Meet the Monster: The Phenomenology of Bigfoot

 

Monsters are an odd thing: people encounter them but people never find them. What I mean by this is that monsters reveal themselves on their own terms but never ours. A resident of Washington State might meet Bigfoot on a dark country road but anyone who goes looking for Bigfoot meets empty air. Bigfoot does not appear as a thing present to hand but only as a numinous encounter. This strikes me as a basic trope of any monster narrative. The monster resists totalization: any attempt to locate, identify, classify, weigh or register the monster as a standard entity in relation to other standard entities comes up empty. Yet, just as the earnest searcher has given up on Nessie, his latest sonar sweep coming up as empty as every past sonar sweep, another sighting reignites his hopes! Perhaps there is no Nessie OR we need more powerful sonar equipment. A phenomenology, however, is constituted by bracketing that (to me) not very interesting question. Clearly, this suspense between legend and fact is part of what makes for a monster and if we were to resolve it one way or another we would have either a figment or a simple, unidentified animal and neither of those is a monster. This is because neither of these things disrupts a totality: each of them is a clear instance of a type and can be brought directly under a simple rubric. Each is an irruption brought back in relation to the categorical in the simplest way this can be done. If Bigfoot were an ape or Nessie a marine reptile each would lose all charm or interest except for a subset of zoologists. The same would hold if Bigfoot was a mangy bear or Nessie an oddly shaped log. They would be mere objects with no more claim to our attention than a host of other objects. Neither finding (and classifying) nor debunking monsters are any part of the monster hunter’s business in my humble opinion. The monster is not given as an object for direct inspection. If Bigfoot were an ape, frankly, we would have shot one by now and someone would have hooked Nessie long ago or found her bloated, floating corpse. I do not, then, think the about-to-be-found-but-never- located cryptid offers us much purchase on the nature of the monster.  

Let’s start again then: let‘s forget about what quantifiable, observable objects are ‘in’ the forest or the loch. Let’s admit that being always about to be but never actually found is essential to monstrosity and that a monster will lose his phenomenal essence the instant he is shot and tagged. Nor, I suspect, do we have any interest in a monster who is an actual object. Perhaps, then the monster represents an interest we have or an existential concern. Since we never find him and don’t deep down want to find him, he must represent a phenomenal residue left over AFTER everything findable is found. After everything is located and classified and weighed the monster is what is left over. The monster, then, would be the original object of experience in its object hood never to be reduced to the identity of the subject and its universal categories. The monster, then, is no more and no less than the other not reduced to the same! From the other-not-reduced-to-the-same the new can emerge so that the monster would then be, as Yeats had it, the possible emergence of the new from the repetition of the same! This is why NOT finding the monster is part of the narrative structure of the monster show which only gives us a tantalizing glimpse of a brown furry something! This, I think is not simply a reflection of the fact that there may be no monsters to show but is inherent to the narrative structure of cryptid shows: it is why people keep watching them as opposed to turning away in disgust! 

 This is just what Horkheimer and Adorno seem to tell us in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The monster is that original encounter with the otherness of the object world that elicits a gasp of surprise. This gasp of surprise names the sacred and terrible object irreducible to a previously encountered entity. The monster is the undifferentiated and non-categorical and, it seems, may be at the very origin of naming and language. This makes fear of the other the origin of consciousness and language. The monster is the first pure object that announces the supremacy of the object world over us poor, primitive, fearful humans. This takes shape in the concept of mana, or fearful and sacred power. A thing is now itself and the mana that inhabits it. The original tautology of being is broken. What is, is and is not itself. The undifferentiated cry of terror which is simply the reduplication of the original fear now becomes determinate speech. Mana is bound up in speech because both involve identity and difference: the thing is itself and yet the other. This means there will always be a monster of some sort I suppose, or at least will be so long as ‘enlightenment’ (and that goes back to Homer!) asserts the dominance of conceptual identity and repetition over archaic strata of experience it only replicates by seeking to supplant. The machines (including the conceptual sort) that save us from the monster, alas, become the new monsters. The robots (who embody instrumental rationality) become our masters! Such is the sum of our current efforts to heal the original split and reduce the thing and its mana back to the first unity.  On this reading the monster is the thingliest of things, the thing-in-itself, everything else being, by comparison, in us or assimilated to us. He is supreme objectivity without mediation and as such terrifying and sublime!      

Of course the assumption of this is that the object world is cold pitiless and indifferent and humanity’s dialectical other: that through which we become ourselves in striving to overcome. Nature is not our friend, to put it another way, until it has become humanized through labor (material and conceptual- a task which Hegel says must take us all the way to absolute knowledge!). There are other ways of articulating the primal experience besides fear though. One is love. We don’t begin in estrangement but in care, maternal care to be specific, both of the human mother and ‘mother nature’. So Augustine seems to tell us. The infant and mother are linked, pre-linked as it were, by a logos: the cycle of repletion and depletion that joins infant and mother by means of the breast. Each naturally needs the other because they are opposite poles of natural cycle. This is, perhaps, why in the City of God the monsters become not fearful but misunderstood. If we understood providence, we would see that the dog headed men and monopods who live in the antipodes are just children of God like us. They exhibit the variety of nature’s forms and are part of the circle of moral concern. They bear no freight of otherness, fear or threat. Bigfoot, if you knew him, would just be one of God’s family, perhaps related to us through Adam or perhaps not! He would be a brother or sister rather than an object of scientific curiosity or primeval terror. He would bear no fearful touch of that primal dominance of the object world that sets us at odds with God and nature and, indeed, ourselves. At any rate the monster in Augustine’s world is not the ‘object’ but pride and sin who emerge, early in the Confessions, as the envy that sets Romulus against Remus or Cain against Abel (under the persona of anonymous twins). The monster, here, is very definitely US.  In our sense of the term though, the monster is not a monster any longer once he is understood as a creature. For a charming take on this the reader should peruse the following drawings from Fortunio Liceti: (https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/fortunio-liceti-s-monsters-1665?fbclid=IwAR3twH-N0feWRK4briDkpQs6ovvgp9iQw-ZpL3i_k37m5WXGOwfm5dAtX8U). Liceti took the Augustinian view very much to heart!

Of course there is a third perspective on the monster and that is that of the human ‘others’ for whom they are not monstrous but familiar. The indigenous people of Indonesia know and respect the ‘hobbit folk’ in the sense of staying out of their hair. This is because they are folkloric or narrative objects not proto-scientific ones or primitive eruptions of the unconscious in an over enlightened technocratic society. They are part of the story world and, because of that, part of the forest in which the stories transpire. Please note that by a narrative object I do not mean a figment or a ‘myth’ (as in the improper use of that term). I mean a counter or figure in a narrative ‘language game’. I will not here, in the spirit of Lyotard AND of the title of my piece, make any effort to judge narrative language games by the standard of the denotative ‘science’ game or vice versa. I will assume narrative utterances about ‘characters’ and denotative utterances about ‘referents’ to be two ways of constructing a world and while one might, in some other discussion, be better than another that is not part of my concern here. We might, though, in such a context, ask if science puts us into contact with pure referents (as they are in themselves) or whether it also constructs narrative objects.   

This means that Bigfoot is a different thing, a different kind of entity, to those indigenous Americans who tell stories of him. One supposes he is never found by US because he is not a legitimate part of our stories. Bigfoot declines to be culturally appropriated! Thus, he is said by some to be hard to find because he dislikes white people and shuns their presence. He KNOWS which narrative world he belongs in! Certainly, he has no interest in being constructed as a worldly object by researchers. I have learned that for the Haida people and others of the west coast Bigfoot stories play with ideas of courtesy and relation more than fear, aggression or terror (though one doesn’t mess with him either). I suppose then he is not the ‘terror of the primary object’ but simply part of the reciprocity of being and may be, indeed, one of the guardians of it. Might one conceive him as a kind of mediator between the world of the forest and the human culture that interfaces with it?  

We have then several constructions of the monster to consider: as a crypto-entity in pop culture/science and always-potential-never-actual zoological object; as psychic residue of our archaic experience of the reality principle; as acceptable deviation from the presumed norm; and as a narrative entity who embodies reciprocal, convivial bonds of humanity and nature. The latter, of course is not a ‘monster’ at all, at least as we have been constructing it. These are three backdrops from which we can assemble a foreground entity out of the sounds and startling yet fleeting visual effects that make up a forest. THAT (lights and noises) is where we began and, alas, where we end. To quote a certain poet: “’Issues from the hand of God the simple soul’ to a flat world of changing lights and noise; to light, to dark, dry or damp, chilly or warm.” This bring us back, I suppose to Protagoras the Sophist and perhaps to Plato’s account of what is true in sensation! That, though, brings us very far from the subject of monsters.