2nd Global Conference

Monsters and the Monstrous:
Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil

Monday 10th May - Wednesday 12th May 2004
Budapest, Hungary

Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 3: Monsters Hopeful and Friendly
Chair: Fiona Peters

New Territories: Biology, Architecture, and the Hopeful Monster
Chris L Smith
Centre for Tectonic Cultures, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, United Kingdom

The monster I am concerned for is of the ‘hopeful' variety and it (re)emerges in philosophy at the juncture between the work of Gilles Deleuze and David Hume. Desiring to sire a “monstrous offspring”, Deleuze takes Hume ' s work and poses the problem; how is a subject constituted? Subjectivity, according to both Deleuze and Hume, is a habit and a fiction, but this is not to suggest that the expression of subjectivity should be disregarded. Rather, this subjectivity need be considered in terms of its acts and its margins . For them, nothing happens at the centre; there is no core of identity, but rather dispersed processes configure at the margins of self: The margins which bring it into proximity with the monstrous.
The paper is concerned with one hopeful monster and three primary texts. Two texts from two disciplines are explored; Richard Goldschmidt's The Material Basis of Evolution (1932) and Marco Frascari's Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory (1991). I am concerned with the textual construction of the ‘hopeful monster' in each text and for the monstrous acts they signify. Goldschmidt is interested in the monster as a biological subject that allows him to attack Darwin's theory of natural selection. Frascari ' s fetish for the monster relates to what he describes as the “excrescences and orifices” of architectural design and the monstrous subject is deployed specifically against the architecture of humanism. A third text, Deleuze's Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature (1953) is functional. This text provides the primary concepts through which the assemblages of the previous two are explored; through which the new and interdisciplinary territories of the monster are carved.

We Scare Because We Care: How Monsters Make Friends in Animated Feature Films
Richard Stamp
Bath Spa University College, United Kingdom

‘The things that we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.' – Disney Store motto, cited in Giroux, Impure Acts (2000).

All phenomena of friendship, all things and all beings to be loved, belong to spectrality. ‘It is necessary to love' means: the spectres, they are to be loved; the spectre must be respected' – Derrida, Politics of Friendship (1997)

From their inception Disney's animated feature-length films have held two elements in tandem: the thematic promotion of an ethical-political principle (indicated in the first epigraph) of friendship – from Bambi and Thumper via Pete's Dragon to Woody'n'Buzz; and the animator's prerogative of depicting non-human ‘subjects' – from cute woodland animals and magical creatures to malicious predators. In short: what interests me about Disney is this highly potent, but by no means unambiguous, ideological confluence of friendship and the non-human or the monstrous .
This paper is interested in the ethical and political problematics produced by this confluence; in particular, with respect to the more recent CGI-based films that have begun to monopolise Hollywood animated feature production. Following on from work by Byrne and McQuillan (1999) and Giroux (1999/2000) on the cultural politics of Disney, it will examine the ideological and pedagogical operations at work in the highly successful thematic of the ‘friendly monster' in films such as Monsters Inc (Disney/Pixar, 2001) and Finding Nemo (Disney/Pixar, 2003).
The paper focuses on the ambiguous effects of portraying monster characters in these two films, whether they are monsters ‘proper' (such as Sully and Mike) or fish (Bruce the Shark and ‘friends'): there is the sense that these films ‘rehabilitate' their monsters through demonstrating, or learning, friendship skills – respect, responsibility and responsiveness, etc. By becoming (better) friends, they become (more) human – scaring must become caring. ‘He's a good monster now, isn't he daddy…?' My daughter's question relates to wider debates over the ethics and politics of friendship (as indicated by the second epigraph): are there only ever human friends? Is ‘becoming friends' always humanising? And what kind of ‘humans'? Can friends ever remain with the ‘monstrous'? Might there not be an imperative to love the monstrous (the enemy, the fiend) within the most traditional concept of friendship? Always to love (and respect ) the fiend in the friend… In this respect, it will also be interesting to consider the strategies used by the makers of Shrek (Dreamworks, 2001) in an attempt to distance their monster from Disney's dominant model.

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