ABERRATE

CONJUGATE

From the dictionary:

APOSTATIZE: to abandon one's beliefs or church; 
to forsake one's principles or faith 

(next word down: )
APOSTEMATE: to form into an abscess; 
to swell and fill with pus 

and how about: 
APODEME: the plates of chitin which pass inward from the 
exoskeleton of anthropods and divide as well as 
support the internal organs 

next word down: 
APODICTIC: absolute certainty 

Twisting free into a monstrous overlap of differences, the shingle effect (imbricated and overlapping 'hIstorical' and 'ontological' regions)of post-modernism is late-modernist in its iteration of differences which the early moderns--Nietzche, Freud, Marx, etc.--sought to excavate in various personal and social strata. This disseminative effect now threatens (or promises, depending on one's frame) to undo even the remainder of historicity which exceeds this overlap. This overlap, remainder, residue, is compounded of certain ideas of connectivity and stability and their absence (of possibilities of meaning-making, whole-ness, 'presence' as it is now defined in philosophical and critical circles.) The continued tectonic shifting, however, of those great continent-like verities of human existence continues to be engineered by the great modernist severing of historical sequence and positioning. Progress now appears, diochronically, as the untwisting or drift of these great plates rather than their being gathered into a comprehensive bundle of sensibilities and rational actions as the great figures of the late nineteenth century foresaw and for which there is considerable nostalgia now.

This 'twisting free' from even the space of modernity (a space which was apparently incapable of seeing the full implications of its various programs) is only prefigured by the post-modernist tropes of fragmentation, pastiche, historical retrieval and the like.

Everything now belongs to one genre or another, separate, stratified entities which can undergo methodological excavation, extrapolation, and finally, the end result of monstration, the fusing of categories, the blurring, dislocation and creation of new boundaries. In other words: we devise techniques for teasing out differences, for finding iteration and difference in sheer repetition, for further categorization and exemplification, only to find that we then become privy to the 'secrets' (since we have very patiently and scientifically exhumed them) of the formation of species, personalities, societal formations, the material constitution of material objects and entities, genres, (and in fact have formed a literary genre--science fiction--because of our infatuation with the cleverness of that methodology and its potential impact on human life). But the inevitable correlate of analytic process--synthesis--still awaits us. The question is: under what aegis will this take place? Under all former system formations the lot of all analysis was to be sublated into a technological correlate with the human psyche, even if the ostensible target of analysis was the transcendental state of the human soul, inevitably the impact was measured in human dimensions. There was always an ethical underpinning so that the nature of epistemology and the nature of ethics seemed to be marks raised on the same substrate. In all times there has probably been incremental accretion (a form of iteration) in knowledge systems and formation of investigative methodologies with the difference that the torsion thus induced in systems of 'presence' had nowhere near the effect of modern philosophies of absence, driven by the analytic methods of science. The thing that comes after all the moderns is the fusion of genres, the confusion of the species, the interchangeability of the sexes, the dissection and re-alignment of selves, the fabrication of virtualities, an intense indifference leading to a blurring (let us not forget that blurring comes from great speed in relation to a fixed point of view). We are in the realm of monsters.

"...'monster' also means something shown, proven, or demonstrated--like an idea or argument. From the Latin 'monstum', 'monster' originally meant a divine portent or warning, so that from the outset it has born a prophetic relationship to, or has been a sign of, the future...the french 'monstre' (a relative of 'monster', to show) was once in English a now obsolete form of monster, and meant both something huge or enormous, and a demonstration or proof; to ' monstrate' is to prove; a monstration means a demonstration and the archaic verb ' to monster' meant to exhibit or point. Theory, then, the showing or demonstration of an argument or concept, is not only bound up with vision, but the very notion of showing is itself bound up with, or indeed a synonym for, monstrosity: monstrosity is as involved with demonstrating and proving as proving is with monstrosity."

Barbara Freeman

Thus, the category of the monstrous is not, strictly speaking, a category at all but rather the node at which categories cross and blur. Also, the point at which such a singularity becomes manifest. The confusion of categories is necessary but not sufficient to create the singular. With the emergence(y) comes the monstrous, a demonstration of the crossing, the singularity is the crossing, at the occasion of the crossing and not the assemblages or typologies in either side. It is not even a point of gathering and dispersal as perhaps an evolutionary theory would posit for a singular arena for punctuated evolutionary change. There is no genealogy which can issue from the monstrous (for the same reason that theory is sterile) or the singular, no proliferation or replication of its kind, for it is not a 'kind' (and perhaps for that very reason cannot be kind since the ethical variant of the term would seem to be tied to the necessity of there being more than one of a kind.) Thus, being a kind of and being kind to are inextricably linked. That is precisely why we fear the monstrous: it is not a 'kind' of anything (in the sense of being a singular representative for a larger ensemble) and hence is not susceptible to the cultural blandishments and social controls (the monster cannot be taken hostage; who would pay the release payment?) which 'kinds of' and 'kins' must operate within. It is not that it's controls are absent but that they are fused and can't be operated either historically\diachronically or ethically/synchronically. No appeal can work because there is nothing to appeal to and nothing to work toward or against. What can work against something which is out-of-history (at least viewed close-up) and from which one can take no hostages?

In western culture, X marks the spot of the unknown, as in more than one science fiction film from the fifties, but it is more properly a chiasmic X, a place of meeting, crossing and reversing; and while it is not replicable, it may be repeating or perhaps even iterative. (It may not be possible to adjudicate the positioning of the line between repetition/iteration as regards the emergence of the monstrous since such judgements rely on standards of historicity which the singular repudiates and effaces and, from the point of the planar assemblages ('normality') fore and aft of X-marks-the-spot, defaces.

To quote Rudolf Gasche, " Chiasm or chiasmus is an anglicization of the chiasma, which designates an arrangement of two lines crossed like the letter X (chi) and refers in particular to cross-shaped sticks, to a diagonally arranged bandage, or to a cruciform incision. As a grammatical and rhetorical device, the figure of chiasm corresponds basically to inverted parallelism." (Introduction to Readings in Interpretation, Warminski)

Conceptually, Gasche points out that chiasm is "one of the earliest forms of thought: it allows the drawing apart and bringing together of opposite functions or terms and entwines them within as identity of movements" and that "chiasmic reversals secure (because of this inverted parallelism) the agreement of a thing at variance with itself."

What is of primary interest to us here, however, is not some primitive (as in prime) dialectics, although that point of intersection is necessary for an understanding of the monstrous, but rather the extent to which this folding of opposites over and past one another leaves an unaccountable residue, an unsublatable portion, an unequal prong of the X or as Jacques Derrida puts it "the chiasm folds itself with a supplementary flexion". (Positions, Derrida) In the Law of Genre, Derrida further elaborated the chiasmic invagination which makes problematic the notion of the boundary, or a distinct delineation of the set of conditions which constitute the extent of the range of an ensemble. Therefore, non-closure is always, at the least, a possibility; all the conditions for boundary maintenance cannot be fully enumerated or demonstrated. The attempt to de-monstrate (beyond the confines of the enclosure--and hence to 'show' the enclosure itself) is a monstrosity. It is not that the chiasmic point cannot be captured, it is that it cannot be fully captured: the residue is the revenant, the haunting, a return and subsequent blurring.

This inverted, parallel, incompletely recuperative, non-closeable state of affairs is the condition of genre and typology (and signature) on one side and the condition of loss, combination, smearing and monstrosity on the other. It is the always open transformative possibility and its subsequent collapse and falling away.

On one side there is the optic, the condition of possibility of seeing, a photo-tropism which guides and arranges along the lines of orientation which are peculiar to the eye and the distinctions it must have to operate. Modernism, western culture and philosophy are phenomena of the eye par excellance, the sun god shines benevolently on them, bestowing its sharp outlines and quick co-ordination in the light of the noon-day.

But past the fold, along the supplementary flexion and down the unequal fork, skoto-tropism prevails, an orientation towards large, dark masses. The eye has no purchase here because there is no light; or rather only a light refracted through a dense and turgid medium (porous but not transparent), a presence defined through its lack. It is the pull of a vacated space, of a vacuum.

The monstrous is not this vacuum but rather the filling of this emptiness, not with the straight edges of definition, of signing, of typologizing epistemological increments which gradually build a rational space but rather the gloppy splatterings of cells which have lost their membranes, their 'integrity', and yet retain the now un-wholey urge to merge, to complete their visibility out of the glare and gaze of the sun (recall the glottals of Derrida's Glas), where their parts cannot be enumerated. But that is precisely the 'problem' for the count goes wrong: there are too many or not enough eyes, legs, arms, testicles, noses. And bits of debris have been sucked in, pieces of machinery, rectangular blocks, gears, chips of stone, slabs of flesh. But the ability to clear the path, to clean house (heimlich/unheimlich), to count properly, to find the edge has been lost due to skotoma, a dark spot in the field of vision. That spot made manifest (de-monstrated) is the crossing, the chiasmus, the monstrous fusion of effects, devices, organisms: an event can't be seen, can't be written and can only be felt in its perturbation of affect, of history. A black body, passing through, un-reflected but deflecting, fractionating, speciating and fusing. Bending and warping are but precursors. There is a torsion.