This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). The first 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). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). 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 “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Demon Module) is out (2/14/2025)! 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.

Saying Goodbye: Onto Better Times Ahead (and Harder Ones) (opening)

Lastly, your paranoid vindication tells me you have learned nothing from our discussions, and it feels tremendously disheartening to work so hard at maintaining a friendship between us only for you to disappoint me so thoroughly at the end. Apparently yesterday was Mario Day, the day Super Mario Bros. (1985) released? It coinciding with the termination of our friendship feels incredibly strange and sad to me. But I am glad to be rid of you all the same; I am so very tired of trying to meet you halfway only to watch you pull away and insinuate, or transform and attack me like you are now. I regret to say that this is, in fact, the end. Farewell, [Zeuhl]. May you live the rest of your days in peace. I will be moving forward with the book. Please do not contact me again.

—Persephone van der Waard‘s last words to Zeuhl, March 11th, 2023

Picking up where “Dark Xenophilia, part two: Magic, Drugs and Acid Communism” left off…

To escape Capitalism, you must walk through the land of the dead and of demons. We’ve done that. Talking about rabbits, we were discussing xenophilic negotiations between workers occurring in good faith; i.e., reunion with idiosyncratic states of alienation to help reunite all workers with nature: as monstrous-feminine to cultivate dark radical empathy as half-real but pushing towards actualization—not fake bridges towards empty promises in the dark: the innocent party in the shower minding their own business while the guilty party is blowing out the proverbial shitter! A blast from the past ass, waffle/curb-stomping us! “Et tu, Brutae?”

(artist: Taiga15)

To that, seeing others as “animal” is to awaken ways of caring for animals that are anthropomorphic; i.e., not textbook profiling and suspicion, nor to apologize for a particular postpunk rogues’ roughness around the edges (and whose rebellion was over before it started; e.g. Zeuhl, Morrison, Byron, etc), but invite holistic inclusion through suitably therapeutic adrenaline-pumping regressions that push towards Communism: as lycanthropic engagements regarding friends and foes, but also threats both actual and perceived!

Times change, but historically-materially stay the same. In 1973, when pressed in an interview about whether he ascribes any political revolutionary implications to rock according to a narrow definition of “political” (cutting out sex and drugs), Frank Zappa initially responded with, “Well, what are you including?” Chagrined, the woman grilling him replied that ascribing political significance to rock is to fall victim to Hollywood trends; i.e., that radical change can’t occur without musical accompaniment. Um, Maple the drumming dog takes offense to that (Acoustic Trench’s “Star Wars Cantina Band w/ Maple on the Drums,” 2019)!

Ignoring the fact that music isn’t simply diegetic and that much of music and musicianship has military roots designed to mobilize troops and rally morale (re: Holst’s “Bringer of War“)—and with me agreeing that while a certain leeriness is required towards corporate output or those attached to it as rescuing damaging practices from their own flagging moral (re: Holst, vis-à-vis Heinlein, Lucas and Cameron, Romero/Carmack, etc, per Zizek’s universal application)—the fact remains that sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll are criminally underrated (so to speak); i.e., they make rebellion not just fun, but bearable and worthwhile, during cryptomimesis!

Faced with his young enthusiastic critic, ol’ Zappa replied, speaking to a certain pulse-taking utility to consumer trends: “Radio is controlled by how much money the sponsors can make by buying time on the air. And the station has to present ratings to the sponsor which show how they have the largest audience, and where they do the research that says that people want to listen to the Osmond Brothers or Jackson Five. That shows or tells you something about the audience” (Pauline Butcher Bird’s “Frank Zappa is persistently questioned by a female student“).

Indeed, it’s effectively putting our ears to the ground of a dying Earth through braindead workers tilting at windmills during Capitalist Realism. Said idea likewise exists now except inside social media; i.e., whose own half-real interactions between the state and its proponents follow the leader to their graves (and ultimately the leader’s). Fascism is a land of different kinds of strange fruit, requiring an orchard of protest. We gotta take our labor back through universal land back; i.e., as a matter of good holistic stewardship, not rape rankings. Gothic Communism is an art, not a science, but there’s still a few hard, fast rules.

In other words, we can’t wait for it to affect “just us” because by then it will be too late. We also can’t join those who say they’ll “keep us safe”; re: predation aside, people join cults to have their needs met, thinking they’ll be safe from harm. We need to give people a better option while exposing our foes, opening everyone’s doors and minds (drugs open pupils and other holes) to end state monopolies; i.e., on sex, drugs, and roll ‘n roll, thus the Base and the Superstructure on the Aegis!

Furthermore, we can’t hold back because our future has been canceled before we were born, but we can’t lie and use each other like Zeuhl did to me. They’re the bourgeois black bun, you see—someone who lies by having absolutely no idea what they did was wrong (or so they claim). Not even when they’re holding your bleeding heart in their hands, but also before that point when they weren’t who I thought I recognized; i.e., as someone I felt in love with as a shadow of a thought. That’s what the Medusa is, extending to Zeuhl as one of many black buns canonically bred for meat and mates, which mirrors the chattelization of people as scapegoats (e.g., black men and bucks, versus rabbits). Like a wild animal, they were incapable of actually loving others, save to get what they wanted using sex and force (a lie is just force through words). “Just a bun,” after all! I once found them dashing and cute; eh, they’ll always be cute to me, just more alien now. No regrets, there, but some sadness!

That being said, while Zeuhl used me as an easy mark, they also introduced me to acid Communism (whether in good faith or not, I can’t say for sure); i.e., shortly before the end of our friendship, when they pushed back on my book when it was only about 50,000 words long (versus over two million, now). Reasons asides, their challenging me helped turn Sex Positivity into what it is; i.e., by sending me on a long winding road—one where there is no Zeuhl waiting for me at the end, but which I’ve been trying to understand their gradient and tokenized actions for years (enby-on-trans violence versus shadism). I’m still falling from them versus for them, but I’m free of them. A Black Bun? “Keep it; I got a Pitbull, now!” Your pussy was the tightest in the world, Zeuhl, but it was the One Ring and I’m Tom Bombadil-ing that shit! “Sickness, BE GONE!” Rapscallion! Bay’s puppy trumps the bunny!

Quite the twist, eh? Now hop along, little shadow. Get lost, but stay safe out there. Don’t bite no one.

From Butler and Warner to us, sex and gender are separate from each other and from biology as the policing coordinates that marginalized in-fighting and abuse also fall back on, but whose concentric veneers apply to us versus any normativity you can think of; e.g., Monty Python’s Life of Brian having straight men playing women playing men versus Matthew Lewis’ the Devil playing Matilda playing Rosario. There’s also real-life examples; e.g., my partner Crow, a trans masc AFAB enby playing a drag king (versus a stripper); i.e., which isolates asexuality and gender performance from gender identity to get away from cis-het male drag queens like Ru Paul punching down against trans and other GNC drag kings and queens’ own varieties!

(artist: Crow)

In short, none are determined by biology save by straight weirdos who “made it,” but also token members of the LGBA and fascist feminism seeking validation through virtue and vice; i.e., as something to signal and farm as perpetual tourists who gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss themselves and those around them; e.g., the Mom from Landman taking the old folks to a strip club and giving them alcohol with their meds or Nicholson’s character kidnapping the mental patients in Cuckoo’s Nest, and so on; i.e., Whitey and the Straights unable to see beyond their own noses/role in settler colonialism; re: Landman and Taylor Sheridan’s weird, White Man’s view of the world: as trophies to collect, while Trump and Elon Musk destabilize, then blame the poor and marginalized.

Such social constructs are colonizer mentalities tied to Capitalist Realism, thus have to die; i.e., just like my attachment to Zeuhl had to expire for me to move on (their ghost always haunting me, of course). And even now, I still love that part of them I kept inside, all these years: the eternal black sunshine of my admittedly not-so-spotless mind (something to protect from the closeted coward who wanted it hidden in all its forms).

(models and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Zeuhl, my brother Ben holding the camera at my twin’s wedding, in 2019.)

To it, Gothic Communism treats all workers as equal, but it’s not blind to privilege as it currently exists. Either we use what we have to help each other as one people to universally liberate, or we’re all doomed, lose-lose. We outnumber them and have the labor they need to rape us with; i.e., which we can deny them our keys to a once-and-future queendom (from drugs, to oil, to sex), starting now and right fucking now. Capital’s already dead; it’s just in its throes!

By extension, development’s a marathon, not a race or a business; i.e., capital is incompatible with life, thus can’t coexist with us; re: it rapes us by design, and tokenizes labor to police that fact. We have entered a time of monsters, hence of Zombie, Vampire and Demon Capitalism versus Communist versions on two sides of the same Numinous coin: workers and nature vs the state, thus sex positivity vs sex coercion: “The future, once so clear to me, had now become like a dark highway at night; we were in uncharted territory now, making up history as we went along.”

Except, keeping white cis-het men/tokens is frankly a giant pain in the ass, because the burden of care falls onto the caretakers (women or those treated like women, hence slaves/monstrous-feminine); i.e., men aren’t cool badasses that give it their all for the Cause, like Arnie’s T-800, but weird expensive pets looking for a second mother to baby them and fuck them; e.g., as vulgadrawings’ 2025 “The Burden of ‘Mankeeping’” explains the issue, minus a vital dialectical-material critique—meaning the corporatized dogma that shapes such things, and which older feminism tends to ignore/assist in by attacking “the Patriarchy” as a scapegoat. We can’t do that, going forwards. There must always be a material critique to go with the social one and vice versa, and we must always punch up, not blindly at self-deceiving spectres; i.e., at cops, versus low-hanging fruit, which includes tokens bought and paid for! My mentioning of them in Volume Three is to highlight the castle they come from/serve in perpetuity. They punch down, we punch up!

In historical-material terms, we’re left with a cryptomimetic chain whose fascist “force of will” strata translates endlessly into shonen, Amazonomachia and other psychosexual kayfabe; re: the monomyth monopoly and cartographic refrain. Nature’s alien returns; summon hero to defend through force of will during the Protestant ethic. Said ethic (and its silly ideas of afterlife) never pan out historically because it’s symptomatic of a dying socio-economic system on its way out (again); i.e., life imitates art (and vice versa); e.g., the Saiyans can’t self-reflect when colonizing themselves in a gobstopper ring colony boomerang model, but simply put up more expendable and bad faith buffers when making recursive golden (“Aryan”) revenge arguments: against a perceived external degenerate backstabber/tyrant’s enemy within/upon the Aegis. There’s no logic, save that someone stronger always emerges to challenge the rooster’s perch!

Same idea with Super Sonic vs Shadow. They can’t self-reflect, and instead self-report whenever they act high-and-mighty while punch-projecting their flaws onto others; i.e., during the abjection process attacking the holy ghost of the counterfeit. It’s folly Star Wars dreck—Milton or Frankenstein without the irony and all the hypocrisy (a Beowulf regression’s praxial inertia during the Cycle of Kings, in the Shadow of Pygmalion/infernal concentric pattern’s narrative of the crypt).

As Zeuhl showed, anyone who acts like that is a cop, thus an enemy to themselves and others; i.e., there is always an element of delusion, denial and antagonism to their traitorous actions; re: antagonize nature and put it cheaply to work according to those who—in their own minds—can never be wrong. They do it to themselves during mirror and virgin/whore syndrome: policing the whore outside themselves to hoist themselves on their own petards. Once someone corrupts, they become bad cops, then sacrifices during the euthanasia effect’s refrain during modular and intersectional persecution mania; i.e., nature is other and death must be brought to the barbarian traitor or suddenly outsider menace, Brutus or Hannibal: “I am nothing like you!” shouts Sonic at his own shadow, Peter-Pan-style, while Robotnik the evil Doc Brown tries to turn the moon into a wunderwaffe as the Marty-vs-Biff wunderkinds do battle outside (while the parent shoots themselves in the head from success fatigue).

Now where have we heard that before? Take your pick; history is littered with such copies and egregores pointing to their offstage Roman fools in similar Icarian-Promethean numerical sequences (re: Sonic 1, 2, and 3 vs WW1, WW2, and WW3). First in tragedy and then in farce, such things repeat because they’re built to repeat; i.e., as the elite want them to, harvesting the bloodspill by moving money through nature during the pimp’s revenge. Zeuhl simply sold out and found someone to spend their last days on Earth with; i.e., to cease rebelling is to slowly commit suicide inside-outside the danger disco opera. Very postpunk!

To have the whore’s revenge bursting the heroic death cult’s bubble, we must anisotropically reverse the flow on all registers; i.e., at the usual gravesites where capital has died and revived before. Rather than install self-defeating abject (us-versus-them) apotropaic barriers—doing so to alienate and fetishize nature as undead/demonic by chasing the shade/monstrous-feminine whore monomythically to Hell to sacrifice them (as Sonic does, chasing his evil half into outer space to banish Shadow and Robotnik [a play on peacenik and beatnik] to oblivion)—we must go to where the dead are and interrogate their trauma and token mistakes; i.e., to prevent a fresh, even-worse cycle of cyclical destruction resulting from the Promethean Quest and Faustian bargain tied to capital acting on loop.

Capital is recursively Promethean/Faustian, and neoliberal power is recursive false power and delusion; e.g., Superman, Super Saiyans, Super Sonic; i.e., all equaling personal responsibility and austerity politics alienating and fetishizing nature, thus workers colonizing themselves after God is dead (a secular dogma). Sex positivity vs sex coercion happen in the Capitalocene as fading towards state shift; i.e., we must revive increasingly Socialist, thus Communist forms using Gothic poetics to liberate all workers (sex or not) using iconoclastic art: to talk cutely to our pets in symbiotic stewardship, all of us in the same boat!

We’ll get back to that in Volume Three, but for a moment, let’s extricate ourselves from Zeuhl’s warren (and their fat wiggling ass/plump ham-sandwich pussy folds). Onto dead malls and the graveyards of capital; i.e., where Medusa waits for us, inside! We need to negotiate with ourselves, because she’ll walk away with everything Humanity has to offer! Gird your loins; the end is ‘nigh, but not secured!

(artist: Pereira Cartoon Studio)

The Future Is a Dead Mall; or Reviving the Zombie Future with Proletarian “Archaeologies”: Revolutionary Cryptonyms that Defy Snobbish Critics of the Gothic to Break Capitalist Realism

“If the concept [“metaverse”] is so broad as to be little more than a vague gesture at the future, if successful and popular things like Minecraft and Roblix and Fortnite get to be the nascent metaverse, then [Decentraland] does too. And if this is the future, then the future is a dead mall.”

—Folding Ideas, “The Future is a Dead Mall – Decentraland and the Metaverse” (2023)

(source: “Auctioning Off a Dead Mall,” by Jessica Testa, 2020: “The body parts come as a surprise, even if you expect them, when they’re the only things left behind.”)

Enough about rabbits. Volume Zero and One introduced revolutionary cryptonymy as a means of expressing and interrogating trauma in monstrous (especially animalistic) Gothic language that challenges state monopolies on violence, terror and monstrous expression during Capitalist Realism. In turn, Volume Two has focused on the Humanities as something to apply/historically learn from—by poetically using the Wisdom of the Ancients less as forgotten knowledge that once was and more as forgotten perspectives now to create new ways of existing in the present; i.e., to humanize workers as fetishized, psychosexual aliens through various xenophilic monster types: zombies, vampires, ghosts, composites, and supernatural demons, as well as lycans and other monsters tied to nature and the natural world. The idea is to shift our cultural understanding of the imaginary past in ways that challenge Capitalist Realism (thus profit), exposing the decay behind the illusion as often being integral to what the elite cannot conceal. They cannot, so they dogmatize the ghost of the counterfeit using the abjection process as dumping site: a Promethean ruin!

Because language and the material world are where these things presently exist (and have existed for some time), I wish to conclude Volume Two by looking at language itself—not at more monsters (whose praxial synthesis we’ll unpack in Volume Three) but at the assorted “crypts” that house their replicated, revolutionary forms: cryptonymy as a means of fighting against business-as-usual using the ghost of the counterfeit to reverse the process of abjection in hauntological, chronotopic spheres (“canceled futures” + castle).

This includes the dead mall as both a symptom of Capitalism’s manmade instability under its own xenophobic disasters echoed by Gothic doubles (the imaginary disinterment of potential/ongoing epidemics, societal and ecological collapse) but also a nostalgic, crumbling veil to conceal the disaster inside-outside itself—like a zombie, but specifically as a sublimation for what Capitalism is doing to workers, the environment, the entire world; re: Capitalist Realism. Through revolutionary cryptonymy as a counter process to state forms, said forms’ canonical, monomythic sublimation can fail to benefit workers, but requires dismantling the various cyclical aspects to said Realism; re: the Shadow Pygmalion, infernal concentric pattern/narrative of the crypt (and their canonical refrains), Cycle of Kings, etc.

Doing so faces several hurdles, mostly notably critics of the Gothic. In other words, as we workers must declare, “This is our mall!” as the call-and-response from accommodated intellectuals is very much the same phrase leveled against common people. In turn, the mall becomes a war zone during oppositional praxis amid war-like language; e.g., the zombie apocalypse as straining to bring about intense change: from Capitalism as an end of the world as we know it onto something better than has ever existed; i.e., something beyond the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and dead retro-future, etc.

Beyond just dead malls, then, I want to examine the larger creative space as liminal; i.e., both as haunted, but also criticized by those who won’t eat green eggs and ham: critics of the Gothic mode who turn their noses up at its sexualized cryptonymies and monstrous, supernatural language; e.g., Fredric Jameson[1] but also Coleridge. Never trust a skinny cook, but also any fiction snob who’s allergic to monsters and liminality but still bothers to write academic volumes about goddamn spaceships. Not only is denying monstrous expression to deny the humanity of those interrogating it—i.e., the pedagogy of the oppressed—but it occurs in the covert nature of human language that moderates demonstrate so well (and makes them more dangerous than overt reactionaries—a fact we will examine thoroughly in Volume Three).

First, when I said “crypt” and “haunted” a moment ago, I was referring to specific types of either—the process of cryptonymy itself, whose trail of semantic wreckage and endless narratives-of-narratives (the mise-en-abyme) remain occupied by something not fully present: a hauntological “ghost” beyond the immediate, material world and its crumbling linguistic devices the ephemerate mall demonstrates so well.

Capitalism deliberately encourages the recreation of profitable commodities, not artistic statements that challenge the system. Yet their erotic proliferation of sublimated war pastiche/monomythic junk food leads to a series of illusions built upon the structure itself as a concentric curse; i.e., one whose increasingly obvious decay during ergodic, liminal, anisotropic back-and-forth motion/castle-narrative outlives generations of owners and workers alike. Inside this desert of the real, the glory of Capitalism is burdened by the tangible spectres of Marx as gayer than the man himself, hence adumbrating the existence of a nightmare to such men without end. The exit strategy lies within oppositional praxis and dialectical-material function inside the text as reaching outside itself into larger half-real mazes and labyrinths, but also monsters (and their morphological architecture).

Specifically by covertly retooling the “bricks” that build the crypt, workers as monstrous-feminine may recultivate the Superstructure with new, proletarian “archaeologies” that bring out a rebellious, sex-positive xenophilia; re: undead, demonic and/or animalistic; i.e., to have the whore’s revenge through iconoclastic art touching on these decaying liminalities! The Gothic is writ in decay and regeneration happens out from the fertilized necrobiome graveyards ceasing to be holy in defense of capital. Hostile to capital, we can pilfer them and weave new spells friendlier towards Communism: by making/summoning monsters of/closer to nature, or befriending those already attuned to a Communist postapocalypse!

Since the 1970s, an iconic site of circular American decay has been the mall; i.e., a weird, seemingly self-contained place to consume, but also where canonical monsters go to die. Their likenesses are preserved as dolls and other chronotopic emphera, but eventually outlast the people who were meant to consume them. In other words, Capitalism encourages the harmful, xenophobic consumption of blind pastiche through efficient profit (a reoccurring theme in musical hauntologies like Vaporwave, whose own facing of decaying and reassembled nostalgia [“corporate mood”] is ultimately palliative when taken to palliative-Numinous extremes).

Fortunately for workers, language resists standardization, but also total concealment; i.e., the graveyard as a hauntological chronotope/p(a)lace of concealment for fresh visitors to walk through—no matter how rotted/nostalgic it appears—and behold the cryptonymic revelations of a decaying hyperreal: one we can sow new seeds in dead empire with (the plot to The Matrix)! Doing so might make you a xenophile or xenophobe; i.e., depending on which seeds you plant—a praxial outcome that relies on the allegory hiding with the code’s context; re: the seeds that you plant in furtherance to competing dialectical-material struggles and structures’ lattice-like scaffolds and fractals!

A good example is Satanic Panic, with “Satanic” being a cryptonym of repressed queer persecution that straight audiences, through the ghost of the counterfeit, are expected to look back at with fondness; i.e., a relishing of abject nostalgia and witch-hunter mania (e.g., Zionism). So often, real systemic trauma becomes repackaged as darkly nostalgic (exhibit 60c). Revisits happen not once, but like rain on a windshield, demand constant attempts to keep things clear and cloudy (from a praxial standpoint). These synthesized poetic forays, in turn, require special theories to get at the truth (our Four Gs from “Paratextual Documents“). Portrayed via informed exhibits through the repeated repainting of one’s canvas, these can help viewers pierce the Black Veil and break on through to the other side (Jim-Morrison-style, but without actual death, self-imposed suffering and bigoted destruction). Bit by bit, the mall can become ours minus the canonical violence used to colonize/gentrify its territories. Doing so is development in small.

We’ve already covered abjection/reverse abjection a great deal and will continue to explore it (and chronotopes) throughout Volume Three. I want to close out the module and Volume Two by focusing on cryptonymy (and to a lesser extent, hauntology); i.e., as a covert means of devising proletarian archaeologies—a kind of poetic conversation with ghosts/other monsters comparable to ghosts: that free the mind by refamiliarizing it with the xenophilic language buried by Capitalism, but also abandoned by critics of the Gothic like Jameson and Coleridge; re: the excessive, sexually-charged language of the Communist dead (and Gothic Communism’s inclusion of ace expression, of course).

These “paragons” draw the line at moved goalposts; i.e., something for Gothic Communists to ignore, thus reunite with what’s held away from us by these goons: something we make for ourselves over time to spite their gatekeeping tactics. Using hauntological variants of the past, rebellious cryptonymy contains, conceals and evokes trauma as something to face, but also embrace and subvert during xenophilia of our mad architecture. Doing so involves the creation of new ghosts and aquariums for ghosts—not an “end of history” at all, but a likeness of the traumatic past; i.e., as something to fearfully inherit, then express through rememory in ways that remain useful to our purposes and our enrichment; re: without enslaving us to the same old tyrants and their xenophobia towards us (exhibit 43d): “the future of one moment that has now become our own past” (re: Jameson)—to inherit!

(exhibit 60d: American hauntology isn’t restricted to malls; it can be any dead location under Capitalism. Case in point, Willy’s Wonderland [2021] swaps the Gothic castle and walking suits of armor for an undead theme park guarded by bloodthirsty mascots in fur suits [furry panic]. The park’s ghoulish residents are actually a mish-mash of various undead and demonic types dressed in animal furs. Contained inside biomechanical suits, the spirits of former employees forever seek the blood and souls of fresh victims [revenge for abandonment]. Having formerly murdered the middle-class families and their children as impostor employees, Willy’s lycanthrope animal demons continue to “threaten” Capitalism by h[a]unting the spirit of nostalgia itself.

Yet, this decaying idea of a “better time” is still nostalgic, cashing in on Five Nights at Freddy’s [2013] through a fairly shameless Nic Cage vehicle. All the while, the murderous shells continue their “Satanic” rampage, aided by local protection: a vindictive police force that desperately safeguards their village from their idea of evil using outsiders as bait [the scapegoat’s scapegoat]. A self-defeating lie that cryptomimetically echoes the colonial guilt from Hawthorne’s 1835 Young Goodman Brown and its Puritanical critique, the fantasy of ending the town’s curse co-opts the white knight/cowboy from its original colonizer role. Cage’s silent protagonist turns the violent ritual into a self-debasing joke: the chattelized sacrifice of demon and devil-worshipper alike, mid-abjection, while revering either as an ’80s sacred cash cow fallen on hard times. Instead of critiquing material conditions, the film sports the critical “balance” of a dumb popcorn movie—one made to patently capitalize on a recent, franchise hit: worshipping capital in decay as a latter-age Gothic castle!)

Beyond revolutionary cryptonymy as working in opposition to complicit state doubles, there are two forms of the basic cryptonymy process I wish to highlight, here, in relation to our own “archaeologies”; i.e., our own “dead malls” built in the shadowy decay of American infrastructure. The base function of cryptonyms, then, is to conceal and reveal (re: Hogle), which denotes a generalized process of cryptonymy separate from Gothic language; e.g. monsters, lairs/parallel space, and phobias, etc. By comparison, Gothic cryptonymy denotes a concealment happening through these devices that reveal; re: expressing the dislocated presence of trauma without showing its existence directly! Instead, like a canary in a coalmine, the unnatural quality of the concealer is the clue; e.g., the incongruity of the Gothic castle as a pre-fascist throwback that reaches forwards through dead-mall simulacra; i.e., the ostensible disconnect between the two insofar as a transgenerational curse/circular ruin (and nostalgia) is concerned; re: capital in decay alongside its concentric, sorry and left-behind illusions.

So while Gothic Communists aims to attack the bourgeois directly with xenophilic monstrous language “putting the pussy on the chainwax,” brevity isn’t our sole concern as workers; survival is equally important, lest the revolution be spotted and replicated by xenophobic copycats (fascists). An indirect route is beneficial, articulated by the users of rebellious forms of dialectical-material code; i.e., code-switchers in monstrous guise/fur suits. Revolutionary cryptonymy uses the natural aspects of dying language to camouflage ourselves, mise-en-abyme.

To it, we have already examined the history of cryptonymy and how it occurs beyond the obvious, corporate euphemisms and blind-vs-perceptive pastiche; but we’ve yet to apply this ourselves to the present world (which Volume Three will do, next). This being said, the basic, natural functions of human language also play an important role. In terms of our own artistic analysis that highlights sex worker abuse through Gothic theories, methods and art, we will examine some mundane linguistic effects that occur within canonical media, here. However, we’ll only do this as long as those linguistic effects connect back to the four Gothic theories we’ve chosen; i.e., provided they help expose sex worker abuse through sex worker activism (extending to all workers sexualized by Capitalism), meaning as gradual-yer-driven improvements on Gothic-Communism as something to perceive: more and more with as the Superstructure is steadily and progressively altered ASAP! Rome wasn’t burned in a day! Then again, its hyperreality (and burning behind the sparkly map) has already occurred!

The riotous aim during oppositional praxis is to develop Gothic counterculture (thus counterterror) through cumulative forms of iconoclastic art. Stacked on top of those that already exist, these expanded, versatile approaches to sex-positive sex work should teach better ways to prevent worker abuse in the Internet Age; e.g., puns, memes, digital art, PPV nudes, etc. Once developed, this plebian xenophilia can be put to use in covert ways; i.e., by using revolutionary cryptonymy to liberate sex work from the status quo by furtively liberating the language and popular subject matter sex workers use, generally in cryptonymic fashion: as a method of use, but also of recognition—code, in other words. To it, there’s a tremendously playful element (during ludo-Gothic BDSM) to human ingenuity and resistance, especially insofar as monsters can pass themselves off as “ordinary.” Their creation and sale—while already Numinously liminal—becomes a kind of disguise for other activities useful to Gothic Communism’s development. “Nothing to see here, folks! Just late-stage Capitalism in its usual death throes!” Sike!

Given the specialized Gothic theories we’re using—and the abjection process that we’re primary seeking to reverse through cryptonymy—our emphasis concerns the abuse spoken of/about in popular stories; i.e., that frequently deal with sex work as it historically-materially presents through Gothic stories and broader media attached hermeneutically to those stories. Such holism subsequently permits workers to discuss the Four Gs in relation to oppositional praxis, specifically while regarding the tokenized sex-coercive elements of different genres and styles, but also modes of delivery (videogames, short stories, stage plays, etc); i.e., canon we can camp inside itself while bewaring half-real imposters onstage and off. In short, we’ll use whatever is needed to reify our theories as thoroughly as we can; i.e., by exploring sex-positive and sex-coercive manifestations while focusing on the creative successes of proletarian praxis seizing the day!

This means the self-determination and Satanic self-expression of ourselves as alien but loveable (fuckable or otherwise); i.e., during the deterioration of any façade (ours or theirs), hence includes addressing workplace traumas—however they normally present in media normally designed to hide them—but also as it occurs behind-the-scenes: stories of a fantastical or sci-fi predisposition (re: Frankenstein or At the Mountains of Madness), retro-future dystopias (e.g., Blade Runner or Cyberpunk) and pointedly hyperreal futurist dystopias (re: The Matrix) ringing similar alarm bells for different reasons (for workers or the state).

Furthermore, this cryptonymy also extends to pin-up photos, action figures, music videos, rock-opera danger discos, Metroidvania, and so forth (all topics for Volume Three). The sticking point, but also the paradox, is that our lessons pertain to sex worker abuse tied to Gothic theories and monster puns, but also goals (the Six Rs); i.e., as a quick, relatable-thus-reliable way of connecting such diasporic chaff to magically address (through the wonders of technology—like my computer helping this Lady of Shallot weave her magic spells): the Numinous-sized problem all around us without giving the game away entirely! Through buffers that shield, hide and show us off on the same shared Aegis, revolution is a mirror game not unlike the dead mall’s usual Gothic heroism; i.e., one where the heroic survivors are faced with undead, demonic and/or animal menaces to bond with, I-Am-Legend-style (e.g., the mushroom men gargoyles from The Last of Us serving as Red Scare and eco-fascist watchdogs guarding the temple during [thus inside] the same shared fantasy space).

Clearly human language is wedded to nature as biomechanical, thus unreliable but also cagey and guarded; i.e., whose basic-to-Gothic cryptonymy makes revolution possible. Keeping in the Gothic tradition of investigating the deceitful past (code left behind for future rebels to find, mid-allegory inside Plato’s cave), all of this stems from investigating its assemblage of notorious, modular agents (which I acquired in literal “Gothic modules” at MMU); i.e., as superstitiously suspicious towards antiquated curios, but also intrigued with the uncanny self-same unheimlich and its make-believe past: a ghost of the counterfeit during the liminal hauntology of war’s debrided “senescence renaissance” leading us to a palliative Numinous to recultivate the Wisdom of the Ancients towards Communism out of Capitalism!

As such, any “unreliable principles of detection” have a cryptonymic element to them that conceals trauma for or against the elite’s benefit. Capitalism is a perfidious hyperobject; i.e., one concentrically filled with recursive, xenophobic illusions and counterfeits. Thus, it’s vital for workers to have doubled means of confirming the assortment of conflicted, messy feelings that historically-materially result from the same complicated situations that Capitalism generates in its death throes; i.e., a hyperobject that’s so big that you can’t directly observe it, and whose descriptions through simplistic metaphors are abstracting at best.

Even so, Gothic language (and its cryptonymy process) are already about as grey/gay an area as you can get, and remain tremendously useful when articulating Numinous—mysterious and tremendously fascinating—feelings with or against some of the usual suspects; i.e., that materialize under Capitalism during oppositional praxis as a process of decay and rebirth: witches, zombies, demons, werewolves, vampires and ghosts, goblins, golems, ninjas, et al. The stealth of a masque is to blend in with those around you working at dialectically-materially cross purposes. If they’re wearing monster outfits, it behooves one to do the same! The better coders will prevail (again, just like The Matrix)!

And no, it’s not “just” because I think monsters are cool, sexy and fun (they are); it’s because I think they’re cool, sexy and fun in relation to social-sexual activism as something to furtively “hook” you on xenophilia—meaning startlingly vivid cryptonyms that one can mix, match, and blend[2] in figurative-literal composite ways (and still retain their critical power and bite). Canon sells heteronormative monster girls and boys, their props and costumes manufactured to sell you a xenophobic idea you’re meant to embody and sublimate to varying degrees: heteronormative war and rape, but also moderately critical means of dismissal pertaining to Gothic emphera and praxial synthesis; i.e., which people like Jameson or Coleridge cannot conceive save as redundant (re: Botting) or devilish, dubious and abject! Beware the snob, because they benefit from being a snob!

Variations “friendly” to Gothic Communism and its development should work as satirical code, then—stealthy “magnifying glasses” swiftly and discretely administered to workers ASAP to avoid them physically and emotionally winding up like these monsters’ more tragic canonical counterparts: the zombie, ghost, vampire, rapist, accidental incestuous lover and necrophile and/or witch, etc, as indicative of more than a former human’s ignominious death; i.e., their sleepwalking life as informed by various grim foreshadowings that present the entire system itself as actually falling apart!

A common causation of ignominious death in Gothic stories, then, is blindness through Promethean Quests and Faustian bargains dressed up in monomyth poetics; i.e., feelings of heroic invincibility and self-deceptive hubris that come crashing down around us/down on our heads; i.e., for Promethean heroes, but also the doomed, Faustian, and currently neoliberal capitalist civilizations they call home or fight for spoken about by various critics “too cool for school”; re: Jameson and company selling others down the river by becoming abjectly “nose blind” or allergic to Gothic and its smell tests. Waking from the nightmare only to die still inside of it is a classic Gothic outcome; i.e., the “bad ending” live burial as illustrated by the proverbial “dead mall,” ghost town, and/or haunted castle, etc, as a home for monsters the xenophobe wants nothing to do with. They’re already dead but think they’re helping others survive by abstaining from tools of survival!

As if, Doctor Silberman! You’re Ozymandias, and we’re offshoots of the Medusa dancing on your stupid grave; re: “Look on our Works, Ye Mighty, and despair!”

Instead of advocating for a structure and language system historically doomed to fail, the ironic, rebellious usage of these tell-tale beings (friendly ghosts and xenophilic gargoyles) can help prepare people to defend against canonical possession and its “sleeper agents.” This includes what moderate state proponents further through canonical art and apologia dressed up as “radical criticism”: lobotomy and its consequent torpor but also rape, murder and war belonging to a half-real, historical-material outcome—one that emotional failures to learn from Capitalism and its artistic trickeries—reliably results in, time and time again; i.e., worker exploitation through a system that treats the owner class (and those who shield them from criticism) like gods, and stews workers in a menticidal culture of rape and war apologia’s endless waves of terror disguised as “cures” and knowing-better sophism; e.g., Jameson’s wholly inadequate Utopia apologia; re: Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire Called Utopia. Newsflash: “Utopia” is Omelas, and you’re Orwell with more masks, fucker!

Ozymandian engineers of their own “greatness,” such colossal pride, systemic abuse, and endless lies only lead to their (and our) extinction. We can’t directly attack them, but we can hit them where it hurts: their xenophobic propaganda, canon, and management structures’ chains of command. The Superstructure that leads to the final devastation of all life under the Capitalocene can be supplanted with spies useful to our sex-positive aims: ourselves and our own humanizing forms of monstrous xenophilia/revitalizing concentrations of older spirits and “essence”; i.e., any way you wish to quantify that, as long as it makes you more intelligent and aware of the world around you in a dialectical-material sense tied to nature as dark, hence needing dark empathy (and similar forces) to combat the state’s own cryptonymy process furthering abjection: in the usual chronotopes’ hauntological spheres (the liminal hauntologies of war), thus on the same Aegis and with the same fires of the gods. So is the Medusa fought over during Frankensteinian tug-o’-war!

(source)

Taking such credibility away from false prophets like Jameson and Coleridge, the dead mall becomes a place where idiosyncratically marginalized workers can show our ass in holistic ways; i.e., differently than the state does (and normally with less self-harm, above): the whore’s revenge castrating profit by showing the Cycle of Kings eating its own tail in the same dead contested kingdom space (another mall inside new variations that never fully extricate)!

While Volume Two has extensively explored monster poetics—i.e., as being something to Gothically foster through poetry and historically catalog and gauge through older (and newer) thesis work—it has hardly exhausted the endless and awesome power of Gothic that puny men like Jameson, Botting and Coleridge have historically run away from like little pathetic cretins. Instead, it has outlined our Four Gs through some of the most common monster examples; i.e., building on the undead, demons and totems of the natural world during three consequential monster modules (themselves built on my PhD and manifesto).

In seeking to learn from the reinvented past as populated with these monsters, I wish to return to the role these monsters play in Gothic Communism’s development across space-time: “re-excavating” the past in search of wisdom as something that Capitalism discourages in highly specific ways; i.e., iconoclastic “archaeologies” versus canonical dogma’s preaching to an increasingly embattled choir! If Capitalism leaves behind its own dead malls, so can we, and this is what Volume Three will focus on, when those archaeologies come to light!

Our focus, again, is ironic xenophilia—on monsters and humanoid expression that yield sex-positive, universally liberatory effects through parallel societies; e.g., Richard Matteson’s Communist vampire-zombies, but also the places these animal demons call home (re: Deborah Christie). Through a desire to habitually recreate the past as forever incomplete—but also fragmented and cloaked by class war as a cryptomimetic byproduct of Communism vs Capitalism—these satirical monsters emerge in parallel palimpsestuous “haunts”; i.e., a wild castle appears!

Like grave rubbings, their giddy recreations invite comparison to former monomythic versions and different monsters that warn of potential danger and trauma—and whose combined nostalgic iterations (from canon to camp) are what Jameson more broadly calls “archaeologies of the future” (which is what I meant by “re-excavation”); re: “the future of what is now our own past” that requires continuous “elaborate strategies of misdirection” to break through (re: Jameson’s 1982 “Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?“); i.e., including monsters, but also spaces where monsters—both good and bad—call home: my camping of Jameson to walk away from Omelas as he envisioned it, thus return to home as Gothic in ways we can make more Communist than he dared dream. As Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communists, we’re the superior model, but nonetheless cannibalize his derelict wreckage for spare parts!

In short, Jameson’s Victor Frankenstein and we’re the Creature camping his (soon-)to-be ghost (never mind—his actual ghost; he died on September 22nd, 2024). Androids do dream of electric sheep, and we want more life, fucker! Enjoy Medusa’s snakes skull-fucking your dead sockets! Feel the camp flow through you! “Head Crusher!” (Megadeth, 2009). It’s quite the death rattle, your deadly headache our gift to your legacy married to our own; i.e., phrenology from Hell, making new lumps as we probe your globe for speculative and probative value! Vae victis, bitch! Learn to see with our Galatean eyes, not your Pygmalion peepers! “I’m the harvester of eyes!” (Blue Oyster Cult, 1974).

We sadly don’t have time to ravage Jameson’s freshly-dead corpse like we did Radcliffe’s less-fresh stiff, but you get the idea; re: stringing them up and beating them with sticks! Our doing so combats society’s “constitutional inability to imagine Utopia” (code for “Communism” as Jameson fumbled at during Capitalist Realism blinding him); i.e., by beating the gatekeeper’s effigies through dark empathy with the alien as something to generate and embrace again by revisiting old dead things that have been criminal but also exotic and worshipped under Capitalist Realism; re: Jameson’s weird temple. Yet another darling to kill!

To it, however “boring and exhausted” Jameson finds the Gothic, his famous inability to engage with it results from Gothic canon, which upholds the status quo through Jameson’s own notion of “blind parody” abjecting us. He’s thrown the baby out with the bathwater and become xenophobic himself. I don’t want to prescribe the Gothic to him, but its vast, integral nature to queer discourse needs to be recognized and appreciated by him if he’s to be an effective ally (too late—but I wrote this back in 2023). Otherwise, he’s just another Picasso arrogantly assuming he can speak for the marginalized. Time to splash paint on his priceless pedagogy!

Jameson clearly favors science fiction and fantasy hauntologies, exploring them far more intimately than he ever did the Gothic’s recursive neo-medieval. Yet, the Gothic is famously rooted in fantasy and science fiction; re: by offering up some of the latter’s earliest examples like the Shelleys; i.e., in ways far less alienated from nature and from labor than Jameson bothers to argue. Indeed, he goes so far as to dismiss the entire mode; re: Postmodernism and its own post-Freudian veilings of Marxist potential in workers older than Freud or Marx. The etiology of Jameson’s picky skepticism lies in the hauntological murkiness after our classic examples of Gothic fantasy-meets-science-fiction; i.e., the elite having long since obscured ironic, sex-positive forms by mimicking Shelley’s productive and potent xenophilia, post hoc. Jameson does the same thing by debriding (so to speak) science (and its Protestant ethic) from Gothic fiction; i.e., in pursuit of Omelas as something to shack up with! He’s the homewrecker saying to others more marginalized than he is, “It’s just too hard!” Like, get fucked, old man!

In doing so, homeboy’s offered up his own cryptonyms, dropping them inside a reinvented, bad-faith past: the dead mall as a complicit, sullen burial ground for neoliberal worship while Capitalism decays as usual. Far from being effective satire, the elite’s ghost of the counterfeit bandies about ritualistic trauma before burying it, thus prolonging Capitalism’s survival under Jameson’s dubious watch. When this burial fails, the elite rely on fascists to do their dirty work for them, Jameson conventionally sleeping on the job. We gotta wake him up; i.e., like David dissecting Shaw into a new Gothic-Communist effigy made from stolen parts!

Unfortunately for snobs like Jameson (and Coleridge, as we will see in just a moment), combating these requires “digging up” the traumatic past as something to reinvent[3] in opposition to state-corporate media and benefactors. Doing so means facing the black knights of fascism as very real (and very dangerous) obscurantists, but also the moderate/neoliberal obscurantism; i.e., of centrist gentries like TERFs and the girl boss persona, but also Jameson’s own strange DARVO (which, as we’ll see in Volume Three, generally translates to “boundaries for me, not for thee” during reactive abuse). Again, the primary difference between fascist and moderate is a matter of style and degree; i.e., working in relation to the same basic outcome: exploitation through the bending of words and monsters to empty them of their critical power (e.g., “woke”). Guilty as charged, Jameson!

Courtesy of the elite and their lapdogs, the collision of unironic vs ironic “archaeologies” often leads to confusing and fragmented disagreements (re: “Outlier Love”) but also material results complete with their own socio-political responses (this entire book series and sex work). More to the point, this messy convergence includes general cryptonymy and Gothic cryptonymy operating in socio-material conjunction under Capitalism; i.e., as something we subvert regarding Jameson and other Pygmalions’ usual collusions protecting Omelas as much as not! He’s Ash from Alien, protecting corporate models!

Note: This portion of the “Dead Mall” section is one of the oldest in the book; i.e., I actually wrote it when I was first grappling with cryptonymy (a concept newer to me at the time than Jameson was—with me exposed to the former [through Hogle’s “Restless Labyrinth[4]“] in 2018 versus the latter and Archaeologies of the Future in 2014). I want to preserve it, though; i.e., as a historical artefact similar to Walpole’s Otranto except minus the actual posturing of true discovery the 1764 cryptonymy (and its ghost of the counterfeit) teased at. I’m doing so because I touch on some linguistic points that you might find useful when reversing abjection during the cryptonymy process, yourselves! —Perse

General cryptonymy is defined in Punter’s Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2012) as

“words that hide,” by which is meant a word in the form of a “cryptonym” that has apparently no phonetic or semantic connection to the prohibited word it is disguising. Repression has been exercised upon the word itself, which means that the original word has been concealed.

This, for example, could be the general discussion of sex; i.e., as something to censor to varying degrees, but also white male privilege as part of the larger conversation being had, and women’s role in relation to them (and people of color and GNC individuals, non-Christians, the elderly and disabled, Indigenous cultures, and/or sex workers, etc). Cryptonyms are difficult to understand because they resist exposure to a natural and unnatural degree. Naturally they are a feature of language that simply occurs; unnaturally all exist in relation to others inside a material world having recursively evolved out of capital’s historical-material looping in on itself—i.e., as a structure existing over space-time, and one that uses hauntological descriptions of itself to prolong the lie. This includes general cryptonyms and Gothic cryptonyms, at once discrete and indiscrete!

First, an exhaustive (and hardly comprehensive) list of general cryptonyms, which highlight the cryptic nature of oral-to-written human language. These include but aren’t limited to: double entendres, non-sequiturs, euphemisms, white lies, concealed bribes, open secrets, patronizing admonishment, gaslighting; segregation, relegation or consignment; censorship, suppression, repression, and oppression; figurative or literal imprisonment; live burial, incarceration, compelled silence or speech (torture); misdirection (creative), embellishment, tall tales; misdirection (rhetoric), lies, “making nice,” false courage, false cowardice; myths, malapropisms, misnomers (necrophilia, pedophilia) or generalizations (necrophobia = superstitions, historical abuses, taboos, prejudice, misconceptions, etc); rumors, gossip, urban legends; allegory, metaphor, poetic license, lionization or otherwise self-aggrandizement, darkness visible; riddles, passwords, shibboleths (and songs), code, cryptic responses; synonyms, games of telephone, figures of speech, fake news, optical illusions, special/visual effects, shadow plays, sarcasm, false praise (and other linguistic pragmatic techniques); anonymous speech, pennames, alter egos, pseudonyms, noms des guerres, dead names, new names or a combination, like Charlotte Brontë’s Currer Bell (source: Sandro Jung’s “Currer Bell, Charlotte Brontë and the Construction of Authorial Identity,” 2014); perceived irrelevance (apophenia) and pareidolic danger, trauma or vaso vagal threats; veiled threats, disguised praise, friendly insults, “love taps,” deliberate contradictions, paradoxes; anathematic status, disorder, chaos, entropy, decay, senescence; treachery, unreliability, perfidiousness; replicas, imitations, simulacra, counterfeits, fakeries, deceptions, sleights of hand, tricks of the mind, Freudian slips of the tongue; guarded language, dubiousness, apprehension, caution, disassociation, hallucination, altered states, possession; rejection, abjection, displacement, doublespeak, Gothic doubles, obfuscation; recuperation, appropriation, appreciation; centrist, neoliberal and fascist vs Communist hauntologies and fencing political euphemisms, recuperation, sublimation, etc…

(artist: Charles Burns)

Furthermore, not only can the above list “mix and match” various general cryptonyms at the same time, Gothic cryptonymy combines monster poetics with general cryptonymy (take your pick); i.e., as a form of compound bias and concealed exposure!

To it, Gothic Communism uses general and Gothic cryptonymy (thus xenophilic monster poetics) against the state; i.e., by depicting state proponents and projects as fearful, bourgeois sources of past trauma: the wreckage of the infernal concentric pattern forming an endless train of megadeath, its centrist apologia sold to defend the monomyth, not the bodies of the working dead (while also hiding the men behind the Cycle-of-Kings curtain: the elite). While Capitalism threatens the present with its own cryptonyms, revolutionary cryptonymy becomes a fight to survive through linguistic concealment that “blends in” while also standing out; e.g., Wicked-Bad-Naughty Zoot leaving her grail beacon on at Castle Anthrax, or Count Fenring and his equally-crafty wife “speaking” non-vocally in code to fool the Harkonnens: in plain sight.

There’s considerable historical precedence for this approach. Punter and Hogle’s usage of the word “cryptonym” specifically articulates a transgenerational curse survived only by its own hauntological narrative: inadequate linguistic markers, concentric illusions, and semantic wreckage whose hidden trauma must be investigated but frustratingly resists discovery during the cryptonymy process on all sides; re: what Jerrold Hogle calls a “vanishing point”: “on ashes of something not quite present” acclimating to cryptonymy decades before Marx and over 150 years before Jameson sucked and wailed his first breath (and over two centuries before his last breath)!

Under Capitalism, then, you have the appearance of many seemingly unrelated things; i.e., the general discussion of sex as feared and fetishized in ways that Jameson callously and prematurely hand-waved: commodified, neoliberal horror stories that discuss Gothic sexuality while simultaneously trying to pacify revolutionary xenophilia (and older authors like Radcliffe) that interrogate the usual systemic, social-sexual abuses commonplace under Capitalism (thus Jameson’s watch); re: the ubiquity of rape and police surveillance leading to genocide/endless revenge against nature as monstrous-feminine. This bourgeois agenda produces cryptonyms meant to be used complicitly by men like Jameson; i.e. in support of capital’s systemic xenophobia/radical apathy versus our polar opposition during praxial synthesis engendering radical empathy—meaning towards whores and nature at large preyed upon by the state while Jameson turned a blind eye/walked towards Omelas as he spouted semi-useful nonsense we could reclaim.

The resultant “black hole” occurs relative to the public imagination not as totally emptied and more like “badly drugged” (see: Charles Burns, above); i.e., by past hauntological forms, themselves something to coercively conjure up and shoot into people’s veins whenever investigators start to notice more generalized cryptonyms tied to systemic abuse in Gothic forms: criminogenic conditions, social unrest, “disorder” (to borrow from Joy Division) and state-sanctioned/monopolized violence through various state proponents like fascists or neoliberals mucking about (the concealed word, here, continuously being “genocide” or some other hidden atrocity profit causes—what’s called “the quiet part” in common parlance, and Hogle marks per the ghost of the counterfeit as something to pimp and abject).

The ultimate canonical outcome isn’t a literal drug—at least, not by itself alone—but “bad hauntologies” like the alien dead mall assimilating workers into lobotomized, unironically zombie-like police states. While this can be reversed, it also takes generations to enact. Likewise, the same is true in reverse, and people will inevitably die before the curse noticeably starts to fade. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Let’s not stand on ceremony by sucking off old dead guys. We look postpunk, but we’re actually punk decaying towards future forms built on past language hugging the monster during the dialect of shelter and alien! This is our mall, Jameson, and meaning is made in monumental obscurity and proximity to titanic forces grappling for supremacy—workers vs the state! You rise up to eat our brains; we stand on your shoulders to elevate our own understandings of the world you apologized for in your own roundabout ways!

Capital gentrifies and decays to create strange appetites, but also strange methods pushing towards forbidden, unknown pleasures; e.g., cryptonymy and post-scarcity wedded like Persephone to Hades, hence the imaginary past as continuously reimagined as cryptonymic, thus cryptomimetic. By that same token, the cryptonymic devices being used by the state’s complicit parties are being simultaneously pilfered by revolutionary authors unafraid to “dive in” to the Aegis; i.e., by using said devices creatively in search of parallel, emancipatory hauntologies that lead people “out of the crypt” while simultaneously through cryptonymy disguising themselves from those with power (either having it, neoliberals; or aligning with it, fascists): as ghosts, demons, witches, zombies, furries, cyborgs, golems, aliens, etc. Jameson was a white privileged straight guy in academia, thus estranged from the need for such therapy and disguise! He sucked, and sucked on Utopia’s white-supremacist cock coming home to roost!!

Furthermore, the resulting senescence can still appear (or be) a drug-addled mess, hence a violent fever dream the likes of which Jameson’s total, snobbish dismissal is part of a longer chain of moderacy directed at the Gothic; i.e., as something to pimp during the same cryptonymic hogging since Coleridge of stages they policed, scrubbing of any dark whorish testimonies. Opposition is a liminal gradient, forcing its utility to be met by those who think they know better but are too good to play with dead things (or fuck demons). Otherwise, they might realize what Gothic iconoclasm is trying to imagine in relation to Capitalism and its Realism: not a run-down former paradise that failed, but a well-oiled, unethical system of worker exploitation working perfectly towards that aim by disguising its transgenerational trauma in linguistically cunning ways! Moderates be like that!

In Volume Three, I elucidate this chaos (and roosting chickens) as clearly as I can; i.e., by venerating Gothic hauntology and cryptonymy as I argue in favor of sex positivity and Gothic Communism (actually having done so first and published last; re: after the five proceeding book [sub]volumes)—the achievement of the latter through subversive xenophilia breaking down the “crypt” of Capitalism, thus replacing its tyrannical Superstructure with a post-scarcity variant (doubling for the old castle; i.e., a “Trojan fort,” below).

Before we cross volumes, though I want to close Volume Two with a final commentary about our aforementioned snobs; re: turning their noses up at sexuality and the Gothic in relation to dialectical materialism; i.e., as something to dance around (for them) not with/among the dead as fake, but not automatically in service of the state and its historical-material process of abjection; re: Jameson shivering before the Aegis, whose act of controlled opposition/functional obeisance towards capital was actually done first, by Coleridge!

(artist: Brian Froud)

As we’ve touched on, Coleridge liked his drugs. And we’ve already examined Stuart Mills accounting how Fisher himself offered various solutions in response to Capitalism; re: acid Communism as a trippy means of escaping Capitalist Realism (alluding—perhaps accidentally in his case, I think—to Blake’s aforementioned acids, or things that produce a similar drug-like effect).

Fisher seemingly divorces hauntology from the supernatural, but according to Castricano cannot escape the cryptomimetic language of ghosts that Marx relied upon (and which I attach to all monsters, thus all work as sexualized by the state into dead alien whores); I want to consider how the breakthrough can happen at different points through different means, focusing on sex (especially Gothic depictions of sex) as an elaborate, xenophilic strategy of misdirection that helpfully guides viewers out of capital’s shadow.

This, in turn, requires a great deal of optimism regarding the powers of imagination; i.e., as able to shift, but also their utility in sexualized forms as operative towards rebellion to furtive degrees (as we shall explore in Volume Three, kayfabe is the language of espionage within a grander monstrous-heroic discourse, including monstrous-feminine as tremendously common in either side of the praxial equation). Mills writes how “Capitalism constrains creativity and innovation,” but also, in my opinion, imagination. This is plain-as-day with Jameson’s dismissal of Gothic, but also Coleridge’s; re: his rabid attacking of gay iconoclast/rebel, Matthew Lewis: “Yes! the author of the Monk signs himself a LEGISLATOR! We stare and tremble” (source: Pressbooks’ “Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s review of The Monk”). Moral outrage/pearl-clutching is a witch hunter’s smokescreen for ethnocentric superiority and hypocrisy! ACAB!

So whereas Fisher saw hauntology as a prison that traps people inside Capitalism, I treat hauntology as something slightly different. My goal isn’t exodus at all, but poetic transformation; i.e., when Gothic imagination is liberated by a different kind of hauntology than what Fisher entirely envisioned: the emancipatory kind offered by Gothic Communism and sex positivity as not a whitewashing of the tyrannical Gothic castle and more an emancipatory double whose happy ending is the steady push towards equality and post-scarcity by reclaiming the symbol of the dark castle itself—indeed, its entire cast, construction and age as something heretofore undreamed of: a progression away from the monomyth and infernal concentric pattern by ironically using these same devices predicated towards a different outcome than what historical-materially offers up through canon like Coleridge onwards; e.g., the queer princess, dance hall, monster and castle, etc, as dressed up in the binarized Gothic aesthetic that, within and outside of its own text, is the metatext of oppositional praxis; re: doubles allowing for troubling comparison to break Capitalist Realism (and its monomythic violence against whores)!

(artist: Johannes Helgeson)

Compared to Coleridge, then, our contribution is subversive doubles that envision a post-scarcity world and out our abusers in their usual forms of disguise; e.g., Dark Link if they weren’t just a shadow puppet for Link to fence with but their own Gothic-Communist entity teaching emancipation through demonic exchange. But from Coleridge to us, there’s always a duality when fencing with monsters (demons or otherwise); i.e., the shadow housing our Gothic potential to liberate and exploit, as Coleridge himself did while anisotropically sparring with Matthew Lewis. In either case, hauntology works with outmoded, formerly fearsome liminalities (again, the xenomorph, but also its castled home and the princesses, detectives and soldiers who share these imperiled spaces with it, inside the castle as yesteryear’s corpse malls). To make their dated views of the future emancipatory requires earnest, good-faith, even covert engagement with common social-sexual material.

I say “common” because imagination, whether through canon or counterculture, is continuously educated by images—often of people; i.e., created by producers, artists and consumers working in tandem, hence coming from warring schools of thought, using similar sexualized imagery whose communication with is primarily viewed by sight but gleaned through subtext. Capitalism, though, limits imagination to a mode of thinking that supports itself; i.e., one leading to a complicit, cryptonymic continuum (say that three times fast) under those accommodated socio-material structures already in place; re: as used by Coleridge onwards. Standard canonical space, thought, bodies and sexuality—all counterfeits, lucrative and hegemonic, that bury the public imagination alive and keep it there with an army of bad-faith or otherwise unfriendly zombies, witches, ghosts and other monsters. Same goes for Coleridge and those aping him (and his unapologetic classism, anti-Gothic screed and drug-addled xenophobia)!

It would be a tremendous mistake, then, to assume all monsters are created equal, as Jameson does, or that they lack the critical power to reshape the public imagination. They instead require constant dialectical-material analysis, which he remains curiously unable to afford them, any more than Coleridge before him did; i.e., both men shivered at whores being ghosts of the Medusa pimped by capital raping said whores, thus nature as monstrous-feminine; re: as Ambrosio did when Matthew Lewis summoned the whore to testify to her own rape by his hand! Beware the policer of tones; they are cops, thus complicit in rape! Coleridge was a rapist by proxy and politique; i.e., his own reputation as a poet laureate and famous literary critic whitewashing and colonizing Gothic[5] was no different than Roger Ebert’s Pulitzer-winning rape apologia; re: DARVO obscurantism enacting “boundaries for me, not for thee!” White straight guys are the most privileged by the system, hence the biggest hypocrites.

As we’ve been hinting at, then, this fatal moderacy and consequent normalization stems from a heteronormative prudishness that Jameson borrowed from Coleridge (without the laudanum). That’s the point of my book—to collectively demonstrate the sex-positive/class-conscious potential of iconoclastic sex worker imageries; i.e., in spite of professed knowing-betters like Coleridge trying to stay sober/steer away from whores by segregating them during the abjection process. To reverse abjection, we must in effect “summon the whore.” This includes as a subject of study but also any who historically studied them with contempt; i.e., while dealing with accommodated intellectuals like Jameson having zero punk energies to begin with, xenophiles must do our collective best to manifest good praxis under Gothic Communism without decaying our punk selves!

Except, we’ve already spanked Jameson—and we’ll get to Coleridge in just a second—but first, what about those whores, again? How do we summon them, Ed Zachary?

To summon the whore as Lewis did is to summon the Medusa as echoes of a Communist Numinous raped by capital before it was fully conceived; i.e., through older undead, demonic and animals forms of policing nature that Coleridge and company aided and abetted. Through a combined, transgenerational effect on the public imagination, our archaeologies should work “in tune” against capital’s self-styled bards; i.e., by speaking to systemic trauma in ways Coleridge couldn’t monopolize; e.g., with his 1796 “Eolian Harp” gentrifying poetry as Britain’s rock ‘n roll of the times, effectively abjecting what Rudolph Otto’s 1917 The Idea of the Holy would call “the Numinous” 150+ years after Burke’s much-touted Sublime (from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757) tried to hog the stage (source:  Simon Morley’s “A Short History of the Sublime,” 2021); re: as something to dismantle in opposition to Capitalism’s bad-faith copies, but also steal back those who are too prosy and chaste to get down in the trenches (so to speak) and tell beautiful, dark, sexy and splendid “lies” (as Walpole did, in 1764, and Matthew Lewis, in 1794).

Po-tay-toh, po-tah-toh. Application through hindsight trumps dry historical documentation, atomized theory and praxial inertia. The Numinous, then, is a decayed idea of the Sublime that speaks to capital back then and now as having decayed into hyperobject abstractions; i.e., what Coleridge tried to deny by pimping nature and the Numinous into what he preferred (the Romantics didn’t actually call themselves “the Romantics,” anymore than the Beats called themselves “the Beats”).

Yet, such succubean darkness visible also isn’t false or true, but both as half-real, onstage and off; i.e., xenophilic demons, undead and animal whores comprising a collective pedagogy of the oppressed—specifically that of sex workers (though Capitalism sexualizes all workers to some degree or another): as old friends who speak from us through a reimagined past that feels ready to change back into itself, like an exciting dream that never quite was but could someday be! Numinous is hauntological and, when summoning the demon slut, can hoist the champions of the Sublime on their puny petards!

Here’s an example, with Krispy and I:

(exhibit 60e1: Model and artist: Krispy Tofuuu and Persephone van der Waard. This piece explores subverting demonic summoning and torture during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., the succubus being identified from the Renaissance period well into the Romantic era as an Enlightenment continuation of what became the femme fatale of future times regressing harmfully backwards; re: the Great-Man pimp as threatened by their own outmoded ideas of nature-as-vengeful, hence the usual signature torturers of men of the cloth/reason: the whore’s non-white body tempting the Romantic stoic with naughty outlawed Numinous fun!

Numinous ≈ Sublime, then—our summoning of the chonky profligate fucking with rigid applications of these lofty notions like Coleridge’s, thus the latter’s singular canonizing of such ideological fortresses undermined with our own bodily ones’ flexible autonomy and cathartic synthesis; re: of what I call the palliative Numinous, breaking Norton’s Imperialism of Theory down versus not just Coleridge, but those unironically riding his dick! The future can’t change if our understanding and application of the past is frozen in defense of the state as Sublime, Numinous, whatever!

[artist: Krispy Tofuuu]

To it, Krispy’s another black rabbit to Numinously pursue in the wake of state prows and their historical-material disorders. Hairy and thicc, she chubbily pushes the pursuer as the black rabbit does; i.e., towards new understandings [and applications] of terms like the Numinous and Sublime [whose meaning is not set by white moderate historians playing cop]! If you’re not afraid to follow her and be taken for a ride, yourself, then you’ll emergence from state spells bearing out/carrying forth healthier means of illustrating Gothic than Coleridge policing the whore for his own gain did! Such is ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as operating light years beyond Coleridge’s narrow lens of a shackled Gothic he could p[r]imp!

Specifically this collage depicts an expression of how Krispy wanted to be portrayed in demonic form, and which I have presented alongside photos of them from a normal sexting session had between us; i.e., I think the latter photos present a cuddly and sweet depiction of Krispy alongside their semi-innocent and non-threatening succubus self: one that dickwads like Jameson and Coleridge would shiver at and dismiss while imagining a preserved paradise bereaved of native, thus Indigenous demons testifying to whorish survival; re: pandemonium without the whore [abjected for a swept brothel converted into a Protestant church, as Coleridge very much argued for]. Genocide is genocide, the ensuing silence speaking volumes through cryptonymy we can reclaim! “She’s lost control again!” [Joy Division, 1979] and therein breaks Capitalist Realism on her Aegis! Such graveyards are only bereft if we make them bereft; to give them humanity is to give them space to shake and shout, mid-penetration!

[artist: Krispy Tofuuu] 

Specifically Krispy asked the succubus to appear somewhat innocent but also overtly demonic—a paradox, they admitted, but still what they pointedly desired. I think any straddling of the monster language fits with perfectly with canonical subversion; i.e., humanizing the colonized language of persecution against whores by divorcing demonic expression from state violence on the same grander Aegis; re: another rabbit, and a shapely and fuzzy one to boot!

[artist: Krispy Tofuuu]

Moreover, the animalistic expression, in this case, pointedly sees Krispy as a human worker through the demonic-human expression of their sexual labor—not as something to exploit, but to appreciate and understand; i.e., as human beyond Enlightenment constraints like Coleridge’s own Gothic pretensions. In other words, Krispy’s monster and human sides belong to the same worker and should be valued and appreciated accordingly.)

As something to summon to scare canon’s champions, Sex Positivity exhibits Gothic art unafraid of sexuality as something to reify in culture forms; i.e., any that reunite workers with what is lost—the dead, but also the natural world before exploitation as something to reimagine and speak about, mid-synthesis.

As stated during my PhD and manifesto, our aim isn’t a regression away from technology but a xenophilic means of rearranging material conditions through the Superstructure as plastic; i.e., my art combined with the art of others—be they separate drawings or drawings by me of models personifying various monstrous concepts and brands in iconoclastic ways—that celebrates sex positivity’s ability to generate “parallel” societies that, if not “outside the crypt” then at least leading in that direction; re: away from worker trauma through dark, radical empathy in older forms of drug-like poetics chronotopes, hauntologies and cryptonymies echoing trauma as something to cryptomimetically play with; e.g., Krispy’s delicious body filling that role nicely! “No, I’ve never seen anyone like you before—not while I was awake, anyway!” Matilda’s a thicc demon, and Cristobel’s got cushion for the pushin’! Summon whore; open “doors of perception” wider than the gates of Hell, green eggs and ham to chagrin Coleridge with! “Stare and tremble” at this, dickhead!

(artist: Krispy Tofuuu)

This chasing happens generally through spaces and occupants that—like a dead mall or Gothic castle—teach one to think differently about nature and sex as already-colonized, especially monstrous-feminine sexual labor (female or not) as something thoroughly ignored or dismissed by the sexually-estranged (which Coleridge totally was). When viewed, occupied or felt, parallel “archaeologies” reassemble the reimagined past changing through altered states of empathy as Numinous perception to a matter of degree; i.e., digging it up again and again and again, mid-live-burial, to better teach viewers to avoid Capitalism’s myriad mind traps, menticides, and ignominious deaths: summoning the whore to humanize her harvesting by men like Coleridge “calling dibs,” then thirsting after Cristobel’s peach behind Victorian buffers they anticipated and installed for their own delight.

Victory takes time, and exposed to the lessons we teach while camping the ghosts of cops like Coleridge dick-riding himself, the next generation can learn to imagine something better than any of us have; i.e., doing so to change how future individuals perceive/experience sex work, thus all work and how its various chronotopic intersections, hauntological variants and cryptonymic trauma markers paradoxically survive and exchange under Capitalism as something such illustrations of mutual consent aid in subverting: as a liminal position that can shift towards Communism through such summoning as phenomenological.

Rebellion, then is a constant hermeneutic means of freeing one’s emotions/mind through the very things that shape it inside the material world. In turn, breaking the mint starts with imagination as informed by past media as rerouted, moving away from harmful, dated counterfeits that alienate/divide in favor of sex-positive dated counterfeits; e.g., the futurist Utopia, the retro-future, the fantasy in outer space, but also the various uniforms and disguises found within them—the wizards, witches, Jedi, and so on compromising Wordsworth’s language of the Poet told to the common man, who, while “closer to nature by Wordsworth’s measure, tends to speak in the language of their class. Our Romantic friend, though he didn’t realize it, was inadvertently advocating for compound rebellion, allowing for middle-class revolutionaries to speak to the common person in modified language that nevertheless spoke to both differently.

To that, this chasing the whore brings us to Coleridge as something rather bitter to chase with sweeter tinctures. He lived to old age, and wrote about loftier things while Goya screamed about the horrors of war and Lewis giggled about gay Madonnas ripping evil monks apart:

(artist: Washington Allston)

Kathryn Kummer notes that Wordsworth’s partner in crime, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “believes that common language [did] not apply to all classes; and therefore, should not be practiced” (source: British Literature Wiki, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” 2018). Then again, Coleridge couldn’t write poetry after he stopped doing laudanum (a tincture of alcohol and cocaine) and—as we acknowledged in our thesis volume:

Coleridge achingly bemoaned the presence of Matthew Lewis’ The Monk having been written by a MP (Member of Parliament). He looked down on the Gothic as “cheap” and base, like spitting off a bridge to try and communicate grand ideas (as Dale Townshend once told me in class; “his Gothic cathedrals were envisioned as holy and filled with light”—to which I replied that Coleridge was merely pissing in the wind [relative to the rise of impolite forms of counterculture]. Dale merely shook his head and grumbled at my contribution). Or as London Skoffler writes,

Coleridge may have used Gothic elements in his writing, but he would have been vehemently opposed to this suggestion. He criticized Gothic literature, specifically the sexually charged story The Monk by Gregory Matthew Lewis, as corrupting and perverse (Townshend). So why was Christabel so sexual? Perhaps, as Ann Radcliffe says of terror and horror, it is because Coleridge did not graphically depict his characters’ actions. Instead, he only hinted at what may have happened. Coleridge leaves a lot of interpretation up to his readers, forcing them to use his beloved imagination, to decide for themselves (source: “Coleridge’s Gothic Romanticism,” 2019).

In other words, Coleridge was a privileged nerd who—like Jameson’s latter-day dismissal of the Gothic, but also Austen’s parody of it or Radcliffe’s “armoring” in more delicate novels—was heavily predisposed to prescribing proper modes of sexual expression: veils. Not only does doing so cater to the status quo (which will sexualize the veil anyways); it remains inadequate from a holistic, dialectical-material point-of-view (which Gothic Communism demands) [source].

To be frank, refusing to look at something “improper”—and by extension playing with and examining it—makes you increasingly ignorant and stupid; i.e., from Coleridge to Jameson to Botting about capital and the natural world and things “of nature” to whore out. They’re the statues with blind eyeballs, but nonetheless thinking they’re right, correct, noble, and good, etc (meaning on the side of the Patriarchy/God and capital-by-another name—the Sublime, Utopia[6] and so on)!

Call it what you want; a pimp is a pimp, a Pygmalion always looking to pimp (thus rape) Galatea/nature-as-monstrous-feminine for profit! ACAB, cops and capital; APAB, meaning pimps, Pygmalions, prudes and profit—i.e., they’ll invent whatever they like/summon whatever they want to have control over whatever they deem inferior to themselves, the whore’s revenge being to break that perceived superiority by developing Gothic Communism to emasculate such Cartesian, heteronormative and settler-colonial structures and temples, one and all! Fuck ’em and their prescriptions of wandering womb and bicycle face sullying Gothic: “Look, something I can pimp and control under my own tentative position!” Being prudish and sanctimonious in one’s colonizer position doesn’t erase what it functionally is!

(source)

Furthermore, doing so makes you liable to get hurt or deprives you of an enriched existence, the Gothic seemingly saying over and over to any who will heed the whore, “What was that? Maybe you should go and check…”; or “Try this out—it’s really fun!” or “Where do monsters come from and what are they for?” Beware the uncurious, but also those who prepare a myopic, “correct” way of looking at things that abjects everything else; i.e., the reactionary attacking you, the moderate speaking for you instead versus listening to you, or the corporate hack/academic bigwig selling you fake monster copies and passing them off as “doing their part and yours.” Pure, xenophobic claptrap. Per Castricano, playing with the dead as not infallible gods is how we learn from the past; i.e., by not denying our impulses, thus what makes us human: our empathy towards those policed together under the same shadowy crimes that white supremacists like Coleridge apologized bigotedly for without fail; re: gagging Medusa behind an English hyperreal façade.

Christ, enough about snobs! Let’s close out this short chapter with some food for thought (four pages), then segue into the Demon Module’s conclusion (thus that of the entire Monster Volume)!

First, rebellion is whorish, thus fun; i.e., as Catherine Spooner rightly points out in her 2017 book, Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic—meaning “fun with monsters.” Where all monsters operate as pimps or whores to some degree (as I argue), they can be consequently and performatively transformed through function; i.e., as things to play with and learn from in fresh xenophilic, even “necrophilic” ways; re: the Medusa, among other things, is a zombie, but looks can be deceiving on either side of a larger cryptomimetic refrain: slated for domination, but challenging that on the usual surfaces and buffered thresholds’ recursive returns to old graves (malls or otherwise!

(artist: Mari Sappho)

This often, I would add, happens musically and to mounting degrees of descriptive sexuality and all-around prurience (a concept we’ll explore more of in Volume Three, Chapter One); it can also be an operatic way of gradually bringing people out of state-imposed culture shock, thus pacification and xenophobia—i.e., doing so by waking them up like Morpheus did to Neo; re: regarding nature as already raped and dead behind the decaying illusions housing the latter’s caged brain as mall-like: by opening their minds, meaning to the possibility that the whore isn’t a figment of one’s imagination at all, but instead needs to be summoned repeatedly and heeded to break Capitalist Realism with!

“Once more unto the breach!” Even if that means about talking about impolite things or scary ideas (re: the mall is dead into the future), it must be done because our entire existence is impolite in state eyes pimp the monstrous-feminine whore of nature; i.e., once damning evidence comes to light about the falseness of state and state proponent alike—and “sets” the reluctant public’s assigned saviors’ reputations, at the very least, “on fire” for fun—it should nonetheless be done as many times as needed to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and awareness to new states of maturity concerning profit, thus genocide. This goes above and beyond old dead dinosaurs like Coleridge or Jameson, and threatens more active and currently harmful people like Ian Kochinski; i.e., pimping the usual victims under capital that his forebears did (we’ll discuss the corrupting influence of perfidious “allies” like Kochinski and others, in Volume Three, Chapter Four).

However, I also think that (a)sexuality as liberated in revolutionary language interrogating the whore’s trauma to human the harvest (thus expose the state as inhumane) needs to be weighed and considered; i.e., through its surface level and deeper dialectical-material context as part of the same summoning cycle. What’s legit and what ain’t? Is it “politeness-trapping” if you mention sex in a seemingly private discussion weighed upon by commonplace public attitudes; i.e., even if that private place in a graduate-level classroom at MMU where your tenured professor is talking about the size of Satan’s cock according to Ira Levin, and a sudden mention of personal anecdotes in relation to one’s own sex life causes people to freeze like statues? Are these boobies being sold to you for profit tied to a famous franchise known for having them in cartoonish ways? Or are they opening up your mind provided you know how to think about them, sexually and asexually?

(artist: Blazbaros)

This conversation must happen dialectically according to opposing material forces that already exist punching down at the alien whore of nature; i.e., as something to preemptively attack again out of deliberately misguided state arguments for revenge (re: false flags). Regardless, a common enemy of effective sex-positive education isn’t just the powers-that-be (or lateral extensions of them and their influence), but also cognitive estrangement as a buffer created by moderate, cowardly and power-abusive academics; re: Foucault, Sartre and Beauvoir occupying the same problematic register as Coleridge and Jameson; i.e., any prospecting imperialist keen “to call dibs/plant flags,” but also open-to-the-public whiners like Coleridge clutching their pearls and wringing their hands. Bent on cataloging knowledge through safe, accommodated, monasterial formalities, this abstraction of ideas doesn’t actually challenge the status quo; it’s a failure of iconoclastic praxis on their part! One might even argue “on purpose,” insofar as results trump intent (the latter used to cloak bad actors with)! Just look around you at the dead malls we whores call home to see how wrong men like Coleridge are, regardless of intent. It literally doesn’t matter save as something to navigate during the cryptonymy process reversing abjection!

By defending their own reputations and positions as accommodated intellectuals, any so-called “auteur” can demonstrate how their current positions matter more to them than distributing useful knowledge to a larger working audience. Good praxis is less about teaching them to think for themselves—i.e., foregoing xenophilia through the suitably chaotic ways of synthesized praxis that help liberate worker minds—and more speaking as the whore does to the targets of dead dogma: in naked-not-naked ways that people actually think, feel, create, consume, and process information with. Whether intentional or not, this functionally amounts to class betrayal if such things are pimped. It also extends to canonical auteurs with revolutionary ideas—meaning those who sometimes need a little help from their employees to seemingly appear better than they actually are; i.e., from those they’re pimping or otherwise bossing around: a warlord canonizing his own half-real Pygmalion fantasies, onstage and off!

(source)

George Lucas, for example, explained how Star Wars famously took anti-totalitarian/anti-American ideas and communicated them to an American audience (re: AMC+’s “George Lucas on Star Wars Being Anti-Authoritarian,” 2018). What Lucas left out of the narrative is how Mark Hamill and company hated his original dialog—so much so, in fact, that they used to joke about tying Lucas up before forcing him to read his own lines at gunpoint: “George, who talks like this?” Hamill would exclaim, on Johnny Carson in 1977 (Game’s Radar, 2017). The lines were changed, saving the film (according to Hamill; the latter-day prequels did fairly well despite their ropey script, but also rode on the coattails of a billion-dollar franchise personally directed by Lucas at the helm—”billionaire Marxism,” in other words). Yet, there’s still “no underwear in space,” Lucas would argue; i.e., cultivating whatever double standards he tended to in his own canon’s pastoral (e.g., bikinis, above being curiously allowed because Carrie Fisher [echoes of Mark Fisher] was the director’s Galatea to groom, festoon and pimp as he chose, not her). But workers and their relationships nonetheless trumped singular men, mid-praxis! For good or ill, Lucas relied on his workers to tell whatever story all of them had in mind!

As such, there won’t be too much name-dropping in Volume Three (well, maybe a little bit). Instead, the arguments contained therein take academic ideas, communicating their gnosis as accessibly as possible without sacrificing the overall message. Doing so, said volume concerns praxis, thus marries academic ideas to sexually descriptive, xenophilic dialogs between real-world people synthesizing praxis; re: doing so how people actually talk and strut their stuff (the whore’s paradox). Such quests for the Communist Numinous include

• making Gothic art (thus arguments) about sex work; i.e., as a wonderful thing that has become loaded with systemic trauma (of class, culture and race betrayals), said liberation by us seeking not to separate them, but liberate sex work (thus all work): as a poetically enriching activity inside the dead mall of capital’s token frontiers—with us sharing said space with our foes while distancing ourselves from trauma, onstage and off, during the rememory and cryptonymy process’ calculated risk!
• responding to popular media (thus Gothic poetics) about sex and trauma in various creative ways; i.e., which then involve theatrically guerrilla (counterterrorist) exchanges of labor commonplace under Capitalism, and which recursively illustrate mutual consent during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s own dialectical-material context!
• less rehabilitating canonical monsters, and more rescuing their whore/pimp aesthetic from a colonized xenophobic; i.e., as Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism continues to develop, describing a kind of “monster war” occurring between Capitalist and Commie variants of the Numinous as dualistic.

As we said at the very start of the Monster Volume, monsters cannot be destroyed, only repurposed towards different aims. For the state, a particular arrangement will always come back, and for proletarian forms—the proverbial spectres of Marx—such arguments are equally die-hard. We must replace the former with the latter during our own cryptomimesis, thereby camping canon to challenge Capitalist Realism in our own daily lives; i.e., camping the twin trees of Capitalism during oppositional synthesis and its praxial catharsis, which confront and dismantle state trifectas, monopolies and trauma, but also bad echoes (e.g., skinheads originally being punks that decayed into Neo-Nazis). They echo us, and we echo them, our own cryptonymy opposing theirs in the same grander chambers thereof! A mall is just a castle to court however hauntologically we wish, doubling in liminal duality ever onwards through ergodic motion and labor tied to nature and the imaginary past!

(artist: Armored Elf)

So forget/forgoe monopolies; the elite and their servants (moderate or not) are dangerously cut off, beyond accommodated intellectuals and extending reactionarily through holistic tokenism through hard and soft power ranging from the CIA and World Economic Forum to a legion of apologists and not-far-enough dickheads like Jameson and Coleridge devaluing what Lewis, Radcliffe, Shelley and others touched upon before Marx and Engels blazed their own trail glazing Medusa’s asshole (while Freud and a ton of other white supremacists leading up to Jameson and others like him who turned a blind eye towards Medusa; re: prefaced by Coleridge and other gentrified fucks who could afford to willfully obtuse/morally superior to the whore’s they pimped in some shame or form): always hungry for tribute!

(artist: Lera)

When humanizing harvest, then, it ain’t over ’til it’s over! So when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis—meaning to whatever degree of show and conceal you prefer using your own restless labyrinths’ Xs marking the spot (to hit the castle-in-the-flesh where it hurts and/or feels good, above)! Regardless of the senses being invoked, the whore is always a martyr to camp martyrdom with playful psychosexual forms that reliably get people’s attention. Using ludo-Gothic BDSM, we experience more per sense than those “in the cave” can imagine with all five of them. For Coleridge and similar Pygmalions, anything that doesn’t match their previous Omelas is garbage. Fuck that noise (which we’ll get to, in Volume Three); better to be a scoundrel and die with one’s dignity intact—i.e., fighting for a worthy cause like universal liberation; e.g., Berlin from Money Heist (below, 2019)—than to be the state’s usual pimp or token whore (the classic antifascist vs fascist refrain)! No pasarán! Ciao, bella, ciao!

James Baldwin once said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” To those who came before, those who are, or those of future generations exploited by Capitalism and its masters—this next volume is entirely for you. May it lead you out of the darkness of the crypt and into a better world, one you imagine for yourselves without worker trauma, abuse, or sexual exploitation; i.e., a parody not just of the Pygmalion legend but also Beauvoir’s lolita syndrome revived through Re-animator or Frankenstein‘s liminal, dualistic satire of the Renaissance man; e.g., from Hamlet to Faust to Da Vinci himself being a queer-coded deviant with some truth to it (from necrophile to pedophile, vis-à-vis mad science [and hate crimes, sexual assault] walking the tightrope between what is ethical and what gains entry to forbidden knowledge through notably unethical means; re: acquiring freshly-dead corpses in a time of religious hegemony and enforcement versus the master/apprentice argument being its own form of secularized Promethean-to-Faustian dogma to instill and enact against Humanity and nature for the state).

And as you imagine a post-scarcity planet through your own labor exchanges, remember that we—those who came before you and the ruins of our mighty nostalgic splendor (re: Krispy and their formidable Aegis/a nice Galatean bow to put on the present from the past we give to you)—are by your side; i.e., watching over you as you grow into the people you were always meant to be! As you follow us into Hell as ushered back into your home during the Imperial Boomerang bringing the bunny home to roost, fear no evil for we are with you; re: laying eggs like Yoshi the dragon to give you weird-ass superpowers, floating through the warm cold of space; i.e., with our “lunar orbs,” below, giving you extra 1-Ups, during ludo-Gothic BDSM! Pathological transubstantiation, from autopsy to rehabilitation, it’s a miracle! That’s no moon, it’s a space station, but one privateered by Medusa’s children and their Aegises felt on a traveling motherland: a boat of whores echoing the Big Whore! “Oh, what a time we had / Livin’ underground / I move to station number five / See you next time around!” [re: Montrose’s “Space Station No.5,” 1973]. Hell, as authored by us, awaits!

Your Commie Mommy,

—Persephone van der Waard

(artist, left: Krispy Tofuuu; right: Passion Peachy)

 

The Caterpillar and the Wasp; or, What’s to Come

“You are no longer butterflies. You. Are. MURDERFLIES!”

—Brock Samson, The Venture Bros. (2003)

 

I originally wrote this conclusion in April 2024; i.e., in the spirit of camping medieval poetics, and to cap this volume off with one that suits its unique (sui generis) Humanities flavor. A tip of the spear, the iceberg, the penis—I now want to close the book on the Monster Volume, doing so with a poetic apologia to whores. As part of that whole, I shall do so in defense of nature as monstrous-feminine (suitably written last in my usual backwards process: from Medusa to “Monsters, Magic and Myth” to this); i.e., from the egg-laying Hares of Easter (and Giger’s own surreal version) comes another hauntological throwback to evoke during ludo-Gothic BDSM: the caterpillar and the wasp as aliens to hug during said dialectic.

Earlier in this series, we discussed Gothic Communism and caterpillars; i.e., a wasp eating a caterpillar to develop Gothic Communism (re: “My Quest Began with a Riddle“). And if that seems totally gross, just imagine a big fat, super-cute caterpillar eating a leaf instead of a wasp eating a caterpillar (“Om nom nom!”). Yet even that is terrifying for the imagination-starved when it involves their home as something to permanently change. For them, any change is radical change, radical change death, and death nothing to them; i.e., they’re menticided, deprived of the medieval (thus Gothic) power needed to use their imaginations to liberate themselves with (re: Coleridge). Canonized as such, the Gothic merely becomes another means of raising harmful boundaries, caterpillars included.

Except, the inverse is true when the Gothic does what it historically has always done: resist canonization (“I am become death!” the little guy squeaks, “destroyer of worlds!”). Armed with proper vision, the way through the maze suddenly becomes clear as crystal: through intersectional solidarity—as devils writing our own fate (versus masters of the state, or moderates like Jameson tragically sealing worker fates to benefit the state while posing as rebels). To escape, we whores again have to imagine the future of a past that was tragically cut short by capital, thus making it a past-past; i.e., one that tragically never was but could be if we only opened our minds and, far from hauntologically canceling the future, instead used it to free our minds (as my arguments demonstrate, duality applying to all Four Gs; i.e., our oppositional doubles resonating with me as something to impart to future workers).

Of this whore’s revenge, two things:

One, the Gothic has power through creation as largely imaginary but still half-real. Again, I get furious when anyone says otherwise; i.e., that the Gothic has “no power” to “actually challenge” (meaning actually threaten) established canonical norms and material conditions; re (from “Modularity and Class”):

This is why I get really mad when anyone says the Gothic has “no power,” thus no way to “actually challenge”—meaning “actually threaten”—established canonical norms (or that only certain voices have the “right stuff” to speak to power—i.e., academics; e.g., Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, who we’ll discuss in a moment). Like, it’s only the power of creation as historically devoted to upending the status quo. No big deal, totally unrelated (sarcasm)!

The fact remains that if the Gothic didn’t have power then the state wouldn’t regulate illusions, including monsters, as things to play with and perform through paradox; they wouldn’t acknowledge it or waste their time with neoliberal cages (re: academia) sequestering such voices to a privileged few as hording knowledge: in a rat-race “fame game” first, helping people outside academia a distance second (or fourth). As such, people who attack the Gothic unironically (or restrict it to/only contribute towards hopelessly patrician discourse) likewise uphold Capitalism unironically, contributing to its defense (and often in bad faith). […] Words are easy to find if you have imagination, especially if your imagination isn’t myopic thanks to Capitalist Realism. The way out is inside, using imagination through Gothic poetics to set ourselves free (source).

The Gothic’s power stems and thrives from its historically dualistic ability to create things that question and upend canonical norms (and ostensibly immutable) godly positions ipso facto; i.e., through medieval poetics, hence imagination, as various critical lenses (and theories) working in service to workers, namely whores and their revenge. Whereas serfs formerly challenged the Divine Right of Kings, we whores can challenge the state now and all its defenders; i.e., by using the Gothic as a powerful option for universal liberation: by bursting bubbles as whores do, teaching others how to love with—you guessed it—caterpillars and wasps.

The idea, then, surely isn’t “vote with our wallets” because voting under Capitalism is a rigged problem; i.e., it’s bourgeois politics that serve profit through a) the commodifying of struggles in canonical media, and b) established systems rigged against the oppressed. Their advocacy is de facto. Also, contrary to what the commercialized monomyth might have taught you, the quest for a better world generally happens in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with profit at all; e.g., videogames can inspire us through home entertainment, but these are classically pacification devices geared towards the American middle class/nuclear model; i.e., the abject counterfeit, not its ghost! We have a right to do this because we, as workers, have a right to exist regardless of what the state thinks; i.e., to enact the whore’s revenge through reclaimed terror language they cannot monopolize, mid-paradox.

To it, the state is not all-powerful and it has no logical claim to our bodies, labor or lives; the poetics (and their infinite forms) used to describe these struggles and conditions likewise belong to us as struggling to be free—to transform from the state’s false chrysalises, thus become true to ourselves and our right as natural, unalienable monstrous-feminine fuck toys: the butterflies we’re meant to become by taking our habitat back from them; re (from “A Song Written in Decay”):

Re: our “Teaching” refrain, the caterpillar and the wasp. Jadis often had to explain to children about the short lifespan of butterflies—that they wake up, eat and eat and eat, take a dump and fall asleep, wake up as a butterfly and bone until they croak: “That’s not so bad, is it?” she’d ask them. But furthermore, they have the right to be butterflies, even if for a moment or never but trying to break free under false chrysalises arresting their development (which, for humans, is partly self-authored). The undead struggle—to survive and become what we’re meant to be in opposition to the state rotting us—is ultimately what matters (source).

However cute or silly a caterpillar may seem, then, its entire existence remains predicated on struggle as built into the natural world and the material world as informed by human struggles adopting natural ones to essentialize one of two things; re: workers or the state, ludo-Gothic BDSM designed to give workers power though playing with heavily controlled substances.

Regardless of monstrous type, there is no in-between; the state is always hungry for more than its fair share. By seeking cryptonymies to resist their options of raping us, we’re fighting back whether we want to or not. By fighting back at all, our existence becomes ironic to the state’s idealization of workers as completely alien and fetishized (for them to rape by design); i.e., our Halloween-candy alienation and fetishization as reclaimed, hence what terrifies the elite to no end: no more free food. They cry in anguish, “God forbid!” and short their circuits/shit their pants. Such is the Aegis in our hands (the page after next).

(artist: Cavity Colors)

Gothicists play with their food. Yet while this defense of caterpillars becoming murderflies might seem quaint, horrifying and bizarre, all of this fortunately means that—like The Last Unicorn‘s wayward magician—we have all the power we need if only we dare look for it; re: “There is no Robin Hood. Robin Hood is a myth; we are the reality!” To it, the magic chose the form, not us; but we are still the bearer, dwelling and messenger from whose tendrils it springs from. “Magic, do as you will!” then, becomes a merry-go-round statement of see-sawing clichés, fetishes, and delights in duality’s liminal expression: “That’s what heroes are for!”

For us, that means not just transforming to hide from power but dueling with our own weaponized whore’s potential for class, culture and race war leveled against state forms whilst on the beaches (above). We’re not just in it for ourselves as individual, atomized agents, then, but fighting while entrenched as an intersectional, solarized collective’s pedagogy of the oppressed living in the shadow of state violence; i.e., for those we love as harmed by the state and its insane, all-consuming greed—in short, by fighting back with all the irony and power of a pissed-off unicorn.

All history is writ in class struggle, Marx argued, which I extend to monster whores and pimps fighting for worker rights vs state’s rights. It’s essentially the basic same idea, but gayer and more inclusive, thus more sex-positive than Marx was; i.e., as determined by our bargains giving and taking while camping his ghost through various inclusions he seldom explored, himself. In doing so, we live in the long shadows that men like him cast, but camp said shadows with our own awesome tools; i.e., whatever the register or form, flow (of power) determines function, not aesthetic. Development concerns combative redistribution, one whose oscillating flow happens dualistically during a constant, tenebrous, liminal game of push-pull: the Gothic’s reclamation unfolding inside shared shadowy zones of performance; i.e., including of (and with) our monstrous-feminine bodies, labor and Gothic poetic expression taking power anisotropically back for us from the state, during ludo-Gothic BDSM!

This forbidden exchange/feeding and radically transformative trauma’s strange appetites extend to caterpillars and butterflies or some other such “harmless” thing (a grub-like cock, blow) taking its power back by refusing to be stepped on/cannibalized by wasps (except in the ways it wants; i.e., “rape/death” play as a reversal of the state’s harmful forms to empower ourselves with; e.g., size difference in terms of bodies, but also genitals—power to be near and seize for profound, often hilarious[7] contrast): a dog with a bone, a magician with a wand wielding great cryptonymy reversing abjection on the Aegis!

(artists: Bay and Beat)

So do we whores fight for and love each other because we’re all we’ve got; i.e., as whores, we keep each other’s secrets and give each other comfort during existence as fundamentally imperiled; e.g., as Indigenous, queer and/or disabled (all of which the state will pimp inside the same modular-but-intersecting persecution networks).

For us, life under capital equals a constant, ancient struggle of survival and brothel espionage under police duress inside state shadows; i.e., protection and shelter as things the state cannot give us, because its own advertised protectors of workers actually place property before people; re: there must always be a slave, thus a whore to pimp, the wasp side of the terrorist/counterterrorist exchange enslaving state prey to eat as such. Except, while canon speaks to wasps eating us alive, the anisotropic nature of duality also concerns the iconoclastic ability for “two can play at that game.” By swapping roles—which is easy enough to do, mid-cryptonymy—workers can cuckoo the state; i.e., as the wasp eating the latter’s grubs parasitically from within! Brutal.

As such, the whore having Medusa’s revenge against profit (thus the state and its brothels) speaks to workers as “mad, bad and dangerous to know” in the eyes of such bad actors! To it, we’re the creatures of the night unchained—the forces of darkness taking back what’s ours through cute terror and squeaky “doom” to joust in competition against its regular instruments of profit (token or not); i.e., with the state, not ourselves: agency as a right its armies and agents cannot permanently invade and coerce! Keeping with that, we’ll rob Churchill’s corpse blind and declare, “We will never surrender!”

Power then, is an illusion that, when harnessed by us through an iconoclastic Gothic’s paradoxes, oxymorons and mixed metaphors, collectively helps our shackles disappear (whores of the world, unite); i.e., a mind prison having raped our brains for so long (through Capitalist Realism) suddenly evaporating like Radcliffe’s veiled banditti. Because those mental chains fetter our ability to imagine anything better while we’re alive, we must target them deliberately whenever able; i.e., to lose those chains is to make the dream of a better world, mid-crisis, become lucid; re: insofar as Gothic poetics regularly manifest in day-to-day conversations and operations, all the time.

Suitably half-real, the mode’s monstrous-feminine arguments can be seen in the meta dialogs taking place. In turn, however silly or serious those are, they take hammers (force, below) to break and rebuild a harmful way of thinking (about nature, labor and sex) that—like a bone set wrong—will definitely hurt to reconfigure. Furthermore, it can affect how we think, thus see and experience the world as we’re born into its harmful, state-appointed roles. Equally terrifying—as we operate on ourselves—is the Gothic at large; i.e., writ in feelings of prolonged obscurity and disintegration inherited near Promethean power sources: the Imperial Core, whose operating on can feel a bit like do-it-yourself brain surgery (to attack the state is to attack a false and harmful sense of self inside-outside ourselves)!

(artist: Bob Camp)

And it kind of is (similar to how the Gothic is “almost holy”), except our procedures aren’t mutilative and invasive like actual lobotomies. They just feel that way because the state wants them to; i.e., how scared people view what we do as criminally and terminally insane. To this, pro-state workers can often still imagine; they just can’t imagine a better world than Capitalism because it forces them, through material things that affect their vision to work and work and work until they drop dead, and to see work and enslavement as “life” and liberation as “death,” unthinkable, nothing to them.

As if! High in my tower above the clouds, I’m the sassy Lady of Shallot—a cushy medievalist who has the option to imagine a better world. In turn, why not grant this option (thus vision) to others using what they have to wage counterterror purely by virtue of performing liberation; i.e., as already terrifying to the state? We have nothing to lose and everything to gain by making them shit their pants (thus ready to take our demands seriously and at face value). We tilt at vague ephemeral windmills, but are onto something big: two hyperobjects, thus two ouroborotic giants locked in perpetual argument, contest, a duel for supremacy! Communism and Capitalism never stop fighting!

By comparison, pro-state thinkers include moderates like Jameson (whose service to the state is fascism-in-disguise); i.e., menticided fools defending the state through DARVO by seeing it as the caterpillar[8] just eating the leaf and us as an evil wasp up to no good (ignoring the fact that wasps eat/are part of nature, too). Their compromises and lack of healthy vision put the chains back on themselves and us. The ticket, then, is emancipation of the mind and body together through Gothic. If one starts, the other will follow hand-in-hand (with polyamorous love unafraid to make friends of all sorts—for sex, but also general companionship and inspiration, ace or otherwise; all contribute towards a better future).

(artists: Bay)

Our focus is obviously the Superstructure. Let’s take what this volume has discussed, the monstrous past, and bring it into the future still yet to arrive: our own “ode to Psyche,” synthesizing praxis Gothic Communism is not a quick way out, because we are not trying to escape our home, but rather seek to transform it inside of itself (often in concentric, anisotropic miniature); but Gothic Communism is a way through Capitalism while inside it and using all the arrows of our proverbial quiver’s disposal, during revolution as historically ergodic. We want to speak to others, including straight allies, in language they are given as we are, thus more prone to understand from us transmuting dogma by camping it as queer people/whores do. There’s always a medieval element at play.

As such, I could quote acts of chivalric bravery in the face of dragons: “Still one more life of pain; cut well, old friend, and then farewell!” Except, Capitalism (and its Realism) are not so much a dragon to slay at all, but transform into our home, thus us and our surroundings with it; i.e., of our home as draconian and whose ownership/status is largely a matter of perception. Jameson was right, insofar the present space and time is the only place we have, except he was wrong as well; it’s one one to alter however we wish by using whatever we can however we can, including a people’s cultural understanding of the imaginary past as Gothic would have it. In turn, such slings and arrows of outrageous fortune routinely yield adventuresome roundabouts (ergodic, nonlinear routes) and strings of castles (of castles) that, like any conquest, occur territorially and in sequence; i.e., towards a serendipitous (and handsome) final goal: liberation as attained during class, culture and race conflict as eternal (workers vs the state).

The way forward clearly isn’t straightforward (why would it be when the elite use everything they can [always defaulting to violence] to lie, cheat and confuse us?) but the path to take is—the Gothic. Solidarity as monsters is the only would to rule in Hell, versus serve in Heaven. All lie on the same Aegis as contested; i.e., per the medieval, boundaries elide amid historical-material constants. “Death” can be expressed a priori as classically inert, inanimate, but per the Gothic reinvented takes on fresh iconoclastic life; i.e., as challenging the state’s canonical ordering of things to avenge ourselves at their loss. The problem with duality (as something to solve and live with, not to discount) is that it cannot be monopolized by anyone any more than violence, terror and morphological expression! Caterpillar and wasps are simply qualities to grant unto whores for a variety of aims, liberation included!

Instead of unironic submission, then, our use of such poetry is diametrically opposed to the state; i.e., by wiggling free of  their traps to frustrate them (as guerrillas historically have done, and to which I did with Jadis, arguing against their position with the state through the same basic language). They have their deathly monstrous Trojans and castled walls, as do we; but we’re the prisoners of the slave colony and the very alien force whose execution is routinely justified, our death warrant prompted issued by people monopolizing the same poetics for the state; i.e., in defense of it, pimping us one and all.

(artist: Keighla Knight)

Per the abjection process demonizing nature as us-versus-them, monstrous-feminine whore, Gothic canon views us as the alien inside their house; i.e., “the enemy at the gates” rattling Caesar’s progeny. So it’s time to marshal our forces to better show those pimping us out of revenge that this is our land, thus our bodies, labor and shelter/castles-in-the-flesh (and what is written on said flesh, above, Psyche taking many forms). The state is the ultimate foe, not workers (except traitors, of course, whores policing whores); and the ultimate eternal battle is waged as much in our minds from moment-to-living-moment: as things to project outwards into the material world, on and of our bodies. Whatever occurs/appears, function determines flow and form follows function, letting us play with whatever we want to reverse abjection provided it’s sex-positive. That’s how the Aegis and ludo-Gothic BDSM work: getting back whatever you put into it (monster love, in my case), love is our revenge, and I love all my friends shown here. They deserve all the hugs I can give!

(artist: Nyx)

And if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again! “Madness” is a method to repeat, generally built on older attempts[9] that, when reassembled through habit by creatures thereof, help us see differently regarding liberation as second-nature; i.e., an unchanging goal to move endlessly towards empathy as such. If you don’t “get it” in the present moment, you’re simply not there yet and might never be. But again, this is a group effort, and one that marshals the willing and eager but also the curious and capable (e.g., herbo Amazons, “chonk, stronk and ready to bonk,” as Nyx is): as able to dance with death during sex and war liquified into a class-conscious exchange, mid-duality—a butterfly or wasp inside the grub’s cocoon, but also on our grub-like bodies pleading for insertion; i.e., to put us out of our misery! Delicious devastation, see us free!

(artist: Nyx)

Because there isn’t a monopoly on such toys—nor their awesomely child-like potential to restore nature by challenging profit and the state to have the whore’s revenge—we’re dealing in a process that effectively never ends; i.e., in a great Ozymandian Work that less goes on forever unfinished in the bare and level sands, but rather like a breath of fresh air fuels us to keep at it pushing through the dunes: that we can wrestle such things out of bullies’ hands to speak for ourselves; re: with our bodies as weapons, thus our sex (and gender trouble) as a flexible social-sexual weapon that helps develop Gothic Communism (and love between workers) in opposition to pro-state forms!

Like Bottom’s Dream, the dream of Communism enshrines in us and our friends’ shared love; i.e., becoming a rare and fatal thing to drive us “mad,” but in ways useful to development in small; e.g., to say her ass looks fat as a compliment she wants to hear (versus a tool of shame) and educate future workers with: Queen Maeb’s stellar bedonk, a mirrored moon shining love for all things great and small!

So while a return to balance assisted by oral cultures and technology is hauntological, it isn’t centrism provided we cheat the pimp and break their ethnocentric, good/evil refrains tied to Capitalist Realism raping the land! To break said Realism is to free the imagination through love that frees us through those trying to unironically capture us for themselves; e.g., Nyx’ ass loving to reclaim anal as a terror weapon (re: “Reclaiming Anal“), but also PIV sex, too!

(artist: Nyx)

Deprivatization happens on the Aegis, Medusa’s peach/pie reversing abjection through “pull” towards “land back” as “bodies back,” too; i.e., attracting cuties, laying pipe, taking dick, etc, as we make footprints “in the sand” as a kind of delicious waiting for penetration (to savor it, below); re: dots for us to connect with and for others to all bind together because we collectively feel safe by our vision as one in good faith building towards a better tomorrow today looking at the past as Gothic poetry applied to future forms we leave behind: to give as well as receive, versus canon teaching us to fear all forms of exchange, save as taking endlessly from whores to give up to the elite pimping all of nature.

(artist: Nyx)

On and on, beyond our lives and what we can currently see while alive, such “ancient” dereliction bleeds into what others once-alive and alive-again in another world, another time have themselves passed on; i.e., fragments of the Medusa as a creature of chaos that yields many forms for those under solidarity as something to pick up the pieces of and reassemble together across time and space. Giving to a queenly nature feels good, because a nature treated well treats us in kind!

In turn, closeness with Her Majesty is a Numinous feeling and place we occupy together as a collective, holistic matter of conjoined inspiration (a very queer phenomenon): “We may meet in another life, but not again in this one!” Time is a circle, all the Medusa’s past forms shine gloriously through in her various avatars posing for the viewer on the Aegis! All our yesterdays become a wall built on trust and selective penetration, the Great Corruptor a healing force destroying that which destroys and imprisons nature-as-whore! The state is incompatible not just with life, but mutual consent as something to illustrate; i.e., the monomyth heroic is always a rapist, the whore always their that we subvert, mid-iconoclasm!

(exhibit 60e2: Models: top-far-left: Persephone van der Waard; top-mid-left: Harmony Corrupted; top-mid-right: Crow; right and bottom-far-left: Blxxd Bunny; bottom-mid-right: Bay; artist: top-far-right and bottom-far left: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-mid-left: For us, “too many cooks” don’t spoil the broth; i.e., solidarity means disagreement about smaller things [signposts, but also methodology[10]] while united on bigger things [goalposts, ethics]. Like a collective of cooks in a kitchen, then, there are many hands and bodies available to supply ingredients and inspiration as needed; i.e., it’s not about vertical arrangements of power but a group effort that continues to fight over and over against the state as the Great Destroyer of our age. Well, bully for them. In the Internet Age, we can make incredible and interconnected projects like this book to attain intersectional solidarity and, as night follows the day, a pedagogy of the oppressed that is always being added to; i.e., one that fosters universal empathy [for workers and nature, not the state] through praxial catharsis that reclaims whores through monster language: as a humanizing device taken away from Cartesian hegemons during oppositional praxis; re [from “A Song Written in Decay“]: “From most complex to most simple, good praxis requires a successful pedagogy of the oppressed, which requires synthesis, which requires the basics: anger/gossip, monsters and camp.”)

Like Henson’s fearsome Dark Crystal, such foreboding sight must be seen through strange cartoonish (abstracting) blindfolds that help us avoid, thus see through, Capitalist Realism; i.e., Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything (re: Marx and I, dancing together). So total liberation, including the imaginary and the sexual, starts with using the “almost holy” paradoxes of the Gothic; re: to weaponize the sexual and the warlike as already canonized in everyday (secular) speech: the world as dying in ways we restore through empathy as equally radical! To stumble upon a whore and befriend is to stumble across a unicorn and suddenly release: they are real, and each once is special!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

As such, it’s our demon castle and undead army to wage war with, doing so for (a)sexual reasons that include public nudism; i.e., as a classic weapon of the Medusa’s virgin/whore, thus caterpillar/wasp; re: Blxxd Bunny loving such abilities, insofar as it gives both them and me power to shape and work with: speaking to “rape” in ancient oral forms bleeding into written ones (this book series a weird hybrid of such exchanges). This, in turn, starts with a caterpillar and wasp (synonymous, for our purposes, with any animal; e.g., the rabbit or turtle, insofar as cryptonymy goes). So let’s make them ours by reclaiming the awesome power of the alien, thus of all ludo-Gothic BDSM and the palliative Numinous, and monsters as critical lenses that push capital towards post-scarcity with pre-capitalist nostalgia in demonstrably non-fatal forms; i.e., monsters—whether undead, demonic and/or animalistic—that don’t dehumanize (alienate and fetishize) workers the way capital historically-materially does: to land and occupant as monstrous-feminine, thus a trick to turn and build empires that fractally recursively extend the brothel outwards into the universe. From Columbus to Victor Frankenstein to Peter Weyland to Trump to Athetos, a pimp is a pimp, and whores set themselves free by spurning such advances!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

These communal antipredation maneuvers include whatever sandcastles we build in the beachhead; i.e., each one extending in a dialectical-material series stepping towards something great—meaning asleep and “dead,” insofar as it is not truly dead, but a goddess of creation speaking asexually about life/death resurrection and transformative sex work through shared, informed labor exchange (the above video from a commission); i.e., waiting patiently to take shape and wake up—a possible future made through magical assembly, selective absorption, and a confusion of the senses that sing profoundly as a chorus of whores: all part of our Song of Infinity resonating across space and time.

For example, Bunny is ace, thus keen to show the Medusa as not just a dead queen/sexual being for the sake of sexual gratification at all, but likewise someone who has awesome nails, hair and ink while purposefully having surrounded themselves with cozy images of calculated-risk danger and safety (stuffed animals, like sharks and bears, and tattoos of daggers on their skin); i.e., a ludo-Gothic BDSM assemblage that speaks holistically to recovery and liberation—of whores and their liminal expression being part of nature, thus the land and its non-human occupants; re: all from a sample of one, and which our Aegis yields stewardship over the others we protect by taking away the killer’s desire to rape such things at all: “I was blind, but now I see!” Such is the Aegis in the proper hands!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

But the whore out of the closet is still something many people will be unaccustomed to seeing or thinking about Cats will be confused, bussies will be stuffed, and all our dreams sit on the cusp of something truly awesome. That can be our doom as one of total destruction (state shift); or by putting the pussy on the chainwax (“trying to start a thing”), such Numinous forebears can also be our salvation from a damned “all our yesterdays” leading to “dusty death.” Fuck to metal, instead!

(artist: Jinedem)

Except for us, our “Jesus” is a Trojan agent fucking with Ambrosio: a “dummy thick” cock-warming demon slut who, like Matilda’s false Madonna, fails stealth checks because her booty cheeks always be clapping. Keeping it real through cultural appreciation as a streetwise vein, lets pursue this in classic Gothic fashion—deliciously! To that, let’s envision such delicacies through the language of the holy whore as secularized and class, culture and race conscious: a fatal (false) offering pleading “sacrifice” through a prostration of itself as “wicked, bad, and naughty” in the eyes of the state, but in the eyes of anyone not dead will say in response: “God damn!”  Not to pimp, but hug the Medusa as worthy of such treatment during the dialectic of the alien! She squish!

When in Rome, the alienation of dogma into critical thought requires speaking to the uncritical as one might in a church that is no longer theirs, but like Young Goodman Brown, is occupied by sinners of a Communist sort! Speaking to the uninitiated in the language shared by all peoples is effective through a) the feeling that it’s “their language,” b) the carnal power of persuasion, and c) good old-fashioned peer pressure. Apart from whores, everyone likes monsters and sex (which includes ace forms of public nudism and demon BDSM, of course), so take our hallowed transubstantiation as green eggs and ham to eat (said the “caterpillar” to the state). Try it, just once! It’s perfectly safe (won’t make you gay as fuck, pinky promise)… That’s how we wasps get you good!

Equally indicative of that army of the dead (and demon castle) I alluded to, several pages back, we (the monstrous-feminine) are the mothers of the future playfully expressed in “past forms” of exchange, feeding and trauma/transformation: our cute little badass alien caterpillar of death (which would definitely be a boss in a Final Fantasy game per Capitalist Realism) as profoundly symbolic; i.e., of a current inexorable leading to fresh life in the wondrous necrobiome that is Gothic Communism: Capitalism already dying and we making use of the corpse to contribute to something we won’t live to see but can imagine and experience in smaller pockets and pieces—a better world, a more sex-positive world, thus a god that lives in our breast, our wombs, our bussies, our animal side and small animal friends we’re stewards of (familiars and pets); i.e., each smuggling the familiar (not a pun) and the foreign into countries utterly moist with rebellion. All buzz and rattle, bark and bite, drool, wag and howl (“what sweet music they make”); i.e., excitedly for treats of the usual strange kinds (murder, rape and death fantasies, but also ironic empathy during those). So long as those treats enact worker liberation, then it’s all good, baby!

The undead shamble forward to outrun their prey and demons teleport into reality. Just as we return with Medusa and nature to the West as the living dead and demonic invaders generally do—to a threatened, grave-like homestead—the state will likewise tremble in fur(r)y at our “hubris” for wanting basic human rights, thus animal and environment through land back during Gothic redistribution. Through the liminal hauntology of war as something to raise against our own revolutionary cryptonyms, the state will desperately claw “its” fire of the gods back by sending its de facto armies after us (stochastic terrorism playing the guerilla).

To it, freeing Medusa is generally a civil conflict; i.e., one meant to upset the comfortable, but also measured in sad divisions (the whore and the queer generally isolated by all except others in the same boat). As such, we liberators will also be crucified for “politeness trapping” by the sexually repressed for talking about such things in public (ace people are valid, provided they don’t closet, thus colonize us for the state). So clearly development will be a test, and one that includes violence against us in many forms (doubles of our own monsters). But we must not concede or yield an inch to these tyrants and their braindead hordes. Despite our doubt, we must persevere and mix the metaphors—the monsters, magic and myth of medieval poetics—to press them to our Gothic advantage, mid-opposition:

Contrary to state copaganda, the Commie’s work is always unfinished; e.g., this volume and book series full to bursting (with cum and donors of all sorts); i.e., as part of a larger refrain towards liberation through Gothic paradox during ludo-Gothic BDSM liberating sex work through iconoclastic art, thus praxis. So remember your own training as, like mine in my tower high above, having led up to a defining moment as one in a series: a lullaby to lull the caterpillar to sleep and wake up Communist. Be that butterfly or wasp, radical empathy towards the whore’s revenge is what matters!

So gird you loins, little soldiers, and onto Volume Three and proletarian praxis proper! Or as the skeleton guy said in Army of Darkness, “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war!” Yes, we’re taking that back from Caesar and his stupid ghost, making it gay. Gay zombie war vs the Straights. Go.

This concludes the Demon Module and, by extension, Volume Two. I’ll be releasing Volume Three in the following month or so (aiming for the Ides of March)! Until then, Happy Valentine’s, you crazy kids! You can download the entire PDF for the Demons Module on my one-page book promo! —Perse

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Footnotes

[1] Re: “that boring and exhausted paradigm,” quoted frequently in many sources; e.g., Alex Link’s “The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson’s Gothic Plots” (2009):

In the midst, of its definitive arguments, Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) pauses to consider the Gothic just long enough to single it out as a hopelessly “boring and exhausted paradigm.” The Gothic, he declares, is a mere “class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised” and it should not be mistaken for a “protofeminist denunciation of patriarchy” nor “a protopolitical protest against rape” (source).

[2] Presenting as an audio-visual theme in the artwork itself to—intentionally or not—holistically communicate the ideas; i.e., on par with a Gothic portrait animating or a medieval work starting to bleed in miraculous fashion, illustrating the union in literal terms. The genius/Gothic maturity at work, here, is meta; i.e., that an emotionally and Gothically intelligent and class, culturally and racially aware person can generally tell the difference and not be confused by what “speaks” to them in a Gothic way!

[3] If the splendide mendax seems intellectually dishonest, remember that personal memory is already neuroplastic, especially in relation to dissociative trauma. Mnemonic images, then, are designed to assist in remembering things that are physically difficult to recollect—not from one’s own trauma, but also because those in power don’t want people to remember the unspeakable abuses the state and cops regularly commit in pursuit of material profit. To paraphrase Maarva from Andor, “the Empire wants you asleep”; i.e., unable to fight back because you’re drugged, lobotomized, and suitably undead in ways the powerful can enact (through critics like Jameson), then exploit.

[4] Written in 1980 versus Jameson’s “Progress versus Utopia” in 1982, the latter no doubt written to apologize for American scholarship (and abuse of scholarship) up to that point; i.e., while punching down at rising Gothic discourse out of the 1970s into the neoliberal period (a broken record/fiddle Jameson would continue sawing at in 1991’s Postmodernism and 2005’s Archaeologies).

[5] I.e., the British Romantics’ war with the Neo-Gothic hardly a quiet or singular event, but one its various proponents crowed much about; re: Coleridge’s “General Character of the Gothic Literature and Art” (1818): “…the Gothic art is sublime” (source). He fought for singular white-supremacist interpretations anticipating the rise of empire in Britain (Queen Victoria was born in 1819, a year after Marx). Coleridge was a cunt.

[6] With Jameson dogwhistling Tomas Moore’s own 1516 ethnocentric dogma before Cromwell screwed the pooch and Milton wrestled psychomachically with such errors before Coleridge frankly papered over them with his own poetic apologia.

[7] Re: This Is Spinal Tap—with the midgets and the model of Stonehenge failing Scott’s forced perspective trick in Alien (using his sons to make his “Space Jockey” seem bigger); but also the Game Grumps’ “John Boner”: “There’s no jizz but what we make for ourselves!” The medieval loves prurient, juvenile humor (dick jokes being a classic pun that hyphenates with so many poetic devices).

[8] “You’re not a leaf!” Jadis would cutely say about caterpillars, impersonating one that would try and nibble through her skin and then decide not to once it recognized what it was chewing through. They loved caterpillars, but also thought Ray Kurzweil was onto something. The technological singularity is wishful thinking and it struck me as profoundly odd that someone who championed nature also wanted to one day become a robot who would have no biology or feelings to speak of. They became a state-sanctioned executioner of nature less by working as an exterminator as a local job (animal control is humane, insofar as population control helps lessen animal suffering thanks to human interference).

To better protect nature and ourselves, the idea is to be active with what we have during asymmetrical warfare, synthesizing praxis by raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class cultural awareness using paradox (“darkness visible”). The rest will fall into place, one generation at a time.

[9] More arrows in our quiver to loose and play with as needed.

[10] Often on protocol, to fight fire with fire, on decisions we can live with. Regarding these, diversity is strength, variety the spice of life!