This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” 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). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! 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.
Thesis Volume Outline/Summary of the Thesis Statement, “Camp Map” and Symposium Divisions/Subdivisions
“Crom!”
—Conan, Conan the Destroyer (1984)
Picking up where “Author’s Foreword: ‘On Giving Birth’” left off…
Continuing our vast baggage train of war, the rest of the volume contains my thesis argument. I have decided to organize it into three divisions (with their own subdivisions and sub-subdivisions): the thesis statement, “camp map,” and conclusion. To summarize their whole operation:
- The thesis statement: Contains my core thesis argument (regarding canon).
- The “camp map”: Serves as an introduction to camp as an iconoclastic device; i.e., camping the canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM.
- The thesis conclusion: Wraps everything up and segues into the symposium, which is a conversational follow-up/aftercare “sesh” to end the volume with.
I will now summarize its general approach per subdivision:
- The “Notes on Power” essay [included in this post] discusses how power is theatrical, and plays off paradox and liminal expression (doubles) to develop Gothic Communism. Specifically it examines Gothic Communism’s campy ancestor/palimpsest, Paradise Lost (1667) and its complex relationship to future works that likewise have adopted theatrical Amazonomachia, paradox, and artistic/pornographic liminal (monstrous) expressions that speak truth to power—i.e., through “darkness visible” (the Gothic imagination) but also “darkness deliberate” as performatively mired in the self-same classical allusions: actively utilizing the Gothic convention of fetishes and clichés as class-conscious, thus of the devil’s party and knowing it (unlike Milton; our revolution cannot be accidental if we are to survive).
- The thesis proper contains my manifesto tree (an expanded list compiled from the main points of my original Gothic-Communist manifesto), Four Gs (four main Gothic theories, also from the manifesto), a small essay about where power is performed during the Gothic mode/inside the Gothic imagination (“Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox“), and my thesis paragraph, which the thesis body expands on using most of this book’s keywords and manifesto terms. To expand on that, the manifesto tree lists our praxial equations and coordinates relative to the holistic study and camping of canon’s singular interpretations under Capitalism; the Four Gs and essay concern the Gothic imagination/mode as something to “spelunk” while we reclaim our creative power/pedagogy of the oppressed. All are followed by the thesis statement’s paragraph/body and everything they bring to the table (whose own inner sub-subchapters are unpacked when we arrive): Capitalism sexualizes everything dimorphically inside a heteronormative/colonial-binarized profit motive that leads to Capitalist Realism; this can only be escaped through an iconoclasm/Amazonomachia (“monster battle”) that liberates workers through sex-positive art.
- The “camp map“ and thesis conclusion assemble the manifesto tree pieces and explains (using the Four Gs) how to camp the canon as normally heteronormative by “making it gay” with ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., normally canonized through the settler-colonial/heteronormative quest for power in a Faustian bargain (told in the warlike language we’re all accustomed to), which we then camp during our own Promethean Quests. Told in four parts, part one explores camp as a counterterrorist activity in relation to state terrorism, and outlines various monster types featured in the exhibits (e.g., femboys, catgirls, himbos, Amazons, etc); part two’s first and second halves explore the interrogation/negotiation of power in relation to Gothic space (castles) but especially in videogames (shooters, High Fantasy and Metroidvania); part three considers the making of monsters and goes over more monster types (nurses, xenomorphs and other phallic women); part four puts all of these ideas to the test, executed by my friend Blxxd Bunny and I prototyping ludo-Gothic BDSM.
- The symposium is an aftercare/wind-down period; i.e., looser, more generous articulations and exhibits of the thesis proper and “camp map’s” broadest, most common arguments and key points (e.g., the Gothic, monstrous-feminine, Amazonomachia, etc): exhibits, lists, mini thesis statements and additional equations. I wrote it before the thesis statement/”camp map” and is meant to be visited and examined after you’ve read those portions. There’s also a very brief conclusion (included with the symposium), which serves as a bridge between this volume and Volume One (the manifesto).
Be forewarned: the remainder of the thesis volume frankly starts off quite dense and paradoxical, but does “mellow out” towards the symposium. To avoid “drygulching” anyone, I’ve tried to prepare you as thoroughly and gently as I could. But now that you’re more or less as prepared as you ever will be, I’m gonna pull a Gandalf and shove your ass out the hobbit hole door. Gird your loins; it’s adventure time!
(artist: Hitoshi Yoneda)
Notes on Power (paradox) and Liminal Expression (doubles)
“Now…what can we say of John Milton’s Paradise Lost? Well, it’s a very long poem, it was written a long time ago, and I’m sure a lot of you have difficulty understanding exactly what Milton was trying to say. Certainly we know that he was trying to describe the struggle between good and evil, right? (picks up an apple from his desk) “Okay. The most intriguing character, as we all know from our reading, was”—(writing “SATAN” on the blackboard)—”Satan. Now, was Milton trying to tell us that being bad was more fun than being good?”
(He takes a bite out of the apple; a long pause as he chews and realizes that the class remains unmoved.)
Okay…don’t write this down, but I find Milton probably as boring as you find Milton. Mrs. Milton found him boring, too. He, uh, he’s a little bit long-winded, he doesn’t translate very well into our generation, and his jokes are terrible.”
—Professor Jennings[1], Animal House (1978)
Before we proceed into the thesis proper for Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, this essay provides a few basic things to keep in mind about power and oppositional praxis throughout the book.
Concepts like “real power” and “false power” are dialectical-material concepts, and occur in relation to the Base (and its historical materialism) as something to claim and the Superstructure as something to cultivate during theatrical heroic expression; i.e., as consistently monstrous, thus liminal, as a (crypto)mimetic form of poetic expression that can be for or against the status quo: the psychomachy (“mind battle”) and Amazonomachia (“monster battle”) as psychosexual—literally “of sex and the mind,” but in Gothic often having a combative “sex battle” element. Torn between pleasure and harm, but also human-monstrous language/expression, such rhetoric and performance is profoundly contradictory in a variety of ways all at once—the paradox. We’ll talk about paradox in general; then, power as paradox according to Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667); and finally touch on liminal (monstrous) expression—i.e., Gothic doubles as powerful, psychosexual paradoxes useful to our proletarian purposes during class/culture war against the elite.
First, paradoxes—specifically the Amazonomachia in its broader usage; i.e., of monster battle that, in latter-day forms, speaks to the ancient pimping of nature as classically female (re: the Medusa):
(artist: Yasya)
Amazonomachia (Amazon pastiche, subjugated/subversive)
Not a term I coined, but one I certainly expanded on (to speak on subjugated, reactionary, TERF-style forms and subversive variants, mid-duality). “Amazon battle” is an ancient form of classical, monstrous-feminine art whose pastiche was historically used to enforce the status quo; i.e., Theseus subjugating Hippolyta the Amazon Queen to police other women (making regressive/canonical Amazonomachia a form of monstrous-feminine copaganda). With the rise of queer discourse and identity starting in arguably the late 18th century, later canonical variations in the 20th century (e.g., Marsden’s Wonder Woman) would seek to move the goalpost incrementally—less of a concession, in neoliberal variants (every Blizzard heroine ever—exhibits 45a, 76, 72), and more an attempt to recruit from dissident marginalized groups. The offer is always the same: to become badass, strong and “empowered.” In truth, these regressive/subjugated Amazons become assimilated token cops; i.e., the fetishized witch cop/war boss as a “blind Medusa” who hates her own kind by seeing herself as different than them, thus acting like a white, cis-het man towards them (the “Rambo problem”): triangulating nature against nature, pimping itself for the state. In the business of violent cartoons (disguised variants of the state’s enemies), characters like Ripley or Samus become lucrative token gladiators for the elite by fighting similar to men (active, lethal violence) for male state-corporate hegemony. To that, their symbolism colonizes revolutionary variations of the Amazon, Medusa, etc, during subversive Amazonomachia within genderqueer discourse.
This “telling truth with lies” is a double paradox, demonstrating the word as we shall use it in Gothic apologia as, “two ideas can coexist at the same time despite being diametrically opposed”; i.e., the duality of the Amazon legend, but frankly any state hero as paradoxically monstrous and, from marginalized groups seeking assimilation, tokenize per the usual funnels monopolizing such things; re: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss extending to all betrayals under the sun (female or otherwise).
In turn, the mise-en-abyme (echo of fabrications) repeats, but also echoes stacked counterfeits on top of counterfeits, on top of myths and legends as forged for opposing forces at cross purposes—the irony being that it’s generally far easier to lie and tell the truth by accident (or on purpose) like Banquo’s warning to Macbeth
“And oftentimes, to win us to our harm the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray’s in deepest consequence” (source).
than it is to try and spell things out in such a way as to encompass the whole ordeal (or in the words of the late, great Alan Rickman: “Mention you’re the Metatron and people stare at you blankly. Mention something out of a Charlton Heston movie and suddenly everyone’s a theology scholar!”). To this, Banquo got it wrong: Lies and the language of darkness aren’t inherently bad, meaning harmful or deserving of capital punishment; while he exclaims, “Can the devil speak true?” to himself and Macbeth, the devilish workers of Communism can speak true—i.e., in order to help each other survive the real dangers of a structure evolved to deceive us through harmful forgery (the irony being Banquo was killed by his own friend, not the witches—all for the same status inside the same power structure they lived inside together and which Shakespeare relayed through a stage play whose name people [specifically thespians] don’t like to say[2]).
Language, like the devil, is plastic and can change shape (only following the Cartesian Revolution and Capitalism’s rise of mapping and dominating the world through doubles inside and outside of “pure” fiction [exhibit 1a1a1h2a1] did language solidify and binarize in service of the profit motive). Paradox is an essential component of human language in its natural and material forms; i.e., the immensely popular idea of theatre and duels told through heroes and their monstrous contradictions to ascribe meaning through staged conflict. Within this broader dialogic, the Gothic is mired in mimetic paradox through the communication of “deathly” appetites” (indented for clarity):
Death is the ultimate feeling of a lack of control, to be out of control. To face it as codified according to stigmas and biases, theatre is a tremendous, psychosexual device for calculated risk/informed consent (which operates to give agency through performance as a negotiated, heavily controlled affair). For Gothic Communists, these praxial contraptions are built around the profit motive as something to face and challenge through its praxial doubles: Gothic Communism’s monsters and their poetic, liminal extensions versus Capitalism’s, communicating in shared struggle and language as paradoxical on various registers simultaneously.
calculated risk/risk reduction exercise
A calculated risk minimizes harm but mimics the feeling of being out of control; e.g., consent-non-consent/informed consent.
consent-non-consent
Negotiated social-sexual scenarios through informed consent, consent-non-consent where one party surrenders total control over to the other party trusting that party to not betray said agreement or trust; aka “RACK” (Risk-Aware Consensual Kink) in relation to risky BDSM; i.e., bodily harm; e.g., public beatings, rape scenarios, whippings, knife play and blood-letting.
As such, Epicurus was perhaps not entirely on the nose when saying, “Death is nothing to us[3],” because people (regardless of their political inclinations or stances) absolutely love “death” in theatre as appealing to appetite as taboo, excessive, forbidden, Satanic, etc (e.g., ahegao, or “death face”); but whose power is dialectic-material regarding arguments about what is or isn’t correct, valid or otherwise important. Often these dress up as “it’s not important, so let’s never talk about it again”; i.e., “it is important, so let’s not discuss it because it challenges my sense of agency relative to canonical notions and structures of power and performance”; e.g., “the hobbits are gay” versus “the hobbits are not gay (and never mention it again).” Their anxiety (and biases) are projected onto us, seemingly as if to ask, “Why do you care so much?” (to which my response is, “Because I’m a gay little faggot who likes the Gothic, biznatch”).
In this perennial, dialogic sense, power and death constitute societal gatekeeping and countercultural transformation through theatrical fetishes and clichés (of which the Gothic is positively rife with) that play out in real life: a means of practicing debate as a wrestling tactic inside human language to better prepare us for its harmful, pro-state deceptions between daily conversations (and sex, or both) that we have with other people that look more or less like us; i.e., by recognizing and challenging them through our own sex-positive Gothic subversions that recultivate the Superstructure and reclaim the Base. In doing so, we’re accomplishing Gothic Communism’s chief aim: taking back the critical, class-conscious power of paradox-(thus power)-as-performance, specifically that of monsters, on- and offstage simultaneously. It’s chaotic, but knowing how to swim in the void of the shadow zone (the Gothic imagination/mode) and its “darkness visible[4] can be, paradoxically, an illuminating and life-saving affair—i.e., as something to deliberately cultivate for Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism (thus for all workers) by taking back Hell, thus the world, as having been thoroughly colonized; i.e., ever since Milton first wrote Paradise Lost and challenged the status quo (arguably by accident, in his case, and certainly within the traditions of theatre as having been in conflict for far longer—since Hippolyta and the Ancient Greeks, at least). For us, there needs to be a deliberate re-camping of “darkness visible” through our “creative successes” during proletarian praxis.
(exhibit 0a1b2a1: Artist, top- and bottom-left: Monori Rogue; top-right: Dmitry Prozorov; bottom-right: source. “All deities reside within the human breast,” wrote William Blake[5], but have been retooled by canon to guide manufactured division to serve the profit motive. Faced with the double as doubled for these nefarious aims, we must utilize the same paradox for proletarian means; the war isn’t simply muscles and brawn, but conflict on the surface of the image during liminal expression. A class/culture warrior fights the good fight by challenging the canonical function of paradox with their body by subverting sexualized labor’s traditionally warring factors: the Cartesian dualism of the colonial binary as sexually dimorphic; i.e., men-as-men vs women-as-women. The theory might seem dense, but the art speaks quite naturally/for itself and quickly to whatever praxial position we hold during oppositional praxis through the same theatre and its monsters’ liminal expressions and paradoxes: reimagined and reanimated statues coming alive to fight for or against the status quo in the same hauntological language [torn between the past and the present]. Like the media itself, their battle takes place at the same time, and during the chaos “you’ll know it when you see it”—the battle, of course, but also which side you’re on, or want to be on, as you oscillate inside of yourself in the Gothic sense: the psychomachy [“mind battle”] of the imaginary monsters representing repressed or openly playful ideas that war with/wear each other for fun; of play as both a serious and lighthearted game; for political reasons as fun; but also an internalized conflict regarding all of these external things making up who we are in relation to the world and it to us.)
Now that we’ve discussed paradox at large, onto power as paradox and a list of things I thought relevant: Power is a paradox, meaning it is largely theatrical, invented, and built on top of itself through counterfeits, myths and legends; it is staged, dialogic and combative. During the Gothic mode, power is doubled and dialectical-material.
As such, power’s legitimacy is invented under crisis and struggle as manufactured by the state. State power aggregates during crisis and transforms during decay. Power and resistance occupy the same theatrical space. Power to create and its theatre are deified as a show of force, of legitimate violence against iconoclastic power, which speaks truth to state power through dark, Satanic poetics that challenge state authority and abuse through delegitimized violence (and counterterror). Power manifests as monstrous and animalized through the shared language of stigma and bias: undead and demonic monsters for or against the state during the making and performing of monsters as animalized; i.e., monsters are animalized, undead/demonic, chimeric/composite stances of power for or against the state.
It bears repeating that monsters and their critical power transform not just through mimetic expression, but cryptomimetic expression; i.e., (according to our Four Gs) as hauntological cryptonyms inside parallel spaces (chronotopes) that further or reverse the process of abjection, but also conceal it to varying degrees in the ghost of the counterfeit/narrative of the crypt‘s “cancelled future” (and various other small-but-vital theories we’ll unpack in the rest of the thesis volume). And all of this unfolds through bodies, masks, weapons, catchphrases (call-and-response crowd participation), special/super moves (coups des grâces/”strokes of mercy” or murder strokes), uniforms, identities, color codes, etc, as struggles to adhere to/comply with or resist canonical norms during Gothic poetics. Monsters are effectively lies created to demonstrate what power is during class/culture war, operating through examples and exceptions that prove/disapprove the rule.
(exhibit 0a1b2a1a: Artist, left: Raphael; top-right: Alexey Steele; bottom-right: Henry Fuseli. Milton’s accidental stumbling onto “darkness visible” as campy owes to him famously being blind, but also having internalized the ideas of “good vs evil” in ways he could camp inside his mind to say something allegorical about the world in which he lived. The paradox is, he wasn’t a nice man; for as many years, each morning he would wake and have his daughters transcribe his dreams into Latin. But without their dutiful penmanship, we wouldn’t have Paradise Lost, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [whose framed narrative contains a copy of Paradise Lost inside of itself] or sci-fiction [e.g., Scott’s Alien films] as having stemmed from the same iconoclastic Gothic tradition into the present. “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the Earth,” said Archimedes[6]. Indeed, that power can also be ours if we dare to write things down—to intentionally make monsters that camp canon and Capitalism to liberate sex work, thus all work, through iconoclastic art’s deliberately campy “darkness visible.”)
For example, Satan from Paradise Lost. In that story, God and heaven are all-powerful, which is a paradox, meaning it requires perception to work. Satan is made to justify the crisis to hold onto absolute power/total power[7], but the whole point of the story is him resisting God’s plan yet simultaneously being bound up in it. The two seem inextricable, but the allegory of Satan is a rebellious figure whose power and energy are hidden within war and its usual panoply as displaced, far away and en medias res (“in the midst of things,” like Star Wars): whole hosts of warring angels and demons acting like white knights and black knights, their armor and spears, chariots and formations, maneuvers and stratagems:
Now had Night measured with her shadowy cone
Half-way up-hill this vast sublunar vault,
And from their ivory port the Cherubim
Forth issuing, at the accustomed hour, stood armed
To their night-watches in warlike parade;
When Gabriel to his next in power thus spake:—
“Uzziel, half these draw off, and coast the south
With strictest watch; these other wheel the north:
Our circuit meets full west.” As flame they part,
Half wheeling to the shield, half to the spear.
From these, two strong and subtle Spirits he called
That near him stood, and gave them thus in charge:—
“Ithuriel and Zephon, with winged speed
Search through this Garden; leave unsearched no nook;
But chiefly where those two fair creatures lodge,
Now laid perhaps asleep, secure of harm (source).
Milton exhausts a tremendous amount of energy explaining the pre-existing intentions to Christian hegemony and its warlike hosts’ heteronormative purpose, but the entire paradigm is challenged by Satan making monsters for himself: he can create, transform and do things previously thought exclusive to God. It may be to a lesser degree in terms of sheer time spent in the perceived moment of things, but solidarity is a seditious proposition told through the Arch-Fiend as the Byronic rebel of the story: the anti-hero having the power to rule in Hell by making pandemonium (a place whose name means “all demons”) and tempting God’s children with it. This power is beholden to the same principles of performance, but offers the ability to organize differently than God does: horizontally versus vertically—i.e., anarchistically and anachronistically for workers and the oppressed.
Because of its allegory as having such awesome revolutionary potential, Milton was described by William Blake as being of the devil’s party and not knowing it; or as Jamal Subhi Ismail Nafi writes in “Milton’s Portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost and the Notion of Heroism” (2015),
According to [Tesky] Gordon, it was Blake who expressed this view most emphatically by saying that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it. He expressed this opinion chiefly in relation to the portrayal of Satan who, according to him, has been depicted as a character possessing certain grand qualities worthy of the highest admiration. Other romantic critics supported this view with great enthusiasm. [Percy] Shelley, for instance, reinforced this view when, in his “Defense of Poetry,” he said:
“Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy.”
According to Shelley, it was a mistake to think that Satan was intended by Milton as the popular personification of evil. This argument is still very much alive and valid today (source).
In other words, Milton’s story is sympathetic to the devil’s rebellious plight because it supplies him with the means to escape and make trouble in ways that speak truth to power through monstrous poetics; i.e., by playing god and camping canon through the language of stigma and bias, power and resistance, undead and demonic animalization (e.g., Satan turning into a toad or a snake to tempt Eve), feeding and transformation through disguised struggle, open resistance and subversive/transgressive means of power exchange and expression that camp canon, thus fall on the side of labor and sex positivity. The British Romantics all adored Satan, but particularly the second generation of more rebellious poets (whose poiesis endeared itself to Satan’s by making that which has never existed; i.e., a fabrication that favors its own campy arrangements of power and material conditions over the canonical fabrications of the status quo and its arrangements); to Byron, the Shelleys, Blake and Keats, Satan was a righteous dude, the underdog fighting from the “superior” ethical position against a giant, “all-powerful” bully while on the poetic/theatrical backfoot: the underdog from Hell.
(artist: Gustave Doré)
These aren’t platitudes, but ontological[8] descriptions of power-in-action through warring positions thereof inside the state as status-quo, but also its state of exception as profoundly liminal:
liminality
A linguo-material position of conflict or transition, liminality is ontologically a state of being “in between,” usually through failed sublimation/uncanniness; it invokes a “grey area” generally demonized in Western canon as “chaos.” In truth, semantic disorder can be used to escape the perpetual exploitation and decay caused all around us by Capitalism and its giant lies (a concept we’ll explore throughout this book). Liminality also occurs when working with highly canonical/colonized material, like the Western, European fantasy or highly exploitative material like canonical porn (with the word “pornography” being criminalized, thus something iconoclasts must reclaim). Gothic examples include monsters and parallel spaces, which tend to oscillate in liminal fashion.
liminal space
Liminal spaces, in architectural terms, are spaces designed to be moved through; in Gothic terms, these amount to Bakhtin’s Gothic chronotope as museum-like time-spaces that, when moved through, help past legends come alive, animating in literal and figuratively Gothic/medieval ways: the Gothic castle of the historical past. Classically these include the animated portrait, miniature, gargoyle, (often giant) suit of armor, effigy and double, etc; more modern variants include Tool’s early music videos (exhibit 43a), Trent Reznor’s 1994 music video for “Closer” (exhibit 43b) and Mario 64’s own liminal spaces outlined by Marilyn Roxie’s “Marilyn Roxie presents … The Inescapable Weirdness of Super Mario 64” (2020).
The above examples all operate through cryptomimesis, as per Jodey Castricano’s Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (2001):
cryptomimesis
A writing practice that, like certain Gothic conventions [e.g., Segewick’s commentary on live burial as a timeless fixture of Gothic literature] generates its uncanny effects through the production of what Nicholas Rand might call a “contradictory ‘topography of inside-outside'” [from Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word …] Moreover, the term cryptomimesis draws attention to a writing predicated upon encryption: the play of revelation and concealment lodged within parts of individual words (source).
Castricano further describes this process as “writing with ghosts,” referring to their nature as linguistic devices that adhere the sense of being haunted in domestic spaces: the house as inside-outside, familiar-unfamiliar and inherited imperfectly by the living from the dead.
(exhibit 0a1b2a1b: artist, bottom-middle-and-left: ringoripple; top-right: Lustyfairy666; bottom-right: Jasmin Darnell; top-left: source. What Segewick calls “a fixation of the ocular confrontation,” the image on the surface is sexualized during phenomenological[9] “debates”: staring contests. Regardless of what’s behind the veil—be it an old woman’s face or Lady Dimitrescu’s “thicc mommy peach”—the canonical surface is dimorphically sexualized and interrogated through traditional stigma, bias and fear-fascination. For the classic Neo-Gothic, the surface would have been used to communicate sexual tension/contagion in oft-unironically harmful forms.)
liminal expression (monsters)/monster girls
Monsters are generally liminal, but some more than others openly convey a partial, ambivalent, oscillating sense of conflict on the surface of their imagery. A hopelessly common example is the monster girl, as AFAB persons are generally fetishized/demonized “waifu” in canon and must be reclaimed in sex-positive forms (exhibit 5e; 23a, the Medusa; 49, phallic women; 50, furries; 62e, cavewomen, etc). The advanced degree of this trope is the monster mother, which expects the women to exist in ways that cater to men that are both loved and feared in fetishizing ways, but also sacrificed (exhibits 51b1, 87b1 and 102b, etc). Akin to a black mirror, Eve Segewick, in 1981, called this mimesis “the character in the veil [or] imagery of the surface in the Gothic novel.” The basic gist, they argue, is the sexualizing of a surface imagery in Gothic media (their example being the nun’s veil); i.e., a “shallow pattern” literally on the surface of paper or a screen or glass that can evoke a deeper systemic problem that spans space and time.
(artist: Honey Lavender)
Keeping the above definitions in mind, the word liminal can also denote to being “in between,” insofar as a monster is canonical versus iconoclastic—with a particular spatial/personalized expression moving towards one pole or the other from its de facto starting point. Monsters are generally liminal in liminal types of media: art and porn.
As a liminal hauntology of war (another term of mine) that “suddenly appears” during Gothic dialogs, monsters are generally “not of this Earth”; i.e., as forever belonging to a
liminal hauntology of war (danger disco)
…a half-real poetic space to heroically move through, onstage and off, and one that concerns the hauntological presence and function of a Gothic chronotope (the castle or some other war-like alien double of the nuclear home); i.e., of the Imperial Boomerang bringing monsters (and their masters) home to roost, during fascism; e.g., Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain (the High Fantasy treasure map and Metroidvania/shooter), per the monomyth and Promethean Quest (for power) chasing the Numinous: for different reasons during the dialectic of the alien. In turn, these translate in and out of neoliberal stories (especially videogames) into real life; i.e., during the abjection process as something to reify and further for profit raping nature as monstrous-feminine (re: “A Note About Canonical Essentialism“). Also something I call the “danger disco,” or source of Numinous thrills; i.e., where the hero chases the Numinous during calculated risk: to articulate and interpret generational trauma under state confusion and duress.
the dialectic of the alien
A term I coined to articulate the dialectic of the abjection process and venerate the Gothic—vis-à-vis Julia Kristeva, but also Frederic Jameson’s “dialectic of shelter” and subsequent class nightmare (re: Postmodernism), as well as Summoning Salt’s “The History of Mega Man 2 World Records” (2024; timestamp: 8:25); i.e., as a dialectic useful towards universal liberation, one concerning the alien as something to parse and arbitrate for or against abjection (as something to reverse): to hug or hate, police or liberate, the assignment of “alien” status using the same language/aesthetic of the alien, mid-play. As I write in “Brace for Impact: Some Prep When Hugging the Alien” (2024): “All in all, I live the Humanities as a ludo-Gothic means of thinking inclusively about and experiencing the Gothic first-hand (an ongoing relationship the Gothic deliberately combines—an affect); i.e., BDSM or otherwise, people work through preference and experimentation to issue public statements that are, to some degree, coded. Monsters are code for the dialectic of the alien (us versus them) as taught to us through canon, power being made to flow in one direction when faced with trauma as a historical-material effect: the ghost of the counterfeit waiting patiently for revenge (state shift). The horror of the Gothic, then, is when it truly comes alive, ceasing to be a pure fiction but a nightmare that applies to us as victims of the state cannibalizing us” (source). Ludo-Gothic BDSM, then, is a potent means of negotiating generational trauma during the dialectic of the alien; i.e., by rarefying or otherwise going where abuse (or spectres of abuse) are—mid-dialectic—to perform and interrogate shelter and alienation for development purposes: setting nature-as-alien (re: the monstrous-feminine) free from state control/pimps (re: the whore’s revenge).
As such, history in totality is an invention written through otherworldly violence and force, including the Gothic theatrical/practical implements of those things; i.e., historical materialism in action, but through dialectical materialism, or the arrangement of opposing forces through material means according to Gothic poetics during oppositional praxis: doubles. Doubles invite comparison to encourage unique, troubling perspectives that “shake things up” and break through bourgeois illusions. To that, the paradox of performing power compounds through the visitor(s) from other worlds, planets, times as fabricated, but also doubled in a praxial sense; i.e., Satan builds pandemonium and hell follows within him, but he looks and acts uncannily like those he’s rebelling against. While warring against the status quo, the monsters from either side (which come from/occupy the same shadow zone, whose nebulous, psychosexual “forces of darkness” we shall unpack during the thesis proper) start to resemble and not resemble each other. Sure, they look a lot alike, but dialectically-materially are actually polar opposites.
(exhibit 0a1b2b: Artist, top-left: Gustave Doré; everything else: UrEvilMommy. The private poses are being used as negotiated for an illustration that will be going in Volume Three, but I’m including them here, ahead of time, to make a point about oppositional praxis: Psychomachia and psychosexuality often employ medieval language as something to consciously interrogate by sex-positive workers who use their labor to revive and invigilate [display in exhibits] monstrous conversations about sexuality as heroic, thus athletic and/or adjacent to depictions of war in traditional gendered ways that have been canonized/camped back and forth over space and time.
The monstrous violence and sexuality in Paradise Lost are thoroughly psychosexual and gendered in relation to heteronormativity as something to rail against, and hence plays out in the usual theatre as something to witness: through battle, specifically that of angels and demons adjacent the human occupants in the Garden of Eden. These various, sex-positive paratexts become a collective meta “fan fic” that supports former “perceptive” arguments by overwriting future attempts to efface their critical power and liminal expression as invited voyeurism of an exhibitionist troupe’s ironic peril: the rape play as cathartic, but also a guilty pleasure that overrides and counterattacks harmful wish fulfillment [the unironic battle-of-the-sexes]—i.e., the desire to see others “die” through collaboration and friendship versus actually die through class resentment [the slasher villain as the instruction of such destruction; e.g., Michael Myers, a “demon lover” of the operatic[10] Radcliffean sort, unironically killing slutty teenagers]. In short, it takes what people like—sex, tasty food, kink, monsters and BDSM, heroic theatre, heavy metal, and drugs [or evocations of those things]—and camps them further than Milton could have possibly dreamed.
[artist: Frank Frazetta]
The functional opposite would be something like Frazetta’s John Carter through the Gothic mode, but this remains liminal because it can always be camped [exhibit 0a2c] during our battles fought in praxial opposition to the state.)
In other words, languages are dialects with an army of dated, spectacular monsters to back them up, but the army and its monsters needn’t be an argument for nation-states or some other organization of power as vertical; camps of campy soldiers can use the paradox of performing power in doubled monstrous language to radically deviate away from camps of canonical soldiers in terms of appearance, but vary exactly on how they do this to achieve a universal proletarian function. Even so, the aesthetic variations of said function occurs using the reclamation of ancient traditional language, whose traumatic depictions of theatre and war are something Americans (or those living under Pax Americana) have been well-acclimated towards, including its dimorphic gendered and sexualized elements; i.e., the (to use the Superbad analogy) “phallic” nature of such brainfood as “dick-shaped” and the ubiquity of rape through (to use the Team America analogy) the “fucking” of “pussies” and “assholes” by “dicks.” Modern theater’s copaganda and Military Industrial Complex is kayfabe, or the wrestler’s “dialog” during a staged, back-and-forth match between two “warring” athletes (or theatrical positions of argument that resemble athletes):
Military Industrial Complex
(from Wikipedia): the relationship between a country’s military and the defense industry that supplies it, seen together as a vested interest which influences public policy. A driving factor behind the relationship between the military and the defense-minded corporations is that both sides benefit—one side from obtaining war weapons, and the other from being paid to supply them. The term is most often used in reference to the system behind the armed forces of the United States, where the relationship is most prevalent due to close links among defense contractors, the Pentagon, and politicians. The expression gained popularity after a warning of the relationship’s detrimental effects, in the farewell address of President Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961.
In the context of the United States, the appellation is sometimes extended to military–industrial–congressional complex (MICC), adding the US Congress to form a three-sided relationship termed an “iron triangle.” Its three legs include political contributions, political approval for military spending, lobbying to support bureaucracies, and oversight of the industry; or more broadly, the entire network of contracts and flows of money and resources among individuals as well as corporations and institutions of the defense contractors, private military contractors, the Pentagon, Congress, and the executive branch.
copaganda
Any form of canonical media that defends state abuse through official or functional police agents, but especially their monopoly of violence against those living in the state of exception under crisis as meant to recognize and worship/submit to them like gods. The state is always, to some degree, in crisis, leading to the generation of myriad monomyth stories that express this fact—i.e., as a dividing line between the police and everyone else. Skip Intro, a YouTuber with an extensive series on copaganda, explores how this phenomenon goes well beyond planet Earth, going so far as to call it a Faustian bargain. This bargain manifests in many different kinds of fiction genres that endorse the status quo. For example, the “witch cops” and vice characters of fantasy narratives (war chiefs, Amazon war bosses; white and black “wolves,” exhibit 1a1b) either attack orcs, Drow or some other enemy of the state during oppositional praxis, or they rally them in doomed rebellions and futile/misunderstood attacks of revenge. One assimilates, the other is destroyed and vilified.
kayfabe (the full definition)
The Wikipedia entry for “kayfabe” reads:
the portrayal of staged events within the industry as “real” or “true,” specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not staged. The term kayfabe has evolved to also become a code word of sorts for maintaining this “reality” within the direct or indirect presence of the general public. Kayfabe, in the United States, is often seen as the suspension of disbelief that is used to create the non-wrestling aspects of promotions, such as feuds, angles, and gimmicks in a manner similar to other forms of fictional entertainment. In relative terms, a wrestler breaking kayfabe would be likened to an actor breaking character on-camera. Since wrestling is performed in front of a live audience, whose interaction with the show is crucial to its success, kayfabe can be compared to the fourth wall in acting, since hardly any conventional fourth wall exists to begin with. Because of this lack of conventional fourth wall, wrestlers were once expected to maintain their characters even out of the ring, and in other aspects of their lives that could be made public (source).
For a good introduction to the concept and its history in modern professional wrestling and popular media, consider Behind the Bastards’ podcast episode, “Part One: Vince McMahon, History’s Greatest Monster” (2023). The concept applies not just to wrestling but includes any professional sports—e.g., e-sports but also vigilante sports/action hero narratives with athletic crusaders such as the heteronormative avatars from Streets of Rage and TMNT or Street Fighter as something to endorse through their police violence of state-oriented criminals, potential subversives, revolutionaries and so-called “terrorists” threatening the existence of “correct” action heroes as something to perform (exhibit 34c2, 98a1, or 104a1); or to subvert these false revolutionaries in a variety of ways (exhibit 102a4, 111b).
Between the flow of capital and two forms of theatre (one being more “onstage” and the other a semi-theatrical enforcement of the state’s laws out on the streets), the masked play of warlike theatre offers a chorus-like commentary during the show of force wherever it occurs. Often, its showy pugilism and brawn are set to music, but also a team-based competition with single or multiple people per side: sports. In a canonical sense, performers are generally athletic and warlike, their bellicose struggles relayed through incredible-yet-heavily-scripted feats of arms and armed conflict as hyperbolically violent and over-the-top, but also inviting the crowd to join in, knowing all the special moves, reversals and related gimmicks—i.e., performances of idealized strength, with sweepingly wide, theatrically “loud” motions pitted by powerful-looking heroes against powerful-looking enemies or enemies designed to threaten the hero’s power in bigoted ways (the corruptor or monstrous-feminine): the kayfabe babyface is, for all intents and purposes, an Americanized Beowulf pitted against nominal Communists and cartoon Nazis (often in literal Nazi outfits); but its pastiche extends to cops who both look, act and function like wrestlers to convey state propaganda during class war as emblematized by the arm of the state—its class traitors working within a staged bout’s standard-issue reversals: the enemy is both weak and strong.
Canon’s target audience internalize fear and dogma as something to accept and practice, but also endorse like a sports or wrestling fan watching and taking a match at face value—i.e., endlessly warlike and sexualized/gendered according to us versus* them made through monstrous arguments for vertical power as something to endlessly maintain through canonical mimesis; this repeats according to the perception and maintenance of righteous order (according to beings adjusted to order as a heteronormative paradigm). To subvert this Symbolic Order[11]/mythic structure[12], I say to our target audience: “Do you like sex, demons and power? Then you might be a Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communist (or at the very least curious enough to make it past this volume’s initial ‘Cerberus’)!”
*I use the word “versus/vs” a lot. When it’s a verb or a title (as with my book: Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion), I prefer to use the full, non-abbreviated word, “versus”; when it’s a noun, I generally use one of two contractions: “vs” for compound noun phrases (e.g., “vampires vs zombies”) except “v.” with SCOTUS legal cases (e.g., “Roe v. Wade”); another exception is “us versus them,” because “us vs them” looks incredibly weird to me. However, apart from my book title, SCOTUS cases and “us versus them,” I might not be super consistent following this rule (the reason being I think the meaning should be understood regardless if I’m stressing its function as a noun or a verb).
To this, Sex Positivity crosses over the canonical threshold, stepping into the breach and liminal hauntology of class/culture/race war fought by Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism’s campy monster doubles in contested theatrical spaces on- and offstage; i.e., subversive Amazonomachia as the cryptonymic, “Trojan” announcement of transformatively beautiful lies throughout culture as a whole: the monstrous theatre of the class- (race- and gender-)conscious splendide mendax telling beautiful lies whose elaborate strategies of misdirection (from Fredric Jameson, below) are “found” (written and announced as a discovery like King Arthur’s coconuts from Monty Python) as “archaeologies” that counter the canonical refrain as stuck:
“archaeologies” of the future
Fredric Jameson’s titular 2005 idea, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, of an elaborate strategy of misdirection (an idea originally from his 1982 essay “Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?“) that breaks through the future of one moment that is now our own past, often through the fantasy and science fiction genres (the Gothic variant of this strategy as we shall discuss it is the Gothic castle/chronotope, discussed in the thesis proper). Canonical “archaeologies” sell this dead future back to workers to pacify them; iconoclastic variations devise ways of seeing beyond canonical illusions by “re-excavating” them, using what’s left behind again to liberate worker bodies and minds in the process.
Hauntology’s praxis includes the appearance of spaces, but also the metanarrative during paratextual discussions about the poiesis/mimesis of monster and lair alike, but also their raising and razing (which we’ll unpack during the “camp map”). It’s androids dreaming of electric sheep, whereupon slaves close their eyes and inhabit canceled retro-futures that have become class-conscious, thus reclaimed. This isn’t just the sci-fi schtick of the 1980s, and I thoroughly want to go beyond Jameson’s own bias to explain things he couldn’t be arsed to touch:
Although some critics continue to disavow the Gothic as being subliterary and appealing only to the puerile imagination—Fredric Jameson refers to the Gothic as “that boring and exhausted paradigm[13]” (source: Jodey Castricano’s Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing, 2009).
I want workers to use Gothic poetics—its liminal expression (doubles) and paradox—to transform all fiction, thus history as built on incredible heroic (monstrous) falsehoods (not to mention science fiction emerged with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as [still] one of its best examples, from a proletarian standpoint. Much of Utopian sci-fi is far more apologetic of Cartesian rhetoric; e.g., Isaac Asimov’s “Laws of Robots” pacifying slaves dressed up in [now-dated] futurism).
To this, the paradox is at home in Gothic expression—of power, of liminal expression/doubles, of telling truth through lies whether on purpose or by accident (to be of the devil’s party and know it/not know it) via shadows on the wall; i.e., elaborate lies/strategies of misdirection, splendide mendax and their “archaeologies.” Absolute power is a paradox, but so is “pure evil” as part of the canonical framework; e.g., the politer xenophobia of the woman-in-black mistress in a novel-of-manners, versus the overt, psychosexual demon lover as “phallic” in traditionally male, warlike and rapacious ways: Victoria from Zofloya was murderously sexual[14] in order to canonically scapegoat sodomy while also stabbing Lilla—the cliché, passive version of the Gothic heroine archetype—to death. But not all that glooms is Gothic the same way. The dark monster can be functionally doubled without changing its overall appearance across multiple stories in the dialogic imagination. In many cases, the monster is ontologically but also praxially ambiguous (e.g., Ellen Ripley/Samus Aran as a phallic-woman girl boss; but also the “black Amazon,” Coffy/Pam Grier, whose blaxploitation camps the “woman-in-black” vice character/detective from much older Gothic fiction, vis-à-vis Zofloya). This means it can go either way per appearance, wherein its potential character during class/culture war is ultimately decided by the performance as something to reify and execute through dialectical-material scrutiny of past performances. While Milton famously did it by accident, the class warriors of Gothic Communism have the advantage of hindsight; with it, we can consciously weaponize Gothic poetics/paradox during liminal expressions of power not by accident, but on purpose and to the widest possible degree that critiques capital and consumption under it.
(exhibit 0a1b2c: Source—fair warning: a “photo dump” site with lots of pop-ups on it. The taboo nature of hard kink often means that pictures aren’t credited, hence remain artistically anonymous.
The class/culture motives for Radcliffe’s classic demon lover marry harmful psychosexuality to sin and xenophobia, playing out like “bad BDSM” from a female author I seriously doubt had even the slightest idea what sex-positive variants were [e.g., pillow princesses, rope bunnies]. For one, Fetlife didn’t exist yet, or the Internet; the terminology for BDSM had only just started to appear in operatic forms and women be recognized as human: “Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the décor and costumes and blasphemous rites” (re: “Fascinating Fascism“). Needless to say that nearly two centuries later, Sontag‘s opinion of BDSM is limited to a harmful canonical version of Sadomasochism that frankly is way off the mark in terms of what sex positivity’s entire gamut entails: “Sadomasochism has always [emphasis, me] been the furthest reach of the sexual experience: when sex becomes most purely sexual, that is, severed from personhood, from relationships, from love” (ibid.). She completely ignores the matter of degree and negotiation, and the fact that sex isn’t even automatically included in BDSM:
So what about the intersection of kink and sex? When is this appropriate and what are the guidelines?
It’s a tricky topic. I remember telling a friend who is pretty vanilla but curious how kink scenes are distinct activities. She said, “So, wait, there’s no sex?” And I remember struggling to answer this. For me, most kink scenes are separate from sexual encounters, even if sex may follow a scene. This is very partner dependent, but for me, a kink scene requires aftercare before there is sex. And so far this was almost always the case for me – negotiation, scene, aftercare, possibility of sex [source: Victor’s “Intersection of Kink and Sex,” 2019].
In other words, if Sontag was “vanilla,” then Radcliffe was barely even ice cream [whose naughty operatic fantasies are unironically violent and sit on the ledge of threatened morality—what Ash, in Alien, would call “delusions,” exhibit 51a]. But their combined inexperience paradoxically stems from dark fantasies invented from the open secret of sex abuse turned into urban legends; criminal hauntology and cryptonymy pointing at imagined realities through copies made by people in materially privileged positions: a conditioning to expect harmful violence during Faustian BDSM rituals, constituting a moral panic/criminogenesis in its own right [Satanists just love sacrificing women, babies, and white, teenage virgins, apparently].
These canonical misconceptions operate on the automatic conflation of sex and harm, versus merely being adjacent to it during psychosexual expression [there’s a thin line between the two—a tightrope to tread carefully]. That is, sex-positive BDSM is generally about negotiated unequal power exchange in a written, contractual form that is founded on (relatively) equal bargaining positions[15]; and catharsis through rape play is a common form, given how calculated risk [minimalization] exercises are commonly designed to mimic the feelings of being out of control minus the danger of actual harm; i.e., to help someone [commonly women in heteronormative societies where sex crimes/abuse are prolific but also romanticized/apologized for and covered up] gain agency over their maladaptive survival/prey mechanisms when seeing things that remind them of their abuse/generational trauma: popular media as built to scare women towards men [white knight syndrome] according to the profit motive. Their subsequent camping can employ an “evil Italian count” to “threaten” the woman with, or the woman herself in or surrounded by black and red, including wearing fetish gear as an eliding of power and resistance on her body—in short, anything to enhance the experience.
[artist: Cara Day]
BDSM in popular media [canon] isn’t made to educate, but to shock naïve people looking for a thrill. It’s about as accurate as sex is during porn, tending to romanticize the therapeutic psychosexual elements divorced from performative context; i.e., merely showing them as they appear at first glance: recreations of traditional disempowerment, whose paralysis and vulnerable exposure hauntingly evoke real scenes of abuse; e.g., hair pulling and physical attacks, kidnappings with bindings and gags, rapes, drownings and murders—often by knife [canon synonymizes sex with violation, including abject reproduction: the murderous cock and womb of the father and mother but also their hideous “brood”]. The neophyte’s idea of what BDSM is often tries to mimic the trust-building exercise without understanding why it exists in a sex-positive [often trashy/pulpy] sense and why someone might try to perform it to achieve psychosexual catharsis that is often embroiled within self-destructive pathologies [the “call of the void”] seeking unironic harm; the novice counterfeit also tends to look like the expert performance at first glance. The difference lies not in the aesthetics but the skill level and intent, which can be hard to detect. Nevertheless, the fact remains that BDSM, when sex-positive, is built around community and trust as something to establish over time. It’s rehearsed over and over in a highly controlled environment [informed boundaries/consent, safewords] to prevent harm, hence the motto: “Hurt, not harm.”
Yet, there’s also the paradox of professional sex work, which capitalizes off hard kinks to turn a buck. There’s frankly nothing wrong with this, provided there’s a communal understanding encouraged by the paratext. For example, Cara Day having her panties sliced off with a knife [source tweet, 2023] certainly looks dangerous, but is no less dangerous than driving a car or a trapeze act. Rather, she and her partner have provided the visible threat of the knife without any actual major risk to themselves.
[artist: Cara Day]
Keeping with the circus allegory, the vast majority in the audience probably understand the staged nature of the performance and turn out to paradoxically feel “in danger” with minimal risk [the paradox being there is always some risk involved]. Due to its often taboo and cathartic nature tied to lived generational trauma, the experience can be very intense/profound for the sub, which can make it seem authentic, thus believable. As such, there’s always a small group of people who—like Dorian Grey—take what they see at face value. To prevent any dangerous confusions such as public excoriation or abusively do-it-yourself, “homebrew[16]” BDSM, it remains incredibly important for sex workers to have discussions with their customers [through interviews, public service announcements or hell, books like this one] that speak plainly about the voyeuristic/exhibitionistic nature of their work: its function.)
For example, regarding activist hindsight as cultivated by workers, consider the Amazon. While Amazons are a classic Greek monster and the word Amazonomachia literally means “Amazon battle,” Gothic Communism applies it to any monster in heroic discourse where competing notions about sexuality and gender are “duking it out.” This includes the heroes themselves as enforcing or resisting the hierarchy of power in heteronormative theatre (there is no functional difference between a hero and villain insofar as canonical heroes are concerned; all canonical heroes function like cops and “All Cops Are Bad,” not just the ones that look “evil,” because they universally victimize everyone else for the state). All heroes are monsters, thus liminal expressions that are sexualized and gendered (often to pornographic extremes; e.g., monster girls, exhibit 1a1a1h3a2; i.e., porn is liminal, thus monstrous, regarding its “action”). Gothic Communism’s praxial aim is to camp, thus overthrow/transform vertical power’s canonical/regressive or subjugated Amazonomachia (which invariably regresses during state decay) and replace its artistic/pornographic liminal expressions of sex and monsters wrestling back and forth with more stable, healthy and sex-positive horizontal arrangements; re: iconoclastic/subversive Amazonomachia supplied by liminal beings well-adjusted to chaos and struggle during oppositional praxis’ class tensions and performances of power at any register.
(artist: Blondynki Tez Graja)
To conclude, Milton’s “darkness visible” highlights power and liminal expression as being largely false/made up, relying on theatrical paradox through psychosexual performance (warring sex) and Amazonomachia (warring monsters) to operate during oppositional praxis (warring theory) in ways that aren’t always class-conscious but can be if taught and encouraged; i.e., “darkness visible” as deliberately campy. Keep this in mind when our thesis statement and “camp map” explore (and camp) the canonical argument for power and its Faustian offerings and Promethean pursuits; i.e., during the monomyth as mimetically executed through videogames and other artistic forms (exhibit 1a1a1a1_a). Class/culture war is fought on the streets, but also in the hearts and minds of the combatants in a very theatrical sense—i.e., inside the Gothic imagination with masks, costumes, props, and bodies in general, including their sexuality (organs, appeal/allure, appetite) and gendered components as heroically monstrous. Since the times of ancient theatre, then, all heroes have been monstrous, which is to say dictating the flow of power and resistance in theatrical language and Gothic poetics told through battle. This includes their grappling exchanges as relayed through ancient canonical codes into the present: heteronormative, thus binarized portrayals of athletic, one-on-one or team-based competitions; and resistance to those codes’ heteronormativity and binary within similar competitions across a grand, liminal meta-narrative.
(artist: Jan Rockitnik)
Onto “Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox“!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!
Footnotes
[1] The film (and its writers) reduce the Miltonian allegory to a simple “come hither”; i.e., the wanton professor tempting (female) students within forbidden unlawful carnal knowledge. The stereotype exists for a reason; e.g., Simone Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre raped their students (Andy Martin’s “The Persistence of the ‘Lolita Syndrome,'” 2013) and Foucault and other postmodernist French thinkers wanted to abolish France’s age-of-consent laws (The Living Philosophy’s “Why French Postmodernists Were Pro-Paedophilia in the 1970s,” 2021). The clue with Jennings lies with how bored he sounds, but also his open confession to the class (thus the audience): He thinks Milton is boring and merely wants to get laid by trolling the undergraduate body. In short, he’s a sex pest giving the snake (and Satan) a bad name—not from wanting to have sex, but having sex by flagrantly abusing his position as professor and not really teaching the students anything except that power can be abused.
[2] Instead of Macbeth, the play is often just called “the Scottish play.”
[3] From Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (On The Nature of Things) (c. 99 BC): “Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness” (source: Jack Maden’s “Why Death is Nothing to Fear: Lucretius and Epicureanism,” 2020).
[4] “Darkness visible” was the mysterious stuff at the bottom of the burning lake/void that, once freed, Satan and Beelzebub used to fashion pandemonium and the rest of Hell with. In short, it was a paradoxical creative force in Paradise Lost.
[5] From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790):
“The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity;
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast” (source).
[6] “As attributed to Pappus (4th century AD) and Plutarch (c. 46-120 AD) in Sherman K. Stein’s Archimedes: What Did He Do Besides Cry Eureka? (1999)” (source: Today in Science).
[7] (from the glossary):
totalitarianism
A state condition towards the total consolidation of power at one point. For example, in respect to Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia, Richard Overy writes in The Dictators (2004), “‘Totalitarian’ does not mean that they were ‘total’ parties, either all-inclusive or wielding complete power; it means they were concerned with the ‘totality’ of the societies in which they worked.”
With Milton’s God as an allegory for the Church of England, the same idea of total power also applies; i.e., not that their power is total, but perceived as total: “Perception is reality.”
[8] “Ontology” being of, or otherwise pertaining to, the study of existence.
[9] “Phenomenology” being of, or otherwise pertaining to, the study of experience.
[10] An Western opera or fairytale generally contains a princess, a hero and a demon lover inside of a castle, and is penned by white people who—after making things taboo through the process of abjection, have promptly become fearful of, and fascinated with, the abject; they then seek to explore what has been walled off from them through various fakeries: navigating the ghost of the counterfeit as made by them (enabled by double standards, of course; a white woman like Radcliffe is allowed—more or less—to misbehave, navigating her own reverse-engineered trauma more than a woman of color would be, or a gender-non-conforming or Indigenous person, etc).
[11] “The social world of linguistic communication, intersubjective relations, knowledge of ideological conventions, and the acceptance of the law” (source: “Symbolic Order” [Lacan] from Dino Franco Felluga’s “Introductory Guide to Critical Theory,” 2011).
[12] (from the glossary): The Symbolic Order of Western canon: “Oh, look, it’s a king or a god! Guess I’ll bend the knee and turn off my brain!” Originally disrupted by the “mythic method” as coined by T.S. Eliot, who “Jerry” from GLR Archive writes in “Eliot and the Mythic Method” (2004):
defines what he exemplifies in The Waste Land [1922] – i.e., the “mythic method” – in his essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” [1923]. The mythic method looked to the past to glean meaning and understanding for what has been lost or destroyed in the present [… abridged] (source).
Eliot’s 20th century modernist shenanigans (not to be confused with Modernism, aka the Enlightenment) fly directly in the face of James Campbell’s “monomyth.” Canonized as “the hero’s journey” in popular Western fiction and formative to new fictions, the monomyth is central to state hegemony through worker pacification. Perhaps not entirely aware of this, Eliot still chose not to retreat into a “better” past in search of individuation (to borrow from Carl Jung); he addressed the present as a modern confusion that needs to be faced.
[13] The quote is ubiquitous, but consider the opening page for Alex Link’s “The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson’s Gothic Plots” (2009) for a summary of it:
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.” Although surprising at first, this condemnation is strategic in that it establishes the Gothic as Jameson’s critical other; the Gothic becomes an object of ritual sacrifice, imbued with those qualities in Jameson’s argument which are most discomfiting. […] If one regards Postmodernism as telling a story about postmodernity, its plot, taken as a whole, is curiously Radcliffean, in that it routinely presents the reader with postmodern objects meant to inspire anxiety before explaining them away. Jameson’s dismissal of the Gothic, in other words, resembles nothing so much as his own description of the Gothic, in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979), as a means of raising and exorcising an object of anxiety (source).
In other words, Jameson writes like Coleridge does—like a scared white boy but even more allergic to the Gothic mode, oddly emulating one of its most famous (and white) female authors.
[14] Victoria, as we shall see, was basically the TERF/female incel prototype of 1806: She marries her husband, then poisons him to death so she can marry his brother instead; when the brother is too busy doting on his own wife, Lilla, Victoria grows increasingly impatient. So she kidnaps Lilla and chains her to a wall inside a cave. After a while, Victoria starts to poison the brother of her now-dead husband, who she tries to court while Lilla is still alive. Mid-negotiations, Victoria goes to the cave and kills Lilla by “pulling a Brutus” and stabbing the helpless girl to death before throwing her body off a cliff, which smashes to pieces on the rocks and washes away in the stormy current below. After that, she goes back to Lilla’s unsuspecting (and now-widower) husband and confesses her “love” to him, promptly causing the poor man to die of shock and disgust (it goes about as well as Darth Vader telling Luke he’s his father).
[15] Think the written contract from 50 Shades of Gray (2011) except less materially unequal from the offset—i.e., no pre-requisite of the master/slave dynamic through the bourgeois man in his castle (then and now) and a white, middle-class wallflower to negotiate with him—and instead a written, informed and (relatively) fair negotiation typically executed between two or more people under less extreme disparities. It’s fine to acknowledge socio-material-inequalities in society. The problem with white, middle-class women like Radcliffe is they presume a stuck, pre-fascist alignment with the usual historical materialisms in order to get their jollies within said system: the negotiation has to be unfair to describe the material conditions as they presently exist in relation to the actual or imaginary past supporting them. In short, there’s no attempt to imagine something better—merely the damsel’s unironic threat of rape by Blue Beard. It’s criminogenic (more on this in the thesis statement).
[16] BDSM is generally done in an amateur setting to some degree (not everyone knows a pro with their own dungeon; not everyone with a dungeon is sex-positive); the “homebrew” I’m talking about is domestic abuse dressed up as “BDSM” and sold as such through criminal hauntologies—i.e., the serial killer romance; e.g., The Phantom of the Opera (1909) or Silence of the Lambs (1988). Ludo-Gothic BDSM seeks to subvert canonical varieties, camping them to break Capitalist Realism with.