MONSTERS

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Rumour raced at once through Libya’s great cities,
Rumour, compared with whom no other is as swift.
She flourishes by speed, and gains strength as she goes:
first limited by fear, she soon reaches into the sky,
walks on the ground, and hides her head in the clouds.
Earth, incited to anger against the gods, so they say,
bore her last, a monster, vast and terrible, fleet-winged
and swift-footed, sister to Coeus and Enceladus,
who for every feather on her body has as many
watchful eyes below (marvellous to tell), as many
tongues speaking, as many listening ears.

Virgil, Aeneid BkIV:173-197

Book IV of Virgil's Aeneid portrays a flamboyant allegory of Fama, the Roman goddess of rumor. In this tale, rumor begins humbly, but quickly circulates throughout the city, and eventually extends her wings into the skies. Like a pathogen, rumor spreads in thin air. It amalgamates with the atmosphere as a kind of ethereal miasma. And perhaps miasma is fitting for rumor since Virgil's description of Fama is more grotesque than it is graceful. Rumor is not a radiant or angelic being, but rather some kind of uncanny creature, a "monstrous bird with many feathers, eyes, tongues, mouths, and ears" (Dyer 1989, 28). So rumor is a monster. But on the inverse, the monster itself is also a rumor. The monster as a cultural entity cannot escape the realm of rumors. The intensity of the monster's presence is equivalent with the amount its word is spread about and communicated person to person. The terror of the Yeti or the Sasquatch, whose existence remains unproven, comes not from its material or physical being, but from the collective belief of those convinced of its roaming "out there somewhere" (Abatemarco, 1). Likewise, ghosts and other spirits thrive off a common circulation of tales and folklore such as Bloody Mary or the Flying Dutchman, which empower them and bring them to life. The monster and the rumor are inseparable from another. As the town continues to whisper, gossip, and spread word, the monster's essence and capacity to instill fear grows in strength. As the rumors begin to dim and peter out however, the tangibility of its perceived terror disappears. Fear resides in the multiple - which is to say, fear resides in the Noise. Serres writes: "What terrifies is not the meaning of the noise...but the increasing multiplicity that says it" (Serres 1995, 66). The monster is more terrifying the more people reproduce its story.

But fear is not the only attribute that legitimizes the monster. In many European traditions during the nineteenth century, the Werewolf existed broadly as a supernatural transformation bestowed upon a person after death as punishment for moral wrongdoings during their lifetime (Mencej 2023, 196). As a result, the Werewolf was adopted into a wider cultural rhetoric where it was used as a derogatory term to badmouth individuals thought to be socially deviant or irregular (Mencej 2023, 202). To say someone was a Werewolf was to jeopardize their social status and to intentionally spread "bad" rumors about them. The Werewolf transcends the realm of terror as its influence proliferates a higher network of communication. In this sense, the monster does not simply dwell in the space of rumors, but is fundamentally synonymous with rumor itself. Linguistically, rumor and Noise are closely intertwined. The French 'rumeur' is both rumor or gossip, as well an indistinct rumbling sound - some kind of hubbub or murmuring. In Metamorphoses, Ovid depicts Fama's dwelling as an ever present reverberation reminiscent of the murmur of a distant sea (Ovid, Metamorphoses XII:39-52). For Serres, the rumor is a Noise, a stochastic turbulence that "acquires strength at the bifurcations" (Serres 1995, 58). The rumor is volatile and heterogeneous; it relays and breaks apart. Its propagation is a mechanism of disorganized recurrences which grow increasingly stronger with multiplicity (In Virgil's Aeneid, Fama gains strength as she accelerates, alluding to the plural nature of the rumor). A singular rumor cannot not exist, only the virality of multiple rumors. As the rumor is passed on, the notion of a single truth turns fuzzy and misconstrued. Instead, what becomes is the unstable buzzing of many truths, or rather, some Noise. The rumor is a virus, a rabid parasite. If the monster is a rumor, it starts with Noise.

According to Jeffrey Cohen, the monster's body is a cultural body (Cohen 1996, 4). In other words, any culture that spawns a monster projects something collectively felt or understood onto its body. This body, then, is an assemblage of some "fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy" (Cohen 1996, 4) shared by the many. Frankenstein embodies a mutual fear of technology, and Bigfoot a fear of nature. But a monster like Frankenstein is also born precisely out of technological desire, and the fascination of Bigfoot stems from a romanticized allure of the natural world. Thus, the monster is an incarnation of the cultural zeitgeist they are born in. The word monster comes from the Latin 'monstrum,' whose root word 'moneo' means "to warn," and refers to a kind of divine omen from the gods (Martinez 2022, 12-14). Given this, the cultural function of the monster has always been that of communication. It exists as an ostension or a critical moderator of "a time, a feeling, and a place" (Cohen 1996, 4).

Vampires were ancient monsters that originated pre-nineteenth century in an era deeply concerned with health and contagion (Bacon 2023, Howell 2021). Accordingly, the original connotations of the vampiric body always seem to be tied to "ideas of infection, pollution, and disease" (Bacon 2023, 2). But the true power of the monster lies in its mutability; its threat, Cohen states, comes from "its propensity to shift" (Cohen 1996, 5). The Werewolf adopted new meanings, allowing it to live on. Evidently, Vampires have not disappeared from a culture where scientific and medical breakthroughs have more or less neutralized a universal anxiety of plagues (prior to COVID-19) - so what do they represent today? Amanda Howell emphasizes one affiliation of the Vampire with nostalgia in contemporary culture (Howell 2021, 258). Once signifying a rampant fear of contagion, in the 21st century, the Vampire has transfigured its monstrosity to manifest counter-narratives of anti-modernity and collective desires of an aestheticized and forgotten past (Howell 2021, 259). The monster is able to reallocate its powers as the sands of the culture that surrounds it shifts. As such, the Vampire communicates these sensibilities, appearing mediatically in "gloom-ridden soundscapes of Goth youth and music cultures" or in the "retro opulence of velvet-swagged vampire bars and cafes" (Howell 2021, 258). If the monster's function is to warn, its body is by definition a channel that transmits information. To embody the milieu of culture is to continuously move along with it. But as such, the monster also becomes a communicative medium, repeatedly relaying the signal of culture as it evolves.

Rumor is mass media, and Noise is the monster's domain. It moves freely and effortlessly through various types of media to adapt to new forms of transmission. In more recent times, a Japanese yokai called Amabie has reappeared in the collective consciousness (Bekirov 2023). Occupying the space of multiplicity, Amabie first began to make Noise in the form of commonly distributed woodblock prints during the late Edo period. In many ways, like rumors, the woodblock print was a kind of viral media, foretelling the yokai's revival as an internet meme in 2020 during the COVID pandemic (Bekirov 2023, 126). In folklore, Amabie is a fish-like creature with ambiguous features resembling parts of a bird (Merli 2022, 11). Emerging from the sea - the Noise, Fama's house - it warns of imminent disease, instructing the town to draw and reproduce its likeness if it so hopes to prevent such a fate from occurring (Furukawa 2020, 531). The monster mediates a common message shared by the masses, it is no different from an omnipresent "word" on the street. Amabie's memetic revival in the public consciousness during the pandemic serves as the communicative means of "a certain cultural moment" (Cohen 1996, 4). Rumor dissolves into the environment. It manifests as gossip on the street or text in the newspaper, but also online in forum threads and viral memes. If the monster's body is a cultural body assembled in the virality of rumors, it becomes the means of that culture's communication by navigating through mass media.

The creation of monsters is contradictory. While the monster signifies something about the overarching zeitgeist of the culture that creates it, its form is always placed outside or alien to normality. Cohen highlights the monster's "ontological liminality," pointing to its "refusal to participate in the classificatory 'order of things'" (Cohen 1996, 6). Monsters are strange, they are feared for their irregularity and transgressive position as the unfamiliar third man. This is to say, monsters are Other, and as such, they are parasitic. But the parasite is not truly external - so is the monster really an outsider? The parasite is unwanted by the host, but it comes from the host itself, meaning it becomes parasitic only when the host "[asserts] the existence of boundaries" (Smith 2021, 184). Similarly, the telephone call is disrupted by Noise, but the Noise is internal and essential to the call itself. The monster disrupts or deviates from social norms, but society's arbitrary creation of those norms is precisely what makes their transgression seem monstrous in the first place. In reality, those differences - those fears, desires, anxieties, and fantasies made bizarre when projected onto the monster already exist internally and essentially within the body of culture itself. They are "rhetorically placed as distant and distinct" (Cohen 1996, 7), but they belong intrinsically to the cultural stock. The monster is internal, but becomes external as it is displaced by society.

Now, neo-liberal urban revitalization engages a similar contradiction. It claims to promote the vitality of the street, but sets up arbitrary boundaries and systems of control that make monsters out of the very things that give the city life. It fails to recognize that the city’s vitality lies in its inherent proclivity for randomness and chance. As Serres would say: "The town makes noise, but the noise makes the town" (Serres 1980, 14). Difference and disorder are internal to the city's milieu. But sonic, visual, spatial, and social complexity become monstrous and parasitic to the Silence mandated by the city. Noise pollution bylaws serve public health and safety but conflate volume with sonic diversity. Graffiti is censored and broken windows are wrongfully accused for rising crime rate. Communities are expelled, and public space is controlled, surveilled, and often times substituted entirely for profit-driven alternatives. The city fears Noise, but what constitutes as Noisy is decided by the city itself. Mladen Dolar points out that the uncanny (unheimlich) is inextricably tied to modernity such that it "constantly haunts it from the inside" (Dolar 1991, 7). He states:

"Ghosts, vampires, monsters, the undead dead, etc., flourish in an era when you might expect them to be dead and buried, without a place. They are something brought about by modernity itself" (Dolar 1991, 7).

Silence is homogeneity and sheer conformity. But paradoxically, its mere existence produces its difference, its Other. Thus, a monster is born in the Noise. Or rather, what should be clear by now is that there was always a monster in the Noise: the monster is the Noise itself. Let us consider Leviathan, the great world eater, the monster of all monsters. The frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes' 1651 publication Leviathan depicts a large body comprised entirely of countless smaller bodies (Hobbes 1651). Leviathan is plural and irrational. This notion is not unique. Serres writes: "It so happens that this collective was given the form of an animal: Leviathan" (Serres 1980, 10). Leviathan is the monstrous figurehead for the Noisy and collective milieu. A mythical sea-serpent, it is unmistakably the monster in the Noise - an amalgam of rumors, or as Cohen would say, "pure culture." Moreover, this monster is innately architectural, "a Babel in flesh and fleece" (Serres 1995, 124) and "an unfinished architectonic surrounded by noise" (Serres 1995, 24). Many stories of monster architectures have been told in the past. Impossible architectures that are neither utopias nor dystopias, but uncertain architectures that speculate on the possible. The CITYEATER is a monster that lurks on the street. A big parasite. An unknowable Leviathan. It is the Noisy and erratic miasma of rumors. The collective milieu of anxieties, desires, fears, and fantasies. The repressed, but ever-looming disorder that inhabits the street.