This post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second book sample series originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact“ (2024). That series was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two’s assorted chapters and its twin modules, the Undead and Demons. As usual, this promo series (and all its posts) are written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out now (5/1/2024)! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets'” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer at the bottom of the page.

Volume Two, part two: Gothic Poetics, Their History (opening)

“But you’re dead! You can’t taste, can’t smell!”

“Ah, but I remember!”

—Schmendrick the Magician and the Skull, The Last Unicorn (1982)

(artist: Quinnvincible)

Volume Two’s poetry and monster modules encapsulate Gothic poetics from two different ends; i.e., that which collectively concerns the imaginary past as something to reclaim and cultivate for a more intelligent and empathic Wisdom of the Ancients, pedagogy of the oppressed, etc. As such, Gothicists fear the return of a barbaric past; the way to escape that under Capitalism is to break Capitalist Realism—i.e., by studying the imaginary past as something to learn from and create new liberatory forms of “enslavement” with. Part one explores the usage of medieval poetics (of monsters, magic and myth) when making new proletarian histories (the Gothic—of which the Neo-Gothic revives in the present); part two reverses the arrangement, examining the history of these monstrous poetics in two basic modules that future workers can learn from while thinking like Gothic poets—through monstrous creation that represents struggle through monstrous identity as paradoxically pleasurable, cathartic.

When there’s hell to pay and Medusa’s out for blood, neither oral nor written traditions are enough to avoid state shift by themselves; they must be combined and considered as such: a new combination of both to avoid disaster with—holistically pushing for post-scarcity as something whose slow-but-steady progression moves as quickly away from older harmful systems as it can. This includes the uncontrolled chaos of the natural world as enslaved by Cartesian forces. Capital is an old, brutal system that enslaves nature to profit from its cheapening (thus genocide). We want to be stewards of nature (thus ourselves) by transforming capital (and “Rome”) from within using Gothic poetics as oral and written, half-real.

Monster Volume Outline, part two

“Didn’t you just love the picture? I did! But I just felt so sorry for the creature at the end!”

“What’d you want, for him to marry the girl?”

“He was kind of scary looking, but he wasn’t really all bad! I think he just craved a little affection! You know—the sense of being loved, needed, wanted?”

—The Girl and Richard Sherman, The Sever-Year Itch (1955)

This is the volume outline for Volume Two. The first half will be the same for parts one and two, summarizing the goal of the whole volume; the second half will list and summarize the main chapters/modules per volume half.

Capitalism leads to universal alienation, sexualization and fetishization to serve profit, which has a functional opposite—worker liberation. This means that monsters speak to the evil in and around us as a historical-material consequence of those dialectical-material forces. They take infinite forms, but do fall into some fairly distinct classes.

To that, Volume Two is composed of various essays/chapters, but primarily three modules that divide the volume in two, before segueing into Volume Three: our Poetry Module and Monster Modules, which holistically invite readers to partake in all monsters to find what is useful between them. That is, rather than focus on one exclusively for the entire book, my focus is diversity-as-strength to contribute towards monstrous pedagogies of the oppressed; i.e., on holistic modularity with emphasis as needed to better illustrate (thus achieve) intersectional solidarity through oppositional praxis, mid-synthesis. To that, I implore you to try things out—to mix, match and combine rather than specialize in just one, when making your own. Most people have a preference, but most monsters are also quite flexible, walking the line between demon, undead and/or animal during the Gothic’s fatal nostalgia and “exploitation” put into quotes; the more flexible the monster, the more flexible the mind using it as a critical humanizing lens. I try to cover the classic monsters, here, but may leave something out:

(artist: Oh No Justino)

The state and workers are always at odds; the Gothic fixates on nature as fetishized and alien (monstrous-feminine) to better notify workers of the state in decay—i.e., as data that manifests linguo-materially as pain, stress and death in various half-real forms (meaning “between fiction and non-fiction”). The Poetry Module focuses on the poetic procedure regardless of the monster type; by comparison the Monster Modules consist of two primary halves—undead and demonic—of which animals (and other nature-themed beings) are included in the demonic side. This being said, there is an undead component to nature-as-alien being harvested by Cartesian forces, leading my thesis volume to argue (and my manifesto to both simplify and expound upon):

As a kind of deathly theatre mask, something else that’s equally important to consider about demons and the undead (and which we’ll bring up throughout the entire book) is that animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms; i.e., stigma animals relayed through demonic BDSM and rituals of power expression and exchange that embody hunters and hunted, predators and prey that play out through the ongoing battles and wars of culture, of the mind, of sexuality and praxis as traumatized: marked for trauma or by trauma that parallel our green and purple doubles onscreen.

So when I say “animalized” vis-à-vis Gothic aesthetics, this is predominantly what I mean (source).

All monsters are alien; Capitalism, Volume One argued, chattelizes workers to serve profit, making them (and those peoples and places in connection with them) alien and fetishized, thus ready to be abused in all the ways that Capitalism demands in order to profit. In turn, power and material flow towards the state through the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection; i.e., by sexualizing everything to serve profit through Gothic poetics that flow power towards the state. As my thesis statement from Volume Zero argues:

Capitalism dimorphically sexualizes all work to some degree, including sex work, resulting in sex-coercive media and gender roles via universal alienation through monstrous language; this requires an iconoclasm to combat the systemic bigotries that result—a (as the title reads) ‘liberating of sex work under Capitalism through iconoclastic art.’ Gothic Communism is our ticket towards that end (source).

All in all, the Gothic plays with the past as monstrous. Put in more blunt language, the monstrous past becomes something to, at times, quite literally fuck with, mid-consumption; i.e., in ways that cross undead, demonic and animalistic forms during a social-sexual ritual of some kind or another as meant to humanize the dehumanized: the alien, the other as normally ripe for slaughter by Cartesian forces, but for us expresses in delicious, food-like forms of theatre that are quite old—the Comedy and the Drama, but also the Ancient Romance revived in Neo-Gothic forms. On the Internet, workers can take things further than historical forms have dared to. We can embody the imaginary past as something to recultivate in ways that change the flow of things by literally fucking with it ourselves:

(exhibit 33b1b: Model and artist: Jericho and Persephone van der Waard. Often, an effective way to humanize monsters is to romance them; e.g., Beauty and the Beast or The Creature from the Black Lagoon [1954]. However, those narratives “transform” the monster, either killing/banishing them [as with the Creature] or converting them into an acceptable human shape [the Beast]. The latter is as much a historical-material concession of the princess as it is the monster itself: the canonical “kissing of toads,” hoping they turn into princes [which isn’t really fair to actual toads or those who identify with them. Indeed, many monster-fuckers hope the monster stays exactly the way it is].)

These are the primary sections/chapters of part two of the volume. Modules are sections that concern multiple chapters (which divide into subchapters that I will not list/summarize here):

“‘In Search of the Secret Spell’: Digging Our Own Graves; or, Playing with Dead Things (the Imaginary Past) as Verboten and Carte-Blanche (feat. Samus Aran)” (chapter): “Sets the table” by transitioning from what Volume Two, part one outlined (using Gothic poetics to make new histories/a sex-positive Wisdom of the Ancients) to focus on the imaginary historical aspect of Gothic ancestry we’re always inheriting, playing with and subsequently learning from as a self-defining exercise. This chapter outlines the riddle of exploring said past as “half-real,” commonly as a member of the privileged group (the Anglo-American middle class) whose various privileges intersect with various axes of oppression (similarity amid difference) that allow us to play with the past and heal from its older rapes by putting “rape” in quotes; i.e., to cultivate a pedagogy of the oppressed that acknowledges power abuse (which is what rape is) dressed up as xenophilic ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., a complicated, multimedia and transgenerational means of liminal expression that can serve workers or the state, but for us is a potent means of interrogating trauma to prevent it again in the future.

The Undead (module): This module explores the undead as creatures driven less by active intelligence and more by a desire to freeze and feed in the buried presence of trauma and harmful conditions. It explores how the state’s monopolies lead to a state of exception within its sites of settler-colonial violence, which in turn create a violent upheaval/silent scream among the oppressed and oppressors alike; i.e., the voice of colonial trauma and the vengeful, desperate feeding on the living by the undead as the genocided dead, having come home to roost—zombies. However, the alienation and feeding also affect the ruler class, leading to vampirism as a canonical effect that must be personified in healthier forms of medieval nostalgia that, for their usual logical motions, become ghost-like, copied and imperfect. Reclaiming these modules requires embodying and subverting the very traumas the state relies on to control us by keeping us hungry and braindead (a process I call “lobotomization”)—to, as the undead generally do, paralyze our prey and feed on their frozen bodies, albeit in ways that pointedly develop Gothic Communism.

Demons (module): This module explores demons as actively cunning-yet-alien shapeshifters, presented canonically as treacherous within forbidden knowledge and power exchange; i.e., as untrustworthy beings made deceitful and torturous through the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection. As such, they are manmade, presented as occult beings that are summoned, composite bodies that are built (cyborgs, golems and robots), or overtly natural totems that are hunted down within nature-as-alien in either case: something to present as demonic, then isolate, dehumanize and invade under Cartesian duress. Reclaiming them requires embodying and subversively humanizing the Satanic transformative power they provide, generally in defense of nature as made alien by state forces (the trifectas, monopolies and their proponents)—to imbue with transformative fatal power that, in some shape or form, targets us for state abuse, which we subvert mid-exchange away from Capitalism’s usual tortures and towards Gothic Communism’s unknown pleasures.

The Future is a Dead Mall (chapter): Monsters are classically devalued outside of canonical forms utilized by state forces, which leads to Capitalist Realism under the current order of things. To critique Capitalism, then, we must critique people’s devaluing of the Gothic or otherwise misusing/scapegoating it for Capitalism’s woes: Radcliffe, but also Coleridge and Jameson. Through a cultivated Wisdom of the Ancients (a cultural understanding of the imaginary past), we can confront Capitalist Realism through the monsters normally pitted against us instead of speaking for us and nature as exploited by the elite. It becomes something to synthesize through our creative successes—a concept we’ll explore entirely in Volume Three while reflecting on Volume Two’s monstrous histories.

“The Caterpillar”; or, What’s to Come (conclusion): A conclusion to the volume based on its contents, but highlighted through medieval expression and a coda (the caterpillar) to encapsulate everything the volume has discussed moving into Volume Three.

Capitalism treats bodies as monstrous to compel and enslave workers through set intended uses that serve the profit motive (thus genocide) through Cartesian thought; we, to liberate them using the same language—our bodies and poetic extensions of them and their sexualities, genders and orientations serving as a potent, emergently playful means: of storing and exchanging precious forbidden data per outing to challenge Capitalist Realism as a settler-colonial project. In this volume, then, we’ll be playing with monsters you’ll undoubtedly have seen before (often as little [sex] toys), but will be asked to think about now in ways that may seem new and strange to you and me (and I’ve been doing this awhile); re: “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about.” The shape doesn’t matter provided the function (and flow of power) is consistent—for and towards workers united in a Cause that is in-the-flesh, intuitive, second-nature. The continual idea, then, is a constellation to reassemble and reflect on trauma in a holistic manner using monsters to liberate workers (and their bodies) with; i.e., to illustrate mutual consent with Gothic poetics to break Capitalist Realism once and for all. “New vistas of reflection,” indeed!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Onto “In Search of the Secret Spell“!