‘Non humans only’ (2011) by Tove Kjellmark. Image description: a glass case on a metal trolley. The class case is filled with toy animals whose fur has been removed. A thick line of cords is connected to the glass case, and there is a painting of a small child hanging on the white wall next to the glass case. There is a window directly behind the glass case.
Drawing on feminist theory, decolonial theory, queer theory and critical disability studies, the Monsters of the Anthropocene Collaboratory invites creative and critical engagements with the figure of the monster in order to address questions of power, vulnerability and othering in the Anthropocene. To do so, the Collaboratory hosts a reading group series as well as a series of workshops and a mini-podcast series produced in collaboration with the University of Stavanger as part of the Monster Network’s regular podcast series Monster Talks. The aim of the Collaboratory is to foster interdisciplinary collaborations as well as create a space for co-writing research grant applications. In other words, we aim for the Collaboratory to be the beginnings of bigger and even more monstrous things yet to come.
If you are interested in participating in this monstrousness, you’re welcome to join us – the first two reading group meetings are open to all and take place on the 4th of February and 18th of March, both at 14:00 – 15:30 Oslo time on Zoom. After the 18th of March, we close the reading group meetings in order to allow the core group to focus on collaborations and research proposal writing. The workshops, however, remain open for all.
If you would like to participate in the first reading group meetings to find out if this is something for you, feel free to contact us at promisesofmonsters [at] gmail [dot] com to hear more and to get the Zoom link and password.
We will update this website with news of lectures, workshops and other events relating to the Monsters of the Anthropocene Collaboratory, but you can also read more at our OSEH website.
This blog-post is a companion text to the podcast episode Writing With.
Image description: Table filled with paper, writing utensils and mugs. You can see the hands of the people sitting around the table, holding pens and papers. Photo by Marie Blønd for ETHOS Lab.
Aino-Kaisa:
In academic writing, citations are the obvious sign of who you are thinking with and thus also writing with. Yet, there are always influences and companions in writing and thinking (and feeling) that remain uncited due to the limitations of the academic format. This is why we wanted to make a podcast about our writing companions; the ones we write with that remain uncited, but are maybe heard between the lines (a cat, a ghost, the ghost of the cats of the past)?
Writing is about making worlds, and it is therefore important to consider, who inhabits those worlds. Who are invited as companions in those worlds? If I write about writing with a cat, who am I writing it for? What is the use of my writing for the cat? As I explain in the podcast, I have recently been living, writing and thinking with a cat, which has raised some pressing questions about what I have come to call cat-writing, inspired by Haraways (2003, 3) “dog writing”. Can words ever describe the attempt to live ethically with a cat – and not just any cat, a particular cat that I live with, Sotku – and the problematics of having to sacrifice others for her to survive?
Yet, as a human being, I express myself with writing, reaching out to the world with words. The writing must continue, then, as cat-writing; with the cat, about cats, about writing with cats. Even though the cat herself always escapes, always refuses to settle into words.
As the Monster Network, we have also written texts together. In this process of co-writing, different writing companions – such as disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds, bodily/material realities and life histories – are brought together, even though we all spring from more or less similar interests and indebtedness to, for example, feminist/queer/postcolonial/more-than-human theories. This multiplicity of writing – how one’s “own voice” is always more than one – is what evokes the monstrous in writing.
Different methods and methodologies can also be used to perhaps tease out the monster, to craft the Frankensteinian creature into existence.
Line:
There is, indeed, a lot of debt in writing (as with all things). The writing ‘I’ owes a debt to past generations who created and sustained (though altered through repetition) the language used to express oneself in, as well as to future generations, who may or may not read the text. As Derrida suggests in Specters of Marx, one must learn to live in the company of such ghosts, as well as acknowledge this debt to the past and to the future as they haunt the present. In this sense, the writing ‘I’ speaks in multiple voices, is being spoken by the ghosts who came before and who come after.
While preparing the workshop ‘Writing Monsters’, Katrine Meldgaard Kjær and I discussed the figure of the exorcist – to the point of writing ‘exorcises’ rather than ‘exercises’ in our blogpost for this website. The exorcist, not least within popular culture, serves as a figure that gets rid of ghosts and demons, rids not least the female subject of multiple voices, makes sure she no longer speaks in tongues, in languages she has no right to know. There’s a violence in the exorcism, which is excused on the grounds of the humanist understanding of the subject as necessarily singular, as speaking in only one true voice. Katrine and I came up with the figure of the ‘intrasist’ as someone doing the opposite of the exorcist: an intrasist does not get rid of creatures that haunt the speaking, writing subject, but summons them, makes them appear not in order to be exorcised, but to be acknowledge, lived with, as a means of paying back our debt to them (this can never be fully done). A monster writing method may, then, be imagined as a summoning, an intrasism, a thinking with the other voices, not least those that contradict what we thought we wanted to say, or that speaks in tongues impossible to interpret, or that screams till our throats hurt, because what they want to say, what they want to speak through and with their host, is beyond any language, any known means of expression, still to come.
Aino-Kaisa:
The idea of intrasism is really intriguing, and I think that the practice of cat-writing can also be seen as a form of intrasism. Living with a companion animal, a carnivore, summons up the complex histories and possible futures between humans and their companion animals – as well as the messy entanglements of love and violence that these relationships entail also in the present. In this sense, cat-writing is what Donna Haraway (2016) might call “staying with the trouble” in the present. Perhaps, monstrous writing is also something that, as a process, asks us to be mindful of the troubles that occur in the present, at the present moment of the writing?
Line:
I definitely think that monster writing can be understood as the ethical urgency of ‘staying with the trouble’, that is, staying with troubling, haunting voices rather than exorcising them. I also like the idea of cat-writing as intrasism; the voices we speak or attempt to speak are not necessarily human, and our writing companions may be teaching us how to challenge the borders and boundaries between the human and the nonhuman as we write. That would, perhaps, be the cat as intrasist.
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“Sotku working as a writing companion.” In the image, there is a laptop with a bright screen in the background and, in the foreground, a cat’s head that blocks the keyboards and some of the screen. Image: Aino-Kaisa Koistinen.
Readings: Haraway, Donna J. (2003), The Companion Species Manifesto. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Haraway, Donna J. (2016), Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
In this episode of Monster Talks, Aino-Kaisa Koistinen (University of Jyväskylä) and Line Henriksen (IT University of Copenhagen) talk about the people, thoughts, creatures, objects and events that keep us company when we write, and that make writing possible – or sometimes impossible, even monstrously disturbing. They talk about their own writing companions, a cat and procrastination, and Kaisa Kortekallio (University of Helsinki) shares a story about writing with darkness, Katrine Meldgaard Kjær (IT University of Copenhagen) talks about writing with music, and Nina Lykke (Linköping University) introduces us to a series of writing companions and their stories.
Guest stars:
Katrine Meldgaard Kjær is an assistant professor at ITU. She works with interdisciplinary approaches to studying digital health, and is currently working on a project about medicinal cannabis. She has her PhD from the Department for the study of culture at University of Southern Denmark, and is based in Copenhagen.
Kaisa Kortekallio works on environmental speculations and embodied estrangement at the University of Helsinki. Whether dealing with climate change or winter depression, she prefers strategies of adaptation to those of warfare.
Nina Lykke is Professor Emerita, Dr. Phil. Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden, and Adjunct Professor, Aarhus University, Denmark. Author of numerous books, such as Cosmodolphins. Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and the Sacred (with Mette Bryld, 2000), Feminist Studies (2010), and Vibrant Death. A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning (forthcoming, 2021).
Monster Talks is a podcast series that explores the figure of the monster and the concept of the monstrous as important thinking tools for addressing dynamics of power, inclusion and exclusion, discrimination and violence. The podcast is made possible by the support of Nordic Culture Point and produced by The Monster Network in collaboration with Network for Gender Studies at UiS. All episodes are available from the podcast’s website at UiS.
Image description: Ghost Trees in Snow, Wikimedia Commons. Sheila Sund from Salem, United States. Image description: Snowy landscape. Two spruces covered in snow are almost swallowed by a white fog. The fog erases the line between ground and horizon.
We’re happy and excited to announce that the Monster Network has received funding for a two-year Collaboratory at the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, the University of Oslo, together with Rebecca Scherr (internal PI) and Hugo Reinert! The Collaboratory will take the shape of a reading group, and we will organize two workshops on the subjects of the monstrous and the Anthropocene. Keep an eye on our website for more information on the latest developments and possible ways of getting involved with the Collaboratory.
Until then (and after): beware the monsters of the Anthropocene.
Image description: Person, almost visible but largely transparent, holding a mug in a kitchen. Through the person we see various kitchen appliances. Photo copyright: Donna McCormack
We invite photographic submissions to a digital exhibition on the subject of chronic illness. Donna McCormack & Ingrid Young, exhibition organisers, welcome works in progress as well as finished pieces. Submissions are not limited by style or subject. We invite submissions from people who are living with or have been affected by chronic illness and who want to share their work. We are particularly interested in photographs that challenge traditional imagery of chronic illness, and that engage with queer, feminist or decolonial modes of capturing these experiences.
As part of the submission process, we ask you to provide a short description (max 200 words) of the image (or images) and say a little about how your image speaks to chronic illness.
Photographs will be hosted on the project website, and the exhibition will form part of the Visualising Bodies programme at the Being Human Festival in November 2020.
Deadline for submission: Friday, 6 November 2020
To find out more and to submit a photograph, please go here.
Any questions? Contact: capturingchronicillness@gmail.com
The Monster Network 