaks, half-and-half molecularities: “He resolves the bodies into two bundles of virtual affects, or bodies without organs, and then actualizes a selection combination of them. What he comes up with is neither a molar dog nor a molar man, but a monster, a freak.” [119] All becoming is becoming monster; even the desire to want to become is monstrous, because all becoming is about becoming an ambiguity between, but never attaining either of, two points. Massumi recognizes becoming as desire “Becoming begins as a desire to escape bodily limitations.” [120] However I do not think becoming is about escaping bodily limitations so much as escaping the limitations placed by normalizing culture upon and within the stratified, signified body. We can, of course, only live the body to which we have access. In order for there to ever be a potential for actual becoming, the potential of the body we are now must be recognized. Our bodies present enough of a potential for change and transformation. Perhaps Massumi means the limitations our cultural and biological body represents, the so-called already perfect subject body, or scientifically described and hence ‘finished’ body. Becoming is embodiment at last in the first few becomings of Deleuze and Guattari: becoming-woman, becoming-animal etcetera. Indeed, Massumi goes on to state “The goal is not to develop a general idea (model) that would stand out and above (transcend) the bodies it subsumes; it is to create a new body at ground level.” [121] Our bodies are enough to start our line of flight, our aim is corporeal but not the same as the body we have now, which could be described as signification over substantiative flesh. The body we have now is important as the primary vehicle to change and of change. From here the potential is limitless. The line of flight does not fly off into the distance but rather flies inside our own bodies in transformation and redistribution of fleshly intensities, spatially static we fly from what we were before and become something otherwise.

To align the gaze with concepts of narrative cohesion and character identification is to dismiss the very perversity of unadulterated staring. It is not that which we watch that is perverse, but who we are while watching.  Is pretending to watch for sympathy and emotional mirroring with on-screen figures an attempt to bring into the rational world of the symbolic the most obvious loss of self for pure pleasure? ‘I cannot be me, I am busy watching.’ The fact is, the subject who watches has no idea what is happening to the body, it is reacting and retching secretly, affording a pleasure difficult to name or know - the abject being, the horror of voyeur.

Different kinds of film enhance the possibilities of different ways to look, and eventually different ways to read the act of looking. Perhaps an acknowledgement that some pleasure is perverse, and to accept it as such is to accept its existence outside symbolic discourse? Then, such an ‘ordinary’ western pop pleasure as watching film, being re-figured (or exposed) as the act of a pervert asks also for the re-negotiation of ‘pervert’, of the fissure between watching and being, on-screen and off-screen, and the limitless potential of our own bodies unbound. The residue of theorizing a gazing subjectivity in this way has the potential to lead to a new form of theorizing film, for pleasure, and for a becoming outside the single-normative code.

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