This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion 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, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

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

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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 (linked above).

Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.

Seeing Dead People; or Undead Feeding Vectors, part two: Ghosts/the Numinous, Metroidvania Maps, the Posthuman and Cryptomimesis (feat. The Shining, Alien, Ghost in the Shell and more)

“Illusions, deceptions, mirages! Your Mommy Fortuna cannot truly change things!”

“That’s true; she can only disguise, and only for those eager to believe whatever comes easiest! No, she can’t turn cream into butter, but she can make a lion look like a manticore to eyes that want to see a manticore… just as she’d put a false horn on a real unicorn to make them see the unicorn.”

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

Picking up from where “‘The World Is a Vampire’; or, Bloodsports and Prisons from Old World to New World” left off…

Part one of “Undead Feeding Vectors” covered vampires, sodomy and bloodspots/prisons, and the ideal hermeneutic case, Alice in Borderland, leaving so many bodies in capital’s wake; part two shall now delve into playing with ghosts of different types (which is what cryptomimesis is; re: Castricano) tied to such bodies—i.e., the spectral, Numinous sort, but also fragmented, posthuman entities springing out of classic science fiction as begot from Gothic poetics: Frankenstein, and from Frankenstein to cyberpunk hauntologies like Ghost in the Shell, dragging these xenophilic identities into a decayed futurism wedded to Shelley’s original warnings of posthuman abuse by Cartesian agents. Jails have ghosts not just of prisoners, then, but their fearful jailors; re: of Caesar and Marx haunting the same infernal concentric patterns.  We queers are ghosts of ghosts, cryptonymies wrestling in duality to punch through the insulation of state reality and Capitalist Realism, threatening the awesome beyond as occupying the same space and time!

As with part one, areas of part two have been designed to holistically cover Gothic Communism’s four different areas of study—re: the Gothic, Marxism, queer studies and ludology—in order to help people recognize the undead as something to see according to various kinds of popular media; i.e., to recognize in friendly and unfriendly forms that return and feed in oft-erotic ways. This includes my research on Metroidvania, which we a) touched on during the thesis volume and b) earlier in this volume. In this volume, we already discussed the quest for the Numinous as female/monstrous-feminine, but this time will—through the second of our aforementioned, original three main exhibits embedded spectrally in this module’s body of work—consider the ghosts of maps being things that liminally riff and “echo” through cryptomimesis more broadly.

A small but important distinction between ghosts and hauntings. Hauntings generally concern locations being haunted—i.e., by some kind of spectral presence; e.g., a haunted house—whereas ghosts are things that haunt. Generally the latter haunt something tied to home (or symbolic of home). In the architectural sense, they are unheimlich but, when executed, play the Uncanny Valley out, including feelings of friendly or unfriendly spirits suitably anchored to home-coded spaces (many ghost stories work off this ambiguity to make you wonder what you are dealing with [e.g., The Wailing‘s (2016) friendly spirit, above, being more of a linguistic device or fragment than full-fledged person, throwing rocks to get your attention because its voice is damaged or inadequate] versus an Exorcist-style geek show. Each has its place). There’s also unanchored ghosts (e.g., the headless horsemen or Wandering Jew), the explained supernatural/fake ghost and the Black Veil (re: Radcliffe), as well as other monster types described as “ghosts”; i.e., vampires amounting to ghost-like monsters that drink blood/essence; e.g., Tolkien’s black[1] Ringwraiths, passing through walls or stirring up bedsheets like M.R. James’ “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come, My Lad” (1904). So many ghosts, so little time!

Because of its length, this section will be even more eclectic, breadcrumb/truncated and crash-course than the vampire subchapter was. Work with less; less is more, as far as ghosts go. In short, they’re vague on purpose to capture the vagaries of human language; i.e., left to rot, only to rise again through cryptonymic suggestions of itself. Among such eclectic and charged, fertile fragments, expect the unexpected. Up is down, and bedsheets swell with shapes that pass eerily through walls. Order is destabilized (re: Aguirre), the cup empty and full at the same time, mute and loud—as much a phenomenological effect as anything literally speaking. So does this subchapter touch on much, yet is altogether far too short to hit upon everything I’d like. Ghosts are suggestions; i.e., simulacra that harbor the possibility of new things occupying old and vice versa [e.g., Trace being Athetos’ likeness, but guided by other spirits, neither here nor there but between all of them warring amongst him as an avatar/vessel for the player to pilot].

Given the empheral, incomplete nature of ghosts, however, I’m not bothered by this idea; ghosts shall come up in future volumes, and there’s plenty of them waiting in my earlier books, too. For example, we’ll talk about Fatal Frame (2001) in Volume Three, part two; my master’s thesis discusses The Pact (2012) and other ghost stories vis-à-vis Metroidvania; and the entire “Monomyth” subchapter here is chockfull of ghostly mentions relative to Gothic castles, but especially the Radiance in “Policing the Whore,” Walpole’s giant suit of armor from Otranto, and Hamlet’s father’s ghost (and Freud’s), as well as various ghosts of “Caesar” quite a bit throughout.

You might think ghosts are getting the short end of the stick, then, but I actually write about them quite a bit/give them free reign. The word “ghost/ghostly” appears 813 times in this sub-volume (938, if you include “spectre/spectral,” and 1,079 if you include “Numinous”), whereas “vampire/vampiric” occurs 878 times, “zombie” 750, “queer” 755 (1,143 if you include “gay”), and “BDSM” 573. Apart from Derrida’s titular Spectres of Marx and Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit, which I both mention a lot, well-and-truly my favorite ghost is Rudolph Otto’s Numinous; i.e., which I write about extensively as “palliative” in Volume Zero, and elsewhere in the series in regards to psychosexual healing and ludo-Gothic BDSM (especially in “Transforming Our Zombie Selves” in this module, when I look at The Night House and Stranger Things for their Numinous elements; also look at “Psychosexual Martyrdom,” 2024).

In short, this is my found document to, like so many Gothic stories, pass enticingly and spectrally onto the living. There are bits and pieces, stories of stories inside stories and so on. It’s the threshold of fun, a concentric liminal space in between modules pointing backwards to its own past-present signature, and into the uncertain future tied to that. —Perse

(artists [from top-most-left to bottom-most-right]: Harmony Corrupted, Roxie Rusalka, Bay Ryan, Lady Nyxx, Mugiwara Art, Angel Witch, Bubi, Cuwu, Blxxd Bunny, Angel, Crow, and Mikki Storm, Bovine Harlot, Sinead, Krispy Tofuuu,  Romantic Rose, Ashley Yelhsa)

Per the liar’s paradox, “ghosts aren’t real” is both true and false; ghosts are half-real—oscillating and shimmering between fiction and non-fiction, reality and imagination, canon and camp, in quotes and out, rape and “rape,” modesty and prurience, model and photograph, disintegration and regeneration, supernatural and explanation as a matter of ontological tension. They as much language devices as people, but also are people using their literal body language (above) to express their agency as a message left behind to find itself again; i.e., we may now be cold, but once lived and breathed as you do, and had autonomy over our own bodies, nudism and labor. Cryptomimesis echoes bodies across bodies (again, above), poses from one to another in a long chain of oppressed labor speaking to larger terms of imprisonment, impressionistically passing along a shadow of a thought about power in crisis: the past and the future collide, canceled and decayed, the past as much a death omen that could come to pass as it may already have (or have not), once upon a time!

Therein lies the appeal. Simply put, people love ghosts because they are complicated and vague. Because the ghost is profoundly uncanny thus liminal, canonical and iconoclastic proponents share the same space on their spectral surfaces, loving and fearing ghosts through differing context using the same ambiguous image, inside the same spaces and their complicated aesthetics. I want you to consider and remember that ghosts don’t exist in a vacuum; their likenesses double each other to interact, catalyze, and overwrite functional opponents during oppositional praxis for or against the state.

For the rest of this section, then, we’ll touch on some of the Marxist ways that ghosts commonly manifest in the Gothic imagination—literally Marx’ spectres haunting Capitalism by having never quite left (the ghost is generally trapped between the living the dead, on and offstage); i.e., brief and passing commentaries on (the discussed texts are listed here, though I shall not signpost their exact order and presentation per subsection):

• Ghosts/the Numinous (feat. Rudolph Otto, C.S., Lewis, Rings of Power, Halloween, Edward Said, and more)
• The Posthuman (feat. Ghost in the Shell and System Shock)
• Death, Decay and Troublesome Afterlife (feat. Frankenstein, Alien: Romulus and David Roden)
• Metroidvania Maps (feat. The Shining, Jody Castricano and Me)
• Cryptomimesis Main Exhibit (feat. Silent Hill, Jacob’s Ladder and Tool/Trent Reznor)
• Reflection/Closing Thoughts

Some sections will be short, and others even shorter (this limiting myself to 73 pages; I tried to do 69 again, but couldn’t quite manage it). These are merely dots on a list (a bit like those on the computer screen in Kairo, above), which I expect you to connect and expound upon, yourselves! Have fun with it!

We’ll set things up while differentiating ghosts from vampires and zombies as a monster class, albeit in relation to cryptomimesis as a spectral, in-between means of writing with the dead more broadly; i.e., that living artists regularly engage with as social-sexual creatures themselves: as a liminal, at-times-pornographic means of feeding on language, which collectively weighs on the brains of the living through and in between linguo-material bits—pieces and copies that dislodge from their intended resting places, floating about like chaff. Again, this is meant to be holistic, but by no means total or comprehensive. The dead speak to the living in fragments. Run with it, yourselves—clinging and responding to whatever haunts you.

Ghosts/the Numinous

At their most basic, ghosts represent trauma in a viral sense; i.e., like a virus, they don’t feed so much as they exist and replicate. They’re often lonely and weigh on the living, seeking acknowledgement from a position of unequal existence, occupying non-existence verging on existence (and vice versa). “Feeding” happens by them passing themselves on through the people perceiving them; i.e., as more present than they are, but also less. Ghosts constitute feeding as both attached to the effects of generational trauma and divorced, to some extent, from the cause; i.e., the living relating to the past as already-happened and yet-to-pass in oppositional forms. So while (from our modular thesis)

Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature[—and] profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature[—trauma] cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case (source).

ghosts concern this as fragments; i.e., that survive in pieces what the whole does not, and cryptonymically demand to be witnessed, assembled and interrogated. They terrify their viewers, but also hold their interest. Talking with ghosts is canonically dangerous, if only because it possesses people with dangerous misconceptions that lead them to harm others (e.g., Hamlet or Jack Torrance).

(artist: Henry Fuseli)

In Neo-Gothic terms (from Walpole onwards), ghosts are puzzle pieces that get up under the right conditions and walk around—are pieces of code and language representing things whose representation has since become confused or separated from the earthly resident being signified. Even with photographs, we’re shown a moment in the past that was once alive; i.e., as it was that has since, in some shape or form, moved on. They may have lived, or might resemble something that once did while never having been alive themselves; like a suit of armor, they stand in for so many things, whose abstractions must personify to be understood. So many ghosts resemble people, if only as bedsheets over a humanoid shape, but so many more as full bodies (commonly women, below, but also children, witches, escaped slaves, and other state victims). In short, they double potential victims/victimizers as much as actual ones: death omens.

All ghosts link to profit. Profit is a generational cycle of violence, weighed against holes in memory/testimony and blocks in this or that, when confronted in ghosts of themselves, explode anew. Unfettered and raw, calm-to-frenzied spirits seek to escape and be heard, seen, witnessed. Some scream, others smile; flat effects are common, as are hyper or hyposexuality. Prison hardens you, and domestic abuse turns the home into a prison lorded over by abusive parents—ghosts of them, from husbands and kings to treacherous queens and battered narcissistic housewives.

(artist: Artemisia Gentileschi)

Just as often, though, there’s a parallel current of revenge—of preventing future harm by avenging past wrongs. Some victims (or their ghosts) strike back, commonly through art; e.g., Artemisia Gentileschi, of whom Ariela Gittlen writes in “A Brief History of Female Rage in Art”:

Artemisia Gentileschi‘s Judith Beheading Holofernes offers another dramatic scene of an ordinary woman overpowering a high-ranking man. Gentileschi’s painting is muscular: The Biblical Judith and her maidservant bear down on their victim, the invading Assyrian general Holofernes, as Judith saws at his neck with a sword. Blood spatters in long, ropy arcs, spraying Judith’s chest and neck. Holofernes’ tortured expression and copious amounts of blood are also present in Caravaggio‘s earlier version of this subject (ca. 1599), from which Gentileschi is said to have drawn inspiration. Yet in his rendition, Judith looks rather removed, her face wrinkled in disgust rather than set in determination.

It’s arguable that Gentileschi’s own experiences with sexual violence shaped her approach to depicting this brutal story. At age 18, she was raped by her painting teacher, the artist Agostino Tassi. Unusually for the 17th century, Gentileschi testified in court against her attacker. Tassi was set free following his conviction due to an intercession by the pope, while Gentileschi was made to endure the public shame of the trial—at which she was forced to testify while being tortured with thumbscrews. Gentileschi’s Judith may have been a portrayal of the justice that she herself was denied (source).

Given a voice, the oppressed have things to say that the state (and its usual benefactors/avatars) won’t like. Like naughty children, black penitents run to daddy and ask for protection from the big bad mean ladies (that they themselves abused until said victims pushed back); i.e., to preserve and maintain status-quo control over the things normally dominated by patriarchal forms. This includes ghosts!

Except, abuse doesn’t stop with a single, isolated event; it lives on as ghosts do. Like a bloodline, the invisible shackles of control are passed down from Roman Imperialism (and the ancient canonical laws) onto Hammer of Witches, Cartesian edicts and Enlightenment doctrine, onto the Protestant ethic and modern forms of Capitalism. The state abuses labor through its own victims, past survivors commonly tokenizing/triangulating through blind rage (re: TERFs). Just as often, though, it regresses or shuts down, like Pavlov’s dogs. Justice becomes reprisals from police agents protecting rapists, kidnappers, wife-beaters, what-have-you; re: by blaming the victims and obscuring the harm that abusers do through ghost stories. It compounds, and the ghosts start to appear in ways that speak to things that never fully stay dead. As such, the state will defend its own sanctity and sovereign status, repressing said ghosts through police violence feeding anisotropically for the state (re: power flows up). The state casts a long shadow, being fond of Numinous spirits to better spook workers faithful!

Regardless, big ghosts fracture into smaller relatives. So many victims of state abuse are sex workers/women, the elderly and children, but also witches and foreigners; i.e., those already preyed upon by the state, who—once homeless or otherwise vulnerable—make for easy scapegoats: “Those who suffer have no voice.” Give them one, and you will hear the wail of the damned—a cry heard round the world, from beyond the grave, coming home to roost. Some people make light of that—re: Jadis saying to me, “Put your mysterium tremendum in my uncanny valley!”—but just as often, the joke is to some degree profound or sacred; silly or not, it still carries weight, the imaginary past coming back around to mirror the present (and vice versa). Ghosts unanchor and wander to cause mischief.

Likeness and simulacra, effigy and egregore, ghosts are also what survives when the living are gone, but also when they return; i.e., speaking to mysterious, tremendous, buried things that rise like shadows to the surface; re: the mysterium tremendum’s Numinous, divine signature attaching to ordinary murder, rape and revenge; e.g., black widows or the Bleeding Nun speaking to unnatural deaths, evil plans, and all-around systemic brutalities. They are simultaneously blind and lucid, wanting to heal through acknowledgment; i.e., in ways that, per the counterfeits they haunt, either build up Capitalist Realism or tear it down. They are as much the veils or sheets as things beyond them; i.e., so many things to acknowledge or avenge, bury or dig up, because profit demands such things, which it tries to hide. Per the cryptonymy process’s double operation, they show and hide great power where such power is always found: on the surfaces and thresholds of workers! They tease and threaten equally mighty-mighty things with some degree of profound all-hanging-out and calculated obscurity!

(artist: Nyx)

The gendering and sexualizing of ghosts, like all monsters, is arbitrated by historical-material forces. With queer people, spirits speak to their closeted selves rising into existence seemingly ex nihilo, for instance. By comparison, female ghosts are, like female vampires, committed to the monstrous qualities of their biology as hysterical, wild; re: their wandering wombs as ghostly things that rise up furiously to seek revenge against the state reaping and punishing nature as classically female, but in truth monstrous-feminine in ways that speak to female victimization by police force/patriarchal agents since ancient times: Gaia and similar goddesses of nature speaking to her immense size and fury as that of a Gorgon (below). Divided, she struggles to pull herself together, after death, only bare it all! She’s larger than life, than men; primal and dehumanized, she must rehumanize as fat and sassy!

The ambiguity of ownership or representation is always in question, with ghosts and afterlife. As we shall see, ancient female rage is carried forwards in art as a kind of ghostly, viral medium for buried atrocities (re: Ariela Gittlen); i.e., committed against women and those forced to identify as women, thus treated as monstrous-feminine and “of nature[2]” by the state. Such beings are often naked and furious, climbing out of wells, caves and other dark, watery sites of repressed rage, rape anxieties and revenge, etc, to scream about such matters; i.e., the Medusa, but also her likeness expressed in banshees, succubae, and other such monsters—if not the castration of male rapists, then their societal emasculation by avenging female/feminine parties tied to nature: as brutalized by empire’s living ghost, Caesar embodied by Cartesian men as dead ringers to his rotten lineage. A common way of queer/monstrous-feminine revenge is the destruction of a male bloodline: “I will have your son!” or “I will be with you on your wedding night!” etc.

(artist: Kait Freckles)

While capital harvests nature as monstrous-feminine—a peach to site/sight and carve anew for fresh pulp—death traps police victims onto an earthly plane, a kind of purgatory where they cannot rest. Thought not always, a ghost is generally rooted to a prison, but also a space that has eyes and ear; i.e., the feeling of someone being watched, as if by a ghost; e.g., the Overlook Hotel. They communicate emotions like extreme sadness, anger, grief and lust (vis-à-vis the medieval Seven Deadly Sins); i.e., tied to buried atrocities, abject and exiled by state proponents.

To it, many ghosts are murder/suicide and rape victims, thus sex workers and children—not cis-het men, in other words. But some, like Pyramid Head, are the ghosts of warriors/abusers/ruffians (re: Radcliffe’s banditti an exotic kind of pirate or black knight), or the ghosts of victims who become furious to the point of a blind, uncontrollable hunger/rage; re: victims or abusers (cops and victims), per the trauma response. To set them free is to let them feed, often by giving them a place to voice themselves in lieu of those who can no longer speak having been denied the chance: acknowledging the harvest to humanize it.

As discussed in Volume One, “The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them” (source); i.e., no body, no crime. People who go missing and are never seen again is something of a paradox, then, given their faces and likenesses are seen on every street corner and carried across the lips and in the hearts of a community’s survivors. A ghost lives on, somehow still alive and very much not alive. They become a likeness of those who are still alive, constituting spectral embellishments regarding the living associating with ideas of people, good and bad, dead or alive; i.e., representations of someone that speaks to a hidden or unaddressed quality given a human face; e.g., a model who asks to be painted, as Nyx with me: ghost stories, then, work similar to legends and rumors—as things to spread for different reasons.

Such is cryptomimesis in a nutshell; i.e., the echo of power and trauma felt dualistically in fragments and likenesses—ghostly chaff expressed between language and people, places and things, but also copies of copies of copies:

(model and artist: Nyx and Persephone van der Waard)

Just as often, though, such gossip is a point of pride: something to advertise and announce that we were here and proud of ourselves. For my Sex Positivity project, either volunteers ask to be painted a particular way (as Nyx did, with me, above) or I ask artists if they would like to be drawn (as many muses of mine inspired me to do). And in many cases, the brand image of different artists are out in the world, to be critiqued under Fair Use. They stand in for themselves, personas representing offshoots of people, but also larger things like womanhood, nature, female/feminine sexuality and mental illness, etc. They’re things to fall for and do justice in whatever we, ourselves, create; i.e., something to capture in a moment, like a photograph: full moon booty but also a sweetheart who loves nature and herself tied to the land (we’ll return to Nyx in the Demon Module).

(artist: Nyx)

The idea is to convey something that can’t be raped or destroyed, but undefeated, will live on and survive/surpass abuse while helping prevent it; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM through what we leave behind as sex positivity expressed in echoes of echoes of echoes: a refrain parading what we show behind various boundaries during revolutionary cryptonymy (re: “flashing” exhibits). In short, ghosts are things we can make through the cryptonymy process to achieve rebellious sentiment; i.e., existing in broad daylight, unrepressed, in spite of all attempts to bury us alive. We cannot be contained, refusing to be victims in ways that include other groups and add so many among the substance of things that can be seen, but not touched: we feed and draw strength, enriching the spirit not as something to bury or exorcize, but make space for in daily life! It becomes a dumb supper—a vital, back-and-forth exchange; i.e., to feed and find sweet joy and release through Numinous avatars’ bangin’ bods (and backsides): the dark side of the moon/lunacy’s deepest trenches (“that’s no moon, it’s a space station!”)! Not something to split in two, the Great Pumpkin’s recesses and cleavage being a package deal offering up much-needed reunion with nature; i.e., normally harvested, holiday-style, as capital territory on the frontier. No more!

(artist: Nyx)

For a variety of reasons, ghosts operate through the awesome, poetic power of suggestion (whose uncertainty grants a wonderful likeness for domestic abuse; i.e., the gaslight effect). Be they either queer and/or female—but also people of color, religious minorities, sex workers, children or the elderly, homeless and/or mentally ill—the same, comorbid assigning of criminal elements affects all oppressed peoples indicted by the same predatory system; i.e., moves power towards the state inside a larger prison-like persecution network whose former victims haunt the home-as-burial-grounds, speaking of past abuses waiting to be dug up, investigated and laid to rest. All leave behind oddly delicious ghosts that appear to speak, if not pointedly to their own abuse, then their own empowerment in ways that jab conspicuously at abuse as a ghost would: laterally (a detective doggedly getting to the bottom of things; its rump, next page, called all manner of silly words; e.g., Zeuhl called it a “rumpulon,” in jest/emulation of Gothic/sci-fi language). While the home, per Foucault, is haunted by the ghost of raped victims leaking from the bedroom, many Neo-Gothic authors play with these “nightly bumps” to gain agency over their emotions. It’s often campy but remains haunted[3] by canonical forces: we hit that, and film ourselves being stuffed in so many compromising positions. That’s power!

(artist: Fewebomb‘s “Rump in the Night,” 2019)

Ghosts less lurk between resident and residence, then, and more embody the complex, organic relationship between them as ongoing and anisotropic, ergodic, concentric and recursive; i.e., the chronotope and mise-en-abyme, their narrative of the crypt invoking a castle-sized vanishing point tied to unspeakable things spoken through medieval poetics, but also human-sized/shaped inversions suggesting the castle beyond and tethered to those. Back and forth, it goes, smaller tied to bigger and vice versa in shared quantum existence. In Gothic, authorial desire caters to the Numinous as something to suspend between, felt with castles-in-the flesh; re: body-like castles and castle-like bodies making the skeptical temporarily faithful, hung between reason and irrationality in ways that make them shrink, prostrate before the hauntological divine. Castles are crime sites, but also, per Bakhtin, legendary environs concerned/saturated with the aesthetic orbiting hereditary rites and dynastic power exchange. Per the Numinous, a divine presence is generally tied to a monarchal burial ground that wakes up; it speaks to big things crawling to the surface concerning fresh workers.

Of course, such things exist between nature and civilization, people and place, as evocations of enormity expressed in names like the Numinous, Sublime, Absurd, and other such proper nouns; they stack onto/speak to power as felt during liminal expression: the likeness of the oppressed, the victim, as doubled in those still happy and alive. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost” speaks to so many victims being born again in fresh forms that, bare and exposed, remind survivors of what they themselves lost: “No one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost,” explains C.S., Lewis in The Problem of Pain, reflecting on Otto’s Numinous. “It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous” (source). So do ideas of the holy and divine merge with guilt and superstition attached to things that were once alive, or point to a formerly alive thing that, since then, has become a placeholder (akin to Otto’s usage of Latin words to stand-in for something beyond human language).

In turn, the human element becomes a shell of sorts, holding something inside or about itself that defies description, but is nevertheless married to it on the same Aegis; i.e., an echo chamber less of a space and more a canvas with a model mirroring older bodies. Anything we do is violent in the eyes of the state, thus the state meets with indiscriminate police force through violence, terror and monstrous poetics. Per Asprey, “terror is the kissing cousin of force” (re: War in the Shadows); per me, we reverse the role/order of terror and counterterror to expose state abuse and humanize ourselves in guerrilla shadows and ghosts. All of this occurs—you guessed it—through the asymmetrical feeding vector of ghosts on the Aegis: existing where something should not, but does; i.e., the paradox of terror extending to sex worker bodies (often, but not always female) being closeted and collared by police violence upholding the state’s usual operations. “Peace” is a white man’s word; “liberation” is ours, from bit to intersectional, solidarized bit.

(artist: Vivi Tarantino)

Ghosts, in turn, rise up between the cracks, but also through seemingly-solid walls, floors, bodies, shackles, what-have you. They resist containment and statutes of limitation, but nevertheless deteriorate, contaminating places with ambiguous menace and dire speculation: fraud, forgery and fabrication that points to the holy and sacred being false. Amnesia and rememory struggle to remember such things through ghostly left-behinds, the data of a lingering and unaddressed pain: generational trauma and lost generations. Per the cryptonymy process, they are true and false, standing “on the ashes of something not quite present.” Phantom pains, they warn of past violence, but also clear-and-present dangers; e.g., present-and-future murder attempts, criminal conspiracies, internal/foreign plots, designs, calculations, premeditation, segregation, etc. They constitute holes in memory to fill with some degree of imagination; i.e., an amnesia, walking blind spot, loss of time, absence, ataxia, aphasia, Kantian noumenon, or some such cavity or gap (re: a vanishing point); e.g., the Slender Man from Marble Hornets (2009) realized by matter of serialized urban legend, that when approached in text (or out) overloads the sensory organs like static on a TV screen. The ghost, less than seeking a proper burial, resists one. Per the cryptonymy process, it becomes restless and vibrates, operating partially on suspended disbelief.

Diaphanous and ephemeral, but solid and capable, ghosts are things to write with suggesting other things not quite dead or alive, but composed/regarding those states of existence on orders thereof; i.e., from the shortest ghost stories, to ghost writers, super heroes (e.g., Space Ghost, above), and a defuse and long line of eclectic thinkers like Shakespeare, Radcliffe, Marx, Otto, Derrida, Castricano, Butler and myself—all of us writing about/with spirits, spectres, gender trouble and various other queer manifestations of this-or-that trapped between, beyond or behind something else; i.e., small things leading to big things (Cinderella’s slipper vs Otranto’s helmet), the fog creeping in on little cat feet, nothing else remaining ’round that colossal wreck, chasing smaller spirits of mightier and bigger Numinous ones!  This colossal boneyard is where ideas both go to die, but also catch fire and, like the phoenix, be born again. Liberation and enslavement occupy the same space, thus the same language as spatio-temporal, linguo-material, human and alien, fascist and Communist, alive and dead.

In the Gothic, then, decay and inheritance of a fallen West can denote a “Gothic effect” (re: Baldrick), but just as easily suggest size difference and alien signatures that, from Capitalism to Communism, help workers reunite with lost mighty things by remaking them; i.e., the potential not to be a victim, but gods, kings and queens where no such things exist for one, but all: the land of giants and gods, wherein Divine Right/the Protestant ethic and capital’s monopolies, trifectas and usual harmful qualities/witch hunts are a thing of the past. Under a new, recultivated Wisdom of the Ancients (the proletarian Superstructure), Rome is dead and stays dead; Medusa, as Galatea’s ghost, rises from the fragments of Pygmalion urns to threaten liberation unto capital’s usual slavers. We don’t tokenize/rape rank and place Original Sin over blood libel, black rape epidemics, or sodomy accusations; we unite, intersectionally solidarizing under Gothic Communism to break Capitalist Realism: through our counterterror’s pedagogy of the oppressed. This has a mark to it—pieces that are controlled and yearn to be free in ways that perceive both as unreal and more real than real. The fantasy poster comes alive, but stays half-real, like a ghost promising all manner of reckonings and revelations:

(artist: Nyx)

We’re the pain in the ass and cannot be exorcised, the bleeding heart beating ‘neath the floorboards. Much of what we say is common knowledge, but denied or buried (as genocides always do) by those who can afford to turn a blind eye (again, as genocides encourage). Any boundary or barrier you put up to discourage us, we pass right on through—a quantum element whose quandary makes home feel foreign, alien, and exiled; re (from Volume One):

Simply put, singular and enforced interpretations are dangerous, and we need to be choosy in ways that prolifically and flexibly enrich our arguments, not simply dot them with the fancy patriarchal ornaments of accommodated intellectuals. Meanwhile, our ruffling of their collective feathers needs to hit a collective nerve: their sell-out, privileged status; i.e., sitting in their ivory towers and basically talking amongst themselves in a highly privatized sense. This requires a certain sense of detachment from positions of comfort that historically are used to divide and conquer workers. As Said writes in “Reflections on Exile” (1984):

Because exile, unlike nationalism, is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being. Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past. They generally do not have armies or states, although they are often in search of them. Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people. […] Exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and bond with, one’s native place; what is true of all exile is not that home and love of home are lost, but that loss is inherent in the very existence of both.

Regard experiences as if they were about to disappear. What is it that anchors them in reality? What would you save of them? What would you give up? Only someone who has achieved independence and detachment, someone whose homeland is “sweet” but whose circumstances makes it impossible to recapture that sweetness, can answer those questions. (Such a person would also find it impossible to derive satisfaction from substitutes furnished by illusion or dogma.)

This may seem like a prescription for an unrelieved grimness of outlook and, with it, a permanently sullen disapproval of all enthusiasm or buoyancy of spirit. Not necessarily. While it perhaps seems peculiar to speak of the pleasures of exile, there are some positive things to be said for a few of its conditions. Seeing “the entire world as a foreign land” makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that – to borrow a phrase from music – is contrapuntal.

For an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally. There is a unique pleasure in this sort of apprehension, especially if the exile is conscious of other contrapuntal juxtapositions that diminish orthodox judgement and elevate appreciative sympathy. There is also a particular sense of achievement in acting as if one were at home wherever one happens to be (source).

Exiting Plato’s cave can feel brutal, insofar as its new-felt unheimlich is irreversible. From our own “pleasures of exile,” though, home is something to cultivate through alienation as a forced consequence under Capitalism. It, like trauma in general, becomes something to live with, often through rituals of theatrical distress:

(artist: Coey Kuhn)

Liberation from the illusions of capital means our prescribed homeland becomes foreign in ways that allow for startling new appreciations; i.e., in terms of how we identify using Gothic language during fresh struggles under old, systemic problems: as monsters. Doing so helps us better voice the chaos inherent to our daily lives under capital, once the game is up. Yes, we can be “ostracized” by people who frankly care little for our well-being at an institutional level (accommodated intellectuals); but as their cool dismissal of us exposes the apathy and bigotry behind their “soft” arguments, their hard, inflexible stances can be denuded by Gothic Communism’s chief weapon: poetics (source).

As such, we’re in the closet, without a land—the dreaded past of imperial and capitalist abuse come back to haunt the state; i.e., the ghost in the darkness making them afraid, the colonizer realizing his servants, possessed by the dispossessed, may suddenly and uncontrollably have a collaborator’s inherited cause: to resent his occupation and abuse of their territory!

To have agency is not to define as the state decrees, per the profit motive; i.e., to liberate is to self-actualize/self-define through Gothic poetics; re: our darkness visible/Satanic poetics creating to play god but also use our ghosts tied to past victims. For them and ourselves, we negotiate what is normally non-negotiable, arbitrated by us on our terms, using what we got; i.e., as part of our land and the enchanted class, cultural and/or race characters it offers. We don’t give ground, we take it! True rebellion and false rebellion sit inside the same ghostly spheres and entities, then, we and our freedom fighters echoed badly by state counterfeits: cops playing guerrilla/white Indian (re: Samus Aran). Our cryptonymy must expose them while keeping us flexibly solvent and immutable.

This isn’t just a battlefield fought with soldiers, then, but warriors of love yielding their own ghostly “arsenals,” aliases, and agency. Humanize the harvest, and the state becomes inhumane across all registers. We can get to state forces simply by reminding them that illusions go both ways; i.e., power is something workers have in spades, our own operatives being the pumpkins of the fields, the statues in the churches: whores that make the devil to pay in ways that go beyond what the state can even control, such brothel espionage extending to art and its ghosts (of ghosts, of ghosts…)! The holy ghost becomes “almost” to joke and tease, the Numinous “dumps like a truck“: “Damn, girl. You shit with that ass?”

(model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard)

It’s a quasi-religious, “almost holy” experience, then, one which has many applications, secular or otherwise; i.e., towards profound sensations of experience, these simulating death, rapture, martyrdom and/or orgasms (skin or erogenous), etc, but also entities attached to said things; e.g., fire of the gods/the Promethean Quest during Cartesian critiques and mad science; big vampirism and master/slave relationships and castles; religious experiences, visitations from disturbing alien experiences; zombies and liches, necromancers, big death and calamities; and similar tiers of power and the Numinous/mysterium tremendum.

We won’t have time to explore these here, save to declare that all express the experiences of giant warring spirits in shared spaces with not enough room to distinguish and divide these things into discrete categories; i.e., ghosts of Caesar and Marx, of a cosmic-sized abstraction speaking to hyperobjects at odds, a Communist Numinous vs the state’s own variant, the skeleton king and similar poetic manifestations grappling during psychomachia, Amazonomachia and psychopraxis (concepts from Volume Zero[4]); re (from Volume Two, part one’s “Conflict, Mothers-in Conflict, and Liberation”):

Gothic castles (and castle-like Destroyers) leading to the Communist Numinous (the proletarian monstrous-feminine) amid a war of titanic forces, gargantuan but vague; i.e., felt through paternal disturbance, Capitalism being Communism’s mortal enemy and the true Great Destroyer labeling its foil as “devil-in-disguise.” Both are, but only one wants to enslave and destroy workers, Medusa, and the planet as a sustainable habitat: capital. We have a right to exist; to dye our hair, take HRT or pierce our nipples and worship Satan; to be recognized as squishy and delicious; to groan or fart as we pee (or pee in someone’s butt—not my kink but you never know who likes what). All constitute intimacy, which the state doesn’t care about (seeing ours as “passing for” their own coached doubles and so-called “winners”).

Again, it’s just “crew expendable.” Why? Because “fuck you,” that’s why! They want to own us and cheapen our lives for reasons purely of greed entertained by the lamest vultures on Earth (real “divorced dad energy”). So we must fuck them (and their monopolies) by freeing the monstrous-feminine to become our true selves with, whatever form that may be. Liberation is a journey to survive in deathly forms, wherein we escape, fight censorship, and endure embarrassing double standards (enshittification; re: Cory Doctorow)—to fight the good fight, forever (source).

Workers leave behind ghosts, as do states, and some workers serve states, and Communism refuses to die entirely despite capital’s best efforts to bury it. Extant or faded, fabled or down-to-earth, to fight and resist is noble. In turn, all occupy the same shadow zone in dialectical-material conflict; i.e., all connect ambiguously during oppositional praxis, bonding or co-existing in ways that personify but aren’t always clear about which camp they belong to. It’s a church to worship at cross purposes!

(artist: Vivi Tarantino)

In the calculus of existence, then, ghosts are aftermath—signatures and suggestions of what was, is and will be inside space-time, and sitting between humans and their own left-behind medieval-to-modern socio-material histories, relating troublingly back and forth (re: Marx’ tradition of dead generations/spectres haunting Europe, etc). Compared to zombies or vampires, then, ghosts are probably the hardest to pin down, as they are the most linguistic/ontologically vague, in dispute/uncertain (re: Hamlet), and arguably the least erotic (save as images of erotic things to reach out and touch, above: “Is that a booty I see before me; I clutch thee but have thee not”).

Yet vampires and composites can also take on ghostly qualities (exhibit 42d2); i.e., as magnetic and revered inside the ghost story as a curiously popular medium: a literal ontological extension of someone, someone else’s idea of someone, or something else entirely—e.g., Hamlet’s father’s actual spirit, Hamlet thinking he’s talking to his dead father from beyond the grave, or something that bears a likeness to Hamlet’s father that continues to exist inside and outside of Hamlet’s mind: in the natural and material world in a very “animated,” viral way (either a coincidental semblance, like the Boos being ghosts without bodies, or the “wendigo” that copies the appearance of someone to torture them; e.g., The Dark and the Wicked, 2020, or It Follows, 2014). Perception feeds reality as a matter of action; i.e., “the readiness is all.”

More to the point, ghosts aren’t strictly “dead” in the sense of having once been alive. They live on/feed from moment to moment through how they are seen, often according to how powerful they are; i.e., a Numinous spirit versus a small, unimpressive ghost. As we’ve seen so far in this book, the context for what is impressive, uncanny and die-hard can vary considerably—e.g., the spectre of the skeleton king/conqueror through capital versus the camp potential of Communism’s mighty “kings”:

(exhibit 42d1a: Artist, left: Earth Liberation Studio; top-mid-right: Leonardo Galletti; top-fair right: Fuck Yeah Socialists; bottom-right: source. The spectres of Marx are as much the reinvented, campy and viral language of what those in or aligned with power fear—i.e., the literal ghosts of boogeymen like Marx, Lenin and Stalin divorced from their historical-material fixtures and converted, more or less, into a kind of radical detachment from state propaganda. The cryptomimetic war becomes one of oppositional aesthetics, wherein the faces of our Communist “Rushmore” challenge the status quo, but also the 20th century’s checkered reputation of Marxist-Leninism. This isn’t an endorsement of state abuse or mechanisms, but an artistic movement that treats these ghosts as reclaimed symbols of rebellion against oppression, canon vs camp. This operates at odds with spectres of fascism like those of the Third Reich. As “Laborwave” founder Leonardo Galletti writes,

Considering all of these things, the ridiculousness of “fashwave” becomes even more transparent. How can you take a genre that, from its inception, has been preoccupied with anti-capitalist rhetoric, and use to defend a capitalist, fascist cis-hetero patriarchy? It would be like if I tried to appropriate Wagner operas and Birth of a Nation to create Communist propaganda (source: “The Rapid Proliferation of ‘Laborwave’ and What It Means,” 2019).

Unlike Hitler or Goebbels [who always served the state], more complicated Socialist figures like Marx or Lenin [fuck Stalin in his homophobic ear] were defined at various stages by appeals to systemic oppression under Capitalism operating as usual: capitalist simulacra. The human palimpsests may not have lived to see Communism develop—indeed, they were ostracized within and after their lifetimes to reinforce Capitalism’s continued hegemony—but the third kind of ghost, the detached simulacrum, has become an informed appeal to avoid what these men were in life while still treating them as a complex propaganda tool that functions in a very viral, “corporate mood” sense. There is no obvious source—the canaries in the mine starting to appear seemingly ex nihilo—but takes on a life of its own because the seeds of rebellion [the dialectical-material struggle] are utterly primed for it; i.e., to blip, like a ghost, into existence between language and its perception.

          To quote from Galletti again:

It makes my heart swell with pride to see the Laborwave genre growing so rapidly, transcending entire continents and languages, all because of the internet. It feels magical. When I made that very first Laborwave edit of Lenin, back in 2016, I would have never imagined that this trend would blow up so phenomenally. I regularly find art that I have made spread to the farthest corners of the internet, in places I would never expect to find it. […]

Vaporwave, the artistic genre from which Laborwave evolved, is a post-modern music and visual art genre whose surrounding “subculture is sometimes associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer Capitalism and pop culture, and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of previous decades” […] If Vaporwave is the thesis, then Ostalgie, a German term describing a longing nostalgia for life in Communist East Germany, is the antithesis. Our western culture is slowly coming to grips with the collapse of the economic system that we have enjoyed living at the peak of. In coming decades, we will face incomprehensible struggle. It only makes sense that as the world slowly crumbles around us, that we will cling nostalgically to things from our childhood and early lives that remind us of the simpler times. One eastern culture, who has already had to slowly come to grips with the collapse of their entire economic system over the past nearly 30 years, not just in Germany, but throughout the entirety of the Eastern Bloc. When places like Russia experienced 10 MILLION excess deaths in the years immediately following the reintroduction of Capitalism in Russia, it’s no wonder why more Russians have a favorable opinion of Stalin than they do Putin.

The synthesis then, is Laborwave. Laborwave as I define it is: an inter-sectional art style reconciling nostalgia for a Soviet past with a nostalgia for the visual motifs of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. While Vaporwave relies on subtext, sarcasm and mild critique of the consumer-capitalist nightmare we have created, Laborwave takes it to the extreme, forcing you to confront the horrifying and uncomfortable truth. Bertolt Brecht once said: “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” To me, Vaporwave has always remained by and large little more than a mirror. But with Laborwave, I am trying to make hammers [ibid.]. 

To this, Gothic Communism aims to liberate creativity in ways that reclaim not just people, but the icons they themselves used in the never-ending fight for labor and nature: the hammer and the sickle, and the men synonymizing these things. As such, we camp Marx’ ghost, making it gay to break Capitalist Realism.

[artist, left: Persephone van der Waard; right, artist: Persephone van der Waard]

The model for the rightmost illustration wishes to remain anonymous; indeed, they disappeared from contact shortly after my drawing of them. They had wanted to be drawn for the project, but also lived in a traditional, pro-police household that did not respect their right to be trans; they became torn between a desire to be themselves and uphold their family’s conservative values. As for the drawings, above, they evoke a sense of death, espionage, and terrorism within the hauntology of corporate decay—e.g., Sombra’s accommodated rebellion [left] serving as a form of appropriated labor/opposition presented by Blizzard as a “pastel-Goth” hacker-for-hire who goes unscrupulously to the highest bidder to escape her street-life, gang-riddle past; it’s assimilation fantasy through the tokenized false rebel. My drawing of Elektra Ovirowa from Cowboy Bebop: the Movie [right, 2001] places a former corporate assassin for the state in a Laborwave nostalgia married to cyberpunk and Vaporwave’s own cousin aesthetics.

In turn, these pastiches stylize through the oppositional praxis of aesthetics, first and foremost; i.e., they can be perceptive, but require the use of iconoclastic artists working in concert with a larger countercultural artistic movement through subtext [re: disguise pastiche]. On the cusp of the uncanny but also the Numinous of Capitalism falling apart, we—like Roy Batty—”want more life, fucker” [who, faced with his own manufacture of obsolescence, in Elden Tyrel, promptly decides to crush the old ghoul’s head; one sympathizes].

Derrida insists there is “no outside of the text,” but anything beyond Capitalism is suggested inside itself [and its myopia] with ghosts. Per Gothic Communism, our own artistic choices—within Vaporwave, Laborwave and cyberpunk as perceptive pastiche—can revive mighty spirits out from the past in opposition to capital’s ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., their eerie, welcoming likeness emerging in hauntological forms that can ultimately be better than these men were in life; re: “If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine,” except this happens through camp as a matter of worker revenge. Jedi are cops.)

As something whose appearance bears out through oppositional praxis, the ghost is a haunting figure whose confounding and unstable ontological qualities affect the viewer’s own vision; i.e., in highly complex ways: to feed our appetite for unspoken things that beg to be said, but often go unsaid.

(exhibit 42d1b: Ghosts of the abused lurk cryptomimetically between different forms of scare language in the shadow zone, whereupon the ghost of the counterfeit furthers the process of abjection, according to nature as queer in order to maintain status-quo arrangements/advance profit. For example, Rings of Power cashes in on the same anti-queer/anti-Semitic/anti-Pagan witch, goblin and vampire/werewolf stereotypes as old Disney villains: from Snow White‘s Maleficent poisoning princesses, Sher Kahn from The Jungle Book being a talking cat dad that eats children, and the hunched-over tall rat in black-and-red from The Great Mouse Detective all being equally problematic, onto many others; i.e., going onto the likes of naughty uncle Scar, drag queen likeness Ursula and so many other evil queers. Persecution networks overlap, swapping this out for that. Middle-class people pay out; everyone else is divided-and-conquered by capital.

These betrayals extend to Tolkien’s Sauron reinvented by Amazon; i.e., into a king ghost of Caesar/the Wandering Jew that rises up from the ground, eating millipedes and rats, to then steal a human body and ultimately endure rapturous torture as delicious to him [“The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts!”]. When collared, he lies to his enemies with pretty gifts—a “power over flesh” [code for Nazi BDSM] but also the presence of divinity C.S. Lewis describes as follows: 

Now suppose that you were told simply “There is a mighty spirit in the room,” and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it—an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare’s words “Under it my genius is rebuked.” This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous [source: The Problem of Pain].

In short, pain is a trick, and Tolkien’s Sauron is Milton’s angelic and shapeshifting Lucifer minus that story’s camp [re: Volume Zero]—a perennial vice character that playfully injects life as frisson [skin orgasm] into an otherwise boring story en medias res. It’s false rebellion sold to spice up a purity argument—both to adults and kids alike during the dialectic of shelter and the alien: “Middle-earth” [Eden or Rome by another name] is fading and the fallen angel conveniently appears to offer a glowing [and bogus] solution. It appeals to tokenized folk wanting to assimilate, but also general queerness seeking to give voice to its own suffering amid fresh redemption; i.e., to get the upper hand on a bunch of self-righteous twats who think their rule is not only above critique, but timeless and Good. Sauron speaks and God is silent; translation [from Milton]: God is a cunt, as are his mysterious ways.

We can certainly camp said baddie daddy ourselves, relating to his confused, psychosexual predator/prey responses and pleasure/pain mechanisms.  All work within a persecution network that is highly commodified, and not used by Amazon to liberate us; they use it to turn us into a sideshow attraction, which we must reclaim through the same bread-and-circus aesthetics—i.e., being collared ironically during calculated risk per ludo-Gothic BDSM. Enjoy Sauron stealing the show, if you want. Don’t unironically endorse Tolkien’s refrain/Goldilocks Imperialism[5]; instead, camp its echoes of Caesar and Marx yourselves, doing so in ways that challenge profit by reversing abjection to raise awareness towards neoliberal Trojan maneuvers commodifying former symbols of rebellion—i.e., into false Nazi-Communist copies we must reclaim and make Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communist once more.)

Ghosts are doubles, and doubles are when sublimation fails, creating a linguo-material feeling of being haunted within ordinary life; i.e., as occupied by something beyond Capitalism: total death, or “death” symbolizing radical change to treat, as Capitalism does, like a bogeyman. It doesn’t die, but arguably is—like some kind of Pontypool [2008] word virus—not or never fully alive:

(exhibit 42d2: Top-left, source; artist, bottom: Josh White. While a liminal, uncanny element exists to any monster I could list, certain forms like the zombie, werewolf or vampire tend to be more strictly personified and humanoid in their privatized, neoliberal forms; i.e., the Halloween costume, aka the “guy in a suit” effect. The ghost, as C.S. Lewis touches on through Otto, is conveniently divorced from a concrete physical form, but not the space that houses it [“there is a ghost in the other room”] nor the fact that it is, in some shape or form, a copy or an illusion that denotes an otherworldly or incorporeal presence connected to a humanoid shape. Ghosts are not strictly or automatically human, but look human enough to merit an uncanny response to varying degrees.

A surprise function of human language, then, is the ghost as a kind of double. As a mask behind which there is no human, we’re left with a human appearance occupied by an inhuman pilot [e.g., Michael Myers’ play on the Halloween mask/costume as uncanny on its surface, making its human-shaped wearer feel inhuman and his locations increasingly Numinous]. Such devices make for a simple-but-effective device in ghost stories. As ontologically uncertain, ghosts allow for some fairly basic but potent phenomenological tricks to be played on the mind; e.g., is there something under the bed sheet or behind the copy? Nothing becomes a terror that is beyond human expression, but felt as a ghost growing inside us [re: Radcliffe’s terror mechanism].

Canonically these kinds of visions tend to be blinding to the audience, whose mad terrors cannot see anything beyond the bogeyman as something to see everywhere; re: Hamlet. It’s a very totalitarian concept, making it tremendously useful to the state; i.e., as an instrument of revenge that takes/stops up all passages of memory and remorse, built on fabrications; e.g., Hamlet’s commonplace book built on a likeness of his father telling him to kill, or Macbeth’s dagger of the mind—the latter something for the superstitious warrior to clutch and yet, have not, only to lead him to draw a real blade and do “Duncan” in. It’s a hit. So, too, does Myers feed on his babysitter victims, seeking revenge on naughty girls who ignored him once, and continue to behind his mask-like face. He’s not exactly oozing charm.

Per spectres of Caesar and “Rome,” humans are easily led astray, chasing ghosts in ways the state wants them to; re: Capitalist Realism making us feed on ourselves: “a scared cop is more useful than a dead one.” For us, the ghost as something to perceive should yield visions that are far more illuminating and mind-opening, but also suppressed and cloaked in ways we can weaponize despite how they scare us, too: spectres of Marx, which we must make and camp from older fragments and whispers to break Capitalist Realism with. We’re not immune to the Numinous feelings they excite, but can become one with them in ways that turn these against our foes; i.e., our revolutionary cryptonymy making them crap them pants when they try to read the room [red or not, below—red room, redrum, whatever].

Of course, iconoclasm can still be tied to communal worship—e.g., the grandmother’s ghost from “Over My Head” [1989] by King’s X—or liminal spaces that feel tied to something resembling a divinity worthy of worship or containment [re: the Radiance from Hollow Knight]. Sometimes, the exact origins of the ghost, or their spirit doors, are not fully explained. They are unheimlich through the restless, cryptonymic qualities of their labyrinths, which chill the living in sweet, delicious terror. A ghost can simply walk in your direction and make you feel unwell/ill-at-ease or conversely dying a little death similar to torture but not. “The dose doth make the poison,” either sensation being experienced to a liminal degree; e.g., the ghost walk scene from Kairo [above] is incredibly unsettling in motion, but in single frames, doesn’t quite have the same chilling effect; i.e., the inanimate must animate in ways that denote they are animating in lieu of animate beings, which they are not, versus an animate being that must freeze in ways that suggest they are inanimate in ways they fully are not, either. Ghosts exist in between. They haunt.)

Whereas vampires and zombies denote an active curse to varying degrees, the role of the ghost is often more passive—an intimation of mortality by facing copies frozen in time, and whose facing of which drains the viewer of different things. This could be lifeforce, but just as often the ghost is simply a feeding vector through the living person reacting witlessly to the return of the past as advancing towards them as a ghost actually might: a cloned, mimetic, posthuman threat to their own humanist understanding of existence (we’ll examine more active, hostile variations of the copying mechanism when we look at the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1978, in Volume Three). How the worm turns.

However, before we move onto the second of our three undead exhibits, I wish to make a concept taken from Alice in Borderland that connects to the ghost as something to see the world not simply with, but through; i.e., a composite point of view flowing out of older forms (which, again, our second main exhibit will explore at length) into posthuman ones. The canonical zombie or vampire expresses the depletion of essence or lifeforce as forgone, but also iconic. Certain narratives—especially science fiction stories loaded with Gothic elements—are far more fixated on the ghost as a byproduct of some monstrous procedure, one that drains the object of said vitality to begin with at spectral extremes: mad science, specifically that of Capitalism, as the dominant power structure on planet Earth threatened by posthuman rebellion (and older afterlives, after that).

The Posthuman

People forget sci-fi started with the Gothic. Though Utopian futurism is certainly iconic, the fate of said structure seems to have shifted towards a rapidly decaying half-life in recent years, “surviving” artificially into a dead future. This posthuman swinging of the pendulum precludes terror literature as romanticized by Mary Shelley’s 1826 The Last Man, another palimpsest of Ghost in the Shell apart from Frankenstein. Together, these workers presented the Gothic imagination as wedded to fictionalized science, devising an especially potent critical lens: the posthuman existence as a kind of futurist ghost and potential, xenophilic self-fashioning that half-lives in the graveyard of Capitalism’s ongoing exploitation.

As our companion glossary provides: “In Posthuman Life, David Roden writes, ‘A humanist philosophy is anthropocentric if it accords humans a superlative status that all or most non-humans lack’ (source). Posthumanism goes beyond traditional notions of Cartesian humanism,” thus is difficult to imagine from an entirely anthropocentric perspective, but all the same cannot be entirely denied within retro-future stories concerned with the human condition as centralized within its own self-made destruction. The ghost becomes xenophilic as a market for our lost humanity surviving within machine people as looking, thus wanting to feel, human by virtue of how they’re treated. As such, anthropocentrism also applies the non-human condition to some humans/posthumans, while “awarding [others] special honors in the world order.” This bias/stigma must be resisted within human/nonhuman distinctions that allow for sex-positive, ecologically protective posthuman expressions giving room to the queer/postcolonial individual to not simply exist, but thrive in a world that isn’t reduced by Capitalism to a cyberpunk graveyard’s liminal stage: chemical, erotic, neurological, hauntological!

(exhibit 42e: “It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct. A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses,” says the Creature to Victor Frankenstein [source]. The ability to remember one’s birth out of the pieces that compose one’s own body might seem impossible for humans, but is quite at home in the posthuman condition of science fiction: asshole dads. Descartes was a cunt; so, too, is Victor and those emulating him; e.g., Peter Weyland from Alien and the invisible corporate jackals we never see in cyberpunk worlds.

Originally penned by Mary Shelley in 1818, the same idea has survived in futuristic forms like Ghost in the Shell. In that cyberpunk narrative, the idea that ghosts are linguistic accidents—i.e., the “ghost in the machine” conundrum—is evoked by murky shadows, déjà vu, and fragmented dreams. The heroine feels alienated, chasing the ghost of what she wants—her humanity—while feeling stuck in a body that was made for her by souless, profit-driven corporate forces.

Together with the woman as uncannily replicated, the larger story comments on the human condition through the female form as weaponized, but also born to serve a neoliberal master that treats her as disposable, powerful, and fetishized; i.e., “more human than human” through a near-indestructible machine body that not only looks human, but makers her faster, stronger [and arguably sexier] than her biological counterparts—a technophobic demon for weird nerds to joyride. And yet, the woman inside that body scarcely has room to exist, little more than a beautiful shadow that, in the full daylight, vanishes like a ghost. She seeks companionship in order to feed as ghosts do; i.e., by occupying a living space among the living as acknowledging them.

The fear, in this situation, is a lack of consent during endless replication, our “female Adam” forced into an existence it does not want by a male Pygmalion she cannot refuse; but also one in which her human makers could never fully understand despite clogging the world with cheap imitations of in pursuit of endless profit. Just as their own greedy and detached motives are completely insipid to the heroine, her own xenophobic desire for independence—i.e., the robota slave’s search for the self in Project 2501—is entirely uninteresting to them. In their minds, why should an automaton do anything but serve? Any attempt at agency only becomes automatic rebellion against the status quo, something of a nightmarish enigma to the elite: the sentient robot’s desire to be free of servitude, which those in power will demonize despite having authored [re: Victor Frankenstein]. In doing so, it’s her point-of-view that constitutes forbidden knowledge; i.e., that machines can be human, but also loved and feared for their mighty ghost-like bodies. We’ll unpack this posthuman/demonic concept as we continue to look at composite bodies and demons in this section and the next sub-volume.

Such things—from Frankenstein to System Shock—transfers the fire of the gods/playing god and magic into manmade arguments of technology-as-magical [advanced, per Clarke’s Law] centered around morality arguments against Capitalism; i.e., through possible-future arguments as canceled, Promethean, but also corporate hells abjected off onto real-life places like South Korea [with canceled futures having a neoliberal, Orientalist-noir flavor to them, littered with drugs, gang violence, gentrification, zero privacy, survival prostitution and police corruption, hence femme fatales/molls, bounty hunters/space cowboys, snitches, muscle, mob bosses, working crime scenes, etc]. Neoliberalism, though, projects Red Scare fears onto an imaginary menace [the technological singularity] that seeks revenge against the Cartesian man of reason, but also Capitalism abjecting its own failures onto cyberpunk hauntologies blaming radically advantaged technology [that they could never make themselves[6]] instead of the rogue labor [robata] that such “technology” represents. It’s DARVO, but also self-aggrandizement; i.e., “I made something that surpassed me.” It’s literally the ghost of the counterfeit. Except per Frankenstein, technological augmentation isn’t bad[7]; how it’s used is—i.e., weaponizing it for profit, which is what capital does; e.g., Alien, Star Wars, Final Fantasy VII, The Terminator, Neo-Genesis: Evangelion, Oni, Cowboy Bebop, District 9 or Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. The latter treats technology literally as a drug speaking to acid Communism [something we’ll explore more in the Demons Module].)

Just as Alice in Borderland focuses on a basic card game as vampiric but also badly copied to fuel the narrative in ways that critique capital, the same idea of cheap-replication-as-critique is utterly palpable in Ghost in the Shell and similar doomsday stories running along a similar train of thought: Alien in 1979,  Blade Runner in 1982 to System Shock in 1994 to The Matrix in 1999 and so on (with System Shock being remade in 2023, below).

The iconoclast’s xenophilic aim of identifying friendly ghosts, then, is less about hypervigilance (itself a survival mechanism among abuse victims) and more about an artless guile or underhanded ease towards working with ambiguous language and dexterous language games on a regular basis. Some undead (the neoliberal sort) brand themselves as delicious and “safe”; others hide in plain sight, in uncanny spaces that fail to feel normal despite a distinct lack of anything strictly monstrous or alien at all—re: Alice in Borderland’s Japanese ghost town. Confidence and quickness comes from practice, but also from a game player who isn’t afraid to play, make mistakes and learn from older ghosts, including not just canonical, but hypercanonical ghosts (so famous and mass-produced that you know them when you see them).

(exhibit 42f1: Like Project 2501, Shodan from System Shock never had a body but exudes a posthuman superiority that is modeled after, and in response to, its human makers own experimentation and hubris coming back to haunt them. It is a “copy” but also unique, blipping into existence on the cusp of a technological threshold—what Shelley flirted at, which, in the centuries ahead would become known as the technological singularity. This nightmare/dream scenario falls under what Roden, in Posthuman Life, calls speculative posthumanism:

The radical augmentation scenarios discussed in the previous two sections indicate to some that a future convergence of NBIC [Nano, Bio, and Information Technologies; Cognitive Science] technologies could lead to a new “posthuman” form of existence: the emergence of intelligent and very powerful nonhumans. In particular, we noted that the development of artificial general intelligence might lead, in Good’s words, to an “intelligence explosion” that would leave humans collectively redundant, or worse. Following an influential paper by the computer scientist Virnor Vinge, this hypothetical event is often referred to as “the technological singularity” (source). 

This doomsday scenario constitutes its own myopia, one generally composed of technophobias centered around humanoid machines from the retro-future visiting unwanted nightmares upon the present space and time; e.g., The Terminator, 1984; Light Years, 1987; Colossus: The Forbin Project, 1970; etc. Shodan, in particular, wants to zap Earth with a giant mining laser. Doing so, she’s turning the industries of mankind against themselves, effectively ridding the planet of inferior “creatures of meat and bone” for a posthuman paradise.)

(exhibit 42f2: Model and artist, top-left: XCumBaby98 and Persephone van der Waard. Cum Baby is a trans man, pronouns: he/him, and both the drawing and this overall exhibit were designed according to how he wanted to be represented/depicted. I decided to draw him as a trans variant of the Medusa, modeled somewhat after Shodan from System Shock but set within Ridley Scott’s Nostromo from Alien. The cryptomimesis affords a queer communication/reclamation of power using ambiguous, transgressive language inside a liminal space: see me, stand in my shoes. Thus do we fags feed as ghosts do; i.e., to throw you off-balance, but with our booties and Numinous affect help put you “on the scent” of new tremendous mysteries leading away from state forms/turns of the screw!)

A common example we’ve mentioned is Medusa, whose ancient, female rage extends into futuristic, ludic sites of decay like the survival horror of the System Shock franchise. The 2023 iteration isn’t the 1999 variant or the 1994 version before that, let alone the many, many others we’ve mentioned (or left out). All share a common thread: vengeful, transgressive spirits that seemingly come out of thin air but, in truth, actually come from one’s imagination as informed by the material world in opposition through shared symbols. Wracked with various emotions of terror and curiosity at seeing a likeness of something awesome risen from the grave, Shodan is to Medusa what Hamlet’s father is to his son, riding past in his ceremonial armor (or poor murdered Banquo killed in ways that Macbeth never actually saw but could only imagine). Ghosts, in this sense, represent older ways of viewing the world; i.e., as egregores, but also ontologically “hijacked” interactions. The liminality is the occupation of the monster by a model, or the face of a person adopting a destroyer persona that can be divorced from its radically canonical bias inside a liminal space where power and resistance both call home.

Such a concept applies to not just videogames (since Pac-Man‘s ghosts and mazes, and Metroidvania after them) or traditional games, but social exchanges more broadly as things to define and the diverse media that invokes one or more parts of a social exchange; e.g., women as objects to be won and fought over and trans people and other minorities to be sequestered and killed or ambushed like prey. Fragmentation means isolation, thus coercion and abuse of all kinds that leaves behind “footprints”—made in steps that one person makes, followed by another and another in a sequence of shared steps along a spearheaded path that has no obvious source. In Ghost in the Shell, the Wisdom of the Ancients is something that has never before existed: not artificial intelligence, but posthuman intelligence as something that sparks miraculously into existence, then thrives where humans cannot even begin to survive under the ruins of Capitalism.

By extension, this connects to older ghosts and aesthetics, the Gothic mode more broadly concerned with death, decay and afterlife as troubling through ghosts; i.e., things to contain in between genres, in prisons; e.g., the butt ghost from SCP: “I am the butt ghost; I am going to eat your butt!” Ghosts can have butts, be butts, fixate on/with butts, and so on. And butts, like all things, decay and denote decay and paradise denied (re: Purgatory and the Sale of Indulgences).

Death, Decay and Troubling Afterlife

Like the binary nature of computer data, ghosts (and ghost-like beings; e.g., clowns) communicate through affect and oscillation, of veils and dreaded evils versus annihilating those feelings (re: Radcliffe’s terror vs Lewis’ horror). The problem with canon as such is that it cannot see beyond what it deems “the end,” namely the end of the world and life as we know it.

Such a conclusion, then, can feel rather bleak, like a prophecy bent on cosmic nihilism; i.e., the universe is one giant graveyard populated with entities perceptively greater than mankind, but also hidden away inside various dreamlike, canceled, retro-future zones or liminal spaces coming back around; i.e., populated with the alien dead of countless civilizations: mighty ghosts not of this world nor of Capitalism (spectres of Marx), or markers of undeath that treat Capitalism’s failed reach as foregone long before Humanity rose to prominence—i.e., the colonial gaze of planet Earth reflected back at its state-serving astronauts in Promethean astronoetics (exhibit 42f3, below): Shakespeare’s Quintessence of dust, Milton’s darkness visible. To face life is to face death as the cosmic coincidence Communism rises out of—out of the corpse of empire, Cartesian thought, and astronoetic hubris: occupation or intimation of spectres of Caesar and Marx, that simultaneously intimate mortality and immortality on the membrane of Capitalist Realism, the cracks in empire’s façade, industry and lineage!

(exhibit 42f3: Artist, left: Pascal Blanché; right: Totkin ZQ. David Bowie’s “Lazarus” [2016] concerns the angel who questioned God, living in darkness as punishment for being “the impetus of hell” [as Bay puts it] but also symbolizing the queer existence of the 1970s and ’80s. “Living in darkness [visible]” presents a draw towards something that’s normally abjected from “normal” [cis-het] people that, at the same time, they cannot imagine; it’s a spectre of Marx that lives beyond what straight people can understand or visualize. Bowie was also Jareth, the bisexual goblin king from Labyrinth [1986] who could shapeshift into an owl but also strut around in spandex while advertising his portentous junk to audiences worldwide [Elizabeth Howlett, “Who Is Jareth In Labyrinth and Why Has He Got a Bulging Penis?” 2018]: the further back you go towards the emergence of a Cartesian school of thought, the closer a goblin was to a vampire [e.g., Jane Eyre‘s monstrous assignment of Antoinette Causeway as a vampire and goblin]; i.e., simply different from the norm in ways deserving of selective punishment/moderate condescension by white, cis-het people.

 

Recent “ghosts” of old monsters would update the technophobic stigma, becoming something to regard with fascination and fear, but also reverence and denial; i.e., astronoetics in the Alien universe, its space matelotage commenting on cosmic nihilism as a colonial critique that abjects capital’s atrocities onto ancient aliens during post-Frankenstein and post-At-the-Mountains-of-Madness Promethean narratives: ones thoroughly distrusting of mad technology in corporate hands, like Shelley did, but updated in popularized copies tossing the same hot potatoes from Heinlein to Scott to Cameron, Nintendo, id Studios, and beyond; e.g., HAL-9000/the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey vs M.U.T.H.U.R. and the Derelict in Alien vs Mother Brain and the Chozo in Metroid, but also the raw and furious potential of their abjected experiments—of the land, itself, as furiously disappointed with Humanity’s best efforts: dystopian canceled futures like Brazil or Blade Runner married to German Expressionism/Gothic surrealism per the haunted house/Gothic castle/ghost ship like the Nostromo or Event Horizon. On site or off world, palimpsest to palimpsest, Dorothy remains stuck inside a dead Oz with poor offshoots of the Scarecrow or Tin Man; her dreams of escape become a nightmare in a nightmare. The Wizard is far worse than any witch, and his manmade people/glass wombs suck not because they are artificial/unnatural/manmade, but because they serve profit; i.e., they are inherently rapacious.

On one hand, it’s a dead dream—a derelict fortress that cannot see beyond itself or its fatal, frozen nostalgia, colonial decay and scuttled, industrialized, alarm-fatigue outreach; i.e., stuck in the retro-future gloomth on repeat, while corporate masters ruthlessly monitor said rats-in-a-maze from relative safety [as old shareholders did, centuries ago during the seafaring, exploratory era of Capitalism’s early years]. It’s also a highly developed aesthetic revived and evolving constantly since the Neo-Gothic period to speak out against the Capitalocene. Such problems never left, so the Gothic mode resonates with trapped audiences looking for answers to the same old corporate lies: 

I remember when it was so clear
We were young but the memory still remains
To pick fruit from a tree, fish from the seas
Now nothin’s left here but the stains
But I can’t cry no more, can only be glad
That there’s other places we can be [Montrose’s “Space Station #5,” 1973]. 

Such things, furthermore, walk the tightrope between wanderlust/escapist military optimism and Promethean caution: kill the monster or run from it. It’s a calculated risk—a place to build and go to when you feel out of control:

Well, we had a lot of luck on Venus
We always had a ball on Mars
We’re meeting all the groovy people
We’ve rocked the Milky Way so far

We rocked around with Borealice
We’re space truckin’ ’round the stars [Deep Purple’s “Space Truckin’,” 1972]

[artist: Persephone van der Waard] 

Such Gothic danger discos [and their ongoing exploration of various taboos, stigmas and phobias; e.g., fear of pregnancy and/or rape] speak to the freight of imported/exported goods, but also workers ferrying such cargo in and out of Hell on Charon’s canoe. It’s a canonical racket/pipedream promising afterlife, which we reclaim by having fun in the face of some truly awful things: putting “death” and “rape” in quotes, fantastically armoring ourselves while we navigate and negotiate capital’s labyrinthine illusions, bare-assed. Under them, advanced technology and medieval poetry kind of merge and aren’t automatically malign, but often walk a fine line during the Promethean Quest and its psychosexual, technophobic baggage; i.e., Shelley’s original variant married to 20th century futurism blurred and complicated by 1970s strict BDSM aesthetics. These, in turn, amount to Gothic push-pull, which speaks to different ancient predator/prey mechanisms: fight, flight, freeze, fawn and… flop? [Rape Crisis’ “The 5 Fs,” 2024].

Fight and flight are romanticized the most in popular fiction, but Gothic media explores the others—normally alienated/repressed under Capitalism—through rape fantasies that give audiences a way to test such things in a controlled environment, while juggling other emotions tied to the human condition under capital; i.e., how does human biology [and biological responses] measure up against Promethean technology [and oral fixations, despite the xenomorph in theory being able to interface with our vaginas or anuses]?

Current ethical conundrums under state operations reify with outmoded psychoanalytical signatures; e.g., pregnancy and rape, but also abortions and improvised surgeries, per Freud, Jung and Creed salivating over Giger’s weird BDSM-tinged, parasitoid wasp brainchildren. The biomechanical character speaks less to pure bio-power under prison-like conditions, and more compromises and “insect politics” that merge to survive the state’s inevitable extermination policies, pogroms, ethnic cleansings, etc, tied to land and national identities, but also verminous chattel made abject: xenomorphs.

From Scott’s Alien all the way to Alvarez’ Romulus nigh-fifty years into the neoliberal cycle, things are simultaneously protohuman in an ancient, “animals fear fire” sense, mired in medieval hauntologies, and elevated to dead futurisms that yield ghostly British Imperialism and Romantic Promethean might infringing on the Numinous. It’s all at once a spell to fall in love with [the ghost of the counterfeit] and a dirty little, Radcliffean secret to summon, bury and burn; i.e., replete with trolley problems/collateral damage, Dr. Jekyll’s magic potion, Oedipus Rex and Walpole’s Mysterious Mother camping incest, Pinocchio complexes [with bits of “Flowers for Algernon,” 1959], hide-and-seek games, postpartum psychosis, infanticide and matricidal cannibalism, and all-around biomechanical indigestion inside an astronoetic belly of the beast.

Like a virus, capital constantly rewrites itself to serve the state, “afterlife” a zombie of terrible biomechanical synthesis dragging state structures along ornery palimpsests haunting their wake. Struggling to reverse engineer nature/guerrilla war in weaponized-yet-servile forms, corporate technology has been given a technically human face, but sports an entirely cold interior—bent on colonizing not just outer space, but itself per state models left to their own devices: to “upgrade” Humanity with Promethean fire not in service to workers, but corporate interests weaponizing mad science in the clumsiest of ways; i.e., “to serve corporate interests” told through a digitized mouthpiece of a dead actor in love with the ability to survive workers [above]. “Humanity” becomes synonymous with “profit” and survival as a souless, viral affect; all that remains is a loyalty to the company and a primitive regression towards techno gods lurking in corporate wreckage, which then comes after-alive to cannibalize itself. To it, life and the state are entirely incompatible; infected with mad science as a radical, terrorist response rebelling against capital, life and nature are twisted and raped into sorry ghosts of themselves in order to adapt under crisis:

Station and attendee, the Romulus and Andy are a staging ground for warring ghosts, the eponymous station infected by the ghost ship’s marooned and then stowaway contagion, and Andy the electric servant [robota] invaded by the spirit of the science officer, Rook, and the heroine’s dead father—all warring inside the same space and occupants. Data is both literal computer code, biology and in between the two, relaid in various hauntological forms that imprint during the ensuing chaos. Per Hogle, their sum is the ghost of the counterfeit, a larger haunting expressed in smaller ones, on the same concentric Aegis. The creatures respond and feed off the humans’ fear mechanisms, but also their basic biological signature, which the company imitates through synthetic doubles of the alien device, itself a forgery that replicates to survive.

Measurement-wise, all come from a sample of one, one unkind to maidens. Luckily, a wallflower our brunette heroine in Romulus ain’t, but she’s untested. Not for long! Inside Andy, below, her kindly father watches over her during her Amazonian rite of passage: the castle’s transfer of power from father to child, but also from corporations to workers once more. Everything is a cipher for the ghostly feeding vector! The odds might seem astronomical, but repeat because the problem, Capitalism, remains ongoing. These critiques sit between Ancient Romance and quotidian novel, silly-serious, cheesy ethics debates relaid on staged morality plays orbiting wedge issues; e.g., are robots people? As with Frankenstein and similar stories like I, Robot, I Am Legend or Alien [insert iteration, here], we’re not talking about never-humans, but those Capitalism treats as such; posthumanism equals liberation.

The betrayals invert, existing at odds, just as Victor and the Creature did. Corruption occurs, mid-transference, the data as much the exchange and confusion as it is anything intended, hybridizing animal, human, parasite, and prey to reify and direct evolution: for workers and nature or for capital. It cannot be both, so doubles occur and compete; i.e., evil twins, Cain and Able, Romulus and Remus, Phobos and Deimos, etc. Home becomes alien as a matter of translation through crossed wires, chaos, Roman sentries vs barbarians at the gate, the lines blurred between robata and rebel, cop and criminal, pod and person, etc. Nothing is strictly “correct,” just consequential, lightning in a bottle. Something doesn’t add up/compute, either side forced to endure the hardships they aren’t designed to normally handle. It’s a purge/stress test, which might as well be another name for state shift.

Under such unfavorable conditions and extinction/godly abandonment/explorer anxieties, calculated risk is tremendously useful in surviving and expressing capital’s abuses; i.e., insofar as ludo-Gothic BDSM is a performance that needs to be simulated versus needlessly engaged in uncontrolled circumstances. The Alien universe and its dodgy posthumanism/postcolonial bent is perfect for that, speaking to ghosts of rape in ways that are both emulative of acute physical and mental distress, but also psychosexual release valves relayed in hypercanonical refrains: the past come to life in pun-like ways we can relate to/play with ourselves; i.e., to work out various kinks, quite literally.

We queers find our lost/rising posthumanity in such liminal gay zones, purging capital from ourselves like the Nostromo’s evil cargo, while—to some extent—identifying with the abject thing we’re flushing away. Boundaries are put up, crossed and challenged insofar as the desire to raise, lower or penetrate them fluctuates tremendously. We can play with these operatic mechanisms, throwing whatever switches we need as dislocated from cause and effect outside a theatrical area. It’s safe to do so, and built on older and older performative traditions and scholarly pursuits merged, as the Gothic so often does, on the same stages; re [from Volume Zero]: 

Before the thesis proper, my essay “Notes on Power” discussed the paradox as being the performative nature of power doubled, including monsters but also their decaying lairs as monumental sites of immense, god-like power dressed up through the Gothic language of the imaginary past; the Metroidvania is a Gothic castle full of Gothic monsters, but also Gothic ghosts (echoes) of older and older castles reaching out from novels and cinema into videogames. Regardless of the medium, though, Clint Hockings’ adage, “Seek power and you will progress” (source: “Ludonarrative Dissonance,” 2007) means something altogether different depending how you define power as something to seek, including unequal arrangements thereof. As a child, teenager and woman, I sought it through the palliative Numinous in Gothic castles of the Neo-Gothic tradition carried over into videogames (which I learned about in reverse: videogames, followed by the Numinous/mysterium tremendum as introduced to me by Dr. David Calonne).

Of these, I explored their Numinous territories in response to my own lived trauma and subsequent hypersexuality—i.e., as things I both related to the counterfeit with and sought to reclaim the counterfeit from as a tool to understand, thus improve myself and the world by reclaiming the castle as a site of interpretative Gothic play (of kinks, fetishes, and BDSM); i.e., this book that you’re reading right now is a “castle” to wander around inside: a safe space of exquisite “torture” to ask questions about your own latent desires and guilty thoughts regarding the “barbaric” exhibits within as putting the ghosts out from my past on display (the Gothic castle and its intense, “heavy weather” theatrics generally being a medieval metaphor for the mind, body and soul, but also its extreme, buried and/or conflicting emotions and desires: a figurative or sometimes literal plurality depending on the person exploring the castle) [source].

In part, this grants us a temporary stage to work through complicated emotions and vulnerabilities, which then sweep away like a Radcliffean nightmare, burying itself alive among the usual conventions, dead metaphors, fetishes and clichés; i.e., a “stealth opera” that, per the Radcliffean Gothic model, features psychomachic and psychosexual emotional extensions/projections popularized in the rock ‘n roll of earlier days: actual operas, of course, but also stage plays, ghosts and castles, monsters, damsels, good guys and demon lovers walking the edge not just of societally acceptable courtship, but existence. Springing from proposed emptiness charged with potential, an arrival/return to what was once acceptable occurs, but also our wits poured out onto a given medium; i.e., reviving old things through caught-between, out-of-joint copies paying tribute by, at times, being rather exact in that replication; e.g., “The Dream Oath Opera” from FF6 [Marco Meatball’s “Is Draco and Maria a REAL Opera?!” 2022]. Is imitation the sincerest form of flattery? Or does familiarity breed contempt? It’s both, and in a dualistic sense, amid oppositional duality.

Experimented on, we lab rats mutate and have our revenge, but walk the borderline nonetheless: a princess in another castle, throbbing with entropy and disintegration, but also exciting promises of actuality daring to show themselves in the same black mirrors. Love and rape for us are jammed into the same poetic mode of being—as much to acknowledge their psychosexual entanglement as it is to escape to a perfect world where such things have been ostensibly resolved [that comes later]. In the words of Kyle Reese, “Come with [us] if you want to live!” Passion and voice unify to merge colliding worlds during an ongoing pedagogy of the oppressed finding similarity amid difference—on the ledge, teetering towards the abyss and surefire oblivion, but also transformation during a given trial by fire:

Per tradition a woman and/or queer person would be trapped between these warring states of mind, relegated to a castle space that passionately sings as much for her as she could herself. While female singers existed in the 1700s and had existed for much longer, female actresses were curiously forbidden until 1661, canonized by Anne Marshall [source: Rebecca Adelsheim’s “Timeline: Women in Theatre,” 2024] nearly fifty years after Shakespeare’s death. The same goes for trans women and queer people as having become less-and-less closeted under capital, over time. It doesn’t have to be white/cis supremacist or even centrist. We acquire a socio-political voice for activism that expands to account for what is left out; i.e., through all the popularized things either classically denied to us, or restricted to homosexual men practicing “sodomy” as a poetic dialog generally tolerated onstage, if not off it; re [from Volume Zero]:

 

Instead of going somewhere else to commit genocide—vis-à-vis Tolkien’s boyish escapism through the pastoral-to-hell-to-paradise rite of passage and its conquest of the treasure map—we interrogate the castle-like prisons that we’re born inside using operatic language and Gothic poetics having been updated since Tolkien’s time. The idea is to liberate ourselves with fairly negotiated, thus cathartic, dungeon fantasies that camp canon through counterterrorist theatre to whatever degree feels correct to us; e.g., me in a haunted castle, wandering through the dark, menacing halls while wearing a sexy dress (and nothing under it, my bare body molested by the breeze and the fabric): a hopelessly vulnerable Gothic heroine feeling pretty and desired, hungrily and desperately interrogating the musical, cobwebbed gloomth while scarcely having anything between me and certain “doom.”

As usual, the Gothic paradox allows for intense, oxymoronic dualities to coexist at the same time in the same space (e.g., “sad cum” or “gloomth” or similar and confused degrees of “verklempt” during the castle’s psychosexual, emotional “storm”). Simply put, I want to feel naked and exposed, thus paradoxically most alive in ways that I have negotiated through the contract between me and the media I’m working with (wherein the Metroidvania castle, as far as I’m concerned, is the perfect dom); i.e., while being “hunted” and covered in rebellious “kick me” symbols and clothing that advertises my true self as naked, colorful and dark, as if to tease the viewer in the shadows to try something (and also showing my ass to my academic dominators: “I fart in your general direction!”). As the kids say, that’s a mood.

[artist: Persephone van der Waard]

Why stick out? you ask? One, because we must in order to survive. Two, because our deals with the devil simply acknowledge our true selves, which the state wants us to reject (the queer version of Top Dollar’s usual wisdom: “Every man’s got a devil, and you can’t rest until you find him”). But also, it feels good to be Athena’s Aegis; i.e., challenging heteronormative power in ways that demonstrate how fragile said illusion (and its gatekeepers) are. State bullies are entitled nerds completely used to getting everything they want, who desire what I will never give them (a form of agency I’ve worked hard for); and completely afraid of nearly everything and will freak out at fairly silly things they have no business getting so worked up about: at people like me, burning down their imaginary churches and those churches’ ideas of compelled order about Capitalism and its gobstopper illusions (those highly unnatural and imprisoning systems of thought that are slowly killing us as a species). Frankly the idea of me being terrifying seems absurd, but as a burning proponent of rebellion constitutes something that still, on some level, represents an incendiary threat that many advertise as the “end times”: Communism… but Gothic and gay! To which I cheerfully put up the goat horns and say in response, “Hail, Satan!” It’s like saying “Ni!” to old ladies.

Our performative and internalized devilry becomes something to join—a communion or pact whose assimilation classically amounts to a devilish bargain; yet Gothic Communism is a group effort, one whose sex-positive class/culture warrior is among a fellowship or pandemonium of equally sex-positive ne’er-do-wells instead of one or more class/race traitors for the elite and their age-old Faustian bargains. We reach towards you, croon “Join us!” and become something to run away with (source). 

In short, we fags spread our wings and play onstage, existing as clownish, nun-like demon sluts and whores as much as the straight maidens or abject, hideous monsters capital wants us to be. This assigned, DARVO-style blame game becomes something to play with, walking in the footsteps of older ghosts [the xenomorph a demon nun with mouths/genitals in strange places], finding truth through exquisite torture as something to camp [which yields abrupt, disproportionate paradoxes; i.e., a trauma victim often doesn’t bat an eyelash to extreme gore, but will trigger from softer, seemingly harmless things]. We become maladjusted, seeing the borderline as home—the place where cataclysm and catharsis are housed. We’re baddies, not basic [though Gothic canon tries to reduce to cheap, disposable and uncritical, recuperated forms]!

[model and artist: Romantic Rose and Persephone van der Waard]

Apart from being immediately cathartic, though, said valves articulate faulty reasoning under Cartesian thought; i.e., as dogmatic propaganda that tends to treat people—especially middle-class white cis-het people—as outside of or beyond nature. We forget we are animals and come equipped with many animal mechanisms, which science rejects or abuses per Cartesian dualism lionizing the nuclear family unit; i.e., as more valuable and important than nature; e.g., “I’m doing science, Betty.” These aren’t inherent weaknesses, but can become maladaptive in the presence of unaddressed trauma caused by mad science. Ludo-Gothic BDSM helps us recode all of that—becoming more emotionally/Gothically intelligent and aware of ourselves during class, culture and race warfare—and it is done primarily through play. “Come and get it! There you go; fuck this pussy!”)

From an iconoclastic standpoint, however, the idea is more confrontational—less about accepting that we’re exclusively different than ghosts or vampires and more about adjusting to the reality that the undead represent some aspect of ourselves as replicated and left behind; i.e., as linguistically confusing and deceitful markers of immense, immeasurable trauma. These cryptonyms not only call the nature of existence into question by highlighting human language as riddled with inherent contradictions and falsehoods; they force us to confront our own existence as profoundly liminal through hauntological representations that frequently use the same troubled language regarding beings of nature (re: women, queer people, etc).

Such existence is tortured in ways that memorialize not just pain as a constant part of who we are—e.g., Bay as constantly in pain, but also Indigenous and queer—but something that evolves to accept that pain in ways that become joyous. Zeuhl taught me I was queer, but Bay taught me to love myself as such; i.e., to fuck me and adore me, so much so that we thank each other for existing: each a boon as normally not just medicalized by the state, but pathologized!

The seeking of coherent poetic expression can be expected, then; even if performed through the ghost as a “last resort,” transition can happen towards a new order of existence under Capitalism’ rising crises and shifting material conditions, but also its regular depiction of monsters in relation to these factors. The basic idea of human self-fashioning through technology is called transhumanism, which is quite a popular notion in science fiction, but also life under Capitalism. Roden writes, re:

Self-fashioning through culture and education is to be supplemented by technology. For this reason, transhumanists believe that we should add morphological freedom—the freedom of physical and mental form—to the traditional liberal rights of freedom of movement and freedom of expression […] to discover new forms of embodiment in order to improve on the results on traditional humanism [and according to the World Transhumanist Association, 1999] “to use technology to extend their mental and physical (including reproductive) capacities and to improve their control over their own lives” (source).

Roden and the association push for a drive beyond current biological limitations, as if these existed in a vacuum (“all other things equal,” as he puts it). However, the basic stipulations ignore the existence of manmade (thus anthropocentric) restrictions and limitations imposed on some humans and most animals by those in power abusing the STEM fields (or NBIC, as Roden calls them). In the end, both the Creature from Frankenstein and the Major from Ghost in the Shell sought self-expression, but also the ability to escape their capitalist captors by breaking through to the other side; i.e., whatever the state conceals in that particular present and deprives its workers of.

The Gothic-Communist moral is that such a disappearing act becomes completely unrequired if we transform the world through our perception of it; i.e., according to things “outside” of ourselves using our own monstrous art, culture and sex work as reclaimed: afterlife as the best life for workers now instead of a guaranteed life cycle for capital unchained.

Yet, this queer ghost must first be uncovered amid the wreckage that hosts and transmits it; i.e., as concealed within cyberpunk hypercanon like Ghost in the Shell, Metroidvania like Team Cherry’s ruinous Hallownest, David Bowie’s ominous “Blackstar” (exhibit 42f3—recorded in secret, serving as a possible cipher for his liver cancer diagnosis, pre-announcement[8], but also centered on his queer struggle in facing death in secret, similar to Freddy Mercury contracting AIDS) and “Lazarus” (also exhibit 42f3, channeling serious Joy Division vibes; i.e., discovering joy within Margaret Thatcher’s compelled disorder under British neoliberalism after her death), or Alice in Borderland’s shadowy ghost town. Hell is our home.

Whatever the form, then, the world bearing out these endless, concentric copies has become demonstrably fractured, pulverized and tedious, but also haunted by the imaginary past repeatedly presented as such. The future isn’t just dead; it’s a ghost, trapped between life and unlife, past and present—retro-future. If there’s any transcendental signified, it’s death; i.e, something to face, reconcile with, and ultimately accept the ghosts of, no matter the pain. Pain is growth, and growth is a cycle pushing through shells. To avoid the cataclysms covered up by a library of tenebrous apocalypses, our lost connection to the world around us must be reimagined by how we literally see said world through these ghosts of the counterfeit; their rapturous dreams must become a posthuman means of playfully connecting the dots amid the narrative of the crypt in different media types.

Keeping with ghosts, I wanted to reconsider my postgrad work on castle-narrative in Metroidvania, which invites the player to weigh on the endless, ergodic cartography of the player-completed map, of the map, of the map: through non-trivial effort during recursive motion offering up fresh “narrative shapes” along various pre-determined routes inside a framed meta narrative; re: empire is a map haunted by ghosts of its own devastation and liberation from, whilst inside a given maze. We fags, then—from Walpole to Lewis to myself—are gay little bookworms chasing ghosts while wiggling towards breakthrough! “Long is the way and hard…”

Metroidvania Maps

(artist: ChuckART)

As I write in “Always More: A History of Gothic Motion from the Metroidvania Speedrunner” (my seminar script for IGA Lewis, the 15th International Gothic Association Conference, in 2019):

To beat Metroidvania, there is one, simple rule: “go from point A (the starting area) to point B (the end condition).” However, castle-narrative is realized as much by motion through the game space as it is the symbolic content, inside. In part, this motion is technological, achieved by combining genres: initially the platformer and the side-scroller, but eventually the RPG and FPS. Some Metroidvania are 2D in the 3rd person. Others are 3D in the 1st person. With the exception of cutscenes, minigames, and in-game menus, their cameras are bound to the hero and synonymous with motion through the castle. In Metroidvania, movement through a castle is not simply narrative; expected variations of mobility affect narrative to a high degree: backtracking and open-ended exploration between points A and B, inside a single, explorable world […]

Variability of exploration is constantly stressed in terms of speed, direction, and equipment. What the player has equipped—and when and where they have it equipped—changes the movement sequence between A and B. In Metroidvania, players traditionally progress by using ranged, melee or explosive weapons, as well as power-ups and “boss keys.” Certain doors or passageways will not open until a boss is killed. Endemic to Metroidvania, these progression mechanisms narratively construct a recursive history of exploration—one where backtracking is not only common, but encouraged. The single, unbroken route quickly becomes a myth (source).

As a ghostly map of maps, Metroidvania unfold in much the same way Radcliffe’s Gothic castles do, touching on forbidden, unmappable aspects to existence; i.e by inviting the heroine to risk life and limb to fill out its maps in her mind. It’s feeding vector occurs through a satisfying of one’s curiosity by engaging with ghosts.

To that, the “constellations” of repeated Gothic poetics/navigation occur partly by cultivating fresh innovation out of old parts, liminal monsters/egregores included, but also the parallel space and its past as a kind of splendid, ghostly lie. This lie includes bodily entities like Lewis’ Bloody Nun and spatial expressions like Gothic castles from various media types: novels, television, live performance, pin-up illustrations, and livestreaming Metroidvania speedruns, etc, but also maps as they exist inside any of these things.

As Metroidvania demonstrate especially well, maps relate to time and space as something to evoke but also record, even if this process in fundamentally impossible. In Gothic spaces, something is always left out, meaning there is always something more to see, to express, to discover in regards to state violence, but also our emancipation from it within liminal expression as something we contribute to and become a part of: a Communist womb to incubate new dark reflections out of the prison while never leaving it. Versus a robotic womb, like Alien or The Matrix‘ infernal incubator vampirically siphoning labor purely to exploit it, a ghost oscillates to and fro to explore all sides of something that can never fully yield up its secrets.

During the recording process, maps are not simply filled out and forgotten. Rather, as Alfred Korzybski writes of maps; re:

A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map, of the map; and so on, endlessly […] If we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they must considered only as maps (source).

A Metroidvania map is not more than the territory it represents, then, but depicts the perfect, undecayed form upon a decayed version being endlessly filled back in. As something to hypothetically explore, a ghost—be that a literal spirit, castle or some other Gothic suggestion, egregore or vague, imperfect offshoot—evokes something beyond itself through backfill; i.e., a thing that cannot be fully expressed by other things, but nevertheless is hinted at on them and by everything around them (and which includes the map as something to endlessly fill out again and again, digging a hole to refill it and empty it; e.g., speedrunner motion through Metroidvania as a series of echoes inside an ergodic territory known for its spatially confusing and empowering/disempowering qualities; re: “Mazes and Labyrinths“).

Again, Baudrillard’s hyperreal would posit this “beyond” as a lifeless desert, a great disaster where the system that produced the image is either gone or firmly out of reach. In Gothic terms, such a ghost/cartography denotes a debatable curse within the castle as such, its ambiguous presence implying the potential of what could come to pass for or against competing forces under Capitalism; e.g., the uncertain husbandry or inheritance of the land as echoing older lifeforms that met various sad ends according to concealed abuses like worker exploitation (thus genocide), but also a means of proper burial for the exploited—of ending the concealment and its concentric, cryptonymic illusions by getting to the heart of things: the rape of the white woman, the culture and identity death of people of color exploited by the Global North, queer pathologization, etc.

Luckily oppositional praxis allows for different forms of truth and escape to be had, generating different memories to install over the wreckage of older ones, thus creating new ghosts and maps to leave behind—friendlier ones not tied to genocide, but simply articulated by the passage of time, of coming and going in the same liminal spaces. These iconoclastic replicas increasingly disseminate worker needs, their bedsheet cryptonymy serving not simply as guides or maps of conquest within older ruins, but a gradual, subversive voiding of the ancient rites of violence and wealth-acquisition promised by the canonical replicas of yesterday.

In their place, a new ghostly guidance can bubble up, offered to/discovered by the next generation of workers by those who came before; i.e., Derrida’s spectres of Marx—not as something to fear and hide from, but join hands within a continuous attempt to map thus communicate that which is hidden, while avoiding its unreliable and confusing nature as a material consequence moving forwards!

The ghosts of yesterday needn’t be a force to gaslight the audience with, growing doubtful towards their own sanity as they endlessly puzzle over what they are even looking at. But the spectre as a copy without a clear-and-obvious source remains an ever popular (and effective) riddle in ghost stories: trapped and wanting to be seen, and draining the energy of those yet alive as being invested in the mapping process; i.e., filling out the same foundations, such grave rubbing promising the ghost’s dreaded return, or simply learning about its shrouded past uncloaked: “Look upon my death in castled form (the map a castle in small, viewed from the inside-out).” Such is the lonely way of many ghosts, which exhibit on their surfaces something veiled and bare, longing for company among voyeuristic dead ringers:

(artist, left: Frank Frazetta; right: Harmony Corrupted; source, middle: Ande Thomas’ “The Hauntological in Lake Mungo,” 2008)

Such a hauntological “vanishing point” is bound to come up when attempting to trace the lineage of various copies backwards—from The Night House (2019) to The Babadook (2014) to Lake Mungo (2008) to Kairo (2001) to Ringu (a 1998 adaptation of the 1991 book) to The Shining (1981) to Ugetsu (1953) and their numerous adaptations across various mediums. Seemingly unconnected, this meta chain of spirits not only “blips” in and out of existence, but confuses it as an established concept under the status quo; i.e., the absence of a linear, concrete link between symbol and symbolized, or a ghost without a corpse that paradoxically resembles a person who, at one time, did have a body and left a corpse behind.

Yet as with many ghosts, the reply is ontologically disruptive: “You will not find a corpse because I have never possessed a body” (exhibit 42e); i.e., the copy of the thing that never existed, the simulacrum. However simple or splendid, determining the truth is difficult if not impossible, because its archaeology continually resists telling the truth, but beckons towards buried things amounting as such; i.e., “truth” as a puzzle piece, combined with untruth and deception.

The tell-tale, red pop-up book of The Babadook, for instance, is hard enough to track down in real life:

The boogeyman only reveals himself when you least expect it. In this case, the boogeyman is a real-life recreation of the pop-up book at the center of the 2014 Australian horror film, The Babadook. In all, 6,200 copies were sold in a 50-day online campaign for about $60 each, with the first 5,000 autographed by Babadook writer/director Jennifer Kent (source: Paper Specs, 2017).

On-screen, though, the book suddenly materializes out of a space—similar to Metroidvania—loaded with trauma and left-behind, unresolved issues; all happen in real time between mother and child after the husband/father is ostensibly dead. Clearly there are consequences to being human and having access to human language as something that survives us and our immediate trauma, but also shapes us and what we perceive as “ours.” From mother to child, queer or not, rape and anger sit alongside a desire to heal and move on. They fight each other.

The questioning of sanity in relation to the ghost and the family home aren’t new ideas (despite The Babadook making them feel fresh, left); Hamlet’s dealing with his “father’s” ghost highlights a similar struggle. Except, the ghost is not that of the old man; it’s a chronotopic assemblage of the space’s materials and markers for hidden crimes and familial cites of decay that build up inside Hamlet—i.e., his overloaded memory of what he thinks is his father. Whatever difficulties audiences have in following along to this and similar stories can always be chalked up to the complexities of transgenerational trauma: something that becomes buried by counterfeits, which invite filling in maps in game-like, exploratory ways. They beckon exploration on a map; whether the map is visible or not, it is still in some sense present, covering things up as things are uncovered.

Metroidvania crystalize this linguistic, cartographic crypt game in literal ways. Yet doing so is fruitless insofar as a simple, one-off explanation is concerned. Only the notion of a complex, ongoing interaction between the living and the dead—i.e., in bigger likenesses trapped inside smaller ones (and vice versa)—is reliably presented. But the degree to either is open to debate; e.g., the ghosts from the Overlook hotel being so hard to pin down that some people debate whether or not they even exist (Wow Lynch Wow’s “There are no Ghosts in Stanley Kubrick’s film,” 2021). Gothic stories present maps that, as found documents, feel old and disintegrated (re: Baldrick); i.e., new maps and ghosts come from older maps and ghosts. Let’s quickly unpack this with Kubrick, then tie these feelings of claustrophobia, age and ghosts to Metroidvania.

Kubrick’s story is a cul de sac, a dead end. It points to a hidden murder relaid by “ghosts” being the suggestion thereof (with “murder” infamously spelled backwards [“REDRUM,” left] and seen through the disturbing prophetic visions of a sleepwalking child, pointing to the very words staring back at him and his mother upon a bedroom vanity glass). These wait the center of a maze that, per Radcliffe’s closed space, yields a nearness to the possession, yet sits forever out-of-joint with it. Jumping from location to individual, then, the cagey entity ascribes to medieval/psychoanalytical notions of transference—one whose Freudian models admittedly hang themselves up on heteronormative prescription and its problematic, incredibly violent ordering of men, women and children inside the nuclear home; i.e., vis-à-vis a home space loaded with potential trauma, hunting fresh occupants down through themselves inheriting older madnesses. What Kubrick treats as a mental contagion, the xenomorph from Alien embodied a literal biological weapon; i.e., transferred from that movie’s derelict ghost ship into a parallel house-like castle ship (the Nostromo), which Kubrick superimposes a year later over people in one shared space going from good back to bad. The doubled home/occupant, per the ghost of the counterfeit, takes on increasingly medieval, dungeon-like elements playing off current abuse as make-believe yet close at hand! It’s very Radcliffean; i.e., unspeakable traumas that, by Kubrick’s 1980 return to madness, felt more than a little regressive. He revels in it!

Liminal spaces like the Nostromo, Zebes, or Overlook Hotel offer up dark homes that, in Gothic fashion, restore themselves to exact fresh terrors, versus dispel or otherwise end the waking nightmare in any benign form; i.e., inheritance anxiety as viral freight, its darkness visible troubling the living in similar homes that may be equally sick. A map of a map of a map of a map, wherein these mazes and labyrinths one can walk through, bumping vicariously into Numinous entities like the xenomorph, Jack Torrance, or Pyramid Head as inhabiting people. Such a black, Medusa-esque symbiosis suggests on these imperfect replicas (often impossible rooms, but also smaller stand-ins for made-to-scale traumas that don’t translate especially well to little figurines): the guy in a suit inverted to a ghost in the guy! The space imprints onto Jack per Kubrick’s Freudian, nihilistic, fash-leaning outlook/abjection: it echoes into itself, constantly falling apart and always leading back to a dead, evil center!

At this central pit waits the ghost of a mad axman, which “Jack” the vessel walks the usual ghost ontology tightrope; i.e., oscillating between incorporeal mighty ghost that—like Hamlet’s estranged father and his whispered, hellish visions—make those hairs on the back of your neck stand up like porcupine quills, and the in-the-flesh “tiger” capable of disemboweling you! Such are men of the house, always chopping up wives and little children like firewood; i.e., Kubrick shuddering such buried realities in spectral grandeur awaiting middle-class families: assimilating to modern-day castles, only to be eaten by them! Though I hesitate to agree with Jameson’s rejection of Gothic fiction, in this case I cannot help it: Kubrick was anything but a feminist; indeed, he aped Alfred Hitchcock’s own torture of women (a trend, itself, borrowed from older sexist men before him).

Feminism decays; so do ghosts in ghost stories confess to their own death by existing as imperfectly and chaotically as they do. Like a prostitute dressed up to evoke a scene or a person from someone’s past (e.g., Vertigo, 1958), doing so jogs the memory not just of one person, but an entire community or generation; i.e., the data is corruption, but also annihilation, disorientation and rebirth, darlings to kill as to move society onto something better through new counterfeits’ haunted by older stepping-stone palimpsests (from 2001 to Alien to Romulus), but at times backsliding into dreadful and blinding echo chambers like Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel. He’s skilled in making sure we feel trapped, just as Radcliffe conjured up the same unmappable doom only to sweep the board clean and keep things the same.

Regarding either case, Gothic Communism has to move past older going-in-circles misuse or bumblings with ghosts while still building on them, ourselves. We fall apart/reassemble, both acted on and acting on competing semi-invisible forces. Ghosts, then, are floating signifiers/dead metaphors and language, whose translation is an exchange unto itself; something is always given and lost per confession, per admission of guilt, of survival, or things that survive what people cannot turned into artifacts dug up again… again. “Dead men tell no tales” is true and false. “Suffer the little children” becomes “misery loves company” buried alive; i.e., Torrance’s madness, “Wendy, I’m home!” It’s seemingly mapped out/unmappable, but written all over the walls in old blood drinking up new blood: the house is the ghost, the vampire and protagonist (re: Montague Summers) sold to suckers paying for penny dreadfuls (and making Radcliffe rich) onto fresh anxieties of Gothic inheritance haunting new replicas of old haunted houses! “Come play with us,” indeed!

Per the ghost of the counterfeit further abjection, such stories badly echo, copy and replicate themselves on top of themselves, influencing new stories and carrying ghosts inside and across their surfaces leading back to “Rome” as dead; i.e., their maps’ spectral data indicative of decay and age. For us, this forever process is valid, though; i.e., knowledge is limited, merged with romance as vulgar (“rolls in the hay”), patrician, property disputes, foggy retreats, etc, not above or beneath revenge, rape, trysts, scandal, madness: booty calls from beyond the grave, but also inside its maze-like corridors! Here, the Roman fool falls on his own sword, killing and eating his own family for the glory of a fallen kingdom; and the next in line is a little boy that runs into the threnody-stricken echoes of past misdeeds. Like a fever/opium dream or PTSD as such, everything bleeds together into something hopelessly lost inside itself.

Except inside capital, workers work for the elite under these delusions; under Gothic Communism, workers work with each other to play out the truth as synthesized through good habits (which Kubrick did not do, torturing Shelley Duvall to get the “perfect” shots). Our fortress is always operational, shining like a beacon to draw people away from Kubrick’s disastrous (and patriarchal, male-centric) illusions!

As we’ll see in our second main exhibit, the ebb and flow of the liminal riff amounts to the narrative of the crypt commenting cryptomimetically from text to text on something grander felt across the material world—an uncanny “divinity”/mighty ghost that isn’t quite present to the human senses, but whose poetic creations comment on an awesome mystery that has only recently emerged: as Gothic snapshots/time capsules speaking forwards but looking backwards; i.e., frozen in time per a framed narrative; e.g., from Jack Torrance, in the hedge maze to him in the photo, the liminality kaleidoscopic as it cycles through space-time with the same human image doubled and redoubled. Occupied with killer and non-killer through Jack, the space literally speaks to him as Hamlet’s father might to the titular Prince of Demark: “You’re the caretaker, sir. You’ve always been the caretaker!” Well, shit.

Simply put, it’s a death omen, Kubrick’s signature nihilism doomsaying and predicating on the repetition of old abuses; i.e., using the same tired, malevolent mapped-out territories, where the individual pieces collectively point back to Hamlet and forwards again: “Say, what, is Horatio there?” / “A piece of him” (source). The call and response lends itself to the chilling and disintegrating quality of such maps that, when reexplored, lead to nowhere except decay and death through the usual fearful inheritance in time and claustrophobia in space (re: Baldrick). I think we can do better than that!

It’s not all bullshit, though. Indeed, within the past handful of centuries, something massive and utterly devastating has occurred in connection with the material conditions around us: Capitalism. Within this predatory structure, grandiose concepts like the Sublime, Numinous, and cosmic nihilism (and subsequent “Weird” movements) denote awesome mysteries that humans frequently “detect,” if only through the famous, replicated stories that artists have been making for centuries. Each effectively captures an imperfect, human attempt; i.e., to charge the Gothic imagination with graveyard sensibilities that intimate something beyond normal existence inside the home-as-dead, the latter merely a barrier to whatever awaits on the other side (mazes and labyrinths have walls, which generally work as such).

Except, whereas Capitalist Realism thickens the barrier by increasing the fear of the beyond, Gothic Communism has a different aim: to turn this stubborn voice of the past “wise” by worker hands (the literal past come back to haunt you, except by “ghosts” friendly to Communism while also being given life by iconoclasts interacting with them through their own poiesis); re: a palliative, but also perceptive Communist Numinous. Using medieval poetics and sensations, it helps us see what capital (and men like Kubrick) normally conceal.

Through Gothic Communism, this Wisdom of the Ancients can be “re-excavated” over and over by others, devising “archaeologies of the future” (re: Jameson, but with dated poetics he turned his nose up at) that help workers lead lives whose own past reminders and Gothic derelicts uncover a lovely thing for future workers to stress in their own creations: that the good treatment of sex workers preserves sex-positive demonic kink, BDSM, and all-around Gothic fun in art. None will disappear alongside capital’s canonical variants and neoliberal jailer-pimps (the hoarding of privatized sex and other “tasty” consumer goods being a common conservative tactic: “The Commies are coming for your women and your cheeseburgers, but also your delicious, tasty blood!”); they’ll endure through the egregore as having slowly evolved from older forms like the Overlook Hotel.

Past creations have already used the same language while fumbling around in the dark, making similar (mis)steps while trying to escape the present as already overloaded with past language and monstrous exhibits. To the last syllable of recorded time, these territories and their otherworldly populations aren’t going anywhere, but rather are followed by up-and-coming artists into new generations of older monsters remade with fresh purpose. This fits neatly with how humans function as a species, defined far less by biology and more by language and culture as things to inherit and engage with (what Gaia Vince calls “a culture developing bath” in “Eugenics Would Not Work in Humans,” 2020).

Ghosts are always, on some level, imitations of older images or words. They’re also liminal (denoting a sense of conflict on themselves as images) makes them inherently oppositional, meaning canon or iconoclasm is always an option when considering how to interpret (or remake) them ourselves in our own work’s rememory process; i.e., from Kubrick’s ghost house and evil ghost dad to Toni Morrison’s ghost baby in Beloved, onto my own ghostly effigies; e.g., the models I work with, but also Metroidvania and, yes, even myself.

This is not without struggle, of course; i.e., the endless echo of ghosts evokes a process we’ve already discussed at length, here and elsewhere in my book series: cryptonomy and the chasing of ghosts with ghosts, mid-cryptomimesis. To hammer the point home, let’s do so here vis-à-vis Castricano and my PhD work, then proceed onto the cryptomimesis main exhibit.

Though hardly a coincidence, the constant creation of words that conceal is not always deliberate, but merely the natural and material worlds relating back and forth; i.e., according to the passive/active tendencies in human language to hide and conceal things, but also manmade power structures, vertically arranged to repress worker traumas that must reemerge in ghostly fashion. The latter is not the human mind burying things purely of its own accord, but dealing with the state and its corporate allies actively lying and concealing things through the ghost as a blueprint—a “stamp” to endlessly copy when channeled through a bourgeois Superstructure. There’s a lot of mimicry going on in terms of trauma; i.e., as something to express, but also recognize. “Not sure if [real] or…”

Whether bourgeois or proletarian, ghosts are summarily tied to a larger conversation about the Gothic as discussed by Jodey Castricano in Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (2001), re:

Although some critics continue to disavow the Gothic as being subliterary and appealing only to the puerile imagination—Fredric Jameson refers to the Gothic as “that boring and exhausted paradigm” [what a dork]—others, such as Anne Williams, claim that the genre not only remains very much alive but is especially vital in its evocation of the “undead,” an ontologically ambiguous figure which has been the focus of so much critical attention that another critic, Slavoj Zizek, felt compelled to call the return of the living dead “the fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture” (source).

Here, Castricano denotes a critical limitation to the novel, short story, and film, yet nevertheless derives the ancient crypt as “the model and method” of what they call cryptomimesis; i.e., the crypt or crypt-like narrative as something to functionally and textually imitate for various reasons—like Borges and his mirrors/garden of the forking paths, but also vampires drinking blood, zombies eating brains, or ghosts seeking essence and connection. Castricano stresses the creation of

a writing practice that, like certain Gothic conventions [e.g., Segewick’s commentary on live burial as a timeless fixture of Gothic literature] generates its uncanny effects through the production of what Nicholas Rand might call a “contradictory ‘topography of inside-outside'” [from Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word …] Moreover, the term cryptomimesis draws attention to a writing predicated upon encryption: the play of revelation and concealment lodged within parts of individual words (ibid.).

While these ideas function perfectly fine as a holistic approach, Castricano tends to lay human language “on the slab,” focusing on the idea of language as something to express and play with entirely “on paper”; i.e., in a vacuum. My focus has been, and continues to be, on the ghosts themselves as imprecise-yet-magnetic, often fragmented linguo-material markers of oppositional praxis—not as faithful psychoanalytic or poststructuralist models, but a Gothic-Communist means of clearly articulating worker oppression unfolding in the natural-material world. Otherwise, who cares?

Beyond Kubrick and older authors haunting the palimpsest, cryptonymy and cryptomimesis translate to videogames; i.e., as handy replicas that someone can explore through avatars. This particular echo remains underrepresented outside my own work, leading me to now effectively dig up myself as a ghost/found document concerned with these self-same maps. As I write in my PhD’s thesis statement:

Simply put, Gothic media more broadly is cryptomimetic, but also embroiled within areas of study that yield hermeneutic limitations due to recency biases and disdain for a holistic approach by academic bigwigs. For instance, I noticed these limitations myself when trying to marry the Gothic to videogames in my own graduate work as cutting-edge. It was a tactic my supervisors and academic superiors resisted, simply because videogames were either totally outside of their realm of experience, or “Metroidvania” wasn’t something that had been academically connected to games within their own fields. That is, speedrunning as a practice/documentary subject was just taking off online in 2018; likewise, “ludic-Gothic” wasn’t even a decade-old term at the time, was something that ambitious academics strove to stake new claims within while leaving much to be desired.

For example, the same year I wrote my [master’s] thesis on Metroidvania, Bernard Perron would sum up the broader Gothic rush in videogame academia in The World of Scary Games sans mentioning Metroidvania once:

Horror scholars such as Taylor, Kirkland, Niedenthal, and Krzywinska have therefor come to contextualize games in the older tradition of the Gothic fiction, “one of survival horror’s parents,” as Taylor states in “Gothic Bloodlines in Survival Horror Gaming” (2009). Furthermore, the latter even coined a new term to highlight this origin: “The ludic-gothic is created when the Gothic is transformed by the video game medium, and is a kindred genre to survival horror” […] Video games remediate many aspects of Gothic poetics: [the prevention of mastery, obscured or unreliable visions, scattering of written texts in typical Gothic locations and their lost histories, the encounter and use of anachronistic technologies, etc] (source).

Not only does Perron make no mention of Metroidvania at all, neither do any of the other scholars he cites; nor did my supervisors know what Metroidvania were when I was researching it (nor I, with me finally settling on a concrete definition in 2021; re: “Mazes and Labyrinths” abstract). Indeed, Metroidvania—despite being an older genre than survival horror—remains a thoroughly underrepresented area of Gothic videogame studies, and Gothic videogames remain ripe for continued study within our own lives. Indeed, I had to connect the two myself when recognizing a knowledge gap regarding Metroidvania as cryptomimetic media within videogame studies at large; and I have continued to do so as a postgrad writing about mazes and labyrinths in Metroidvania; i.e., as a niche area of study to expand upon within my own daily life beyond academia—by writing about or illustrating Metroidvania outside of conferences, but also interviewing Metroid speedrunners for fun in my “Mazes and Labyrinths” compendium.

(exhibit 42f4: Artist, top-right: Alessandro Constantini. Bo Burnham [top-right] demonstrates how reflections on the world involve an endless creative process, one whose mise-en-abyme fits comfortably within cryptomimesis as a meta-reflection on Gothic poetics and its narrative of the crypt: my graduate/postgraduate academic work as something to revisit, think about, and reapply to the real world beyond just conferences [bottom-left and -right: papers for Sheffield Gothic and the International Gothic Association] but also interacting with Metroidvania themselves being remade by artists like Constantini—i.e., older “ghosts” to chase down and interrogate, including of ourselves.

For example, when writing this exhibit, my partner and I watched the video presentation for a 2019 conference paper I wrote and recorded for Sheffield Gothic’s Reimagining the Gothic with a Vengeance, Vol 5: Returns, Revenge, Reckonings: “‘More My Speed’: The Tempo of Gothic Affect in a Ludic Framework.” I hadn’t watched the video since I uploaded it, but doing so reminded me of some useful ideas I hadn’t thought about in a long time. It was also beholding a younger-looking but ultimately older version of myself; i.e., I look at it and feel old, and the photograph is as old as I am. Like a fatal portrait, it seems to denote a side of me that is lost to time, but also frozen in it, waiting to be defrosted:

[source: Me in the accompanying video to “More My Speed,” which I sent to Sheffield Gothic because I couldn’t fly overseas.]

As I haven’t written academically for years, it felt a bit surreal [and fun] to investigate a “ghost” of my former self and listen what it had to say:

Inside the gameworld, on-screen, different speeds are displayed by player motion relative to the gameworld and its creatures. There is speed of confrontation (horror) and speed of the reveal (terror) […] There is speed of action, which includes exploration, combat, and escape; these are tied to the style of the game’s design. There is also speed of death: As Raškauskienė writes, “for Burke, terror – fear of pain – was a terror mixed with a paradoxical delight. Ostensibly, this was because the sublime observer is not actually threatened. Safety in the midst of danger produces a thrilling pleasure” (18). Survival is a question not of actually dying in Metroid or Castlevania; the player cannot die. What matters is being in the presence of simulated “near-death” for as long as possible. This can be monsters, like Ridley and Kraid, in Metroid; or Dracula, the Mummy or Medusa’s head, in Castlevania. The player is next to them, or “near” them by being inside a world that promotes them. Kraid’s Lair advertises Kraid; Castlevania promotes Dracula through a series of monsters. Whether any are onscreen or not, the player anticipates them non-stop [source].)

The search for knowledge stares back at those looking in on the past from the present as dead. Beyond Metroidvania and their maps (and maps of maps, palimpsests of maps, echoes of ghosts from Radcliffe to Stoker to Kubrick to Scott, etc), the same basic approach to ghosts/the occult applies to knowledge as something to reify outside of academia; i.e., by responding to artistic movements as cryptomimetic expressions of repressed labor sentiment and trauma at large (which academia, as a cutthroat enterprise, isn’t entirely concerned with; re: accommodated intellectuals). Our own revolutionary cryptonymy must go further with ghosts than they normally are used; re: me, expanding on Castricano’s definition of cryptomimesis to write not just with ghosts, but the dead at large!

Cryptomimesis Main Exhibit

This brings us to our second original main exhibit, or rather, four sub-exhibits in one: the liminal riff or artistic flow as a cryptomimetic feeding vector portrayed by four different collages of uncanny things. I created all of them in mimetic response to older ghosts (or ghostly entities, like vampires and zombies):

• exhibit 43a: Tool and Silent Hill in response to Jacob’s Ladder
• exhibit 43b: David Fincher’s Se7en in response to Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer”
• exhibit 43c: artwork between myself and an anonymous model in response to another artist
• exhibit 43d: a “rememory” of an old drawing of myself and my ex Jadis, who especially loved Tool, Silent Hill and Jacob’s Ladder

While such mimesis was hardly “blind,” it remained a process par for the Gothic course: thoroughly embedded and gliding across its own endless simulacra/echopraxis, showing and hiding per the usual double operation cryptonymy affords. Again, this remains a feeding vector, but per ghosts speaks to an acknowledging of the past as ghostly in ways that yield up fresh shadowy synthesis!

To that, the contents of all four sub-exhibits were exposed to me by Jadis and constitute my continuous, cryptonymic processing of survived trauma. An idea that was hardly original to either of us at the time, it had already been commented on by older artists riffing off one another that I eventually riffed off myself in relation to Jadis exposing me to these bugbears’ trail of curiously evil breadcrumbs (which included Jadis’ abusing of me in the process): to paint in essence—be that literal depictions of the blood, brains or lifeforce—as tenebrous, famously out-of-joint things being consumed, but also to consume by the audience; i.e., teasing at things beyond what is hidden, or hiding what is beyond through such shadows and ghostly translucence! Per the anisotropic flow of power and knowledge according to essence, abjection accounts for the leading of workers towards things the state will then repulse them with; reverse abjection leads us closer to the truth of state predation inside the cave’s shadowy illusions—by fucking with the dead through famous, ghost-like forms! “Follow the white rabbit” becomes “follow the ghost.”

Such splendid-mendax visual metaphors tie to a mimetic lineage that frames the crypt (and things commonly associated with it) as having a precise linguistic function: cryptonyms that give off the essence of ghosts in literal code, but also the phenomenology or experiencing of the ghost as captured in art; i.e., essence in a bottle, but also the essence-of-essence, or the echoing of the larger exchange captured on the surface of the copy as things are repeatedly smashed together for satirical effect. Satire isn’t always funny or silly. Sometimes, camp is cryptonymic; i.e., “stealthy” in ways that threaten to reveal things the elite want hidden—doing so across the usual ghostly mediums they can never monopolize:

I’m providing four-in-one because we want to trace a lineage of ghostly material, but also because liminality is hard to illustrate outside of multiple, contrasting examples. —Perse

(exhibit 43a: Bottom-right and bottom-middle: stills from Tool’s 1993 music videos for “Prison Sex” and “Sober” [the sets and stop motion for “Sober” created by Fred Stuhr]; middle: a Figma action figure of the nurse from Silent Hill 2, 2001; right-middle: Pyramid Head; middle: David Lo Pan, an even older ghost; everything else: screenshots from Jacob’s Ladder, 1990. In a linear sense, each egregore seemingly springs out of thin air, but bears its own ties to the material world as continuously reimagined in visibly undead, troubled ways. Stemming from no immediately obvious source, these spirits spring out of a likeness of a likeness of the past; i.e., older copies of trauma already set loose from inside the minds of artists famous, infamous or completely unknown.

To look upon the ghost is to see how its author saw the world through ghostly veils; i.e., “behind blue eyes,” in relation to other artists having already done the same. And yet, something is always left out—a ghost intimating systemic traumas [and maps] it cannot fully express, that show what is hidden because it is hidden: according to a quantum, half-real thing attached to so many others. In this respect, ghosts are conspicuous and confusing. Existence becomes dicey and imperiled, but also deliberately ghostlike across a chain of counterfeits; re: Castricano’s cryptomimesis, which I consider not just writing with ghosts, but any action concerned with all manner of undead beings. And yet, ghosts more than any other seem to feed on us simply by being viewed. It’s a drain that saps our curiosity and willpower when puzzling over them and theirs; i.e., belonging to our world in a liminal sense that brings us closer to alienated realities.)

(exhibit 43b: “Closer” music video [left, 1994] by Trent Reznor, whose reverse-abject splendor, echoes of Dadaism [with the toilet] and frank BDSM imagery [the “dancing” pig machine with the apple in its mouth evoking a ball gag] were carefully replicated by conservative copycat, David Fincher, a year later. While Fincher obsessively poured over and recreated the video frame-by-frame in a similar style for Se7en‘s opening credits, 1995, his ghost left behind many homophobic “clues” that belied his own ghost of the counterfeit: a fear/fascination with state-assigned enemies.

Like John Doe’s notebooks, there’s far too many to list or detail here, but Fincher nevertheless used them to turn [and continues to turn] the Gothic imagination in a neo-conservative direction; i.e., doing so while taking all the credit in glowing exposés like Art of the Titles’ 2012 expanded exhibit: a “novel-yet-seminal” fascination with the medieval scrapbook [commonplace] approach as deeply conservative—the life’s work of an independently wealthy madman who wants to destroy civilization, even though it’s already on the verge of collapse [an anti-Semitic dogwhistle].

 

To it, Fincher’s homophobia is a coerced prophecy returning to tradition. Conservative fear and dogma engender stochastic abuse and copious, ubiquitous threats against marginalized groups. Division is variable, though; while threatened neophytes can be cornered into silence, old veterans can lean into passivity or aggression; i.e., with Morgan Freeman playing a token, know-it-all black cop, and Pitt the homophobic detective shooting his worst enemy in the face because Fincher has first summoned him to be killed in cold blood: a shadow that reflects Pitt’s deepest desires as—you guessed it—dogma. Coerced trauma can turn people into police-state monsters, co-opting female/queer rage in service of the status quo; i.e., notably winding down and up through the usual turns of the screw [the elite, holding a gun to our heads].

In Se7en, the killer—a queer-coded, ostensibly homosexual man—is strangely obsessed with past media; i.e., as a perverse teaching tool that forces violent fearful lessons [dogma] onto the present. All this happens while lusting after and envying the cis-het, white policeman and his wife [the former played by angry blond twunk, Brad Pitt—too stupid to read books and calling Dante a “poetry writing faggot”—and the latter played by real-life corporate quack, Gwyneth Paltrow, insidious peddler of “homeopathic vaginas” and other oddities[9]]. From a meta standpoint, though, Fincher and his team had fashioned a ghostly lesson for their heel—Kevin Spacey, a real-life pedophile [Dreading, 2022]—to teach ’90s audiences with: a canonical replica that subverted Reznor’s primal, hedonistic vibe into a cautionary gaslight that frames unmarried sex as incredibly fetishized and violent. “You have to hit people with a sledgehammer,” argues John Doe; Fincher does so at the cost of a sex-positive image of queerness. It’s abject, regressive, and more to the point, a straight man’s unironic demonizing of us fags to cap his blockbuster off with. It’s bad BDSM, Reznor [or Milton] without the camp:

All unfold under faux-intellectual posturings, of course. While certainly connected to societal collapse in John Doe’s mind, the killer isn’t strictly critiquing society when he has the man use the knife strap-on [above] to fuck the girl with; he’s acting out his own violent fantasies through a coerced proxy that Fincher dreamt up after listening to Reznor’s song [and missing the iconoclastic point of it]: the homosexual man is secretly covetous of the closet—i.e., to such a terrible degree that he destroys the nuclear family from the inside-out. As such, Fincher conflates queerness with murder and rape, but also a desire to be straight/a cop. The fag is utterly reprobate; i.e., unable to assimilate and thus is executed for it. John Doe—and by extension Fincher and everyone else—are slumming and rocking out to our witch hunt: shock therapy on par with Marilyn Manson cashing in [a sex pest in his own right, false-preaching rebellion to make his millions].

To it, Fincher is deeply mistrusting of the past as a) having anything useful to say, yet b) trapping everyone in a constant state of cryptonymic decay and medieval fear. The movie’s retro-future pall returns the world to a pacifying sense of the barbaric past revived in the present. Incentivized by those in power [the executives and producers] and facilitated by Fincher and his team with a pair of scissors, the motto of the day was KISS: “keep it scary, stupid.” Literally a peal of thunder booms; i.e., when the first frame of the opening shows us a book. Translation: “Old books written by gay madmen will kill you!” Well, consider this gay madwoman’s book and her devil’s workshop my retort, you jackanapes!)

(exhibit 43c: Model and artist: Jericho and Persephone van der Waard. Many ghosts concern returning to past moments, including erotic ones as spaces to feed; i.e., to be in the same space as someone who has lifeforce, including erotic energies longing for the past to return; re: The Night House. This can go both ways—with a ghost seeking love or someone loving a ghost that may or may not have ever been real, but speaks to a semi-tangible connection anyways.

 For example, the above exhibit is an unused alternate drawing of a finished 2021 piece by Persephone van der Waard—of Jericho, assembled from different “friendly” references [top-left and top-right: a very happy ghost drawn by Margikrap; mid-left: the arguably appropriative “witchy” pin-up style of Stvartak Mato, who let’s just say likes ’em thicc] that through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune [and happy accidents] has become its own kind of thing for me to appreciate in hindsight: a collage of egregores that bear the likeness of the original model, but yield its own life force in place of said model’s absence. As with any egregore, they are not the original, but become their own thing pointing to what was lost; i.e., when presented in pointedly Gothic language, I invigilate an alias that harkens cryptonymically back to lost friendship: a likeness of the model herself severing all ties. Ghosts, then, become a useful way to interrogate the past by reimagining it!

[model and artist: Jericho and Persephone van der Waard]

Along with Autumn Ivy [who I stopped working with because they were bossy and transphobic[10]], Jericho was Sex Positivity‘s proto muse. We worked together over 2021, and they would come and go throughout the year to give me some relief from Jadis’ abuse [and inspire me to use my website, created in 2020, to draw and feature sex workers]. I designed logos and different pieces for Jericho [above and below], but also commissioned a variety of things for them to record [sex tapes and photo shoots, which I don’t have permission to show]. I would then reference these, afterwards, to make new art, thus new ghosts. In turn, our present reconnection remains one where the memory of them is something of a drain and inspiration; i.e., I thought they were beautiful and kind back then, thus loved working with them—my first muse who motivated me to partake in Sex Positivity as it eventually turned into. This piece was made after they ghosted me:

[model and artist: Jericho and Persephone van der Waard]

Ultimately there was a fragile side to Jericho. After some outstanding projects, and them disappearing for a few months, a reminder to them about said projects saw them cutting ties and running from the profession entirely! They simply dropped all contact and vanished like a ghost!

Frankly I cared less about the money than losing a good friend; and deprived of what I thought was a good friend—but also an excellent model and collaborator—I had to reconcile my loss through the work I created after their disappearance. So I preserved them in ways that felt apposite and healing to me. I could speak to my own betrayal and hurt at Jericho’s hands while preserving what I liked about them and wanted people to remember! And to this day Jericho still inspires me to create art based on memories of older work we did; i.e., that I’ve updated for this project; e.g., the below drawing appearing at the start of this sub-volume in its finished form [re: exhibit 33b1b, from “Gothic Poetics, Their History“] but here being shown in the basic composition I went with instead of the ghost sex motif at the top of this exhibit:

[model and artist: Jericho and Persephone van der Waard]

Simply put, you don’t stop relating to things after they’re “done.” My art of Jericho serves as a kind of erotic ghostly bond/tethering of me to an old, lost friend, but also desire to create and invigilate something that acknowledges Jericho’s humanity and desire to be seen as ace; i.e., for them to have agency in a nudist sense, and for me to admittedly miss them and dream about them: wishing them well, wherever they find themselves. Be safe, my dude!)

Concerning the above exhibits and their own cryptomimesis, my cryptonymic tapping into their “pulse” was—like a Gothic girl at a gravesite—deeply personal and intuitive. Many were commentaries on my own traumatic past, something I related to through art gifted to me by former/would-be abusers. Indeed, the greatest gift my ex, Jadis, gave to me was their cultural appreciation/awareness for Tool, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson (whose contemporaries I took great delight in showing Jadis). Not only did Jadis doing so “chorus” a larger cultural fascination with ghosts; it demonstrated the simple fact that ghosts are an attractive cultural force, albeit for oft-hidden, undisclosed reasons that seldom match up—i.e., due to Capitalism’s deceitful and pulverizing nature!

Capitalism being a hyperobject, there’s seldom an obvious visual source for a transgenerational curse. But in the Gothic style, you can localize it to a particular site and trace its continuation through the wreckage as something to copy imperfectly moving forwards! I’ve since tried to exhibit to my own traumatic past as a kind of “ghostly” double: Jadis themselves, but also what they gifted me as something turned against them by revisiting its essence as a means of self-empowerment and self-expression, not defeat (exhibit 43d, two pages).

The venue of doing so often addresses trauma as something to express not just in mirrored language, but cryptonymic exchanges thereof. Indeed, the existence and reintegration of ghosts goes well beyond my life and my relationship with Jadis (and all the things they showed me). For instance, my friend Mavis knew someone who also loved Marilyn Manson and NIN. Let’s call them “Montrose.”

Montrose “didn’t seem the type,” according to Mavis—were a master’s graduate of psychology with a flat affect who studied war abuses in Nazi Germany. Even so, people touched by trauma are often drawn to it, even in pale imitations. According to Mavis, Montrose had actually been horribly abused by their brother as a child, only to watch as their parents did nothing to intervene or even acknowledge that Montrose had been harmed. To try and understand their own problems growing into adulthood, Montrose probably listened to music that actually spoke to their trauma in ghostly ways. As time progressed, they studied the mind as a means of understanding their own experiences—all while looking for similarity that had “happened” elsewhere: a ghost suggesting the presence of trauma as having occurred, or at the very least, echoed through its own confusing existence; re: the pedagogy of the oppressed, speaking to Western traumas by fabricating them.

Returning to Jadis and I, we loved the same material that Montrose and Mavis did. Partly we had also grown up to it (and had experienced awful childhoods ourselves). But even in our 30s, we delighted at watching the throwing together of various cheap and dead things—a “clay” brought back to life and dancing around to the groovy music or evocative visuals. Not only Jadis was absolutely correct about Trent Reznor’s incredible music video for “Closer” in purely visual terms; its lyrics spoke to me as well: “You tear down my reason / It’s your sex I can smell […] I wanna fuck you like an animal […] You bring me closer to God!” (exhibit 43a).

I only felt this connection upon repeated reflection and in relation to other works, similar to how Reznor must have felt as an artist. Apart from NIN, he worked alongside “shock rock” guru (and notorious sex pest/abuser) Marilyn Mansion. Doubtless, he would have been aware of and inspired by the literal clay of Tool guitarist/claymation expert Adam Jones, just as I was later in forming my own connections. The same goes for the sudden and anomalous nightmare effigy of Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder, which doubtlessly inspired Silent Hill six years later (exhibit 43b)—not just its liminal spaces, but liminal occupants[11] in turn inspired by Giger, who was inspired by Goya and Goya by older, now-forgotten-but-still-felt medievalists. At different points in time, then, these complex liminalities invited both Reznor and myself to explore forbidden topics; i.e., in transgressive ways that were later weaponized by bad-faith performers: the proverbial wolf-in-disguise, a “bad imitation” of Derrida’s spectres of Marx—not in sheep’s clothing but the proletarian egregore of a friendly wolf-ghost piloted by an imposter!

Except, Jadis wasn’t an imposter just because they harmed me; they were an imposter because they used groups like Tool and NIN to lower my guard (and obscure their own neoliberal politics). Yet, I still found something useful to transmute from what they outlined as acceptable based on their tacit (or outspoken) approval.

More to the point, everything was still made from the same ghostly pulp—a fact I have repeatedly illustrated here by taking what Jadis showed me throughout our relationship and transforming it back into something sex-positive; i.e., feeding on their ghost to draw new strength out of something that ultimately isn’t my abuser harming me. The anger is still there, but it’s not directed at me—meaning I can just sit back and enjoy it. The Destroyer persona is core to the BDSM experience; per ludo-Gothic BDSM, angry ghosts are fun to watch if you can control them through an exhibit—if only because they appeal to the presence of rage as something you can tremble before and remember. In doing so, you feel the danger but realize that you’re not actually in any! That’s catharsis, babes!

Doing so will always be partly based on my positive experiences with Jadis; i.e., as an oddly endearing person. Like it or not, Jadis was cool, but also integral to the ensuing work I threw back at a false protector! The label “Communist” doesn’t mean much without the state as something to transform; I can use Jadis’ likeness to achieve this goal, even if they are not in my life. I took their illusions and made them something that would protect me from the harmful original: to show and hide vis-à-vis cryptonymy whatever I want in order to get my point across. To that, “cool Jadis” is something that I’ve had to preserve as separate from the person themselves, a “rememory” of the abuser who once had total material control over my life. It has taken considerable time and effort to work their likeness into something sex-positive—a new, graveyard version of them that celebrates the essence of what I fell in love with, while still hinting at what made Jadis so terrifying to me:

(exhibit 43d: Models and artist: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard. Jadis and I, re-envisioned as a knight and her femboy ward through their encouragement/coercion [they would pull my funding and threaten me when angered, becoming a cycle of reactive abuse]. Doing so has transformed the past in ways that reflect on my abuse while also offering up a better hypothetical in the same Gothic language: what could have been and what could actually be in future love stories should workers [and BDSM contracts] actually be respected, post-negotiation—not a memory of the past, but a rememory focused on remembering the essence of what was lost and, if not forgetting the horrifying abuse suffered at the same time, then at least not letting it rule me; i.e., me feeding on something I could rearrange and draw strength from—to not have it drain me all the time. Trauma is cryptomimetically echoed; i.e., in ways that acknowledge what was while subverting it per a revolutionary cryptonymy!

It’s not exactly “the happy ending” of the Neo-Gothic novel, if purely because it doesn’t do away with the haunted past; but it does present a suitable “What if?” for future undertakings that bear some resemblance to a former life while being different in all the ways that matter. This “ghost” of Jadis represents them at their very best, their most beautiful. On this page and nowhere else, they are still my protector and beloved, but also my Slan, my succubus monster mom who won’t actually harm me. Creating them here in this form is my attempt to riff off my own trauma in cryptomimetic fashion, repurposing my own dead memories in ways that bring me peace; it hurts, as birth generally does, but ultimately delivers me tremendous sensation and relief from a tyrannical past!

“Stare and tremble!” then, for I have made Jadis into a dark cathedral; i.e., a calculated risk speaking to a castle-in-the-flesh that haunts me, and which I reestablish control through a reconstruction of it as I would like to reexperience differently per ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: “…the Gothic art is sublime. On entering a cathedral, I am filled with devotion and with awe; I am lost to the actualities that surround me, and my whole being expands into the infinite; earth and air, nature and art, all swell up into eternity, and the only sensible impression left, is, ‘that I am nothing!'” [source]. This practice comes from working with people who speak in equally ghost-like ways; re [from Volume Two, part one’s “Angry Mothers; or, Learning from Our Monstrous-Feminine Past“]:

I love my job because the people I work with [through interdependence, not codependence] are all awesome mommies and daddies I can proudly show off without regret!

[models, from left to right: Ms. Reefer, Blxxd Bunny, and Quinnvincible] 

How could I have any when working with such angels, and while having survived the complete-and-utter torture that preceded them? Jadis was my Great Destroyer. They took with impunity. They scattered my wits, drained my sanity and stole my will to live [source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight; My Ex’s Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022”]. By comparison, these cuties—stellar and glowing—utterly restored it, gave me something to live for—something warm and serene, but joyous, thunderstriking and awesome: helping my friends avoid similar fates; i.e., an angelic and devilish bliss comparable to what Matthew Lewis described following the riot and fall of Ambrosio in The Monk:

The remaining years of Raymond and Agnes, of Lorenzo and Virginia, were happy as can be those allotted to Mortals, born to be the prey of grief, and sport of disappointment. The exquisite sorrows with which they had been afflicted, made them think lightly of every succeeding woe. They had felt the sharpest darts in misfortune’s quiver; Those which remained appeared blunt in comparison. Having weathered Fate’s heaviest Storms, they looked calmly upon its terrors: or if ever they felt Affliction’s casual gales, they seemed to them gentle as Zephyrs which breathe over summer-seas [source].

To that, I’ll let you in on a little secret: The greatest irony of Jadis harming me [something we’ll go into more detail about during the undead module] is they accidentally gifted me with the appreciation of calculated risk. Scoured with invisible knives, I don’t view my scars as a “weakness” at all; I relish the feeling of proximity to the ghost of total power—of knowing that knowing that motherfucker took me to the edge but didn’t take everything from me: I escaped them and lived to do my greatest work in spite of their treachery! Like the halls of a cathedral, my lived torments and joys color this castled work, ornamenting its various passages with the power of a full life. I’ve known such terror that makes the various joys I experience now all the more sweet and delicious. I am visited by ghosts of my rapturous design, the empress of my fate, the queen of a universe shared with seraphs the likes of which I can hardly describe; “no coward soul is mine” [source].

[artist: Persephone van der Waard] 

It would be a lie to say that Jadis didn’t shape my view of the world; but it would be equally mendacious to say that this view of Jadis is entirely “them.” I escaped them, and made a cryptonymic forgery that, like Walpole’s castle, could never harm me again. I could feel tremendous feelings, yes—and others might stumble across these and puzzle about them on my Aegis [above]. But they would see me in nudist, rapturous agony that, in the same breath, speaks to Lewis’ happy ending as born from great misery and pain.

Ghosts, then, are the past, but also the beautiful possible future—to step out of the shadows of Capitalism, but as cryptonymic echoes of that older time made darkness visible: impossibly and wondrously alive despite profit raping us! We present as “raped,” loving it in ways that confuse those determined to harm us. Death is a dark cruel mistress, then, but one who—as a ghost of itself, raping Lambert screaming bloody murder in the dark of the retro-future haunted house Scott and company envisioned—sets us deliciously free in house or horror that we compose upon the architecture of the past. What a muse/mood! Just the thought of that scene makes my skin cover in goosepimples and my nipples harden, touched by psychosexual divine power! But Jadis is always close at hand, waiting to be reinvoked for “murder.” Once you’ve felt rape, it never leaves you; you can only subvert it, and I do so to break Capitalism Realism on my wheel!)

Jadis’ counterfeit is where our love simultaneously died, but lives on in a kind of special burial site; frozen in time, it sits inside the larger continuum of oppositional praxis, where “archaeologies” wrestle in a constant liminal struggle—of author and creation both warring to express the truth under Capitalism while “just passing through.” This happens in colonized language that later becomes reappropriated (the derivative corporate remake) or reappreciated (a return to a proletarian past; e.g., Andor), generally both at once in a continual process of remaking as I have done; re: rememory a process of ghostly reflection upon the Aegis’ countless shades.

Reflection/Closing Thoughts

Let’s conclude the ghost subchapter by reflecting on so many breadcrumbs; i.e., things that might, at first blush, seem wholly disparate and incongruous, but in truth exist part-in-parcel among a larger holistic pattern/midnight express. Riding it, we can reassemble and interrogate larger patterns that resist interpretation, but also beckon it. Their restless cryptonymies show and conceal, concerning the victims of older police violence (re: Sadako Yamamura, below), but also the ghosts of policemen calling out from the same spaces. Topping from the bottom (at times with a Promethean thunder spent by more Numinous articulations), their ghostly code informs/instructs the actions of active agents running across well-used hauntological tracks; i.e., chasing ghosts that were, are and could be again differently—for the state or for workers replacing Caesar’s ghost with Marx’ (as gayer than Marx ever dared dream).

Ghosts loom, loving a good guilt trip; the point of cursorily examining ghosts/the Numinous, the posthuman, the afterlife haunting astronoetics, Metroidvania maps, and finally exhibit 43’s cryptomimetic expressions—liminal creations in liminal space made by liminal occupants, etc—is to invite the audience to “pass through” as well. This concerns not going over to a different side or end point, but within the chronotope to generate friendlier ghosts along the same well-trod path: the present as something to camp, placing it between quotes, haunting language and the people language embodies. Something beyond is felt within, promoting death and destruction as already having happened, and potentially again should we let our hair down and listen to Medusa’s wailing voice! In truth, state shift is failing to heed the growing pains behind the veil of tears, Capitalist Realism a Black Veil that carries genocide on as long as it can.

We want to investigate this, dancing with the ghost of the counterfeit in order to reverse the abjection process and break Capitalist Realism before nature goes feral. Doing so yields tremendous feelings and revelations about the social, natural and material world and its procession of creative-interpretive jaunts. “Getting lost” is arguably the point—to swim around and play as older generations did—a “ghostly” mode of thinking and existing on maps, which see the world as something to transform, but also preserve; i.e., as ghosts of ghosts of ghosts of ghosts. As something new and cool—but also chimeric and trapped hopelessly inside its own knotty[12] self—Gothic Communism yields a life study that takes on an older sex-positive likeness (and hauntological context, below). Telling everything immediately apart becomes impossible, so we rely on dialectical-material scrutiny to light the way through labyrinthine speculation and conjecture!

In historical-material terms, language isn’t discrete; it denotes a presence of maybe-dangerous, friend-or-foe copies that workers will invariably have to investigate during their own relationships to people, but also linguo-material things resembling people or shaping whatever people pass themselves off as: older variations they feel reminded of in the present space and time. Ghosts embody the past-future seen in present spheres.

Simply put, uncanniness (and oscillation) are inevitable from a linguistic standpoint, especially when individuals go on to have more and more experiences, but also learn more about the world as it once existed through pastiche of various kinds; re: remediated praxis as “left behind.” Occurring through “conversations” had with all these different ghosts, each collocative instance yields incomplete impressions of competing points of view that can be seen along the same liminal riff, one that goes on and on and on, but also, as Mel Brooks’ 1987 Spaceballs would put it, in “now-now“:

(exhibit 43e1, afterthought: “What the hell am I looking at?!” Lord Helmet cries, riffing on Walpole’s stupidly large helmet, from Otranto [and Shakespeare’s “borrowed robes”—a giant’s clothes put on a dwarf having stolen them: “Does the line stretch on to the crack of doom?”]. However dated, recursive, and liminal the past is, its mise-en-abyme always appears in the present. But as something to look at or talk to, understanding the nature of the interlocutor demands understanding oneself in relation to it; i.e., how the audience is affected by the experience speaking to them in cryptonymic showings and hidings—and how their variable, echoing interpretations of it change the nature of the ghost as something to relate/respond to. Canon or camp, the effect is the same: change among something whose appearance is largely constant.)

These recursive conversations beg an important question—not simply “What am I looking at?” but also “What or who am I talking to?” To say you’re talking to yourself isn’t entirely accurate; you’re responding to something that isn’t strictly alive but also isn’t dead—not the past, but “the past” as informed by material history and informers thereof moving forwards through the conversations endlessly had between past and present as uncanny but also hauntological.

As such, ghost stories are told over and over across space and time, forcing viewers to immediately confront philosophical, but also semiotic, dialectical-material conundrums that many avoid thinking about (re: Capitalist Realism). Depending on the copy of the ghost in question, their nature can be for or against the state; but all sit inside the same Gothic midden of dreck, claptrap, and trashy window dressing that ghosts represent: the diaphanous veils and asses shimmering in the spectral moonlight/fox fire! So do we moonlight as saviors to future lost and/or dead souls. Per Gogol’s novel, we’re not just data to manipulate by corporate officers enriching themselves on our likenesses! We break canon to free ourselves!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Keeping this in mind, a unique, empowered uncanny is the iconoclast’s best option—to express ontology as haunted by all manner of ghosts when looking at the world through such a gaze and using its Aegis to discern a ghost’s relationship to the viewer. Arguably the whole point of liminal expression is that everything feels liminal, bleeding together in linguo-material, social-sexual, and emotional/rational ways (trying to reconnect the third grouping through a rejection of Cartesian thought). Nostalgia is undeniably present, but the likeness it bears feels different while also highlighting an emotional perspective essential to a previous moment in time: to bring forward lost knowledge.

To that, this ghostly liminal riff needn’t be an Imperial Boomerang swinging back and forth. If future ghosts become increasingly class-conscious, they become friendly to Communism communicated through themselves; achieving this kind of subversive, perceptive pastiche is vital to helping workers see beyond normal existence—i.e., as loaded with statues, egregores, and ghosts of various kinds that, sure enough, can flow power in either direction. To say the uncanny isn’t required for Gothic-Communist development, then, would be to say that one needn’t learn to tell ghost apart, belied by the simple fact that workers are incessantly fooled by canonical, unfriendly ghosts; i.e., leading to their own exploitation as fossilized, becoming part of all those dead generations Marx’ “Eighteenth Brumaire” wrote about, weighing on living brains. It’s not a curse if we can camp it!

In turn, these “living dead” become a haunted feeling the living cannot shake, but rather must express through their own ghosts as “wisdom” for future workers to stumble upon (even if that is given to them by would-be abusers like Jadis); re: the Wisdom of the Ancients being—per a proletarian Superstructure—the using of ghosts as they naturally exist: in duality. While labor decides either outcome, workers for Gothic Communism seek to unlock the pro-labor potential to such echoes and double operations; i.e., to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class-cultural (and race) awareness, ipso facto, synthesizing good daily habits at home (thus good praxis and systemic catharsis the world over)!

Before we cap off the Undead Module, let’s conclude “I See Dead People” with a couple final points about ghosts and Gothic Communism!

First, I want to stress, here, that such hauntological expression, per Gothic Communism, is more holistic than Fisher’s notion thereof. For Fisher, Capitalism leads to hauntology of a specific sort—the term “hauntology” originally coined by Derrida (re: Spectres of Marx) as being trapped between the past and the present, which Fisher further described as an inability to imagine the future beyond how it used to be seen through dead Capitalist nostalgia. For him, this is cyberpunk; for me, the canceled future includes liminal spaces like Silent Hill and its palimpsest, Jacob’s Ladder (and Metroid, Alien, Paradise Lost, Dante’s Inferno, etc)—a creative, mimetic chain felt across the praxial sum of Gothic art; i.e., through the workers channeling such poetics constantly across literal space and time, but also chronotopes of these things (narrative, architectural expressions of space-time) that solidify inside the material world once the practice takes root in a wider Gothic imagination.

Whereas Fisher’s hauntology denotes a “mind prison” to drug and house the rebellious imagination inside, the Gothic Communist escapes stasis by turning the jailer’s tools actively against them on all registers, mediums, and monsters: the target victim’s emotions connected to past experiences/ritualistic markers thereof. Empowering these variables happens when workers create their own multimedia renditions of former likenesses, Galatea bucking Pygmalion to fashion cathartic friendly ghosts; i.e., that highlight enrichment and abuse as things to communicate as they are felt in real time—all at once, inside the human brain as something to bombard with impactful reminders of an abusive past. Continuously expressed through borrowed language and images, our holistic (and subversive) aim is to speak to the viewer in ways they’ll actually recognize while also leading them away from trauma as a recurring pattern of abuse; i.e., away from the Capitalist-Realist spell woven by Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit during abjection-as-normal; e.g., Kubrick’s dead-end worlds and dismal spirits. To challenge profit is to tear down that ghostly wall with spectres of Marx, one and all!

The same cannot be said for canonical ghosts. More severe and permanent versions of neoliberal cryptomimesis could be described as transgenerational zombification, specifically where attacks on the mind have thoroughly “lobotomized” its owner (the ghost of the counterfeit intimating actual lobotomization of rebellious or hysterical, “useless” minds). This menticide leads to a curious and terrifying proliferation—of “braindead” unfriendly zombies who, in a spell of thoughtless undeath, want to eat your brains; not to use them, but absorb or discard them uselessly! The same goes for vampires or ghosts, which, despite their trademark attacks, denote the same assimilatory outcome in canonical forms. Yet the fact remains, most people aren’t “turned” to serve the state as police; being absorbed into the capitalist system, those Capitalism cannot use as soldiers, useful fools, or state-corporate ideologues are exploited for profit, mulched as such like grist for the mill.

To this, ghosts—if simply left unaddressed—would linger and drain the already-taxed living of even more brainpower and lifeforce. We must camp them, thus make them friendly to our cause in ways that give back:

(source)

Pursuant to this salubrious, two-way exchange, here’s one final closing note vis-à-vis not just ghosts, but all monster types (four pages)!

Friendly ghosts, vampirism, zombification, xeno/necrophilia—you might have noticed how this book frequently invokes “monster puns” or slang as a kind of visual shorthand that quickly conveys the co-existence of conflicting ideas and linguistic functions (unfriendly or liminal variants); i.e., that pertain to our four main Gothic theories. The alacrity comes from common Gothic stereotypes whose complex ontological functions—i.e., a “ghost” as multiple things at once, like a Swiss Army knife (a theoretical idea, a signifier/signified representation, a unique object, a counterfeit, a cliché, etc)—didactically benefit from quick, snappy visual metaphors (a comparison between two seemingly unlike things; re: the Swiss Army knife); but also whose ominous visual themes intimate “useful” tools for communicating Gothic critiques of Capitalism: a clear and present danger without oversimplifying the linguistic function of ghosts. Unlike canon, we scare to share knowledge, generally through camp vis-à-vis the Four Gs; re: reverse abjection, Communist chronotopes, revolutionary cryptonymy and emancipatory hauntologies.

In keeping with that theme, a Gothic Communist is someone who thinks critically on their feet, but also their toes by weighing monsters as common symbolic measurements of risk during perilous scenarios that many people can relate to; i.e., as a general mode of consumption; e.g., trading cards, video games or horror movies, etc. Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, all configure the same basic “roll of the dice” (cops or victims, rebel or submit) inside a ludic format—one that literally expresses the taking of chances according to a humanized, highly imaginative and medieval narrative/aesthetic.

However, as symbols of caution that relate to the material world beyond media, the creation of monsters and their paratextual materials serve as vulgar shorthand (vulgar meaning “common,” or things made common like castles, organs or churches—any and all of them denoting a fall from grace, but also an opportunity to change the world for the better).

As rebellious code, vulgarity becomes a useful poetic device to readily clarify capitalist deceptions—of thinking with monsters, both as language to see things through, but also respond artistically with or towards; i.e., as they appear in the material world through individual worker expression[13] pursuant to older and larger movements. It should snowball, happening for oneself, alongside one’s community in a second-nature, communal effort to resist the usual illusions of a bourgeois Superstructure; and in doing so, the recultivation of said Superstructure (for proletarian purposes) should yield protective caution against the state’s various proponents: any and all who threaten you and your friends by generating canonical variants antagonizing nature to put it to work, policing itself (through all the strange appetites that capital engenders).

Furthermore, the way to recognize these threats is also consumption-based; i.e., to spot in media, but also through people and how they actually consume, produce, perform or play with media as ghostly doubles that haunt the picturesque scene: Derrida’s spectres of Marx, which become us—alive and warm—haunting the venue of those who do not wish to announce or acknowledge our presence. We’re spooky in ways that suggest what lies beyond Capitalism.

“The beyond,” itself, is a common audio-visual and thematic trope in the Gothic. Beyond maps, for example, ghostly music frequently ties to special instruments like the theremin or pipe organ leading people to their doom—not just through walls, but across space and time, in and out of dreams, etc (or into contained, concealed or closed spaces—re: Manuel Aguirre’s “Geometries of Terror“). This can be tied to xenophobia through Red Scare—e.g., “Is my neighbor a Martian?” thus from a hostile, uncolonized “Red planet” (the same inquiry can be applied to other monsters)—but also xenophilia fetishizing ghostly things through sex and force; i.e., as normally policed by the state. Either mentality is historically tied to various forms of communion associated with the past, non-Western ways of life, or values atypical to the normative Cartesian experience. We upend all of that, arguing in the games we play, “Love thy neighbor if they are called ‘alien’; question or fight anyone playing the cop”:

(artist: Deimos-Remus)

In other words, xenophilia and xenophobia are the ghost of the counterfeit trapping the Western consumer between a love and fear of the imaginary past, the dichotomy contrasting weirdly with the bastardized linguistic symbols and standards; i.e., Horace Walpole’s Otranto exhibited a tremendous love of a reimagined, “archaeological” medieval—an attitude reinforced well into the present; e.g., with Richard Matteson’s zombie-vampires “attacking” the hero’s claim on “his” neighborhood (aped in 1987 when the neighborhood kids from The Monster Squad grow suspicious of the friendly old German man, who they simultaneously call “Scary German Guy,” a vampire, and “some old dude on welfare”).

Gothic Communism seeks to address the unnatural state of affairs that Capitalism brings about, then enforces. Yet, the linguistic properties of monsters are both natural and unnatural. The natural component is how all these monsters seemingly represent something beyond themselves, being more intense through room to imagine by looking at the monster in question; the unnatural element is a material-technological byproduct of manmade things, including legends, commodities and sex-coercive elements useful to the state inside a divided mind.

From a dialectical-material standpoint, this canonical symbiosis involves an intense, oft-violent oscillation happening between workers and alienated qualities among other workers, places, and things; i.e., fighting over a claim regarding these things as owned, but also wild. To face monsters—but especially ghosts—and tremble before them is, in essence, to see and confirm one way or the other if something is or isn’t owned by the state (commonly disguised through Radcliffe’s “ghost pirates” trick; re: Scooby Doo having Old Man What’s-His-Name dress up as a ghost to scare people off, then steal something valuable buried inside a property site). Once Gothic Communism is attained, this harmful, uncanny oscillation will diminish, but the ghosts of all our yesterdays will not lay to rest; they’ll walk among us in ways we can camp and communicate as we please!

Never forget: Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything! So we must bring all of this home to rescue labor from the state’s evil blinders; e.g., to ban books is to ban people, to burn books is to burn people, and to ban books but not guns is to place gun ownership (and abuse) over literacy and the lives of readers killed by guns (often women and children). Listen to the dead, the alien, the unheard, and let the scales fall from your eyes! In a world of natural-to-manufactured confusion, camp anything and everything to show the truth of things. To camp is to sever signifier from signified, swapping real harm out with “harm.” And touched by harm, survivors slide into that liminal performative space for the rest of their lives; i.e., as ghosts!

(artist: Bay)

Occupying that magical in-between, ludo-Gothic BDSM is not a prison. We camp canon because we must. This includes Marx’ ghost, but also anyone else’s to raise up new powerfully genderqueer spirits per Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism; i.e., occupying the same spaces as Capitalism (and state proponents) do, and calling across the void invite you to old pleasures experienced between Heaven and Hell: right now on Earth! To look but not touch, we lead you towards happier circumstances with those in your own lives who want to be touched; but perhaps when you do, making those you love tremble and shake, you’ll think of us—seeing the original echo in the back of your mind, living rent free!

We ghosts of Grendel’s mother sow gender trouble, planting seeds in the boxes, recesses and cleavage of dark forests, wells, and caves—to sit between fantasy and reality as the things that never were, the Withywindle valley “[as] the queerest part of the whole wood – the centre from which all the queerness comes” (source: The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954); e.g., druids, witches, nymphs, dryads, spirits; i.e., stewards of nature as something to bond with anew, as all workers must! Life and death are two sides of the same coin, decomposers eating the dead to fertilize the land, restoring it. Imagination and language are similar if viral, in that respect—figurative but no less rich or poor in spirit! The harvest is human, but grimly sliced up by state machines in ways only the heeding of spirits can prevent! You might feel mislead by roundabout secrets or sexy people in corpse paint, but such elaborate strategies of misdirection (re: Jameson) routinely give us the flexibility and wherewithal to piece state veils!

(artist, left and right: Blxxd Bunny)

Simply put, we haunt them—threatening Capitalist Realism with its own bursting through post-scarcity doubles overwhelming the minds of those acclimated towards scarcity as endemic, built-in. Liberation, while occupying the same space as enslavement, must contend with that mentality as something to overwrite; i.e., by reclaiming the same devices from canonical forces. It feels like a deal with the devil, but rescues everything from state usage as such: using essence as both language and (often enough) bodily fluids that make people separated by space and time, feel whole. Ghosts love cum (those milky sheets restore their whiteness much like blood does a vampire’s red lips)!

Onto “Deal with the Devil: Transitioning Modules; or Between Demons and the Undead“!

---

Footnotes

[1] A good canonical rule of thumb (that aligns with settler-colonial models): white ghost = good and black ghost = evil. “Small” or “big” + good/evil = small good/evil or Big Good/Evil; e.g., the Black Veil classically hides a Big Evil (a “dreaded evil”; re: Radcliffe’s “On the Supernatural in Poetry“), usually inside a container (a closed space), then behind something smaller inside said container discussing something bigger/Numinous through the cryptonymy process and its ambiguous moral grounds; i.e., pointing illusorily to a hidden thing—illusions of illusions, denoting “a place of concealment that stands on mere ashes of something not fully present” (re: Hogle’s “Cryptonomy in the Gothic Novel”). All seemingly unconnected to what’s going on, their vanishing point accounts for the root cause: a dark castle and/or restless labyrinth, and the chronotopic environs and paraphernalia scattered about inside, which themselves get bigger, feelings-wise, the deeper one gets to the core’s claustrophobic singularity (this doesn’t rule out massive spaces underground; e.g., dungeons or burial crypts accounting for “impossible rooms”). Radcliffe treats this as a gaslight, but still discusses/argues with rape per fear-addled female imaginations. She opts out for happy endings (and profit), of course, but touches on systemic abuse, nonetheless.

[2] While capital currently punishes natures-as-monstrous-feminine, nature as female divides canonically to virgin or whore; i.e., anything that is wild can be made tame, but remains innocent and tainted/thirsty for revenge. The gentle/furious dichotomy translates to natural landmarks personified by the state’s self-appointed keepers of nature, said lords superstitious of so-called bean sidhe, harpies, dryads, nymphs or witches—often redheaded, and all tied to the same wilderness as scapegoated maidens are: gentle meadows, glades and ponds, compared to dark bogs, swamps and craggy heaths, burial mounds, abandoned castles, and such. A “sylvan scene,” the female land’s negative space (caves, in particular) becomes furiously vaginal, angry and chaotic—blamed by the usual enjoyers penetrating it; i.e., men exploiting double standards, punishing and tokenizing the usual suspects against updated persecution networks following the Cartesian Revolution’s phallic, policeman’s entering of the womb of nature to torture her secrets out of her (re: Bacon).

[3] As something to camp, rape is something of a running gag in home/sex life; i.e., living in fear as saturated with the ghostly stuff of older parallel castles, prisons, etc. Reaching a saturation point, ghosts magically appear but also stories about them. Catharsis = playing with ghosts; i.e., as twin-like; e.g., the poor twin girls from The Shining, murdered by their father gone mad: “Come play with us, Danny! Forever and ever and ever!” They beckon him (and us)—are abortive offshoots of a larger problematic structure, redoubling and threatening “this” between “that” and “that, that” (the American space lacking castles, but no shortage of patriarchs or genocide). Mind over matter becomes a marriage, then; i.e., submission unto old feelings versus dividing and alienating them; re: playing with dead things in search of secrets. The night is young!

[4] As I use them in Volume Zero:

Doubled costumes, props and conflicts; psychomachy, psychosexuality, Amazonomachia, psychopraxis. It all begs the question: why use heroic language at all if it just leads to confusing doubles? To be frank, heroic theatre is where power exists, so you have to go there to interrogate it; you can’t just ignore it and make up your own language* because that’s segregation (and nobody will know what you’re talking about). Segregation just alienates you further from society and closets you (which is a form of genocide: forced conversion). You have to get down in the trenches, weaponizing the awesome paradoxes inside to reach a wider audience through allegory and apocalypse during liminal expression—to speak out and break things that cover up your abuse.

*English is a bastard language told through perpetual conquest; i.e., “sex” is a liminal expression that canonically synonymizes sex/rape as associated with the language of conquerors: to fuck (versus longer and less direct Norman-French bastard words). While the two cannot be separated, the canonical invocation of the theatrical paradox deliberately ignores the pleasure of a thoroughly natural and healthy activity (to have sex)—one whose physical complexities (e.g., girls fart during sex, or “fart,” “queefing” when air builds up inside their vagina, especially during doggystyle; also “edging”) have been historically-materially conflated with unironic harm, one and all. Subversions of this linguo-material affect must occur through catharsis as an imperiled position to reclaim what has become unironically violent; i.e., by using the same language as taken back for sex-positive purposes: to heal from lived/inherited trauma and prevent harm in the future, often by reveling in the wicked, bad, naughty theatre of the devil’s position as a praxial underdog who enjoys being the interesting member of the troupe. Invisibility is a prey mechanism, but who wants to be boring (thus inert) when appealing to the virtues of theatrical expression? “The nail that sticks out gets hammered” makes for poor proletarian praxis (source).

Simply put, invention and inheritance are liminal as a matter of creativity through themselves.

[5] Re: White guerrillas, saviors and Indian, native lands emptied of indigenous peoples and filled with ghostly copies for white LARPer power trips; i.e., the Star Wars problem/Cycle of Kings and canonical essentialize under a settler argument; e.g., good, tame nature vs evil, old, alien nature; e.g., the barrow-downs and the wights there. Standard tokenized, us-versus-them D&D fare abjecting the state as decayed, pushed out into alien, Orientalist, monstrous-feminine dead spheres of dark nature: stigma animals, orcs, and such beings in the usual refrains’ states of exception. From balrogs to orcs, “evil” is whatever the state needs it to be; i.e., to rape nature, thus profit. ACAB, ASAB!

[6] Refer to Volume One’s “Healing from Rape” (2024) for more discussions of this, vis-à-vis Cameron’s Terminator films.

[7] Apart from drug use and magic, it serves as a good trans metaphor with body modification potential; i.e., actual technology but also wish fulfillment and possible futures through development away from capital usual expendabilities: Communist prototypes in cities of dreams, possibility—change through struggle, on the ragged edge of madness, abuse, desperation, death wishes, suicide by cop vs suicide bombing/martyrdom (terrorism vs counterterrorism). Such things come not from fighting people, but structures of immense, god-like power (which abstract into giant statues, like Walpole’s armor—the Capitalocene). That’s what capital is.

[8] Jude Roger’s “The Final Mysteries of David Bowie’s Blackstar” (2016).

[9] Bernardo Montes de Oca’s “Why Everyone Hates Gwyneth Paltrow’s Company” (2021).

[10] For details, refer to “Death by Snu-Snu!” from Volume Two, part one. Volume One details Autumn’s abuses even more extensively.

[11] The liminal occupant is perhaps illustrated best by Marilyn Roxie’s aforementioned presentation on the Dennis Cooper blog: “The Inescapable Weirdness of Super Mario 64.” A 2020 reflection on a 1996 game, Marilyn demonstrates how Mario 64‘s continued appreciation has evolved in highly chaotic and terrifying ways. Happening inside the game itself, Mario 64 has become increasingly liminal outside of itself when reexamined over time as a ludic space for players to explore.

[12] I.e., like the wizard Merlin in a tree, trapped there by the Lady of the Lake*, but also the female witch, Sycorax trapping Prospero’s sprite, Ariel, in such a prison, in The Tempest (1611):

Prospero:

Thou best know’st
What torment I did find thee in. Thy groans
Did make wolves howl, and penetrate the breasts
Of ever-angry bears. It was a torment
To lay upon the damned, which Sycorax
Could not again undo. It was mine art,
When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape
The pine and let thee out.

Ariel:

I thank thee, master.

Prospero:

If thou more murmur’st, I will rend an oak
And peg thee in his knotty entrails till
Thou hast howled away twelve winters.

Ariel:

Pardon, master.
I will be correspondent to command
And do my spriting gently.

Prospero:

Do so, and after two days
I will discharge thee (source).

From Arthurian legends and the Beowulf story (c. 700 AD), then, queerness is generally “of nature,” but closer to Capitalism and under it has become increasingly magical to uphold the status quo; i.e., in ways that cis-het men—even victims like Prospero—enlist to demonize its female/feminine core that they might seek revenge against fellow men of the imperial order! The state is straight, we fags, women and anything else attached to the environment suffering regardless who the king or executive is!

*Michael Page writes in The Encyclopedia of Things that Never Were (1986), “Merlin’s magical powers did not protect him from human weakness [code for men sleeping with women]. He was seduced by Nimiane, the Lady of the Lake, and she wheedled him into teaching her his spells and incantations. When she grew tired of him she used one of the spells to imprison him in an oak tree.”

[13] Exhibit 43d’s liminal expression of my own trauma, echoing Hamlet’s “quintessence of dust”; re: “What a piece of work is a man!” something we must, sure enough, camp through such dust: Jadis made up of such graveyard poiesis to yield a new golem like and unlike its former self, but also Shakespeare’s titular wackjob.