Considering the complex dynamics of the monster, from the return of the repressed to the politics of othering, a series of activities are developed to capture monstrosity as a critical and creative performance full of ambiguity. Through such an approach, questions of madness and emancipation, migration and the stateless, listening and transformation are mobilized, bringing into play what Jeffrey Cohen highlights as the fact of the monster: the dialectical Other always already closer than imagined. The monster is the very thing that emerges from within while seeming to appear from without – in short, the projection of fear as well as secret wishes. Creatures of the night, the stranger at the door, the thing one cannot name. Monsters are also deployed as allegorical creatures bringing to light social borders and taboos, and guarding the limits of the permissible through forms of haunting; others are also made into monsters, scapegoats, outcasts, so as to reinforce states of exclusion or exception. The figure of the monster and gestures of monstering, though, additionally provide a tool, a creative vocabulary, or an imaginary for crafting emancipatory, fantastical expressions: to draw upon the monster as a vehicle for fostering transformation, creative mutation, other life.
Engaging this constellation of perspectives, the monster is mobilized as a research strand, one that acts within the larger question of “the bioacoustic” understood as conceptualizations of life by way of hearing. In what ways do experiences of sound, hearing, and listening shape understandings of life? What particular “regimes of aurality” (R. Kheshti) are deployed in defining “deviant sound”, and which impact onto social, educational, or medical practices? How do we draw upon expressions of sound, music, and audibility in the queering of forms of life, especially in terms of struggles over recognition? And how might the bioacoustic act as a framework for attending to the more-than-human entities or machinic agents that extend conceptualizations of life and which listening may engage?
The bioacoustic is developed to research “mutational” forms or states, the co-constitutive warping and morphing of material encounters, and the constructs of “savage thought” that complicate dominant moral codes of health and the good life.
On the monster
1. It cannot be , this thing : it appears , though it is not in this sense , a sensible form.
2. Toward what end might it , or will it , tremble the borders of the imagination , with its yearning , for it wishes something , of me , my double.
3. A sudden retching , out and up , expunged and exuding , from within and down into , this folding in and unfolding , exfoliating , scraping , what must be called : a project of the deep-aesthetic.
4. Everything shudders in its wake , waking , from the living to the dead , breaths that do not breathe , that gasp , no more of this origin , or another , and another , we may never find our way back to the stability of things.
5. It is , and will forever be , what one wishes , but cannot speak of or say , to bring us toward an ache of the speechless : the scream.
6. What architectures can withstand the ripping up , and the apparitional fever or aroma , of this unearthly flutter , sudden and persistent , of the ghost by which this house shivers , is made other ?
7. I crawl , I hang , I am lost : all positions that force one to be what cannot be , although , what one becomes.
8. Have these bodies not always been , with and without , wounded by the deep prick of the fragment , that cuts in and deeper , this subject no longer , whole , rather , a hole: the life of the incomplete , of the world.
9. Did you not see this unimaginable figure , did you not stagger over this big toe , the mad laughter , the dizzying ooze of mutating objects – did you not feel pulled by the quaking rattle of rapture and the hideous ; were you not moved by this festival of joyous anguish , to surrender.
10. Push back in , get it out , quick , I cannot stand what withstands , and that interrupts , all such unwieldy and oily remains , these stains that start to speak , and that tell me of the catastrophe to come , tomorrow already haunted , by this love for the mad and the lyrical , to startle the skin into the creative act.