Monster Ecologies
[as part of Speculative Urban Futures working group]
I want to speculate by way of the monster: the monster as the dialectical other, the rejected, the outcast, and which originates from within: the monster as an ambivalent figure, constituted by fear and desire, a fear-desire that manifests in all sorts of forms, constructs, expressions; the monster as a creative or decreative force always in excess of itself: and which, as I want to consider, keeps us close to the dead, or the undead.
I’m interested to follow the city as an ecology of strangers, one prone to encounter, interruption, disorder, and where No One, the outcast provides the basis for thinking the future by way of the monster: the outcast that turns back to face us, and that spirits relations with dirt, mutation, media augmentation, trans-species entanglements, money and the nonsovereign citizen.
I’m interested to move toward an “urban monster ecology”: one that maintains a relation to “the negative” / knowing very well that one never overcomes death, to keep in touch with that which always interrupts progress, completion; that corrupts, that haunts.
An ecology that might capture the “creative city” as being deeply connected to the unconscious – a creative city in touch with the force of the imagination which is fundamentally “ungovernable”: that which always moves to the outside, that is insolent.
A monster ecology which is also understood as a force of contagion, mutation: that deepens a relation not only to the more-than-human, but equally the inhuman: the unrecongizable, that places on hold what we understand as a person.
And which is also alive with the pleasure of the feast: to party with the dead, giving way to not only carnivalesque festivity, but attunement to ancestry – those that have come before us, and that may continue to speak: to contribute to the future city.
My speculative focus then is on living with the dead, the negative (where the body is pulled into the ground, into the roots: we might say – the dead grounds us); and where the city resounds with the missing, what is lost (emerging by way of acoustic resonance, extra-sensory perception, sympathies gone too far: to hear beyond the visible); living with the dead lends to the “paganization” of community: to commune with the natural, the law of the cosmos (the dead as what returns to the earth: that requires a certain “ritualistic” attention, even magic); where place is always displaced in time (the dead pulls us backwards, out of (capitalistic) progress, linearity, growth: it may support forms of time travel); and where the ground, the roots also keep us close to the waters below – an oceanic underworld where one swims in a primary sap: the dead replenishes just as it unsettles and haunts the city: it is a source of shamanistic healing: within monster ecologies one trafficks across the rational and the irrational); one must learn how to read the signs – the dead leaves messages across the city (graffiti, nature-culture entanglements, acoustic resonances, circuits – where silence speaks, becomes a current for a range of connections, raw energy, techno-scientific spiritualism); a monster ecology is always close to trash, the discarded, rot, which act as protein for all types of manifestations, germinations, biochemical craft; monsters may be friends as well as enemies, family or strangers, it is never clear; we may therefore speak less of community and more of noncommunity: late night parties, sleepless gamers, precarious night workers, homeless migrants, manic drivers, lost children, guardian angels, pornographic cultures, undercommon zones, invisibilized bodies, stalkers and poets, pirate squatters, spiritual nomads, financial wizards; an ecology shaped by the return of the repressed: where former slaves, marooned subjects, runaway prisoners circulate, providing input onto urban plans; here we might think of the Uncity or Extra-Urban, or what Steve Pile calls Real Cities (following Lacan), the city as “phantasmagoria”, turning the dump into a laboratory of fantasy, which shows that the future is never quite what we imagine it to be: and that also reminds us: to be careful what we wish for.
Monster ecologies rework notions of the city as an embodiment of civilization, progress and the realization of enlightenment, even an informed public citizenry; from trash dumps, impoverished homes, bug-infested kitchens, lonely cells to gated communites, dirty money, and playgrounds for the rich, monsters appear in different ways, figuring precisely an animality – a multi-species mutational urbanism – central to city life. Mapping urban futures by way of the monster may show another geography, an undergrowth to the growing urban density that is also rich with hybridity, germination, transcultural feasting: less a posturbanism and more an alter-urbanism, where overwork, precarity, super-charged affective networks, cognitive capitalism, cultural mania, screen hypnotism, and algorithmic data streams bring us in touch with the zombie.
Monsters are fearsome, terrifying creatures; they are also our closest allies (our innermost entities). As such, they may allow for crafting other forms of inhabitation, ways of moving in the city, of following precisely where our fears and desires may lead. Here, following Steve Pile’s understanding of the emotional-work underpinning urban existence, I might think of a form of Monster-Work: as the work one may do in contending with the monstrosity of the city. Monster-Work may be a fugitive form of collaboration, delirious cooperation, with all that is inhuman in the human, all that is never quite reliable or legible in the public life of the citizenry, all that is underpinning what we might understand the future to be. Monster-Work may also be captured as the work continually made in an effort to negotiate not so much with the living, in our ongoing social and political efforts as subjects, but more in contending with the dead; from all these memories that flood the city, that define the very ground on which we walk and build, dream and fight, to the material wastes that are our fellow urban dwellers, to the sense in which to speak of the future is to also speak of the end, my end, your end, our end – the monster or (echoing Richard Sennett) the “uses of monsters” may contribute to reconciling the fact of the negative, the end, as what is always supporting life in its most energetic and contagious manner.