I’ve been thinking a lot about monstrosity of late and just finished writing a paper on Frankenstein’s monster as the parasitic host–combining Michel Serres’ _The_Parasite_ and Michael Taussig’s _Mimesis_and_Alterity_. It made me consider “monsters” in a new light. Our fear of them comes in part from their uncanny combination of mimicry of ourselves and things we recognize and their inherent alterity. However, it is fascinating to consider them in terms of their parasitism. That the greatest fear their produce is that they might, in some way, devour us. Devour our humanity. Interrupt our lives. Frankenstein meant to parasitically feed off the powers of natural reproduction, rendering it in a new way with male intellect. Yet what he creates, the wretch, has the ability to feed off of him–to make a life within his own, a common space of his private one, simply by existing. The parasite becomes parasited upon. I wonder if that could be part of the fear of “monsters?” That in our fear we might create a monster more powerful than ourselves?

(2) On missing the point entirely (productively or not): Mm. Well I’m lazy, so I’m going to put off looking into the aggregated tweets (I feel like a beetle carrying a large piece of fruit on its back, so I’m going to put off looking into the aggregated tweets). But about possibly missing the point entirely, a thought has been orbiting here for a while, and that’s about orbits in state space, as they relate to definitions and Dr. Fraistat’s paper on the question of defining the digital humanities. If you take the state of a definition to be a cluster of points or a set of variously clustered points in some kind of a state space (where each dimension of the state space is a parameter of some part of the meaning that is more or less present), then you can (in one case) end up with small, fixed points that don’t invite innovation (outside of a formal system where e.g. in mathematics you can get quite a lot out of a few axioms). Let’s say (just to say, and maybe to be wrong) that semantic space is finite, or at least maybe bounded (not infinite in extent),** so something like an energy maximum limits things.

Then you could have various kinds of trajectories through state space as you approach various meanings of a word (you could have approaches that terminate in “point attractors,” some that orbit systematically–”limit cycles”, you could have a chaotic attractor, something that never gets to a point but never wanders to every point in semantic space either, so it would be a haze or penumbra of points, yet far more specific than randomness). What interests me when I think of the word definitions we’ve considered (though it overmatches my mathematical acumen, so far) is the idea that there might be a kind of itinerant pattern of activity of mind, like what is called a “heteroclinic cycle” (with more time I’d hunt up the papers blossoming ten years or so ago on “stable heteroclinic cycles” Aha. Found it. * ). Basically a cycle like this follows a path around a heterocline (if I have that word right), a path through state space across a series of points, each of which points is a minimum in one dimension and a maximum in another (it’s also called a “saddle node” as I remember, something that describes it better for visualizing).

Maybe a definition would be itinerant and move about according to its encounter with various contexts of use. And we wouldn’t want to know what exactly a monster was, e.g. because knowing exactly, we would be unprepared for variants. *** Alternatively, maybe a definition is not something we quite ever want to find, something that should remain fugitive for us to use the word we would assign it to, freely. Like a black hole. Its event horizon, by theory and so-far consistent observation (right? or wrong?) can be observed, but the inside of which is not considered a proper holiday destination.

* Ichiro Tsuda, “Toward an interpretation of dynamic neural activity in terms of chaotic dynamical systems” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2001) 24, 793–847. There’s also some stuff in Science where similar and related work has been reported, early in the 00′s of the present century; and probably more up-to-date stuff of comparable interest.

** Semantic space may be an overly optimistic conception of semantics, as well, suited more to neural network modeling (with that niftiest tool, linear algebra as its framework) than to naturalistic word definition; see Amos Tversky’s “Features of Similarity” in Psychological Review, 84:327–352, 1977. There Tversky presents findings that similarity measures among words prove asymmetric in many cases, so the semantic distance from A to B is not the distance from B back to A. It’s not a proper as-the-crow-flies distance. Tversky accounts for this with an attention-biased (or salience-biased) set-theoretic model called the “contrast model,” as I remember.

*** The way memory is integrated into the present experience, the way it is not like a “picture in the mind,” the way bits and pieces of percepts are dynamically reconstructed into wholes to suit the moment, and the irrelevant bits are dropped off, seems closer to an idea of why a definition would be moving about on us, as new uses reinterpret it–though maybe that’s got a state space conceptualization, and maybe it’s another way of saying something pretty much the same… None of this makes for happy propositional logic–or first-order logic, or nonmonotonic logics either, I suspect.

On the other hand, and I think this is closer to what you’re getting at, we also consider certain creatures monsters when have no bearing or relation to us at all. This occurs, I think, when creatures are so distant from us that they are hard to understand. The hagfish (and other really odd sea creatures) or the star-eyed mole embody the bizarre in this way. H.P. Lovecraft made a (very poor) living off of writing about the completely inhuman and unhuman, making us afraid specifically because we could not relate to his monsters.

As for what constitutes a monster when we pick and choose parts from different animals and put them together, it’s really hard to say. It’s in some way related to what I’ve been talking about. Certain combinations may be pleasing to us for certain reasons, and other creatures are monstrosities. Why? Maybe they go too far in one direction, either too human or not human enough. But I think you’re right: there’s more there that I can’t seem to grasp. If only we could better define what makes something cute and what makes it a monstrous. Of course, that might be missing the point entirely.

That’s an interesting catch, of human parts common to the Greek mythical creatures… and temptingly consistent with theory built around abjection. With that we’ve got other stuff compiled, in tweets–where the etymological roots have been particularly interesting (was it Dan who posted about a root “to warn”?). It hovers in my mind without time materializing to try to aggregate it. Tweet aggregation could be productive… –> “Is there a cluster of meanings of this word in which fundamental parts of its meaning line up in an unexpected way?”

While my target post is an attempt to draw something out in a formal model–drawn from a monstrous Greek mythical creature, but intended to conceptualize literature rather than the way I used it–it’s guided in part by “common sense” construals and uses of the word “monster” as I have learned it, where in many cases it referred to things that were either large, powerful, or scary, or unfamiliar, or some combination of those, which seemed to be independent of similarity to human beings. There may be a systematic configuration of that part of “monster” semantics that fits tellingly into a psychoanalytic theory of abjection, but I’m not there yet. (There’s a PDF of a Behavioral and Brain Science article on a unified theory of repression, e.g., that’s going to have to wait while a lot of other stuff gets read! And with it, Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, which at this moment happens to be open but cannot get the time it deserves…)

And even with the continuing scientific controversy about psychoanalytic concepts, evident in the Open Peer Review section of that repression article just mentioned, abjection seems where it’s at for a close analysis of Frankenstein, for its conception of the monstrous. But I’m going to make myself stop there, since time to type is running out…

Principle Components Analysis of uses of “monster?” Hmm.