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.
The Monomyth, part three: “That Which Is Not Dead”; or, Capitalism as a Great Zombie(-Vampire)
Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners[1] had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming” (source).
— Francis Wayland Thurston, “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926)
Picking up from where “Myth: the Fallen Lords, part two: Soulblighter” left off…
This short section concludes our exploration of the monomyth, ending with not just the biggest zombie of all, but vampire, too (the next chapter will discuss feeding at length, but we’ll start to introduce the lingo, here): Capitalism. To it, someone like Jadis raped me in emulation of monomythic characters, just as those characters rape their victims for much the same reasons. By extension, Capitalism is an undead monster that hides its gigantic, ever-growing hunger for profit through fantasies pushed to the margins; i.e., the decayed gentry (and their castles) from Gothic fiction’s monomythic refrains: futile revenge, Cartesian hubris during the Promethean Quest (as person and place), and crime lords/warlords as part of the same abject, scapegoating cycle under Capitalist Realism; re: “Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature.” Nazi or Commie, there’s always a scapegoat to pass capital’s foes off onto (a buck to pass, in queer language). In short, capital destroys people’s lives on so many levels—through comedy to drama to nostalgia and aesthetics—by raping and devouring them (anything monstrous-feminine) pursuant to profit.
Taking all of those factors holistically into account, this conclusion discusses the world and Capitalism as a zombie to keep track of; i.e., how the main Gothic devices (abjection, hauntology, chronotopes and cryptonymy) operate more broadly through the endless undead wars and decayed power fantasies (the monomyth and nuclear family unit) that, as cryptonyms of Capitalism eating nonstop, haunt Capitalist Realism revising itself, regardless of what form the tyrant takes: a bit like a bodybuilder hungrily putting on mass (a gentrified exercise if ever there were).
In other words, Capitalism decaying in these various fashions speaks not to purely imaginary genocides, exterminations and ultimately extinctions, but ongoing ones reflecting in popular media as part of the same ravenous hyperobject; re (from Volume two, part one):
the profit motive as not only Cartesian, settler-colonial and heteronormative, but something that reflects in the usual warrior performers who—per all of these things—serve the profit motive by treating nature as monstrous-feminine on any register and in any format: rape and kill Medusa, torturing her secrets out of her to consolidate power around the usual patriarchal nuclei buoyed by capital on top of older imperiums. Canonically the motive always reduces to a pyramid point scaled by standard (white)/tokenized people harvesting nature as monstrous-feminine (source).
In gaming terms, the “meta” or optimal form of play through capital is raping nature-as-monstrous-feminine to generate as much profit as possible as quickly as possible; i.e., speedrunning in ways that avoid emergent gameplay as an extratextual device that challenges profit. Anything that doesn’t assimilates, then invariably gentrifies and decays—from feminists to fags to speedrunners to Saiyan princes in kayfabe-style wrestling matches. Through the monomyth as baked into capital and its usual medieval regression, a bad guy shows up (usually a conqueror out of the imaginary past bearing a likeness to the present), followed by a powerful hero we must then surrender our rights to before, during and afterwards (the white knight): a pissing contest that drains/exsanguinates both sides of their essence for the state, for profit.
(exhibit 41e2: Kurosawa loves his world-ending hysteria [so do all capitalists, to be fair]. In this case, Capitalist Realism amounts to a Japanese Atlas holding up the fearsome heavens punching down on his head. Except this is a big ol’ lie! Neoconservative ideas of war are not good [versus class and culture war serving workers] and such enemies are fabricated to justify the state’s continuation through tokenized supermen offering up a false version of a perfected humanity that serves capital like usual; i.e., Goku is a foreigner looking to fit in by defending “his” planet. He’s a cop, one whose inevitable decay reflects in Vegeta as the heel per the usual kayfabe arrangement; the entire centrist production is bullshit, “solving” the world’s problems through shonen-style force; re: heteronormative, settler-colonial and Cartesian arbitrations of sex, terror and force. The saiyans are literally genocidal marauders for Freiza and cops for Planet Earth; i.e., taking the extermination rhetoric to its sad conclusion: playing the victim to someone even worse [also an alien] while working off the argument of giant-strength performances that posture as weak and strong per ongoing kayfabe-style momentum shifts. The size of the threat, scale of the conflict, and externalized power of the actors [their muscles and power beams] are exaggerated to motivate people [usually men] to be violent for the state/corporations in service to profit. In short, it’s incredibly self-serious, treating such neoliberal cycles [of profit] as holy [the Protestant ethic] and needing to—as usual—be camped to Hell and back; e.g., Mega64’s “The Saiyan Saga In 5 Minutes” [2024].)
Be they futile acts of revenge; castles, prisons, and panopticons; criminals or conquerors, such devices are useful insofar as their dialectical-material dialogs expose capital’s usual operations through the people who perform them for the state. Being against the state, our counterterrorist stewardship of nature must anisotropically reverse the flow of power as a matter of abjection, hauntology and other Gothic theories, liminal spaces, theatrics, aesthetics/medieval poetic devices, puns, doubles, etc; i.e., to develop our own doubles’ arguments to challenge capital’s monopolies, trifectas and harmful qualities, thus prevent its continuation (and ultimately state shift) through revolutionary cryptonymy (for example) by using Medusa and our own ludo-Gothic BSDM; re: Athena’s Aegis. It will certainly be a shock to the system, to be sure, but one that is required if we are to change the system (and its myopic, disastrous illusions), thus survive as undead entities inside a better world. The humanizing glare of nature-as-abject must freeze these heroes, thus Capitalism, in place so we can move in, then work our influence on their chilled brains; i.e., diminishing their capacity for police brutality and territorial harvests through asymmetrical warfare as a historically guerrilla maneuver.
(artist: ChuckART)
Thanks to capital, tyrants are the most sheltered, hence alienated and fragile; i.e., hiding behind “dragon lord” images of themselves as badass, but also threatened by dark sexy women they cannot monopolize (and anything else monstrous-feminine). As a result, they often have high opinions of themselves, somehow thinking they are beyond death or rebuke, thus somehow able to conquer death/fetishize it and rule over the land for all time. Show them otherwise—to that, show them their true destiny behind their false one as likewise written by them; i.e., the Roman fool self-deceived; e.g., Tolkien’s nine mortal men doomed to die—and they generally won’t like it, certainly long enough for us to do what we need to do: to cut off their head (usually in a theatrical sense) and take from them their illusion of power by exposing the ghost of Rome, not burying and digging it back up over and over (re: Bungie).
As such, the act of decapitation would seem to be occurring either way you slice it—the classic method of zombie disposal being to attack its head and remove the brain—but ours is a lesson meant to transform and educate the head as something to take back in theatrical aways that reclaim the Base and recultivate the Superstructure in unison. This all falls on the teaching of tyrants using intimations of death that reflect one’s mortality as evident and one’s god-like authority as insecure, fallible, and in question: “Nothing lasts forever and their destiny is the same as everyone else’s—eventual change and ultimately death, insofar as such a transformation leads to a surrendering of one’s power, privilege and position for the betterment of all.”
To that, lobotomy or decapitation certainly isn’t permanently harmful, in a poetic sense; rather, per Matteson’s own rebellious (counterterrorist) Communist zombie-vampires, systemic healing of the brain isn’t a loss of undead status at all, but using it as a clever, poetic means of adapting on the fly insofar as generational trauma, once experienced, never quite leaves us. Indeed, the horrors of Capitalism eating us are so extreme it would be premature and foolhardy to expect that. But we have to take canonical undeath seriously if we are to successfully subvert and replace its heads of state with our own Trojan maneuvers pushing for liberation.
Cryptonymy goes both ways, of course. Through fantasizes of violence against a mortal foe, the canonical zombie as a giver/receiver of fascist violence is valorized inside an ongoing relationship—us-versus-them police violence, token workers cannibalizing themselves and preying on nature—that is quietly covered up by corporate illusions doubling said decay (exhibit 41e1).
To this, such “power trips” are deliberately palliative, doing little if anything to address Capitalism as a structure; worse, they pimp out coercive sex as the only gig in town, yielding a bevy of “undead” war brides, damsels-in-distress, twinks-in-peril, femme fatales, token Amazons (witch cops), appropriative torture porn, and coercive BDSM, etc. Those treated as zombie or vampire scapegoats to eradicate aren’t strictly infected or cursed, but viewed accordingly a punitive status (often of guilt, shame or blame) that is applied to them by the state blaming the victim through police violence; i.e., in ways that dehumanize all parties, thus encourage the victims’ witch-hunt-style execution by cops, mid-DARVO: operating endlessly inside an expanding state of exception during moral panics encouraged by state defenders who, like the state itself, are functionally undead in ways that move power towards the elite.
Excluding overt examples that treat the lived condition of the state of exception like a literal disease or social contagion (“the woke mind virus”), sex coercion (of labor) is larger than single “Warning!” posters, which must be weighed in relation to other factors: who made them, who consumed them, how they’re being used presently and by whom.
In moderate canon, for instance, sex coercion is generally felt under a continuous “whitewash” that compels cursory consumption, not deeper analysis, of dream girls whose conspicuous presence deliberately conceals Imperial destruction during Capitalist Realism; e.g., Laura, from Street Fighter V, exhibit 41e1/41f, mirroring similar levels of corporate subterfuge that have existed since at least the 1970s (as far as neoliberalism goes, that is). It’s their continued, scared job/role to make American’s forget that racism, white supremacy and fascism existed in America first—i.e., before the Nazis existed, at the same time as the Nazi rise to power in Germany as inspired by America, and after the Nazis were defeated by the very American forces they coped; or as I write in “Military Optimism”:
Glorifying war through the creation of an idealized enemy remains firmly rooted in American culture, and for good reason. Fascism is rooted in racism, with Hitler borrowing his theories of medieval posturing and eugenics from the United States, not the other way around. Prior to WW2, America’s connection with fascism, Nazism and racial violence was no secret (the deliberately archaic titles of the KKK; the American Nazi bund; and Woodrow Wilson’s screening of Birth of a Nation [1915] at the White House); after the war, Nazis scientists were hired en masse to further US hegemony. As the Nazis were secretly assimilated, the fascist Reichsadler (“Imperial Eagle”) was absorbed by its “neutral” American variant. Said variant still covered everything in sight; it was just disguised by the flowery language of liberalism. Even so, the outcome of this imperial pageantry remains fascist. It’s just more neutral about it. “We’re not an empire, we’re united,” as Anansi’s Library puts it. As such, the Reich’s infamous blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) was eclipsed by something older than it: Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which embodied the spirit of American politics before, during and after Wilson, though especially the pursuit of property. Fast forward to Reagan, the former actor-turned-politician’s Christian-tinged, family-friendly patriotism was a sham for mean-spirited revenge (for Vietnam) while simultaneously conveying strength on the world stage; in 1986, Cameron carried this torch into American theatres, spreading Aliens fandom across the world while simultaneously discouraging “weaker” incarnations within the franchise (source).
Fascism isn’t “dead” because its source never died; it was only ever denied, discredited and obfuscated (re: the subterfuge trifecta) behind militarily optimistic fictions informing a bourgeois cultural understanding of the imaginary past (the Wisdom of the Ancients) bleeding into the canceled future!
As we continue discussing fascism (and tokenism) throughout this book series, please remember fascism’s staying power owes itself to capital’s built-in reliance on fascism; i.e., to survive workers fighting back against bourgeois control. To it, while Hitler’s actual Nazis might technically “be gone,” fascism never left. Imperialism (and its undead consumption) are always coming home to empire!
In other words, fascism is integral to capital—a copycat ideology based on bad-faith aesthetics (disguise pastiche, cryptofascists and compound DARVO/obscurantism) demanded by American auteurs having perfected older examples; i.e., of the state and its own Pax-Americana exports—those wherein liberal democracy and fascist “counterculture” and decay (re: false rebellion, Parenti) have invariably led into present-day neoliberalism built on older iterations and tools of empire; e.g., palingenesis, Manifest Destiny and old, white money/nepotism-in-action (Bad Empanada’s “How the USA Inspired the Nazis – From Manifest Destiny to Lebensraum,” 2022).
History—of Capitalism as something to uphold through capitalist dogma and lies (which is all that Capitalist Realism really is)—becomes Kissinger’s “memory of states” that, in turn, the state renders back into cannibalized feed that braindead workers re-ingest before going on to police, thus eat themselves for the elite again. The world is capital, and capital is a giant zombie-vampire ouroborotically eating itself on all registers while flowing power and knowledge, labor and resources always upwards! Trauma and feeding punch down, dividing and conquering the same-old territories and occupants; i.e., vis-à-vis the perpetual (re)invention of the same kinds of us-versus-them enemies and conflicts (re: the manufacture trifecta) that Capitalism demands—normally on frontiers far-removed from the middle-class:
For example, Henry Kissinger’s aiding of Jorge Videla would bleed into the 1980s, resulting in thousands of mass murders through Operation Condor via the actual[2] contras; re:
Operation Condor used [the Monroe Doctrine] for a slightly different purpose in the Cold War as a larger operation to recruit and use security forces in countries around Latin America. This was done to make sure these countries stayed friendly to US interests, and out of the orbit of Moscow. This work mostly happened with the help of the CIA. It began with ideas drawn up at the infamous School of the Americas. Declassified documents show a meeting occurred between different officials from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The idea was to coordinate their efforts against “subversive targets.” It sounds like it’s trying to stop guerrilla fighters, but moreover it meant anyone who threatened these dictatorial regimes that took over all the countries listed earlier plus Brazil from 1954, to 1976. The first actions were for the support and direction of groups called death squads.
A death squad is an armed group that conducts extrajudicial killings or forced disappearances of persons for the purposes such as political repression, assassinations, torture, genocide, ethnic cleansing, or revolutionary terror. They’re about as nice as the name implies and are basically teams that execute extrajudicial killings, as an act of terrorism in order to repress a population or commit genocide just like many authoritarian regimes such as the Cheka in revolutionary Russia as a preamble to the gulag system. Their first targets were political exiles living in Argentina. Anyone associated with the old governments or anyone displaced for being socialists were now finding themselves victims of these squads. Estimates are as high as 80,000 people died in these killings [source: Rough Diplomacy’s “The Bloody Hand: Operation Condor,” 2019].
Moving forward, South America would be a testing ground for neoliberalism under Pinochet, 1973 (Bad Empanada’s “Johnny Harris: Shameless Propagandist Debunked,” timestamp: 51:45) while also being a famous hotbed for prominent WW2 defectors. In turn, Americans—even self-titled “Socialists” who should know better but play dumb—fall victim to the same police-and-prey tactics via horseshoe arguments: associating Peronist Leftism with German Nazism, thus something “corrupt” (alien) to police, rape and control as nature being monstrous-feminine as has historically unfolded for thousands of years (towards more globalized, dogmatized forms); i.e., the dialectic of shelter and the alien resulting in all the usual punching down by those who normally must grit and bear it; e.g., women being the ancient enemies of patriarchal power being expressed in a wider persecution network that jumps from different modernized versions of old historical targets; re (from Volume Zero):
[artist: A Baby Pinecone]
The historical-material reality of Grendel’s suspiciously Satanic-sounding mother is ordinary people being placed into the out-group by the in-group—i.e., less hag-horror in the sense of actual withered hags [the furies] and more the ancient mother goddess [the Archaic Mother] as embodied in AFAB persons and viewed fearfully by men as devious shapeshifters that could be anywhere, inside-outside anyone [a killer impostor that is instantly fatal upon encountering; e.g., the T-1000 disguised as an innocent housewife]. While the stigma applies to anything remotely female or incorrectly male, the redhead classically evokes the presence of pagan power and Sapphic energies. She embodies nature, and nature is something for Beowulf’s hauntologized clones to kettle/box-in, then rape and kill for “their own” God-given glory in bread-and-circus-type stories [with her predictable revenge—at becoming like them for the death of her family and loved ones—being seen as cowardly and illegitimate in the eyes of the state and its kayfabe monopoly of violence; i.e., the back-and-forth cycle of reactive abuse]. It’s not just “boys will be boys”; the pussy looks like a cave to conquer by men according to men during rites of passage that have been baked into our culture as fundamental to capital. It’s Manifest Destiny in action—challenged by the simple fact that God is an invention, a cruel joke to abuse others with through the rise of Capitalism’s Cartesian Revolution and resultant maps of conquest [exhibit 1a1a1h2a1]. It becomes not just a scribble of Old-English runes, but a harmful game spawned into endless copies of itself: the power fantasy as Warrior Jesus’ perennial resurrection, raping and killing the world as monstrous-feminine, “gendered at every turn” according to cartography as a technology of conquest that fits into the ludologized scheme:
[Francis Bacon, the father of modern science,] argued that “science should as it were torture nature’s secrets out of her.” Further, the “empire of man” should penetrate and dominate the “womb of nature.” […] The invention of Nature and Society was gendered at every turn. The binaries of Man and Woman, Nature and Society, drank from the same cup. Nature, and its boundary with Society, was “gyn/ecological” from the outset [source: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things].
The kingdom is threatened; call Beowulf [or the Ghostbusters] out of the mythical past to slay what ails the king and the land, the uncanny home as “rotten” [as Hamlet put it, in Shakespeare’s parody of the hero/murder mystery] and needing to be restored through great destruction [sold to the masses, of course] (source).
Misogynistic or otherwise, capital alienates and fetishizes everything through different stigmas and bigotries. It does so to cultivate the very perverse, traitorous appetites that lead to workers policing and preying on themselves, once internalized, as cops and victims recruiting from the same populations (antagonize nature, put it to work); i.e., the tired recycling of old clichés and fetishes to galvanize capital in its current evolutionary state. Such cycles are no fluke, nor are they recent; i.e., Zombie-Vampire Capitalism occurring thanks to the strange marriage of American popular media with state engines of ongoing subterfuge and denial (with Reagan’s Tower Commission finding “no fault” when investigating America’s involvement with the contras). My praxial focus often falls to videogames, but the universal policing of nature, the monstrous-feminine and sex work is far older than those. However, even if videogames are far more dominant nowadays at illustrating Capitalist Realism than novels or movies, bondage is bondage. Except, the usual dualities and doubles also persist during oppositional praxis!
To it, undead exploitation under Capitalism as a giant zombie-vampire takes many different forms, themselves stuck inside a gradient of psychosexual abuse workers relay during liminal expression’s surfaces and thresholds (whereupon pastiche remediates praxis regarding police activity monopolizing violence, terror and morphological expression for the state, versus proletarian counterterrorism concerning sex and force, bodies and labor). Per all the usual paradoxes, any sex-positive, liberatory form (of camp) occupies the same performative shadow zone as any sex-coercive, carceral form (of canon).
As usual, the functional difference to such cryptonymy is dialectical-material scrutiny and the anisotropic flow of power expressed through knowledge and wealth in one direction or the other (always as a matter of praxial tension, flowing in both directions and at cross purposes during our daily reifying of such egregores; re: oppositional synthesis). But visual ambiguities nevertheless persist, leading to the same kinds of historical-material contradictions, which themselves make up the bare bleeding heart of the queer laborer’s existence; i.e., surviving under capital’s inherently hostile and predatory sphere that simultaneously hates us and needs us to police with and unto, and which we must interrogate and negotiate inside of itself: the self-aware scapegoat camping their own rape.
(artist: Cursed Arachnid)
This performance’s many paradoxes likewise apply to Nazis and Communists, both shoved kayfabe-style into the American Liberalist boxing court; i.e., as something to canonize or camp to varying degrees, and which future interpretations fall on either side of the fence concerning. Few things are as readily camped or canonized as the Nazi, being used to justify the half-real existence of “corruption” that, recognized by state proponents, trigger to effectively maintain global US hegemony under neoliberal Capitalism; i.e., by conflating labor—but especially labor abroad, in colonial territories—with “fascism,” thus obscuring actual fascism’s ongoing role in defending capital for the elite!
For example, in “White Evil: Peronist Argentina in US Popular Imagination Since 1955” (2004), Victoria Allison writes:
In the absence of any open conflict between the two nations, the American media in the late 20th century concentrated, sometimes obsessively, on two ultimately related phenomena: Eva Peron and the existence of escaped Nazis in Argentina. This focus dwarfs all Argentine leaders subsequent to Peron as well as the compelling saga of Argentina’s ongoing, frequently violent struggle to define itself (source).
Within this struggle, Allison notes Eva Peron being established through manufactured American sentiment as a “Latin American Lady Macbeth” that shaped future depictions of her character such as 1979’s Evita: “The campaign waged by Ambassador Spruille Braden and the U.S. media in the immediate postwar clearly have succeeded in convincing successive generations of Americans that Peronismo was an unequivocally Nazi-fascist movement” (ibid.).
To this, Eva was seen as incredibly glamorous, treacherous and powerful in order to further Pax Americana through its canonical trauma and feeding elements. While sexiness from the region would continue to shift and alter in the following decades, the framing of female/monstrous-feminine strength would remain charged with lightning and trauma like the Bride of Frankenstein (exhibit 41f, below): as overshadowed by the presence of an evil German simulacrum’s imaginary past. Indeed, American elite proponents would treat the exploitation and demonization of the Global South as something to romantically portray while constantly hiding its ongoing neoliberal exploitation (Bad Empanada’s “Operation Car Wash,” 2023). Because sex-positive and sex-coercive art use the same basic language, they require additional context to separate them; re: context that only appears under dialectical-material scrutiny, which neoliberalism discourages. Instead, it promotes the free market as benign, furthered by a proliferation of canonical, oft-Gothic images that yield the usual banana republics farmed for different “crops” (and which, per Capitalist Realism, disguise the whole process all over again).
For example, Laura Matsuda might not seem terribly Gothic or zombie-like, at all; she nonetheless wields lightning on par with an Amazon or the Bride of Frankenstein while also hailing from a distant, fearsome land populated by the corrupt, but also bandits of one kind or another (the Italian banditti populating Ann Radcliffe’s own faraway lands to terrorize her white, cis-het heroines with):
(exhibit 41f1: Artist, right: Josef Axner; left: screenshots and assets taken directly from Capcom’s IP, Street Fighter V [source: Eden]. Whereas Eden showcases the zombifying nature of Laura as a stereotypically Brazilian pin-up model that Capcom is shamelessly banking on, Axner’s fanart pointedly presents Laura as the Bride of Frankenstein—wearing that specific persona in a critically blind, corporatized sense: the Halloween costume as a critically dead advertisement of Capcom’s Brazilian “waifu.” There’s nothing wrong with embracing sexuality in partylike ways that open one’s eyes to settler-colonial abuse; Capcom does the opposite, the allegory left for workers to produce and pass on.
The Bride is already a popular example of a popular kind of demon: the composite body. In its strictly undead form, such a body is less a singular zombie risen from the grave and more a collection of zombie parts assembled by a mad scientist [the Cartesian man of reason made into a Nazi-Communist cartoon]. During oppositional praxis, this can yield canonical or iconoclastic variants; both exhibited examples, here, are canonical, insofar as they conceal genocide by exploiting the Brazilian woman as fighting games and cheap Halloween costumes usually do: through cultural appropriation and Gothic recuperation useful to profit raping nature while dressing her up as the usual Medusa-style whore).
Despite the neoliberal whitewash, Capitalism is a kaleidoscopic graveyard of cheap Halloween costumes reaping on holiday cycles: row upon row of counterfeit copies “haunted” by a larger system of disguised, displaced police violence and state predation; or again, as Marx himself put it: “the tradition of all the dead generations.” This “ghost of the counterfeit” is historical-material, its harmful effects on workers including pacification, cruelty and stupidity of the zombifying “lobotomy” sort; i.e., controlled opposition more broadly occurring inside a continuous police state populated with cops and victims (more on this precise framing in Volume Three). Private sexual property has made people stupid about sex—about its labor and social-sexual interactions becoming “undead” in ways the elite can abuse to stay in control. By comparison, iconoclastic uses of Gothic theory can help break this spell through reverse abjection, but also gives the iconoclast a particular enchanting flavor that struggling workers can identify with and use to freeze capital in its tracks: ludo-Gothic BDSM and (as far as I prefer it) mommy doms.
(artist: Vintage Fantasy)
Regardless of gender or sex, orientation or performance, monsters reify Gothic poetics as an iconoclastic matter of class and culture war that seeks liberation through performative paradox, but challenges profit as a socio-material byproduct; i.e., through canonical ownership as a Faustian, Promethean arrangement deleterious to workers, which workers subvert to achieve liberation from bourgeois forces. Indeed, iconoclasm is more than reverse abjection, invoking hauntologies, chronotopes, and cryptonyms that yield the trademark intoxication of the Gothic mode’s modus operandi—fabricating transgenerational illusions from materials historically thought of as cheap, insubstantial, and “pulpy” but also magnetic, precious and capitalist-regulated means of educating workers: monsters, sex, drugs, music, food, etc.
These are all things that most people like, but which workers have been conditioned to consume a particular way tied to particular canonical personas; i.e., not just wizards, warriors, and monsters, but sexy “undead” versions. Canon often pimps theses “zombies” as abusive metaphors for shameful or guilty pleasures inside capital’s joy division; e.g., not the fucking of literal corpses, but a broader Gothic imagination whose theoretical underpinnings shackle honest sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll hedonism to coercive, pacifying language that results in all the usual police brutalities. Iconoclasm ties the same phenomena to an active, subversive mode of rebellion—not by burying the mind (as canon does) but freeing it through cryptonymic interactions with a reimagined past made sex-positive: a “dead,” sexy teacher come back to life, reversing abjection from the largest zombies (capital and the elite) to the smallest (workers and their individual creations)!
When humanized, zombies simultaneously belong to capital’s dead future while becoming collectively retooled for emancipatory purposes; i.e., sexy illusions that demystify through revolutionary subterfuge, a complicated process that borrows from (and blends in with) older examples that weren’t always sex-positive, themselves; e.g., Frank Herbert’s catchy maxim about facing fear from Dune, which we want to reclaim while ejecting Herbert’s pernicious homophobic dogma:
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain (source).
The goal of the iconoclastic Gorgon isn’t simply petrifying our enemies, showing them their own greed and mortality (thus eventual need to face the music) while also giving ourselves room to work, live and play with dead things; it’s to reduce states of exception and predation to zero (thus avoid an Omelas scapegoat), decloaking those vampires without reflections that hide their normally invisible, decayed and predatory selves behind the looking glass; re: always hungry and rotting and bloated, like the Skeksis (frankly an anti-Semitic trope [so-called “lizard people”] also fetishizing Eastern Europe), thus always needing an ever expanding amount (compounding appetites) to regenerate the same amount as before: the glutted leeches, resting and digesting in their castled coffins. The more they eat, the more they must lie to conceal themselves, thus continue ruling the world from beyond the grave (concentric veneers, but also Jewish conspiracies blaming Marxism instead of capitalists). The DARVO-style lies compound, fracture and reassemble.
In turn, our Aegis subverts both canonical monsters/weird nerds and their bourgeois tyrants (and stereotypes), but also the chronotope we all share. Doing so, we utilize sexuality and gender as driving forces that hold everything loosely together during distinct, visually ambivalent arrangements: unequal power exchange during the kinks and fetishes known to ludo-Gothic BDSM. Such exercises often court themselves amid visually “appropriate” locales historically criminalized and commercialized by the status quo in hauntological fashion. During reverse abjection, however, these old demonic places generally associate with pleasure and punishment as interwoven among palpable, “heavy” time—so thick it’s like wading through fog (a kind of opium den).
(artist: Soon2BSalty; modified by Persephone van der Waard)
As we’ve talked about already inside this module, there’s often a spatial element beyond the dolls, themselves; i.e., dollhouses; e.g., Metroidvania. Doll or dollhouse, Capitalism deliberately manufactures harmful iterations to blind us with, then feed on workers through the usual vampiric hyphenations, portals, personas (such spectres of Rome and Marx only begging for us to camp them using what we have; e.g., Gentlee Webb, below):
(artist: Herb Ritts)
Bit but not bled, the same standard/tokenized workers go on to stochastically assist in capital’s recursive trauma and consumption; i.e., assimilating as class, culture and/or race traitors (which, again, theatrically resemble their rebellious brethren, on and offstage). Regardless of the exact monstrous-feminine form(s), the house is the zombie and/or vampire (demon, animal, etc) as much as the person is (and they generally share these qualities in between each other as representing residence or resident; e.g., Dracula and his infamous castle [above] as something to uproot and transplant elsewhere pursuant to larger models).
Except, such feeding always goes in both directions, requiring times of relaxed control and vulnerability that capital might operate the way the elite want it to; i.e., feeding itself on itself: to eject the necessary foodstuffs, then claw profit back through the usual cycles of police violence unfolding inside colonized lands and populations that endlessly recolonize per new settler arguments (that benefit the usual groups), thus devour themselves (and their victims) anew as part of the same giant zombie-vampire. Things harden, soften, and harden again as part of the same peristalsis swallowing process: moving food round and round, in and out of the same holes, bodies, identities and struggles existing in perpetual duality! Like with sex, we need to be rigid at times in social situations (that often concern sex as something to enforce; i.e., through poetics onstage and off; e.g., with drugs and rock ‘n roll, prostitution, etc), but also flexible and fun in our dialectical-material opposition occupying the same contested arenas; re: we camp things because we must! Silence is genocide and cops are generally too dumb to tell the difference!
(artist: Gentlee Webb)
When developing Gothic Communism, then, emancipatory hauntologies/chronotopes—like cryptonymy and reversing abjection—become increasingly perceptive and loud, not blind and quiet, to what workers could enjoy when expressing our genderqueer/postcolonial selves through ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., versus canonical instances that merely extend the rot in perpetuity while hiding the elite’s reflections (which vampires do not have) and celebrating the capitalist tyrant: as an ultimate glutton billionaire we should eat and tax to hell and back, our zombie eyeballs extending to the spatial side of things—the corporal, temporal, social and political, etc—stewing in the same witch’s pot (an organism, in Bakhtin’s words).
Such is capital, our home waiting to be reclaimed. Unlike canonical death, though, which only leads to worker exploitation and unironic cannibalization, the signifiers of death in iconoclastic, sex-positive narratives liberate workers through the humanized worker zombie as terrifyingly alive: the thinking undead who see (with their perceptive eyeballs) who has made them desire, through praxial synthesis, a changing of things; i.e., to achieve catharsis as a wider healing process that chills solid the usual actors of Cartesian predation, of the monomyth, of ghettos and police stations, of rape and abjection as fundamental to capital, to profit. As we reverse-abject what the elite fear most, they become Matheson’s legend: to petrify with our Aegis, then leave behind to chill workers again through a culture that has become increasingly class conscious and emotionally/Gothically intelligent!
(artist: Emil Melmoth)
With that being said, capital is as vulnerable as any undead, the way to its heart through its stomach. To it, let’s move onto other forms of undead; i.e., besides zombies and their famous apocalypses, monomyths, what-have-you. Let’s examine ghosts, vampires and composites, considering how these egregores historically feed as undead beings! Onto “They Hunger (opening) and Eat Me Alive, part zero (vampire crash course)“; i.e., a summary of the whole feeding chapter, followed a crash course on vampires (and witches)!
Footnotes
[1] Lovecraft speaking through his usual racism/xenophobia to Capitalism’s cannibalistic nature through the process of abjection—literally cannibals abjected onto non-Western races and ethnocentric evil lands; i.e., rather dated (but effective) settler-colonial arguments.
[2] And whose state-sanctioned death squads would horrifyingly inspire both Arnold’s Dutch from Predator and Bill Rizer and Lance Bean from the Contra videogame franchise; i.e., as half-real fascist “Rambos” defending the “free world” from “Communism” as thoroughly Giger-esque: Red Falcon’s endless army of cybernetic space demons. You see this fostering of a police mentality among the middle class through the process of abjection and ghost of the counterfeit; re (from earlier in this module, citing Volume Two, part one):
“Capital relies on dogma as something to internalize and serve profit on all registers—on and offstage, at home and abroad, by white male predators” (source). This extends to token agents (women acting like men, fags acting like straight people, etc), which is precisely what Jadis is and how they acted towards me. Moreover, harmful mentalities like theirs are informed by popular media such as videogames, which victims escape into only to be bombarded with the very ideas that drive their abusers at home and abroad. The effect is often one of recruitment (cops or victims). I continue,
Regarding videogames as a neoliberal form of dogma, from the early ’80s to the end of the Cold War and beyond, you went from public entertainment devices (arcades) that had a bunch of mostly young male clients cycling through them like a pimped-out sex worker… to the 1983 Atari Crash and subsequent 1985 smash-hit success of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. encouraging the widespread sale of videogames in the Gothic’s usual haunt: among the middle class. Except this time, the elite wanted in through ways that didn’t exist during the Neo-Gothic revival: televisions as personal property that could funnel in their burgeoning ideology through the disguise of (expensive and highly recursive) games.
From the early days of Space Invaders (1978), Pac-Man (1980) or Donkey Kong (1981) to Mario, then (about seven years—twelve, if you start from 1973 when the elite began their first experiments with neoliberalism in South America), the usual place of neoliberal business and indoctrination transitioned from single arcade machines to larger amounts of money (from quarters to hundreds of dollars) per customer in each household (where there is more money to be had, and seasonally at that); i.e., a Stepford Wife, purchased for paychecks, not pocket change, and ready to implement the business model into the first generation of what would become the New World Order under neoliberal Capitalism: a world of us-versus-them enforced by neoliberal, monomythic copaganda’s harmful simulations of Amazonomachia to maintain the status quo at a socio-material level; re: the shadows of a new republic’s man-cave walls.
In turn, the American middle class (so called “gamer culture”) would gatekeep and safeguard the elite through videogames being an acclimating device to neo-feudal territories to defend in reality (outside of the game world[s] themselves) as capital starts to decay like usual (ibid.).
Capitalism is a structure that operates across space and time; i.e., inside the working public’s hearts and minds, but also through their labor extending into the physical world (and back into their hearts and minds; re: gargoyles). Those with relative privilege—white, middle-class straight men—prey and police everyone else, monomyth-style, leading to a concentric gradient of tokenization, gentrification and decay branching out from white women (the classic gatekeepers of Gothic fiction) towards more marginalized communities passing the Judas-style donation plate doubling as a police badge.
The same basic issues of extratextual police and predation outlined above (say nothing of the tiered “rungs” of tokenization and preferential mistreatment that result) continue to effect workers in new forms of media, including fictional and non-fictional worlds as a liminal position; i.e., interacting back and forth, on and offstage. Nothing is every truly separate in that respect, the liminal hauntology of war traveling back and forth across imperial territories foreign and domestic, real and imagined. Such half-real oscillation is not simply incidental, but required for capital to function at all!