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 Statement: the Gothic Mode and Its Reclamation

“What do you mean?” he said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is morning to be good on?” 

—Gandalf, The Hobbit

(artist: Martin Sobr)

Picking up where “Book Sample: Thesis Proper Opening and Essay—Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox” left off…

I have divided my thesis statement into five pieces:

• the thesis paragraph: Contains my entire book’s central argument, distilled into one paragraph (and provides the full definition of heteronormativity).
• the thesis body: Summarizes Gothic Communism’s primary foil, the state—specifically its monopoly of violence, state of exception and Protestant work ethic in relation to the historical materialism of the state’s propaganda (canon); i.e., canon’s monomyth, Cycle of Kings, infernal concentric pattern and narrative of the crypt amounting to the Shadow of Pygmalion.
• “Pieces of the Camp Map (from the Manifesto Tree)“: Unpacks the main sections from the manifesto tree in relation to oppositional praxis; i.e., canon vs iconoclasm (camp).
• “The Roots of Camp“: Examines canonical demon BDSM and Radcliffe’s fiction/tricky tools as popular literary devices that desperately need to be camped (with ludo-Gothic BDSM—a concept we’ll introduce during the “camp map” and explore much, much more in Volumes One, Two and Three).
• “Overcoming Praxial Inertia“: Explores some popular examples of canonical, monomyth Beowulf-style heroes and the threat they represent as also needing to be camped (re [from Volume One, onwards]: to have nature’s monstrous-feminine revenge—specifically the whore’s [from Volume Two’s Demon Module]—against profit and the state pimping them).

Note: While preparing this volume for its 2025 promotion, I decided to write a small reprise preceding the thesis paragraph. Composed of new and cited material (totaling ten pages), its design accounts for the undeveloped portions of my thesis argument. To it, said reprise deliberately covers the work I wrote after my thesis volume was completed (whose argument I would steadily build on across four-going-on-five additional books, especially regarding ludo-Gothic BDSM and its tremendous utility when challenging Capitalism). —Perse, 3/22/2025

Two Years Later (give or take): Returning to My Thesis Argument after Five Books

Have you ever talked to someone
And you feel you know what’s coming next?
It feels pre-arranged

—Bruce Dickenson; “Deja Vu,” on Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time (1986)

This reprise seeks to revisit things I’ve written before, and which I cannot entirely change, but nonetheless want to expose and frontload you with hindsight I lacked, back then; i.e., the fact that my work on camping the canon through Gothic poetics would go on, across five books, to focus extensively on Metroidvania (to a lesser extent) and ludo-Gothic BDSM and the palliative Numinous (to a greater extent). For further information specifically on ludo-Gothic BDSM, refer to my new webpage cataloging the subject and its history as coined and synthesized by me. A similar page exists for Metroidvania. —Perse

(artist: George Roux)

History (therefore time) is a circle; in Gothic, it’s a structure that—like Dracula’s castle—can magically reappear again and again to be entered and explored in search of power and knowledge (therefore radical change through intense healing when facing trauma; re [from Volume One]: “If you want to critique power, you must go where it is”). Per the chronotope, space-time becomes familiar and alien in hauntological and cryptonymic/cryptomimetic forms, having a Numinous, therefore portentous (and often psychosexual, above) signature. All the same, it’s surprisingly easy to take the past and its slogans for granted, then, which is why when reversing abjection we want to self-introspect as much as reflect upon the work of others on the same shared Aegis (to avoid Marx’ tragedy and farce while, at the same time, camping his ghost). As I will write towards the end of this book volume, “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about.” So that is what this short reprise will do!

Please note, the thesis paragraph situated directly after said reprise is my book series thesis argument as written in late 2023. Therefore, it is broader and more complex in its language than my argumentation would become, in later books of said series; i.e., which narrowed their own arguments down to focus more heavily on ludo-Gothic BDSM to achieve systemic catharsis, deliberately healing from and combatting rape through oppositional synthesis (daily habits): by illustrating mutual consent through informed labor exchanges; e.g., through Metroidvania and the palliative Numinous (which this volume does introduce and explore). This expansion also included working more and more with other models (which we’ll get to, in a moment); i.e., each of us ghosts to dance, in smaller form, with the Medusa—as something Communist to invoke through whatever shadowy monstrous-feminine likenesses we leave behind before we die; re: the Gothic chase of the Numinous, fearing the “Gothic” past (from Walpole onwards) to, through such blatant fakeries, proceed to camp the ever-loving shit out of it. For me, that’s a dark mommy domme (of the gentler sort, below): a “castle in the flesh” whose half-real morphology invokes the same transformative qualities that an actual Gothic castle might (more on this, deeper in)!

(artist: Nyx)

In Volume Zero, our focus is mainly “canon vs camp,” whereas Volume One goes on to isolate and identify nature as monstrous-feminine (while also articulating the state’s various tools—re: its trifectas, monopolies, and qualities of capital—to exploit nature with); i.e., as something for the state to dehumanize and harvest for profit (thus genocide through rape and war).

In turn, Volume Two would begin to expand on ludo-Gothic BDSM in the Poetry Module (especially towards the end, in its preface), followed by the Monster Module’s own thesis argument:

Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature. Trauma, then, cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case (source: “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis,” 2024).

From there, the Undead Module would explore this idea vis-à-vis the undead and the rememory process per ludo-Gothic BDSM, but the Demon Module would really crack things open; i.e., with its own establishing of the whore’s paradox and whore’s revenge against profit, thus rape. Before it could do that, though, I would need to define rape much more clearly than I had done previously in Volume Zero or One; re (from the Poetry Module):

I want to define [rape] as something broadened beyond its narrow definition, “penetrative sex meant to cause harm by removing consent from the equation.” To that, there is a broad, generalized definition I devised in “Psychosexual Martyrdom” (2024), which will come in useful where we examine unironic forms of rape, but also “rape” as something put into quotes; i.e., during consent-non-consent as a vital means of camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM:

martyrs are generally raped by the state, which we have to convey mid-performance without actually getting raped if we can help it (“rape” meaning [for our purposes] “to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,” generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit) [emphasis, me]: finding power while disempowered (the plight of the monstrous-feminine).

Rape can be of the mind, spirit, body and/or culture—the land or things tied to it during genocide, etc; it can be individual and/or on a mass scale, either type committed by a Great Destroyer (a Gothic trope of abuse of the worse, unimaginable sort, rarefying as a person, onstage) of some kind or another as abstracting unspeakable abuse. It’s a translation, which I now want to interrogate with the chapters ahead. So we must give examples that are anything but ironic before adding the irony afterward as a theatrical means of medicine; i.e., rape play challenging profit through the usual Gothic articulations in service to workers and nature at large.

Simply put, to be raped is to be deprived of agency facing something you cannot defeat through force alone (rape victims are often brutalized for trying to fight back)—capital and its enforcers, pointedly raping nature and things of nature-as-monstrous-feminine by harvesting them during us-versus-them arguments according to Cartesian thought; terror is a vital part of the counterterrorist reversal humanizing Medusa during activism as a psychosexual act of martyrdom. There is always damage, even if you survive, but there is a theatrical element that lets you show your scars; i.e., during consent-non-consent as an artistic, psychosexual form of protest through ludo-Gothic BDSM: having been on the receiving end of state abuse as something to demonstrate and play with for educational, activist purposes—generally with a fair degree of revolutionary cryptonymy (showing and hiding ourselves and our trauma).

By comparison the state uses masks, music (and other things) as a coercive, complicit means of cryptonymically threatening us with great illusions. These rape our minds without irony in service to profit. Such proponents are generally people in our own lives who don the mask/persona of the Great Destroyer to frighten us into submission; i.e., by threatening us with total annihilation as a force of unreality that feels shapeless and overwhelming yet humanoid. This is no laughing matter, nor is subverting it during rape play, both of which the rest of this volume (and Volume Three after that) will explore at length (source: “A Note about Rape/Rape Play; or, Facing the Great Destroyer,” 2024).

From there, I would write on my website, several days ago (concerning my work and rape as something to camp through ludo-Gothic BDSM, which I wanted to update on my one-page promo for the entire series):

[…] In short, to establish healthy grounds for humor and play during Gothic and camp is to give workers control over things over things normally out of their control; i.e., putting “rape” in quotes during calculated risk, which ludo-Gothic BDSM essentially treats as activism when developing Gothic Communism to break Capitalist Realism; re: (from the Demon Module):

try to understand how demonic desires are shadowy and repressed, given form by oppositional poetics in dialectical-material argument. So when I say “revenge” from here on out, I do so with concerns to the usual us-versus-them, cops-and-victims language that demons manifest as/relate to us with (and we them) while pinned between nation-states/corporations and nature growing increasingly turbulent; i.e., said revenge had by one against another pursuant to worker or bourgeois needs. Rebellion through demonic poetics happens through a particular thesis to counteract: nature is monstrous-feminine (re: Volume One)—a whore under state control, which the elite rape for profit, and for which both sides seek revenge before, during and after structural abuse. The exploitation is endless because profit and labor value (of nature) are endless!

(artist: PiMo)

Demons, then, are whores under Western (Cartesian) dominion opposite virgins, but also are virgins depending on the circumstances; e.g., subjugated Amazons like Psylocke, left. This need for state control and dominion introduces a paradox from which a new thesis can arise during ludo-Gothic BDSM (for this chapter/module, indented for emphasis):

Ludo-Gothic BDSM has many theoretical definitions[1a] and applications. In practice, though, I frequently utilize it through rape play that paradoxically achieves catharsis; i.e., by putting “rape” in quotes, thus healing from rape without quotes. Often by rape survivors, such people classically find power/agency through theatrical reenactments of unequal, unfair or otherwise rapacious treatment and conditions; i.e., by relying on a concept I’ll heretofore call “the whore’s paradox.”

(artists: Ray Sugarbutt and Sammy Stocking)

The paradox is simple: demons are maidens and maidens are demons, but both are virgins and whores, and each finds power (and knowledge) according to how the state forbids access, yet access happens anyways; i.e., (de)valued, mid-exchange, thus used to humanize or dehumanize the demonized through performance and play. Per Marx and myself, Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything. Nature is monstrous-feminine as such, “empowerment” applying to any aspect of our life, bodies, violence and terror the state wishes to monopolize/control, and any trope, convention, cliché or fetish that might be used to degrade, humiliate, rape or otherwise demonize/dominate beings “of nature” per capital’s qualities (re: settler-colonial, heteronormative and Cartesian); i.e., that we can reclaim during ludo-Gothic BDSM, hence through unequal power letting us “get a leg up,” topping from a position of normal disadvantage to have our revenge: perceived disempowerment becoming a paradoxical, interchangeable means of escape, regarding universal worker liberation onstage and off (versus equality of convenience inside the text).

(artist: ALT3R4TI0N)

To do so is to break capital’s hold on all things demons, darkness and nature they stole and monopolized, in turn smashing their own abjection against them and breaking Capitalist Realism with our Aegis—to deny capital’s dead labor and language feeding on living labor and language according to what power and knowledge we exchange to and fro. The whore’s revenge is to break the profit motive by making a world for which it (and rape) are no longer possible using these methods; i.e., by using the same demonic and slutty language capital does, but at cross purposes: to hug the alien—not demonize it to receive state violence—thereby (ex)changing how the world is seen to begin with. We aggregate power differently than state forms, outlasting and outperforming them to dismantle their harvesting mechanisms, social and material, foreign and domestic.

Nature, then, is always a whore who punches up against state pimps to end profit as an endless structure of genocide. History more broadly could be described as whores vs pimps, hence workers vs the state; i.e., something the seemingly cannot die, but whose aforementioned whores are as imperishable as Medusa despite being beheaded.

That’s basically the gist of the whore’s revenge during the whore’s paradox (source: “A Rape Reprise,” 2024).

Furthermore, I would also reflect on the entirety of my series (doing so after having just tried to explain it to someone who had never heard of my work before); and this is what I would write (and post on the same promo page):

Sex Positivity is non-profit/entirely funded through donations and commissions; i.e., I am unemployed, and any money I raise goes towards helping the people I work with. You can donate directly to me through

• • my PayPal, but also Ko-Fi, Patreon and CashApp
  • written and illustrated commissions

as well as through any of the donation links attached to the individual model promotions; i.e., those found on the Sex Work page specifically or on the individual webpages built for my muses; e.g., Nyx’ page and the various details it contains: an Aegis for where power is found, stored and expressed!

(artist: Nyx)

Concerning what these donations and commissions ultimately go towards, this entire project is the result. Sex Positivity seeks to raise awareness and engender activism towards and from all workers, but especially sex workers and the marginalized more broadly (many of whom turn towards sex work to survive); i.e., I do sex work, myself (see: “About the Author“), and the vast majority of sex workers I operate alongside are marginalized in some shape or form. To it, the overarching goal of my work is to humanize the dehumanized by reclaiming monstrous poetic tools of dehumanization; i.e., during informed mutual labor exchange, using the dialectical-material context (and social-sexual factors) of every exchange separately and together to vividly demonstrate protest: through artistic invigilation and expression, one whose holistic, intersectionally solidarized cooperation unfolds during a larger pedagogy of the oppressed (and its modular axes of privilege and oppression synthesizing praxis, mid-duality and -opposition). Those who walk away from Omelas, we seek to amplify and mobilize our cause using what we got—to unite and stand against the state, profit and capital’s various traitors (cops, which pimps are, token or not) by reclaiming not just our bodies, sexualities and genders, but our labor and its holistic performative value: developing Gothic Communism through stochastic means and de facto education. The state from the beginning is a pimp, one that antagonizes nature as monstrous-feminine to put it (and those of it) cheaply to work; i.e., by pimping it genocidally through imbricating persecution networks guided by pre-emptive revenge labeling workers (and nature) as “terrorist,” “black,” “alien,” “witch,” and “other,” etc; e.g., Amazons and the Medusa—with Athenian women tokenizing to attack themselves and the natural world they (and other workers) belong to. In turn, sex work is the oldest profession, hence the oldest form of labor exploitation through rape (which is all that profit, hence wage and labor theft, is); the oldest form of worker revenge is the whore’s against profit, which sex workers (and by extension all workers) attain through collective protest raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness on all registers: reversing the terrorist/counterterrorist refrain (thus abjection process) through ludo-Gothic BDSM (see: footnote, above) cryptonymically playing with power as it is understood in society at large (re: Gothic poetics and the dialectic of the alien). We not only heal from rape as something to survive by playing with it; we seek systemic change and universal liberation by playfully putting “rape” in quotes, showing and hiding various things during the cryptonymy process, mid-paradox (refer to “Paratextual (Gothic) Documents” and “Audience, Art and Reading Order” for further summaries of these terms and arguments). To accomplish this, we must endure shameless tokenization, unchecked police brutality and widespread decay in the interim. Sex workers are offshoots of the Medusa, which the state has exploited since Antiquity into the present space and time; i.e., from Athens, Sparta and Rome into the First, Second and Third Reichs leading into Capitalism and Pax Americana as it currently exists. Labor has infinite value, and the elite only have what power we give them in that respect; i.e., monopolies are impossible, provided we fight back any way we can; re: by showcasing our humanity on the very fruit the elite want to harvest. On our Aegis, Medusa speaks through us, our peachy cakes and pies freezing capital Numinously in its tracks, breaking Capitalist Realism. “Stare and tremble,” indeed! (source: “My Book: Gothic Communism”).

(artist: Nyx)

Concerning this reprise, that’s the gist of things I want to supply you with, moving forward; i.e., less with actual foresight, and more the ostensible clairvoyance of someone having been here before (multiple times) and written about it (also multiple times). So, if things seem a bit structurally confusing ahead and you suddenly find yourself feeling lost in the Labyrinth, consider what I just supplied as Ariadne’s thread—not to lead you out of the labyrinth, but rather to furnish you with the clarity needed: to proceed and transform, thus subvert said maze (and its monsters) from within according to where power is stored, meaning as something alien and fetish (fearsome). Take back what they try to pimp as alien (from my abstract, modified while writing this reprise):

Simply put, Gothic has that mood, that cool factor to do the trick; i.e., by subverting monstrous language, which normally dehumanizes workers and nature through popular stories furthering abjection (us versus them): to suitably humanize the harvest, which capital (and its Realism) can only pimp out when vengefully raping nature as monstrous-feminine whore. The whore’s revenge against profit, then, is to fuck back on the same Aegis; i.e., when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis. When done correctly, its paradoxical, cryptonymic exposure will set you free (re: silence is genocide), but reversing abjection must happen together as one—per intersectional solidarity healing from rape through a shared pedagogy of the oppressed: walking away from Omelas and towards post-scarcity while becoming better stewards of nature than historically have ever existed (assimilation is poor stewardship)! Medusa demonstrates there is power in what they try to control; take it back by using it in ways they can’t steal from you! Become the Gorgon!

(artist: Nyx)

To it (and to conclude), exploitation and liberation exist paradoxically in the same half-real territories (on and offstage). From capital in small to the world at large, then, universal liberation all starts with our bodies and the labor attached to them, but also what we make as part of something bigger you can read about in these books (writ in disintegration, but living impossibly on in undead, demonic, Ozymandian versions of themselves)! Capitalism sexualizes everything but it cannot monopolize that process nor its smaller-to-bigger imbricating labor exchanges (and their modular-but-intersecting polities’ privilege/oppression). Turn said process (abjection) anisotropically against the elite; become Medusa to remind our jailors of their own colossal hubris—re: by breaking Capitalist Realism on your Aegis, humanizing the harvest to expose the state (and its proponents) as inhumane! “From cops to states to billionaires and Pygmalions, ACAB, ASAB, ABAB, APAB, etc; re: the state is straight, thus heteronormative, settler-colonial and Cartesian” (source: “Rape Reprise”)! We don’t need them; in fact, we’re better off without them!

Your Commie Mommy,

—Persephone, 3/22/2025

Thesis Paragraph: Capitalism Sexualizes Everything

“Enthrall me with your acumen.”

—Hannibal Lector, Silence of the Lambs (1991)

After deliberating about the keyword format, I’ve decided to keep them bold and color-coded to illustrate their presence in the thesis statement in a very graphical way. Many of these will have been defined already. I’m highlighting them again to show their usage as a group of interrelating terms. —Perse

(artist: Jessica Nigri)

This book wasn’t written/illustrated for Academia, but if it were and I was seriously treating it as my PhD to defend, I would argue that it addresses a knowledge gap regarding the synthesis of Gothic theory with anarcho-Communism, gender studies, ludology and Marxist argumentation (my thesis paragraph, indented for emphasis):

Capitalism dimorphically sexualizes all work to some degree, including sex work, resulting in sex-coercive media and gender roles via universal alienation through monstrous language; this requires an iconoclasm to combat the systemic bigotries that result—a (as the title reads) ‘liberating of sex work under Capitalism through iconoclastic art.’ Gothic Communism is our ticket towards that end; i.e., developing anarcho-Communism, hence a post-scarcity world without nation-states and their built-in, thus historical-material, genocide and exploitation of workers. My teaching approach stresses oppositional praxis according to sex positivity vs sex coercion when reclaiming the harmful language of stigma, bias, control, fear and hate from our colonizers (capitalists), but also power exchange and resistance as a cultural means of social-sexual catharsis and theatrical disguise; i.e., cultivating emotional and Gothic intelligence through a reclaimed Gothic mode of artistic, thus political collective/self-expression (monstrous poetics and applied Gothic theories). Capitalism sexualizes everything for the profit motive using canonical (dimorphic/Cartesian) monstrous poetics to brainwash workers and pit them against each other during Capitalist Realism (core argument); i.e., the Shadow of Pygmalion‘s monomyth/Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern: unironic rape and war are everywhere because Capitalism rapes everything for profit, including people’s minds, according to a profit motive that synonymizes all of these things. Utilized deliberately by Gothic Communism, subversive Amazonomachia‘s ‘dark forces’—its famous, Miltonian paradoxes[1b] and manifesto coordinates: the tenets, theories, and means and materials of expression, fetishes and clichés, etc—can revert Capitalist Realism’s doomed narrative of the crypt by putting “rape” and “war” in quotes, recultivating the Superstructure and reclaiming the Base during class/culture war’s camping of canon. The asymmetrical nature of guerrilla warfare obviously covers of an extremely wide range of artistic possibilities, but generally focuses on sex work and its canonical, dimorphic sexualization, or work in general as similarly sexualized, and heteronormative enforcement/the colonial binary established through regressive Amazonomachia as something to camp; i.e., through ironic kink, fetishization, and BDSM rituals/aesthetics (of psychosexual power and death, stigma and revenge, but also catharsis and transformation, etc) with demonic/undead poetics synthesized through the ‘creative successes’ of proletarian praxis as a class-conscious, ready-for-war response to/critique of capital.

Heteronormativity is obviously something to critique through our thesis argument (and its bevvy of resources), so I want to give its full definition before we proceed into the thesis body:

(from the companion glossary’s exhibit 3b: Author/artist: Meg-Jon Barker from “What’s Wrong with Heteronormativity?” featuring their 2016 book, Queer: A Graphic History.)

Heteronormativity is both highly unnatural and normalized by capital. It is the supremely harmful idea wherein heterosexuality and its relative gender norms are prescribed/enforced to normalized, institutional extremes by those in power—i.e., the Patriarchy. In Marxist terms, capitalists and state agents own, thus control, the media, using it to enforce heterosexuality and the colonial (cis-)gender binary through advertisement on a grand scale (re: the canonical Superstructure). This influence reliably affects how people respond, helping them recognize “the social world of linguistic communication, intersubjective relations, knowledge of ideological conventions, and the acceptance of the law”—re: Lacan’s Symbolic Order. Acceptance of this Order when it is decidedly harmful is manufactured consent, leading to basic human rights abuses perpetrated by the state and its bourgeois actors. Pro-bourgeois abuses happen through various concentric lenses of normativity—heteronormativity, amatonormativity, Afronormativity, homonormativity and queernormativity, etc—that appeal tokenistically to the same colonial binary and its heteronormative mythic structure; i.e., that which conflates human biology (sex and skin color), thus sex and gender roles within a transgenerational curse: the king saw the black, queer and/or female monster and went mad because he had been alienated from them and himself. The curse of the castle and the Shadow of Pygmalion, then, is reliable decay and socio-material madness felt through this engineered tension as being ultimately profitable for the elite and detrimental to everyone else (whether they’re defending the institution or not). Heteronormativity doesn’t just explain away ignominious death, but essentializes and endorses it; i.e., the hallmark couple looks happy so the system must work, right? All you have to do is conform, consume and obey…

(exhibit 0a2b1b1a: Artist, left: Devilhs; middle: Pat Benatar; top-right: Doruk Golcu; bottom-right: Angel Witch. Hysteria [also called “the wandering womb,” exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a1] is commonly portrayed in the monstrous-feminine “Medusa” hairstyle[2] as immodest; i.e., lacking decency or virtue by being visually “loud” [making unironic admonishment of such descriptive sexuality/gender a form of tone-policing: “Hush, darling!”]. But in the same breath, anxiety more broadly is a symptom of society whereupon women [or beings perceived as women] are made by men into what men want to see: a damsel who is sexy by disempowered, or “threatening” in ways they can “kettle” [to surround and attack, a police anti-protestor tactic]. This nuts-and-bolts approach gives little space for the woman to classically voice her concerns, so it surges forth from her Frankensteinian body like ghosts and lightning—a tall, imposing, undead passion of suggestibly orgasmic release that men classically view as “weakness” [which they then sexualize]. Losing control isn’t just a symptom, then, but a means to addressing larger historical-material concerns in the self-same language hijacked for proletarian dialogs: “Fuckin’ metal!”)

Please note: The thesis statement focuses more on canon itself, whereas the “camp map” is about camping everything we talk about here. The remaining ~137 pages of the thesis statement, then, are dedicated to unpacking my thesis paragraph in relation to the “Notes on Power” and “Shadow Zone” essays, the Four Gs, as well as listing most of our keywords and unpacking the core components of the manifesto tree. —Perse

Thesis Body: Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism vs the State; or, Galatea inside the Shadow of Pygmalion

Guilty as charged, but dammit, it ain’t right
There’s someone else controlling me
Death in the air, strapped in the electric chair
This can’t be happening to me
Who made you God to say
“I’ll take your life from you”?

—James Hetfield; “Ride the Lightning,” on Metallica’s Ride the Lightning (1984)

From videogames to music, movies, novels, performance art and open sex work, my base argument (thesis paragraph) is the same: that functional anarcho-Communism is queer and Gothic because it uses grassroots worker solidarity and collective labor action to cultivate horizontal (anarchistic) arrangements of power. Once internalized, said arrangements automatically and intuitively challenge heteronormativity‘s vertical arrangements of power through democratic/non-establishment participation at the linguo-material level (the Gothic has always been queer and inclusive of the demonized to varying degrees; just look at Matthew Lewis, but also Oscar Wilde, James Whale, Clive Barker, Ann Rice, Cassandra Peterson/Elvira, Susan Sontag or Vincent Price—Price in particular being a bisexual icon and famous advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and the rights of Indigenous Persons and a strong challenger to the Pygmalion ideal of a subservient Galatea (e.g., Dr. Frankenfurter and Rocky from Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1975—builder and “built,” if you know what I mean): Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism being the process of countercultural Gothic poetics as a creative rebellion against a Pygmalion-esque status quo/Shadow of Pygmalion and its profit motive and disastrous paywalls on basic human necessities (Lemmy.world: “Capitalism is the paywall of life,” 2023); re:

the patriarchal vision and subsequent shadow of any knowing-better “kings” of empire, thus capital; i.e., of male- and token-dominated industries inside the Man Box, wherein “Pygmalion” means “from a male king’s mind,” but frankly extends to all traitors (male or not): upholding profit/the status quo raping nature for profit (and those treated by the state as “of nature” for those reasons);

i.e., a profit motive challenged by Galatea herself as come alive and making her own media as a gender-non-conforming idea splintering into countless monsters spawned from a transgenerational/-continental, public Gothic imagination: the shadow of Galatea through oft-horny and very gay simulacra of sex-positive egregores, tulpas, and Yokai. We’re taking these dark forces back by “making it gay“; i.e., “camping the canon” (which the “camp map” will explain further after we’ve laid all the “map pieces” out about canon).

For the state, we are the proverbial “forces of darkness” threatening its “perfect, eternal, natural” existence (through various campy paradoxes; e.g., sexy Marx/nerd sex); for the anarcho-Communist, the state is the enemy (meaning the nation-state, but also the historical-material status quo) that exploits everyone through colonized and colonizing monstrous poetics and its arbitration by police forces. Often, these forces are hauntologized as knights and other male action heroes, or token persons inside the same Man Box as arbiters of justice; i.e., wearing the badges of state agents and de facto vigilantes that serve the status quo and enjoy its rescindable benefits, which play out in various durable stereotypes: “boundaries for me, not for thee” illustrating a double life whose alter ego/persona (secret or open) unites with the wearer’s mask-off identity to torment the underclass. It often manifests through false generosity and protection. As such, The strings attached to charity are a noose for class traitors to hang themselves with; inside a framed narrative—that is, a narrative that is both thoroughly unreliable and frames persons. Somewhere is the real killer but more than that is the structure that produces more chaos the killer can manipulate and control. Cops like to fuck us over for the state; we lie to preserve ourselves in the face of their deceptions.

In other words, Christian “charity” can manifest as class guilt and betrayal towards the go-to sacrifice by the slightly less expendable as sometimes-sacrificed when the state eats itself; i.e., owner zombies smaller than the state (the Big Zombie) buying away their systemic problems as tied to older clichés and dead metaphors. Reassigned to power as it exists currently in theatrical iterations, these self-deceptive acts of cannibalization manifest in thoroughly domesticated affairs of the heart regardless of actual theatrical potency or charm; e.g., Bill Gates (who materializes through the master of the old manor’s inheritance anxiety as a hopelessly old throwback that critiques the bourgeoisie in outmoded language: Count Dracula, or “Gates” but sexed up and/or openly ghoulish far more than he normally appears).

(exhibit 0a2b1b1b: A modern-day retelling of “Young Goodman Brown” [1835], Ari Aster’s Hereditary [2014] chillingly presents the Gothic home as devouring of the blind who, despite their Herculean efforts, are sacrificed inside a castle, inside a castle, inside a castle. Their combined, recursive downfall is a great lie built on lies, assisted partly by their inability to effectively or honestly communicate with one another towards unveiling systemic issues. The mother thinks herself freed of the former matriarch’s tyranny but through her “objective recreations” merely apes the larger scheme: the more she fights, the sweeter she tastes.

In turn, Queen Leigh [pronounced “lie”] is part of that same scheme, serving a patriarchal “top dog” as his queen bee. As such, the movie—similar to The Witch [2015] or Rosemary’s Baby [1968]—is sexist; i.e., it demonizes corrupt and hellish female forces as naturalized around patriarchal power—a male hegemon who gives orders to lesser female witches to do his bidding as the great witch of all: “Service to Satan is service enough!” It critiques Capital through the harvest without having anything good to say about witches or the harvest. In short, it scapegoats them and blames Capitalism on witches. Aster’s witch hunt stokes the middle class’s fearful fascination with the harvest through bastardized versions of itself, specifically to apologize for the grim avatars holding the sickle handle under Capitalism: the witch cop as a black rabbit or cat slicing as the Grim Reaper does the through the proverbial “wheat”; i.e., themselves and their own bodies, their own necks to lend to the blood spill’s dark harvest—an obscene perversion of paganized rites married to the Western lie of the Gothic castle’s own chronotope: the castle is the vampire [or the “mommy dom,” as I argue for Metroidvania, in the “Camping Tolkien’s Refrain using Metroidvania” subchapter].

[artist: Art Spiegelman]

“And where they burn books, they will burn people.” Most of the time, it will never affect the [non-token] class traitor to the same degree, but it is still incredibly abusive to condition someone to think they have power by putting them in positions of coercive domination over others [often by working off them through their lived trauma/criminogenic conditions]. In a world where everyone is lying, Gothic Communism conducts rebellion on the same stage, in the same costumes and masks; i.e., it doubles these perfidious black bunnies and other animalized demons and performative undead through “Trojan” variants that camp the grander canon, often in druglike ways: “Follow the white rabbit” but also the black rabbit, whose function determines their dialectical-material role during class/culture war, not aesthetics [we’ll unpack this much more when we look at Acid Communism in Volume Two’s “Call of the Wild” chapter—exhibit 56a1a1].)

Whether a lord, sheriff, queen bee, or his or her deputies, canonical praxis amounts to team cop vs team victims. Trauma, in turn, lives in the body but also the estate as an extension of personhood; i.e., inherited, hereditary trauma expressed through the historical Gothic’s site of dynastic primacy and hereditary rites: the castle intimated through the old manor or high-rise. In these places, abuse begets abuse (the father or mother abusing their children), and fascism recruits from the broken home as criminogenic. In turn, the elite’s gang of undead demon thugs cannibalize the latter through DARVO/reactive abuse: “You’re the zombies, not us!” (which will only intensify when the state crisis enters decay—i.e., throwing the state of exception ever wider and eating the workforce from the outside inwards like a piecrust towards the precious center). Not just a war on drugs, but a war with drugs and the stuff of drugs tied to smaller conflicts fenced inside larger conflicts trying to make sense of them. In the end, Capitalism is a giant lie, where fascism is one side of a murderous chameleon—not guilty of accidental confusion but deliberate deception; unmasked, they drop the mask’s friendly affect and, like Father Schedoni, have a flat affect underneath. We must expose them and this requires masks, but also a silly sense of humor tied to sex and drugs as things to camp:

(artist: Devilhs)

As Gothic Communists, we share our battlefield with these thugs and their material condition’s historical materialism. That is, our shared stomping grounds are the Gothic imagination (and its language, drugs, aesthetics and materials) on all registers, our own campy doubles subverting the usual double standards of our would “protectors” (who serve the state and protect property before people): the blood-soaked battlefields of Vietnam and other killing fields as music-tinged (the drugs, aesthetics, and music[3], etc, all yielding what Slavoj Zizek—from A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology [2012]—would call “universal adaptability,” whereupon function is determined by function/dialectical-materialism, not sloganized aesthetics); monsters and drugs are not exclusive to the elite and their dogs of war. Nor are their canonical “magic glasses”—to see the world through, hiding what the elite and their proponents are—the only prescription. We can change the prescription with a different set: dialectical-material analysis, but also enjoyment of our labor as re-seized. When worn we can see the elite and their proponents according to how they function: as vampires from outer space, brainwashing the rest of us to consume and obey until the end of time. Eventually, we won’t have to wear the glasses to see how the world works; it will become second-nature.

(exhibit 0a2b1b2: Artist, left: Luke Preece; top-middle: manedpizzawolf; bottom-middle: Patrick Connan. Plato’s allegory of the cave is primarily a visual metaphor that, under Capitalism, describes how the profit motive is guided through vicarious experience and brainless consumption that codes our behaviors. Capitalism alienates everything and everything in monstrous, heteronormative language. As I write in a now-discontinued book that has been absorbed into this one, 

The survival of neoliberalism hinges on the neoliberal’s ability to remain invisible. For example, John Carpenter’s They Live turns class theatre-going nostalgia on its head, illustrating the elite’s panoptic, ever-present desire to invade and control others through what we consume as tied to how we see the world as something to eat. This turns them into giant parasites that codify rather fittingly as vampiric aliens from outer space, and their victims into brainwashed zombies/smaller vampire offshoots. The moment this spell is broken—say, by putting on a pair of magic glasses—the elite’s power vanishes/is revealed to be an illusion. The problem is, those “still in the cave” will refuse to put the glasses on; the reason being they are so hopelessly dependent on dogma to supply their structured worldview that anything else constitutes the apocalypse [a grand revelation] as the literal end of the world. They literally cannot imagine anything beyond Capitalism, even when shown its harmful effects [source: Neoliberal and Fascist Propaganda in Yesterday’s Heroes, 2021]. 

The basic idea could be called Zombie-Vampire Capitalism, whose business-as-usual operations we’ll provide a full definition of a little later in the thesis statement. For now, just know that the concept of challenging Zombie-Vampire Capitalism has been absorbed into this book through the creation of “special glasses” that, oddly enough, are often based on the accidental perceptive elements to people who weren’t always aware of what they were doing—e.g., Milton or Radcliffe’s accidental critique of Captialism. All the same, the state-apologetic elements in their famous media results in a thoroughly “rose-tinted” “prescription” that not only blinds workers, but turns them into zombie-vampires that devour for the state through various means; i.e., by embodying the pro-state damsel, detective, demon, or dutiful, tokenized scapegoat, etc. In other words, we have to update the prescription by embodying the monstrous underclass as something to not just identify with, but see through the eyes of in order to conduct dialectical-material analysis [a concept of “monster vision” we’ll explore quite a bit during Volume Two’s Humanities primer].)

From all walks of Gothic queerness, then, labor movements treat class/culture war as something to express in monstrous language that challenges canonical Amazonomachia (“monster war,” but often with a monstrous-feminine flavor) as a heteronormative enterprise; i.e., by evoking the apocalypse to uncover and expose the division of labor as sexually dimorphic in ways that normally reward white, cis-het Christian men first and foremost, but also turn them (and their tokenized subordinates) into regimented abusers who rape and kill for the state’s profit motive: the Protestant work ethic enacted through a monopoly of violence/state of exception where said violence is always possible (from Max Weber and Gorgio Agamben, below)

• Weber’s maxim regarding the state’s monopoly of violence: “To fully rule a territory requires the authority to violently control it if necessary. This is the source of Weber’s well-known maxim: a state holds a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within its territory, meaning that violence perpetrated by other actors is illegitimate” (source: Matthew Farish and Timothy Barney’s “Maps and the State,” in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2020).
• Weber’s notion of the Protestant work ethic: “that Protestant ethics and values, along with the Calvinist doctrines of asceticism and predestination, enabled the rise and spread of Capitalism” (source: tutor2u regarding The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism); this extends to the demonization of the Catholics, the Puritans and various Protestant outlier denominations, and obviously Islam and pagan/non-Christian religions (with Communism often regarded as secular thanks to Stalin).
• Agamben’s state of exception: “A special condition in which the juridical order is actually suspended due to an emergency or a serious crisis threatening the state. In such a situation, the sovereign, i.e. the executive power, prevails over the others and the basic laws and norms can be violated by the state while facing the crisis” (source: State of Exception, 2005), which we apply to any marginalized group the state targets during crisis, moral panic and decay.

and whose steadfast practitioners, during Amazonomachia, are always putting in holy work as male action heroes (or heroes acting like cis-het men).

(artist: Andreas Marschall)

All heroes function and appear as monsters in some shape or form. Heteronormative theatre’s copaganda and Military Industrial Complex binarize monster theatricality in service of capital (thus the profit motive as something to replicate and enforce through unironic Gothic poetics/mimesis). There are “correct” male heroes organized between white and black knights, and “incorrect” male heroes who are “corrupt” in ways that destroy the established order of the athletic/athletic-adjacent conflict as lucrative, thus heteronormative (and vice versa). This historical-material gender trouble extends to female/token heroes, who either are monster girls (exhibit 1a1a1h3a2) of the traditional sort—i.e., the damsel/detective (Gothic heroine) and demon (female Gothic villain) or the foreigner whose heteronormatively assigned power conveniently challenges Western (white, cis-het) men, thus patriarchal dominance—and whose warrior-esque compromises with power are allowed for short-lived gradients: the subjugated Amazon as phallic/”like a man,” but who must eventually conform to varying degrees when the state’s perpetual crises enter decay and radicalize the heteronormative model of war at all theatrical registers on- and offstage. Until the woman or token is closeted/collared, they are afforded the same crisis of position—i.e., the white, animalized, undead/demonic enforcer as threatened by the parallel forces of darkness coming out of the shadow zone. But because women/token minorities are coded as “weaker” by canon, they will corrupt “faster” thus be closeted or buried to prevent the spread of infection (what I call the “euthanasia effect,” which I will unpack more in a moment).

Yet, even if women or token groups submit to their “correct role” in regressive Amazonomachia, segregation is historically no defense from the profit motive. Because there must always be an enemy to fight (a crisis to extend war into forever), a woman or a token minority—even when entirely submissive and bridal/slave-coded—are precious but contested property that can always turn into a “bad demon” at any moment (e.g., the wandering womb, exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a1), thus are always a threat that must be policed, often by members of their own group (cops defend property for the state; for token cops, this means themselves). The historical materialism of canonical Amazonomachia is a train of girl bosses and their witch cop/war boss variants that manifest on- and offstage as TERFs who unironically punch down against people more marginalized than them while performatively punching up against the elite, who they don’t meaningfully challenge during oppositional praxis; kettled, they instead emulate the Man Box (traditional male sexism and other bigotries tied to weird canonical nerds, who we’ll unpack in a moment) as a token assimilation fantasy—i.e., parroting the colonizer (e.g., Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, 1952). As such, they take war brides from the underclass during military urbanism, colonizing the poetic sphere and real world while furthering psychosexual violence, token “white” fragility and employing DARVO—in short, acting like white cis-het men as the prime colonizing force in polite and impolite (moderate and reactionary) forms: the white and black knight.

I’ve provided the most central keyword definitions (monster-wise) after a short list of undefined ones, below, but please consider the glossary for the undefined ones, as they are all important:

• tokenism/assimilation fantasy/minority police
• war brides (submissive class traitors/collaborators)
• TERFs and SWERFs/NERFs^[4]
• punching down
• punching up
• white (cis-het, Christian male) fragility
• gaslight, gatekeep…

…girl-boss (tokenism)

A popular moderate MO, girl bosses are usually neoliberal symbols of “equality,” a strong woman of authority who defends the status quo (an overtly fascist girl boss would be someone like Captain Israel; source: Bad Empanada 2’s “Marvel’s Israeli Superhero ‘Sabra,'” 2022). This can be the female “suit,” in corporate de rigueur, but also Amazons or orcs as corporate commodities (war bosses). Suits present Capitalism as “neutral,” but also ubiquitous; Amazons and orcs (and all of their gradients) centralize the perceived order of good-versus-evil language in mass-media entertainment. Queer bosses are the same idea, but slightly more progressive: a strong queer person of authority whose queernormativity upholds the status quo. When this becomes cis-supremacist, the boss is a TERF—an assimilated war boss who regresses to a war bride herself when decay sets in, removing token privileges from most-marginalized token to least-marginalized (canonically speaking).

witch cops/war bosses

A class, gender or race traitor dressed up in the heroic-victimized language of warrior variants of past victims. Their baleful gaze is diverted away from the elite, instead punching down at their fellow workers to break up their strikes, unions and riots; but also to tease disempowered women with the “carrot” of active, physical violence they’re conditioned to use against the state’s enemies… [abridged].

reactive abuse

Systemic/social abuse that provokes a genuine self-defense reaction from the victim, whereupon the expectant abuser “self-defends” in extreme prejudice through DARVO. Reactive abuse correlates with reactionaries defending the state—i.e., reactionary politics being a form of white, cis-het fragility (moderacy being a veiled form of this).

In Gothic terms, this threat of animalistic/chimeric and undead/demonic possession (and composite reification) is theatrical “fact” complicated by the ghosts of Marx seeking “Jewish revenge” versus members of the middle class inheriting the anxiety of their own accidents of birth haunted by the shadow of revenge manifesting through the spectre of the skeleton king as threatening to return and level everything (a concept called the Leveler, which we’ll unpack more in a moment). Cryptomimetically everything haunts the same shared oral/written language as opposing Destroyers: the “kaiju” principle.

(artist: Nunchaku)

Because the state historically-materially rejects democracy through medieval abuse, it will advertise anarcho-Communism’s subversive Amazonomachia as “dangerously different” in an animalized, undead-demonic sense, thus threatening to the canonical idea of men and women and its canonical, regressive Amazonomachia; i.e., an abject, monstrous-feminine “woman is other” (Julia Kristeva, vis-à-vis Barbara Creed and Simone Beauvoir) courted and cowed through harmful xenophobia/xenophilia—in short the slaying and fucking of monsters to various harmful degrees in the same theatrical space:

xenophobia (sex-positive or sex-coercive)

Monster-slaying. A fear of the unknown as something to exude or endure, which may take sex-positive or sex-coercive forms. Inside Gothic circles, theatrical xenophobia sits between fear of and fascination towards “the other” as a social-sexual construct; i.e., inherited either by privileged workers acting out unironic gender trouble, or minorities surviving it through their own ironic variation of gender trouble and gender parody in monstrous forms… [abridged].

monstrous-feminine

A term lifted from Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine. While Creed focuses on the desire for the cis woman not to be a victim, thus terrifying men in abject, monstrous ways (which are often then crucified by heteronormative agents, including token ones like Ellen Ripley), the fact remains that the monstrous-feminine extends to a much broader persecution network; i.e., of any “feminine” force that falls outside of what is acceptable within the Patriarchy’s heteronormative colonial binary. I have placed feminine in quotes to account for anything perceived as “feminine” thus “not correctly “male”; i.e., “woman is other” expanded to trans, intersex and non-binary persons (and the animals associated with them: bunnies, butterflies, cats, dogs, foxes, etc). This can be a male twink or vampire; the cis-queer bear’s expression of tenderness and love towards another man (or whoever they’re intimate with in whatever way constitutes intimacy for them); a female Amazon that rebels against the state, whether cis, or genderqueer in binary/non-binary ways. The possibilities for heteronormative conformity are narrow and brutal inside a vast historical-material tableau of the same-old patterns; gender-non-conformity’s ironies go on endlessly.

xenophilia (sex-positive or sex-coercive)

Monster-fucking. A love of the unknown as something to exude or endure, which may take sex-positive or sex-coercive forms. Whereas harmful (sex-coercive) xenophobia bleeds into harmful xenophilia, the sex-positive reversal of abjection and canonical xenophobia/xenophilia resists state power through covert, proletarian means; e.g., “Trojan” monsters and monster-slaying/-fucking rituals that hide revolutionary intent during liminal expressions of oppositional praxis as oft-pornographic. The monster isn’t simply someone to fuck (though it can be); it’s also someone to potentially love asexually as an “ace” friend/co-conspirator—e.g., Nimona (exhibit 56d2). As such, cathartic xenophilia extends to empathy for the wretched, whose medievalized trauma often overlaps with their sexuality and gender but doesn’t synonymize with it; indeed, cathartic xenophilia seeks to understand their rage at, and medieval alienation by, state powers (the xenomorph being a queer icon we shall examine many, many times throughout this book, but especially in Volume Two’s “Demon” section of chapters).

Monsters—specifically their killing and fucking[5]—sit within liminal expression as something to reflect on with various degrees of irony. As such, the monstrous-feminine’s prescribed, “correct[6]” devilry can take a million different “incorrect” forms—from Amazons to bears, twunks and twinks to vampires, zombies or werewolves to xenomorphs, etc—and whose mere existence intimates the practice of “sodomy” (non-PIV/extramarital/interracial sex) as a direct challenge to the (settler) colonial binary/standard, thus worthy of exile, of capital punishment, of genocide: carried out by the sexually dimorphized roles of monogamous, white, cis-het Christian warriors and wives (and their token subordinates) within a vicious-yet-sacred propaganda cycle, which I call the Cycle of Kings; i.e., part of the Shadow of Pygmalion (which we discussed earlier) and various interrelated terms (embedded for emphasis, the full definition this time):

the Cycle of Kings

Another term of mine, the Cycle of Kings is the centrist monomyth, or cycling out of good and bad kings (and the occasional queen), which extends to all the kings’ white cis-het Christian men or those acting like these men, thus warrior-minded good cops and bad cops (weird canonical nerds) apologizing for state genocide through Man Box and “prison sex” mentality arguments; i.e., within hauntological copaganda dressed up in medieval language; e.g., TERFs but also other token groups in-fighting for profit, hence dressing up in bad faith. Trapped between the past and present according to “spectres of fascism” and “spectres of Marx” (which grapple, mid-kayfabe, in anachronistic language, thereby having an emphasis on the imaginary past/retro-future, aka Fisher’s “canceled future,” vis-à-vis Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis), these dark reflections often trouble persons of the heteronormative persuasion versus those of a genderqueer persuasion. Either struggles to identify with themselves in relation to canonical propaganda dictating how non-standard deviations from canon must die; i.e., someone is always a cop or a victim, but generally with some sense of overlap, imposter syndrome and internalized stigma, bigotry, guilt and shame, etc. To it, Capitalism is always in a state of emergency/exception, and this relies on the creation of monstrous enemies (and related qualities; re: internalized stigma) to turn workers against each other (the in-group and its tokenized proponents). Doing so during state decay and regeneration (feeding vampirically on workers and nature) serves to keep labor too busy to effectively challenge the elite; i.e., by warring with one another and inside-outside themselves. In turn, these inherited confusions, guilt and mistrust are used by the elite to justify their hold onto vertical power as a structure, whereupon the calamity of war-as-an-apologetic-business—of canonically whitewashing class, culture and race war (e.g., the battle-of-the-sexes or civil rights activism)—personify in theatrical wars that extend offstage, as well as total war and shadow/proxy war on the global, non-diegetic stage (or its return home via the Imperial Boomerang/military urbanism). All collectively reek from Capitalism’s zombie-like bulk, its hellish orifices release Promethean “exhaust” during offshoots of the infernal concentric pattern.

the infernal concentric pattern

Described by Manuel Aguirre in “Geometries of Terror” (2008) as the final room, or rather a room that, per my arguments, conveys finality through the exhaustion of military optimism[7] in the face of an endless, yawning dead;

where the hero crosses a series of doors and spaces until he reaches a central chamber, there to witness the collapse of his hopes; [this infernal concentric pattern has] in Gothic one and the same function: to destabilize assumptions as to the physical, ontological or moral order of the cosmos [… It is like a Mandelbrot set (left):] finite, and yet from within we cannot reach its end; it is a labyrinth that delves “down” instead of pushing outwards. From the outside it looks simple enough: bounded, finite, closed; from the inside, however, it is inextricable. It is a very precise graphic replica of the Gothic space in The Italian […] Needless to say, the technique whereby physical or figurative space is endlessly fragmented and so seems both to repeat itself and to stall resolution is not restricted to The Italian: almost every major Gothic author (Walpole, Beckford, Lee, Lewis, Godwin, Mary Shelley, Maturin, Hogg) uses it in his or her own way. Nor does it die out with the metamorphosis of historical Gothic into other forms of fiction (source).

i.e., the infernal concentric pattern is the smoke of the ignominious dead used as a myopic screen of arrogant, Americanized Capitalist Realism—one that hides the obvious function of the free market and exploitation as an irrefutably man-made, but nonetheless brutal Cartesian, heteronormative, and settler-colonial model: profit, by any means necessary (often through a Protestant work ethic whose post-Enlightenment era of “benign” Reason demonizes medieval markers in ways useful to the state and its Radcliffean thieves; e.g., the Roman Catholics, but also the paganized Romans before them and the selectively-religious fascist “Romans” after them, etc: the First Reich, Second Reich, and Third Reich, aka Holy Roman Empire, Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany).

Furthermore, such patterns are generally archaeological and architectural in nature, speaking to the medieval idea of mise-en-abyme (“to place in abyss”) and Numinous occupations with palliative therapeutic and harmful potential, alike; re: canon vs camp, during the demonic, ergodic, concentric, anisotropic, entropic and gigantic recursions at work; e.g., Metroidvania and similar Gothic castles (or otherwise haunted mighty homes’ signature castle-narratives, mid-chronotope) relayed through endless inheritance and doomed heroic motion: death from the house birthing and eating you while exploring it through fatal homecomings. Furthermore, as things to generate and play inside for different reasons, such spaces suggest profit as normally concealing itself during the cryptonymy process; i.e., showing things normally hidden/opaque through unresolved systemic/ontological tensions, exquisitely torturous emotional distress, total imprisonment, taboo subjects, raw aggregate power, paradoxical healing and tremendous obscurity (re: darkness visible, the Black Veil, etc). The pattern, then, is Capitalism (and its deliriums) in small, hence conducive to ludo-Gothic BDSM (and calculated risk) at large when played within miniatures expressing those hypermassive/quantum things felt beyond and inside themselves.

Not only does this profit motive incentivize the state to aggregate[8] against labor solidarity‘s mere suggestion at every possible register; its resultant cycle—of state power relayed through monomythic stories that quell labor aggregation as its primary opposing force—becomes something to rescue from its own seminal tragedies of self-cannibalization (these will be mentioned in many different forms throughout this book, enough that it may be hard, if not futile to point out each time I do: “this is an apocalypse!”): the monomyth is a cryptonym[9] that disguises and apologizes for state-sanctioned genocide; i.e., all the Jedi (not just the Sith) are hauntological cops by virtue of a shared centrist function: to kill younglings before handing the sword and the magic spell (the mind trick) to the next-in-line to repeat the monomyth cycle as disseminated far and wide. Obi Wan was projecting when he said, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes!” (which is, itself, an absolute—George Lucas’ Hollywood-Marxist allegories earning their keep).

(source)

The above dissemination happens according to the monomyth being prolonged under Capitalism according to ancient theatrical traditions revived in the present in hauntological forms: the staged combat, wrestling match or team-based engagement with heroes (monsters) who appear “strong” in the dimorphic, heteronormative sense: through the sport of war with opposing teams (armies/contestants), often at an unfair advantage[10]. As mentioned a moment ago, all heroes are monsters, and any of them can “turn heel” at any moment. Always threatening to “corrupt” the whole in a theatrical sense, there are myriad double standards (and doubles). White male heroes are built to “defend” in a pre-emptive sense, thus can always become the Great Destroyer who must be “put down” after “going feral/rabid,” but are automatically given the benefit of the doubt/expected to kick a certain amount of ass (an ass-kicking quota, to serve the profit motive). Meanwhile, female/token heroes always threaten to “turn”; i.e., to revive the vengeful spirits of the colonized dead under Imperialism, which possess and take hold of them, thereby breaking the narrative (thus cycle) of war as a business. Class-war sentiment cannot be prevented, which means that token monsters/vice characters are passed off as “absolutely fine,” provided their jester’s speech (speaking truth to power) ends within sacrifice or conversion; i.e., controlled opposition. Until then, the usual suspects are squinted at suspiciously by a leery eyed Conan (classically an intolerant sexist thug who solves his problems through banditry and open violence). Through the mechanisms of capital, historical materialism predicts that the forces of darkness will always rise from hell, requiring their anticipated exorcism and smiting. Shoved back into the pit, the underclass has been scapegoated, restoring order by returning things “to normal.”

Also called the Hero’s Journey, the monomyth is a normalized rite of passage whereby a (traditionally male) child finds himself offered the “rare” opportunity to elevate through the seemingly divine provision of a sword or some such masterful weapon (which the Gothic frames as a doomed quest for mastery through the Numinous during the Promethean Quest and/or Faustian bargain—more on this deeper in the volume and later in the series). There’s many steps and moving parts following the Call to Adventure (often categorized between twelve and seventeen), but the basic gist is: offer adventure, refuse, change mind, get sword, cross boundaries, overcome trials and ordeals, kill the (corrupt, monstrous-feminine) monster, return in some shape or form changed by the quest, save the princess (from getting raped by the villain)/get the girl. Joseph Campbell is more prescriptive and optimistic, writing in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949):

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered, and a decisive victory is won: the Hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man [“bros before hoes,” I guess].

Personally, I find this whole notion incredibly dubious; i.e., harmful wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure that is generally trapped within a space chockfull of prescribed war and rape cryptonyms (not a genocide, but an “adventure”), thus meant to instruct (through prescriptive sexuality and bad education; e.g., sex education and prescribed gender roles) coercive, harmful sex as medievalized rape fantasies/appropriative peril built around the Gothic/wrestling theatrical formula as dimorphically “at war”: someone who is simultaneously “biologically female,” mentally stupid (“emotional”), and conspicuously weak must be in danger of being raped at all times so the white knight can rescue them from the black knight (who’s always supposed to lose). It’s systemic entitlement and apologia for “good” men against “bad,” as usual, but also (as we shall see) the structure that produces them as ubiquitous, lucrative and instructional inside and outside of the kayfabe‘s contest of arms, the staged combat/duel: the centrist “good war” of good cop, bad cop; babyface, heel; (boring) hero, (interesting) demon lover/vice character; American, Nazi, etc (they’re functionally in cahoots, hence no “vs”). Furthermore, there is no escaping the narrative space/structure and its didactic conventions, wherein the fear of colonial inheritance also runs deep in Neo-Gothic fiction: the chronotope as historically communicating the fear of rape, incest and murder as doomed[11] but also treacherous, committed at the hands of men who are supposed to be our protectors (the usual suspects).

(exhibit 0a2c: Artist, left: Frank Frazetta; right: Yukiko Hirai and Emika Kida. Frazetta’s girls are always animalized as intensely erotic sexpots who are being threatened by various forms of captivity by equally eroticized male power/death fetishes. The pre-fascist monarch keeping her chained and naked by his throne; the dark male rapist springing from the shadows to drag her off or, worse, her choosing to run off with him; or her [as princess or warrior-princess] acting as a performative “hyena” that submits to Conan as the visible “stud,” alpha/top dog [thus chief performer in the heteronormative hierarchy] when all’s said and done—all are fetishized/fought over, forcing the woman-as-property into an unenviable position where she is constantly naked, imperiled and animal-magnetic/chimeric, thus somehow “asking for it.” It’s the skeptical cop’s smug question, “Well, what was she wearing?” followed by the pissed-off retort, “Whatever the artist forced her to [often nothing]!” Stripping is not consent, but you wouldn’t know that from Frazetta’s work. For him, it’s normal, our Pygmalion deliberately blurring the lines between consent and refusal, thus “yes and no” through incredibly bigoted, thus harmful/sex-coercive, psychosexual stereotypes [versus cathartic ones during sex-positive forms of monstrous liminal expression, exhibit 1a1a1g3].

 Worse, these become something to mimic by imitating “the master” himself as a seasoned professional. Frazetta was a child prodigy who worked in comics since he was a teenager, and painted for decades after that. But his “style,” with all its sexist/racist baggage, is largely unchallenged in videogames [Dragon’s Crown, 2013; above] and other mediums in Gothic [thus popular] poetics today. This aesthetic can be taught to any artist, regardless of their gender or sex; e.g., John Kricfalusi’s pedophilic tendencies reflecting in his art, but also his abusive relationship with underage female artists that he worked with to draw in his problematic, nostalgic style [blameitonjorge’s “John Kricfalusi: An Open Secret,” 2019]. Things don’t stay “on the canvas,” and Ren & Stimpy [1991] was a children’s cartoon[12] full of inside adult jokes penned by a literal, confessed pedophile[13]. The same osmotic qualities extend from older palimpsests that inform culture—its consumers and commodities—as forever interacting back and forth, mimetically shaping the way that heroes, as monsters, are used to communicate, thus teach, emotional and Gothic intelligence through popular hero narratives; i.e., how monsters should appear and behave as indicative of industry-wide “open secrets.”

People love monsters; they’re the ultimate comfort food to Capitalism’s systemic bullshit, but also the ultimate didactic device from a canonical standpoint: com panis, or “with bread,” as had by companions during panis et circenses, which translates to “bread and circuses, a somewhat derisive term for food and entertainment offered by a government to soothe public discontent” [source: Merriam Webster]. It’s Pavlovian, the carrot to the stick by trotting out various spectacles that commodify struggle and resistance as heteronormatively coded in hauntological/cryptonymic language whose capitalist time-spaces further the process of abjection.

As stated earlier, games master players by coding them to act towards stigmatized enemies with heroic violence. Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy touch on this in “Little Jesuses and *@#?-off Robots” [2008] when they write:

conventional assumptions that players learn the game system to achieve mastery over it—and that this mastery is the source of the prime pleasure of gameplay—is in fact an inversion of the dynamics and pleasures of videogame play. Games configure their players, allowing progression through the game only if the players recognize what they are being prompted to do, and comply with these coded instructions [source]. 

But in truth, this applies to any game/struggle, theatrically and dialectically-materially speaking.

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

Per Anita Sarkeesian, this canonical mastery can be challenged with critical thinking skills and still enjoyed despite the problematic elements: “It’s both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects”. And indeed, I absolutely love Dragon’s Crown and Frazetta, but after I camp their unironic waifus/wheyfus [a kind of monster girl, exhibit 1a1a1h3a2] with my own subversive Amazonomachia/thicc warrior mommies. But doing so challenges the profit motive, thus historically is met with suspicion; i.e., the foreign plot; e.g., Gamergate, as per weird canonical nerds. In their eyes, I must be up to no good, “having an agenda” or “making things political.”)

Through camp’s questioning of canonical monomyths, we can spot disempowering patterns beyond that of canonical, Faustian empowerment (false power) tied to unequal material conditions and dogma: the Cycle of Kings as a both a “bad bargain” that destroys those who take part and a Promethean Quest where theft from the gods (the elite) leads to self-destruction: the invented hero is both fetishized as both a “good-vs-evil” bringer of death against a foreign enemy/plot (we’ll explain how in a bit) and expendable by design (wielding Excalibur[14] and wearing the crown is fatal to him). Simply put, it’s profitable to the elite and conducive towards disguising their aims to cycle through kings and soldiers during monstrous poetics as mask-like, imbued with temporary theatrical power (thus leading to more copaganda in the domestic sphere; re: military urbanism/optimism and the Military Industrial Complex).

As part of this grand, obfuscating cycle of self-destruction, the state exploits workers to recruit soldiers they either send abroad and commit genocide, or use to (re)colonize the homefront (re: the Imperial Boomerang) in the name of the father and one’s bloodline through patrilineal descent. A common historical materialism, then, is the collapse of said descent; i.e., the endless/circular ruin’s castle-narrative as the fatherly ghost of the counterfeit/narrative of the crypt, meaning “a false copy of the barbaric past” that seemingly goes on forever and survives all living things as a viral, souless copy of itself: “A narrative of a narrative to a hidden curse announced by things displaced from the former cause.” This narrative structure and cycle was later identified by me in videogames during my own graduate work/master’s thesis on the Metroidvania‘s chronotope (a story told through recursive/ergodic motion [endless and performed through non-trivial effort—from Espen Aarseth[15]] through a Gothic castle, which we’ll examine more in during the “camp map,” but also in Volume Two when we look at Team Cherry’s 2017 Metroidvania, Hollow Knight, exhibit 40h1/i).

While queer intersectionality is important during mise-en-abyme/framed (concentric, unreliable) narratives, the gendered politics of the canonical imaginary medieval tends to frame the monarchs of the castle as male and female (which so-called “Male Gothic” explores through direct confrontation and combat, whereas “Female Gothic[16]” gingerly investigates through a process called “armoring” lest the effeminate detective swoon and perish); i.e., the male skeleton king, dark-skinned barbarian horde, or dragon lord and the female “phallic woman“/Archaic Mother:

phallic women

The cock of the state. A monstrous-feminine archetype predicated on active, penetrative violence (or scapegoated for it; e.g., the trans woman as a “woman with a penis” trope). Canonical phallic women are female characters, villains, and monsters (often Amazons, Medusas or something comparable) who behave in a traditional masculine way—though generally in response to patriarchal structures with an air of female revenge; e.g., Lady Macbeth from Macbeth… [abridged].

(artist: Patrick Brown)

Archaic Mothers (and vaginal spaces)

The womb of nature. An ancient, monstrous-feminine symbol of female/matriarchal power. In Gothic stories, the Archaic Mother (and her space) is generally something for the canonically male/phallic woman to slay and rape (as per the Cartesian Revolution)—e.g., Samus being the “space” variant of a knight or Amazon, specifically a subjugated, TERF Amazon killing Mother Brain, the Dark Mother, in service of the Galactic Federation and “the Man” (the entire Red Scare’s class character dialog being displaced to outer space) [… abridged; see: “War Vaginas” for more on Metroid’s vaginal spaces].

One of the most famous Archaic Mothers is the Medusa, but she takes many similar forms: the transgenerational undead preserved as living latex, leather or clay that comes alive like a gargoyle to seek indiscriminate vengeance against the living for having been wronged by proponents of capital, Cartesian thought, patriarchs, etc.

Archaic or phallic, either monster traditionally belongs to a heteronormative mythic structure/Symbolic Order, both of which Gothic-Communist poetics lampoon, of course (exhibit 1a1c): the hero-monster as something to fear and kill, but also to romance in a dated courtly sense—i.e., to worship, serve and fuck, but also belittle and mock through private/open schadenfreude (evoking taboo sex in the process: mythical rape, sodomy and incest, but also the enigmatic kink of torturous/exquisitely “torturous” sex during demonic BDSM rituals that can be camped during ludo-Gothic BDSM, but not by default; e.g., Ann Radcliffe’s “demon lover” as something originally devised for/mass-marketed to privileged white women; i.e., to puzzle over when navigating their own trauma as a protected class inside abject operatic spaces: the recycled fabrications of the musical castle and its paradoxical panoply of rape, forbidden desire, taboo sex and Certain Doom). Angela Carter’s adage[17], then, proves that such unironic practices (and the anachronistic residents that call them home in dated locales) haven’t gone anywhere; the Gothic—as much as it ever has—remains very much alive in our own imperiled sphere, including the monomyth as thoroughly haunted by the profession as cautionary in different directions. This can be a moral panic, but also camp as an ironic pedagogy of the oppressed reclaimed through the same basic schtick to unlearn shame, self-hatred, and dysphoric/dysmorphic incorrectness as taught through Renaissance canon onwards. “We [are living] in Gothic times,” either way.

(exhibit 1a1a1a1_a: Artist, left: J. Scott Campbell; bottom-middle: Fabián L. Pineda; right: Tom Jung. The monomyth and infernal concentric pattern are traditionally heteronormative, thus sexually dimorphic canon [dogma]; iconoclastic examples can subvert heroic double standards and bellicose, phallic language/rites of passage, but still work from positions of irony that parody heroic conventions and apocrypha [a popular, didactic story generally regarded as fictional; i.e., a “tall tale” connected to folklore and oral traditions] by toying with them during oppositional praxis as dialectical-material. In other words, iconoclasts tend to mutate what is already present according to what the artist knows about propaganda, thus makes and embodies as part of Gothic counterculture.

Consider videogames [my domain]. As a queer, Gothic ludologist and anarcho-Communist, I can attest to how genderqueer poetics would happily poke fun at Link’s “Master Sword” shooting “bolts of power” when “fully charged”—a mechanic borrowed from Star Wars [1977], Conan the Barbarian [1981, which was reviewed as “Star Wars made by a psychopath,” which applies as much to Rob Howard as it does John Milius] and even older palimpsests [such as the legend of King Arthur] copied by Pan’s own “sword” in Hook [1991] or Simon Belmont’s elongating “chain whip” in Castlevania [1986] or Mega Man’s “mega buster” [1987] or Samus Aran’s “beam cannon, missile launcher and bombs” [1986] or, hell, Mario’s “mushroom” helping him “grow” [1985]: canonical war is full of violent, harmful innuendo; e.g., Macbeth’s cycle of war as watered with blood: “I have begun to plant thee, and will labour / To make thee full of growing.” As we shall see, there is always an enemy to kill or secret plot to uncover, thus revealing an enemy from within who “originated” from outside: the ghost of the counterfeit’s false copy of a corrupt backstabber/doppelganger. Instead of an invincible barbarian/enemy at the gates, the white-knight warrior of light faces a corrupt, dark version of himself—a shadow person or Gothic double:

 

[Artist: Gabriel Dias. Keeping with the idea of paradox, the opposition between Link and “his shadow” is both thrown into doubt and extremely dogmatic. On one hand, it’s entirely divorced from material critique in favor of a basic value judgement—literally light vs dark, wherein light is canonized as “good” and dark as “bad”; there’s no in-between or class character because the story has been displaced to a fantasy tableau emptied of earthly history. It’s trope-heavy and mechanical. As we’ll explore later in the thesis and rest of the book, though, class character often comes from gender trouble and parody within canon as thrown into personified doubt [a rather literal embodiment of self-reflection]; i.e., in relation to these prescribed gender roles as “ghost-like” or otherwise undead. Ontologically challenged, Dark Link might not “belong” to Link at all; he might simply be an uncanny simulacrum or likeness that triggers the presumed owner to attack [thus confirm his suspicions by eradicating his fears]. Doing so exposes his own flaws as a self-described “hero,” but also reveals his open-secret intended function: to kill the enemies of the state. The enemy must die, trapping the hero in a frozen state of inaction as they lie caught between their orders and their conflicted sense of identity.]

As a whole, videogames have served as neoliberal, music-heavy copaganda since the 1980s—first, based off Star Wars as franchised, but also Aliens [with the original, self-contained text for each being neoliberal critiques that, in their franchised forms, became operatically neo-conservative] as monomythic canon attached to real-world geopolitics: the American revenge fantasy after a re-freeing [deregulation] of the world market post-Bretton-Woods under global US hegemony. The common thread to these canonical remediations is a quest-for-mastery meta-narrative whose videoludic simulation of war helps acclimate the state’s children to endless future war through the Hero’s Journey as forever expanding on- and off-screen: made for bigger and better worlds, but also bigger (thus more phallic), traditionally masculine weapons; i.e., a heteronormative mode of ludic wish fulfillment that routinely sets the player on the path to prescribed empowerment, thus appearing to realize the impossible promise [not the universal fulfillment] of sanctioned sex by a) rescuing the damsel and slaying the cock-blocking [ostensibly fascist/gay] dragon/minotaur as something to stab or shoot [exhibit 51d4a1/2] and b) facing off against the monstrous-feminine not just as not-white, female-coded, and non-Christian, but somewhere in between all of these things; e.g., orcs, drow and goblins; Dark Link, Protoman/Zero [exhibit 982b] or Pan’s shadow as the genderfluid, potentially trans, non-binary, or intersex false hero/man, dark twink, “phallic woman,” etc; but also Samus as the phallic-woman tomboy acting like Rambo to serve the state, or Odessa from Overwatch 2 [2022]:

“Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty!” [from Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy].

I’ve spent my life subverting them, treating Samus as having the potential to not be a palingenetic handmaid [exhibit 38c1b] or Odessa/Zarya as something other than unironic girl/queer war bosses [exhibit 100c4/ exhibit 111b] while also having a great deal of fun with twinks in iconoclastic videogame fan art that treats the twink-ish hero as the non-bellicose sub [exhibit 93a].)

(source)

Fascism and centrism are two sides of the same coin, wherein the fear of the outsider as outside becomes a fear of the outside within: the imaginary inside/outside infiltrator as correct-incorrect, becoming uncanny as per Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis as an extension of cryptonymy that also connects to the narrative of the crypt as a Gothic chronotope during the process of abjection. Inside-outside the narrative of the crypt as a half-real, parallel time-space that doubles the real world and vice versa, the state’s target audience is conditioned through canonical media to forget the invincible barbarian enemy[18] from elsewhere, which is suddenly viewed as the traitor “among us” (the status quo) having formerly come from outside before stabbing the in-group in the back; i.e., when Capitalism’s perpetual crises start to decay and fascism takes root, these play out through the process of abjection as making monsters and killing them in and outside of media/real life. But because there is no outside-text, all of this happens within the home as inherited, full of peril and anxiety exacerbated by capital’s creature-factory of extenuating circumstances: more and more complications equal more and more war and rape, thus profit. The graveyard becomes a mine.

We’ll continue unpacking the nature of these structured crises and their mire of paradoxes. For the moment, know that it creates a vicious cycle of historical materialism predicated on the posturing of masculinity as threatened: the spirit of the Leveler. This presence actually stems from medieval thought—death being the great leveler of kings and peasants alike—but also the fascist idea of the historical cycle: “‘Hard times create strong men, strong men create weak times, weak times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.’ The quote, from a postapocalyptic novel by the author G. Michael Hopf, sums up a stunningly pervasive cyclical vision of history—one where Western strategists keep falling for myths of invincible barbarians” (source: Bret Devereaux’ “Hard Times Don’t Make Strong Soldiers,” 2020). Just as Caesar historically demonized those he conquered as savages fighting dirty from the shadows against the state (not for the state as fascists do), videogame companies (and other mediums) use canon to connect state crises to the embarrassing destruction of what was built—i.e., senseless destruction of the warrior’s hall, versus the “useful” battles of the past that led to Pax Imperium in its current, glorious form (for us, Pax Americana): the soldiers of the present must appear strong by avoiding degenerate weakness and sacrificing themselves; lacking this strength, “true evil” first gains a foothold, then ultimately prevails by destroying Rome from within. The white knight becomes black and that’s apparently why we’re all dead and fucked.

Of course, it’s not nearly that simple (the myth of the shadow play is that it is devoid of meaning; the myth of monsters/duels is that they are “just” spectator sports that stay onstage/on-canvas):

(exhibit 1a1a1a1_b: Bottom-middle: source [“Chuck Wepner: Meet the Heavyweight Boxer Who Inspired Rocky,” 2020]. The duel sits in the shadow zone to perform power with monsters, sexuality and paradox; the doubles and their trademark violence/”violence” glide between fiction and reality on- and offstage diegetically and during para- and meta-textualities that conceal class character as active or repressed [Wepner sued Sylvester Stallone for basing the 1975 Rocky screenplay off his life; they settled the case outside of court]. Life imitates art and vice versa through [crypto]mimesis of a particular kind: war personified in the traditional masculine way—through combat.

Yet, in the Gothic model there’s plenty of room for canonical/campy gender trouble and gender parody according to Gothic devices that “spice up” the monsters doing battle: terror and horror, the Black Veil, the surface of the veil, the explained supernatural, demon lovers; and various class, race and gendered stigmas in their animalized, undead/demonic chimeras, composites and ghosts. The resulting mise-en-abyme might see like Shakespeare’s bad play, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” but therein lies the paradox: the battle as meaningless, doomed and significant at the same time [i.e., Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940]. People love sex and violence for a variety of reasons; the theatre is one place where these monsters—and their tremendous energies, paradoxes, and vitalities—run well and truly wild. To “pull a Frederic Jameson” and ignore these spectacular sites/sights of campy combat and their profoundly artistic deceptions is to ignore much of their allegory and the larger conversation being had in the language of the vulgar [common] masses and the elite, the plebian and patrician. Amidst the oscillation of the stage, we’ll have to tune in, but also contribute, if we want to recultivate the Superstructure and reclaim the Base; you’re sure-as-fuck not going to do it with fancy essays that no one reads except academic eggheads[19].)

(exhibit 1a1a1a1_c: Artist: Jeso. “Did he who make the lamb make thee?[20]” The Amazon is a tremendously complicated monster because it is both seen as untamable and hunted by man, but also tamed through the wearing of “maiden armor” that fetishizes her “maidenhead/bride price” as “scrappy.” It panders to the wet dream of the tomboy as animalized, the tiger an anthropomorphic “metamour” shared between viewers but also class, gendered and racial strata for or against the status quo during liminal expression. She is “phallic”-thus-manly at the same time as she is traditionally feminine, baring her tigress “fangs” to symbolize her “combative” potential [erotic energies; i.e., “fight like a tiger, fuck like a tiger” or maybe the opposite: “tiger in the streets, mouse in the sheets,” etc] while fighting tooth and nail and showing off her female warriors’ “assets” in, for all intents and purposes, an “actual [meaning ‘asexual’] duel” between her foil, the black-and-red dragon. But no duel is ever fully “ace,” nor canonical; there’s always something being fought over/resisted. A tremendous amount of innuendo, thus cryptonymy, is available for revolutionary purposes if the artist is of a particular socio-political leaning. Communists like monster sex and violence, too; we’re just sex-positive about our nostalgia and use it as de facto educators to raise the cultural bar regarding emotional/Gothic intelligence, thus class consciousness.)

And yet, crisis, exposure and vulnerability (above) is part of the paradox of power inside canon: the duel as the lingua franca[21] of the masses (indented for clarity):

Our psychosexual exhibit explored overt sex work and BDSM presentations that stage various forces, presenting them as “dueling” one another in “live” performance art; i.e., practiced rehearsals that codify societal values that exist chaotically between monsters adjacent to violence and sexuality as blurred/”at war.” It’s controlled chaos, walking several tightropes at once during a larger balancing act. In pugilistic media, a good duel between knights follows the same theatrical paradoxes using the same monsters for the same reasons of allegory (concealment) and apocalypse (revelation, often violent). It should make you forget its staged nature during the ensuing bedlam. Even the classical gladiators were well-trained and expected to put on a show, not kill each other. The idea is to make you forget it’s staged, without killing both men. Throw in a bit of theater (two or more masked men dueling over a woman or some such honor) and just the right amount of blood, sweat and tears, and everything should come together to walk the tightrope between fantasy and reality.

Of course, the paradox remains that it’s an unsafe event, but the expectations of violence are managed within the colosseum circle as the place where the magic happens, or the “squared circle” of the 20th century boxing ring. In the case of contact sports, there’s a variety of rules and judging thrown in, but sometimes you just have a white horse and a dark horse utterly wailing on each other and staying up by mere magic. That can go either way and is the kind of “theatre drama” that sports fans love (the vicarious reconciliation of physical, fetishized violence in society told through theatre’s captive honor and sanctioned bloodletting per theatrical sacrifices: the matador and the bull as “sexy beasts”). Granted, the “truth” of it is still a distraction from everyday life, but in kayfabe war narratives the allegory of these shadowy caves can speak to various dialectical-material truths hidden among the lies;. i.e., the paradox of truth told with lies, often bigoted ones: the kayfabe stage language of the American vs the Nazi, Communist or racist caricature, but also the white knight/god versus their dark “double” fighting within the perilous language of swordplay as color-coded, animalized, sexed-up: the fencer’s cryptonymy of the bind, the trap, the feint hiding and exposing class/culture war simultaneously on the imagery of the surface of the veil (if you see a furry artist, they probably have increasingly NSFW versions of their characters; their characters denote hidden struggles and desires regardless of how clothed or naked they are):

(artist: Jeso)

The praxial role of centrist theatre is designed to make you forget that either knight is a killing implement useful to the state, in unironic forms, but also whose tightrope can be walked by ironic performers camping the same theatre props to sneak in an antiwar narrative—often through the underdog trope; e.g., George Lucas’ 1977 Star Wars. But this can just as easily become franchised and swing the other way using the same contested iconography (the paradox of camping Capitalism is that we must do it within capital, thus using the same dark forces but for proletarian purposes; re: “darkness visible,” and deliberately so).

In the canonical sense, state power and its inventions must be threatened in order to hold onto itself and acquire glory (often in a blaze thereof; e.g., Davy Crocket’s “remember the Alamo” as played by John Wayne or some-such doofus). “Armor” is both the exposed spot for the arrow to go into and the unpierceable midsection, Smaug’s waistcoat of unbreakable diamonds. As such the proliferation of counterfeits become their own place of concealment and displaced trauma within the transgenerational curse as the power fantasy’s shadow zone, desperately haunted by unironic tyranny reaching out of the aforementioned vanishing point to choke us with its mighty rock ‘n roll fist. Men seemingly can do as they wish, here, playing around inside while the roles of everyone else appear to be extremely limited. In truth, gender trouble and gender parody are potent weapons that allow the iconoclast to fuck with the formula through their own reinventions of old falsehoods (my favorites, again being “gay hobbits,” but also “imagine Conan with a pussy”). The idea is to break canon ourselves because it’s not going to break by itself; e.g., Mad Max as a cowboy of the postapocalypse (-revelation) showcasing our white savior duking it out with a stand-in for Australian Indigenous Peoples dressed up in psychosexual fetish fear. And yet, George Miller would camp his own canonical ghost of the counterfeit with Fury Road (2015), decades after The Road Warrior (1981) “found” an oral recording of the hero addressing fears of societal collapse tied to real-life fuel shortages (manufactured scarcity): “Fury[22]” Road being the virago Furiosa breaking free from bondage and spelling the old tyrant’s doom (fittingly played by the same actor from the 1979 original; i.e., a perennial scapegoat).

(source)

Therein lies the rub: Capitalism isn’t “corrupt” or faulty when exploitation or bigotry happen; it’s working as intended, creating crises and bigotries as needed in order to exploit workers through theatrical war. The infernal concentric pattern during the Cycle of Kings is the merely monomyth as stuck within itself, denying escape through live burial and trapping the hero in a hell of their own making but also one that was passed down from father to son, Star-Wars-style. Like that story, the origins of patrilineal descent (and its much-touted collapse; e.g., Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” 1839) date back to Antiquity (the “Fall” of Rome being a colossal lie; re: fascism) and like Antiquity valorize the masculine implements of war as “doomed but glorious”: the sword as a sexy-equals-power-and-status symbol that promises promotion and material elevation through ritualistic conquest/combat: the duel as being fought over sexy-looking “helpless” monsters (the damsel, a kind of “non-male” monster in her own right) by sexy-looking “good” monsters (male action heroes) killing “bad” monsters (medieval, pre-fascist black knights, but also people of color as dark, marauding barbarians, thieves, pirates, mercenaries/blackguards, rapists, and tricksters): demonic and undead masks that hide power levels and intent during theatrical exchanges written on their surfaces that also give the wearer some sense of plausible deniability—i.e., they’re “acting” out forbidden knowledge/power exchange with “demons” and communicating trauma and decay with the “undead.” In all of these cases, the Gothic, per Segewick, sexualizes its surface imagery.

Another name for this “Cycle of Kings” and its operatic sexiness is the Promethean Quest/awesome mystery (from Mary Shelley’s “Modern Prometheus” and Rudolph Otto’s Numinous/mysterium tremendum); i.e., the search for sword-like power as self-destructive (the Roman fool’s sword to fall upon). Whereas the monomyth unironically fetishizes[23a] the sword and its kink-like usage (denoting unusual or theatrical sexual activity) as a phallic passing-of-the-torch, the infernal concentric pattern treats the whole ordeal as thoroughly doomed within the grander chronotope (re: a time-space, from Mikhail Bakhtin; used in his sense of the “Gothic chronotope” or castle and its castle-narrative): the skeleton king as one’s ultimate doom fated by the writing on the walls (or voices coming from inside the walls), but also the sexual imagery on the surface of things dueling back and forth (which, in the Radcliffean tradition, operates as a Black Veil inside a closed space of terror and horror for the Gothic heroine and demon lover to wander around inside, or the disempowered/emasculated male hero; e.g., the Lovecraftian scientist. We’ll unpack these Gothic terms when discussing Metroidvania’s “ludo-narrative BDSM” during the “camp map”). In this sense, the popularity of the monomyth during seminal get-togethers like Star Wars remains entirely haunted by “Darth Vader” as the fascist “death father” who threatens to turn the young knight errant, “Luke Skywalker,” into a false copy of the black knight instead of a white knight as also being a false copy (exhibit 93b1b)—the horror being there is no escape from the death knight because white knights serve the state, thus conduct or assist in genocide during the return of the good king/revenge of the bad king but also the white and black knight/medieval cop as a zombie/vampire class traitor to a matter of degree, repeating Conan’s classic answer to “What is best in life?” in bad faith: “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women!” In the neoliberal, hyperreal[23b] sense, it’s the imaginary past come back to haunt the position of the hero as something to swap consumers in and out of for profit, but it’s still the ghost of the castle as inherited; it’s just forged in a neoliberal sense, meaning privatized, digitized: the treasure map as fake, but covering up the destroyed reality behind itself until it starts to (in the Gothic sense) denote the decay behind itself within or upon itself—i.e., the canceled retro-future. As part of the ludic scheme between the player and the gameworld (or the power/values shared through any vicarious relationship between customer and story as action vehicle), the feudalistic power trip conveys dynastic primacy through said scheme as doomed.

Capitalism is always in crisis/policing itself through class-dormant nightmares that assist the profit motive, but the degree to the crisis and its decay determines the degree to how “corrupt” a hero appears; i.e., how demonic/undead and heartless they look on the surface of themselves as a kind of theatre mask belying the myth of male power. The greater the crisis, the more Capitalism’s bloodless, pure-white façade begins to decay towards a dark, medieval one, its pre-fascist veneer announcing a hidden function of it and the state, Zombification/Zombie-Vampire Capitalism:

Zombification/Zombie-Vampire Capitalism

The death of ethical parody and its replacement with “blind” forms; e.g., Zombie Simpsons. In “Zombie Simpsons: How the Best Show Ever Became the Broadcasting Undead” (2012), Dead Homer Society writes,

By almost any measurement, The Simpsons is the most influential television comedy ever created.  It has been translated into every major language on Earth and dozens of minor ones; it has spawned entire genres of animation, and had more books written about it than all but a handful of American Presidents. Even its minor characters have become iconic, and the titular family is recognizable in almost every corner of the planet.  It is a definitive and truly global cultural phenomenon, perhaps the biggest of the television age.

As of this writing, if you flip on FOX at 8pm on Sundays, you will see a program that bills itself as The Simpsons. It is not The Simpsons. That show, the landmark piece of American culture that debuted on 17 December 1989, went off the air more than a decade ago. The replacement is a hopelessly mediocre imitation that bears only a superficial resemblance to the original. It is the unwanted sequel, the stale spinoff, the creative dry hole that is kept pumping in the endless search for more money. It is Zombie Simpsons (source).

Zombification results from people living under Capitalism, a system that discourages them not to think for themselves, but also to violently attack people who try. Zombie-Vampire Capitalism is when Capitalism becomes “feral,” entering a fascist state of decay—whereupon violent, pro-state zombies suddenly appear and attack rebellious workers, “eating their brains” (symbolizing an attack on the rebellious mindset). Being the target of the state in this manner means you have fallen into the state of exception—disposable zombie fodder even more useless to capital than the zombie heroes[24] the state endlessly sends after you.

This decay is Capitalism defending itself; i.e., through a radicalizing of the feeding process in order for the state to survive.

The centrist, then, is the good hero—a canonical version of the “himbo” (or herbo) meathead who, even when faced with doubt at the old sage’s orders, remains canonically heroic by preserving the fascist’s essential role in disguising what Capitalism is: a giant vampire/zombie that makes smaller vampires and zombies to serve the will of all-powerful old men (emblematized in the Jungian/monomythic sense as good wizards/sages and evil wizards/necromancers). This evocation of the fascist in pre-fascist language is a kind of post-fascist rhetoric; i.e., made after the fall of the Third Reich, implying a cartoon version of the quintessential bad guy for the good guy to stomp onstage and off. It becomes blind pastiche/parody (from Fredric Jameson’s “blank parody[25],” meaning it lacks a conscious class character), but also a factory designed to make good guys and bad guys that acclimate future children to the larger indoctrinating process: of endless wars’ cops and “criminals” (victims) working in tandem/cahoots as class traitors against the state’s real victims, the underclass (cops are class traitors who, generally from the middle class, betray the class interests of the working class/proletariat for the owner class/bourgeoisie; refer to Howard Zinn’s discussion of this principal in relation to slavery under American Liberalism in A People’s History of the United States); i.e., the middle management of a neoliberal pecking order of staged theatre and its class argumentation as thoroughly armed, muscled and aggressive (indented for clarity):

Management of exploitation under Capitalism is tiered, pyramid-style—i.e., the top, middle and bottom; or lords, generals/lieutenants, and grunts according to corporate, militarized, and paramilitarized flavors (which often intersect through aesthetics and social-sexual clout). This “pecking order” translates remarkably well in neoliberal copaganda, whose bosses, mini-bosses, and minions deftly illustrate Zombie-Vampire Capitalism in action; e.g., Reinhardt Heydrich or Ian Kochinski/Caleb Hart (the latter two who we’ll discuss in Volume Three’s Chapter Three and Four) as “middle-management” desk murderers in a bureaucratic sense (which sits alongside the middle class, in a class sense—with both defending capital as a perpetually decaying structure that operates through wage/labor theft according to weaponized bureaucracy during crisis, class sentiment and Faustian bargains; i.e., harmful conditioning whose disguised ultimatums prey on various stigmas, biases and dogma riddled within canon to condition their employees to fight the good fight against the underclass as an advertised threat loaded with connotations of foreign/internal plots.

Erstwhile, as said “threats” are met with waves of terror, vice-character personas, and moral panics, they splash back into these same paranoid workers; they are slowly convinced to surrender total power to the elite under perceived states of emergency against imaginary enemies, trading basic human rights for false power and genocidal legislation inside the zombie police state[26] (neoliberal illusions of “hollow victory” and Quixotic moral superiority/exceptionalism). It’s a scam, a bad game with only one rigged winner: the owner class franchising war as copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex through war simulators. The illusion, like a franchise, becomes something to grow into and endorse more and more as time goes on; i.e., into adulthood; e.g., child soldiers charging from Mega Man into Mega Man X as an increasingly adult take on the forlorn hope (the military expression for a suicide mission/death charge):

(exhibit 1a1a1a2: Continuing with the Star Wars pastiche, Mega Man—after miraculously “saving the world” with a big explosion [on par with the Death Star]—becomes a general, being “rewarded” with a conspiracy that extends the conflict indefinitely through an imagined cabal of dark rebellious forces. Touted as a “rebel,” he and his “freedom fighters,” aren’t rebels at all because they’re always acting like cops in service of the state; i.e., class traitors hunting down their opponents using a kill list. Simply put, he’s the mercenary who bought into his own whitewashed legend: that he is a goody-little-two-shoes and not actually a robotic hitman treating the state’s enemies [called “Mavericks”] like disposable, worthless scrap—a payday stuck on loop, game after game in-text but also across an entire series of similar excursions.)

As “green biker dude’s” ignominious death becomes a meme (mirroring the X-wing fighters dying next to Luke during the canal chase), X becomes desperately valorized as the Great White Hope/one last chance—i.e., Star Wars minus the antiwar allegory of the first film and all of the musical/visual bombast of the sequels. The indoctrination becomes a giant lie built on older lies: the hero’s destiny as a walking robot corpse foretold by the most exciting[27] fantasies of a child’s life (nostalgia-wise) used to assuage their growing fears about war and death all around them, but also their material conditions as threatened by the much-touted “end of the World,” Communism. The label and its prescribed manifestations must be fought tooth and nail during a never-ending shouting match (or throwing of “lemons,” in Mega Man’s case). Its ubiquity and regressive lack of irony (thus dormant class character) is sobering and doomed. You gotta camp it, because the cheap comic-book-grade lore and legendarily awful voice acting are practically begging for it.

As a part of this state-sanctioned wrestler’s kayfabe, the fascist is the heel—a “corrupt,” bad cop who the good cop (the babyface) normally scapegoats to help the state save face during staged, deus-ex-machina combats. In turn, their combative, bread-and-circus spectacles continuously shape public opinion regarding war as legitimate, but also as a business at home and abroad that colonizes (thus drains) both sides.

There’s even a failsafe: In times of extreme decay that threaten the state’s existence, the state and its rulers allow the white knight and black knight to team up during the cycle of war dressed up in the language of the Crusades; i.e., giving the disgraced cop a chance—if not at total redemption, then one last deputized hurrah before they’re banished, exorcized and/or killed to prove they’re not a heretic (the sacrifice of the anti-hero to defend Capitalism; the redemption of the fallen, tragic hero); i.e., a bad, vigilante maverick to help tag-team, thus gang up against and destroy the one thing that can actually take power away from the elite: Communism, aka labor presented as the monstrous-feminine, the person-of-color zombie or queer vampire inside the state of exception/emergency (and various other stigmas we’ll unpack throughout the book). It’s death by conversion therapy (which is genocide). All of this happens by design/is built into the state’s Superstructure as groomed by the elite (who control the Base, thus can afford to build expensive illusions). The middle-class surrender their power to the elite, who groom the class traitor into a dehumanized state thug that is a smaller version of them, a legitimate arm of the police state (the good cop) and a vigilante homunculus (the bad cop) sculpted to exploit others in order to survive but also experience pleasure: to eat their flesh and drink their blood (dressed up as a religious experience tied to familiar organized religions; e.g., transubstantiation).

As a small, obvious vampire, the fascist becomes the perfect scapegoat to hide the state’s vampiric/zombifying design behind: a smaller, displaced parallel and vindictive sellout who criminalizes and bleeds everyone dry around him; i.e., a false revolutionary that serves old money behind the veneer of false rebellion[28], thus false power/guerrilla warfare as stolen through murder (commonly symbolized as blood or sanguine through the execution of blood libel/quantum by a fascist Count) but also acquired/kickstarted by Faustian bargains (that is, it is offered to them by someone instead of found/stolen from the gods like the Promethean Quest is—i.e., given/accepted in a self-destructive sense from a treacherous old man/necromancer Master to a dumb, deceived and self-deceiving apprentice; e.g., the Emperor from Star Wars to Anakin Skywalker but also Mortanius from Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen to that game’s titular hero). Tempted with revenge, the white knight becomes become the black knight: blind, feral and cruel, their pearly Excalibur twists into a dark Soul Reaver/Great Destroyer version of itself that—along with the rest of their altered appearance—echoes the dragon lord/skeleton king’s vengeful wrath during a dark, perennial, orgy-of-violence Grim Harvest/killing time (a perversion of paganized harvest and fertility rituals; e.g., Halloween and Easter):

And the angel of the lord came unto me
Snatching me up from my place of slumber
And took me on high and higher still
Until we moved to the spaces betwixt the air itself
And he brought me into a vast farmlands of our own Midwest
And as we descended cries of impending doom rose from the soil
One thousand nay a million voices full of fear
And terror possessed me then
And I begged, “Angel of the Lord what are these tortured screams?”
And the angel said unto me,
“These are the cries of the carrots, the cries of the carrots!
You see, Reverend Maynard
Tomorrow is harvest day and to them it is the holocaust!” (Tool’s “Disgustipated,” 1993).

Jokes aside, when the proverbial Dark Lord does return, Caesar the Just becomes Caesar the Tyrant/Zombie Caesar, and his fellow men must put him down to save the leader (and them) from himself. Like a vampire, they stab him to death, but also betray him and steal his power with a proverbial stake through the heart; like a zombie, they cut him to pieces (mirroring the ancient legend of Osiris). In short, the hero’s staged fall from grace embodies the infernal concentric pattern that revives and reassembles the pieces of the puzzle that revive the dead tyrant. Instead of a simple guardian, they become “fallen,” the anti-hero as a bonafide reaper who threatens total cataclysm by slowly becoming the Leveler (the medieval death-incarnate) as the decay not simply occurs, but expands and accelerates. The closer to death the state is, the more destructive the hero—the more mad, dark, and glorious. He’s the ultimate badass, but also the ultimate scapegoat to blame, thus sacrifice (the medieval-grade village assignment of blame/veneration taken to a macro level). Cut off his head, apologize for his actions (never blame the state), rinse and repeat. The world is “saved” from Kain thanks to the Belmonts… for now.

(exhibit 1a1a1b: The vampire/necromancer is both an anti-Semitic and pre-fascist trope that informs post-fascist rhetoric concealing American fascism festering under neoliberal illusions. The evil wizard gleefully has Kain killed, then offers him revenge and liberation from torment: “You will have the blood you hunger for!” All he has to do is kill the necromancer’s enemies for him. No biggie! It’s a combination of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus [1604] and Jew of Malta [1590], presenting the Jew as a scheming bloodletter who a) trades his soul for forbidden knowledge, per Faust; but also whose b) sanguine usury is ultimately quelled by killing the Jew. In fascist myth, the Jew is the backstabber of the Germanized soldier—i.e., an act of betrayal that justifies demonizing both sides, but having one be sacrificed to the “benefit” of the other. “Benefit” is in quotes because vampirism of this sort is a disease that strikes the subject with xenophobic madness and bloodlust. Their theatre is unironic and mean, a “suffering to the conquered” brought back around through a false-rebellious war cry from Kain: “Vae Victis[29]!” Whereas the unironic queer vampire is code for “sodomite”/sexual heretic as targeted by the state to be exploited, the hunger of the unironic fascist vampire is to exploit the sodomite as someone who [in their eyes] “drew first blood.” It’s standard-issue revenge fantasy [which elides with camp during oppositional praxis as patently reclaiming these labels, similar to the zombie, mad scientist, Medusa, etc, by ironic performers].)

From start to finish, the whole ordeal becomes inert, heteronormative dogma stuck on loop—our “Pygmalion effect” as part of the broader Shadow of Pygmalion, which zombifies worker brains to not simply accept these moon-sized tortures through Capitalist Realism, but embody them as menticided soldiers and victims (men—specifically our aforementioned holy men, the Belmonts—and their trusty frenemy the paladin-turned-death-knight, Kain/Dracula. Women, meanwhile, turn into subjugated “herbo” Amazons, but also infantilized “Barbie dolls,” exhibit 1a1a3; aka, tradwives[30]/war brides). The two exist simultaneously within various offshoots of the colonial binary under the Shadow of Pygmalion; i.e., as a harmful mythic structure enforced by the gender trouble that weird canonical nerds experience; i.e., their rape culture‘s heteronormativity-in-crisis being pitted against the campy gender parody of weird iconoclastic nerds (whose campiness generally occurs in response to gender trouble, or the making of gender trouble through campy parody to expose abusive parties and structures; i.e., “self-reporting“). As per the first half of our companion glossary’s definition, weird canonical nerds are

work within a toxic subset of nerd culture. Whereas nerd culture more broadly is for those who present an increased intellectual interest in a given topic—often in literature, but also popular media more broadly as something to consume, critique, or create (with iconoclastic varieties extending such matters into a spectrum of modular activism and counterculture)—weird canonical nerds are those who undermine genuine, active intellectualism; i.e., by exchanging it for dumb, hostile and even bad-faith consumerism and negative freedom for the elite.

Weird canonical nerds, then, are tasked with executing stochastic terrorism from the shadows[31] when queer-baiting/pacification fail; i.e., the “bury your gays[32]” trope (attacking the queer and putting them back in the closet, but also underground in more ways than one), but also purity argumentation (e.g., blood libel/quantum) that leads to the very creation of sexual difference the colonial binary is known for (exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a1; from Luce Irigary: “Only one form of subjectivity exists in Western culture and it is male,” source). They rape and kill everything they see, measuring embodiments and feats of strength (their dicks) as they operate like a hostile alien tank (with good/bad variants): a bulldozer’s war of movement/sheer momentum (the wrestler’s economy of motion), special moves and bodies (wunderwaffe and wunderkind), an occupying army‘s fortress mentality and enforced division/false rebellion to assist elite profits (which trickle down to them, the always “imperiled” middle class).

(exhibit 1a1a1c1: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” [“The Eighteenth Brumaire“]. To this, the oral traditions of the stage play can be especially medieval, thus plastic and vivid. Macbeth’s fatal vision isn’t just “A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain” [Macbeth], but a copy of a copy of a copy in an endless nightmare loop. The yawning hall of kingly mirrors shadows him as shown guilt and revenge of a smiling past victim that somehow is all around him, having already won. The psychomachy [“mind battle”]—of this reunion with the past by the anxious, sleeping mind—imitates the Gothic Communist’s own futile grappling with the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern as a narrative of the crypt that outlives us to haunt future generations with, putting potential class warriors to sleep. The imagery is the same, but the context is altered through the performance as a meta-narrative: 

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing [ibid.].

Macbeth’s notable lack of cheer at the prerecorded nature of history needn’t be prophetic, provided the nightmares are reclaimed and used by us to awaken future workers to a class-conscious approach within Capitalist Realism; i.e., an altering of prior historical-materialisms [and all their fatal crypts, tyrants and black knights] as something to collectively escape through an actively reclaimed Gothic imagination/”darkness visible.” History is predicated on material conditions and propaganda; rewrite them and you rewrite history and avoid the cataclysm/seminal tragedy again [until the last syllable of recorded time]. But you must learn to commune with witches, ghosts and monsters—the spectres of Marx [re: Derrida, meaning Capitalism as haunted by Communism after the Cold War‘s so-called “end of history”] as friendly to the Cause of developing Communism away from the bloody death omens of characters like Macbeth and Kain. In short, you must acquire the Wisdom of the Ancients in the modern world; i.e., to learn to swim in dangerous waters, thus make your own monsters in the darkness while able to tell these apart from state doubles, masks, uniforms and weapons inside a shared aesthetic.)

All at once, the revenge fantasy of Pax Americana kayfabe is the source of the class traitor’s greatest strength/treasure as false/on loan, an Achilles Heel whose “dagger of the mind” puts them to sleep; i.e., a heteronormative killer on autopilot blinded by canonical “darkness visible,” wherein they deliberately or accidentally (usually a combination ruled through fear and dogma) cling to class-dormant illusions and sacrificial theatre whose imaginary “ancients” are continually not wise to greater and greater degrees of tragedy and farce; e.g., George Orwell’s highly unimaginable and callow “double-speak” from 1984 (1949) as a Red-Scare dogwhistle coined by “the son of a British colonial officer from a wealthy landed family who began his career as a British imperial official in South-East Asia—basically an imperial cop” (source: Hakim’s “George Orwell Was a Terrible Human Being,” 2023). As such, the class traitor cannot scrutinize dialectically-materially. They are also a gender/race traitor whose false power—their theatrical “sword”—is also their greatest weakness/castrating source of impotency for the Roman fool to promptly fall upon (indented for clarity):

The greatest weakness of a bourgeois-minded worker/class traitor is their collective inability to critique endless war as an acclimating force; i.e., of them, towards manufactured illusions where the chosen hero does one of two basic things: a) picks up the false (imaginary) sword, mask or death edict and fends off or an imaginary enemy of darkness, or b) where someone else picks up a real weapon and conducts state-sanctioned violence through military imperium and paramilitary stochastic terrorism (vigilantism against agents of the Left or perceived “Left” labeled as “terrorists[33]“). Either way, the end result is a class-dormant inability to critique the system’s alienation of ourselves from our true potential as workers. By virtue of a hypercorrect, biologically essential, sex-equals-gender approach, the ensuing knee-jerk reactionary’s violence becomes an ultimatum during the state’s decaying crises: Anything that isn’t correct must die/is a threat to the fortress they’ve build around themselves through the state’s supplied dogma. Yet, the half-real dagger works as Macbeth’s dagger of the mind would: also in his hand but something he does not own (“I clutch thee but have thee not”). Used unironically in copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex, such a weapon operates in conjunction with the meta-narrative as rigged, thus entirely out of the player’s control; i.e., through the ghost of the counterfeit to further the process of abjection as lucrative for people who aren’t us, playing by their own set of rules that leave us with as little power as possible: not paying their fair share, but taking as much for themselves as they can through a parallel ruleset that steals our labor and pacifies us through marginalized in-fighting. The exact nature of the illusion—a fatal vision or fatal deed—doesn’t really matter if the material consequences and bad intent are combined in ways that are good for business. It becomes a vicious cycle of tilting at windmills (as Don Quixote does); i.e., generating and slaying real victims thought of as dragons, or “averting one’s eyes” through escapist illusions that disguise the mirrored murders displaced to somewhere else. “Out of sight, out of mind,” except there is no outside-text; the illusion is always there, “the handle toward our hand.” The black knight is always there, lurking like a shadow. Tied to the class traitor’s body and actions—he is the ideologically rigid, notoriously cruel doppelganger they can never outrun, a dark reflection mirroring their own evil deeds/compliance as one class traitor of many inside the profit model. His eyes are blacked out, showcasing his lack of humanity through state-issued blinders: a dark warhorse (the color of death, the fetish, the weapon, the gun, the Nazi/zombie Roman) waiting to sacrifice them, too.

As such, the hero-turned-heel is figuratively hallucinating while acting like a coercively fetishized, “killer man baby” and class traitor/ghost of the counterfeit the rest of the middle class can stare at with equal parts fear and fascination; i.e., towards and of the imaginary medieval as serious (or campy vis-à-vis iconoclasts); e.g., “demon BDSM” via Nazi vs “Nazi” (“camping the Nazi”; e.g., Mel Brooks’ A History of the World, 1981) or rape vs “rape” (the liminal expression of Gothic rape play) vis-à-vis Susan Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” (1974): the “Nazi” mask as a fan-favorite in ironic and unironic kayfabe circles (exhibit 1a1a1g2). Canon-wise, the bloodthirsty crowd loves a good fetishized and powerful monster but isn’t really taught to question how or why that might be while drinking up the fake blood as reminiscent of real-world atrocities (which they dub “apophenic[34] conspiracies”). Instead, power is accepted as genuine in order to enjoy the spectacle as an apocryphal-yet-reverential event. Despite the paradox, canon is simply sacred and unironic, whereas functional, “perceptive” irony is generally heretical to the centrist worldview (and whose ensuing conflict assigns or removes class character as a performance that is heteronormative or genderqueer).

There’s no long-term benefit to keeping quiet in the face of systemic oppression. Even so, it’s dangerous to camp, so the performer weaponizes the joke in favor of class war as a kind of tongue-in-cheek disguise: the antiwar allegory as equally magnetic, but dressed up in the same aesthetics like a kind of mask that’s very much worn on purpose. Unlike the male warrior’s Max Box “armor” and false power/hope, this effeminate “armoring” is not “true Camp” in Sontag’s sense or Radcliffe’s; i.e., that our seriousness fails without our knowledge or consent to protect our fragile minds. Rather, we know exactly what we’re doing and commit to the bit for two reasons: a) to avoid being attacked and killed while b) getting our life-saving (thus necessary) message across; i.e., to raise sex-positive awareness through emotional/Gothic intelligence as a “woke,” active process—one whose conscious class character is developed during oppositional praxis. Funnily enough, it’s not so different from Radcliffe’s “archaeologies” during her own dereliction, post-Italian—i.e., they’re left behind for us to repurpose when some people don’t have the guts (I’m looking at you, Radcliffe[35]).

We’ll unpack all of this during the “camp map” chapter after the thesis statement concludes. Until then, we’ll need to explain some manifesto terms: the pieces to our castle map as something to assemble, then fuel up and use to besiege the enemy’s fortress (the castle we want to take back by “making it gay”). The exact order of the terms’ explanation is less important than explaining how they interrelate. By the time we get to the “camp map,” we’ll “mount a siege,” explaining how to camp canon in relation to these terms and why that matters (reversing the process of abjection tied to the ghost of the counterfeit as a false copy of itself in monomythic canon, the Cycle of Kings, and the infernal concentric pattern as a souless, viral copy—i.e., the narrative of the crypt as the historical-material wreckage left in Capitalism’s wake, covered up by Capitalist Realism).

Onto “Pieces of the ‘Camp Map’“!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1a] The word as I coined it has several definitions. One (from the Six Rs):

games occur along Gothic, liminal routes, wherein workers playfully articulate their natural rights in linguo-material ways between reality and fabrication that go beyond games as commodities but are nevertheless informed by them as something to rewrite; i.e., through play as a general exercise that involves a great many things: a reached agreement of power and play in Gothic terms, whose luck/odds are defined not through canon, but iconoclastic poiesis that can be expanded far beyond the restrictive, colonial binary and heteronormative ruleset of the elite’s intended exploitation of workers to challenge the profit motive and all of its harmful effects in the bargain; e.g., genocide, heteronormativity and Max Box culture. The sum of these concepts in praxis could be called “ludo-Gothic BDSM.”

Another (from the glossary, abridged):

My combining of an older academic term, “ludic-Gothic” (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp. The emphasis is less about “how can videogames be Gothic” and more how the playfulness in videogames is commonly used to allow players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of fairly negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms

As I’ve moved through this series, though, the definition has narrowed, according to my focus on the term specifically to play with rape as I define it; re (from the Poetry Module’s “A Note about Rape/Rape Play,” 2024): […]

To that, rape is something that demons play with during the whore’s paradox. By extension, ludo-Gothic BDSM is effectively rape play combined with Gothic themes and BDSM practices to avenge state wrongs against nature.

[1b] Gothic doubles but also theatrical perceptions of power (“darkness visible”) as liminal expressions/elaborate strategies of misdirection/”archaeologies.” For example, not everything that is black and red is a fascist, but is treated like a fascist (and various other things at once) until the level of decay affords the usual centrist compromises between white knights and black knights against the Communist variant of the corrupt, the monstrous-feminine, the pedagogy of the oppressed coming out the same Gothic imagination’s shadow zone.

[2] Classically the entirety of the female form—its sexuality, gender identity/performance, emotions, etc—is sexualized by men for men. As such, Medusa’s big hair synonymizes with her “phallic” snakes; i.e., her “dickhead” literally as a headful of penises or symbolic of a phallic, masculine foil to traditional male heroes’ own power source: their singular penises (though the head and the hair are classically seen as a storing site for potency—e.g., Samson from the Bible). The idea of female body hair as “phallic” is certainly not out of the blue, either—with the pubic area (especially its unkempt versions) being synonymized with “incorrect masculinity”/an extension of the clitoris as “phallic-like”; i.e., an offshoot of the “correct” penis’s legitimate violence, thus violent in a delegitimized, rebellious counterterror form. Keeping in this spirit, I jokingly in the past referred to Zeuhl’s pubic hair (which was especially full and thick) as a “hair penis.” Heteronormativity would treat these “exceptions” to the Vitruvian, European standard as anathema, but in truth, they are incredibly common; they’ve just been abjected into a state of exception that weird canonical (art) nerds can police with impunity.

[3] Antiwar tends to combine sex, drugs, and roll ‘n rock at cross purposes with state hegemony—e.g., opposing the American Vietnam soldier’s pulling of a modern-day variation of the Viking berserk’s war ritual: getting high as fuck, then fucking shit up and otherwise raping everything in sight. The antiwar/anti-capital activist might use the hidden, ironic function of “White Rabbit” (1967) or “99 Red Luftballoons” (1983) to ferry a message to other collaborators; i.e., anyone who is against war as a business (and all that entails). It becomes a graveyard shift, embracing the communication of such counter codes; i.e., disco-in-disguise, on par with the Mancunian postpunk movement and assorted mimicries in the years ahead.

[4] Sex work/non-binary exclusionary radical feminists (we’ll explore all three groups extensively in Volume Three).

[5] For canon, fucking is synonymous with rape regarding monsters: fuck the monster (up); for iconoclasm, fucking is cathartic, including ironic appreciations of rape theatre that put “rape” in quotes—i.e., calculated risk/informed consent that helps targets of generational trauma (including rape) feel more confident about their bodies, identities and ability to at least laterally confront their abusers: by theatrically performing inside a safe space about what happened to them.

[6] Correctness is tricky. As stated during the “Regarding Hard Kinks” disclaimer, correctness can mean “what is right, or universally ethical—i.e., pertaining to basic human rights (and the health of the planet’s ecosystems and the humane treatment of animals)”; or it can mean “socially acceptable—i.e., correct according to the ethical beliefs of a specific group,” which under Capitalism systemically favors the in-group historically-materially exploiting the out-group for the profit motive. This means that as long as profit occurs, fucking the monster (xenophilia) or killing it (xenophobia) is acceptable under Capitalism in harmful, sex-coercive forms (aka efficient profit).

[7] (from the glossary): “A term I wrote for a discontinued book series, Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes, military optimism speaks to the half-real ‘gun-happy optimism of Pax Americana—i.e., that one can always shoot away the state’s enemies and problems’ (source: ‘The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,’ 2021). This includes any scapegoats that exist in and out of media/the Superstructure and society’s public imagination; i.e., between fiction and non-fiction, onstage and off; re: during Capitalist Realism antagonizing nature as monstrous-feminine, pimping it through abject (us-vs-them) revenge before repeatedly summoning and banishing it, Radcliffe-style.”

[8] The verb, “to aggregate,” referring to “Power aggregates”—a phrase I lifted from In Range TV noting that “power aggregates” against potential/actual revolt in Atun Shei film’s “Fighting for Freedom: The Weapons and Strategies of the 1811 Slave Revolt,” 2021; timestamp: 20:55).

[9] Re: a word that hides, part of a larger linguistic process called cryptonymy whose pattern of concealment and trauma attach to Gothic spaces and echo inside their train of ruins, vis-à-vis Hogle’s “narrative of the crypt” and Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis, or mimicking dead language and undead things trapped between said language to evoke Marx’s “spectres.”

[10] E.g., Conan’s “two stood against many” argument (arguably stemming from the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae).

[11] Meaning “fated/foretold,” but also “inescapable and ominous”; i.e., “to meet one’s destiny.”

[12] We’ll examine children’s literature, talking animals, and cartoons’ sex-educational potential in Volume Two during the “Call of the Wild” chapter.

[13] “Robyn Byrd and Katie Rice were teenage Ren & Stimpy fans who wanted to make cartoons. They say they were preyed upon by the creator of the show, John Kricfalusi, who admitted to having had a 16-year-old girlfriend when approached by BuzzFeed News” (source: Ariane Lange’s “The Disturbing Secret Behind An Iconic Cartoon: Underage Sexual Abuse,” 2018).

[14] “To kill and be king, Merlin?” “Perhaps not even that!”

[15] (from the glossary): As defined by Espen J. Aarseth in Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997): “During the cybertextual process, the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence, and this selective movement is a work of physical construction that the various concepts of ‘reading’ do not account for. […] In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to traverse the text,” meaning effort beyond eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages; spatially there is more than one route to take, or multiple ways one can take the same route to complete an objective or series of objectives (which in Metroidvania, are generally unspoken; Super Metroid is famous for its lack of narration, open-ended world, and non-linear fragmented narrative).

[16] From Ellen Moers’ Literary Women (1976). The term is rather outdated, similar to Beauvoir, Sontag or Wolff (and any of the other 20th century Gothicists we examine, to be frank).

[17] “We live in Gothic times,” from “Afterword” to Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974); source: “Carter, Angela,” Encyclopedia.com.

[18] For many an illuminating counterexample, refer to Asprey’s War in the Shadows: the Guerrilla in History. Labor fights dirty because we’re given no choice: not terror but counterterror to state forces’ usual brutalities: “No student of the period can seriously condemn the protesting peasant as a terrorist, for here, as in the case of Romans in Spain and indeed of most governments, European monarchs and ruling nobility held options of rule ranging from the most benevolent to the most despotic. Their subjects, however, held limited options: submit or rebel” (source).

[19] Whose pay-walled gnosis (“hidden knowledge”) adopts a kind of medievalized “trickle-down” to everyone else.

[20] A line from William Blake’s “The Tyger” (1794), part of his Songs of Innocence and Experience collection (1784); the poetic opposite of “The Tyger” is “The Lamb” (1789).

[21] “A lingua franca also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups of people who do not share a native language or dialect, particularly when it is a third language that is distinct from both of the speakers’ native languages” (source: Wikipedia). The bridge, within globalization and Capitalism, is war and rape; i.e., “violence is a universal language where ‘might makes right.'”

[22] In classic Greek myth, the Furies, much like the Fates or the Medusas, are traditionally depicted in groups of three, and generally are “gifted” with the power of foresight (a “female” quality also attached to the Oracle or the Sphinx).

[23a] As established, to make something a fetish is to objectify it, often within a ritual of unequal power exchange, BDSM, and kink (with a Gothic flavor of deathly aesthetics and power); re: what I call “ludo-Gothic BDSM,” giving something power (or taking power from it). Fetishization becomes harmful when canonized because canon is prescriptively sex-coercive towards women or beings forced to identify as women, while also turning men into sex pests with zero humanity/impulse control during scenes of appropriative peril, uninvited voyeurism, and unironic rape play. Psychosexuality becomes normalized within this theatre, conflating sex with harm according to popular (often-Gothic) tropes: incest, but also moe and ahegao (the fetishized child aesthetic and “death/rape face” anime/manga tropes, which under neoliberal Capitalism, have begun to develop eco-fascist tendencies that are traded back and forth across the global market; i.e., in a negative feedback loop between America and its allies, but especially Japan, that ramps up canonical xenophobia, war and rape in monomythic forms). In other words, abuse begets abuse, trauma living in the body and society as interacting back and forth psychosexually over space and time: a social-sexual criminogenesis that leads to intersectional forms of segregation/discrimination and overall carceral violence and harm with sexualized flavors. Criminogenesis and palingenesis (re: national rebirth, historically tied to fascism/Capitalism-in-decay) go hand-in-hand as canonical ghosts of the counterfeit that feed the process of abjection during climate crisis and masculinity-in-crisis as used to stoke the fires of war and rape, thus profit the elite through businesses centered around these things: the Military Industrial Complex and copaganda, whereupon “killing is their business, and business is good.”

[23b] (from the glossary): A distillation of Jean Baudrillard’s broader notion of the simulation representing things that do not exist, yet, over time, have become more real than the reality behind them, which has decayed into a desert the hyperreal simulation has replaced in the eyes of its viewers—i.e., has covered it up. Baudrillard’s hyperreality comments on similar historical-material issues that the egregore or simulacrum do as occult creations and copies of older likenesses or illusions. The preservation of the illusion as Capitalism turns the natural world into an uninhabitable desert could be called hypernormal. As Nasrullah Mambrol writes (exhibit, theirs):

Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality is closely linked to his idea of Simulacrum, which he defines as something which replaces reality with its representations. Baudrillard observes that the contemporary world is a simulacrum, where reality has been replaced by false images, to such an extent that one cannot distinguish between the real and the unreal. In this context, he made the controversial statement, “The Gulf war did not take place,” pointing out that the “reality” of the Gulf War was presented to the world in terms of representations by the media [as inherently dishonest …]

4) There is no relationship between the reality and representation, because there is no real to reflect (the abstract paintings of Mark Rothko).

According to Baudrillard, Western society has entered this fourth phase of the hyperreal. In the age of the hyperreal, the image/simulation dominates. The age of production has given way to the age of simulation, where products are sold even before they exist. The Simulacrum pervades every level of existence. (source: “Baudrillard’s Concept of Hyperreality,” 2016).

[24] E.g., Metallica’s “Disposable Heroes” (1986): “I was born for dying!”

[25] (from the glossary): In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Frederic Jameson writes,

“Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs” (source).

Personally, I think Jameson’s “normality” echoes Nietzsche’s or Freud’s. As such, I envision pastiche and parody as likewise having bourgeois and proletarian qualities, much like sublimation does. They can be blank under bourgeois (centrist) forms. Likewise, though, “perceptive pastiche” can adopt the appearance of a false “blankness/blindness” (see, above: “Vaporwave,” a hauntological subgenre) in the face of power—a tactic vital to revolutionaries’ continued funding from different sources, as well as keeping them safe from violent reactionaries.

[26] E.g., Ion Fury (2019) as a cyberpunk policed by Shelley Bombshell (exhibit 84a1), who we’ll discuss more in part two of the “camp map” and in Volume Three; i.e., Persephone van der Waard’s “Neutral” Politics: Feminism, the Gothic, and Zombie Police States in Ion Fury” (2021).

[27] I can’t get behind X’s politics, but will always adore the music attached to his adventures. Sure, it’s tied to nostalgic drama as an unironic escape from boredom, but I can always treat that as a rememory of its former self; i.e., by writing this book while listening to the very music whose genre/Call to Adventure the book happily critiques via the “universal adaptability” of music.

Rememory

From Tony Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved, to which Morrison herself shares in a 2019 interview, “as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past. And it was the struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting, that became the device of the narrative [in Beloved]” (source).

[28] “Fascism is a false revolution. It cultivates the appearance of popular politics and a revolutionary aura without offering a genuine revolutionary class content. It propagates a ‘New Order’ while serving the same old moneyed interests. Its leaders are not guilty of confusion but of deception. That they work hard to mislead the public does not mean they themselves are misled” (source: Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds, 1997).

[29] “Vae victis is Latin for ‘woe to the vanquished,’ or ‘woe to the conquered.’ It means that those defeated in battle are entirely at the mercy of their conquerors and should not expect—or request—leniency” (source: Wikipedia). Kain translates it to “suffering to” not “woe.”

[30] E.g., after Trevor Belmont kills Death in Castlevania season four (2021), Sypha—previously coded as the nerdy bookworm—gives up her academic/asexual pursuits to become Trevor’s dutiful housewife, full-time and on autopilot. In short, she’s biologically essentialized to obey Trevor’s every whim once the big villain is vanquished and she learns he’s “conquered” her—i.e., knocking her up and her hysterics taking over to build a nest “purely by instinct” (I’m really not kidding. The show plays all of this for laughs, but still treats it as Radcliffe’s “happy ending” gimmick; i.e., the promised marriage/compelled sex awarded to the male hero after the black castle crumbles; e.g., Emily St. Aubert giving her entire inherited fortune to Valancourt—who conveniently gambled away his entire fortune while in Paris as she was kidnapped by the evil Count Montoni and forced to survive at his treacherous castle, Udolpho [source: Shmoop Study Guides]).

[31] I.e., as a kind of pro-state shadow war—i.e., “AstroTurf guerillas” like the Contras of South America (exhibit 1a1a1g1) except fought on home soil by the middle class against the underclass; e.g., fascist ninjas or Vikings (which historically were raiders).

[32] (from the glossary): …the “bury your gays” trope (defined and explored by Haley Hulan’s 2017 “Bury Your Gays: History, Usage, and Context”). / The heteronormative sublimation, violence and moral-panic scapegoating of anything that doesn’t fit the colonial binary model. Historically this would have been homosexual men (with queer cis women appropriated by cis-het men as exotic sex toys existing purely for male pleasure); however, it extends to trans/non-binary people or gender non-conforming persons more broadly (with various minorities being assigned heteronormatively atypical, gendered qualities, like women of color being seen as more masculine and sexual voracious/aggressive than white women, for example).

[33] Something to keep in mind when we examine Joseph Crawford’s introduction to Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism (2013) during the “camp map”: the state’s agents of terror see themselves as the counterterrorists—with the state somehow being unable to turn them into monsters to do the elite’s bidding. In their own eyes, they’re pure and good, thus uncorruptible; in truth, they’re infantilized monsters, afraid of everything and conditioned to kill at the drop of a hat.

[34] A pejorative label attached to critical thought; i.e., “to see patterns in random data,” whereupon nothing is connected to anything else and suggesting otherwise is “political,” hence mendacious, misinformed, even seditious.

[35] After writing The Italian in 1796, Radcliffe stopped writing and traveled abroad, enjoying the luxuries of her “fuck you” money (out-earning her husband’s government job) while the French Revolution raged and she conspicuously distanced herself from it. Indeed, she never wrote again, effectively spending the rest of her days not just in luxury but in hiding (this lent her a mysterious air we’ll continue to critique throughout the book).

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 Proper: Concerning Canon (opening)

“What would an intellectual do? What would Plato do?”

—Wanda, A Fish Called Wanda (1988)

Note: While this post contains “Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox,” said essay comes after the Manifesto Tree and Four Gs (four main Gothic theories), which I cite elsewhere in “Paratextual (Gothic) Documents.” From citation to original, the information they contain is essentially identical—with a small amount of additional content that only appears in Volume Zero. —Perse, 3/20/2025

Picking up where “Notes on Power and Liminal Expression” left off…

This chapter covers what we will be camping: canon. It contains my manifesto tree, four main Gothic theories, essay about the Gothic imagination (the shadow zone whence all doubles come), thesis paragraph, and larger thesis statement/subchapters. Combined, they introduce most of my book’s keywords, manifesto terms and main Gothic theories. Concerning signposts, the Four Gs is mostly a map already and “Into the Shadow Zone” is a mini essay meant to illustrate praxial duality in a self-contained form; the actual thesis statement and “camp map” will outline their respective subdivisions before each begins.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

On Twin Trees; or, “Taking the Trees Back during Oppositional Praxis”: the Superstructure and Base; Tolkien vs Milton; and Our Manifesto Tree

“Things have certainly changed around here. I remember this was all farmland as far as the eye could see. Old Man Peabody owned all of this. Had this crazy idea of breeding pine trees.”

—Doc Brown, Back to the Future (1985)

 

The manifesto tree lists our praxial equations and coordinates relative to the holistic study and camping of canon’s singular interpretations (and subsequent policing) under Capitalism. I will supply several equations, followed by two exhibits on the Base/Superstructure and Tolkien vs Milton insofar as “trees” are concerned. Then, I will consider the twin trees of Capitalism—the Base and the Structure—as things to “corrupt” and reclaim away from Capitalism when developing towards Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism: our manifesto tree of oppositional praxis.

Camping canon, as a whole process, can be summarized with this praxial equation (on oppositional praxis):

Sex positivity happens during oppositional praxis’ class/culture war (class traitors/weird canonical nerds’ class dormancy and betrayal vs weird iconoclastic nerds’ class [thus race and gender] consciousness); i.e., sex positivity vs sex coercion to recultivate canon/the bourgeois Superstructure, thus reclaim the Base (means of production) according to our proletarian tree of Gothic-Marxist tenets and other factors.

and this one (on proletarian praxis):

Successful Proletarian Praxis (recultivation of the bourgeois Superstructure through iconoclastic art creation, critique, or endorsement; the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis) = Thesis Statement + Praxial Coordinates (manifesto tree) + Synthesis (social-sexual habits, emotional/Gothic intelligence, and financial support during worker’s daily lives; i.e., the camp map from the thesis volume and the synthesis roadmap from Volume One) + Poiesis History (the Humanities primer)

(exhibit 0b: Propaganda; that which, Rana Indrajit Singh writes, normally “grows out of the base and the ruling class’ interests. As such, the superstructure justifies how the base operates and defends the power of the elite” [source: “Base and Superstructure Theory,” 2013]—”normally” being the operative word, here. This book isn’t really a fan of what’s “normal” because “normal” for the status quo is bourgeois. Gotta camp that shit. For example, Nazis are “normal” and serve the elite. We must camp them and, like Mel Brooks, make them not just abnormal, but paranormal, too. This oppositional praxis extends to heroic canon; e.g., fostering ironic gender trouble and parody by imagining “Conan with a pussy” or gay hobbits [two favorite examples of mine that we will refer to or imitate in other monstrous forms constantly throughout this book].

Relative to the Superstructure and Base, our two equations apply to a manifesto tree of praxial terms that interrelate and overlap during oppositional praxis under Capitalism.

Before we look at our praxial tree, I wanted to conduct a thought experiment; i.e., to consider trees that illustrate praxis as something to remediate: Tolkien, for which one palimpsest to Lord of the Rings was Paradise Lost, which we just discussed. Except Tolkien took Milton’s campy allegory/potential and gentrified it within centrist war through the cryptonymy of “adventure” as useful to capital in all the useful ways: the creation of an enemy for someone to “go berserk” against, invading their land and “taking it back” (despite having no essential claim to it to begin with).

(exhibit 0c: Artist, top-right: Sebastian Rodriguez; top-left: source; bottom-right: John How Anger; bottom-left: Stefano Villa. Morgoth is like “Evil Thor”—i.e., if Thor was Satan corrupting the Tree of Knowledge and Life instead of Eve directly [but seducing Sauron] while also working in the diffuse shadow space that crams pre-fascism/fascism [“corruption”] and Communism [“the monstrous-feminine”] into the theatrical spaces and bodies involved. Tolkien’s Nordic-Christian hybrid [with him being an expert on Beowulf and Norse mythology[1] as informed by Christian tampering happening chronologically between Beowulf and Tolkien] has Morgoth and Ungoliant camp around the base of the trees and recultivate their superstructure to make a new world that Tolkien—although he didn’t openly like war as a business—spends his entire canon [corpus] to unironically demonize Communist stand-ins as the “end of the free world”: 

“Then the Unlight of Ungoliant rose up even to the roots of the Trees, and Melkor sprang upon the mound[2]; and with his black spear he smote each Tree to its core, wounded them deep, and their sap poured forth as it were their blood, and was spilled upon the ground. But Ungoliant sucked it up, and going then from Tree to Tree she set her black beak to their wounds, till they were drained; and the poison of Death that was in her went into their tissues and withered them, root, branch and leaf; and they died” [source: the eighth chapter of “the Quenta Silmarillion” section within The Silmarillion, 1977]. 

I.e., the Darkening of Valinor is seen as an unironic BBC rape/”dark fellatio” tragedy that canonizes Milton’s camp, his “darkness visible” to Tolkien’s blind, class-dormant “Unlight” of a fat and sassy spider queen and her dark daddy dom in Nazi fetish gear. They both sound badass but I’d much rather have badass camp than canon, especially considering what it serves: Tolkien made the myth, placed it over the palimpsest and passed it off as the truth “found” like an old, lost relic/time capsule. Even if its fabricated nature is brought to light, it doesn’t matter if they have been internalized; his stories are a hypercanonical example of centrist war cartographized.

To this, Tolkien’s refrain [the High Fantasy treasure map, exhibit 1a1a1h2a1] has led to the endless essentializing of war as gentrified through the fantasy mode [e.g., Rings of Power, 2023] but also its science fiction and horror parallels [which we’ll unpack during the “camp map” vis-à-vis Cameron’s refrain: the shooter, of course, but specifically the Metroidvania]. Tolkien’s magnetic, “chaste” warmongering leaves out the psychosexual horrors of war or valorizes them through the slaughter of abjected foes[3], requiring great effort from past writers like Ursula Le Guin to break away from Tolkien’s ghost, thus his trees and pastoral village recruitment antics and moderately xenophobic [racist] war stories. As these are copied-and-pasted along the shared counterfeit, they operate like a formula whose canonical replication centers around the profit motive; in turn, this becomes historical-material—e.g., D&D and its endless official/homebrew campaigns and dungeons—but also the “warcraft[4]” of the enterprising white, cis-het young men of an early ’90s company, suitably titled Blizzard [whose sexist bullshit as a company we’ll discuss much more in Volumes Two and Three]—built entirely around racial conflict [thus endless war and rape] as set into motion by Tolkien himself, whose own orcs are green-skinned, debatably anti-Semitic/cannibalistic savages whose name, “orc,” is Old Norse [from Beowulf‘s orcnēas[5]] for “demon”; i.e., functional zombies in the state of exception that heroes invade to kill for the state through parallel legends weaving in and out of fiction and into real life: there and back again not once, but ad infinitum. If these “zombies” aren’t orcs, then they’re spiders[6] or some other stigma animal/vermin-type pest entity who must be crushed by the forces of good in personified forms; e.g., the Drow as “chaotic evil” spider people [exhibit 41b] who threaten nature as afflicted with the same problematic idea of good vs evil as canonically Biblical [versus Milton’s own accidental camping of these pastoral devices through Satanic war].

Simply put, Tolkien’s hopelessly academic view of nature is whitewashed, High Fantasy copaganda—a British tree huggers’ biased loving of the idealized pastoral/picturesque as threatened by outsiders ruining the scene: the map of empire as sacred. It’s a colonizer’s cartoonishly basic aesthetic that demonizes, thus alienates darkness but also death, decomposers and natural predators [stigma animals] as part of nature; i.e., as evil scapegoats tied to wicked, unnatural places, archaic wombs and dark magic—necromancers, but also their fortress lairs:

At first they had passed through hobbit-lands, a wide respectable country inhabited by decent folk, with good roads, an inn or two, and now and then a dwarf or a farmer ambling by on business. Then they came to lands where people spoke strangely, and sang songs Bilbo had never heard before. Now they had gone on far into the Lone-lands, where there were no people left, no inns, and the roads grew steadily worse. Not far ahead were dreary hills, rising higher and higher, dark with trees. On some of them were old castles with an evil look, as if they had been built by wicked people [emphasis: me]. Everything seemed gloomy, for the weather that day had taken a nasty turn [source]. 

These kinds of Gothic castles were clearly known to Tolkien, though he didn’t focus on them. In The Hobbit, they’re mentioned hardly at all [the word “castle” is used only once in the book]—sidestepped by Tolkien until it comes time to trot out Sauron [also known as the Necromancer] as the unironically Satanic threat to Tolkien’s “new Eden”: Britain by another name, as built by Tolkien’s easily ludologized, High Fantasy scheme[7].

The displacement of British industrialization and slavery is made clear by examining the real-world inspiration for Mordor and Tolkien’s own experiences elsewhere: “the industrial Black Country of the English Midlands, and by his time fighting in the trenches of the Western Front in the First World War” [source: Wikipedia]. Of the former Midlands, Jonathan Wilkins writes, “He based the description of Mordor, home to the evil Lord Sauron, on the Black Country, a region of Birmingham which was heavily polluted by iron foundries, coal mines and steel mills due to the Industrial Revolution. The air in it was so thick with smog and dust it was difficult to breathe and may contribute to the way local people speak today – the infamous Brummie accent” [source: “Birmingham Sites that Inspired Tolkien,” 2020]. Tolkien’s love for home pastoralizes the colonial element by abjecting its theatrical “soot” onto a fictional elsewhere. Places like the Shire and Lothlórien were always green and good and totally “never did a genocide” to get where they are; by comparison, the orcs threatening their naturalized goodness are the colonizers who did all of the bad things. It’s DARVO through British exceptionalism.

[Top-right: My brother’s 2001 copy of The Hobbit, which I’ve had for years and used to cite all of my work on Tolkien, including one of my better[8] undergraduate essays, “Dragon Sickness: the Problem of Greed” (2015). It was also a book that I read to nurse my broken heart, in college; but segued into my planning to go to college to find love (to have lots of nerd sex)—which eventually happened when I met Constance (my first) at EMU and Zeuhl, at MMU, and promptly had an adventure that did not start or end with them, but introduced me to someone whose ghost, for or worse, would stay with me for the rest of my life. I don’t think you can have an adventure without a bit of sex and/or ghosts, by the end of it!

Top-right and bottom: Tolkien’s obvious love of runes and “the West” was shared by his supposed enemies, the Nazis, which reflects a more radicalized trend in cryptofascist groups that currently use the Nordic runes as hauntological dogwhistles.]

The essentialized myth—of Tolkien’s Cartesian-themed treasure map, racist world-building and combined historical-materialism—invoke endless enemies of the state, which generates endless histories that predicate on those material conditions and their dogma [the Protestant work ethic assigning a reprobate quality onto an essential, limitless enemy slaughtered for profit: the crisis and decay of the war machine and its can(n)on fodder]. Post-Tolkien and Bretton Woods, war under neoliberalism has become commodified; i.e., ludologized comfort food during endless crisis: we’re eating it as the state eats us, as we eat each other. In turn, the concept, “there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism” becomes not just normal but hypernormal[9], enforced even though we know it’s wrong.)

Now that we’ve expressed several canonical and campy deaths of trees, we stand before, and look up at, the twin trees of Capitalism: their trees to ours during opposition praxis, for which to “corrupt” as Communists do—which is to say, like Milton and Tolkien but in a progressively campy direction towards anarcho-Communism, specifically Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism as I have devised it.

Please note: All of these terms will be explored later multiple times and in great detail. For now, I just want to list them; re: the engine of oppositional praxis with which to pour our fuel, proletarian praxis.

Also, a note about this list (and really the entire book): Function determines function[10], not aesthetics. Likewise, the parent dichotomies synonymize: canon is unironic, bourgeois, and sex-coercive, attaching everything to human biology (through sex organs and skin color); iconoclasm/camp is ironic, proletarian, and sex-positive, divorcing self-expression from these colonized sites using dialectical-material scrutiny—i.e., biological sex and gender are wholly separate, vis-à-vis, Judith Butler. Each evokes a variety of sub-dichotomies and orbiting factors; e.g., “sex-positivity is sexually descriptive, and descriptive sexuality is proletarian, thus ironic,” etc, and frequently clash in the traditional language of power and resistance: monsters and the military parade. I’ll explain this more when we continue to unpack poetics and mimesis, during the symposium. —Perse

Camp’s assembly and production of cultural empathy under Capitalism happens according to the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis (manifesto terms intersect and overlap; e.g., “good sex education is sexually descriptive”)

• mutual consent
• informed consumption and informed consent
• sex-positive de facto education (social-sexual education; i.e., iconoclastic/good sex education and taught gender roles), good play/emergent gameplay and cathartic wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure (abuse prevention/risk reduction patterns) meant to teach good discipline and impulse control (valuing consent, permission, mutual attraction, etc); e.g., appreciative peril (the ironic damsel-in-distress/rape fantasy)
• descriptive sexuality

during ludo-Gothic BDSM as things to materially imagine and induce (often through ironic parody and “perceptive” pastiche) through Gothic poetics; i.e., inside the “grey area” of cultural appreciation in countercultural forms (making monsters)

• the culturally appreciative, sexually descriptive irony of Gothic counterculture’s reverse abjection with sex-positive demon BDSM, kink and fetishization; as well as asexuality and the ironic ontological ambiguities of trans, non-binary, intersex, and drag existence

that, when executed by emotionally/Gothically intelligent workers, use camp to cultivate empathy through Gothic counterculture; i.e., by synthesizing Gothic Communism during oppositional praxis (canon vs iconoclasm) according to our manifesto terminologies and structure—in short, its various tenets and theories

• Re-claim
• Re-union/-discover/-turn
• Re-empower/-negotiate
• Re-open/-educate
• Re-play
• Re-produce/-lease

• our four main Gothic theories (the Four Gs)

• • abjection (from Julia Kristeva’s process of abjection, vis-à-vis Hogle’s “ghost of the counterfeit”)
  • hauntology (from Derrida “spectres of Marx” and Fisher’s “canceled futures,” vis-à-vis Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis)
  • chronotopes (from Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Gothic chronotope”)
  • cryptonomy (from Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, vis-à-vis Hogle’s “narrative of the crypt” and Castricano’s cryptomimesis)

mode of expression (and assorted mediums: novels, short stories, movies, videogames, etc)

• monsters
• lairs/parallel space
• the Hermeneutic[11] Gothic-Communist Quadfecta (Gothic, game, queer and Marxist theory, which we’ll unpack more in the manifesto in Volume One)
• phobias/stigmas/biases

creative, oppositional praxis

• the Six Doubles of Creative/Oppositional Praxis

• • sex coercion vs sex positivity
  • carcerality vs emancipation
  • complicity vs revolution

and their various synthetic oppositional groupings

• destructive vs constructive anger
• destabilizing vs stabilizing gossip (and abuse encouragement/prevention patterns)
• “blind” vs “perceptive” pastiche (class/culture blindness versus consciousness)
• unironic vs ironic gender trouble/parody (canon vs camp)
• bad-faith vs good-faith egregores

via camp’s class-conscious defense from canon’s class dormancy and class betrayal

i.e., the moderate/reactionary class traitor’s four basic behaviors

• • open aggression, expressing gender trouble as a means of open, aggressive attack (disguised as “self-defense” reactive abuse): “We’re upset and punching down is free speech[12]” (“free speech” being code for “negative freedom for bigots who want to say bigoted things” to defend the elite’s profit motive).
  • condescension, expressing a moderate, centrist position that smarmily perpetuates the current status quo as immutable, but also optimal: “This is as good as it gets” but also which can never decay.
  • reactionary indignation, using sex-coercive symbols (argumentation) to defend their unethical positions: “They’re out to destroy your heroes, your fun, all you hold dear (code for ‘the current power structure’).”
  • DARVO (“Deny, Accuse, Reverse, Victim, Offender”), defending the status quo by defending the people who enslave them (the elite) by going after the elite’s enemies, thereby defending Capitalism during decay. When it decays, these “gamers” see “their” games in decay and will defend those, seeing human rights as an affordable compromise in the bargain. They see themselves (and the elite) as “victims,” and class warriors as monsters “ruining everything” (like Satan).

to foster empathy and emotional/Gothic intelligence by weird iconoclastic nerds reversing the canonical, unironic function of the Four Gs

• reverse abjection
• the emancipatory hauntology and Communist-chronotope operating as a parallel society—i.e., a parallel space (or language) that works off the anti-totalitarian notion of “parallel societies[13]“: “A [society] not dependent on official channels of communications, or on the hierarchy of values of the establishment.”
  • Note: This was originally written in Eastern Europe to manifest against the Soviet Marxist-Leninist political body/state apparatus, which then collapsed and emulated the West under neoliberal Capitalism/global US hegemony. But by that point the East had already stopped trying to develop Communism and the state reliably collapsed into a capital-driven form. The same idea of “parallel society” can be used to develop anarcho-Communism within the Gothic mode; e.g., the danger disco as a campy “party mentality” to queer existence since Matthew Lewis (exhibit 15b1). —Perse
• the Gothic Communist’s good-faith, revolutionary cryptonymy

On the flip-side, our would-be killers collectively lack emotional and Gothic intelligence; they do not respect, represent or otherwise practice our “creative successes.” As we’re going to establish by looking at the definition of weird canonical nerds (in the thesis statement), their conduct is quite the opposite of weird iconoclastic nerds; weird canonical nerds don’t practice mutual consent; they canonize, thus endorse

• uninformed/blind consumption through manufactured consent
• de facto bad education as bad fathers, cops (theatrical function: knights) and other harmful role models/authority figures; i.e., canonical sex education and gender education, bad play/intended gameplay resulting in harmful wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure (abuse encouragement/risk production patterns); e.g., appropriative peril (the unironic damsel-in-distress), uninvited voyeurism, etc
• prescriptive sexuality

through their own synthetic toolkits during oppositional praxis. They endorse

• the process of abjection
• the carceral hauntology/parallel space as a capitalist chronotope (e.g., the “blind” cyberpunk)
• the complicit (thus bad-faith, bourgeois) cryptonymy

to further Capitalism’s crises-by-design, hence its expected decay, according to a variety of bourgeois trifectas that lead to the banality of evil’s

• “trident” (the Superstructure)

• • the manufacture trifecta (manufactured scarcity, competition/conflict, and consent)
  • the subterfuge trifecta (displace, disassociate, disseminate)
  • and coercion trifecta (gaslight, gatekeep, girl-boss)

• the “handle” (the Base)

• • owner/worker division
  • efficient profit (through exploitation)
  • infinite growth (through Imperialism)

and vertical, pyramid-scheme arrangements of power and subsequent tiers and punitive exchanges thereof

• top, middle, bottom
• lords, generals/lieutenants, and grunts
• corporate, militarized and paramilitarized bureaucratic flavors

arranged in neoliberal forms inside and outside of the text

• bosses, mini-bosses, and minions
• executives, middle management/content creators, customers/consumers
• waves of terror and unironic vice characters (menticide)

which leads to a surrender of total power during states of emergency that are always in crisis and decay. Empathy is the casualty of the middle class, whose weird canonical nerds are taught to see the underclass as lacking basic human rights during moral panics. In the presence of crisis and decay, people forget then deify whatever’s in front of them that looks powerful. They don’t take the time to ascertain if the giant trees are canonical or campy—in short, whether the swap has been made and the current falsehood is designed to liberate or exploit them. During the bait-and-switch, they’ll follow the leader to scapegoat the usual suspects under Capitalism unless canon can be camped.

To conclude, Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism camps canon (and its trees) to ensure that empathy/apathy and class character (unconscious/conscious) occur in oppositional praxis as a dialectical-material exchange. For workers, the empathy accrued is established during these creative successes, whose solidarized and active, intelligent poetics (a manifestation of reclaimed labor and working-class sentiment) cultivate the Superstructure in ways useful to proletarian praxis: helping all workers by reversing the process of abjection and its canonical historical-materialism (the narrative of the crypt, or echo of ruins). This happens by camping the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., the barbaric lie of the West told through the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern that drive the process of abjection currently used to exploit workers, resulting in myopic exploitation and genocide under Capitalist Realism while the elite’s endlessly engineered crises enter into, and out of, decayed states of emergency and exception. Rewrite how people respond to elite propaganda and you can rewrite how people think, thus rewrite history by changing its well-trod, profitable (for the elite) and bloody (for us) historical-material track; in short, you can take the state’s propaganda apart, ending Capitalist Realism as you start to develop towards a post-scarcity world (the kind that is wholly antithetical to modern nation-states and their vertical arrangements of power): through the imaginary past and its legion of ghosts clamoring for something better (versus the entitled-yet-incredibly-isolated bully saying “haven’t I earned this?” after having done the state’s dirty work for decades).

Now that we’ve scaled the trees as a potential engine for rebellion, I will now give you the gasoline: the four main Gothic theories. As such, the rest of the thesis proper will provide these theories, then unpack my thesis paragraph/body before the camp map (specifically its finale) will apply them to canon as something to camp.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

The Four Gs: Our Main Gothic Theories

“You have to be careful when you use it in the swamp, and there are warlocks.”

—something I said to Zeuhl in my sleep, while at MMU after playing Hollow Knight and writing about Metroidvania for my master’s thesis* (2018)

*Re: “Lost in Necropolis” (2018). Refer to Persephone’s 2025 Metroidvania Corpus for all of my work on Metroidvania; i.e., from 2017 to the present.

“Gothic,” for our purposes, is the creation of monsters and monstrous spaces (e.g., Metroidvania) for oppositional praxis and dialectical-material analysis. I will extrapolate on both points (the making of monsters, in the thesis statement; and the exploration of their spaces—specifically the “ludo-Gothic BDSM” of the Metroidvania—during the “camp map”) and consider other definitions of the Gothic in the symposium (e.g., Chris Baldrick and Tanya Krzywinska) but for now that will do; the Gothic is, like the West itself, largely made up and retold through a series of violent, monstrous lies.

These four theories (and their dance partners) are not: our four main Gothic theories, the Four Gs, presented in ways that intersect with themselves and my own idiosyncratic research/argumentation. There’s no easy way to present them in this state except as I have (originally written in my 2022 blogpost, “Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism: Manifesto” and ultimately transferred here). I promise it’s a Gordian Knot that we’ll work towards the center of, not simply cut through like Alexander with his sword:

• abjection (from Julia Kristeva’s process of abjection, vis-à-vis Jerrold Hogle’s “ghost of the counterfeit”)

Coined by Julia Kristeva in her 1981 book, The Powers of Horror, abjection means “to throw off.” Abjection is “us versus them,” dividing the self into a linguistically and emotionally normal state with an “othered” half. This “other” is generally reserved for abjected material—criminal, taboo or alien concepts: good and evil, heaven and hell, civilization and nature, men and women, etc. Through Cartesian dualism—re: the rising of a dividing system of thought by René Descartes that led to settler colonialism—nation-states and corporations create states of normality (the status quo) by forcefully throwing off everything that isn’t normal, isn’t rational, masculine or even human, etc. Through the status quo, normal examples are defined by their alien, inhuman opposites, the latter held at a distance but frequently announced and attacked (a form of punching down); the iconoclast, often in Gothic fiction, will force a confrontation, exposing the viewer (often vicariously) to experience the same process in reverse (a form of punching up). Facing the abjected material reliably leads to a state of horror, its reversal exposing the normal as false, rotten and demonic, and the so-called “demons” or dangerous undead as victimized and human: “Who’s the savage?” asks Rob Halford. “Modern man!” Descartes was certainly a massive dick, but the spawning of endless Pygmalion-generated undead and demons scarcely started and ended with him. Instead, it expanded through the ghost of the counterfeit as wedded to the process of abjection in Gothic canon; or as Dave West summarizes in “Implementation of Gothic Themes in The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit” (2023):

In [the 2012 essay] “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Process of Abjection,” Jerrold E. Hogle argues that the eighteenth-century Gothic emergence from fake imitation of fake work is the foundation of what is defined as modern Gothic today. He maintains that Horace Walpole’s 1765[14] The Castle of Otranto, which is considered as the groundwork of the modern Gothic story, is built on a false proclamation that the novel was an Italian manuscript written by a priest. […] Hogle argues that modern Gothic is grounded in fakery. [In turn,] Hogle’s observation of the history of The Castle of Otranto forms the basis for understanding the concept of counterfeit as a result of the abjection process.

Gothic Communism, then, reverses xenophobic abjection through xenophilic subversion as a liminal form of countercultural expression (camp). Sex work and pornography (and indeed any controlled substance—sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, but also subversive oral traditional and slave narratives) operate through liminal transgression; e.g., subversive monster-fucking Amazons (exhibit 104a), werewolves (exhibit 87a) and Little Red Riding Hood (exhibit 52b) or Yeti (exhibit 48d2), etc. Reversing the process of abjection, these monstrous-feminine beings allow their performers to not only address personal traumas “onstage,” but engender systemic change in socio-material conditions; i.e., by performing their repressed inequalities during arguably surreal, but highly imaginary interpersonal exchanges that are actually fun to participate in: as a process of de facto education in opposition to state fakeries (thus refusing to engender genocide within the common ground of a shared—indeed, heavily fought-over—aesthetic).

(artist: John Fox)

• chronotope/parallel Gothic space (from Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Gothic chronotope”)

Mikhail Bakhtin’s “time-space,” outlined posthumously in The Dialogic Imagination (1981), is an architectural evocation of space and time as something whose liminal motion through describes a particular quality of history described by Bakhtin as “castle-narrative”:

Toward the end of the seventeenth century in England, a new territory for novelistic events is constituted and reinforced in the so-called “Gothic” or “black” novel—the castle (first used in this meaning by Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto, and later in Radcliffe, Monk Lewis and others). The castle is saturated through and through with a time that is historical in the narrow sense of the word, that is, the time of the historical past […] the traces of centuries and generations are arranged in it in visible form as various parts of its architecture […] and in particular human relationships involving dynastic primacy and the transfer of hereditary rights. […] legends and traditions animate every corner of the castle and its environs through their constant reminders of past events. It is this quality that gives rise to the specific kind of narrative inherent in castles and that is then worked out in Gothic novels.

For our purposes, Gothic variants and their castle-narratives have a medieval/pre-Enlightenment character that describes the historical past in a museum-like way that is fearfully reimagined: as something to recursively move through, thus try to record in some shape or form; e.g., the Neo-Gothic castle (Otranto, 1764) to the retro-future haunted house (the Nostromo from Alien, 1979) to the Metroidvania (1986, onwards; my area of expertise). Canonical examples include various “forbidden zones,” full of rapacious, operatic monsters; i.e., canonical/capitalistic parallel space. Expanding on Frederic Jameson, the iconoclastic Gothic chronotope is an “archaeology of the future” that can expose how we think about the past in the present to reshape the future towards a Utopian (Communist) outcome. Although we’ll expound on this idea repeatedly throughout the book, a common method beyond monsters are hauntological locations housing things the state would normally abject: the crimes of empire buried in the rubble, but also contained inside its castle-narrative as an equally hyperreal, “narrative-of-the-crypt” (from Hogle: “The Restless Labyrinth: Cryptonomy in the Gothic Novel,” 1980) mise-en-abyme. Iconoclastic parallel spaces and their parallel society of counterterror agents, then, align against state-corporate interests and their “geometries of terror” (exhibit 64c) which, in turn, artists can illustrate in their own iconoclastic hauntologies (exhibit 64b) and castle-narratives; i.e., ironic appreciative movement through the Gothic space and its palliative-Numinous sensations.

• hauntology (from Jacques Derrida’s “spectres of Marx” and Mark Fisher’s “canceled futures,” vis-à-vis Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis):

A basic linguistic state between the past and the present—described by Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx (1993) as being Marxism itself. Smothered by Capitalism, Marxism is an older idea from Capitalism’s past that haunts Capitalism—doing so through “ghosts” in Capitalism’s language that haunt future generations under the present order of material existence. In Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing, Jodey Castricano writes how Marx, though not a Gothicist, was obsessed with the language of spectres and ghosts—less as concrete symbols sold for profit in the modern sense and more as a consequence of coerced human language expressing a return of the past and of the dead as a repressed force; she also calls this process cryptomimesis, or “writing with ghosts,” as a tradition carried on by Derrida and his own desire to express haunting as a feeling experienced inside Capitalism and its language. The concept would be articulated further by Mark Fisher as Capitalist Realism (2009); i.e., a myopia, or total inability to imagine the future beyond past versions of the future that have become decayed, dead, and forsaken: “canceled futures” (which Stuart Mills discusses how to escape in his 2019 writeup on Fisher’s hauntology of culture, Capitalism, and acid Communism, “What is Acid Communism?”). While all workers are haunted by the dead, as Marx states, this especially applies to its proponents—cops and other class traitors, scapegoats, etc—as overwhelmed by a return of the dead (and their past) through Gothic language/affect in the socio-material sphere. For those less disturbed by the notion, however, this can be something to welcome and learn from—to write with; i.e., in the presence of the dead coming home as a welcome force in whatever forms they take: not just ghosts, but also vampires, zombies, or composites, the latter extending to demons and anthromorphs as summoned or made; but also all of these categories being modular insofar as they allow for a hybridized expression of trauma through undead-demonic-animalistic compounds. As Castricano writes of cryptomimesis

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

in regards to ghosts, I would argue the same notion applies to all undead, demons and animalistic egregores; i.e., writing with both as complicated theatrical expressions of the human condition under Capitalism.

(artist: Zdzisław Beksiński)

• cryptonymy (from Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, vis-à-vis Jerrold Hogle’s “narrative of the crypt” and Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis)

In Cynthia Sugars’ entry on “Cryptonymy” for David Punter’s The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2012), Sugars writes, “Cryptonymy, as it is used in psychoanalytic theory and adapted to Gothic studies, refers to a term coined by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok [which] receives extended consideration in their book The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (1986).” Sugars goes on to summarize Abraham and Torok’s usage, which highlights a tendency for language to hide a traumatic or unspeakable word with seemingly unrelated words, which compound under coercive, unnatural conditions (the inherent deceit of the nation-state and its monopolies). For Sugars and for us, Gothic studies highlight these conditions as survived by a narrative of the crypt, its outward entropy—the symptoms and wreckage—intimating a deeper etiological trauma sublimated into socially more acceptable forms (usually monsters, lairs/parallel space, phobias, etc; you can invade, kill and “cure” those. In my 2021 writeup, “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” I call this false optimism the “puncher’s chance” afforded to pro-Capitalist soldiers and de facto killers for the state; the odds suck and are either disguised or romanticized through heroic stories/monomyths). Described by Jerrold Hogle in “The Restless Labyrinth” as the only thing that survives, the narrative of the crypt is a narrative of a narrative of a narrative to a hidden curse/doom announced by things displaced from the former cause: Gothic cryptonyms; illusions, deceptions, mirages, etc. Sugars determines, the closer one gets to the problem, the more the space itself abruptly announces a vanishing point, a procession of fragmented illusions tied to a transgenerational curse: “a place of concealment that stands on mere ashes of something not fully present,” Hogle writes of Otranto (the first “gothic” castle, reassembled for Horace Walpole’s 1764 “archaeology”). In regards to the mimetic quality of the crypt, this general process of cryptomimesis draws attention to a writing predicated upon encryption: the play of revelation and concealment lodged within parts of individual words tied to Gothic theatrical conventions and linguistic functions, but also patently ludic narratives that can change one’s luck within a pre-conceived and enforced set of rules; i.e., rewriting our odds of survival, thus fate, inside exploitative ludic schemes by pointedly redictating the material conditions (through ludo-Gothic BDSM) that represent “luck” as a variable the elite strive to manipulate for profit under Capitalism.

So, yeah, that’s a lot to unpack! A veritable concentric castle with many layers-upon-layers, I slowly built it around a grain of sand into a black pearl. It seems impenetrable, which might tempt us to smash it or pawn it off (which would destroy its value). Instead, we’re going to unpack it all, but like a Gothic castle or Gordian Knot, we can’t do that from outside (where we can only gaze on its glorious façade); we have to get into the thick of it, thus go down into the dark, deep dungeons where the truth of allegory is paradoxically hidden and waiting to be found and brought back up. History is a stage play that only stops on the last syllable of recorded time; until then, the show must go on and so must we in opposition to the state and its liars. We must investigate the past as full of doubled lies and other paradoxes. In short, we’ll have to go “dumpster diving” inside Percy Shelley’s “colossal Wreck[15].” We’ll do that (figuratively) next, and honestly many more time after as the book carries on…

Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox; or into the Shadow Zone: Where We Currently Are and Where We’re Going Deeper Into

“I have weapons you would not dare use!”

—Omadon, the Red Wizard; The Flight of Dragons (1982)

This essay briefly considers power as something to perform, thus interrogate and negotiate inside the Gothic mode/Gothic imagination. This paradoxical theatrical space (and its liminal territories/forms of expression) have many names—Hell; the abyss, the underworld, the beyond, or the void, etc—but I call it the shadow zone!

Per the monomyth as explained by Joseph Campbell (someone we’ll return to in the thesis statement), any heroic quest demands a journey into Hell. Confronting dark forces, there, the hero generally presents before the quest as a paradox: being of two worlds, one foot in the world of the living and one of the dead, magic/science, medieval/modern, heaven/hell, etc. Their liminal state and privilege of position affords them special education/access to old books (or sages) of wisdom that—as we shall see—can be counterfeited, but work within the same medieval poetics and Gothic mode that can be used for or against the status quo. Our journey (as workers seeking liberation from mass worker exploitation under neoliberal Capitalism) is to bring the campy power of a reclaimed Hell/shadow zone (and its subversive forces of darkness) back with us—to transform the world around us to better allow workers to negotiate for themselves while fighting for their basic human rights (and the health of the planet’s ecosystems and that of animals). Each time I went into Hell, I came back different—until Hell’s camp followed me and now lives with/within me; I began to see the world differently according to how I always was but didn’t always have the language; e.g., my queer-coded, teenage fantasies and vast dramatis personae of genderqueer players in The Cat in the Adage (exhibit 0a1) showed that I—like Bilbo—just needed a little push out the door to get the ball rolling.

(exhibit 0a2a: The neoliberal gang’s all here; the Shylock vice character and the white wizard and his token brothers. Death omens/magic visions, psychomachia, anti-Semitism, great speeches, light shows—all in The Flight of Dragons are lifted from medieval thought and presented unironically as neoliberal canon; i.e., in black-and-white hauntological language that serves the status quo as it presently existed in 1982 and continues to exist under the current Internet Age; i.e., under the self-same canonical paradigm/distribution of power and its false mechanisms of exchange dressed theatrically up as heroics in cinema and older media forms, but especially videogames as a then-new rising-commodity-turned-mega-business.)

When I was younger, I was always dreaming of dragons and knights and fairies, and darker Gothic things that stole the show. One of my favorite films was (and still is) The Flight of Dragons, where the Red Wizard, Omadon—played by James Earl Jones (the king of vice characters: the Emperor of the Night, Darth Vader and Thulsa Doom—speaks the tyrant’s plea and threatens the naïve and special zone/Garden of Eden dreamt up by his other three magic brothers:

I have weapons you would not dare use. Fear rules men. By summoning all the dark powers, I will infest the spirit of Man so that he uses his science and logic to destroy himself. Greed and avarice will prevail! Turn brother against brother! And those who do not hear my words will pay the price! I’ll show Man how to fly like a fairy! I’ll show him what distorted science can give birth to! And I’ll give him the ultimate answer his science can ask for!”

Jones’ Omadon is “a seducer of darkness, master of that heartless magic the world calls black,” and his villain’s monologue is seriously raining on their parade. So they hire a squad of mercenaries to chase him to his home, kill him, and steal the performative object of his power: the Red Crown. It’s a quest, a monomyth of the usual sort that scapegoats the Satanic force, like Tolkien did; i.e., as usual, in the canonical sense. But it was also penned in the early 1980s, on the cusp of neoliberalism: “Farewell! Can you not feel the world turning in my direction already!” was a warning to the audience of men like Reagan and girl bosses like Thatcher leading to an endless spawning of so many monomythic quests—especially those in ludic forms that would simulate, parallel and disguise the world being divided and rent asunder by Capitalism. Videogames, in particular, were devised during Bretten Woods but codified by Tolkien’s refrain (the High Fantasy treasure map and Protestant work ethic) and disseminated under Neoliberalism—i.e., from 1979 onwards—towards various other refrains, but especially James Cameron’s: the shooter and Metroidvania (we will explore these at length during the “camp map”; for now, just remember that videogames are an incredibly effective forms of theatrical propaganda: the codification of dogmatic beliefs and instructional behaviors [us-versus-them] taught through videogames as an all-too-effective war simulator).

Omadon is made out to be the obvious cartoon foil, and he seems treacherous by default. But the real enemies (in a class-conscious sense) are his brothers, who perceive of a crisis so great that—in the midst of the waning Age of Enchantment and the dawning Age of Science (Cartesian thought, aka Reason, or the Enlightenment)—their only option is to exclude and scapegoat him (the dark faggot clown) and lock all enchanted things away for safekeeping: to be visited “only during a flash of insight or the breadth of a dream.” In short, our dreams and awesome power are increasingly alienated from us; i.e., locked tragically away, put on loan and leant back to us by the elite privatizing them in whitewashed forms that simultaneously stand for the Greater Good. Sir Peter defeats Omadon—and by extension Omadon’s resistance of the privatization of fantasy (“deny me and you deny all magic!”)—by ignoring a paradox: “two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.” From a scientific standpoint, he’s basically right. From a Gothic standpoint, though he’s dead wrong and this is telling. Sir Peter denies all magic and its critical paradoxes to put his trust in science. For him, science is automatically the Truth and universally good, whereas Omadon’s lies are completely false and bad. This isn’t just naïve, it’s complicit. “You don’t scare me. Nothing so horrible could be real. […] And that’s why Antiquity chose me. You are magic, mere illusion! I am science and the truth!” Dogmatically spouting those equations of “his,” he sounds so blind to the idea that he—a scientist who loves magic—could somehow not be bought and paid for by the same old profit motive that colonizes everything for profit, including white people; i.e., the Imperial Boomerang:

the Imperial Boomerang

“The thesis that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens” (source: Wikipedia). In Foucault’s own words during his lecture at “Il faut défendre la société” in 1975:

[W]hile colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself (source: “Foucault’s Boomerang: the New Military Urbanism,” 2013).

Described by Stephen Graham as “military urbanism,” this phenomenon accounts for the legion of dead futures popularized in American canon and its expanded, retro-future states of exception—hauntological narratives that present the future as dead and Capitalism as retro-futuristically decayed; i.e., Zombie Capitalism and zombie police states.

Sir Peter is the cold march of reason that sublimates genocide behind neoliberal fantasies and centrist myths written by dumb white boys who a) buy into the get-rich-quick scheme of saving the world; and b) who dream, night after night, about getting the girl afterward. “It’s normal!” my mother protests, to which I gaily respond: “No, it’s normalized.”

All of this is harmful wish fulfillment, because it not only excludes everyone but him; it demands their slaughter to fulfill Sir Peter’s entitlement as the Chosen One. In the end, he’s a cop—a class-dormant traitor/slave to the grind and nerdy spearhead to the darkest, cruelest magic of all: convincing the world neoliberal treachery doesn’t exist. He’s Bill Gates, the unsexy nerd who commodifies everything through a monopoly that limits what we can imagine by taking what was open source/open domain[16] and privatizing it, effectively selling our dreams back to us through our own stolen labor paid to us in trickle-down wages (also stolen); or rather, he’s a bad copy of Gates, whose allegory of the cave myopically cages the brains of weird canonical nerds who want to be just like Gate’s badly copied form: the class-dormant shadow theatre of false rebellion and controlled opposition (the fascist/centrist device, which extends to token police, of course; i.e., sublimation and recuperation during the monomyth and its vicious cycle, which I call the Cycle of Kings—more on this during the thesis statement).

(exhibit 0a2b1a: Whitey saves the world by killing the Nazi-Communist, token queer/racial minority scapegoat and getting the girl as result. Like Milton’s Satan but canonized, Sir Peter’s scheme for seizing power is set inside an ancient document that is both inside of itself and “found” externally as something to sell to the masses: an “archaeology” whose counterfeit cancels the future as dead. Hint: the finale shot of the film presents the happy presumed-newlyweds standing inside a pawn shop with the word “loan” hanging over the window frame and their silhouettes; their power and connection is a cheap fantasy that has been loaned to them, around which the world is diegetically decaying mid-crisis. The wish fulfillment—for the white guy and his Sailor Moon lookalike [who he made in the image of “everything he desired in a woman”; i.e., “his” fairy princess as actually supplied to him by pre-existing counterfeits]—is harmful because it’s pure escapism. It both asks him to ignore his real material conditions—holding down two jobs as a research assistant that wants to escape by making a game that everyone loves provided he gets the capital to back it up—and ignore the dreadful fact that he played right into the fantasy of colonizing a class, race and gendered “other” dressed up in medieval language, all so he can then return from the shadow zone, get the girl and live like a king! It’s systemic delusion meant to benefit the elite, not him, and the historical materialism plays out soberingly through Omadon’s curse as the cliché of “Jewish Revenge”: laughing while the Roman fool falls on “his” own sword [remember, it’s on loan]. To quote a different wizard, “There are no happy endings because nothing ends.” Regarding Sir Peter as an analog for aspiring weird canonical nerds shouting, “Pick me!” the fact remains that precious few get to inhabit that money-maker role; i.e., “make a killing” for the elite, now and forever.)

Note: While uploading Volume Zero onto its 2025 book promotion, I noticed several things I wanted to add/change. These changes have been condensed into the following four-page addendum, which includes various ideas largely introduced and/or built on after Volume Zero first released, back in October 2023. I’ll mark where it ends. —Perse, 3/21/2025

 We’ll unpack all of this, as we go. For now, simply bear in mind that such fun and games are canonized to incur Quixotic, imposturous results; i.e., in ways that keep power (as something to enjoy and perform) right where it is; re: from Tolkien’s heyday onto the post-1970s resurgence not just of tabletop games played through dice rolls, but computer games as well serving as extensions of capital into fictionalized variants. Dungeons and Dragons first appeared (as we currently know it) in 1974, right after the 1973 Oil Shock (the same year neoliberalism was being tested in South America). By 1982, though, videogames (and the half-real territories they pointedly represent inside-outside themselves), were well-and-truly starting to crystalize; i.e., the Atari Crash happened in 1983, but in 1985, Super Mario Bros. debuted in the United States, and the rest—as they say—was history.

In turn, such things became something to mime and defend, effectively making Sir Peter a cryptonymic, egregoric extension of those who—already privileged enough as it is (white straight men, followed by token parties)—wanted to become what Gates was already monopolizing in the late ’80s: the center of the universe. They would get their chance in the early ’90s; i.e., with companies like id, Value, Microsoft and Blizzard going on not simply to corner the market, but make it in their image by echoing those weird canonical nerds they were already imitating and contributing to larger harmful systems (and symptoms) in bad faith:

weird canonical nerds (versus weird iconoclastic nerds)

A term I coined while borrowing from and expanding on Cheyenne Lin’s “weird nerds” phrase from “Why Nerds Joined the Alt-Right” (2023), and one I present through my usual dialectical-material approach despite the obvious social components I’m weaving into things: weird canonical nerds vs weird iconoclastic nerds, or otherwise proponents of canon vs camp in popular culture; i.e., anything that weird canonical nerds posit, their iconoclastic brethren challenge in duality.

To it, weird canonical nerds work within a toxic subset of nerd culture. Whereas nerd culture more broadly is for those who present an increased intellectual interest in a given topic—often in literature, but also popular media more broadly as something to consume, critique, or create (with iconoclastic varieties extending such matters into a spectrum of modular activism and counterculture)—weird canonical nerds are those who undermine genuine, active intellectualism; i.e., by exchanging it for dumb, hostile and even bad-faith consumerism and negative freedom for the elite. As something to blindly enjoy/endorse through zealously faithful, uncritical consumption, they celebrate the monomyth and Cycle of Kings as “good war”; e.g., Gamergate, 2014, but also TERFs and their territorial emergence in the late 2010s. Not only are TERFs, and by extension weird canonical nerds, very wide—as a practicing group of stochastic terrorists that encompasses white cis-het male consumers and women, as well as token traitors (of class, culture and race)—but they unironically lead to fascism per the infernal concentric pattern as a holistic enterprise (with Gamergate endorsed by weird canonical nerds into the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and whose neoliberal sentiments’ fascist outcomes were felt throughout the consumption of media and mentality alike as things to practice).

Weird canonical nerds are systemically bigoted, pertaining to Man Box culture as something to openly endorse, or “resist” in ways that do nothing to change the status quo/avoid the infernal concentric pattern/Cycle of Kings; e.g., TERF Amazons, but also proudly “apolitical” non-feminist nerds who embody a particular status within the nerd pantheon of canonical heroes: Mega Man as a go-to centrist male hero, for instance, but also Eren Yeager as the “incel fascist” with mommy issues, or Samus Aran as the Galactic Federation’s singular girl boss/white Indian, etc. All become something to endorse within critically blind portions of nerd culture that ape their prescriptive, colonial heroes within culture war dressed up as “apolitical” (the fascist ideology being secondary to the pursuit and claiming of personal power by changing one’s shape and language to fit those aims; e.g., Reinhardt Heydrich as a fascist war pig [to combine Umberto Eco with Black Sabbath] who would say whatever he could to justify his own iron grip on the minds of the populace: the foreign plot inside the house, once and forever).

To this, the Gothic and its various intersections, contradictions and conflicts are embroiled within oppositional praxis for or against weird canonical nerds, hence depictions/endorsements of different monster types; i.e., that, in the white, cis-het male tradition of privilege, such persons routinely “fail up,” and as success—like a whore/wife or nice house—is something they are taught to believe is owed to them (the promise of shelter and sex). Such betrayals and entitlement extend to token minorities allowed a slice of the pie, post-betrayal, but also must surrender their pie when the time comes (for which the real “Indian givers” are the settler colonist bearing false gifts: the Trojan Horse, aka the Faustian bargain, in Gothic circles).

For every heroic quest, then, there’s always a compelled sexual reward and victim, thus all the canonical essentialism such things are known for (the Imperium’s sex and force relayed through “ancient” theatrical arguments favoring the state). From Tolkien onwards (and from those he borrowed from), weird canonical nerds like Sir Peter are a fascist/centrist device to identify around (versus subvert)—one whose policing of the world in and out of media extends to token police, of course; i.e., sublimation and recuperation during the monomyth and its vicious cycle, which I call the Cycle of Kings (and which overlaps with the Shadow of Pygmalion). It’s all fake (as the Gothic historically is), but in ways that—per Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection—serve the elite when used dogmatically to endorse rape dressed up: as a map to follow to its logical conclusion, heading back to “Rome” as never having left. Similar to Gates, then, Peter isn’t just a fraud, but a Pygmalion rapist and clown posturing as goody-goody in bad faith—a liar claiming he did it all himself when in reality nothing could be further from the truth (Behind the Bastards’ “Part One: The Ballad of Bill Gates,” 2023). Anything that applies to Gates applies to Peter and vice versa, hence those persons imitating them sans irony through prison-like violence kettling state scapegoats while apologizing for Capitalism (and its Realism). Their revenge serves profit, not universal liberation.

We’ll cover this (and more) during the thesis statement (and expound on many things that it cannot, later in this book series), but think of it for right now as a less-than-peaceful transfer of power in neo-medieval language; i.e., if there’s a crown then it’s for the taking in some kind of monomythic quest/Hero’s Journey robbing Ozymandias (or King Lear/Oedipus) blind:

Cycle of Kings (abridged)

Another term of mine, the Cycle of Kings is the centrist monomyth, or cycling out of good and bad kings (and the occasional queen), which extends to all the kings’ white cis-het Christian men or those acting like these men, thus warrior-minded good cops and bad cops (weird canonical nerds) apologizing for state genocide through Man Box and “prison sex” mentality arguments…

Man Box/”prison sex” mentality

Coined in my own work, “prison sex” mentality speaks broadly to rape culture as a practice; i.e., as a systemically taught and enacted approach leading towards the routine harming of others while maintaining the status quo. It is similar to the Man Box argument by Mark Greene, who—in his 2023 podcast, Remaking Manhood: The Healthy Masculinity Podcast—refers to “Man Box culture” as:

the brutal enforcement of a narrowly defined set of traditional rules for being a man. These rules are enforced through shaming and bullying, as well as promises of rewards, the purpose of which is to force conformity to our dominant culture of masculinity (source: Mark Greene’s “How the Man Box Poisons Our Sons,” 2019).

“Prison sex” mentality exists in quotes because it occurs inside-outside actual state-described “prisons”—said facilities (and their legends) bleeding chronotopically into the nuclear home (and onto those things in the home’s shadow as a fractally recursive extension of the state and its victims/perpetrators). To it, “prison sex” mentality is the same idea as Man Box culture, except it chooses to focus less on men and more on the unequal power dynamics that occur between dimorphized workers of any sort; i.e., as trained by the state Superstructure not just to rape and kill one another in literal terms, but also theatrical language; re: any form of abject (us-versus-them) expression that ties into the bigoted, colonial binary of a divided class of male/female, white/black, good/evil, etc, labor force acting within entertainment (sports and porn), the household, the workplace, and Gothic iterations of any of these things. Any cis-het man that fails to live up to the heteronormative standard of manliness (which is an impossible feat to begin with), for example, must be weak but also strong in a manner threatening towards the status quo; i.e., womanly or otherwise monstrous-feminine. The same goes for anyone in the Man Box displaying “prison sex” mentalities through their actions and output against state targets, who must fight back in duality using subversive doubles of the self-same Gothic language; re: weird canonical nerds versus weird iconoclastic nerds fighting to and fro with the language of monsters [more on these in a bit].

As such, the Hero’s journey and completion is Promethean—chasing Numinous things that, far from being conquered, always return to trouble the world; i.e., during Capitalism and its boom-and-bust hidden behind the same old shadowy illusions sold clear-as-day to fresh children (who grow into adults, have children, and pass all of this down, anew).

Flight of Dragons is hella sexist, then, and there’s nothing particularly “noble” about its Radcliffean, false-flag dismissal of fascism and Communism stuck in the same sphere (with Omadon’s red wizard being an abject storing space/red herring for all manner of capitalist scapegoats; i.e., he literally bloats with them, being full of himself as a kind of strawman to dismiss through Reason, below).

End addendum. —Perse

The paradox, here, is that I absolutely love The Flight of Dragons and its language of magic, fairy princesses, twink-looking heroes, vice characters, dragons, knights in shining armor, board games, etc; I just hate how they’re framed within state monopolies. Sir Peter is treated as “unique,” “having one foot in the world of magic and one in the world of science” while literally working for the Man (Antiquity as male-coded; mysteriously but essentially all-powerful: “Trust the judgement of Antiquity!” / “Good old Antiquity! I knew I could trust it!”). Despite the movie’s flawed framework, all I have to do to “make it good” is to camp it; i.e., “make it gay” in my mind and in my work (which the elite don’t want you to do; they want you to purchase “their” power fantasies given out on loan while you police everyone else as their dutiful, preferentially mistreated labor/wage slaves [the middle class] assisting the profit motive through all the usual ways); e.g., imagine Sir Peter (not Conan) with a pussy or have him getting pegged by Princess Melisandre while listening to KMFDM’s “Megalomaniac” (1997), etc.

This is not so hard to do; i.e., the quickest way to camp canon is through sex (and parodies of sexualized violence). As I am Persephone, my namesake is that of a witchy goddess of death with one foot in the world of the living and the land of the dead (all deities live inside the human breast); by accident of birth, I was born but also made for doing so according to my medievalist education as a profoundly special set of circumstances: I was born trans and exposed to education at home and in school that spoke to my desire to be free. I feel unique but have no desire to pull a Beethoven and boast: “Prince, what you are, you are through chance and birth; what I am, I am through my own labor. There are many princes and there will continue to be thousands more, but there is only one Beethoven” (source: Rick Fulker’s “Why Beethoven Snubbed Princes and Put His Music First,” 2016).

(artist: Julius Schmid)

In all the universe, in all the gin joints in all the world, Persephone walked into mine and made me her avatar. “All deities reside within the human breast,” wrote Blake; yet, I think of the “Jewish revenge” of my marriage of Heaven and Hell as Canon’s tyrannical plea, re-camped by me and billions of other workers actively and/or passively yearning for freedom. Its sui generis format is both “Workers of the world, unite! You have only to lose your chains!” married to “Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, then to hell with you!” (this second sentiment goes for anyone who taught me or otherwise contributed towards that dark beautiful thing that became what I am today). For Communists wronged by the state, we monsters and what we make are human as Shylock was:

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction (source).

Our revenge, as a simulacrum, only resembles that of those who wrong us and counterfeit our campy legends for their canonical gain (Tolkien’s refrain); our aesthetic is shared but our function is altogether different: class consciousness as uncontrollable opposition relayed in terrifying medieval language that is thoroughly more wise through hindsight; i.e., not just according to Robert Asprey’s paradox of terror (which we’ll consider in relation to state forces decrying labor as terrorists) but  the hauntological paradox of “the Wisdom of the Ancients,” whereupon old forms of monstrous expression have been updated for the modern world and its challenges to accommodate our needs as workers being exploited by Capitalism and its propaganda. That is our revenge—slowly camping the canon, thus the Superstructure, and reclaiming the Base through our monstrous, ghostly theatre as something that once turned on, can never be shut down or destroyed; it can only be repressed in forms that always come back because the elite cannot kill all its workers (not on purpose, anyways).

Shadow theatre and its mythic structure are nothing new. It dates back to Plato’s infamous allegory of the cave and its mimesis as paradoxically haunted by the shadows of class struggle (the spectres of Marx, which in theory did not technically exist when Plato was alive, and yet whose struggles for emancipation include these older slaves that Marx alluded to in “The Eighteenth Brumaire”). Camus may have noted in The Myth of Sisyphus that canonical shadow theatre repeats to an absurd degree; i.e., Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill as punishment by the gods. To escape it, we can’t just smile at the gods like he proposed, but steal “their” fire on our own Promethean Quest! This means camping the canon, which requires repeated forays into Hell and putting the wrong things right at the source: our “darkness visible” and gods as stolen out from inside our breasts and put on the cave wall of Plato’s cave! Tolkien’s refrain/gentrification of war through High Fantasy is darkly echoed in stories just like The Flight of Dragons (which is especially treacherous because it argues moderately—i.e., as the voice of reason from a position of perceived disadvantage). We purposefully must camp the canonical nebula by camping the map as a source of class education through dialectical-material play (which we’ll elaborate on during the thesis statement and “camp map”): oppositional praxis as playing on in shadowy forms dancing on the same cave wall, our darkness deliberate fencing back and forth with the state’s blind canonical doubles like Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood dueling Basil Rathbone’s Guy of Gisbourne:

Something I will argue repeatedly throughout my thesis (and the rest of the book) is how the greatest power/strength of class-conscious warriors is their deliberately campy “darkness visible” doubling canonical versions (through the Wisdom of the Ancients, though I may not always call it that); i.e., their innate and uncanny ability to camp canon using the same shadowy language/aesthetics that class-dormant class traitors do (whose much touted “greatest strength” is their Achilles Heel, their greatest weakness when the state needs sacrifices). Beauty in “the eye of the beholder” is subjective, but perceptions of power are enforced to a matter of function and objective degree in order to define beauty (and what is “correct” according to basic human, animal and environmental rights as tied to heroic stories) as having a monstrous class character. Everything happens in the shadow zone between dueling hero monsters for or against the state and its profit motive. Meanwhile, state agents are labeled by the state as counterterrorists, calling labor’s agents “terrorists” (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr.) in bad faith; the language can be reversed easily enough, but the function still has to be scrutinized as parsed with a learned eye.

Regarding “Hell” as the shadow zone we must delve into during oppositional praxis, here’s something to remember based on what we’re discussed up to this point: Power is historically about perception and invention; i.e., fabricated for or against the state through undead and demonic masks, uniforms, weapons, performers, etc. Power exchange goes in both directions, onstage and off. Canonically speaking, though, the creation and theft of this power is meta, wherein the ludic contract (as a canonical device) steals power in a Faustian sense that doesn’t just master players (re: Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy) but does so in bad faith; i.e., the promise of false power through a Faustian ludic contract—one whose Quixotic escapism/false hope[17] (a neoliberal weapon/opiate) seeks perpetual “empowerment/strength” to progress through a fictional gameworld that disguises what’s actually disempowering players outside of itself: the elite and their neoliberal illusions as half-real (from Jesper Juul, meaning between “the fiction and the rules” but also real life whose “magic circle” [from Eric Zimmerman] is where the game takes place). Obviously this goes beyond videogame simulations and extends out of and into older mediums that reinforce the meta-narrative of the status quo as part of our daily lives and their mimesis. “All’s fair in love and war” but their battle is expressed across all mediums and life imitating art through our own battles as coded or otherwise informed by these narratives and vice versa. The visible darkness we provide is challenged by the blindness of canon’s myopia (Capitalist Realism); i.e., canonical hell historically-materially becomes a place to give up and accept one’s doom by playing along as a copy of a cop that is thoroughly cynical as Oscar Wilde would have put it: one “who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.”

There’s also the diegetic theft of power by all of these cop-like heroes, stealing it through “the game” (in whatever form it takes) as a training simulator for praxial purposes: the FPS as a military simulator[18]. “Empowered,” the canonical hero learns to rob from an ostensibly fascist, Communist, non-white, non-Christian and/or queer foe; i.e., they—but also canonical moral panics and their campy reclamation—exist (indented for clarity)

in the same outlawed space/shadow zone exemplified by Gothic poetics: forbidden, tempestuous desire and other extreme emotions/mood-swings; the supernatural/occult and bad omens; and confusing or unchecked sin/vice as dark and deadly, disease-like sentiments (revenge, lust, gluttony, etc, as leading to ignominious death, often according to cancer or acute organ failure as surreal, medieval metaphors for “dying of shame[19]“).

Similar to Omadon, we have Count Dracula, but also Mother Brain, Bowser, Dr. Wily and Ganon living in a dark, thoroughly queer-coded shadow realm of medieval, heretical barbarism; sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll; and fascist-adjacent BDSM aesthetics that threaten to turn the white knight’s armor black. All exist in the same sphere of doom for the hero to loot and plunder while assigning punishment as a centrist agent that perpetuates conflict as orderly but also profitable inside the global market: “There are no moral actions, only moral teams”; i.e., good guys and bad guys; re: white knights and black knights and their synonyms/antonyms tied to various nation-states cannibalizing their usual victims on the global stage.

(exhibit 0a2b1b: Artist: possibly Jean-Louis Gaspard. With the likes of Conrad, James Cameron, and Wes Craven, settler colonialism is a fantasy carried out popular fictions to apologize for the ongoing practice during moderate empowerment fantasies. Regarding the historical function of settler colonialism, Lorenzo Veracini writes in “Settler colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa: A Protracted History” [2022]:  

More than other forms of colonialism, settler colonialism is characterized by a “logic of elimination.” This form of domination contrasts with exploitative or extractive colonialisms, where the ongoing subordination of colonized populations is a requirement for the viability of colonial domination. In settler colonies, the very presence of an Indigenous population is sometimes targeted through expulsion or physical elimination. Alternately, settler-colonial powers can undermine the resilience of Indigenous political sovereignty and autonomy. If settler-colonial regimes do not display a uniform investment in outright native elimination, it is because settler colonialism and other types of colonialism routinely mix with one another. Conflicting demands for subsumption and elimination can coexist even if they respond to distinct and, to a certain extent, antithetical colonial logics; all colonial regimes are marked by contradiction. Settlers also respond flexibly to conditions on the ground and to Indigenous resistance and agency. Nevertheless, the objective of a non-settler-colonial regime is the ongoing domination of a colonized collective, whereas the aim of a settler-colonial regime is the reproduction of a settler polity in place of an Indigenous one [source].

In short, the locals are a demonized “other” species/underclass to eliminate, but also harvest in oscillating theatrics that aim to keep them alive [and the Imperial Boomerang away from home] for as long as possible.)

This globalization of settler colonialism during the past several centuries has been tied to a mother territory (America) having naturalized Britain and France’s colonial experiments[20] before reaching into the Global South with smaller ally nation-states and buffer/satellite states during proxy war as both a) carried out during the Cold War (when Russia ceased combating the West and sought to emulate it); and b) after the so-called “end of history” and emergence of Capitalist Realism raping nature full-bore (vis-à-vis Francis Bacon), but also the minds of the public through fear and dogma dressed up as “public relations”: Bernays’ propaganda as relayed through famous Gothic canon; i.e., us-versus-them. Since their inception and initial development during the Enlightenment, nation-states have always been the enemy—the giant cannibalizing zombie-vampire piloted by the elite feeding off workers while teaching them to eat each other from “most expendable” to “least expendable” (compared to the elite, we’re all dogmeat). Under neoliberalism, war as executed through nation-states will not only never end; its proliferation in and out of fiction bleeds into our daily lives as similarly cliché to the pre-existing story’s historical materialism; e.g., my father and (adopted) first-cousin-once-removed fighting over my mother’s honor like two knights dueling at a banquet, except it was two guys in their late twenties wearing dress clothes and trying (badly) to play frisbee football: our figurative Princess Dulcinea and two knights Quixote tilting at windmills during an anniversary party’s novel-of-manners farcical instance of life imitating art and vice versa.

The subsequent canonical synthesis will inform both sides as becoming a powerful meta illusion that the class-dormant will fight for as class traitors who police anyone who threatens the profit motive. Their predication owes itself to various moral panics separating the hero’s reactionary and existential crisis-of-faith/sense of self-worth and self-victimhood from the hero’s victims and their very real grievances: the Red Scares, Islamophobia, Yellow Menace of Orientalism; Black Revenge, and white genocide/replacement inheritance phobias; stigma animals (spiders, snakes, etc) and their anthropomorphized extensions; Satanic/gay panic, but also the automatic, cliché fetishization and commercialization of these things by undercover agents slumming through the conquered, ghetto streets of the colonized as guilty pleasures to peruse; e.g., the Harlem Renaissance or a drag show as a secret lifestyle the rich can get off to. “Seeing how the other side lives” becomes “suffering to the conquered” for those they stare at; i.e., by stealing and appropriating the colony’s culture, industry and agriculture as something to absorb into the mother territory[21] but also engaging in sex tourism while “touching down” on alien soil: moral panics, rape epidemics and drug wars advertised through popular media celebrating these sites as magical and wonderous, like Joseph Campbell’s “region of supernatural wonder” but channeled through the likes of non-immiserated, white metal culture selling rebellion and black culture to white middle-class kids while still keeping black culture on the outside; e.g., Iron Maiden, H.P. Lovecraft and Michael Whelan [exhibit 94c2b] but also female authors like Ann Radcliffe’s murder mystery/true crime (especially “exquisite” torture and “demon lovers”) as cashing in, first and foremost, on xenophobia as a lucrative measure within Amazonomachia. They don’t simply profit from tragedy but from crisis and decay built into capital as a theatrical device across all registers and mediums:

(exhibit 0a2b1a: Artist, top-left: Marie Bunny; top-middle: Nichameleon; top-right: Tay Melo; bottom-left: Alhvida; bottom-right: PedroPerez1973. “The Gothic is… basically Scooby Doo,” Christine Neufeld once said, in my ENG 300 course, at EMU. I thought it sounded funny at the time, but she was absolutely right; e.g., Radcliffe’s pirates stealing stuff from an old castle [Udolpho, 1794] while pretending to be ghosts, only to be foiled by the damsel, detective, servant, hero and/or virgin/whore, plays out in much the same way as the gang from Scooby Doo does: the fight-or-flight reduced merely to flight, thus resorting to their “feminine” wits to solve mysteries; i.e., as the arbiters of domestic disputes dressed up in outmoded [and highly repetitive] Gothic aesthetics and conventions within late-1960s/1970s Americana (Scooby Doo, a talking dog, is a rather blunt metaphor for psychomachy and drug trips; just what’s in those “Scooby snacks”?).

Even so, the show was clearly made for children, but its surfaces and situations are still thoroughly sexualized: sweater kittens, miniskirts; e.g., useless clothes through the paradox of an opaque “see-through” uniform leveled against the Male Gaze [Sarah Vanbuskirk: “The male gaze describes a way of portraying and looking at women that empowers men while sexualizing and diminishing women,” source]. Likewise, the explained supernatural and exquisite “torture”/”demon lover” of the modernized opera are alive and well [and the Black Veil, horror and terror, and other Radcliffean concepts whose spatial, architectural and musicality we will unpack during the “camp map”]. And more to the point, it introduced Radcliffe’s profitable and savvy [albeit centrist] Gothic approach to an American audience in cartoon form roughly two hundred years after the first Gothic novel was written.

Besides Radcliffe or the cartoon “ghosts” of her work, the same Gothic ideas work within pulpier fictions hinted at by our mentioning of authors like Lovecraft or Iron Maiden as doubled by parallel stories set in imaginary recreations of actual locations haunted by the same piqued imagination; i.e., “The Horror at Red Hook” versus “Red Hook in Walk Among the Tombstones [2014]. Lovecraft’s spiel is his usual xenophobia; the latter is a gritty, hard-boiled cop noir set backward in the time of payphones, but built on older stories like The Maltese Falcon [1941] and its faked deaths, double crosses, cliché outfits and endless darkness and rain. But those owe themselves as much to Gothic fiction as much as Cormac McCarthy’s Gothic Westerns do; e.g., Child of God [1973] or No Country for Old Men [2005]. Walk Among the Tombstones is similarly comparable to a Gothic novel: your basic detective story with the hero-as-sleuth, helped by servants and challenged by villains. But as a “noir” in the 20th century, it plays out like Bakhtin’s description of the Gothic novel as a “black novel”; i.e., the black detective novel/Western as a canceled future, a hauntological graveyard. Here, the private eye can take a shot or have a smoke, put on a duster and peer into the imaginary past to then uncover secrets in the present: what’s right in front of us dressed up as “elsewhere, once upon a time.” Like Radcliffe, it yawns into the future with immense pathos.

Neeson is a male action hero with pathos and camp [see: Krull, 1983], and male private dicks like the one he plays in Among the Tombstones are so cliché they don’t need names. They might carry a piece, but rely more on blind luck, quick wits, their gut and a silver tongue [they have to negotiate the ransom but also talk their way out of tight corners]. In short they’re ensconced and disempowered by the chronotope [often beat up; versus women and the threats they traditionally face as detectives: killers can’t hit a girl in a polite novel of manners, but they can make her fear for her life or “modesty”]. The paradox of the story as a truth-telling lie is its gloomy Gothic scenery being explored while disarmed. To this, the paradox of the gun is it can cut through the Gordian Knot instead of solving it. In short, its protection and general utility can backfire [“I wasn’t brave, just drunk”]. But while the same basic space is perpetually rainy, dark, and full of smoke and mirrors, it’s also a space for repressed guilt, revenge, and getting even—i.e., its “ghosts”/simulacra [serial killers, Boogeyman; e.g., Jack the Ripper, Father Schedoni, Buffalo Bill, Michael Rooker’s Henry, etc] squat like gargoyles among the criminogenic conditions, but also prowling.

On some level, they and the heroes they stalk—like the world itself—are meant to parallel the reader’s own complicated desires for revenge as simply being seen: to be heard and felt through historicized passion as supplied to them from older times and… dead things. In short, they’re the “same” as reality but in a doubled sense, separated by theatre’s gulf of Gothic imagination and highlighted by diegetic and non-diegetic mood, method and music; i.e., a “danger disco” to play around inside [the basic idea of theatrical “play” being the stage and its props, music and stories told on and with these things]. In this profoundly playful space, a noir detective often dives into criminogenic conditions like a heroine in the castle does, except they’re more streetwise and less stuck in the medieval imaginary as a site of rape fantasy in the traditionally feminine sense. But in New England, there is crossover [all those churches and cemeteries] and any noir follows the same praxial formula as a Gothic novel when considered as canonical or “ground-breaking.” The rules are conventions that we play with like the characters in the story do—setting and breaking their own boundaries while crossing over the threshold into the shadow space, but also our world as we stare at them; i.e., between the world of the living and the land of the dead as half-real.)

Whether through damsels, detectives or demons (all heroic, all monstrous), canonical proponents of Gothic fiction not only “cash in,” but extend the mystery to likewise prolong people’s anxieties about the structure. Their game of “guess the killer/Gothic cliché” reinforces Capitalism and perpetuating its problems by commercializing them through harmful Gothic doubles that, cleverly enough, offer some measure of false power/hope and catharsis (with Radcliffe touching on some profound truths despite her grift as “the Great Enchantress[22],” or Tolkien despite his centrist schtick/refrain). As class warriors, our best “Jewish revenge” is consciously camping all of this while actively and knowingly being party to the devil; i.e., reclaiming said power from within (and “outside” of the zone; placed in quotes because there is no outside of the text, vis-à-vis Derrida).

Canonical or iconoclastic, the Gothic scheme is emotionally manipulative on multiple levels: “play the audience like a piano.” The capitalist does this so the audience will pay money according to the author’s improv as working them through their pre-existing stigmas and biases. Canon, then, is a bad puzzle told by a liar whose consolation prize is Faustian: “solvable” shadows, their mysteries less a critique of society unto itself and praxially devised to make us feel smart/active in a cop-like sense by beating the author at their own game, all while forcing our heads into the sand; i.e., making us the dupe (a concept we’ll return to in the symposium). It is possible to critique capital anyways, but the iconoclast shall be doing the legwork, not Radcliffe. She’s too busy busking through fear mongering according to stereotypes/criminogenic conditions. Any complicit artist is financially incentivized to lie a particular way—i.e., in defense of the status quo. These are criminogenic conditions, making canon at large criminogenic through the profit motive as endless: the show must go on. The same theatrical imperative applies to Gothic Communists, except our emotional/Gothic manipulations are mutually consensual and meant to develop Communism from inside Capitalism using our privilege as a staging point for rebellious counterterror and iconoclasm (camp); e.g., my own white woman’s privilege used to make a book specifically weaponized against capital. Sure, our methods are seductive and potent (thus resemble the people we’re camping—e.g., our variation of the detective story/danger disco), but they aren’t forced onto others that we might take their money and frighten them into paying more, next time; our sex education isn’t built around structured profit at all, but post-scarcity.

We’ll explore all of this next as we lay out Sex Positivity‘s thesis statement and pieces of the manifesto tree that both lead towards the “camp map” (the means for camping canon) and make up the pieces of the map needed to camp Tolkien’s refrain with, thus ungentrify canonical war by making it conscious class/culture war within a campy Gothic poetics.

Onto “Thesis Argument—Capitalism Sexualizes Everything“!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] As Lynn Bryce writes in “The Influence of Scandinavian Mythology of the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien” (1983): “Tolkien did not invent elves, wizards, dragons or magical weapons; these, and concepts like them, are fundamental to Norse literature and myth.” According to Lauri Linask, Tolkien appears to critique Beowulf, but at the end of the day largely emulates the same old patterns:

In his “Beowulf” lecture he undertook to argue with W.P. Ker whom he quotes as to have said: “The fault of ‘Beowulf’ is that there is nothing much in the story. The hero is occupied in killing monsters… Beowulf has nothing else to do when he has killed Grendel and Grendel’s mother in Denmark: he goes home to his own Gautland, until the rolling years bring the Fire-drake and his last adventure. It is too simple…” […] Tolkien thinks very highly of the heroic narratives in Norse, Icelandic or ancient English because their heroes and their embodiments of evil belong generically to the same class as those of Tolkien (source: Influences of the Germanic and Scandinavian Mythology in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien,” 1983).

As we shall see in the Four Gs and thesis proper, this shared love of the imaginary past has led to the furthering of the process of abjection through the ghost of the counterfeit: the commodification (and endless apologizing for) centrist war’s sublimated genocides. Tolkien emulated the old legends in much the same way the Nazis did, albeit in a less radicalized refrain that could eventually be ludologized under Bretton Woods and neoliberalism as it exists today—in tabletop/videogames.

[2] An allusion to Milton’s Satan, breaking into Paradise:

One gate there only was, and that looked east

On the other side. Which when the Arch-Felon saw,

Due entrance he disdained, and, in contempt,

At one slight bound high overleaped all bound

Of hill or highest wall, and sheer within

Lights on his feet. As when a prowling wolf,

Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey,

Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve,

In hurdled cotes amid the field secure,

Leaps o’er the fence with ease into the fold (source: Paradise Lost, Book Four).

[3] Consider Tolkien’s zero-sex policy versus Terry Goodkind’s naked exhibiting of pedophilia, genital mutilation and rape. They might seem like polar opposites, but both constitute Joseph Conrad’s bigoted fear-fascination with the colonized abomination, in The Heart of Darkness (1899): a white, cis-het fear-fascination with the past as restricted to the fringes of the empire, that—in neoliberal media, which brings the colonial revenge to the homefront—becomes “a spell to fall under” (re: Punter) and exorcise, generally through violence. Tolkien’s colonial rape occurred with swords, leveled against metaphors for people “not of the West” he considered “Mongol-types” (source: Tolkien Gateway) whose linguo-material presence would be entirely unwelcome in white areas (effectively gentrification in a real-world village/suburban setting).

Tolkien famously disliked allegory for his own stories (an appeal, then, to singular interpretations that ignored his writing’s racist, thus colonial potential). But even when reduced to “pure fantasy” as he would have preferred, the terrestrial framework and its cartography and colonial model are all obviously there and being put into practice; i.e., world-building and its manmade languages levied for a suitably war-like purpose regardless if Tolkien openly denounced Hilter. In short, he was a centrist to the core, the old sage handing the young hobbit a blade and preaching loftily about morals, specifically of knowing when to kill and when not to—in short, “playing god” in the face of the abject:

Bilbo almost stopped breathing, and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. He must fight. He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo’s heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. All these thoughts passed in a flash of a second. He trembled (source).

Except this mercy is arguably lacking in the face of those who are physically dangerous (according to white people); orcs, unlike Gollum, are given no quarter despite arguably having a bone to pick with them colonizers: “Show them no mercy for you shall receive none!” It’s tone-policing backed by force—also known as “peace through strength.”

[4] Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994) would lead to the company’s longest, and arguably most popular and widespread franchise, beating Diablo (1996) to the punch by two years and going on to establish the company as the successors to Everquest (1999) as the MMORPG to “kill”: World of Warcraft (2004), a globalizing of the pursuit of capital across the Internet. These games successfully applied a tactical, melee-based, roleplay element to the FPS-/TPS-adjacent strategy game (exhibit 1a1a1h2a1), which took on a massive-multiplayer form built around warring team-based combat with one-or-more combatants on either side. And of course, all of this was heavily dimorphized within the heteronormative colonial binary.

[5] (from Britannica): “A different word orc, alluding to a demon or ogre, appears in Old English glosses of about AD 800 and in the compound word orcnēas (‘monsters’) in the poem Beowulf. As with the Italian orco (‘ogre’) and the word ogre itself, it ultimately derives from the Latin Orcus, a god of the underworld. The Old English creatures were most likely the inspiration for the orcs that appear in J.R.R. Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings” (source).

[6] Tolkien’s inconsistent fear of spiders stretches back to a childhood phobia of them, but he was annoyingly wishy-washy and non-committal to how he felt about them; i.e., talking through both sides of his mouth (a classic centrist maneuver) [source: Tolkien Gateway].

[7] Tolkien did not exist during videogames as they are commonly thought of (though technically he died in 1973, a year after Pong [1972] was released for American home entertainment by Atari’s Allan Alcorn). Yet, Tolkien was also no stranger to playing games. Indeed, the entire “Riddles in the Dark” chapter from The Hobbit is pointedly a game, with a rather involved discussion surrounding luck, fairness and the following of rules:

He knew, of course, that the riddle-game was sacred and of immense antiquity, and even wicked creatures were afraid to cheat when they played at it. But he felt he could not trust this slimy thing to keep any promise at a pinch. Any excuse would do for him to slide out of it. And after all that last question had not been a genuine riddle according to the ancient laws (source).

In truth, Tolkien’s refrain—the High Fantasy treasure map—would translate very well to tabletop games and videogames, but especially The Lord of the Rings, which despite its immense size compared to The Hobbit was actually far simpler in terms of its treatment of war and wealth acquisition/generation. Everything was divided neatly into good and evil teams that—on the good side—weren’t fighting amongst each other nearly as much as during The Hobbit. In his later novels, the world-war machine wasn’t just suggested, but fully devised and given its own vast world to play out inside. And even with The Hobbit, Tolkien clearly understood the power of song and legends, writing his original story for children to acclimate them towards war and revenge dressed up in songs, fantasy and poems. It likewise had all the starts and stops of a radio serial, putting our heroes out of the frying pan and into the fire (similar to Flash Gordon, 1935) before pulling them out just in the nick of time (the Great Eagles being a shameless deus ex machina [and imperial emblem] that Tolkien would curiously refuse to use with The Lord of the Rings in order to prolong the story and its war for as long as possible).

[8] I wrote “The Problem of Greed” in Craig Dionne’s LITR 405 (Shakespeare) course. We had to cross-examine two primary texts with an academic secondary text. I went with Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1605) and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904). The essay won me an award from EMU, whereupon the faculty wrote this award letter—to EMU’s Distinguished Student in Literature Award—for 2016:

[My award letter from EMU, MA from MMU, and me in 2018 sitting on a copy of Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human (2011) borrowed from the school library (the photo was taken by my-partner-at-the-time, Zeuhl, for a school project of theirs).]

There was no money involved, but the letter did help me gain entry to MMU (which was a whole ordeal, to say the least; Persephone van der Waard’s Quora answer to “How easy is it to get into Manchester Metropolitan University?” 2019) when I went there for my master’s degree in English Studies: the Gothic, in 2017. In short, I had an adventure where the things gained is largely open to interpretation: “This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found [herself] doing and saying things altogether unexpected. [She] may have lost the neighbors’ respect, but [she] gained—well, you will see whether [she] gained anything in the end.”

[9] A term that, according to Adam Curtis’ HyperNormalization (2016), was originally used to describe the “whiplash” feelings of Soviet citizens during the 1980s—faced with the terrifying onset of societal collapse despite Soviet national propaganda having adopted neoliberal shock therapy while insisting that things were fine. The same idea can be applied to the uncanny sensation that things are not fine or even real despite how normal, foundational and concrete they seem; i.e., how they “pass” as normal despite a disquieting sense of decay (worker exploitation, for our purposes).

[10] Yes, this is a tautology (e.g., the sky is blue because the sky is blue), but in this case it’s essentially the gist. Function is self-determined, but not self-evident because art—short of spelling things out, billboard-/graffiti-style—often requires dialectical-material scrutiny to parse if it’s sex-positive or not; likewise, it will take someone who is sex-positive to make sex-positive media in good faith (and not by accident)—i.e., art that expresses sex positivity in ways that either yield sex-positive virtues under dialectical-material scrutiny or, preferably, are more explicitly or obviously upfront through their subversions and transgressions of canonical norms.

[11] “Hermeneutics” being of, otherwise pertaining to, interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts; a method or theory of interpretation.

[12] “Free speech” is a common “apolitical” DARVO strategy used by bigots who argue for negative-freedom boundaries that apply to them, but not for others; e.g., “I want to be able to say slurs or profit off manufactured controversies by politically advocating for issues that will never affect me; i.e., punching down at minorities while acting like a victim, myself.” Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.

[13] Source: Academy of Ideas’ “The Parallel Society vs Totalitarianism | How to Create a Free World” (2022).

[14] Walpole actually published the original manuscript in 1764 under a pseudonym without the qualifier “a Gothic tale” (which he added a year later after people pitched a fit that he—the son of the first British prime minster—had effectively forged a historical document and passed it off as genuine). The story was based off his architectural reconstruction (thus reimagining) of medieval history, Strawberry Hill House (a cross-medium tradition carried on by Gothic contemporaries/spiritual successors—e.g., William Beckford’s Vathek, 1786, and subsequent “folly,” Fonthill Abbey, in 1796—but also videogame spaces inspired by the cinematic and novelized forms previously build on real-life “haunted” houses: the Metroidvania).

[15] Referring to “Ozymandias” (1818).

[16] For a recent example of someone fighting the privatization of their intellectual property by corporate abuse, refer to the actions of Bill Willingham’s “Willingham Sends Fables into the Public Domain” (2023). He described it as asymmetrical warfare, aka guerrilla warfare (which is historically the weapon of the Communist).

[17] False power and false hope go hand-in-hand within fascism, neoliberalism and the capitalist propaganda mill.

[18] Rune Klevjer writes in “The Way of the Gun: The Aesthetic of the Single-Player First Person Shooter” (2006):

the short history of the FPS also includes a different strand, which unlike Doom and Medal of Honor does not grow out of a broad tradition of action-adventure. The so-called tactical FPS (sometimes also referred to as the “squad-based” FPS) draws instead on the traditions of strategic war games and the military simulator. In spite of many similarities (which follow from the common perceptual grounding of the first-person-gun) and in spite of the inevitable ambiguities and hybridizations, the binary of action-adventure versus military simulator has become a significant aesthetic distinction within the genre of the single-player First Person Shooter (source).

and yet, for the purposes of generational trauma and the state’s acclimation of its population towards war (through waves of terror), the male action hero’s adventure story is a standard-issue facet to military propaganda ludologized: squad-based tactics vs a terrorist group in training exercises, and larger-than-life superheroes vs larger-than-life demons in strict propaganda narratives; re: Beowulf vs Grendel and Grendel’s mother. These aren’t “separate”; they’re two sides of the same unholy coin that present war as a business across various mediums, but especially in videogames aping their cinematic and novelized palimpsests; re: Tolkien’s infamous treasure map as a place to take the spoils of war back from demons, undead and nature; re: “having an adventure” is complicit cryptonymy in action.

[19] Father Schedoni from The Italian (1796) ostensibly croaks in this manner. Once had out, he actually poisons himself, whereupon he makes a weird, inhuman sound that terrifies everyone around him: “Schedoni uttered a sound so strange and horrible, so convulsed, yet so loud, so exulting, yet so unlike any human voice, that every person in the chamber, except those who were assisting Nicola, struck with irresistible terror, endeavoured to make their way out of it. This, however, was impracticable, for the door was sastened, until a physician, who had been sent for, should arrive, and some investigation could be made into this mysterious affair. The consternation of the Marchese and of Vivaldi, compelled to witness this scene of horror, cannot easily be imagined” (source).

[20] Historically, an effective method of power consolidation is the status quo’s recuperation rebellions or crises (often shortages) to enable/incentivize regressions. After the French Revolution, the social gains made during the ensuing unrest were branded as terrorist actions by the state and in Gothic fiction (vis-à-vis Joseph Crawford, who we’ll examine, later) and used to regress towards the status quo with new “counterterrorist” measures in place; i.e., the defeating of Napoleon (who was a false revolutionary and opportunist, to be fair) in 1815, followed by the rise of the Victorian Era of the British Empire from 1835 until 1901. After the 1973 oil crisis (aka the Oil Shock), Bretton Woods was impacted and ultimately discarded by capitalist opportunists eagerly in favor of a until-then fringe ideology, neoliberalism, wherein Margaret Thatcher assumed power in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1981; both executives lead to the further gutting of the labor movements in their country followed by establishment safeguards for deregulation, which lead to a rise in war, austerity and fascism (not a shortage). In short, modern war developed, expanded and increased, then eventually became corporatized through corporate seizures of direct power on the global stage, working to supersede state mechanisms altogether (Bad Empanada’s “Johnny Harris: Shameless Propagandist Debunked,” 2023).

[21] Often expressed as “the mothership” in science fiction stories; e.g., Independence Day (1996) as a clunky metaphor for the Imperial Boomerang as an alien mass-invasion vehicle visited upon the usual colonizers: America and the Global North (whose big nations eat little notions). During the perceived outsider’s “special military operation,” an occupying army launches from a base of operations with seemingly magical weapons and spacecraft, except it’s displaced onto a dark, female-coded alien force; i.e., “Communists do this, not America!” In turn, this Gothic disassociation of the colonial binary becomes a call-to-war according to unity through neoconservative argumentation; apologetics for the Fourth of July as something to celebrate using the flowery language of American Liberty in defense of the current world order vis-à-vis Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980)

What made Bacon’s Rebellion especially fearsome for the rulers of Virginia was that black slaves and white servants joined forces […] Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites. This bought loyalty. And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality (source).

as opposed to Fredrick Douglas’ “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (1852):

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn (source).

[22] From Dale Townshend’s “An introduction to Ann Radcliffe” (2014):

The “Shakspeare [sic] of Romance Writers”; “the mighty magician of THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO”; “the first poetess of romantic fiction”; “a genius of no common stamp”; “the great enchantress of that generation”; “mother Radcliff [sic]”: Nathan Drake, T. J. Mathias, Walter Scott, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Thomas De Quincey and John Keats respectively, together with countless other essayists, reviewers and critics of the Romantic period in Britain, praised the writing of the Gothic romancer, poet and travel-writer Ann Ward Radcliffe (1764–1823) in the most superlative terms imaginable (source).

In short, it was a giant wank-fest where these literal jackoffs allowed Radcliffe to trespass because she was polite; they couldn’t get enough. And while I think her fiction isn’t total dogshit (I like her suspense and some of her literary devices), it’s also worryingly and unapologetically centrist/”basic.” That shouldn’t be surprising given the period in which it was written, but in our Gothic times (wherein terribly fitting labels like “TERF island” are no accident), we have to do better than “go down on Radcliffe” just because a bunch of old, dead white people did, two centuries ago (and more recently as living ones continue to suck her toes—no offense, Dale). We have to camp her enchantments and risk the tone-policing she was too chickenshit to face while writing her “polite” rape fantasies, then taking her 30 pieces of silver (more on this, later).

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“!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. 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.

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 (Volume Zero) [volume opening]

The Absurd[1] is the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life, and the human inability to find any in a purposeless, meaningless or chaotic and irrational universe.

—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

Capitalism is a giant graveyard, but a shared one to “rock out” inside. For Gothic Communists, the crypt is a place to dance within, while those who pale in face of Capitalism eating itself punch the skeleton (or giant suit of armor) as a scapegoat. Unlike them, we’ve acclimated to chaos because we’re the underclass (to varying degrees of intersecting privilege and axes of oppression); they’re the mythical “middle class,” given pretty baubles thus thinking they have the most to lose: “land back = white genocide.” My silly fools, unite (with us against the state); you have only to lose your chains!

Chaos isn’t meaningless, but an invitation to make your own meaning by cheating death in a ludic sense—i.e., tearing up the Faustian ludic contract of Capitalism by being a “spoilsport” of sorts. The thesis volume, then, contains my expanded author’s foreword and thesis proper on Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, as well as the “camp map” and symposium, which together summarize and articulate its broadest and most common arguments and key points (e.g., the Gothic, monstrous-feminine, Amazonomachia). The author’s foreword explains the various “pregnancies” I had in order “to give birth” to its respective volumes (my not-so-little demon babies), as well as thanking my prime Muse[2] involved in its insemination: my partner (and cover model for this volume), Bay.

(artist: Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri)

The foreword also outlines the cultivation of a broad and far-reaching concept—the Wisdom of the Ancients—which later in the volume (and rest of the book) will be applied to various related ideas; e.g., class consciousness and “darkness visible.” Following that, I will conclude the foreword by discussing my thought process in making the book; i.e., how its making shaped my thought process, moving through the birth canal and towards the finishing line.

Author’s Foreword: “On Giving Birth,” the Wisdom of the Ancients, and Afterbirth

…in assuming [this book] as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. […] I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature […] The circumstance on which my story rests was suggested in casual conversation (source).

—Mary Shelley, “Preface to Frankenstein” (1818)

(model and artist, left: Mary Shelley and Richard Rothwell; model, right: Persephone van der Waard)

Pregnancies are seldom planned. This book, Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism, isn’t just a big-ass porn catalog full of cool, “thirsty” art, nor is it just my little trans demon baby and pure, loving brainchild made with those who passively or actively contributed to its pages; it’s me, a trans woman, consciously reverse-engineering my own creative process as having been ongoing for years (thus why I have so many exhibits from my own work—I had already drawn them years ago). For the better part of fifteen months, this complex reification’s trial and error has happened in starts and stops after long nights at the desk, sleeping on my increasingly regular musings and waking afresh with new queer epiphanies—to keep things straight in my own head, much like Sarah Connor kept journals for herself while figuratively and literally giving birth to rebellion (and doing my best to avoid coming off as a white savior). Just as an expected child is fueled and shaped by its mother’s diet, my book was inspired by the process of older poetics/poiesis (meaning “to make,” specifically a production of that which has never existed; i.e., the simulacrum, or imitation fashioned through   mimesis). The idea of Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism wasn’t just subversion, but reclamation of what was lost to fight back against capital as Einstein’s fish might: to learn not what made me feel stupid for being unable to climb a tree as my prescribed “betters” could, but swim in water as I was always meant to through a cultivated emotional/Gothic intelligence linked to my inherent neurodivergence and queerness as useless to capital (outside of moral panics).

We’ll continue to unpack “Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism” at length during the thesis paragraph/statement. For now, it is class/culture war relayed through monstrous poetics that actively and class-consciously subvert their canonical norms’ etiology by recultivating the Superstructure and reclaiming the Base. I devised the concept to process systemic trauma through ironic monstrous poetics (the making of campy monsters) and thus have written/illustrated a book that is full of what I love: sex positivity, catharsis and of course, monsters. It was originally an attempt to heal/recover from academia and my inability “to make it” as a trans woman/neurodivergent person; as well as my exes and what they did to me, but also a constant reflection on the dialogic Gothic imagination of the larger world and dialectical-material expressions of trauma within its historical materialism. For example, last December I tried very hard to use my manuscript to relate to an ex of mine named Zeuhl[3], taking an idea they leveled against my argumentation and expanding on the pushback I received; i.e., I wanted them in my life and the book was at least partially an attempt to keep them as close as I could. This did not last and three years after they unexpectedly broke up with me in 2019 (while overseas with “an old flame,” as they put it), we finally fell out for good. Undeterred, I continued writing my book, whereupon I met one of my current partners, Bay. Bay’s enthusiastic participation led to a profound expansion on my book’s ideas; i.e., through a shared desire to communicate these academic notions to a wider public by refining them. We didn’t want to reduce them to the accommodated intellectual’s granularized, academic “word soup,” archaic paywall system, all-around gatekeeping and cognitive estrangement, but instead focus on practical, holistic expression as publicly synthesized; i.e., amongst all workers in intuitive solidarity against the state as our ultimate foe.

palimpsest

“A manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain”—common in Gothic stories, which amount to a cycle of lies; i.e., historical materialism: bourgeois history is unreliable, treacherous, like a Gothic lover or a concentric chest/midden of unreliable materials (cryptonyms). It can apply to a variety of media or formats: sculpture, music, clothes, videogames, etc (exhibit 5b, 43a/43b).

Gothic narrators/narratives

For its hero, narrators, spaces and speakers, a Gothic tale regularly involves unreliable/conflicting artificers and imposters, but also the patriarchal bloodline or castle as invented; i.e., as a series of concentric, sedimentary palimpsests. In the canonical sense, everything is fetishized, valorized and disseminated, then spread far and wide to cover up the ghost of the counterfeit (the circular lie of the West) with more ghosts that further the lie. Iconoclastic variants challenge this myopia with their own counterfeits’ opposing class character inside a shared, contested midden.

Gothic doubling

The black mirror of historical materialism’s all our yesterdays. It is the fated, ominous premonition of endless circuituity—that everything has already occurred before, or things that have already occurred will occur again from the same materials that occur out of what has already occurred; i.e., for everything that exists, there must (somewhere in the universe) be a dialectical-material “shadow” whose coinciding status as former-or-future counterfeit is actually historical materialism’s circular approach to space and time felt in the current moment: everything that has ever existed will exist again or things that will exist have already existed in ways that offer up a prior version’s dialectical-material opposition to it—a castle or soldier as “evil” twin, uncanny and undead, replicated like an echo, a virus, a shade; the civil war of black infinity. There is no automatic moral character, merely the presence of infinite possibility amid crushing gravity and decay.

the Gothic heroine

The oft-female (or at least feminine) protagonist of Gothic stories. Classically a passive sex object/detective/damsel-in-distress, which became increasingly masculine, active and warlike in the 20th century onwards (though Charlotte Dacre beat everyone to the punch in 1806 when she wrote Zofloya, having the masculine-yet-trammeled Victoria de Loredani stab Lilla, the archetypal Gothic heroine, to death[4]). Unlike their male counterparts, who tend to default to soldiers or scientists (violent/mentally fragile men of war and reason with—at least in America—closeted ties to Nazi Germany and parallel conservative movements wearing a liberal guise), women within the colonial binary are relegated to spheres of domesticated ignorance; i.e., “Something is wacky about my residence, my guest, my wardrobe, etc. Guess I’ll go investigate (exhibit 48a)!” Ann Radcliffe treated the protecting of female virtue as an “armoring” (exhibit 30c) process that commonly worked through a swooning[5] mechanism; though somewhat problematic on its face due to its pro-European origins, the idea of armoring one’s virtue still presents the notion of feminine flexibility as facing monstrous-feminine things that male, or at least “phallic,” heroes cannot rationalize or stab/shoot to death; i.e., the paradox of terror as something to reclaim through counterterror devices that, yes, include a fair bit of rape, taboo sex, and murderous stereotypes. In other words, it’s entirely possible to have the Great Destroyer persona without being bigoted, but you have to camp it, first.

Star Wars (1977) famously presented the Death Star as something to blow up during a canal chase bombing run, flanking Luke Skywalker with fascist hounds; Battlestar Galactica (2005) inverts the canal chase into a head-to-head, one-on-one dogfight, putting the hero, Starbuck, on a paradoxical collision course with herself but also all our yesterdays: the female knight/Gothic heroine jousting with her own dark reflection as one narrative in a series of endlessly foretold collisions. The nightmarish reverie holds her in trance, bringing her close enough that we see the whites of her eyes—to stare into her very soul. As we do, we’re invited to project onto the screen, seeing a “reflection” of ourselves upon Starbuck; i.e., not just as a dramatic vehicle for cheap, quick “feels,” but the uncomfortable sensation of mistaken identity that this has all somehow happened before—is all happening again right this very second; it becomes an undead phenomenology to freeze under and stare at, but also a communion with all the dead generations who preceded us/will proceed after us. As part of this cathedral, we are merely “in the middle” of a never-ending struggle:

For workers, then, this book is about harnessing the awesome power of the Gothic double—of cultivating a Gothic counterculture useful to liberating sex work from capitalistic bondage, thus requires camping canon through holistic study of the larger aforementioned cycle; holistic study is the returning to, and reflecting upon, old points/dated expressions after assembling them in a powerful, fractally recursive way to understand larger structures and patterns’ own divisions and replications across space and time, but also representations of space-time (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). Camping canon, then, is the profoundly chaotic challenging of singular, thus harmful interpretations (and their reactionary responses) through the commodification of power and resistance as the ongoing (and hopelessly messy) struggle between colonizer and colonized; i.e., “nothing is sacred” (except human rights and the health of ecosystems and the humane treatment of animals) vs Capitalism’s this is old, not new, not something that is sold as “fresh,” ignoring old theatrical devices like medieval puppet shows and bad-on-purpose voices, asides/speaking to the audience, wrestling super moves, theremins and Scooby Doo [1969] running sound effects, Greek Choruses, Kabuki masks, and Jojo’s “tension” katakana and terrible (thus lovely) puns, etc. Capital is always trying to commodify, thus colonize, the antiquated oral traditions of theatre/folklore, but through the inexorable drive of capital these invariably become outmoded as discarded hauntologies/cryptonyms that we can reclaim from canon as it crumbles and seeks profit elsewhere. Canon can always be camped, and relies upon old theatrical stratagems and Gothic hauntologies, but also “talking funny” or incorrectly to achieve its campy Jester’s affect.

(artist: Frederick Richard Pickersgill—taken with my phone while I was visiting the Manchester Art Gallery with Zeuhl in 2018)

Before I continue, the amount of influence Bay has had on my book cannot be easily quantified, so I will simply say that I have a profound gratitude and appreciation for their boundless, substantial contributions. I wanted to summarize that in a brief but heartful and sincere message to them:

Bay,

As neurodivergent and non-binary yourself—and struggling to find purpose and value in academia like I did—you said it makes you feel valuable and seen in an “encompassing way”; i.e., kindness without judgement, and written/illustrated to share with the world what makes you special in my eyes. As such, you said that you want me to not just process trauma but fill this book with love (our making of love). Thanks to you, I have acquired the means—the awesome power—to be able to do that. I have many muses, but you are my Muse, and this foreword and every volume has a dedication to you at the start for a reason. You are the light in my storm, the pulse to my heart, the ghost in my castle; and this book is our shared “stim toy”/song in the night. “The creatures of the night, what sweet music they make!” May our song in the night bring other workers peace and love, and our spectres of Marx—the ghosts of all the dead generations—revive and weigh on the brains of the living, terrifying the elite senseless as we make the ghosts of men like Marx campy, thus sexy and funny according to our Wisdom of the Ancients as we dance with ghosts (with Marx’ memory already rather dry and caricaturized—i.e., of their own “ponsed-up” masculinity [as you put it] relayed through their pointy beards, overinflated egos, and overbearing intellects; and ironically enough, through his debatable anti-Semitism[6] later weaponized by bigots).

Love,

—Mommy

(source: Zelda Dungeon)

The idea with this book isn’t just to camp canon and the Shadow of Pygmalion[7]/ghost of the skeleton king and his madness (the bigoted historical materialism of the status quo that anchors gender roles and identities to biological sex within the colonial binary) by dancing with them, but also Marx’s ghost (which famous thinkers like Max Weber had to argue with in their own work). Marx wasn’t gay enough for my tastes, thus could never camp canon to the amount required. In camping him, I’m obviously doing this through the Gothic mode, specifically its making of monsters—their lairs, battles, identities and struggles—through a reclaimed Wisdom of the Ancients that represents ourselves during shared dialectical-material struggles that take what Marx touched on before going further than he ever could:

the Wisdom of the Ancients

A cultural understanding of the imaginary past. The past is always imaginary to some extent, but through less wise forms reliably leads to genocide and tremendous suffering; i.e., Marx’ prophesied tragedy and farce[8]:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue (source: “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” 1852).

or according to structures of power that preserve themselves through blind pastiche, parody and canonical art. These foolish forms operate according to structures of power that preserve themselves through blind pastiche, parody and canonical art: pure evil and pure good as an essentialized struggle divorced from material reality—simply the forces of light versus the forces of darkness, respectively of good and evil: not of Milton’s humanized, revolutionary Satan, but the Biblical Satan as a vicious backstabber embodied in Beowulf (c. 700) and echoed in future written forms through the canonical monomyth endlessly mimicking itself in heteronormative forms of gender trouble and gender parody.

In turn, canon essentialize Capitalism’s vicious cycle and cataclysmic arrangements of the imaginary past as something that is simultaneously Malthusian, but also paradoxically “as good as it gets” and threatened by the doomsday myopia of nominal Communism that Capitalist Realism affords. As their sense of agency and certitude collapse with the world around them, workers—but especially the middle class—are left feeling cheated or lied to, and either blame the system or scapegoats. Scapegoats are historically easier because you can shoot or kill them, implying the solution is a simple, straightforward one. It’s the “tried-and-true” “wisdom” of the Roman fool, falling on their own sword while Rome burns not once, but over and over. Such “wisdom” is not wise, but a false power, which Gothic Communists seek to reclaim through our own doubling of the imaginary past—its monsters, castles and battles—as a kind of “living document” that can reclaim the Gothic imagination, thus our ability to think; i.e., through lost forms of knowledge retailored for the complexities of the modern world—its warring mentalities, sexualities, monsters (codified beliefs and actions) and praxis during class and culture war.

Something important to consider is the inherently fictional or theatrical nature to history as fabricated in some shape or form by good-faith and bad-faith actors (to which, the stage is merely a place to communicate ideas in theatrical language). Napoleon himself—a famous propagandist inundated with the image of the past as a means of self-deification—once said: “History is a set of lies that people have agreed upon. Even when I am gone, I shall remain in people’s minds the star of their rights, my name will be the war cry of their efforts, the motto of their hopes” (source: PBS’s “Self-Made Myth”).

For Napoleon, and many others like him, the truth is something to bend, but also present in theatrical forms invoking the imaginary past; i.e., a means to hide their true intent in bad faith. By comparison, it isn’t inherently dishonest for a sex-positive person to “lie” in a theatrical sense if it means protecting oneself from bad-faith actors. In other words, good-faith actors rely on theatre and performance to relay the truth in fictionalized, wildly fantastical forms. The aim isn’t misinformation, but a form of acting on- and offstage in every register available to question the so-called legitimacy of people just like Napoleon in the present day—i.e., so-called “revolutionaries” who ultimately used the awesome power of propaganda to manipulate workers towards inserting them into power before reneging on the rights of these same persons while acting out their Romanized fantasies (a trend Marx touches on in the above quotation, regarding Napoleon’s ghost on the post-Terror politics of the mid-1800s: “The French, so long as they were engaged in revolution, could not get rid of the memory of Napoleon”). We live in the state’s shadow of acting out its own lies(-upon-lies) to preserve itself through a ghostly procession of men who-would-be-Caesar similarly becoming ghosts of themselves along the pro-state meta-narrative. Theatre—including its popular, romanticized sites and participants—is a dangerously delicious proposition that can have far-reaching consequences:

(artist: Spencer Devlin Howard)

The thing to remember is that acting, music, poetry and theatre are all powerful ways to communicate, but also a time-tested means of survival against bad-faith actors (the above photo is a cosplay of the villain Salieri, who supposedly poisoned Mozart to death. Regardless if that’s true, Mozart wasn’t exactly hard to attack; an infamously vulgar[9] man, he died penniless in a pauper’s grave—”hoisted on his own petard,” as it were). People act all the time for a variety of reasons; many more “lie” at particular places where lying is expected (e.g., the postpunk disco) as a means of getting at the truth in ways designed to help others (thus policed and infiltrated by undercover state agents).

As I point out with the likes of Frederic Jameson, Edward Said and Luis Borges, this is not uncommon, but indeed involves a shared transgenerational/-continental conversation about persons who know they aren’t “being honest” insofar as official histories are concerned:

Fredrick Jameson is a Marxist critic not without opinions on the science fiction and fantasy genres. For example, he writes, “[science fiction’s] multiple mock futures [transform] our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come” (152) and yet “Fantasy remains generically wedded to nature and to the organism […] Nature thus seems to function here primarily as the sign of an imaginary regression to the past and to older pre-rational forms of thought” (64). Whereas SF addresses the unaddressable―the Utopian ideal, through an imagined “future,” which is really just our present in disguise—fantasy happily engages in the practice of magic and mystical beliefs, which are non-materialistic and affiliated with Antiquity and older, less-modern concepts. What we have here is Jameson describing his view of these genres—their perceived function, according to him, rather than their true, objective, universal function, if there is such a thing. I say, “according to him,” because Jameson writes what he sees, like all writers. Keeping this in mind, I’ll choose authors at random to make my point: What does he have in common with Wolfgang Iser, Jonathan Swift, Plato, Jane Austen, Edward Said, Thomas More and Ursula Le Guin? They are all liars.

Swift was an 18th century Irish satirist; Plato, a Classical philosopher from Ancient Greece; Austen, a 19th century English novelist; and More, a Renaissance writer who wrote in Latin. Excusing the fact that the rest are modern writers and thinkers, each still comes from a different time—that is, the present, which is unique to each. So while Jameson, Iser, Said and Le Guin are all 20th century writers, Jameson is still an American Marxist literary critic; Iser, a German literary critic; Said, a Palestinian, post-colonial literary critic; and Ursula Le Guin, an American fantasy/science fiction novelist. They distinguish themselves in the same broad profession[: lying to get at the concealed truth] (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Jameson and the Art of Lying,” 2017).

When asked by a symposium-goer what my point was in acknowledging that everyone lies, I was a bit long-winded. In hindsight, I’d like to reply some six years after the fact: “People lie, but lying isn’t strictly speaking a means of concealing the truth; rather, it can help us get at the truth, generally by acknowledging the shortcomings of a given academic or author revered for their special strategies.” As we shall see, these past figures weren’t gods, and I certainly won’t hold back when taking the likes of Jameson or Ann Radcliffe to task (especially Radcliffe). Indeed, we should fucking wail on them and see what comes out (for analysis but also for therapeutic[10] reasons) Yet, I will do so while also doing my best to take what’s useful from their own body of work and injecting it into my own. People lie, so it’s good to ask why and in service to what; i.e., who says what about them and why.

For example, Mark Dooley writes of Derrida,

What I saw in Derrida was a man of equal genius whose affirmative understanding of home redeemed French thought from its obsessive oikophobia.

There is one element of my existence which often perplexes many people. How is it that I—Sir Roger Scruton’s intellectual biographer and literary executor—should have written extensively on his arch-nemesis Jacques Derrida? Derrida was, after all, one of those upon whom Scruton regularly poured abundant scorn. He was a high priest of “Nothingness” whose soulless alchemy had corrupted the foundations of intellectual life. Generations of students had fallen under his spell, their minds having disintegrated in the process. This wizard of gobbledygook had earned himself a global reputation, but he was nothing more than a purveyor of “nonsense.” That, at least, was Roger’s interpretation of Derrida until, later in life, he softened his stance in response to my view of the so-called “father of deconstruction” (source: “The Surprising Conservatism of Jacques Derrida,” 2020).

Preservation of “the home” as threatened by the nonsense of a—let’s say, Neo-Gothic fear of colonial inheritance—is, for this dude, peppered with a pure dismissal of those pesky Marxists:

The fact remains, however, that Derrida was not one of the “fashionable frauds” with whom he is often associated. Scruton believed he was a genius, something he confessed in my home in 2010. Both men, as it happens, were arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and expelled from Prague at the height of the communist era. Their crime was daring to address underground seminars for those brave democrats who would eventually emerge from the catacombs to lead their country to liberty. For all their endless talk of the “other,” you can be sure that neither Jacques Lacan nor Slavoj Zizek would not have done likewise. That is because, unlike most of the French Left, Derrida was neither a Marxist radical nor someone who sought to repudiate his own society while simultaneously enjoying its benefits (ibid.).

The publisher, The European Conservative, should be a big fat clue, as should the title of the article: “surprising conservatism”—almost as if it hinges on the particular interpretations of a man who didn’t have as many hard stances as say, Karl Marx! Yet, Daddy Derrida also gifted us with the profoundly anti-conservative (and entirely oikophobic) Spectres of Marx in 1993. Indeed, it provided the groundwork for the likes of Mark Fisher’s hauntology and creative movements like Vaporwave (and later, Laborwave) to flourish. To use a phrase not my own, he was “of the devil’s party and didn’t know it” (more on this in a bit) so it’s up to us to bring his ghost over to our cause. But we first have to be willing to write with ghosts[11], but also dance with them. This includes making fun of them:

(artist: Existential Comics)

In the absence of hard stances—and generally living within the contradictions of a person’s total sum—we have to take what’s useful and leave the rest (Derrida and Foucault took some incredibly iffy takes, which we’ll broach in a moment); the quantifiable value of such a person, then, becomes an act of salvaging their ghost. Derrida may not have been a self-identified Marxist™ like Sartre was (who raped his own students with Beauvoir’s help), and his prose is absolutely fucking dogshit, but out of the perceived “nothingness” of his body of work, I can easily go in and isolate some real winners. The same goes for Foucault, even though—as we shall see—calling him a “Marxist” is a dubious proposition unto itself:

the crux of the matter is that in the social humanities, Foucauldian approaches — which have far, far weaker explanatory power than more materialist approaches like Marxism, and therefore are more often than not nearly inert when it comes to confronting actual concrete power — have fully taken over. This at the expense of not just Marx but the whole broad Marxian tradition that once was the bedrock of social theory and also held a formidable presence in philosophy, literary studies, anthropology, the early stirrings of feminist academics, and other humanisms. There’s a place for Foucault: but his pedigree has, like the suitors in the Odyssey, well overstayed their welcome and gobbled up more than a fair share, considering Foucauldianism’s flawed and downright reactionary implications relative to less discourse-focused and more concrete forms of social and political analysis.

Obviously it benefits the powers behind the academy not to ruffle feathers on class issues the way that Marx and Marxists do. Foucauldian people may speak freely of identity, but their project both has no class analysis and no concrete material demands. It’s always a deferral — the answer is always a deeper dive into the text, forever. Every essay I’ve ever read by Judith Butler[12] — a consummate Foucauldian — ends with some version of “now is the time to begin to begin thinking about theorizing a new conception of…”

Compare this to the threat of student and staff unions and radicalization along lines that actually lose money for the powerful and it’s not hard to see why Foucauldianism is looked upon with much more favor in the humanities than Marxism (source: Elliot Swain’s “Why I Think Foucault Is Basically Entirely Wrong and Bad,” 2021).

We’re not salvaging the reputation of a particular man (or woman, whoever) or their reputation, but their ideas. There’s a difference between the two, even if they seem inextricable at first glance. People who cannot separate the two or think critically about them should be viewed with skepticism.

(artist: Henry Fuseli)

“Embrace chaos,” Zeuhl once said to me. And through the chaos of daily life and the libraries of “books in the wrong section” contributing to the absolute serendipity of chance meetings that eventually leave us talking—if not to ourselves, then with ghosts of past things that continue to shape our lives as giving them structure and meaning long after the originator has flown (a ghost is as much language—i.e., someone’s language and ideas—as it is the person themselves having died and become a reputation; all exist in the present moment as something to converse with, as Prince Hamlet does with his “father’s ghost,” above).

For example, Zeuhl recommended Foucault’s A History of Sexuality: Volume One (1980) to me while we were at MMU, and took great delight in the fact that Foucault once said in a 1993 interview with Edmund White that, “In a sense, all the rest of my life I’ve been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys” (source). Zeuhl also specialized in “twink academia” and introduced me to Dennis Cooper and Gregg Araki. But they also seemed oddly uncritical/apologetic of Foucault as a person. I laughed when they jokingly said to me once, “I ride and die with Foucault,” but the degree to their joke was tested, and utterly thrown into question, by their abhorred and thoroughly dishonest treatment of me later on. Towards the end of our friendship, Zeuhl didn’t bat an eyelash when I showed them the Elliot Swain article and likewise mentioned Foucault’s predatory sex tourism (Bad Empanada 2, 2022) and public, official desire to abolish age of consent laws in France (The Living Philosophy’s “Why French Postmodernists were Pro-Paedophilia in the 1970s,” 2021). All at once, it made their fascination with Cooper and Araki’s “twink[13] exploitation” material seem dubious in hindsight. In fact, when I wasn’t so in love with them (for a variety of reasons—the wonderful [and frequent] sex we had, but also because they were far kinder to me when we were at school together), it became disturbingly easy to spot the flaws I had deceived myself of while we were an item[14] (“love is blind” ‘n all that).

People lie; some people lie in good faith to challenge a state-provided universal truth, but just as many conflate “pure honesty” with “total transparency” insofar as hard political stances can’t somehow be embedded (in good faith) in theatrical forms like allegory and apocalypse; they absolutely can. As a set of widely-agreed-upon lies or performances, the Gothic—when used by good-faith actors—amounts to two keywords from Jameson that I’ll introduce here (which we’ll then unpack in our first essay before the thesis proper): elaborate strategies of misdirection and “archaeologies of the future.” Both are told by liars; i.e., splendide mendax[15] who then use them to reinvent the official histories of the status quo’s past; i.e., in good faith through their own Gothic “archaeologies” that challenge universal “truth” as a dubious proposition, one that—when taken at face value from state proponents by uncritical audiences—can lead to great harm when unquestioned; or, to quote Derrida, not only is there is no transcendental signified[16], but nor is there is any outside of the text[17]!

Canon is more simple in its tack, preserving ghosts and reputations that uphold the status quo. In canonical works, the mimicry of the past is divided along Cartesian thought, according to its profitable binaries. Anything non-heteronormative is alien, “pure darkness” that challenges “pure light”; in truth, canon alienates workers from themselves and from nature inside the material world. Said alienation—of our bodies, labor and ability to self-express according to our sexuality/gender/power, etc—occurs through Capitalism’s profit motive; someone has to kill someone else according to be “correct” or not. Anything that upsets this orderly tension (and its profit for the elite) is gender trouble in ways that cannot be permitted; in short, it instills gender trouble as a kind of chaotic, uncontrollable opposition: iconoclasm through “perceptive,” class-/culture-conscious gender parody. Sex positivity is iconoclasm because it camps canon by default, thus provides us the means to escape the eternal, Promethean nightmare of Capitalism looping in on itself: war is everywhere and in everything; rape is everywhere and in everything. They synonymize inside the profit motive, and their shared ubiquity happens through labor within capital as universally sexualized—all because the profit motive is deliberately built around them as a continuation of history as somehow “ended.” Quite the contrary, it merely becomes replaced with an eternal battle where everything has been sexually dimorphized within the colonial binary. It’s a rigged game, one meant to enrich the elite by exploiting us. Like the fangs of a great vampire, everything suffers to feed their ravenous maws; but it’s presented as “natural,” argued in the essentialized language of good versus evil, darkness and light:

This canonical mimicry has always been constrained by written media as something to disseminate. From the 1980s onwards, however, the spread of all media became easier and easier to ejaculate across what is now the Internet Age. As a result, neoliberal stories like The Legend of Zelda (1987—and its cinematic palimpsest, Legend, 1985) have essentialized the historical-material cycle of a pure good and evil divorced from history (“the end of history,” you might call it). It’s not dialectical-material, merely dialectical, whereupon the past is devoutly imagined in ways that that essentialize Capitalism’s vicious cycle; i.e., cataclysmic arrangements of the imaginary past as something that is simultaneously Malthusian[18], but also paradoxically “as good as it gets.” Manufactured, the stunted plateau becomes a fortress, endlessly threatened by the doomsday myopia of a nominal (queer, non-white) Communism that cannot, must not (according to canon) be challenged by guerilla forces.

As the indoctrinated become hopelessly rigid, they also become the state’s greatest defenders. Waxing nostalgic[19] on their own diminishing conditions while isolating inside their raped minds, they become unable to imagine anything outside of Capitalism; the space beyond its arbitrary boundaries becomes a pure, harmful black filling them with dread (“waves of terror”). They’ll theatrically adopt any mindset or performative role to chase away its terrors, but also destroy them on sight, on- and offstage. In short, they’re bullies, afraid of everything around them. In turn, the cycle of warding off this darkness is sacred, but so are the moral judgements afforded to either side within its operation. Except the cycle isn’t divorced from material conditions at all; the ensuing woes are blamed on “darkness” as Capitalism decays under crisis. As their sense of agency and certitude collapse with the material world around them, workers—but especially the middle class—are left feeling cheated or lied to, and can either blame the system or “backstabber” scapegoats. Whereas Captialism is simply too massive[20] to accurately conceive within theatre, scapegoats are historically far easier to blame because you can shoot, stab or otherwise kill them; such theatre implies the solution is a simple, straightforward one: a dragon to slay instead of a hydra. Point out the decay behind the illusion and they’ll simply shoot the messenger/rape the oracle. Worse, they’ll do it as an act of faith in a system built to deceive them.

Doing so is the “tried-and-true” “wisdom” of the Roman fool, falling on their own sword while Rome burns not once, but over and over. Such “wisdom” is not wise, but a false power, which Gothic Communism seeks to reclaim through our own doubling of the imaginary past—its monsters, castles and battles—as a kind of “living document” that can reclaim the Gothic imagination, thus our ability to think; i.e., through lost forms of knowledge retailored for the complexities of the modern world—its warring mentalities, sexualities/genders, monsters (codified beliefs and actions) and praxis during class and culture war critiquing capital. As you can’t critique capital without camping its monsters, once more unto the breach, dear friends!

(artist: Drew Struzan; source: Justin Norton’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath: The Story Behind The Artwork,” 2016)

First off, there’s nothing critically “redundant” about the Gothic in its more dated-looking forms (see Fred Botting’s very dumb arguments about so-called “Gothic redundancy” on exhibit 1a1a1h2a3); ignoring the paradox of the retro-future’s own hopelessly outdated anachronisms, the wizard, knight, demon or damsel, etc, well as their various stages of performance: their castles, spaceships, graveyards, cathedrals, laboratories of mad science, and other cultural sites of phobias, stigmas and urban legends; i.e., haunts[21] that can all yield creative successes (of proletarian praxis) through dialectical-material roles as determined by function (the aesthetics is just the allure and appeal of power/playing with dead things); in short, they can all be gay as fuck if done in good faith, thus sex-positive/iconoclastic by camping canon with seemingly wizardly power (versus the canonical orc or Drow as a middle-class version of false rebellion or slumming through fantastical “blackface[22]“). Indeed, the foxy flexibility of guerrilla war (emblematized by the fox, but also as thoroughly sexy in how we resist capital in animalized forms—more on that in a bit) isn’t mutually exclusive, as Capitalist Realism teaches the faithful (rewarding these Crusaders with damaging illusions and prophesies of a glorious afterlife). Instead, the guerilla can challenge the seemingly all-powerful, proving just how fragile the power of the elite is: their mighty fortress is a sandcastle, a house of cards. The globalization of capital—thus war and rape and their widespread sublimation in fantastical, “opiate” forms—cannot function unless the icon remains intact. We’re going to break it, proving an enemy only has images behind which he hides his true motives. Break that and you expose the man behind the curtain not just as a humbug but a terrible, bloodsucking monster devoid of any empathy and obsessed with profit.

As guerillas throughout history have proved, doing so is not a zero-sum game. We can fight back, exposing and releasing the tremendous pressure capital puts all of us under every waking moment: “perform better and faster and stronger”; or worse, “Grow up[23]!” Simply put, all monsters are instructional in terms of how to act and behave during times of war and peace as forever in crisis under Capitalism; i.e., canonical crises of culture, but also of sexuality and gender as endlessly imperiled by an outside-inside force, the scapegoat for Capitalism’s hidden function: exploitation and oscillating cycles of failure that grind workers to paste (the gears of war). This canonical “blame game” becomes myopic, directing workers to kill the Monster threatening the Kingdom from all angles and dimensions—the vague, shapeless thing trying to separate human biology (sex, skin color) and gender within the colonial binary (the essence of gender trouble and gender parody but also mass-exploitation tied to the profit motive). Like Plato’s allegory of the cave (c. 380 BC), state proponents from inside the Man Box[24] attack class/culture warriors (attacking the status quo from outside the same box/cave) instead of the system, whereupon the ensuing dreams and nightmares of canon uniformly become an invented lullaby whose tragedy and farce—and utter blindsiding by convenient adversity and set, doomed roles—are all “part of the plan”: retreat inward, into childhood as an execution of state maxims that lead to profit. “Become the destroyer the world ‘needs.'”

In other words, canon (thus Capitalism) is full of ritual sacrifice with a Christianized flavor (crucifixion) or Westernized abuse of paganized forms whose divine right revives the glory of recuperated Roman aesthetics (the Nazi as quasi-pagan); e.g., the sacrificial rooster or lamb, the virgin or scapegoat, as something to bleed out for significance and good fortune, but also stalled demise for the holder of the knife: the Christ-like Herculean warrior as babyface or heel to sacrifice when the state’s crises enter decay while firing up production, which in turn requires more and more sacrifice the hotter the furnace gets. Engorged, the elite need ever more blood to satisfy their hunger as the ultimate parasite, thus demand of their loyal followers, “Defend our land; defend your land from the infidels” (which curiously the elite stole the land from, to begin with). As Hilter put it, “What is life? Life is the nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the nation.” But Hilter’s Nazis were merely radicalized, accelerated variants of their American capitalists cousins’ own bastardizing of settler colonialism[25] from the British, whose New England counterfeit/colony expanded used the same imperial model to make their own genocidal apologia (the myth of the West’s exclusive sovereignty and ownership as forged from the start and ever since; i.e., a fakery of a fakery[26] all the way down: England, “land of the Angles,” reestablished through old feuds fought out in mercenary violence revived under Neoliberal hegemony centuries later). Within this paradigm, everyone’s on the chopping block (except the elite, of course). Gothic Communism aims to camp canon through the sacrifice ritual, lampooning the killer’s false power when sitting on the same chopping block as them (Christ on a cross); it accomplishes this through a fake “sacrifice,” one whose gender trouble puts the warlike ritual of “rape” or “murder” in quotes. Doing so causes the so-called “kings” of capital to collectively lose their minds, outing them and, by extension, the elite and their machinations (which leads to class consciousness).

Canon is classically framed as immutable, eternal—literally “outside of time”—but it isn’t. It can be altered, changing history through the wider interpretation and genesis of popular legends, but also the material conditions that respond to them and vice versa (the Base and the Superstructure). Capital historically-materially alienates owners from workers and workers from each other and themselves through Cartesian dualism (with owners being collectively afraid of the poor and siding with “their own kind” as the persons they are born growing up with; i.e., other rich people they identify with and see as friends): an entire system of thought as built around the essential binding of sex and gender to each other and human biology (skin color and sex organs), which is coded to have various “correct” qualities (such as “Christian” or “cis-het”) when utilized in the “correct” fashion: towards the profit motive. There is an ostensible “other” who is murdered instead of the state defender killing them, but in truth, the soldier is completely expendable. Everything sits within a cycle of imaginary history that plays out through an endless, genocidal mirroring that must, if it is to cease, be met with mirrors:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

These particular mirrors (and their reflections’ visions) become a way of seeing the world that isn’t Promethean; i.e., they upend the infamous hubris of the Patriarchy without joining canon’s process of abjection:

When Perseus slew the Medusa he did not—as commonly thought—put an end to her reign or destroy her terrifying powers. Afterwards, Athena embossed her shield with the Medusa’s head. The writhing snakes, with their fanged gaping mouths, and the Medusa’s own enormous teeth and lolling tongue were on full view. Athena’s aim was simply to strike terror into the hearts of men as well as reminding them of their symbolic debt to the imaginary castrating mother. And no doubt she knew what she was doing. After all, Athena was the great Mother-Goddess of the ancient world and according to ancient legend—the daughter of Metis, the goddess of wisdom, also known as the Medusa (source: Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine, 1993).

In short, Gothic Communism goes further than Julia Kristeva or Barbara Creed. Our “Medusa” doesn’t play into the elite’s scheme of weaponized trauma; i.e, the TERF surrendering her neck and, once beheaded, staring blindly and furiously at the underclass (dressed up to shock the formerly abused with a disingenuous threat of rape, of the shame of unwanted pregnancies projected onto a racialized, genderqueer “other”: the man-in-a-dress, or their murderous, womb-like haunt). Nor does she segregate and “play ball” through compelled modesty/invisibility and tokenism of various doubled kinds.

Instead, our complicated monster heroine uses dialectical-material scrutiny to parse which is which, combining the awesome power of her reclaimed body and its labor to actively petrify the profit motive while blending in with it (e.g., Morry Evans’ lovely gender-bending of the knightly romance[27]). In doing so, she utilizes the bizarre, recycled conventions (anyone who says, “truth is stranger than fiction” has never read a Gothic novel before) to actively encourage/incite degrowth—i.e., a so-called “Jewish revenge” against fascism and the state by borking its profit motive, in this life or the next: through a sex-positive counterterrorism that exposes the state’s usual terror weapons and fictions (a concept we will touch on in the “camp map” when we examine Joseph Crawford’s “invented terrorism” versus Robert Asprey’s counterterrorism historically used by labor). All the while, our Medusa has some semblance of safety because she will be viewed as human behind the looking glass (which serves as a buffer between her and the audience), being seen as something her would-be-killers will not sacrifice because they love her. If slowly taught “good play” in a sex-positive sense, they will not chase her at all; they will embody her by seeing themselves in her—a shared humanity that, like Milton’s “Narcissistic Eve,” happily ignores God’s will. While Capitalism’s universal alienation makes people tremendously lonely and sexually frustrated, this loneliness can be reversed in ways that don’t put all the pressure on sex workers or sexualized workers acting in a Pavlovian sense; instead, we become a social species again, working together to enrich our understanding of the world as we move away from a horribly archaic and medieval system. This includes its gross devastation of the world, nature, and the human condition through rape and war inside the profit motive as synonymous with themselves and with us when we obey like menticided[28] fools. We have to shield our minds, our bodies, our labor as demonic forms of expression that paradoxically must expose themselves enough to communicate the message.

Per Arthur C. Clarke, sufficiently advanced technologies are indistinguishable from magic; per Mary Shelley, they become suitably useful allegories for the titanic forces around us, whose structures are mythologically baked into our lives as besieged by god-like forces. In trying to reclaim our power like Prometheus, we are chained and tortured without end; but we are already chained and tortured before the gods “lay eyes on us” (that is to say, actively—they are always passively watching through state surveillance apparatuses, and active surveillance is generally leveled at the underclass and/or known enemies-of-the-state). “Gods,” in this sense, are less personifications of various emotions and more the caprices of actual persons of a particular class that did not exist in Plato’s day. Instead, the ancient canonical codes and positions of power offered up sodomy as something the elite could do as they wished and condemn everyone else to not: through actions that—vis-à-vis Foucault’s A History of Sexuality, Volume One—eventually became identities associated with the rise of the bourgeoisie. But the same hubris and double standards were present inside a commodified heteronormativity that had started to expand and dominate the Earth. As this expansion has continued, the atrocities of the elite have continued under their cloak of darkness, the “fog of war” perpetuated through a fear of the outside associated with the state’s usual enemies: the underclass.

The elite certainly act like gods and have such powers the Ancient Greeks would have described as god-like: bombing salvos (death from the skies) like Zeus’ thunderbolts, nuclear weaponry like God’s judgement of Sodom and Gomorrah, and giant vehicles that pull them across the sky like Apollo’s chariot. But they aren’t gods; they’re men, thus fallible to the tremendous alienating mechanisms Capitalism has given—if not birth to, then certainly rise to in grander and grander forms. The greater the mechanisms, the greater the hubris, but also the inability to feel anything except when hording more and more stolen essence from everyone else; eventually these kings age and go mad, then—like Saturn the titan—devour their son/”sons” before poisoning the land or setting it on fire[29] (“They say this land was green and soft once; but the moment Haggard touched it, it became hard and grey!”). Obviously the metaphors mix, with the madness of the geriatric human body being expressed through aging billionaires; yet, the madness of the king is also a mentality that has nothing to do with extreme age, but rather a curse of entitled owners (and subordinate workers) being driven to premature madness by the ideology of a brutal, sadistic system: an internalized fear of the monster that compounds until one’s offshoots go mad before their time, infantilized like children afraid of the dark… and equipped with the means to “silence” it during the apocalypse[30] (revelation) of the dead walking the Earth.

The ensuing chaos is the paradox of efficient profit: the state eating itself as the ouroboros does its tail, caught between an endless police state of regeneration and cannibalization (desk murder). And all the while, the terrifying power of the gods is less a metaphor and more a description of actual events: the battle of the gods, of angels and demons, that leads to the ignominious fall of Icarus into the sea, but also the Promethean, planet-sized fireball of Capitalism’s crucible spilling over when it flies out of the elite’s control. Like the demon core[31], they want it as close as possible to release radiation, but not critical mass—except the drive for profit has pushed them and all of us to the brink of extinction more than once (GDF’s “There Was No ‘Cold’ War,” “NATO Is Risking Nuclear War for Money,” and “No, We Didn’t Need to Nuke Japan,” 2023).

Inside this larger tug-o’-war sits our Satan or Prometheus, trying to take back some of this power for ourselves. All must be done whilst being aware of the bourgeois regression through canonical reverence for state power and decayed superstition towards state enemies: as unironic demons from hell. For us, godly language is “the enemy of Reason, but there is something enticing about its form” as a paradoxical means of empowerment by rejecting Cartesian thought (exhibit 51a). Unlike Mako from Conan the Barbarian (1981) cowering before the fearsome gods of a blasted ruin, we can play with the same language in ways that perform class-conscious theatre: It’s less “the spirits of this place exact a heavy toll” or “The wizard! I told him would pay the gods!” and more the conjuring of demons of Communism as the revenge of Capitalism’s innumerable megadeaths: not “of getting even” as Ward Churchill notes in “‘Some People Push Back’: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” (2005)

The problem is that vengeance is usually framed in terms of “getting even,” a concept which is plainly inapplicable in this instance. As the above data indicate, it would require another 49,996 detonations killing 495,000 more Americans, for the “terrorists” to “break even” for the bombing of Baghdad/extermination of Iraqi children alone. And that’s to achieve “real number” parity. To attain an actual proportional parity of damage – the US is about 15 times as large as Iraq in terms of population, even more in terms of territory – they would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people (source).

but a Jewish revenge of all those poor souls manifesting in workers who—suitably possessed by the spirit of wiser Ancients—will not bend the knee or do the will of the gods of capital anymore. In our current age, the state is utterly reliant on labor to function, but also the illusion that they aren’t monsters (e.g., They Live, 1988; exhibit 0a2b1b2); and while military urbanism and stochastic terrorism always pose an issue, they aren’t things that can happen at a mass scale until they’re normalized, which requires a great deal of theatre.

In other words, Capitalism cannot function if workers won’t kill each other in the state’s name (whose brutal, stupid[32] vengeance knows no bounds: the arms race of more murder, more death, more prisons, more witch hunts, more genocide not in spite of state laws but because of them). This refusal to destroy ourselves isn’t Freud’s “monsters from the Id”; it’s called labor action and it requires solidarity to work in opposition to the state’s coded instructions (often videogames, which are literally built around worker genocide; i.e., the exploitation of the Global South by the Global North through the greedy rhetoric of infinite growth according to state-sanctioned [thus hyperbolic] revenge that’s “too far gone” to stop, but also has become naturalized through a centrist order of things, vis-à-vis Tolkien). Theatrical expression and monstrous poetics obviously play a tremendous role in cultivating solidarity as being the usual targets of state abuse: according to them, we’re the terrorists, thus deserving of eternal punishment. The paradox is, escape is generally achieved through the same performances as camped.

(artist: Henri Fuseli)

So, while the basic-yet-giant, god-like tensions built into Capitalism (and its neoliberal copaganda through videogames’ recursive avatars of war) can be explained incredibly quickly through prescribed monsters “self-reporting” the larger scheme, their Promethean torture loop can also be subverted, thus undone by applying Gothic theory (thus mythical monsters in warlike language; e.g., Shelley’s “Modern Prometheus,” aka Frankenstein) to Marx’s ideas: fight terror with “terror” through Robert B. Asprey’s paradox of terror[33]. Becoming a kind of “Athena’s Aegis,” the one-two combo of our black mirror turns the heteronormative attacker’s aggression back towards their own monstrous sense of self[34] in the same terror language they use; i.e., the reversal of the process of abjection as ordinarily prescribed by famous legends; e.g., The Legend of Zelda: “Will Link still rescue the damsel if he’s gay?” (the franchise remains one of my favorite stages to camp because it frankly offers so much genderqueer potential for doing so: Link’s not just canon’s twink-ish warrior of light; he’s simultaneously the “power bottom” wrestling against Capitalism, Amazon bait, and a damsel-warrior given pause by his own double, the “twink-in-black” as a thoroughly non-binarized double of the woman-in-black: Dark Link, exhibit 1a1a1a1_a). Doing so is automatically campy because frankly the camped dialog of warlike negotiation over fairly mundane things (sex and the division of labor) in medievalized monstrous/dungeon-themed language sounds funny as hell: a) it camps “correct,” unintelligent discussions of these matters, and b) it camps Marx in the bargain because it occurs in Marxist academic language that sounds funny in this particular context; i.e., Monty Python’s “Constitutional Peasants” (1969) skit remade by us not just in Zelda, but any manner of dialogic imagination; e.g., Frankenstein‘s autonomous, zombie robota, of course, but also this far more recent gem:

(source tweet: Sidhe-Her, 2023)

A common facet of Communism is polyamory and open communication vs serial monogamy (and abuse) through heteronormative, but also amatonormative stories that prioritize marriage between one cis-het man and wife; i.e., the colonial binary as centralized within canonical narratives about love. It’s obviously important and holistic to discuss other things besides sex, of course, but sex and labor coincide and intersect with socio-economic factors, and our emphasis on Marxist analysis focuses on sex work’s demonization under Capitalism according to these matters as heteronormatively constrained. Our focus is sex work; we will talk about labor and theatricality more broadly but generally inside the Gothic mode of expression, which tends to have a sexual element to it (e.g., sin, vice, passion, desire, rape, torture, etc). Camp is generally sexual, because sex as an element of propriety is constrained to the bedroom (again, vis-à-vis Foucault’s A History of Sexuality, Volume One). To camp canon, for Gothic Communists, is to bring sex back into the public sphere in a sex-positive sense; i.e., by humanizing the monsters who have cropped up there in a sex-coercive way. Those bad counterfeits are reclaimed through what people consume as fed to them: through sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, and our art and labor as alienated from us and fed back to us in harmful, cheaply-made forms (from factories). Their reclamation starts with poiesis as made/cooked up by us, not the elite and their recuperated proponents’ profit motive; i.e., the bourgeois pimping of workers out as unironic sex demons and zombies treated like bad junk food/fruit from the poisoned tree.

The poetic moral, here is learn to cook, yourself, because you are what you eat, and the elite want you remove that ever-important comma—i.e., to cook and eat yourselves following their bad recipes (and grammar). To acquire new ones, you must learn to swim in the darkness of oppositional praxis’ shadows on the wall (more on that in the thesis proper, specifically the subdivision, “Into the Shadow Zone”) and give birth to your own monsters; i.e., as someone who is undead and demonic enough (in a sex-positive sense) to reproduce in this way. While miscarriages and unwanted, illegitimate or terminated pregnancies are a deep, painful and secret source of shame for AFAB persons (thus hidden from judgmental parties; e.g., Abigail, from King Diamond’s 1987 album of the same name), the fact remains that lived trauma and power abuse (rape) isn’t just the domain of AFAB cis-het women; the poetic license of the hideous progeny takes shape in many different secret shames and guilty pleasures that we can rebirth through our own special expressions. The axes of oppression overlap through biological sex, race, class and gender expression for us to convey through these unique births; i.e., the figurative kind produced in art isn’t something to hide but comment on what is normally hidden/unspeakable. In turn, this zombie’s demonic pregnancy takes a reclaimed diet of artistic expression with which to give birth to new Communist monsters and contribute to the grander prandial-praxial cycle (“prandial” meaning “during or relating to the eating of food”): a pregnant mother will eat just about anything but gets cravings. To rebirth a wise Wisdom of the imaginary past, our diets need to be paradoxically “picky.”

In terms of cooking for ourselves, we’re obviously talking about (and committed to) Gothic poetics at large. But food-as-metaphor and -commodity often overlap in the grander market of power exchange within monstrous poiesis and theatre; e.g., the monster as a metaphor for hunger regarding sex and vice, but also Halloween candy or cookies (for kids) whose “cake” (for adults) is a lie that serves elite aims. Ginger’s pork chop (below) is actual food that represents a challenge to the food deserts of the world, seizing the means of production through food production as artistic self-expression that likewise fills their belly with yum-yums: a delicious reunion with their labor as reclaimed from a former state of alienation.

But “yuck” and “yum” obviously pertain to human appetites and appetite as thoroughly medieval; i.e., pinned between ongoing debates about restraint and excess as “the wages of sin,” told through modern-day Sales of Indulgence, albeit through a Protestant work ethic that canonically attacks Gothic poetics: as monsters/food through undead/demonic metaphors. Their feeding and magical knowledge and transformation amounts to forbidden fruit with animalized, stigmatic flavors and cosmetics; e.g., the vampire drinking “sanguine” as essence tangled up in all manner of connotations and statements for or against the status quo: “Eat of my flesh, drink of my blood and live forever.” Also known as transubstantiation, this can be applied to reactionary rhetoric/moral panics that stigmatize Jewish people (and other minorities) through revived instances of blood libel and quantum, but also simply food as literally the stuff we eat and media as the stuff we consume that contains representations of food/food-like monsters and their respective preparing and presenting to us; e.g., Ruben’s infamously obsessive depictions of flesh as “food,” the main attraction that might have been sexual:

Rubens was obsessed by flesh; young flesh, old flesh, men’s flesh, women’s flesh, dead flesh, damaged flesh, the flesh of children and angels and saints. His paintings are packed with the stuff. […] This was Rubens’ genius. He got in among our basic desires and our raw physicality and he gave them form. In this specific case it is flesh and sexual desire, but this preponderance of flesh in Ruben’s art wasn’t always erotic. More often than not the flesh was just there, distended and bloated or stripped or lean. We can see the blood coursing through it, we can see its folds and its scars. The painting of the “The Last Judgement in the Alte Pinakothek” is surrounded by other paintings by Rubens full of jowly fat men with distended paunches, muscular naked warriors, fat babies suckling on bloated breasts, sinewy saints, twisted martyrs and dozens and dozens of plump women with big bums (source: Ian Walker’s “Sex, Violence and Big Bums: Rubens and the Birth of Modern Europe,” 2017).

but of course many, many others besides. The depiction of such things has become complicated by modernized, Enlightenment carryovers onto the global stage. For example, the white body but especially the white female body would become a storing ground of shame, rage, hunger and non-white appetites (exhibit 1a1a1e1b): fat-shaming mixed with slut-shaming and various other intersections of self-hatred imposed by dogmatic forces equating fatness with sin, the devil, and non-white culture, but also rebellion (“fat and sassy”). The best way to deal with dogma is to return to a pre-Enlightenment, Rubenesque updated for a post-Capitalist world that doesn’t commodify the struggle of these persons to serve the profit motive—i.e., through all the usual bigotries and stigmas—but rather celebrates their humanity and bravery while framing their larger/alternative body types as a positive thing to love and accept amid changing material conditions.

The poetic idea is a queer nostalgia that undermines canonical forms of said nostalgia; i.e., a hauntology that becomes flexible, inclusive and linguistically fluent in modern struggles and terminologies that didn’t quite exist during the Renaissance period. There was always a queer presence, but it was associated with actions, not identities within society and its cultural markers. If society and language are rigid, then words and symbols can mean only one thing. Worse, singular interpretation becomes associated with shame and control, which will never change because they are policed. We’re not shooting for fat positivity and acceptance as a personal option/opinion, but a basic human right whose larger societal mechanism—fat liberation*—happens through the language and legends associated with said bodies; i.e., just like with other slurs such as “faggot” or the n-word, the word “fat” becomes something to reclaim through monstrous poetics: faeries and demons, but also their succulent physiques pegged as “wild” through the ghost of the counterfeit. Canon frames these bodies as repulsive and magnetic, which means any iconoclastic act reclaiming them must reverse the process of abjection through the same bodies and language as gorgeous, voluptuous and loveable. This holistic package deal utilizes the human body tied to persons who identify a particular way through their body as an extension of their entire selves—their gender, orientation, and performance, etc—as prone to legendary hyperbole with a sex-positive inclination: the goddess of the harvest, the fairy queen Maeb, Easter and so on. It becomes not something to eat, but a fleshy conduit to exchange various things; e.g., essence, materials and knowledge; fertile minds, spirits and appetites.

*I.e., versus the state, doctors and fatphobia. See: Angry T‘s A.T.A.C.K. (“Angry Trannies* Against Cops and Kings”) series (on Google Drive), which Sinead recommended to me: ADAB (“All Doctors Are BAD”/cops) from Issue 9 Feb 24, and “It is Not Enough to Love Yourself” (on fatphobia) from Issue 4 Sep 23. —Perse 3/15/2025

(artist: Sinead Rhiannon)

Under Gothic Communism, sex positivity is body positivity and body positivity includes fat bodies expressed in Gothic language to consciously liberate us by reclaiming the Base and recultivating the Superstructure. Fat bodies aren’t inherently bad; what is bad is universally pathologizing/fetishizing their image in popular media while prescribing all the usual canonical, heteronormative standards that lead to eating and mood disorders inside a capitalistic model; e.g., skinny female bodies, but also hypermuscular male bodies pumped full of drugs. The double standard with male bodybuilders is how they aren’t seen as medically obese because they are “successful” personalities that make money for big companies (and sell their supplements and drugs); heavier women/gender-non-conforming AFAB persons are seen as products first, people second, and generally are judged far more for their physical appearance even when said appearance is actually healthy. As Mainely Mandy points out in “Good Fatty vrs Bad Fatty” (2021), BMI is an antiquated, racist concept, one that leaves the owners of (often female) fat bodies feeling trapped between how they are actually viewed and commodified versus how they want to be seen and treated—i.e., minus the stigmas while being accepted and loved for who they really are. Often, as we shall see and explore throughout the book, these feelings of self-love and self-shame intersect between various groups of marginalized peoples with various European/”Vitruvian” body expectations foisted onto them: black men with BBCs/muscular bodies (exhibit 10b2), or white women with “modest,” slender bodies versus heavier pornographic bodies that denote an “immodest” type of commodity associated with sin and vice as things to indulge in; i.e., a deal with the devil to achieve forbidden pleasure sold back to us post-theft (exhibits 32a, b; v1) which can be reclaimed through subversive and informed labor exchanges (exhibits 32c, d; v1)

(exhibit 0a1a: Artist: top-mid-left: Juan de Juanes; top-right and bottom-right: Jeremy Anninos; bottom-mid-right: Draculasswife; bottom-mid-left: Nat the Lich; bottom-left: source. It’s human to eat, to fuck, to feed; or [in the Humanist tradition] to poetically compare and contrast unlike things that serve a similar purpose: the body as a canvas, relayed through the medieval idea of miracles; e.g., crying statues weeping blood—i.e., the woman as a sex object whose animation and fleshiness can be conveyed in deliberately outmoded ways to touch upon present stereotypes and structures that haven’t voided themselves of canonical, harmful versions of these [often silly] superstitions; e.g., the “Carmilla” vampire lady trying to drink the blood out of Jim Carrey’s penis in Once Bitten [1985] to steal his “essence” [cougar sodomy]. Tied to capital, unironic forms appear as “sustainable,” meaning lawful and sanctioned to varying degrees towards commodified sin, vice, and appetite, with a middle-class fear-fascination towards these variables. All must be liberated from the shackles of capital as having pilfered the medieval vault of its plentiful nutrients; reclaim your monstrous “meat,” “cake” and “fruit” [quotes optional] to feed each other through your labor as yours, not the elite’s. Despite the AAA stamp of the Second Gilded Age’s return of the mysteries [a medieval name for trade guilds], they want us to blindly “wolf down” their garbage as cheap, low-grade dog food/slave drivel. Defecated by them onto our plates, we’re eating the bourgeoisie’s already digested food, also known as shit. It tastes like imitative honey but its cheap and fast, robbed of its nutrients.)

That concludes the concept of “giving birth” and the Wisdom of the Ancient’s Communist Renaissance (rebirth). Onto the afterbirth: reflection on what came out of me and that which I helped raise to maturity.

Clearly the book has changed much over time. When I started writing Sex Positivity in 2022, I was mainly wrestling with the idea of illustrating mutual consent and combating/exposing TERFs while also working on my PhD/postgraduate work (on Metroidvania[35]—”Mazes and Labyrinths: Disempowerment in Metroidvania and Survival Horror” [2021]—which I still wanted to complete but now have absorbed into this book*). Eventually I called it “Gothic Communism” and wrote my manifesto[36], but that was certainly not the first step (this work having been the combination of my postgraduate research, having been in school for years and researching independently for years after I left).

*Which has now been expanded on, in my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus/extended Metroidvania research. —Perse, 3/14/2025

At our current juncture, my original blogpost has become a Ship of Theseus, where nothing from the original published material is contained within; furthermore, what was just the manifesto and the book became the manifesto and Humanities primer as one volume and the rest of the book a second volume, until suddenly I made the Humanities primer its own volume, resulting in three volumes (the third of which I wrote first)! As such, I wrote the preface and signposted while sharpening my ideas about Gothic Communism, then decided that I needed to write a foreword that talked about things more generally. “Gothic Communism” became “Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism” and I designed its logo. As the publishing date neared, I decided to make the foreword my thesis statement/symposium and the preface my basic reasoning as to why I went with a Gothic variant of anarcho-Communism (as opposed to Marxist-Leninism, for example)—all while signposting throughout the book and rewriting the abstract, and so on and so on for the reader’s convenience (and my own satisfaction). As I am a being of chaos, thus acclimated to holistic study as a chaotic process, this occurred through a process of fractal expansion as guided by a former academic’s desire to “please master”/neurodivergent desire to make a good first impression: little idea, big idea; small book, gargantuan book; thesis sentence, paragraph, statement, symposium, preface, manifesto, other volumes, etc.

For the entire changelog this summary is describing, refer to my website’s 1-page promo for the book. —Perse

In other words, as the publishing date neared, I found myself increasingly haunted by the ghosts of my teachers. I reached out to them to share my work, but suddenly felt a burning desire to write a thesis statement they would approve of, but also that I would in relation to them. My desire to please myself is inextricable from pleasing the ghosts of my academic pedagogues. I knew they would expect it, but also thought it was vital because the vast majority of my arguments could be hammered into something piercing and sharp to then embark on a more leisurely and scenic quest after the trial by fire. I wanted the reader to be as well-equipped as possible when grappling with my complex and myriad arguments. So I went about it, forging for them a healthy “dagger of the mind” as a monster mother would: by giving birth to Sex Positivity’s thesis statement in a Gothic, intersex manner—i.e., by playing out the messy birth/with the afterbirth and ejaculating it as a roiling parthenogenesis of mixed and mixing metaphors (all in the spirit of fun, of course).

(artist: Miss Upacey)

Like a witch’s cauldron, this dark and soupy creative process emerged from having written most of my book from top to bottom, over and over already (about 500,000 words [now nearly two million, after four volumes]). The entire time, its “labor” back then wasn’t something for which I was fully in control, but identified with when I had written my master’s thesis[37] five years prior while burning the midnight oil night after night at MMU’s student library while watching the magpies dance in the trees through the window next to the computer loaned out to me (and thinking of Mary Shelley’s dark progeny when she had “birthed” Frankenstein); and (then and now) with Emily Brontë making Heathcliff:

Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master — something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame. […]

Wuthering Heights [1847] was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur — power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot [source: Nava Atlas’ “Charlotte Brontë is Preface to Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë,” 2014].

The book, then, has been a series of “births” dragging the hellish child up from the depths of my own making and design (my own infernal concentric pattern, perhaps; i.e., the repeated plunging into the abyss while stuck inside it: mise-en-abyme). After the majority was written, I desired to summarize everything as pithily as I could into our aforementioned thesis statement. I didn’t have to; I wanted to, treating it as an educational device according to how I had been taught. Through the benefits of a classical and campy education, I once again “fell pregnant,” this time by myself with myself, but also with Bay who—like a slutty incubus from afar—had filled my slutty cum dumpster long distance. Now “full” of the dark swirling material as having been written and refined many times (many creampies), from toe to top full of these joined ideas, theories and plans, I had to give birth once more and set about it. While unsteadily “pregnant” with this saturated material, I pulled and manifested the entirety out of myself as a comprehensive stab at mapping and summarizing everything that I (once again) had to organize and refine over and over. I clearly want to document the process to you, the reader—to grant you an exhibitionist’s idea of what it was like for me, a trans woman, to create as I have been taught and how I view it. Work isn’t fun unless it’s playful, I think; it should be fun, regardless of its importance (and this work—helping myself and other sex workers escape harmful bondage—I consider to be of the utmost importance).

(artist: Gerard Pietersz van Zyl)

As Galatea resisting Pygmalion by shyly but with great determination making her own work in the gloom, my own statue was born out of the darkness as threatening to take shape, then continuing to grow and develop into something more fully realized after it exited my body. First born, the thesis statement grew as I slathered more material onto it. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, I had done this many times and took joy in its hideous, beautiful monstrosity:

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful (source).

I was a monster mother making a smaller copy of the original monster she proudly gave birth to from older copies from other mothers and loving it just as much the umpteenth time around (maybe I’m a glutton for punishment; i.e., the grad student’s paradoxical flagellation).

To put dates and numbers on it (as of 9/10/2023), by the 31st of August, this saturation point exploded, my thesis statement going from ~5,000 words to another 20,000 on top of that in the next six days followed by another two days’ worth of (currently uncalculated) prose and exhibits produced in two ten-hour periods (followed by me writing all of this down today, and writing the “Notes on Power” section, too) and even more writing* after that. As such, the thesis statement’s initial draft was supplied more keywords, and given the manifesto terms towards the end, laid out like bricks then ending in a “tree” of the manifesto as a whole route and structure for which oppositional praxis is run (the engine to supply our “fuel” inside), and the “camp map” as a small exhibit of its praxial execution. Then, I expanded the “camp map” into its own section, moved the manifesto tree to the start of the thesis to plot out the individual manifesto terms I had laid out already and explained in my thesis statement, and then refined that. From there, I decided to reorganize the thesis statement as its own “mini” volume that precedes the other three, which freed me up to expand my comprehensive argument in ways that felt adequate, holistic and well-paced; i.e., my little vampire’s lips blushed blood red. I took my four main Gothic theories (the Four Gs) out of my manifesto proper and placed them before my thesis statement as a “Gordian Knot”; i.e., central to everything I’m talking about in regards to monsters, but a “tough nut to crack” and one that I would take the entire book doing so (not just the thesis statement). After this, I added even more definitions from the companion glossary into the thesis statement (such as “monopoly of violence” and “state of exception”) until I had included all of the keywords and Gothic terms in the thesis statement, “camp map,” and symposium when discussing how to camp the canon. Then I wrote “the notes on power” section. As I did all of this, I signposted throughout the rest of my book, referring back to my thesis statement, and I added more exhibits (and more after that).

*As of 9/13/2023 (six years to the day I arrived in England to study at MMU), the thesis volume’s renovations (not including the symposium, which was mostly written at this point; nor the disclaimer, “What I Will and Won’t Exhibit,” which is new but not restricted to the thesis volume) now clock in at 74,445 words. That is, from 8/31 to 9/6 to 9/13, my thesis statement went from ~5,000 words to ~25,000 to ~75,000, or nearly an additional 70,000 (and 102 images, ~40 of which are full-fledged exhibits) in two weeks. It feels superhuman, but also—fittingly—like a Gothic dream, one I wrote while awake but possessed; i.e., not by drugs, but my own education and labor has having taken hold in a comfortable pattern, day after day. The contractions.

Comfortable or not, I wrote like an absolute demon, animal, werewolf and frankly am in complete awe of the massive, Godzilla-sized crater left in my own wake: “Did I do that?” And there’s still more work to be done! No rest for the wicked, I guess.

• As of 9/22/2023 (the beginning of my final proofread, which will continue until the end of the month): the thesis volume wordcount (not including the first disclaimer, title page, abstract, symposium and glossary) is ~112k words, and 165[38]
• As of 10/4/2023, the proofread is mostly done, totaling ~177k words and 226 images. I had to write several sections to fit the glossary back into the book (to be able to use the heading system to link to keywords I didn’t have time to define); I also would finalize and add in fun bits as I went—e.g., roasting Ann Radcliffe in a hypomanic fit.
• as of 10/8/2023, the final proofread is completely finished, as are the last of the last-minute changes. The final thesis volume wordcount (again, not including the first disclaimer, title page, abstract, symposium and glossary) totals ~191k words and 250 images.

All the same, my ability to do this isn’t supernatural; I didn’t sell my soul to the devil, but was raised on good foundations that come from tremendous privilege as a white, AMAB trans person. That is, I live in a situation where I can take my time, enjoy a stable life, and throw whatever I wish into the crucible: movies, novels, and videogames, etc. In medieval terms, I may as well be living in Merlin’s tower. But that’s still true now as much as it was, back then; I live in the Global North, and from where I am in a room of one’s own, the Global South may as well be the Stone Age (courtesy of American bombing runs). I want this to change using the privilege that Capitalism gave me to write and illustrate this book as my contribution to the struggle.

Like Ariadne’s thread woven from my spinner (as a Gothic spinster), the abacus of my fractal-recursive calculus oscillated. Following its attenuation (and at a point when I think the creation of this final thesis volume has mostly run its course), my book now has a fully-formed thesis volume that is organized like the other three volumes are; it is comprehensive, detailed and educational to the best degree that I can provide regarding the entirety of Sex Positivity. It may seem dense at first glance and that is a fair criticism, but is meant to include every keyword, map and argument in their logical order as something to unfurl and explain once, then again at a much slower and lengthier pace throughout the rest of the book: Volumes One, Two and Three (if I gloss over a topic in this volume, rest assured another volume will cover it in far greater detail).

(model and artist: Persephone van der Waard)

In the past, I have tried to write many books[39], and have had many creative projects I poured energy and effort into (see exhibit 0a1b1, on page 118); but my magnum opus is something I couldn’t have written ten years ago, or even five. Sex Positivity‘s thesis volume is easily the hardest thing I’ve ever written but also something I’m proud of in relation to the giants whose shoulders I stood on—both my Karate Kid (1984) moment when I show Mr. Miyagi “wax on, wax off!” and one where I include all of my friends in on and the moment. On the academic side of things, Linnie Blake—when asked—once told me that I wrote like an angel, and Christine Neufeld made note of my “weird sexual metaphors” nearly ten years ago when writing about Frankenstein (“Frankenstein essay—Born to Fall? Birth Trauma, the Soul, and Der Maschinenmensch,” 2014). Combining those two sentiments, I worked arm-in-arm with various comrades—fellow artists and sex workers who modelled for me to be included in this book. I may have put in the lion’s share of the overall work, but it was still a group effort and one that I’m proud of and thankful for as demonstrating our arguments; i.e., a collective statement of sex positivity and worker solidarity honed by years of artistic/academic training and otherwise useless (to capital) critical analysis and Gothic specialization (refer to the acknowledgements section to see everyone who was directly or tangentially involved in this project’s genesis, synthesis and completion).

At its full size, Sex Positivity is four volumes, ~742,000 words/2427 pages and ~1096 unique images (subject to change after the final proofreads for those volumes are complete, but I don’t plan on adding much new material to them; i.e., no footnotes for the first editions of Volume One, Two and Three). Though only a fraction of that grand total, this volume is still substantial: ~198,000 words/602 pages and ~260 unique images (not including the paratextual documents). Because there’s so much to cover and unpack, the abstract, table of contents and summaries we’ve provided so far aren’t really enough; we’ll have to summarize the thesis volume itself and what it contains per division, subdivision and sub-subdivision.

We’ll do this, next.

(exhibit 0a1b1: Artist: Playful Maev. Ileana Sanda, the Queen of the Night, is a character I created for a fantasy series called The Cat in the Adage [from Macbeth, 1606] that I started writing when I was nineteen. I never completed it as a full story but the characters live on in my work. As my website reads,

[The Cat in the Adage is a] fantasy novel I worked on extensively after high school. Back when people still used printers to edit manuscripts, and iMac G3s were popular […] partly inspired by Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and Myth: the Fallen Lords, the story had a lot of dark fantasy elements, but also a fair amount of sex. Here’s a concept piece I had drawn up [featuring] one of the characters from the story [source]. 

“The story” was something of a queerer version of Tolkien’s refrain [the High Fantasy treasure map] than Ursula Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea series was. The Cat in the Adage camped the heroic quest, telling the story of a magical princess named Alyona living in a faraway easterly* castle. Bred for war by her evil uncle, she discovers that Uncle Bane is actually her father! He had traced the family’s magical bloodline and predicted he could produce an exceptional wunderkind/wunderwaffe if he sired a child with his sister! Alyona is the byproduct of that dreadful abuse, and must be trained by Ileana, queen* of all witches, to resist the patriarch, face her trauma, and rescue her battered household from certain doom.

*My mother specialized in Eastern European Studies at the University of Michigan, so I grew up right after the fall of the Soviet Union learning about the czars, Peter the Great, and Vlad the Impaler (my little brother wanted to change his surname to Țepeș: Joe Țepeș, or Joe “the Impaler”). When I commissioned Maev to do the drawing of Ileana seated at her throne of magical pillars [modeled after the pillars of Nosgoth from Legacy of Kain], I asked her to cover the pillars in Cyrillic symbols; from what I recall, asking Maev what she wrote, she replied that the Cyrillic symbols were selected at random.

[“A painting of Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia (1431–1476), also known by his patronymic name Dracula (patronymic meaning a name based on that of a male ancestor), and posthumously dubbed Vlad the Impaler due to his brutality. The name of the vampire Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) was inspired by Vlad’s patronymic” (source: British Library).]

Something I realized later was that Ileana and Alyona—in a psychomachic/psychosexual sense—were medieval divisions of me told on the page. As a closeted trans woman, I lived in trauma that was real and imagined, both the lived abuse of my household and my internalized self-hatred and dysphoria/dysmorphia as a neurodivergent trans person who didn’t know she was either of those things. I lacked the knowledge to express that, but I felt it. So I used what I did know to express my unspeakable trauma and trans woman’s existence in the language that was given to me; e.g., the “Stan Lee” approach to superheroes and psychomachy through plurality

plurality/multiplicity

Generally demonized in Gothic canon, “Plurality or multiplicity is the psychological phenomenon in which a body can feature multiple distinct or overlapping consciousnesses, each with their own degree of individuality. This phenomenon can feature in identity disturbance, dissociative identity disorder, and other specified dissociative disorders. Some individuals describe their experience of plurality as a form of neurodiversity, rather than something that demands a diagnosis” (source: Wikipedia). It’s not automatically an ailment or begot from trauma, though it will canonically be presented as such (the same goes for asexual/neurodivergent peoples).

but also the Hero’s Journey [monomyth] as something for me to camp. We learn through sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, but also oral traditions and folklore as a means of storing our culture inside; anyone who thinks otherwise is deceiving themselves. But camping is important because these things [their Gothic poetics] can be weaponized against us; i.e., by turning off our ability to think critically while the profit motive colonizes everything in pursuit of elite hegemony [destroying our culture in the process and replacing it with bad copies that serve the profit motive]. We must not treat such poetics as a means of escape that is purely a numbing opiate; i.e., one that blinds us with its supposedly “visible” darkness; we will need all our wits and linguo-material tools—our “dark forces” of reclamation/reinvention—if we are to escape the myopia of Capitalist Realism. Rest assured that all the sexy monsters will remain, as will their forbidden fun and games [even the dumb shonen crap]; they’ll just be doubled as sex-positive [thus class, race and gender conscious] during our dialectical-material scrutiny’s asymmetrical/guerrilla warfare: by not being anchored to biological sex, skin color and their various heteronormative functions within the colonial binary and its mythic structure/Shadow of Pygmalion’s bread and circus.

That, as I shall explain in my thesis, is our greatest strength.)

Onto “Notes on Power and Liminal Expression“!

Concerning Keywords/the Volume’s Age

“What does this key unlock?” —Conan, Conan the Destroyer (1984)

(artist: Moxxy Sting)

Before we dive into my thesis volume, let me provide a belated note about keywords and the volume’s age, included here (and inside the promotion):

First, keywords. Back in late 2023, I originally wrote Volume Zero as an encyclopedia of terms; i.e., keywords to unpack in relation to other terms, all of which I either borrowed from elsewhere and modified, or coined myself; re (from the full, PDF version of the paratext “What I Won’t Exhibit” not found on my website’s “Paratextual Documents” page):

In this disclaimer and the entire thesis volume, I have emboldened and color-coded keywords (rather than opt for italics/underlining, which I generally utilize for emphasis). Generally this is done when first introducing them, but also when I am about to define/am currently defining or otherwise stressing their involvement (I will also do this as a graphical aid to showcase when a bunch of keywords are being used in tandem, especially during the thesis statement). Regardless of when I do, it’s meant to clue you in that we’re discussing words that have specific definitions that are about to be expanded on or otherwise invoked (at the present time or later in the document) or reinvoked after they have already been explained. Also, while this only happens a few times, a couple of phrases aren’t in the glossary because I haven’t been able to define some of the more niche or incidental expressions (usually idioms or figures of speech); this is something I’d like to address in a future, second edition.

In hindsight, this might seem like a good thing to have explained or otherwise included in my blog-style book promotions. However, while not on purpose, I nonetheless forgot to include this explanation inside them; i.e., because Volume Zero is really the only book volume that even uses the keyword system throughout its entirety! Furthermore, this volume was likewise written before I started serializing my books in a blog-style format to begin with (all the PDFs contain the explanation, cited above, near the very start of their documents); i.e., with it being released in October 2023 and my first book promotion, “Brace for Impact,” not happening until April 2024.

To it, I’m not sure how well Volume Zero will translate to said format, but I want to try anyways; i.e., you can always just download the PDF on my one-page book promo and use its bookmark system and Ctrl + F to jump around. Both will make your life much easier when tackling this very dense volume; i.e., it was specifically written with doing so in mind, including accessing the full series glossary to help readers parse Volume Zero’s many sequences of words, each being listed and explained one after another (words in lists, and lists upon lists).

(artist: Moxxy Sting)

Second, the volume’s age. I released Volume Zero first and it shows; i.e., despite being what was essentially my PhD in admittedly independent form, doing so was never meant to be a shield from criticism (academia or otherwise), but a staging point for what I built off its unfinished arguments. I’ll be the first to admit, Volume Zero was researched for years (nearly a decade) but written over a very short period (roughly a month); i.e., it was always intended, from the outset, to be holistic-but-messy. The magic it still offers despite this lies in its pure assemblage of raw thesis material—material I would go on to do much more solid thesis work with, in my later books. The core strength of Volume Zero, then, lies in the constellation of ideas put forth; i.e., surrounding my basic thesis argument: that Capitalism sexualizes everything and that we must camp it (and its canon) to not only survive, but liberate ourselves with gusto (on the Aegis, above and below)! There’s no shortage of ideas, in that respect.

Some get more time and focus, thus more development (e.g., Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain vis-à-vis Metroidvania and the palliative Numinous), and some are given just enough introduction to bloom far more substantially in later volumes (e.g., ludo-Gothic BDSM and the dialectic of the alien chasing the Numinous as a Communist force). There’s plenty to be proud of, here, but plenty to critique, as well. The good news is, any critiques about a lack of development can usually be addressed by directing naysayers towards my later books; e.g., regarding Metroidvania and ludo-Gothic BDSM. Even so, the volume’s biggest weakness is that it often touches on ideas it hasn’t fully been able to crystalize (what Dale Townshend might call “all over the shop”). Conversely, its core thesis argument is incredibly productive (as are many of its other ideas surrounding its rich speculative value). But the volume’s format is definitely love it or hate it; i.e., I was still figuring how to format when writing it, and have since gone on to do things quite differently for my later books. There’s not much I can do about that, here, short of entirely rewriting Volume Zero, and I’d sooner saw off my left foot, Audition-style.

(artist: Moxxy Sting)

To conclude, this volume—more than the series it started—has a great many keywords it presents holistically and intersectionally across a series of concentric charts (often one per chapter). For many of those, the exact order you encounter them is far less important than how you weigh them together afterwards; it will feel soupy and unfinished in spots, because much of what it suggests wouldn’t be finished for months, going on years afterwards—i.e., when meeting newer models, the list growing from a handful to over sixty as time went on (with Moxxy being one of my most recent additions). As such, this book volume’s experimental nature was intended to be read in various directions, not simply from top to bottom. Treat it as such and I think you’ll get more out of it. So if it seems like I don’t mention a keyword right away if at all, rest assured, I will get to it eventually (in this volume or others)! And if something is absent, there’s always the full book glossary contained in each PDF file (and on my website). Hop to it, nerds! —Perse, 3/21/2025

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] The Absurd sits adjacent to the Sublime, the Weird/cosmic nihilism, the Numinous, and astronoetics, all of which we’ll touch upon throughout this book at various points. The thing to note is, meaning is attained in relationship to these spatialized devices as a form of unequal, dare-I-say Promethean, power exchange; i.e., power and its complex, paradoxical performances formed in relation to us and things that seem (at least in appearance) to be far older and more powerful than us.

[2] For all of my muses, please refer to the Acknowledgements section.

[3] An ex I met in grad school, overseas. Said person has been given an alias (as have all of the exes I talk about, in this book), whereupon we mutually decided for me to call them “Zeuhl”; i.e., after the obscure-but-totally-awesome musical subgenre (Jim Allen’s “There is No Prog, Only Zeuhl: A Guide to One of Rock’s Most Imaginative Subgenres,” 2020). I don’t owe Zeuhl shit, but to be blunt, they’re very self-centered and socially hypochondriacal, and I’m not really interested in outing them in this book despite how they abused me. At the same time, I also don’t want to actively protect them or clean up after their mess by scrubbing every aspect of their mentioning from my online profile and various websites. But to be honest, there isn’t (to my knowledge) any public mention of them and their full name outside of my private socials (unlike Jadis, another ex who is publicly mentioned outside of this book because—fuck them, they hurt me bad and frankly shouldn’t be allowed to date anyone). This being said, I do talk about Zeuhl’s abuse of me (and the abuse I received from other exes) in ways that tries to be frank and educational. What they did was shitty and I’d like to help other people by offering them the chance to learn from my adventures, “happy accidents” and all.

[4] A trick employed by the state called triangulation, or pitting one group against another for one’s own benefit. A common method is weaponizing abuse victims’ prey mechanisms, making them scared and angry and then handing them a weapon. In the case of Victoria, she’s literally “pulling a Brutus” except it’s against a small, defenseless woman; as we shall see with TERFs later on, they triangulate for the state to act just like Victoria does, except it’s against the state’s manufactured enemies: trans people and labor movements. Keep this idea in mind; we’ll return to it often through the entire book (especially when examining Victoria, Hippolyta and Medusa, or offshoots of these archetypes).

[5] For a fun visual guide on swooning, consider Adam Frost and Zhenia Vasiliev’s “How to Tell You’re Reading a Gothic Novel – in Pictures” (2014). Also, the idea isn’t complete bullshit; the xenophobia is an abject counterfeit, but based on a kernel of truth: how the body responds to perceived trauma, aka the vasovagal response:

When I first started reading romance novels I used to snicker at the idea of fainting from shock, thinking it a silly, overblown invention by authors to accentuate the delicate feminine sensibilities of their heroines. And then, to my utter surprise, it actually happened to me. I happen to dislike needles. As in, really dislike needles. The idea of getting a shot has always given me the heebie-jeebies. But I simply ask to sit down when getting one, and it’s okay. One time, though, I must have been stressed about by other things, because I rolled up my sleeve, and then remember starting to breathe a little weirdly. The next thing I knew, the nurse was patting my cheek gently, and looking horribly distraught. “I—I hadn’t even touched you yet!” she stammered. “And you just keeled over!” How embarrassing to find out I’m a flighty peagoose straight out of an Ann Radcliffe Gothic novel! However, I’ve learned that’s much more common than you think” (source: Andrea Penrose’s “Why Do Regency Heroines Swoon?” 2021).

I can attest to this, my ex, Jadis—normally made of steel—fainted at the sight of blood (my blood, no less) while watching me get my vasectomy!

In other words, Radcliffe wasn’t totally full of shit, but she did use the physiological effects of swooning to contribute to some very harmful psychosexual myths, stigmas and BDSM stereotypes stemming from her fictions (we’ll discuss camping these throughout the volume).

[6] (from the “Karl Marx in the Ludwig Rosenberger Library of Judaica,” 2006): The son of Jewish parents, Marx was baptized at the age of six. While he had no Jewish education and embraced atheism, he continues to be identified as a Jew, and his Jewish ancestry influenced his thinking. Marx’s writings about Jews and Judaism, which identify Judaism with capitalism, are nearly all hostile […] It is also not clear if Marx believed the negative qualities he saw in Jews were inherent traits or rather the result of historical circumstance that forced them into specific roles and activities. Whether or not he was himself anti-Semitic, his Jewish origins and his writings have been used by anti-Semites in linking Communism to a Jewish conspiracy; and his remarks about Jews continue to influence the reception of his other writings (source).

[7] (from the glossary): Another of my neologisms (from the thesis volume), the Shadow of Pygmalion or “Pygmalion effect” is the patriarchal vision and subsequent shadow of any knowing-better “kings” of empire, thus capital; i.e., of male- and token-dominated industries inside the Man Box, wherein “Pygmalion” means “from a male king’s mind,” but frankly extends to all traitors (male or not): upholding profit/the status quo raping nature for profit (and those treated by the state as “of nature” for those reasons); e.g., the evil monarchs of older tombs (abstractions of the bourgeoisie in crisis and decay) occupying the same colonial territories at home and abroad across space-time (a classic example being Hamlet’s father’s ghost, Shakespeare’s famously confusing story affording some ambiguity to the experiencing of such entities). More to the point, the gatekeepers of the elite routinely fabricate imaginary visions of the past, present and future, doing so to uphold Capitalist Realism through these ghosts; i.e., a broader pacification that includes the monomyth/Cycle of Kings, but also infernal concentric pattern and heteronormative legion(s) of monsters, invasion scenarios and escape fantasies; re: their reasoned, Cartesian treatment of nature as monstrous-feminine is heteronormative, wherein state proponents (cops) pimp and police nature out of pre-emptive revenge (and spite). Said revenge is generational, thus taught through popular monomythic stories; i.e., whose collective abjection of nature in service to profit ostensibly spares the cop from state cannibalization: antagonize nature and put it cheaply to work through concentric tokenism; re: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss, but also the various modular and interchangeable statuses for blood libel, sodomy and witch hunt accusations—as an intersectional and constantly evolving Venn Diagram of persecution networks recycling dead us-versus-them language. The inverse of the Shadow of Pygmalion (and its effect) is the Shadow of Galatea; i.e., of Medusa/the Communist Numinous (as something to chase) and spectres of Marx (as something to camp) versus spectres of Caesar (the original Pygmalion, also something to camp) existing inside the same performative zones; re: exploitation and liberation share the same spaces of performance (and their fractal recursion happening through the disintegration and rediscovery of monomythic and Promethean language).

[8] E.g., Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon (2013): “It is the near future… The apocalypse has had an apocalypse!” (source: Gamespot’s “Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon – Reveal Trailer” 2013); or, Gloryhammer’s Return to the Kingdom of Fife (2023); or Tropic Thunder’s (2014) Tugg Speedman: “The one man who made a difference five times before… is about to make a difference again, only this time it’s… different!” All are dumb nostalgia on top of dumb nostalgia as a running gag that runs the risk of repeating itself until it loses steam (critical power).

[9] “Vulgar” meaning “common, plebian.” Consider his “Leck mich im Arsch” (1782)—literally “lick me in the ass” (while it’s not strictly fetishized, but rather closer to the Americanized “kiss my ass,” one could fetishize it).

[10] In the past, I struggled greatly to critique monoliths like Radcliffe, the so-called “Great Enchantress.” I’ve since discovered that going after them and their problematic memory is like kicking a punching bag with their face on it (until it starts to look like Doomguy’s when his health is low). When hitting something made to look like someone you dislike, the sensation is oddly satisfying. But also, it’s for a good reason: Radcliffe ‘s a bigot and a moderate one at that; for the good of us all, she (and the legion of copycats she inspired with her School of Terror) needs to be taken down a peg or two (we’ll get to all of this is good time, I promise). This can be by kicking her corpse, but also dancing with her ghost, turning it into something better in the process!

[11] Vis-à-vis Jodey Castricano’s Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (2001), or “the play of revelation and concealment lodged within parts of individual words” (source). As I unpack it later in this volume, “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” (from the “Notes on Power” essay) and “In regards to ghosts, I would argue the same notion applies to all undead and to demons—i.e., writing with both as complicated theatrical expressions of the human condition under Capitalism” (from “the Four Gs” section).

[12] To be fair to Butler (who long outlived Foucault and Derrida), she doesn’t mince words when it comes to TERFs:  “The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times. So the TERFs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism, one that requires a coalition guided by struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia and carceral violence; one that is mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which include high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people” (Emanuel Maiberg’s “Why The Guardian Censored Judith Butler on TERFs,” 2021).

[13] A slur directed at homosexual men/gender-non-conforming AMABs, who are fetishized/coercively demonized by cis-het men during gender trouble when the nation-state cannot provide them heteronormative sex (“war brides”). Often, queer fiction comments on this exploitative side of the “bury your gays” trope through an abject, queer damsel-in-distress: the twink-in-peril, perhaps articulated mostly nakedly (with raw exploitation, but also exceptional nuance) in Dennis Cooper’s Frisk (1991) or Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation (1995). Gentler, less-brutalized versions of this monstrous-feminine can be found sprinkled all throughout popular fiction, including Cloud-in-a-dress from Final Fantasy 7 (1997) and “Gerudo Link” from the Zelda series (which we’ll explore more in Volume Three, Chapter Three, exhibit 93). “Traps” in quotes is something that could be supplied to AFAB workers, whose appearance beyond heteronormative standards leads them to becoming demonized as a queer “bait,” or trick (no pun intended) that leads chasers down queerer and queerer rabbit holes.

[14] This isn’t written to devalue the love that Zeuhl and I had. Quite the contrary, I absolutely cherish the memory of what we shared and want it known how special all of that was. But given that they have zero desire to be affiliated with me and my work, I likewise am bound by the code of my own honor to relegate them to that shadow zone they were so keen on being inside after they broke up with me. If said desire seems odd, know that I felt exactly the same way in 2019 after they left me for their future husband (and future “side pieces” despite telling me the breakup was because they were in a “mono” headspace). Simply put, it smacked of Picasso: “Each time I leave a woman, I should burn her. Destroy the woman, destroy the past she represents” (source: Marta’s “The Women of Picasso,” 2023). Well, sorry, but I won’t be party to such vandalism in service of someone whose treatment of me shows they only cared about themselves in the end (whose mind flipped “off” like a switch when they wanted nothing more to do with me in person). I want to preserve the memory of what we had and why it mattered—not for Zeuhl, but for me.

And if my ghostly recollections of them irks and/or saddens them, know that I gave them every possible chance to avoid the present state of affairs. To Zeuhl: You chose to hide down in that rabbit hutch of yours; you can stay there as far as I’m concerned, but you will do so knowing that you were the primary cause of our broken friendship, not I. Maybe it won’t haunt you, but know that your haunting of me is something I have accepted and am living with in my own cathartic healing process. We met in a disco-like space and it was a hell of a good time, but I survived the hell you put me through, after the party (and the sex, love and kindness from you) stopped.

[15] (from the glossary): The teller of splendid lies; e.g., Jonathan Swift and Gulliver’s Travels (1726); also applies to self-aware weavers of various genres of fiction, from Oscar Wilde to Luis Borges, but also non-white/American authors who have to reinvent their own cultures’ lost histories—e.g., Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Michelle Cliff’s Free Enterprise (1993) and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1998), etc. Furthermore, concerning bourgeois lies vs proletarian splendid lies, Gothic stories are concerned with recycled clichés in either case.

[16] From “Structure, Sign and Play” (1966).

[17] Translated from French: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” From Of Grammatology (1967). A handy way to think of it is as, “There is no outside-text.” For further reading, I suggest Harish’s Notebook’s “Deconstructing Systems – There is Nothing Outside the Text” (2020), which explores Derrida’s (famously difficult) idea nicely.

[18] “Pertaining to the ideas of Thomas Robert Malthus.” Malthus was an English economist and all-around horrible person, who—faced with the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Conquest/Pestilence, War, Famine and Death)—dispassionately argued for the genocide of poor people to combat “overpopulation” (an eco-fascist dogwhistle that continues to conspicuously play out in popular narratives; e.g., superhero stories, vis-à-vis Renegade Cut’s “Thanos Was Wrong – Eugenics and Overpopulation,” 2019).

[19] E.g., Apone from Aliens (1986): “A day in the Marine corps is like a day on the farm—every meal a banquet, every paycheck a fortune, every formation a parade! I love the corps!” Never mind that no one likes the cornbread, many openly hate the job, various characters like Vasquez and Drake are penal conscripts (a prison battalion, essentially), and the enterprising greenhorn lieutenant basically gets everyone killed because he sends the squad into an ambush without weapons (“What the hell are we supposed to use, man? Harsh language?”). Apone’s blind love speaks to the warning of the Black Abolitionist: “We love our country but our country doesn’t love us” (Atun-Shei Films’ “A Black Abolitionist’s Drastic Response to the Fugitive Slave Act” 2023); e.g., the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment cut to ribbons at Fort Wagner during a forlorn hope with stars in their eyes (dreaming of a country that loves them).

[20] Capitalism is a hyperobject, a structure so big that you can’t directly observe it, and whose descriptions through ultimately simplistic metaphors are abstracting at best (for more information on hyperobjects, consider Timothy Morton’s 2013 book on the subject). You can only talk about Capitalism in pieces, from a particular point of view about something you yourself disinterred and reassembled over space and time. Needless to say, the point of Gothic-Communist abstraction isn’t abject confusion, nor is it to pull something out of thin air. Rather, it’s meant to achieve altered perspective for enhanced appreciation of truths concealed by capital; e.g., abstract art that isn’t tied to having an obvious point, purpose, or monetary value/function under Capitalism.

[21] From Jerrold Hogle’s “Leroux’s Fantôme and the Cultural Work of the Gothic” in The Undergrounds of The Phantom of the Opera (2002):

By now, we should not be surprised that Gaston Leroux’s conflicted social vision and its disguised exposure of cultural “abjections” appear most fully in a novel deeply rooted in the “Gothic” tradition. Over the last two decades, the study of the Gothic as a mixed and unsettling mode in fiction, theater, film, and other media has increasingly revealed how the archaic spaces and haunting monsters that loom before us in performances we call Gothic provide methods of “othering” that have definite ideological and social, as well as psychological, functions. In the Gothic from the later eighteenth century on, as David Punter has shown, “the middle class” often does what we have just seen Leroux do in Le Fantôme: it “displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell” with feelings of both fear and attraction towards the phantasms of what is displaced (Punter, 418). The Gothic, well before Leroux adopts it, enables a growing bourgeois hegemony to be both haunted by and distanced from the “hidden barbarities” that have helped make it possible (Punter, 419)—and hence the repressed uncertainties it feels about its own legitimacy (as in Abraham’s “phantom”)—by projecting such anomalies into the horrors of apparently old and alien specters, buildings, and crypts (source).

As we proceed into the book, keep this in mind when we discuss monsters and spaces, and the middle-class fear-fascination with them.

[22] This idea is obviously complicated, as Hell and its undead/demonic occupants can denote intersectional stigmas that aren’t explicitly connected to race; e.g., green or purple as a color of stigma/trauma afforded to people who adopt it for different reasons; i.e., the witch as the vice character who upholds the status quo by playing into widespread stereotypes, or appropriating colonization unto a group that historically only benefits from Imperialism (relative to the Global South); sure, there are degrees of relative oppression experienced by white women in the Global North versus white men, but these woman (and other token groups) can still perform in bad faith by adopting the rebel’s persona, shouting “for the Horde!” and punching down at trans people (or whoever the state needs them to attack) also dressed up as “bad” demons, undead, and/or stigma-animal chimeras to stab, shoot, crush and kill. Keep this in mind when we look at “fantasy blackface” in Volume Two (orcs, exhibit 37e; Drow, exhibit 41b)—not as strictly “of race,” but of class, race, gender and religion as generally emphasized to varying degrees during a given performance depending on who’s playing the role and during which production.

[23] A hideous inversion of the oft-conceived idea of “Peter Pan syndrome”; i.e., the adult is the childish one. The paradox of the heteronormative adult is they are the most entitled and childish of all, albeit without an actual child’s nascent ability to imagine anything except the incredibly narrow set of rules, behaviors and beliefs (thus stigmas and biases) they have internalized. Suitably “grown up,” the weird canonical nerd becomes easily frustrated, conditioned to rape and kill and the drop of a hat, but also lie through bad-faith deceptions. In short, they are useful to capital.

[24] From Mark Greene’s “Man Box culture” in Remaking Manhood: The Healthy Masculinity Podcast (2023); i.e., “the brutal enforcement of a narrowly defined set of traditional rules for being a man.”

[25] Source: Bad Empanada’s “How the USA Inspired the Nazis – From Manifest Destiny to Lebensraum” (2022).

[26] Jerrold Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit, which we’ll explore at length during the Four Gs section.

[27] Like many artists that we examine throughout the book, Morry’s work pointedly revives the Wisdom of the Ancients according to the Neo-Gothic tradition: a marriage between the Ancient Romance’s “larger-than-life” and the ordinary novel’s sense of the quotidian, the mundane stuff of the everyday. And Morry’s work (exhibit 51d2) is fairly tame on the larger gradient, paling in its subversive power compared to someone like Sabs’ far more erotic (and twink-centric) romances (exhibit 91c); i.e., the “Sapphic” is a cliché often weaponized by second wave feminism and the LGBA.

[28] The tragedy of Beowulf is most men can be broken, conditioned like dogs to serve the state without seeing the damage done to themselves or others; i.e., it has been internalized. Per Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605), this is called “tilting at windmills.”

[29] What better way to illustrate madness than the need for profit by destroying as many people and environments as possible? It’s a kind of chasing the dragon/”dragon sickness” by bloodletting entire nations on stolen, privatized land.

[30] As defined by the Online Etymology Dictionary (2023):

late 14c., “revelation, disclosure,” from Church Latin apocalypsis “revelation,” from Greek apokalyptein “uncover, disclose, reveal,” from apo “off, away from” (see apo-) + kalyptein “to cover, conceal” (from PIE root, kel-) “to cover, conceal, save.” The Christian end-of-the-world story is part of the revelation in John of Patmos’ book “Apokalypsis” (a title rendered into English as pocalipsis c. 1050, “Apocalypse” c. 1230, and “Revelation” by Wycliffe c. 1380). Its general sense in Middle English was “insight, vision; hallucination.” The general meaning “a cataclysmic event” is modern (not in OED 2nd ed., 1989); apocalypticism “belief in an imminent end of the present world” is from 1858 [source].

[31] A pair of radioactive materials that, when held together, would near-instantly release fatal levels of radiation to anyone near the core (see: Alex Wellerstein’s “The Demon Core and the Strange Death of Louis Slotin,” 2016).

[32] There’s nothing quite so dumb or cruel as threatening workers with death—as if the elite could offer us the means to cheat death when they cannot do it, themselves! The cruelty is, they’re offering people the basic means to survive after cornering the market.

[33] From his War in the Shadows: the Guerrilla in History (1994): “Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it.” In other words, the state’s monopoly of violence—Max Weber’s maxim, “a state holds a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within its territory, meaning that violence perpetrated by other actors is illegitimate” (refer to our thesis statement for the full definition)—can be challenged.

[34] When confronted with their true selves, most men might not run away screaming but they often freeze up, disenchant or self-report (all of which are usual responses for us to use against them).

[35] An oft-misunderstood term and my area of expertise. We delve more into its full definition and sex-positive application during the “camp map,” but for now here’s the short version (abridged, from the glossary):

Metroidvania

A type of Gothic videogame, one involving the exploration of castles and other closed spaces in an ergodic framework; i.e., the struggle of investigating past trauma as expressed through the Gothic castle and its monstrous caverns (which is the author poetically hinting at systemic abuses in real life).Metroidvania are a location-based videogame genre that combines 2D, 2.5D, or 3D platforming [e.g., Dark Souls, 2009] and ranged/melee combat—usually in the 3rd person—inside a giant, closed space. This space communicates Gothic themes of various kinds; encourages exploration* depending on how non-linear the space is; includes progressive skill and item collection, mandatory boss keys, backtracking and variable gating mechanics (bosses, items, doors); and requires movement powerups in some shape or form, though these can be supplied through RPG elements as an optional alternative.

*Exploration pertains to the deliberate navigation of space beyond that of obvious, linear routes—to search for objects, objectives or secrets off the beaten path (source: “Mazes and Labyrinths”).

[36] In this 2022 blogpost, “Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism: Manifesto,” which has seen numerous revisions since July 22nd, 2022. When it released in early 2024, Volume One contained the manifesto, but also a variety of other documents and changes not included in the original blogpost.

[37] “Lost in Necropolis: The Continuation of Castle-Narrative beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania” (2018)

[38] In short, I was averaging ~5000 words/~15 pages and ~7.5 images per day. Compared to my past blogging efforts, that was essentially a full-size blogpost with pictures and citations (which normally I would write over a week, sometimes longer) every day for 22 days straight (without drugs, I feel I should emphasize—that includes coffee/alcohol or other over-the-counter stimulants/depressants). It’s funny because I remember Paul Sheldon—Steven King’s autobiographical protagonist, in Misery (1987)—giving himself a martyred pat on the back when he said he was writing 5 pages a day (King even italicized it, if I remember correctly) while his “muse” was torturing him. Like, that’s really cute, my dude (though props for doing it on a typewriter, holy fuck)!

[39] One book was produced when I was in high school, and remains unfinished; another graphic novel was finished but is out-of-print; a commissioned novella that is mostly-finished but on hiatus (refer to this page on my website to access descriptions for each). Also, there’s my 2018 master’s thesis, “Lost in Necropolis: The Continuation of Castle-Narrative beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania” (on Academia.edu) and various amounts of commissioned short stories/erotica (on my website).

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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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

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!