Liminal, Loathing & Leveling-Up: The Biological Inevitability of Monstrosity
“Having worn out their welcome in religion, natural history and travelers’ tales, the monsters settled into their new abode of human psychology.” (Asma, 2009)
Monstrosity has always been a means of understanding the unknown. Stephen Asma argues that humanity has consistently constructed and attributed monstrosity to biology, resulting in ideology, fear, entertainment, evolution and ultimately, perceptions of progress. That the monstrous is all too necessary. He does this in laying out his argument over three distinct time periods. A theological period where monstrosity is characterized by fear, an evolutionary period where it becomes understood through method, and finally through a technological period of absorption. Within these distinct periods Asma frames his discussion through a series of structuralist binaries, where liminal ambiguity provides a convenient home for the biological necessity he proposes.
These binaries help to define liminal spaces of fear, but also delineate between the objectification of monsters and the behavior of monstrosity. They provide the necessary guardrails between repulsion and attraction, the sacred and the profane, us and them, internal and external, freedom and oppression, the known and the unknown. Our societal and cultural fascination with monstrosity is attributed to the liminal, to thresholds, to transgression and deviance. Horror is attributed to the distance from the known. And biological protection comes from the psychological safety that we ourselves are not monstrous. For Asma, the biology of monstrosity is always a human construct, however uncanny or supernatural.
But whereas Asma frames his argument as one of necessity, that we have relied upon the role of monsters for evolutionary advantage and biological understanding, we can argue that monstrosity is also inevitable. That humanity has always constructed monsters and attributed monstrosity to biology, but there is an inevitability to humans evolving their own biology, creating cultures where monstrous absorption becomes normalized in the spirit of technological and societal progress. Where Asma attributes monstrosity to biological necessity, he stops short of an argument of inevitability. His hypothesis being if we absorb and transcend the biologically monstrous, then there is less to fear in an increasingly uncertain secular world of external and societal monstrosity. That we no longer need monsters to make sense of the world if we’ve normalized and absorbed the monsters within ourselves. When we as humans inevitably play God.
Fundamental binaries of good and bad, reason and superstition, the sacred and the profane, illusion and reality, fear and hope, and ultimately Man and God strongly characterize this first theological period. But it’s also an era where Asma asserts that monsters are believed to be metaphysically real. They are part of the natural world, and evidence of their presence is the same as evidence of God, but also of man’s hubris. They balance God’s righteous demonstrations of superior power, something we can only defeat through the salvation of trust, worship and ritual.
We see this in Greek tragedy and Homeric tradition as the phantasmagorical miasma which hovers around a corpse, becomes contagious, and fosters retribution, most memorably in Aeschylus’ Orestia, with its literal furies and inter-generational monstrosity. This miasma is chemical and biological, but it’s also elemental and manifests itself into the actions of the polluted. The Greek ‘psyche’, Asma argues, is broad in scope and more aligned with the concept of unique human psychology rather than inner cognitive self, but both concern themselves with a soul. However, that reading only extends to humans. The biology of animals is closely aligned with the ritual of foretelling the future, and when that biological, ritual sacrifice produces deviance, it is correlated with bad omens. Monsters are the protagonists of trouble ahead.
Later in the theological era, Asma contends that “the message of medieval monsterology is that the causes and cures of monsters are spiritual in nature. Human pride may bring them out, but they are metaphysically real. Heroism of the pagan variety will not conquer the monsters. Only submission to Gods and humility will beat back the enemy” (Asma, 2009). Both Christians and Muslims held deep-rooted fears of the monstrous unknown, and whereas Aeschylus’s tales are ones of indefinite resolution, Alexander’s tales are ones of containment. If the unknown and unnamed were seen as the antitheses of civilization, then the releasing of these forces heralded the apocalypse. Containment, first as Alexander’s ‘gates’ but later as boundaries and thresholds in cartography begin to associate the notion of ‘monster’ with the national idea of ‘foreign’. The designation of infidel nations, and monstrous races onto which we project our worst fears not only allows us to hold the unknown at a distance, but also casts an omnipresent threat of chaos and end times upon the heads of Christians. It’s us and them. As Asma explains “the cursed sons of Cain will finally burst forth from the gates, and the realm of the reprobate will be emptied into the geographic world” (Asma, 2009). This fear becomes a biological reality but also a political necessity and effective means of societal control.
This use of monstrous distance and containment continues through the second of Asma’s distinct phases, that of evolutionary necessity, where enlightened binaries of angst and optimism, labelled and unclassified, known and unknowable, repulsion and attraction, internal and external, natural and fabricated appear. Monsters begin to be understood through documented empirical method, curiosity and enquiry rather than seen as creations of a whimsical divinity or explained as repercussions and consequence of proud or sinful behavior. They are seen as organic, logical, and inclusive parts of the world, even if they still foster fear, repulsion and deviance. Our classification of them eases our anxiety, and our curiosity towards them through entertainment remains as strong as ever.
If the monstrous in the theological era is characterized by fear, then the evolutionary era seeks to manage and ultimately eradicate that fear through documented reason and observation. Management of the unknown becomes more common through scientific enquiry, which increasingly develops in binary opposition against organized religious belief. Explanations of nature versus those of the whimsical divine lead to greater understandings of lineage, adaptation, our place in time, biological evolution, and the environmental circumstances in the world which produce these kinds of internal and external notions of the monstrous. The liminal spaces of uncertainty are different, but still present.
Asma argues that we still process and manage our uncertain understanding of the monstrous through curiosity, but that this splits into two distinct observational approaches. Curiosity for entertainment and commercial gain, and curiosity for scientific understanding. He characterizes these thoughts as efforts toward ‘eradicating the fantastic’ (Asma, 2009), and outlines a more objective zoology through amassed collections, specimens and taxonomies being brought back from elsewhere in the world as travel also becomes more prevalent and possible. This ‘bringing back’ from foreign lands leads Bacon to call for scientific societies to democratize and share this knowledge and information in the spirit of managing the unknown through experimental observation, classification and labelling, a process which still happens today.
So as humans start to master and control their own understanding of the natural world, they start to pull away from other animals (and each other) in faculty. Asma aligns this thought with knowledge deriving specifically from systemic, experimental, controlled observation, rather than from scripture and classical tradition. The very notion of divine influence as a creative force is questioned. Rational thought begins to master and overcome the theologically monstrous, with Asma continuing that “the savants of this era believed that a universal rationality operated below the surface of idiosyncratic cultural bias and could be accessed through careful empirical analysis and mathematics” (Asma, 2009). Access to knowledge no longer needed to be channeled exclusively through God.
Observation fueled by fascination and curiosity in managing that which is ‘not us’ still needed to exercise caution around the gullibility of humans for invented myths and monsters, with the main combative technique being the rational naming and grouping of species which helped move from bestiaries to encyclopedic categorization. The fantastic begins to fade away as science separates empirical understanding from the stories we tell ourselves. Asma argues that despite this, we still seek entertainment through the exotic and deviant, and continue to have a ‘strong taste for the abnormal’ (Asma, 2009), irrespective of how disguised as science it may be.
So in the evolutionary era there’s an intense fascination with the observed as a means of managing and mastering the unknown, of that which is not us, which leads to the very rejection of a designing force in nature. The liminal spaces in which the monstrous thrives begin to shrink. But if there’s no consciously divine craftsmanship at work, we still struggle to make sense of the world around us, and increasingly within us. To solve for this, and in moving into the more recent technological era, we choose to absorb the monstrous within ourselves, expand our observation to entire societies, and join with the objects we make to control our fears.
Modern monstrosity in the technological era concerns itself more with human vulnerability. If the natural world has been mastered and managed, and categorization has run its course, then our primary source of the unknown becomes the behavior of those who are not us. The monstrous turns inward upon itself, which we see in early examples of gothic literature, and also thrives today in modern horror movies. But where Asma sees this inward trajectory as consequence of evolutionary understanding running its course, we can go further in proposing that there’s an inevitable culture of incremental boundary pushing which leads not only to more normalization of the previously monstrous, but more and more extreme versions of it. It creates a separation of past and future monstrosity, with the present the liminal voltage propelling narrative forward and seeking resolution. Asma outlines the lineage of cinematic terror through divine means in the seventies, through slasher films in the eighties, and through to the torture porn of modern horror in the early twenty-first century. And he equates sin as a through line in inviting the wrath of others, and perhaps even as simple observers of this entertainment, we’re complicit in that monstrosity. The monstrous is sanitized and held at a safe celluloid distance from which we still willingly watch through our fingers. Here the movies fill the present liminal vacuum of the godless, where flesh is expendable, synthetic blood spills cheap, and fear is commoditized.
So while the monstrous is still weaponized for entertainment, Asma also discusses a broader societal strain in acts of terrorism, mass murder, and the atrocities we reap upon ourselves. Asma doesn’t explicitly say this, but to continue his thought about eras of the monstrous running their course, when categorization and management of the monstrous expends itself, monstrosity again inevitably turns inward upon itself, and this time we exact wrath upon each other. If in the evolutionary era we observed empirically, here our modern, technological observations turn to criticism, judgment, and blame.
Asma concludes with an exploration of biotechnology, where humans play God with their own kind through genetic manipulation, cosmetic correction, and how the monstrous is now a simple matter of choice. As Asma calls it, ‘the all too human urge to escape aging and death’ (Asma, 2009). Here we reconstruct ourselves into the image of the uncanny, where the body becomes more plastic and open to manipulation than ever before. If God is a watch maker, we no longer have to keep time in the clock we’re born into. We deliberately, consciously absorb the monstrous within ourselves, eliminate it surgically, course-correct our own biology, cure disease and transcend the process of aging. By absorbing the monstrous within our own bodies, it’s easier to control it over an external force. But of course, if there’s no differentiation, then we’ve become the monsters ourselves.
Asma’s comprehensive chronology of monstrosity compiles a wonderful taxonomy of our deepest fears. But whereas he articulates this biological history through a distinct series of course-running, expendable waves which crash against each other over time, he stops short of drawing a holistic through line of inevitability from then to now. That the process of normalization over time is a natural part of our understanding of the world, but also the deterministic overcoming of fear. That this normalization is unavoidable on the path of human progress and understanding. That while Asma talks of the necessity of the monstrous in helping us understand ourselves and the world around us, he doesn’t go as far as to state that it was always thus and always will be. That liminal vacuums grow and shrink as the monstrous gets absorbed by its surrounding binaries, but that humans will inevitably seek out more and more creative ways to gouge out those spaces of the unknown.
If Asma sees the monstrous as a biological necessity, we can also see it as inevitability. The monstrous isn’t just something we need to survive and overcome fear out of evolutionary need, but human progress itself and the march of technology in particular, is highly dependent upon the inevitability of absorbing, weaponizing, and conquering that which we will always seek to create. Eradication of the monstrous is inevitable, but it’s only a temporary stop on a dangerously infinite journey.
References:
Asma, S. (2009). On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. (New York: Oxford University Press).
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