Here There Be Monsters Part Two

Rise of the Daikaijucene and Cosmovisions of Love

by Frank Spencer

I love writing about monsters, as I believe they hold a special place in human metaphors of being and becoming in life. This addition to my previous article entitled Here There Be Monsters honors the work of the amazing Genevieve Smith and The Kaiju Papers.

In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about my love for monsters, as they represent all that exists outside of the banality of the colonial/crisis project. As I stated in that article, monsters can certainly represent that which is harmful to the existence of life, but I’ve come to realize that they more often represent that which irrupts into our present system of hegemonic determinism and challenges our routine of lifeless separation. In other words, monsters represent the imaginal unknown that has the power to break the spell cast by the dark practitioners of rationalism, scientism, and imperialism.

“Certainly, to be monster is to inhabit the role of the vile and appalling, but the moniker of monster also belongs to all who chose to live “outside the constraints of the traditional.” (1) Monsters are not just those who shun the light; they are also those who embrace the imaginative expressions of life inside the liminal shadows of alternative realities. This is where my love for monsters resides… in the passion for the unfamiliar, the novel, the transformational, and that which is truly ALIVE — abductive, liminal, interconnected, vibrational, and emergent. (2) There a word for this love of monsters: teratophilia. Commonly defined as a sexual attraction to monsters, many recognize this “condition” as a way of seeing beauty outside of conventional standards. The dominant narratives that we live under set the norms for social engagement and integration, and these same norms create the boundaries beyond which the atypical and peculiar sojourn. However, where the weird and wild manifestations of life itself is concerned, the most monstrous position one can take is that of mass-producing reality. Inside the confines of our hyper-managed perspective, the monstrous is anything that attacks the expected, the identical, the regular, the ordinary; but it’s in the unexpected, the difference, the unusual, and the unique that life springs forth, and it’s in the cosmic dance of combinatorial possibilities that we experience transcendence. To be sure, the former is a type of monster, but the latter is a monster as well.

We need monsters. They humanize us, they rehumanize us, and they unravel the deception that monsters are separate from us. We are all monsters… sometimes that’s awful, and sometimes it’s a reflection of the beautiful weirdness, wildness, and strangeness of life itself. Embracing the liberating transformation beyond the impoverished imagination of sameness and control is to embrace the awe, wonder, and enchantment of monsters.

This is not to say that the monsters that shock and upend our stasis aren’t frightening, but rather that it’s in the terrifically terrifying presence of monsters that we are shaken from our slumber. And this means that we must be willing to go beyond our present reality into alternative realities — to intentionally go where the monsters live — if we are to see the living world in all of it’s untamable splendor anew, transforming through thresholds of cracks, edges, and shadows that only exist beyond the exposure of the well-worn known.” (1)

In the time since I wrote Part 1, I have had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with The Kaiju Papers project and it amazing creator Genevieve Smith. According to the official website,

“The Kaiju Papers is a collaborative transmedia arts and social justice advocacy project that combines futures thinking, political education, speculative fiction, and storytelling to build more just and equitable futures through the lens of Kaiju media. The Kaiju Papers… aims to answer the question, “What might the future(s) be like if humankind were to implement lessons from Kaiju about love, anti-fascism, the world, and ourselves?” (2)

For those who may not be familiar, the term “kaiju” is a Japanese word that translates literally as “strange beast,” but is usually translated as “monster.” In Western popular media, kaiju usually refers to the sci-fi monsters such as Godzilla, King Kong, Roman, King Ghidorah, and Gamera, but in Japanese “suitmation” cinema (tokusatsu), these monsters are referred to as daikaiju which translates as “giant strange beast” or “great monster” to denote the massive size of these colossal, city-stomping giants.

I was very excited to see Genevieve undertaking this project that highlights the connection between the emergently monstrous and futures consciousness, and especially happy that she has given so much love to to what we might categorize as metaphorical hyper-objects that elicit transfixing fascination across the world. According to philosopher Timothy Morton, hyper-objects are “objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity… Hyperobjects possess characteristics such as being viscous, non-local, time-stretched, interobjective, and phasing… The more we know about hyperobjects, the stranger they become. Thus hyperobjects embody a truth about what I once thought only applied to lifeforms, the truth of the strange stranger.” (3) Though Morton acknowledges that hyper objects have always existed — tectonic plates, the biosphere, black holes, the universe, etc. — he argues that we have been able to largely ignore them, as they have had little impact on our personal and tribal day-to-day activities. However, as Morton argues, a new category of hyper-object has arisen due to the influence of humans, one that he argues has already brought about the end of our so-called “ordered” world. Examples of the anthropocenic hyper-object include oil spills, the ubiquity of plastic, capitalism, the patriarchy, and climate change. Are daikaiju actually metaphorical hyper-objects, or are these massive monsters a way for us to explain, embody, embrace, and move beyond the overwhelming scale of our destructive hyper-object reality?

From a young age, I was a kaiju fanatic — a part of my larger embrace of all things otherworldly (For a glimpse into my sci-fi, fantasy, and spooktacular youth, see my Foucaultian heterotopic article I Was A Teenage Elseworlder). That love has never left me, and I can still recall in detail the first time I saw the miniature Shobijin priestesses who sing to Mothra, or Shin Hayata from the Science Patrol raising his Beta Capsule to mutate into the alien giant Ultraman. I always had a sense of the function of illusion that these cosmo-mytho creatures cast upon our personal and collective ontology, even if I didn’t have the knowledge to back it up. Without fully understanding why, I grokked these giant monsters not simply because they were mysterious, but because they told a better story than the one being offered to us by colonial modernity, a story of imaginal anticipation and transformational realities that liberate us to incarnate the vast wonder and enchantment of cosmic consciousness.

Through I lifetime of worldbuilding, I have found my self asking a similar question to the one being asked by Genevieve and The Kaiju Project: How can the fantastical realm of the otherworldly free us from modernity’s extractive and erasive “crisis-mind” — a construct that rejects life’s fertile promiscuity in favor of a never-ending cycle of techno-solutionist collapse — and usher us into a revolution of care, empathy, and love? Over those years, I’ve learned that recognizing, defining, and analyzing the anthropocentric hyper-objects may be important to a degree, but our wrestling with those threats and our seeming inability to do anything about them blinds us to a much larger and stranger beast than we have dared to dream or imagine. If the nuclear weapons that unleashed Godzilla are the hyper-object, then the emergence of the King of the Monsters is something else altogether. Hyper-objects are a vast web of exponential knowledge and events; the daikaiju transcend those events and knowledge. Where hyper-objects manifest in deep time and space, daikaiju inhabit and even deeper experience where time and space have no meaning. To sense, intuit, perceive, feel, and embody daikaiju is to break free from the limitations of the spatiotemporal metrics of Enlightenment reductionism. Like my encounter with the Icelandic glacier that unlocked in me the imaginal anticipation “to rampage through the quiet submission of our constructed realities and smash the walls of our distorted designs,” daikaiju offer us alternative futures that are impossible to ignore. Hyper-objects may disrupt our deception of normality, but the resulting daikaiju deconstruct and reconstruct our realities at the atomic level. When author Dougald Hine tells us, “Sometimes, you’re born into the ending of a world. This is something that has happened to others before, in other times and places. How do you know you’re living at the end of the world you were born into? A world is held together by a story, and when you’re living at the end of that world, then you’re at the end of the story, the narrative arc of that world,” (4) he is addressing both the hyper-object (the end of the world and its story) and the daikaiju (the awakening of a new story and future). Anthropocentric hyper-objects are both a deracination from life and the result of our deracination from life. Daikaiju re-root us in the biological, psycho-cosmological, and sacred dynamics of life itself.

Daikaiju are not hyper-objects; they are the cosmovisions of transformational futures! These cosmovisions of consciousness transcend our present reality, and move us beyond our “crisis of monsters” into the “liberation of the monstrous” that summons the revelatory relationality of being alive.

At this juncture, it’s important to understand that I’m not saying daikaiju are fairytales that grant us an illusory escape from the very real hyper-objects of our present polycrisis. In referring to daikaiju as cosmovisions, I am pointing out their genuine and often corporeal potential in life’s movement and unfolding futures. Just as hyper-objects are real but cannot be seen or often grasped, cosmovisions transcend spatiotemporal boundaries to embody transformative futures in the present — futures not born from the seeds of modernity’s polycrisis, but rather futures born from external fields, relationalities, and realities that are seeking hosts and conduits in the now. As philosopher Jeremy Johnson said,

“In order to move beyond the story of progress, it is necessary for us in the present to begin to live new kinds of futures. These futures are already in relation with us, and to the degree that we can learn to sense and imagine, hear and think with them, we begin to live them. Something of us already belongs to the future, and so we become emissaries from other ways of being and knowing. We live the present in such a way that other futures beyond that of collapse become ‘effective’ in our time and begin to provide the ‘adaptive’ strategies that go beyond mere survival. Living in a relational time of the present is how we open the future, and take the first tentative steps towards planetary community.” (5)

Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe expounds on this idea of new kinds of futures actually irrupting into our polycrisis of hyper-objects, and thereby releasing us from our metacrisis of heart-needy cosmovisions:

“For the task of hosting the impossible, the world summons a hard place and a crack, and in that crack she deposits an equation with no solution, a problem too difficult for the technicians of the day, a question heavier than the asking. The impossible is not what comes after we’ve tried and failed. The impossible is where we begin. The impossible is what summons us into a hidden life, into a strange corner of reality, into the poetry of the unresolved. If we stay with the crack, in her bosom, if we touch the wall long enough, we might become stranger than what can be walled off and obstructed. We’ve tried practical things. These are the days of the impossible.” (6)

In response to the anthropocentric hyper-objects that work to trap us in their crisis of collapse, I’ve identified five responding daikaiju cosmovisions with the power to “summon us into… a strange corner of reality” and embody us as “emissaries from other ways of being and knowing.”

1. Ancestral Daikaiju

This cosmovision emerges in response to the hyper-objects of individualism, disconnection, and colonial erasure. When we host the Transformation of Natural Foresight retreats, we collective engage in a palimpsest mapping exercise in which we forest bathe, meditate, build mandalas, etc., and the first part of that multi-day embodiment of cooperative perception and sense-making is a fireside communion around ancestral futures. As part of the transformations retreat journal, we include this contemplation:

“Ancestral Futures” is a phrase that beautifully intertwines the biological, psychological, and sacred dynamics of Memory and Imagination. Our physical bodies and our collective body act as the interface for these two critical dynamics of life itself. At first glance, we may believe that memory deals with the past, and imagination deals with the future, but in reality these two dynamics are inseparable. As we intentionally embrace the imaginative dreams that have been passed on to us from those that walked before, we can unlock the power of becoming the manifestation of those generative memories. Likewise, as those who are co-creating the future for ancestors yet-to-come, we are actively becoming the life-giving memories that will cultivate the imaginations of the future. As we walk down “memory lane” together, our past, present, and future imaginations are activated, and this allows us to embody memory as a map for developing futures consciousness. In building this map of memory, I can imagine — even experience — the deep time topography I am moving through. I can sense what it means to be a being inhabiting time, space, and experience, crossing an ancestral landscape that has both a different and connected arc to my own. My very cells vibrate to a deeper sense of place in the process of memory mapping. As landscape, nature, place, people and language writer Robert Macfarlane reminds us, paths are maps to other places, other times, and other realities — and they are not linear. They fold and fragment, and such is the beauty of diving deep into the twins of memory and imagination.” (7)

2. Pluriversal Daikaiju

This cosmovision emerges in response to the hyper-objects of hegemony, universalism, and exceptionalism. Writer Ariel Salleh has worked to introduce us to this first Daikaiju cosmovision.

“The Eurocentric fantasy of mastering nature has always been a problematic ontology. Ecologically minded feminists believe this ancient drive to power re-enacts a sublimated form of ‘mother killing’, allowing men to ‘birth themselves culturally’ without dependence on mysterious natural flows… Traditionally, the same patriarchal dissociation, or ‘othering’ mindset, has been used to keep Black folk and children in line, and it remains essential to military roles and policing. But if othering sets up an externalised world of objects and abstractions, its mirror image is sensuous and might be called ‘holding’. This reflects the original moment of human self-formation in a mother’s arms. Holding speaks our embeddedness in the metabolism of nature. And when people sense themselves as ‘nature-embodied’, they understand how all Life-on-Earth is linked to everything else… a pluriversal politics, inspired by the Zapatista practice of democracy, enjoys ‘a world in which many worlds fit’. This is the very definition of a pluriverse, and itcelebrates the practical creativity of peoples outside the global monoculture… A pluriverse fosters alternatives that can ground political change in biophysical processes. It is responsive to the material limits of geographic place. A Pluriversal New Deal will look for local models of commoning that preserve social diversity and biodiversity together. This ‘peoples paradigm’ reaches for a Biocivilisation to replace the life-negating formulae of viral states — and the lonely high-tech individualism expanding so rapidly under Big Data. Against the rationalist cogito of ‘I think, therefore I am’, contrast the profoundly healing South African ubuntu ethic, premised on the conviction that ‘I am because you are’. Other ways of worlding that understand humans as nature-in-embodied-form are buen vivir, eco-villages, hurai, the gift economy, kyosei, sentipensar and swaraj. These onto-epistemologies are now in conversation together, weaving a global tapestry of alternatives.” (8)

3. Eco-Mythic Daikaiju

This cosmovision emerges in response to the hyper-objects of peak-rationality, heroism, and colonial clearing. As eco-philosopher Sofia Batalha has noted, “Eco-mythic activism is not a romantic return to pure origins, nor a revivalist longing for lost golden ages. It does not seek essentialist identities or mythological nostalgia sanitized for modern consumption. Its terrain is explicitly anti-fascist, anti-extractivist, and anti-purist. It thrives in hybrid soil, composted with contradiction, diaspora, dissonance, and deep-time memory. It walks away from the well-marked lanes of neoliberal personal development that promise empowerment through self-optimization and sanitized spirituality. The serpents, sirens, and other mythic beings we walk with are not here to serve individual success stories. They are sovereign forces, unruly, unpredictable, and relational. They will not be silenced, allegorized, or reduced to affirmations of personal triumph. They initiate, destabilize, demand accountability, and sometimes devour. To walk with them is not to ascend, but to descend, to dissolve, and to co-compose new worlds from the ruins of the old.” (9)

4. Imaginal Daikaiju

This cosmovision emerges in response to the hyper objects of determinism, linearity, and analysis. I already touched on the idea of imagination when introducing the Ancestral Daikaiju, but the Imaginal Daikaiju is different in that it speaks to us about very real realms beyond our bounded and rational physicality — the metaphysical fields of what philosopher Eleanor Robins call the “consciousness contract” — where we draw upon transformational realities. According to the archetypal psychologist James Hillman,

“[T]here is a loving in dreamwork… Let us call it imaginal love… This love does not reach only towards unifying as we have been so tediously taught. When we love, we want to explore, to discriminate more and more widely, to extend the intricacy that intensifies intimacy. We are moved to the heart of what makes the notion of the imaginal so compelling, so mysterious and so fertile. In this vision of imagination, exploration and love are naturally and necessarily paired. I find it wonderful, and, once so clearly stated, quite obvious. Suddenly the world opens up. The primordial order of things is revealed. We are bound to this world by love and a natural desire to extend our intimacy with things through exploration. At work is a trinity of active principles in self reinforcing interdependence: exploring, loving and imagining provide the framework for an entire cosmology. Imagining, exploring and loving are the necessary responses to the mad surge of life at our roots. They are how we rejoice at the eachness of things: they are particular, plural and plural-izing. We having imaginings, explorings, lovings — active, diverse, rhizomatic. The more we imagine in particulars, the more complex, fascinating and loveable the world is. We have a deep need to be intimate with the things of the world. As Corbin has taught us, the central faculty of our human be-ing is imagination, and this is how it manifests most powerfully in us: as a drive towards increasing the range and extent of our intimacy — by loving more widely, more fully, more intricately, more completely. Imagining, exploring and loving to “extend the intricacy that intensifies intimacy” is how we are incarnate. It is our incarnation.” (10)

5. Holoptic Daikaiju

This cosmovision emerges in response to the hyper-objects of competition, separation, and singularity. Holoptic is an evo-eco-cosmovision that I’ve been working with for the past ~20 years, guiding my practice of futures thinking and, more accurately, my deep relationship with futures consciousness.

“The term holoptic refers to the compound eye of certain insects such as the dragonfly or some beetles. This holoptic eye covers the entire head of the insect, and allows them to have a “whole-eyed” perspective of their environment — front, back, and side-to-side, all at the same time and within the same 360° field of view… We should not confuse holopticism with transparency. Transparency means the capacity to see the actions of everyone, and often for the sake of conformity. Holopticism applies only when a whole emerges as an autonomous, perceivable entity from the retained diversity of the field… Every individual action modifies the whole which in return informs the player(s) about what to do next within their diverse positions, and so on. An unceasing feedback loop allows for the individual and the collective to communicate with one another… Due to the fact that holoptic vision sees the environment as a unique, autonomous whole entity, it is better suited to perceive and anticipate what is desiring to emerge through the simultaneous actions of the parts and the whole.” (11)

Unlike the hyper-objects that attempt to suppress, control, or eliminate these daikaiju through their over-whelming nihilism, the cosmovisions of ancestralism, pluriversality, eco-mythic narratives, imaginal fields, and holoptic futures invite us into a monstrously “diverse coherence” that re-join us into the life’s transformational directionality. As Genevieve Smith has said in the first edition of The Kaiju Papers Zine, “Are we not all strange beasts, figuring out how to be alive for the first time?” Indeed, we are! We are the conduits, the hosts, the avatars, and the incarnations of these daikaiju, and as such we invite these massive, strange futures to co-create worlds of evolutionary love.

Frank Spencer, Creative Director, TFSX

References:

1. Here There Be Monsters: Part 1 — Traversing the Cracks, Edges, and Shadows That Awaken Futures in All of Us. (https://medium.com/@thefuturesschool/here-there-be-monsters-9340c2f52f1c)
2. The Kaiju Papers website. (https://www.thekaijupapers.com/)
3. Hyperobjects. (https://virtualmmx.ddns.net/gbooks/HyperobjectsPhilosophyandEcologyaftertheEndoftheWorld.pdf)
4. The Examined Life: “How Do We Make Good Ruins?” (https://examined-life.com/interviews/dougald-hine/)
5. Mutations: “Integral Futuring” (https://mutations.blog/integral-futuring)
6. Bayo Akomolafe. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bayoakomolafe_sometimes-the-world-herself-groans-and-tires-activity-7456094625662128128-ot9O?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAADvSxoBwTdvJE9BvX4DLZZIzLZ7xcNDmOA)
7. The Transformations of Natural Foresight Journal (Available at my.TFSX.com)
8. Arena: Re-Worlding — With a Pluriversal New Deal. (https://arena.org.au/re-worlding-with-a-pluriversal-new-deal/)
9. Sofia Batalha, Eco-Mythic Activism. (https://sofiabatalha.substack.com/p/mythic-activism)
10. James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld. (https://ia801307.us.archive.org/35/items/james-hillman-the-dream-and-the-underworld-harper-row-1979/james-hillman-the-dream-and-the-underworld-harper-row-1979_text.pdf)
11. Frank Spencer, HOLOPTIC FORESIGHT DYNAMICS: THE “MANY-EYED” COOPERATIVE PERCEPTION OF EMERGENCE FOR CO-CREATION OF TRANSFORMATIVE FUTURES (PART 1) (https://tfsx.com/2024/10/holoptic-foresight-dynamics-the-many-eyed-cooperative-perception-of-emergence-for-co-creation-of-transformative-futures-part-1/)