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.
Demons: From Composites and the Occult to Totems and the Natural World
“Who needs chicks when you got demons?” [They’re not mutually exclusive, my dudes.]
—John and Moe, The Gate II: Trespassers (1992)
(source: Austin Vashaw’s “Forgotten Sequel GATE II,” 2018)
Note: I wanted to release this opening/symposium on Friday the 13th, but had to rush it a little. As it extends to the entire Demon Module and discusses everything inside, I’ve not only proofread it more, but expanded on it considerably. —Perse
This module focuses on forbidden, unequal exchange (often power, darkness and knowledge, which for us are synonymous with each other) and radical transformation (commonly shifting shape) through demons, but especially creation using such things and their dark materials’ desire/fulfillment of wishes (commonly around advancement and revenge using black magic/mad science); i.e., going beyond what capital normally allows for most people. The gods, for example, classically use clay to create whatever they want (re: all heroes are monsters). Demons, then, commonly constitute unequal exchange through power, darkness and knowledge as a forbidden creative act; i.e., they make for an incredibly broad category of monster that—famously shown during Satanic Panic, in the 1980s—exhibits beings (thus power, darkness and knowledge) as literally fashioned from clay (an analog of human flesh)! Doing so constitutes highly regulated acts of vengeful creation; i.e., showcasing forbidden ability (again, as power, darkness or knowledge) through limitless poetry that we’ll explore in the pages ahead; e.g., from Pygmalion and Galatea, Milton’s Satan, and Shelley’s Frankenstein, to echoes of those we won’t: Ray Harryhausen, Larry Roemer’s Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), and Frosty the Snowman.
(artist: Oxcoxa)
Self-fashioning linguo-materially also ties to incredibly old forms of demonic poetics, which the elite package and sell under capital in a variety of media forms, but also dichotomies; e.g., virgin/whore and videogames (with prostitution and whore-as-sex-demon being something we’ll explore at length, in “Forbidden Sight”). So while demonic “claymation” has occult origins dating back to the Golem of Prague (and far older examples), these have since been reinvoked; e.g., with John Carmack’s own Martian variety in Doom (1993); i.e., as also being fashioned from clay before being digitized (a common ’90s technique, Blizzard originally intending their 1996 flagship game, Diablo 1, to also be digitized claymation).
Apart from clay, however, demons are embodied and invoked by various materials and methods reanimating dead things; e.g., ink (above) but also what William Blake called “corroding fires” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790); i.e., being made of dark hellish materials, summoned from dark hellish zones, or sensed through the imbibing of dark hellish substances:
- posthuman mad science, composite demons and Cartesian thought leading to modern-day fascism and xenophobia (the Promethean Quest)
- the liminal expression of occult language, anti-Semitic black-magic symbols, and BDSM rituals (the Faustian bargain)
- and drug-fueled ecstasies/xenophilic knowledge tied closely to nature, sexuality and gender expression; i.e., as alienated from the modern world and fetishized/pimped out by capital
We’ll go over these ideas one chapter/subchapter at a time:
- “Of Darkness and the Forbidden” (opening, included in this post) is a symposium that discusses various poetic ideas and paradoxes (contradictions) known to darkness and demons, which will come up throughout the entire module.
- “Forbidden Sight, Faust and the Promethean Quest” (chapter) parts zero, one, two and three consider forbidden power as something to see; i.e., forbidden sight, per the Faustian Bargain and Promethean Quest. They do so through the history of making/summoning demons—initially according to Gothic, Renaissance approaches and prostitution (whores) as a Faustian bargain, but then unto the Promethean Quest; i.e., Cartesian dualism meant to punish demons, or otherwise summon/pimp them through the ghost of the counterfeit to further the abjection process in service to capital raping nature-as-vengeful (and whose inheritance anxiety occurs inside the Imperial Core, continuing Capitalist Realism as a fear of the outside, of the dark, of the Earth, creativity and nature[1]).
- “Exploring the Derelict Past“ (subchapter) considers the dialectical-material tensions between a demonic trifecta of damsels, detectives and demons; i.e., as something to enjoy on either side of oppositional praxis, while endorsing pro-state or pro-worker functions (their appropriative dogma or appreciative ironies): according to those expressing and investigating demons and their shape-shifting trauma/catharsis.
- “Call of the Wild“ (chapter) considers the natural world as a hellish, demonic site of animals-as-monstrous; i.e., demonic and/or undead to varying degrees, which the state will exploit per the Cartesian model and its heteronormative, settler-colonial profit motive. Parts one and two consider the revolutionary potential of monster-fucking and the sex-positive educational device offered by the monstrous-feminine as animalized; i.e., how both liberate nature and workers from state-fueled furry panic using acid Communism (the merger of inter- and extra-community measures).
As we proceed, please remember Weber’s maxim concerning the state’s monopoly of violence (and in connection to it, Asprey’s paradox of terror and Crawford’s invention of terrorism vis-à-vis the Neo-Gothic mode); these apply to any demon, be the iconoclast of mad science, occult magic and/or nature, or to some degree chimeric/undead (e.g., the xenomorph). Made to prey on nature as monstrous-feminine, the state has an intrinsically heteronormative, Cartesian and settler-colonial police character that will double and weaponize Gothic poetics against pro-worker forms of counterterror seeking liberation; i.e., through demonic expression.
(artist: Mizugi Buns)
To it, demons embody poetic exchange—as unequal/forbidden, and with transformative linguo-material devices (re: power, darkness, knowledge; if I mention a particular noun in this module, it’s because I’m stressing it). As such, they are classically made, summoned or found, and argue dualistically (through doubles) along these circuits of poetic discourse; i.e., by creating something out of clay or summoning it into a clay-like substance (or dead flesh, possessed victim, graveyard soil, etc): to deal/treat with power in all its forms, including of nature and death as old, haunted, anathema and ubiquitous. Knowledge is power and vice versa during such exchanges; i.e., as dark, anisotropic.
Couched in “darkness visible” as a poetic, xenoglossic device, we can make not just voices, but also bodies that speak cryptonymically to taboo, illusory and paradoxical things, injecting them with fresh poetic life (trans people are poets of identity and the flesh, above); i.e., a half-real, checkered combination of violent, terrifying and hellish morphological freedom of expression, existing in andro/gynodiverse defiance of state monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital, hence Vitruvian medicalization and genocidal apathies (re: the Shadow of Pygmalion as white/xenophobic, fearing things not of the West [“not of this Earth!”] and bastardizing them as abject, alien evil, forgotten; i.e., reimagined with asymmetrical/guerilla powers exploited by the state but not monopolized by them)!
(source: Testament’s Dark Roots of the Earth, 2012; artist: Eliran Kantor)
Per Hogle, the ghost of the counterfeit furthers abjection through the middle class upholding status-quo arrangements of power and knowledge through Gothic fakeries; i.e., viewing colonized land as dark and alien, vis-à-vis Cartesian thought and heteronormative language demonizing older forms of culture connected to nature, life and death, having become alien in ways that uphold capital (and its black/white colonial binary argument). Under Capitalist Realism, something is “dark” if it ostensibly moves anything of value (re: power and knowledge) away from the status quo. Generally this darkness is associated with the vengeful imaginary past based on buried historical atrocities, the latter paradoxically twisted by the former to keep control right where it is (among the elite). Anything that challenges this paradigm is canonically framed as dark, evil, profligate; i.e., nature as vengeful whore, which capital takes revenge on through DARVO-style police violence/obscurantism, witch hunts, tokenism and moral panic; e.g., Medusa and her Aegis’ forbidden sight (we’ll get to her).
Rebel power/knowledge, then, becomes ontological in highly dark, Satanic, and “archaically” poetic ways; i.e., through iconoclastic abstraction and impression, but also hefty substance, sensitivity and savory deliciousness regarding the natural world as funerary and wild (as forbidden fruit generally is): “death” as an extant state of constant radical change, made by those “of nature” the forces of light deem ethnocentrically “lesser” or “accursed” while conveniently abusing the same language of the imaginary past’s priestly and funerary necrobiome, themselves (always in service to profit/a Cartesian paradigm raping nature as whore, Pagan, black, the latter closer to life and death through reimagined death gods, post-genocide—above). And yet, all monsters are linguo-material devices, hence exist in anisotropic duality during oppositional praxis; i.e., in dialectical-material struggle, moving power towards workers or the state. This further complicates by a give-and-take approach to what is being exchanged. Whereas the undead take essence when they feed in relation to trauma, demons give knowledge to transform themselves and others into demons when they teach.
From Ovid to Milton to Giger to Vandermeer’s Shimmer (the Rainbow from Hell, per Lovecraft’s “Colour out of Space” [1927] worshipping cosmic nihilism), we Gothic Communists are not “sick”; we change both ourselves and others through love, pleasure, pain, and annihilation, turning into our true forms less as set and more constantly growing: amid a parallel state of existence whose Wisdom of the Ancients challenges Capitalist Realism and its blind, braindead myopia! Not to cheat death, but face and become it, we knock ’em dead—are the guardians of the universe, not its conquerors: the stewards of nature’s mighty-mighty darkness. Darkness is power as potential, waiting not just to happen but intersectionally collect, consolidate and explode in a rising pandemonium of anarchistic intelligence and consciousness; i.e., shifting the giving of unequal, forbidden knowledge towards worker struggles fighting for universal equal rights, dismantling the state as we do.
(artist: Mizugi Buns)
This occurs through playing with power-as-knowledge-exchange insofar as demons represent it through darkness as an aesthetic; i.e., expressed through ludo-Gothic BDSM. Something of an Unholy Trinity that turns capital on its head (usually expressed as upside-down; e.g., the crucifix), power, darkness and knowledge—often as conspicuous, ritualized acts of creation/poetry and (re)invention through magic/mad science—go hand-in-hand during unequal, forbidden exchange, radical transformation and dark desire/wish fulfillment (my demon thesis, the overarching argument for this entire module). The demon symposium shall explore this lofty and productive concept for the remainder of its pages, using these words somewhat interchangeably. In doing so, we’ll conversationally unpack an assemblage of complexities and contradictions/paradoxes inherent to demonic expression as “dark,” thus useful insofar as worker liberation under Gothic Communism goes; and we’ll impose limitations on demonic variation/our study’s focus, just to keep things—while holistic—somewhat grounded!
Of Darkness and the Forbidden: A Demon Symposium
Darkness imprisoning me
All that I see
Absolute horror
I cannot live
I cannot die
Trapped in myself
Body my holding cell
—James Hetfield; “One,” on Metallica’s …And Justice for All (1989)
This symposium is like that great library from The Shadow of the Wind (2001)—many books on the shelves and far too many to read in one lifetime or several. With selective reading, we shall pull this or that down from the dark, dusty stores, doing so to assemble and articulate a variety of poetic ideas/thesis statements useful to rebellious demonic expression, as well as arbitrating the focus of the Demon Module at large: forbidden knowledge and “darkness” to transform ourselves through ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., the demonic subversion of state harm by playing with copies of these things just as state proponents do, but in reverse; e.g., incarceration, torture, rape/power abuse, and the all-around policing of ironic demonic sex and force with unironic demonic sex and force: deus ex machina, Deus Vult!
Ludo-Gothic BDSM, then, is to play with unequal power as “dark” knowledge; i.e., plastic and anisotropic, to better make art in any linguo-material form that allows for transformation as such. Often, this speaks to someone’s perspective, but it also ties to violence, terror and morphological expression—a communion with dark earthly forces communicated by their bodies and minds as somehow “demonic”; i.e., in monomorphic ways antithetical to state configurations. Power is a paradox, then, something “dark” to (re)invent and (re)enforce along the control of poetry and knowledge by the state. As a structure, it invents conditions and ideas—generally through the assignment of guilt and innocence—that flow power up by criminalizing nature and policing it in us-versus-them demonic forms; Gothic Communism reverses all of this by inverting the same terrorist/counterterrorist devices and arrangements: to illustrate how those assigning guilt—or otherwise benefiting from capital as a heteronormative, Cartesian, setter-colonial arrangement—are generally the most guilty of all.
For your convenience, I’ve divided this symposium into six larger chunks and a conclusion (all concern demons and darkness, and the titles should give you an idea of what to expect):
- Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend
- Playing with Power
- Limiting Our Focus
- Expanding Our Demon Thesis
- Further Food for Thought
- Broad Strokes; Some Larger Arguments about Demons
- Conclusion: New Eyes, Forbidden Sight (and “Religious” Concerns)
Before we proceed into the symposium at length, then, a couple of pages about “darkness,” why it’s vague, and what I mean by it in relation to demons!
Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend
“Darkness,” whatever its form, is aggregate, massive, dwarfing the light—man vs nature, virgin/whore, state/chaos, etc—and its poetics and paradoxical ideas of dark knowledge exist within liminal in-between positions of incomplete knowledge. To be “in the dark” is to be at a disadvantage. These states of ignorance and lies actually stem from older pre-Christian religions (re: Judaism and golems), doing so in ways that hauntologically endure well into the present; i.e., “darkness” and “knowledge” attaching to “power” as, per Foucault, being equally broad. Demons are a very old kind of monster—far older than modern vampires or zombies, and still evoking that ancient tenebrous quality to them: a proximity to power merged with a foreboding but also welcoming sense of the unknown. “Dark” = “demon” as evoked by merely hearing or seeing the phrase; i.e., “a being of darkness, thus power as ‘dark’ or from/of nature as alien, vengeful,” simply as something to feel, thus imagine. Darkness is, in one sense, highly subjective—a feeling or a mood associated with demons. Per Plato, though, it operates through shadowy suggestion, having the capacity to liberate dupes or enslave them again through allegory (which is just as old as golems are).
(artist: ArturSG)
Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, “power” is often psychosexual and conveyed in terms of size or classically gendered, phallic/vaginal symbols of sex and force, like caves or swords under Cartesian reimplementation; e.g., Lion-O’s Sword of Omens from Thundercats (first image, 1985) vs Mumm-Ra’s pyramid of power (and his latter-day Egyptology’s skeleton king in two parts: Old Man Saturn and revived youthful tyrant, above) speaking to neoliberal (false) power fantasies made from dolls/pulp and playing with them. Simply put, power is something you articulate through perception, poetry and play as, often enough, “dark,” subjective, unstable, and Gothically vague. Shadows stand in, doing so as simulacra and synecdoche; they abstract to reify whatever our dialectical-material positions are, and whatever is policed by the state and which workers reclaim (usually sex and force, through nature-as-alien, left). Centuries of dogma change how the world is perceived in ways that must be subverted.
(artist: Kinky Birb)
Cartesian arguments classically divide nature into “thinking” and “extended” beings, essentially boiling down to white, entitled European men colonizing anything else per settler colonialism dressed up as “progress”; i.e., taming nature as wild, whorish, savage. For the state, there must always be an enemy expressed as “dark” in terms of a victim for cops to stomp—less a Snidely Whiplash to make Dudley Do Right appear good by virtue of the team he’s on, and more something that either can unite against. There are no moral actions, only moral teams under centrist paradigms, and the portrayal and perception of strength upholding capital, Pax Americana and the state standing against “true darkness (nature)” is the only “good team” under Capitalism: the state was made from clay as genocide during the Cartesian Revolution, the latter seeking revenge against God’s will through the former as something to possess in alien-like, demonic ways. The pastoral yields a shadow the state scapegoats and pimps mercilessly through DARVO and obscurantism: Lilith, Medusa, zombies, etc, threatening daintier forms with “corruption” (rape epidemics, sodomy and blood libel, etc; e.g., Beauty and the Beast, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Persephone and Hades, and similar stories abjecting or reverse-abjecting our mates; i.e., who we want to marry/fuck versus who we’re forced to). We can defend and protect whoever we want for different reasons.
(artist: waifumelsz)
So while “darkness” is initially a subjective inkblot that serves cosmetically for state forces and victim aesthetics alike, in reality it accounts for the holistic, cosmic, total, objective flow of power through language and nature as phenomenologically ambiguous, dualistic and historically-materially divided in two: team bourgeoisie and team proletariat, workers and nature vs the state, man vs nature (often expressed as women), black/white ethnocentrism vs settler-colonial territory ordered for conquest, ownership and rule (e.g., Tolkien’s Christianized Great Chain of Being and Divine Right[2]), and sex positivity vs sex coercion, etc.
As such, “darkness” handily accounts for the sheer poetic variety recorded, witnessed and experienced under these two constants; i.e., combining the five normal senses, but also swapping their roles to speak to new demonic ones; e.g., seeing in “darkness” but also with it, as with power in all its poetic forms (refer to our medieval poetic devices from the Poetry Module to get a better idea of what I mean: a confusion of the senses, selective absorption, magical assembly and our Song of Infinity). Demons classically mislead. Under state illusions, us-versus-them theatre yields not just cops and victims, but supercops and supervillains. Clarity comes from confusion, then, as something workers control and command to upset state logic/cultural attitudes about nature and workers at large; i.e., to use shadows, seduction and demonic instability to escape bourgeois illusions to pursue Gothic Communism and sex worker liberation through iconoclastic art, instead: our own shapes to occupy. Gothic maturity comes by using “darkness” to achieve sex-positive things, our mirror-imaged twins debating with state forgeries in and out of ourselves (myself being an identical twin, a trans woman versus my cis-het double).
(source: Lina Hoshino’s “‘Ghostly Shadows’ on Petaluma Streets,” 2022; artist: Larry Harper)
Arbitration is just that—arbitrary. “Darkness” isn’t automatically evil; it simply is what it is. For one, shadows are often conceived as “lesser” or “diminished” offshoots of someone formerly “bright”—i.e., to be a shadow of one’s former self—or a vague concentration of some kind of occupation, calamity or hard-to-define force attached to something else (a double or Venus twin). However, this doesn’t make them “less,” and often they have great mass and substance; they’re just a dark side to a person, place or event, or—like a black ghost or spirit—express a presence or entity unto itself that is dark, painful, mysterious, different, intimidating and/or left-behind, etc (a trace; e.g., the shadows of the victims of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, above).
Cartesian thought generally conceives what makes a shadow feel “alien” to begin with; i.e., as needing to be explored, destroyed, and purged, etc (re: the abjection process creating a state opposite to police, a stain generally of nature as monstrous-feminine). But it can just as easily be a pulpy expression of power in romantic language—a potential waiting to happen. To it, the shadowy butterfly Psyche, or ancient goddess of the mind, is a classical symbol of transformation through said potential since Ovid, to Shakespeare, to Keats, to Marvel’s somewhat looser adaption of the same basic idea:
Elizabeth Braddock, Betsy to her friends, grew up in the U.K. with her older brother Jamie and her twin Brian, better known as Captain Britain. Betsy worked for S.T.R.I.K.E.’s psi division after her mutant telepathy manifested, lost her eyes in the line of duty, then was kidnapped by the extra-dimensional media mogul Mojo, who gave her new cybernetic eyes but forced her to star in his wild TV shows. She joined the X-Men, swapped bodies with a ninja name Kwannon, trapped the Shadow King within her own mind, died, and was later resurrected. In fact, there’s not much Psylocke hasn’t done in her life (source: “Marvel Vs. Capcom Origins: Psylocke,” 2012).
Power as “darkness” is something to harness, channel and express for different reasons; it drinks the light trying to purify and extinguish it.
Furthermore, and from a pure applicatory standpoint during oppositional praxis, anyone can betray/stab someone in the back under the guise of luminary holiness and blind faith steered by bad, all in service to American Liberalism, white knight syndrome and capital; anyone can use the abstraction and aesthetic of demons and “darkness” to punch up. Cops and victims, pimps and whores, music and visuals—the state, under neoliberal Capitalism, creates whatever it needs in order to maintain its position; we respond in kind, existing in ways that use the same demonic language for our purposes, passing forbidden knowledge along: “We’re here and we’re queer!”
These ideas generally elide, and it’s actually quite difficult to stress just how similar state and liberatory forms of power outwardly appear. They mirror each other on the same Aegis per the abjection process going forwards or in reverse; i.e., during liminal expression, through state monopolies and trifectas; e.g., “Gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss.”
Cops, then, can look like victims (undercover), and whores can look like cops working for or against the state (re: brothel espionage—with “darkness” ontologically vague in ways the elite can use to expand the state of exception, and for us to hide and communicate inside it during the cryptonymy process). “Darkness” is dualistic, is everything at once, is both the state justifying attacks on workers/nature and the rebel defending themselves/subverting state power through devilish cryptonymy showing you things that normally vanish the closer you get; i.e, are abjected, policed or recuperated by state proponents abusing them: scorn, sedition, lust and other riled-up, simmering emotions/repressed socio-political sentiments, biases, stigmas, phobias, etc (and the linguo-material things attached to either side of them). For political purposes, the disambiguating factor is function/flow, which parses through dialectical-material scrutiny! Cops flow power up towards the elite; rebels redistribute power and knowledge downwards, each addictive, intense, ready to devour and be devoured.
(artist: Durane-S)
Flexibility/vagueness of expression and interpretation is a strength, not a weakness because it constitutes an uncanny ability to play with powerful things and use them to tease people with titillating possibility as “dark,” but also impressive. Whatever their forms, power and “darkness” remain thankfully diffuse and nebulous; i.e., linked to nature-as-monstrous-feminine per the cryptonymy and abjection processes; e.g., shadow warriors or similar beings of darkness, like pirates, barbarians, xenomorphs, Gothic castles, werewolves, and garden-variety Amazonian redheads—all giving weird nerds wet dreams (I want to fuck what I want to be): as badass, of-nature, partially inaccessible things to get close to and play with, “darkening” ourselves in ways that heal the world through subversion and camp as a kind of devious, wicked, energizing pulse to tap into.
Except, our “darkness” and demonic chaos works opposite state “darkness”; i.e., within the same devices at odds through duality. State chaos is a prison, one meant to contain and pacify workers in order to feed on them; emancipatory forms disable all of this, but still work through illusions of power meant to dominate through pain as much as erogenous pleasure. The idea is to unlock the unknown secrets of the body and mind through reunion with alienated fetishized things “of nature,” but especially sex and force injected with irony as inventive; i.e., by pulling us towards truth as, to some degree, encased in powerful, “torturous” shadows that can meet many different communication goals; e.g., Satan’s shapeshifting in Paradise Lost, but also Cú Chulainn’s demonic ríastrad as “a visual reflection of disorder” (re: Enri’s “Inside Out… and Upside Down,” 2013). This can be a threat display to ward off predators, or paradoxically to attract them during calculated risk: “Ravish me, mommy war goddess! Take me into your bush, your sylvan scene! Green light!”
Playing with Power
Darkness is vague, a found document written in Greek; demons communicate through power expressed nerdishly as pleasure and pain, sex and force (Faust was a giant nerd, as was Victor Frankenstein, and so many others pursuing forbidden things to fill in their knowledge gaps). This symposium shall address all of these linguo-materials vagaries and try to articulate the nigh-endless ways you can think about power as such, while still applying it yourselves; i.e., in more productive and less harmful ways than state monopolies do; e.g., Thundercats‘ playing with dolls and symbols of power tied to medieval, European structures of power and their dialectical-material concerns/dualities parallel to various hauntological kinship rituals, rememory and rites of passage. State force doesn’t solve anything and only leads to profit for the elite, thus rape and megadeath for us; to counteract those historical-material effects, workers must familiarize themselves with alienation and exile to poetically speak through the interlocutory (dialectic), cryptomimetic barter of demonic sex and force for workers; re: to give knowledge back to workers, transforming them into outsiders while still inside Plato’s cave and inviting them to do the same with others—through shadows.
We’ll get to that. As demons embody the at-times pulverized exchange of forbidden, thus policed transformative knowledge as a creative act, I’d further like to consider the vague, thus inherently broad umbrella category “darkness” and demonic poetics. We shall do so through an extended exhibit/apologia—one loosely containing various ideas to keep in mind; i.e., insofar as this creative process is a) normally monopolized to serve state forces, and b) reclaimed in the same exploitative boundaries by us to achieve liberation, developing Gothic Communism through ludo-Gothic BDSM: to play with demons, thus hug the alien as a shadowy figure/lie telling truth in virtually endless forms: “Life’s fantasy—to be locked away and still to think you’re free!” (Black Sabbath’s “Die Young,” 1980):
(exhibit 43e2a: Model and artist: Mugiwara Art and Persephone van der Waard. My drawing of Mugi as a dark visitor trapped between their devastated homeworld and ours; i.e., built on the fatal, Orientalist nostalgia of the 1980s Egyptian counterfeit: the return of the demon, demanding submission of the [canonically white] slave, the white Indian: “Frozen eyes stare deep in your eyes as you die!” From Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” [1818] to Slayer’s “Seasons in the Abyss” [1990], you’ll have seen and heard such abjection everywhere, and multiple times in this book, already [re: Castlevania‘s Countess, Jojo‘s Pillar Men, Samus Aran and Skeletor, etc]. Here, it serves a vital theatrical role: “antiquity” in decay delivering calculated risk with a Numinous, beyond-the-realms-of-death traveling flavor we can reclaim from the elite; i.e., as neurodivergent personas challenging their bad demon BDSM—reversing abjection! To that, Mugi and I are both neurodivergent, but Mugi is also plural [and unless stated up front is seamless within a system]. Younger plurals tend to be more open about their condition as a matter of Gothic poetics.
For example, my older friend Mavis likes to be underestimated, operating more like a chameleon, a ninja. They are plural like Mugi is and can agree and disagree with me seamlessly within a position of survival. Once taught, they can’t turn it off, and like all demons, they are made by capital exerting its will upon them. Similar to the nightmare scenario of the skeleton lord coming home to roost, plurality is often a consequence of trauma; i.e., demons are made, but as the entire following module will expose, they and their “darkness visible” can be used for different aims, to represent different things; e.g., plural people, queer persons, and/or Communists to varying degrees: medical conditions, social practices, class attitudes, often as things to summon and offer as paradoxes of forbidden knowledge and unequal power exchange. We become false and true at the same time, our way of seeing the world permanently altered: the inferno inverts, as does our sight—revealing that which is hidden by darkness with darkness.
Except the state doesn’t need to be the only ones making demons and using them to advertise, “other cultures are savage, not us!”; workers can place “rape” in quotes using the same faux-Egyptian counterfeit, albeit for sex-positive reasons that don’t unironically seek revenge against nature-as-alien, profiting as the state does on such inherited anxieties [re: “white people disease”]: a funeral procession making the planet dead as an Orientalist metaphor for fascism and moral panic, a cradle of conquerors and the devastation “they” routinely offer [a pro-state DARVO/obscurantist argument].
[artist: Zdzisław Beksiński]
Gothic Communism camps what is easily canonical, in this respect. The eclipse, here, equals the rising of the black, “ancient,” faraway castle in either case; i.e., as a projection of all the usual bourgeois abuses onto fear-and-dogma playgrounds: the liminal hauntology of war [a flying castle, Walpole’s Capitalocene] on the rise. Canon-wise, it merely becomes a middle-class opportunity to cash in on abjection, as so many did during the 1980s; i.e., move money through nature while dressing everything neoliberally up as “alien, past” [the Stargate Egyptology trick: ancient aliens tied to Biblical reinventions, specifically Exodus] and speaking to that Cartesian division through metal, cartoons, comics, videogames and so on—to sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll as essentially dark demonic pulp, thus where power truly lies. For canon, the black pyramid is simply the West diminished, apologizing for “Ra” [and the sun-like Imperium] as merely decayed, unstable like a volcano during the dialectic of the alien and needing a Walpolean facelift. It’s abject pacification, mid-consumerism—the worship of power-in-decay displaced to an other time, a liminal space, a Gothic-castle Sodom and Gomorrah to play with all manner of demons inside a castled morphology: floodgates to Hell, promising oblivion once thrown wide!
[source]
When I was living this lie, fear was my game
People would worship and fall
Drop to their knees
So bring me the blood and red wine
For the one to succeed me
For he is a man and a god
And he will die too
[…] Now I am cold but a ghost lives in my veins
Silent the terror that reigned
Marbled in stone
A shell of a man God preserved
For a thousand ages
But open the gates of my hell
I’ll strike from the grave
Tell me why I had to be a Powerslave
I don’t wanna die, I’m a god
Why can’t I live on?
When the Life Giver dies
All around is laid waste
And in my last hour
I’m a slave to the Power of Death [source: Genius].
To this, one of the monopolies I articulate is morphological expression; re: Hell and darkness. This power is neoliberal Capitalism in decay as something to camp; i.e., to monologue as Langella does, the sassy lich becoming a god waxing poetic about the power of “death,” for a fleeting moment: “I feel the power of the cosmos; the universe flows through me! […] The universe’s power! Pure, unstoppable power! And I am that force! I am that power! Kneel before your master!”; re: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds!” He’s a filthy whore, deluding himself as much as being a Darth Vader pimp from Space Egypt.
Such delusion mainly the point, the performative megalomaniacal idea is to own the stage as whore-like; i.e., during a given, profoundly intense and campy instance of the grim harvest/Grim Reaper as exotic, magical, straight-up stylish and cool. We faggish whores do it to draw attention to state predation and puff ourselves up, as proletarian counterterrorist guerrillas historically do; by comparison, the state monopolizes the night’s black boner/sodomy champion/gay butt wizard [the ass is dark and full of terrors] or resident catgirl[3] Medusa death god, summoning and raping them unironically through police violence before banishing them again—rinse and repeat. As always, liberation and exploitation share the same stage/shadow zone’s power-and-death, sex-and-force aesthetics.
In the classic neoliberal refrain, Capitalist Realism strengthens by virtue of a presence of corruption and decay darkening the city scape as coming—per the “black Egyptian” classic displacement—out of the imaginary past to threaten the present world with a ghost of the counterfeit: the pimp-like Great Destroyer traveling from older decayed empires into the Imperial Core as weakened and using garden variety obfuscation and DARVO; i.e., deflecting criticism and projecting state violence onto the same-old victims. Through English operas, rock ‘n roll and Gothic, then, power and darkness express less in funeral poems and more in funerary incantations—Christianized per the Resurrection as abject, Gothic in the NWOBHM style [re: as Iron Maiden did, above, with death anxiety and inheritance fears; e.g., “Hallowed Be Thy Name,” 1982].
To this, a Nazi-Communist skeleton king or Medusa [a dark Cleopatra, “O rare Egyptian!”] conveniently shows up, displacing current systemic harm back onto the same imperiled world; i.e., the Imperial Boomerang and military urbanism returning per a fatal homecoming [as the Gothic generally does]. In response, a white knight is canonically summoned to whitewash the Imperial Core through a false promise of restoration; i.e., one that conveniently banishes the angry foreigner/Wandering Jew [and his global conspiracy/cabal—the titular “Masters of the Universe”] whence they came [from the glossary]:
The Ghost of the Counterfeit
Coined by Jerrold Hogle, this abject reality or hidden barbarity is a hauntological process of abjection that, according to David Punter in The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (1980), “displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell” (source). I would add that it is a privileged, liminal position that endears a sheltered consumer to the barbaric past as reinvented as consumable.
In other words, it’s the usual scapegoater summoning the Radcliffean castle during the liminal hauntology of war to enact Red Scare, except we can reclaim such devices to forge our own destinies with the self-same demonic language of the imaginary past. The state doesn’t monopolize that shit, and Langella’s performance [and Silvestri’s sweeping score] become things to camp the ghost of “Caesar” and Marx with in equal measure: “A battle fought in the stars…now comes to Earth.”
[artist: Drew Struzan]
For the state, it’s Star Wars‘ billionaire Marxism, but Gothic like Alien was while cycling profit through an endless series of centrist, neoliberal wars, battles, heroes and villains: an Americanized temple of “ancient” war traveling to and fro along with its conspicuously swole deities/avatars thereof [carried into shooter-style videogames, especially Doom‘s unironically hypermasculine Doomguy as a profoundly stupid and violent himbo protagonist]. It’s gibberish, made-up demonic hieroglyphic nonsense settled through force; i.e, disrespectful towards the actual past as something to learn from in imaginary forms, administering dogmatically through faux “archaeology” and sold over and over to maintain Capitalist Realism: by glorifying police violence as “timeless,” eternal, pimping nature as dark and dead graveyard whore.
Canon-wise, it’s an old war-film tactic, and one that translates to pretty much anything violent; e.g., gangster films and Westerns like Heat’s [1995] infamous bank robbery scene and the ending shoot-out to The Wild Bunch [1969]: cops and robbers, but also dragon slayers; i.e., one-man armies whose hauntological worship under capital ignores the regular victims of those exchanges—nature and workers, obscured by evil necromancers. We can camp all of this, but remain entirely beholden to the same astral poetics. Simply put, knowledge is power but limited in ways that Gothic poetics supplement. Like printing money as much as comic books, the state wants to monopolize violence, terror and hellish bodily expression using their us-versus-them arrangement of demons; i.e., a canonical flow of power and knowledge to serve the state by pacifying workers with moral panics and their demonic codes under heteronormative, settler-colonial rule: more targets of state violence, established by playing with demonic stand-ins. All occupy the same shadow zone and use the same dark forces to say this or that.
Canon-wise, banishing a demon back to Hell is functionally no different than slaying a dragon, punching a Jewish-coded wizard, or shooting a zombie, insofar as the endless bullets, beams, missiles, muscles, blades and bombs [re: “stab, shoot, punch”] all equal profit in the eyes of capitalists selling police violence; i.e., by having soldiers, mercenaries and cops [usually himbos and token herbos] use them on the requisite victims, the latter dressed up as monsters: to be destroyed by other monsters during canonically escapist “empowerment” fantasies.
Videogames—being the classic neoliberal refrain—become monomythic war simulators built atop older media forms already designed from an early age to condition people into cops [of media, childhoods]: us-versus-them against nature-as-monstrous-feminine [whore-like] married to anti-Semitic, Orientalist and otherwise xenophobic stories framing nature as abject, as “ancient,” dark, and unruly! Antagonize nature, then tokenize it and put it to work in ways that cloud its vision and judgement; e.g., Amazons like Ellen Ripley and Samus Aran, Hippolyta pimping Medusa. Betrayal is betrayal and cops are cops according to how they attack and drain nature-as-alien: summoned by state necromancers to induce a police, us-versus-them function. Canonically speaking, monsters are made to uphold and disseminate this device; i.e., to learn its ins and outs by playing with it through state-sanctioned toys [classically made from wood, clay and metal, soil and shadows, etc—with L.A. Beast even attempting to make a sword out of Casein plastic: spoiled milk[4]]. Canon makes worlds it populates with Pax-Americana cops and victims, the state Aegis asking workers, “Would you kindly break that sweet puppy’s neck?” while making it look large and frightening. Nature is a whore; rape it [often with whores policing whores, left].
[artist: Xavier Garcia]
While a proletarian Aegis [often, a booty humanizing the whore] can dualistically and dialectically-materially reverse all of this—i.e., in order to make workers reflect on dark unpleasant realities as they evolve—in the eyes of the state, each is already dead and blind; re [from Marx]: dead labor sucks on living labor to enrich the state with cheaply stolen life, itself further rendered [vis-à-vis my arguments] into addictive junk food marshalling the entire process not once, but on loop, mid-Amazonomachia. In turn, the state cannibalizes its “muscle” [cops] per the euthanasia effect [re: tokens first, then black knights/crooked male cops]: “Bitches be crazy!” They must eventually be married off, generally as burly whores stuffed into bridal gowns [or chainmail bikinis enslaving them to the recruitment process, below]: war is eternal, its pimping forever collared during boom or bust [which again, we can camp, but always inside the same poetic spaces and on their dark angry surfaces; “enjoy but do not endorse,” as Sarkeesian sagely puts it].
[artist: Reiq]
Until retirement, cops are bully vampires that enjoy an army of demonic victims, the latter waiting politely to be destroyed by said enforcers in doubled states of purgatorial exception; i.e., fetishizing the alien to disguise how banal and unsexy the state and economics are [e.g., Red Sonya is basically a sexy alien queen/demon warrior dangled in front of nerdy boys, done canonically to pacify them with “Red Scare,” left]. Playing with smaller toys during a Sale of Indulgence as war-like, such canonical war games acclimate children [starting with white cis-het men] to the complicit cryptonymy of darkness-as-genocide; i.e., standard-to-marginalized traitors playing war for the state; e.g., women playing token subjugate Amazons [re: the monstrous-feminine] like Ripley or Samus, Cheetara or Red Sonya, and status-quo knights like Doomguy or Conan, He-Man or Lion-O, Rambo, etc, doing much the same with men. Power is comparable to itself as something to enforce through shadowy likeness.
For the elite, the goal is simple: “Make monster hero predators and monster victim prey[5] and comfort middle-class children, from standard to token as needed; threaten them with pulpy harm, then furnish them with clay-like surrogate parents, avatars and war-bride wheyfus for them to grow into: demonic sex and power fantasies, thus rewards.” Triangulating against state victims by playing victims themselves, cops manifest as supermen/superwomen impossibly threatened by darkness visible [re: “the enemy is both weak and strong”] and motivated by damsels-in-distress [the usual TERF gimmick] tokenizing feminism-in-decay [and other rotting recuperations that eventually rescind state concessions] set within a Gothic liminal space; i.e., the Man Box—one that isolates the hero monomythically inside Hell as a place to endlessly slay between childhood and adulthood, imagination and real life: a cop to call or a vigilante to triangulate against the unruly mob not just as undead, but demonic! Weird canonical nerds don’t just see red, but all the colors of “the Covenant of the Rainbow”:
And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you will fall on every living creature on the earth, every bird of the air, every creature that crawls on the ground, and all the fish of the sea. They are delivered into your hand. Everything that lives and moves will be food for you; just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you all things [source: Genesis 9].
Through not classically what “Rainbow Capitalism” refers to, the regressive likeness is tempting enough. Called to heel, corporations abuse a Protestant ethic after God’s death [re: Nietzsche] to have state boys and girls rape nature for them in the usual hauntological Crusades: the “apolitical” stance of seeing planet Earth as a game to act power out in ways that historically oscillate/transfer onstage and off. Oddly colorful and toy-like, said paradoxical vision reflects in the hero’s, theirs literally making for a heads-up display[6] [above] but also curiously set to equally hauntological music stolen from a rebellious past.
Visuals and audio, everything becomes like fruity slop—an infernal breakfast cereal stuffed with sugar, bad ideas and even worse intent; i.e., communicating the same fatal nostalgia to gamer culture while trapped inside the Man Box, coded to defend the state by devoting themselves to colonizing said fantasies [any and all of them, across all media forms]. For videogames, this generally locks inside half-real kill rooms mirroring real life in ways the state wants; re: Gothic liminal spaces whose heroically police-violent movement and action inside is written in spilled demon blood—everything set conspicuously to rock ‘n roll and similar “rebellious” music, its plastic reality’s fatal nostalgia turned into controlled opposition: holocaust by sprite and MIDI-tune versions of older devil’s music bled of its wicked irony/potential [from opera, rock, rockabilly [fast cars, faster women], metal, punk, swing and rap, etc]!
Hardly a trade secret, capital needs such things to function according to the profit motive guiding such poetics. As I write in Volume Zero
Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth [or an Earth- like double]—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards “playing war” in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force [source].
I then go on to expand in Volume One
The grander counterterrorist moral isn’t simply that traumatic penetration is psychosexual violence, which fetishes corporally represent; it’s that such devices can be reclaimed through iconoclastic praxis during liminal expression, wherein one chooses to fetishize oneself in controlled, informed psychosexual terms. Despite the ambivalent, conflicted nature of Gothic language, the awesome power to set ourselves free lives within us and our bodies as transcendent gateways to better worlds of infinite possibility framed as “impossible” by Capitalist Realism. Except, Hell—if it is to be a home for all of nature criminalized by Cartesian thought—must be a place on Earth. We must become of two worlds, then, “half-bred” to wreak havoc and sow discord towards a better kind of place than Cartesian order does when enforced by moderate cunning and reactionary brutes’ usual dogma. Their knife dicks rape and kill; ours “rape” and “kill” to drain our would-be-murders’ potency when aiming their weapons against us. They freeze under our power insofar as we humanize ourselves in their eyes and expose them as the brutalizers.
To this, Gothic-Communist instruction occurs through praxial synthesis telling a different story than canon does, the latter’s norms preying on nature and bodies tied to nature as something to harvest (“fat” being the classic state of something “ready-for-harvest”). By humanizing the harvest, the butt needn’t be a symbol of chattel, nor its owner’s smiling face a forced Doki-Doki-Literature-Club-style mask. The smile of the soon-to-be-fucked can be genuine; when the owner raises their butt, they can illustrate mutual consent, indicating how they actively want it from being hard-up: begging for some dick a particular way from a particular type of person while reclaiming the activity with their body and all too happy to do so—i.e., “We are not animals, nor are we guilty or afraid. Now gimme.” It becomes vitalistic in a vampiric way that celebrates the transmission of essence and vitality through all the usual vectors, minus the stigmas; i.e., a revival of older pre-Cartesian ways for seeing the world, updated for the kinds of dialogs-under-capital that have carefully evolved to bring these monsters (and their complicated humanity under state oppression) out into the open: a vampire standing in daylight, making them sparkle.
Trauma is always adjacent to sexuality and performance, but needn’t determine the outcome. Insofar as harm can be reduced to calculated risk in forms of iconoclastic playfulness, the imaginary past remains plastic, thus can be recoded by empowering monstrous aesthetics with a critical-instructional edge, but also jouissance; e.g., the vampire as a play on rape theatre, traumatic penetration (stakes and fangs) and vitalistic power exchange through medieval language as reclaimed by ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., from Cartesian thought’s bad instruction under capital: a harvesting of sanguine that enriches both parties through informed consent that profanes the church and returns to nature [source].
which I now tie to demons, here; i.e., this transfer doesn’t have to be seen exclusively as vampiric through a taking of essence, but instead a giving of forbidden knowledge as demons do on their surfaces and inside their thresholds. Such fatal portraits yield a flexible monomorphic poetic lens, one to think of monstrous things in demonic terms as much as vampiric ones: the foreclosure of dreams, but also the brokering of new ones [false or not].
Capital bullies and rapes nature as monstrous-feminine, except the monstrous-feminine is holistic, employing a variety of modules all at once; e.g., Lady Dimitrescu from Resident Evil: Village [below, 2021] being a vampire on her face, but also a giant, shapeshifting demon: the Medusa as a golem-gargoyle Galatea. While she turns to stone when she dies, she’s already statuesque and colossal. And while she has an outwardly humanoid form, she’s also no maiden. Furious or calm, she’s always a whore, and yields strict-flavored energies in a Gothically “phallic” type: a foxy gangster moll with no immediate boss running her side of things—Bonnie without Clyde, the Archaic Mother with a curiously recent, noir-flavored timestamp!
[artist: Felicia Vox]
“Power corrupts” is generally referring to state power. Yes, Medusa’s Aegis can poetically amount to state abuse weaponizing the “strong” against the meek to inherit the Earth for the elite; but it can also be those whores “of nature” taking the planet back—by subverting the dialectic of the alien, making darkness something to get close to and become “dark” in turn! During such reversals, the whore becomes a demonic muse that corrupts canonical data and transmits subversive, concentric replicas inside the Trojan Horse’s formidable “wagon”; i.e., as doubled, bouncing back onto the glass of the screen—not war for the state, but workers raising class, culture and race war through Neo-Gothic, cryptomimetic means: “Medusa lives; now fight back!” Her harvest humanized, Medusa’s letting it all hang out! Merely doing so challenges state monopolies on their face; i.e., states are pimps that rely on whores being policed/punched down against and brutalized into order to exist as states do. Silence is genocide, but genocide is never fully silent. Frontier romances always come home.
[artist: Sinead]
In response, iconoclasts can loudly revisit and reshape the state’s harmful ideas of “past” in Gothic; i.e., through “tone poem” art as highly personal-yet-cathartic—not just the shape, but the perception of shapes that don’t always change that much in appearance; e.g., a drawing I did of Lady Dimitrescu, originally made by me when I was with Jadis, only to have me return to it three years later for this exhibit. My new version, below, and the original share a love for big strong women, and infuse into their surfaces a strict dominatrix/whorish character for the audience to enjoy and shudder at. Even so, the new picture also seeks, despite those likenesses, to make the alien past friendlier to workers; i.e., per an oppressed pedagogy’s Wisdom of the Ancients recultivating the bourgeois Superstructure: as conceptualized since I wrote my PhD and three other books [up to this point].
The two drawings are quite similar in their design and message, then; I’m just continuing to synthesize them more and more to my liking after surviving Jadis—e.g., akin to Georgia O’Keefe painting flowers after leaving Alfred Stieglitz, but in my case, occurring through active daily habits I’ve kept up after leaving someone who was openly a TERF and a SWERF [thus highly abusive towards me as a trans-woman artist and sex worker]!
[artist: Persephone van der Waard]
Sex and force, pleasure and pain; BDSM, fetishes and cliché rape, death and general power fantasies—all work well enough with demons as undead, in this respect: out of joint, doing their own thang to not just to shapeshift, but turn into objects d’art coded with power. They amount to sex and force expressed as verboten “darkness” but, like the Tree of Knowledge, just hang there begging to be plucked and bitten into. It’s a vanity—a diaphanous robe hanging open and showing the viewer the whore’s goods beckoning into sites of power to play with forbidden knowledge! Per the cryptonymy process, things can be framed to show and hide what you want shown or hidden, but power is always there, always restless and unstable per the vanishing point: “Watch and learn!” but also “Indulge, you sick fucks!” Weird attracts weird, in this respect; trauma attracts trauma, X marking the spot, playing with superhuman symbols of power that range from kayfabe[7] to kawaii: crimefighters and archvillains moonlighting as genuine rebels in our capable hands, a secret identity/alter ago with a secret identity/alter ego! Doubles can double [and double and double…] and whores are an aesthetic and political stance with various sides to them!
[artist: Beefy Kunoichi]
Gothic Communism plays with these accordingly in order to threaten capital and tease development in ways that reward us; i.e., with actual empowerment [socio-material change] while giving the lesson away as forbidden cargo disguised as dumb entertainment/traditional ideas of strength, beauty and vice/virtue: stories classically made during genocide as a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. We take that idea and use it to lead to bitter pills we supplement with our own “sugar” to spice things up! That’s generally how allegory works, and our doing so is yet another black eye we, together as one, align to give state poetics!
“The villagers feared the plague and ran away. All it took was one dead horse to scare them.” Fascism is like a tinderbox. Whores, then, are a crime of reputation that only can redeem itself by doing, as the state defines it, more crimes. When the state sees you as alien, that’s precisely what existence is, but in doing so becomes stronger than the foundations of the Earth, as terrible as the dawn, as deep and unknowable as the depths of the sea. Like the moon, Medusa becomes something to invoke and consequently summon as an appeal; i.e., to the humanity of those demonized. Seen as forces of nature pushing against the Capitalocene, they strive to safeguard nature before state shift becomes permanent. So much damage has already been done, much of it irreversible. But as the saying goes, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings, and she’s just warming up [so to speak].
Life is an experiment, as is rebellion through Gothic art. My experiment with Dimitrescu is just one of many. So many artists play around in much the same sphere of Gothic poetics. The power of revolutionary cryptonymy is something formidable to robe and disrobe as needed; i.e., mixing and matching all manner of powerful and transformative devices, from bodies to swords to castles, to sword-like and castled bodies, etc, as political but appearing as things commonly disputed as “apolitical”; e.g., wish fulfillment and power fantasies told in common language: worker bodies manifesting a desire to never be hurt again but remain desirable—to be stacked in ways that make up for the odds being stacked against them. We are the night, and it can never fully be purged. “What is light without darkness?” The state cannot exist without us to police, but we very much can exist without the state! We want equal rights, not pimps, so tip your sex workers and refuse to ratify genocide in all its forms!
[artist: Vasilia]
Again, that’s where we come in. Whores are both treated as homewreckers and instructors of forbidden knowledge that turn the nuclear model upside-down; e.g., polyamory vs amatonormativity. In turn, people learn through Gothic sex as sexual, but also as asexual insofar as its BDSM can yield artistic and political commentaries about different social-sexual issues and struggles. As sex symbols of demonic beauty and strength, whores remain powerful while disrobed, reversing abjection as such by refusing to cheerlead profit as a genocidal, heteronormative, settler-colonial affair. Instead, we cheer for our right to fuck/get railed by whomever and own our bodies and their labor value expressed in monstrous, GNC language!
With a body like Eva’s [above] from the same videogame franchise, Lady Dimitrescu cooks with gas, popping cherries. Beyond her and her children, nature is simply “Medusa.” Anyone the state could police and pimp, then, Medusa will double to challenge them through a polyamorous, unruly proletariat’s doubles of state counterfeits. She’s truly seen and done it all, having survived worse: the state often beating and raping workers to submission, but not what they represent in duality! Medusa’s body is sex, and sex is a demonic weapon for which no monopoly is possible! There is only argument for or against the state, generally through theatrical combat where the state tries to portray itself as the underdog and its victims’ the “real” abusers; in turn, truth becomes a matter of position concerning which aspect of theatre you want to support—the Gothic concerned largely with paradox about multiple things being true at once. Such is dialectical-materialism, a series of paradoxes through monsters in duality! Heroes are about overcoming adversity. Unlike the state’s, ours is actually genuine, but theirs is likewise an impossible task. Demons don’t die.
[artist: Vasilia]
So play with “Medusa” from any angle, size, shape, sex or gender your rebellious hearts desire; observe what collocates, then insinuate [with sinew] as your “clay” to work with, making gender trouble for fun. Make demons not to pleasure Pygmalion, but liberate Galatea so she might stomp on the Patriarchy’s balls! “Chonk, stronk, and ready to bonk!” as Jadis would say! BALLS DESTROYED [or sliced with a sickle cropped out of the image, above; re: Barbara Creed, the Medusa, and castration fears from the Archaic Mother and her phallic spawn].
Keeping with darkness visible and paradox, then—and darkly mirroring older morality plays from centuries previous [mainly concerned with warring emotions and desire surrounding sex and force]—virtue and vice become things to demonically double, reify and dualistically play with medieval gags as demons do. Except Gothic Communism abjures the state’s policing character in exchange for actual rebellion; i.e., flashing with power during revolutionary cryptonymy in pursuit of a sex-positive, post-scarcity world! The whore, like Pandora, cannot be put back into her box; her “box” is out there, a mighty-mighty fortress speaking cryptomimetically out against pimps while demanding equal pay and other basic human rights! All such play goes where power is to investigate it, we underdogs existing in the same imperiled sphere as our enemies, camping their canonical, completely unethical [and unfair] refrains!
All this being said, power is often not just visual, but audio-visual; i.e., a peep show generally comes with music of some kind or another! So keeping all that bread-and-circus music and violence we’ve already mentioned in mind, and the vampire-demon exhibit above, canon’s inclusive pandemonium has a commercialized, pandering feel to it; i.e., using older examples of demons sold to men [or those acting like men] who never grow up, but LARP to “defend the realm” from evil: projected onto whatever state enemies they demonize, then conceal/dogwhistle with the usual suspects by proxy. The whore is something to attack in-game and out [which we camp in an equally half-real sense].
Yet, while sight has an aural, heard component to accent its visuals, this can decay and age just as fast when abused by profit. For example, as I write in, “Spectating FPS Speedruns: Potential Pitfalls Exemplified by Doom Eternal” [2021]:
Classic Doom is a curious mix, and takes its visual cues from actual gargoyles, toy guns, and clay demons; its music is MIDI metal, but also post-punk, ’70s prog and ’90s grunge. Doom 3 features elegant, nefarious concept art and dark, industrial levels, but minimal music (the opening track is pretty great, but rips off Tool’s “Lateralus“; it also features Chris Vrenna, a former NIN drummer). Doom 2016 had a giant corporation being re-colonialized by the demonic oppressed, underpinned by some desaturated visuals (inspired by late dystopian surrealist Zdzisław Beksiński) and excellent level music (re: “Rip and Tear,” “BFG Division”). This music was composed by Nu-Industrial auteur Mick Gordon.
As observed in my original review, Doom Eternal‘s music isn’t bad. Parts of it come alive, though especially when making obscure nods to older games (Diablo) and movies (Predator). Nonetheless, it’s fairly journeyman and rote; or, as [one of my exes] once said, Doom Eternal‘s OST feels like “industrial lite”—music written for people who have never listened to industrial before. For my partner, the music builds, but never climaxes. It hints at NIN, Rabbit Junk or Front Line Assembly but doesn’t go anywhere with it. You’d be better off listening to those bands instead (see, also: Reznor’s soundtrack for The Vietnam War).
For me, Doom Eternal’s checkered music production history leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Originally the story (from id Software Studio Director Marty Stratton) involved an open letter on Reddit in 2020, detailing how Mick’s unprofessional music for the second game was delivered late, forcing Chad Mossholder, id’s lead audio engineer, to have to piece everything together himself; later, Chad and id really got a lot of hate from fans, and Mick seemingly stayed quiet about it. Except after two years, Mick came forward with a ton of receipts, saying
Marty lied about the circumstances surrounding the DOOM Eternal Soundtrack and used disinformation and innuendo to blame me entirely for its failure. Afterwards, he offered me a six-figure settlement to never speak about it. As far as I’m concerned, the truth is more important (source).
As Greg Kennelty writes in “Mick Gordon Publishes Massive Statement over Allegations Surrounding Doom Eternal Soundtrack” (2022):
All told, Gordon‘s post runs about an hour in length and is long enough to warrant a table of contents. In the Summary of Facts section, Gordon alleges the following against Stratton [emphasis, theirs]:
-
-
- He was not paid for over half of the DOOM Eternal soundtrack
- He received a contract for the soundtrack 48 hours prior to the release of the game, and was not told the entire truth about the scope of his work
- He was cut out of the process at the end of the soundtrack
- Stratton never reached out to him about the controversy, and instead published the open letter
- He received torrents of abuse and harassment from fans afterward
- His reputation has been damaged because of this situation
Read the full letter here.
I don’t care if the guy is an artist that “everybody” loves; compared to famous FPS OSTs from artists like Bobby Prince, Trent Reznor or Sonic Mayhem—hell, even Mick himself—the OST for Doom Eternal just isn’t that great. It doesn’t break any new ground, and it feels like a double CD release that could’ve been trimmed down to just the “combat” tracks. You know, the ones with an actual pulse [source].
Furthermore, old monsters can start to feel adrift as time goes on, like soldiers without countries or wars to fight. Sometimes there’s a punk element, as Richard Ray remarks in “Doom, Coronavirus, the Mancubus and Me” [2020]:
id Software’s Doom was made by a band of dropouts and misfits led by gaming pioneers John Romero and John Carmack. It is widely considered the grandfather of the First Person Shooter genre. It’s also been aptly described as gaming’s “punk moment.” It was loud, fast, violent and didn’t give a shit about your feelings. It glorified the sound effect of pumping a shotgun and blasting away at fire-spewing Imps, vile Cacodemons, unholy Hell Knights and zombified employees of the Union Aerospace Corporation [source].
Except, of course, this gamer-style history of “rebellion”—from Tolkien to Cameron to Romero and Carmack, to speedrunners and content creators at large as weird canonical nerds [seriously, just look at these two dweebs, left]—is all at once incredibly dumb, self-serving and largely false, from a revolutionary standpoint; i.e., aimed squarely at gamer culture performing strength: as something largely white, cis-het and male[8]. Made to “rebel” against a cartoon idea of evil corporations, they do so by soldiering against “evil,” occupying positions of settler-colonial violence to administer as cops do. “Demon,” then, is really canonical code for all the usual things white boys [and token recruits] shoot in the name of state/corporate preservation as beaten into them; i.e., to achieve, for all intents and purposes, an unironic, middle-class clubbism/gang-style revenge of the/for the nerds; re [from Volume Two, part one]:
In turn, the American middle class (so called “gamer culture”) would gatekeep and safeguard the elite through videogames being an acclimating device to neo-feudal territories to defend in reality (outside of the game world[s] themselves) as capital starts to decay like usual [source: “Modularity and Class”].
Back then, white boys “rebelled” as a matter of having the means to do so on ’90s computers [and other home entertainment systems] evolving into a business they got a jumpstart on for themselves as extensions of capital; i.e., what they created, as such. Their creations—our aforementioned heroes, if they were punk in a proletarian sense—quickly became witch hunters once recuperated amid fairly stupid debates had between fighting gangs circle-jerking it[9]; they invent enemies to feel useful while seeking payment as capital decays like always. It’s vital, then, to court such persons through counterterrorist demonic expression, using ludo-Gothic BDSM to offer them a better path than the state does [refer to Volume One for some good examples of this; i.e., the subchapter “An Uphill Battle, part one: ‘Predators and Prey,’ or Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy and the State’s Medieval Monopolies on Violence and Terror”].)
Limiting Our Focus
Despite barely scratching the surface, the above exhibit should hopefully demonstrate the virtually endless ways to manifest and play with power by proxy and in proximity to; i.e., letting darkness inside (or out) versus staving it off through a self-imposed vigilance (thus ignorance of its utility in worker hands). Likewise, neither are poetics, imagination, and creativity divorced from history and politics as a living document; instead, they compose, define and inherit them, hence dictate whatever direction that power flows, or the dark forms it can take through weird nerd culture, en route! Marx argued that history repeats in tragedy and then farce; from ghosts to demons, we faggy whores camp it all, including him!
Arguments are fights, then, for which demonic stand-ins are well-suited. Hell is their home—something to not only show off for those foreign to it, but stare back at them with. This isn’t to so much defeat those being stared at, but demolish their abusive positions towards nature; i.e., as much for the demons to ingratiate themselves through the giving of—you guessed it—knowledge that is fatal to an older perspective that withers in the presence of new forms. On the Aegis, new demons are raised, the exchange helping workers by reversing the flow of power so that state harm against them is lessened and eventually under perfect circumstances, impossible. Nature-as-demonic is effectively a revolutionary’s food for thought—something to love, respect and identify with, post-apocalypse: to camp not holocaust, but our survival of genocide in ways that don’t tokenize into gentrified/decayed spoofs, long after an epicenter of genocide has become a thing of the past (e.g., Afrocentrism unto Afronormativity, post-diaspora).
(artist: Gammel Gaedda)
Keeping both points in mind, we’ll want to introduce some limits to our focus; i.e., when playing with power as demonic argument.
First, classification. As already stated, egregores take two basic, modular forms: undead and demonic (with animal qualities to each, often overlapping in chimeric fashion; e.g., the xenomorph). Both are figuratively manmade in the poetic sense, and undead can act demonic or vice versa; i.e., a demon can feed and embody trauma and the undead can give forbidden knowledge and transform. It’s just not either’s poetic emphasis, historically. While zombie, vampiric or ghostly undeath are qualities that can be supplied to nature, the morphological breadth and liberty of demons invoke elements of actual construction that make them incredibly broad, taxon-wise: literally manmade, summoned/supernatural, and/or linked to nature, the instances of each we shall explore in order—both during the “Forbidden Sight” chapter and in the “Call of the Wild” chapter after it.
Second, morphology. Demons are literally fetishes; i.e., objects (often kinky ones) of fabricated power and darkness, thus status and socio-psychosexual knowledge. As such, the infinite poetic variety and limitless creative potential of demons and nature requires me to adopt a more survey-style approach for the entire module (future editions can always include more close-reads).
In both cases, I’m adopting such pedagogic limitations to be more playful, thus keep true to demons’ shifting physiology and complicated psychosexual torture games; i.e., as poetic license and lens putting “rape” in quotes per neo-medieval expression. So expect a bit of eclectic messiness and campy oscillation to the rest of the symposium and the module at large: something to slurp/chow down on! “Eat me alive, you animal! Oh, no! I’m being ‘devoured’! Heaven help me/the devil take me!”
(artist: Gammel Gaedda)
Demons or not, all monsters provide preferential code talking about sex and force as policed subjects; i.e., haunted by abuse concerning these topics for which assorted euphemisms give way to genuine pleasure: a cryptonymic exhibit of at least one, but often two (or more) people playing and having harmless fun behind calculated-risk suggestions of “harm.” Harm haunts “harm.” That’s what the reclamation of monstrous poetics through ludo-Gothic BDSM is all about! Psychosexual catharsis thriving despite state abuse, Hell spills over and cannot be policed!
The rest of the symposium shall remain fairly conversational and holistic. We’ll proceed as follows—first, to summarize demonic expression through a demon thesis, then examine various food for thought about demons and the complicated darkness they represent (each emboldened to signpost them as we go): demonic cosmetics; the paradox of power and its performance, play and exchange; how demons lie as a means of instruction that commonly expresses through genderqueer existence, pleasure-and-pain BDSM rituals, and hurt-not-harm roleplay scenes/unequal power scenarios; intersectional solidarity, our strange appetites/modular thesis, dark desires/courtly love, demon lovers and the anisotropic/pact-like nature of demons.
Expanding Our Demon Thesis
To summarize demonic expression, demons transform and exchange/give unequal, forbidden things (re: power, darkness and knowledge) back and forth; e.g., unequal power as forbidden knowledge (not ordinary knowledge, then, but dark knowledge that supplies the power to change things in radical new directions). . This only sets the stage; i.e., for our aforementioned infinite variety that occurs in terms of what these things actually are in practice. Demons don’t take like the undead do when the undead feed, but rather give forbidden knowledge back as lessons to embody and witness that—once received—turns the recipient into a demon, which can happen over and over again! “She turned me into a newt” can be followed by any other shape/power configuration the demon desires, often from underground (re: golems, clay and animation; e.g., Steve Universe[10] making its golems not just from clay but gemstones mined from the Earth and uniforms made topside). Hell is a place of forbidden knowledge about the underworld, populated by all manner of demons who—knowing things—can magically transform because of said knowledge above ground. The more they know, the more they might transform into this or that—are beings of voluntary contrast, levied against those whose shapes (and knowledge) remain stuck/mired in harmful dogma.
In other words (indented for emphasis, an expanded demonic thesis for the rest of the module):
Something of an Unholy Trinity, power, darkness and knowledge—often as conspicuous, ritualized acts of creation/poetry and (re)invention through magic/mad science—go hand-in-hand during unequal, forbidden exchange, radical transformation and dark desire/wish fulfillment; i.e., someone will trade what they have for what they don’t in order to transform or otherwise fulfill a given wish: with a demon that has the requisite item(s), build and/or abilities (e.g., sensations; re: Medusa’s Aegis/forbidden sight).
Demons are the classic, mighty and at-times-untrustworthy granters of dark wishes/desires, be those fame, fortune, sex, and/or revenge (which transformation facilitates, on either side of an exchange). During a Faustian bargain, power is exchanged for knowledge; during a Promethean Quest, knowledge is exchanged for power, either being two sides of the same basic coin (of darkness)—i.e., knowledge is power and power is knowledge about sex and force, often as darkly shows thereof. Both hail from older forms of barter that return to either challenge/uphold capital; they concern unequal/unfair trades, leading to self-destruction by the human party trading with the demon party—death being the presumed outcome. And while permanent, this event (often of status shift) marks radical, sudden change in ways that are seldom literal; e.g., Persephone, Faust, Medusa’s victims or Lot’s wife standing in as before/after metaphors; i.e., that seal the dealing parties away from the human world, whence they presumably cannot return (as the monomyth generally allows for/encourages). Faustian bargains predominantly involve a deal with the devil in spoken/written discourse; Promethean Quests concern power as found/left-behind by godly forces, which Shelley describes as denying their power to Cartesian agents: to punish them for using mad science to police nature with (versus reclaiming and safeguarding it from the state, as functional Communists do).
Yet, in the demonic tradition, punishment and reward go hand-in-hand as much as power and knowledge do, this being as much an abject, cryptonymic, esoteric commentary on state reprisals as it is for worker liberation through those (and other) Gothic theories. For all demons, power and/or knowledge is unequal both in how it trades and presents, but speaks to the forbidden, oft-anthropomorphic aspects of nature that state forces close off; e.g., as demonic, whorish, vengeful, off-limits, corrupt, degenerate, etc. Demons stress exchange as such in ways that oscillate; i.e., they go back and forth with such data, empowering people by showing them what the elite have stolen from them, and alluding what workers have to gain by defying the status quo; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM, doing so to experience things that are, from the whore’s perspective, natural, but also under their control despite state assertions to the contrary. For Gothic Communists, mutual consent is power because its illustration demonstrates our ability to exchange what the state can only treat as unironic rape, mid- harvest (of Medusa’s peach). Power is sexy for us because it isn’t sexy as the elite envision it; re: to dominate and harvest nature pursuant to profit, because the state is incompatible with life, with human rights, with liberation.
The word “power” appears a lot in the Demon Module. I synonymize it with “unequal,” and each with “knowledge,” “exchange,” “play” and “virgin/whore” (experience and ignorance) as equally interrelated, thus treated to the same rule of thumb during liminal expression; e.g., “power = unequal knowledge exchange/play about sex and force with whores as sex demons.” —Perse
(source: Reddit)
Form follows function insofar as power flows either direction. Speaking to form, then, whereas zombies are more one-note (despite being a hybrid monster, in modern settings; re: Romero) and vampires—despite their own historical prolificity and ontological complexities—tend to look fairly similar across the board, demons and nature are entirely defined by their morphological, sex-to-gender variety and ludic complexity challenging state monopolies. “Demons” are cartoonishly transformative, thus can be whatever you want them to be; their bodies, terror and violence communicate through sex and force as generally uneven, torturous, and raw (charged on black aphrodisiacal surfaces, above). For instance, the Medusa (arguably the most ubiquitous and famous demon to come out of the West) classically and thus regularly plays out this way through BDSM pastiche (above). Raped by the state, she disrobes any such timidity to expose her succubean whore’s furious and febrile darkness; it becomes her revenge to expose (more on this, later).
To know is to (ex)change; to (ex)change is to adopt a state of mind as a performance one can play out through paradox. To it, the more power given through knowledge, pain or anything else exchanged, the greater the transformation generally is; e.g., Skeletor from Masters of the Universe declaring “And now, I, Skeletor, am master of the universe!” when he receives the fire of the gods, becoming a god in ways that are perceived as “fatal.” His body and his mind—already twisted in pursuit of such things (“It is my destiny!”)—explode in delusions of rapturous grandeur: “playing god.”
A Faustian bargain canonically finger wags, saying “be careful what you wish for” to curious minds/desperate parties; but it also reminds us that knowledge can grant the ability to change our stars in ways that will see us excommunicated from state realms. This isn’t a fate worse than death, but a mercy exiting Plato’s cave: “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.” The same idea applies with the Promethean Quest’s Numinous refrains—the searching for excessive power that leads to us being punished by false Faustian gods telling us we can’t be gods, too.
“Death” becomes a state of change, then, one pursuant to our own building of better worlds using the Gothic aesthetic/poetics of power and death, sex and force (all the fun things). Poetry is cool; power and death are cool; and anyone who discounts the Gothic’s ability to create genuine rebellion through them is terminally lame/a cop defending private property (thus poetics) for the state; e.g., Mark Hamill [the voice for Skeletor, below] being a dyed-in-the-wool Zionist! Gothic is a smoke screen—a regressive/progressive mode of expression whose “new flesh” (as Priest calls it) allows for all manner of politics under its enchanting darkness (no monopolies, remember)! As much as we whores wear the same aesthetics on our sleeves—i.e., to smuggle in good, sex-positive knowledge, mid-allegory—the state can pimp this out, giving bad knowledge to nurse death anxiety with sin: a clownish juggernaut, leviathan, behemoth, and Great Destroyer getting what he wants (revenge) before ejaculating delight and promoting a world beyond our own that we cannot possibly imagine!
Or perhaps we can. Hauntology is nostalgia unanchored from a specific space and time, but haunted by a specific space and time oscillating as the Gothic does, shaking things up like a snow globe. Building anything that challenges God is considered revenge against God, thus forbidden by God (which extends to capital under a Protestant ethic and neoliberal dogma), thus framed as destructive and deceptive vis-à-vis Capitalist Realism. Darkness bad; darkness crossdressing and murderous, turning order upside down. “Come and see!”
In a dualistic, dialectical-material sense, though, Skeletor becomes a great shadow/castle in the flesh for both sides of oppositional praxis—a wrestler’s heel crossing the point of no return per a kayfabe momentum shift; i.e., his appetite for destruction basically makes him not just Caesar but Prometheus and Faust: a whorish/demonic being seeking his revenge, and for the state (and its police) to deny. His impudence must be punished—for making a deal with the devil/stealing the fire of the gods (and transforming like Loki would, from Norse myth) to become less and less human, or conversely posthuman in gigantic ways: that return him to lost states of existence, which state proponents view/treat as “dead”; re: Capitalist Realism. As such, he’s also Satan/Frankenstein’s monster challenging God—either in ways whose rebellion is false, thus in defense of the state, or illegitimate in ways that—as vice characters so often do—promote the joys of basic human rights demonized as non-Christian, foreign, and alien: swollen hubris and bodies of nature, death, and the monstrous-feminine as equally tumescent.
Any way you slice it/want to think about it, knowledge and power are forbidden, but witnessed paradoxically as vengefully out in the open; re: as darkness visible. Looked at/viewed with, this force classically alienates in ways that canonically distance the state from workers and workers from each other and the state. By comparison, liberated workers may exit normal states of existence to become increasingly demonic, thus drawn to other demons who know things, too! Knowledge is power because it gives us the ability to (ex)change not just ourselves, but the ordering of the universe as canonically ordained by bourgeois forces. Iconoclasts upset this ordainment by existing merely as ourselves, thus have our sweet revenge; i.e., if state proponents ultimately deride Melmothian wanderers (or monopolize them in strictly fascist interpretations; re: Hamill’s moderacy/white knight syndrome decaying into fash arguments), then we fags ultimately celebrate them through camp: to mold ourselves and our trauma like clay into demons, thus gain some sense of agency and control over power-as-poetic during rape play and other unequal, made-from-clay power fantasies haunted by state abuse!
As such, unequal power—as something to play with, negotiate and exchange during ludo-Gothic BDSM—is likewise notoriously diffuse, illusory and nebulously subjective; i.e., formally presented as a deal, bargain or negotiation (often of fatal knowledge, through Faust—see footnote), “power” can be whatever you want, can flow in either direction[11] to morphologically arrange however you want (e.g., demon monarchs or servants/imps; circles of Hell, wombs of nature, darkness visible/pandemonium, and other tiered/concentric torture dungeons; “white devils” and other foreigner classifications like “barbarian” or “savage”; kayfabe heels/babyfaces; etc) as an aesthetic or metric (re: Foucault, bio-power)—can be guided by impulse, mood, urgency/detachment and individual preference. Milton aside, one person’s Heaven is another’s Hell, and vice versa. The orgasm (skin or otherwise) is all in the mind!
Furthermore, apart from elemental demons—or demons of nature that yield an elemental quality to their appearance (earth, wind, water and fire; e.g., a fire jinn or water nymph)—nearly all (and their knowledge) are sexual (whores); or they concern sexuality discussed in asexual, meaning in socialized ways that express through BDSM-style rituals of pain, fetishes and kink. These extend to general power imbalance, paradox, public nudism, as well as survived and inherited/generational trauma voyeuristically exhibited. But natural demons, as we shall see in the “Call of the Wild” chapter, often concern sexuality linked to nature-as-abject; i.e., massive and dark, hunted or otherwise pursued and caged/dominated by Cartesian forces.
Divorced from genocide, these conditions become—pardon the expression—breeding grounds (next page) for intense psychosexual expression with asexual elements: to play with that which no one is supposed to see outside the bedroom, but pimped out on street corners and inside bazaars thereof. Reclaimed by workers making the imaginary past wiser, Medusa is a fat, sassy whore (or gigolo) looking to instruct through demonic sex. All are power expressed in dark delicious totality—as, per ludo-Gothic BDSM, something to understand through play! So smack that demon ass, bitches! The more we play god, the more those pre-existing deities of capital seem false and hollow!
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
Simply put, for demons there’s a million-and-one ways to combine, give and instruct with sex and force through pain (non-harmful or not), but also to marry it educationally with erogenous pleasure, medieval aesthetics, mil spec, time periods, (a)sexual fetishes and clichés, masks, costumes, alter egos, herbos and himbos, Biblical allusions, castle parentage/disputes, fatal homecomings and bread-and-circus trials by combat (e.g., Ornstein and Smough, the black-knight-style demons from Dark Souls, or Marcellus and similar oni-style Yokai from Onimusha and similar Asia-themed survival horror and Metroidvania), kink and BDSM rituals/torture implements (whips, chains, leather and so on), muscle and fat, clay and golems, doms and subs, gender and body euphoria/alteration, and various taboos, stigmas—and biases, anxieties, phobias, what-have-you—while likewise arranging and exchanging power imbalance during ironic/unironic demon BDSM. Existence becomes a point of reference, then, one to wrap our heads around by playing with power as such. In turn, all things expressed and played with as demonic conveniently become food for thought, insofar as playing with power-an-unequal goes.
Further Food for Thought
Let’s pursue that. With vampires, for example, the poetic emphasis leans more on fluid exchange/giving and taking essence as fluid. Though “essence” translates easily enough to power and knowledge through BDSM rituals, “demons” make for an incredibly broad umbrella category amounting to food for thought—can enjoy or express power and forbidden knowledge (about power, essence, or anything else) in any shape or size, vestige or portrayal; and they and their poetic lessons don’t need to be red and/or black (often, green or purple works, too, but really any color scheme[12]). Indeed, they could drink blood as a liquid, breathe spirit as gaseous, or eat a solid shiny red apple;
(artist: Judith Meets Salome)
similar to “darkness,” the apple can represent pretty much anything (cum, power, cum as power, etc) and Eve can be phallic/serpentine through Biblical symbolism, or through illusory-to-allusory stand-ins for stand-ins, dead metaphors out-of-joint with canon, classic-to-Freudian-to-postmodern interpretations/umbilicals, and so on. The potential to change is threatened by implied action and temptation: “Eat me.”
Demon cosmetics remain simultaneously prolific and cryptonymically vague, as such; re: “dark”; e.g., a fat, menacing “castle” something of a vanishing point, mise-en-abyme—an event horizon/Satanic asshole that sucks you in (which assholes tend to do, save when shitting something out). The presentational idea, then, leaps to visual immediacy and in language most people understand/relate to in some shape or form; re: sex and force. Exceptions aside, Western whores tend to classically (within the Gothic mode) dress/appear in black and maidens in white; collars, gloves, corsets, stilettos, stockings and lingerie are popular (next page), as are whips, feather dusters and maid outfits, and various dichotomies like leather/lace, angel/devil, black/white, dom/sub and virgin/whore. They communicate, thus grant knowledge through sex and power as things to recursively reify and exchange; e.g., in a dark forest of desire (again, next page); i.e., in any of the ways outlined above: “Eat me. ‘Die.’ Learn. Change. Grow. Become what is needed.”
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
All of these can hybridize, mid-aesthetic (all women are virgins and whores), but whores are canonically property first, people second; both something to call and relegate afterwards, they paywall in visually obvious ways—marked in society for being a particular kind of criminalized servant/forbidden merchandise that cops, as pimps, “protect” (versus the legalized variant of women’s work: the bride/wife, relegated to broodmare status, party to “legitimate” bloodlines [and their households] thanks to virgin/whore syndrome; i.e., the husband getting his jollies with his mistress/paying for her abortions to avoid bastard, illegitimate bloodlines).
We really don’t have time to unpack the universal wardrobe for whores worldwide. Just know the sky’s truly the limit regarding what’s “on tap” and how you want to respond to it (darlings can be killed and authors die): to draw your own conclusions/make your own connections beyond what dogma and the Imperialism of Theory (re: Norton) afford! Dogma forces singular interpretation, hence police violence; for us and Gothic Communism, speculation and critical potentiation/prolific interpretation is the name of the game! “Eat the fucking apple! They’re going blame you anyway!” Rock those fishnets, girl!
Hermeneutics aside, demons essentially and creatively have carte blanche, affording users limitless, infinite potential and creativity in how they themselves perform, present/perceive and play power out through demonic avatars and their doubled, darkness-visible paradoxes; i.e., like money and material goods, power is an illusion, but specifically a transient, dualistic, liminal one to play between different states that hyphenate (fake-not fake, authentic-inauthentic); e.g., knowledge is power and power is terror, violence, and morphological expression, under dialectical-material dispute during oppositional praxis. They’re something to exchange for as long as possible; i.e., as a means of communicating state abuse (and our place under its shadowy tentpole): as something to subvert, thus escape under hollow existence and empty threats backed up with police force.
Original Sin makes for a classic, recursive, and dogmatic example. Satan tempts Eve with the apple, which is knowledge, but also power performed between different players casting blame and owning up to/casting off responsibility in the face of state structures (and punishment): it’s a lie but true through state force as something to administer (often through the soul and purity arguments tied to glory and eternal salvation translating, under capital, to a Protestant ethic). Faced with total power, workers will happily point fingers to escape damnation/excommunication; i.e., desperation marries with convenience to encourage paranoid betrayal (which, in turn, amounts to more power for the state)! A witch hunt is a blame game, then, one where the state and the state alone can “win.” Except, it’s a lie, both everywhere and nowhere. Sex is everywhere in ways that, through these excuses to coerce workers, cannot be avoided.
(artist: Domenichino)
Dogma weaponizes sex as something to control in unequal ways. Paradise, per law and order under state rule, is generally threatened by shapeshifting devilry (queerness) and nature as monstrous-feminine (classically female parties, but really anything that isn’t white cis-het European Christian men); i.e., Eve, per Original Sin, corrupts under Satanic influence (which God allows), opening the door for degeneracy and decay of the state, hence moral panics/states of exception, hence profit during police abuse/tokenization when Imperialism comes home to empire (and when the state preys on the Global South until that point): antagonize nature-as-monstrous-feminine (alien) and put it to work under capital/settler colonialism as informed by older power structures like Imperialism, organized religion and feudalism. It’s women’s fault, and the Gays, the fall of Eden comparable to the fall of Rome insofar as white male fragility is “threatened” by the collusion of dark forces against that biggest of “victims”: cis-het men and their DARVO schemes (which lead to betrayal/triangulation during Man Box/”prison sex” mentalities, and really assimilation of all kinds [e.g., black skin, white masks] embedded inside persecution networks/rungs of preferential mistreatment).
So what is power? Per Milton, power is paradox and darkness visible played with; i.e., both infinite and finite, tremendously figurative and objective, cryptonymically dualistic and doubled; e.g., “heaven in a wildflower” vis-à-vis labor value (which has infinite value, the state wishing to steal our power [whatever the shape] through Faustian bargains). Since “darkness” denotes heretical/abject power and “power” can literally take any form (and often manifests as such through theatre, acting and disguise, all happening subjectively in good faith or bad versus objective forms, like material conditions), the simplest way to conceptualize it is, “power is exchange” as a matter of context concealed/showed during the cryptonymy process’ double operation; i.e., regarding forbidden knowledge in terms of gender, sex and anything else; re (from “Notes on Power” in Volume Zero):
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).
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 (source).
In essence, power is paradox during liminal expression through doubles (two or more things existing at once). From Paradise Lost onwards, then, power and its exchange (again, often through/with forbidden knowledge) becomes something to disguise, then tempt ignorant parties with as a gift; i.e., Original Sin (though, in defense of or from the state, this performative notion [and the epistemological freight it offers each side] goes both ways): canon vs iconoclasm using the same aesthetics in duality. Lies are simply another form of language, begging the question, “Which lies anisotropically serve workers?” As I argue about camp, we want to be of the devil’s party and, unlike Milton (re: Blake), actually know it!
At their most basic, then, devils are splendide mendax sullying Paradise with beautiful lies; i.e., as something to darken law and order (with shadows), to dirty or corrupt the state through forbidden exchange by Satanic forces. “Canon” being the strict, rigid control of information (thus power flow) by state paradigms, a devil is a whore, a tramp, a broker iconoclast of so many different things that earn them backhanded compliments by police agents (applicable to men/queer parties at large, but classically to white cis-het women in a heteronormative scheme): a dirty, naughty and/or bad girl, etc. Whores aren’t just demons, then, but criminals who gatekeep knowledge inside-outside themselves. While iconoclasm takes and delights in that fact, Gothic Communism and ludo-Gothic BDSM are more selective/enterprising than simply offering sex to the uninitiated! It uses any expression of power imaginable to foster sex positivity as antithetical to state aims (namely that of profit, raping nature during us versus them)!
A “devil,” then, becomes someone—usually a charming or brute-force tempter of this or that—to deal with in some imposturous degree of disguise and bald face (the paradox of shifting shape through affect versus literal appearance). But such cryptonymy’s dark, ludic/ontological flexibility further owes to demons being performative/poetic in a highly staged way that goes on and off said stage; e.g., serial killers, vigilantes and again, doms, subs, and switches, classically extending to horny college professors taking advantage of their students through a structural power imbalance (above), etc; i.e., BDSM isn’t just for the bedroom (re: Foucault) and it isn’t purely sexual, combining asexual interrogations of sex and force through demonic power displays and public nudism, amongst other things!
To it, demons teach, and generally by example, mid-poetics. These examples historically date back to the ancient world revived hauntologically in ours; i.e., schools function—from Plato’s Academy to modern universities—as special sites of forbidden knowledge, whose poiesis and exchange are ruled classically by patriarchal agents. Except, anywhere can be a classroom/extracurricular dealing space to exchange with devilish things. Demon sex (commonly framed as “whorish”) becomes an ancient weapon evoking nostalgia and poetics to rewrite the Wisdom of the Ancients; i.e., to levy in devilish arts against the state, which again, their patriarchs cannot monopolize! So long as power can express in parallel courts, it can consolidate there, too!
(artist: Jan Rock)
Revolution or critical analysis, then—but especially labor action and mutual consent established through gender and sex, parody and pastiche—can suitably manifest anywhere; i.e., through artistic/theatrical articulations of forbidden knowledge, demonic morphology and power exchange (above): deals with the devil as a cruiser’s costume—a mask to put on or remove as needed (often in a dungeon, ball, closet or false/inverted “church” of some kind; i.e., a danger disco; e.g., a bathroom stall, below, where forbidden “exchange” and “worship” [often extramarital sex and/or drug use] might take place without interruption or interference: prayer and predation, internment and instruction, education and reeducation, etc)! Pre-capitalist, GNC ideas like demonic androgyny (above) move into a post-scarcity world beyond Capitalism, predicating on the reshaping of those things that, canonized and kept under lock and key/close watch, keep us hopelessly locked in place ourselves: a crucible that heats us up and changes our shape to suit us, not the elite! It hurts, but anything worthwhile does!
To it, demons speak to a heretical desire to change, feel strong and look cool—to fit in, sometimes, but also stand out in ways we pass off as normal, safe; i.e., a death of the old turning into the new as waiting to unfold (as queerness in the closet always is). “The dose doth make the poison,” and we Commie fags—while perhaps setting a trap or two (“The play’s the thing!”)—aren’t exactly Zofloya handing Victoria a poison chalice; we’re giving you, yes you, the chance to learn and grow away from dogma, even if we’re a little slick/two-faced/tongue-in-cheek about it. Nothing lasts forever, and pomp and circumstance eclipse themselves. Things lost stay lost, but can be reborn in new terrifying (and awesome) forms using ludo-Gothic BDSM! As such, demons riot, and “a riot,” explained MLK, “is the language of the unheard.” Mid-argument (thus battle), demons are pragmatic in the linguistic sense, making themselves heard; i.e., through sarcasm, innuendo, play and mood (which Gothic encompasses).
To that, a good BDSM actor/sex worker can take any language on Earth—regardless of where it is written (e.g., in a Bible verse, or as graffiti on a bathroom stall door) or performed (e.g., rock ‘n roll, next page)—and make it powerful through suggestion/subversion, generally through conscious anticipation of various responses, mid-tension-and-release: “I’ll eat your ‘apple’!” Nothing is sacred (except basic human, animal and environmental rights) and anything goes. We whores fuck to metal, then, screw on the first date—in short, we just love to fuck, period—all to spite naysayers and prudes; i.e., they’re hypocrites/desperately starved of good connection, missing out on what makes life worth living! Learning is fun, is sex, is wicked, cunning and bad! “I don’t always cum when I learn, but when I cum, I’m always learning!” Yeah, baby! Everyone loves whores, demons and sluts; the idea is to learn not to hate them, too (e.g., Kim Petras, certified transsexual and slut pop star extraordinaire, below)!
In genderqueer terms, then, it’s less about hating on ourselves (though self-hatred/internalized bigotry are an ongoing problem for those in the closet or threatened with it) and more how we gay devil sluts incessantly delight in fucking with normies’ perceived, pre-determined ideas of sin and salvation; re: green eggs and ham that, once tasted, turn canon’s sad little world upside-down: the sinner being that person in the closet, acting holier-than-thou and for whom “sin” is both a guilty pleasure to watch and death sentence once administered!
Though queerphobia isn’t a joke (token or not), most jokes play with phobias to some extent; i.e., riling workers up not to do what the state wants, but to make some noise/rage against the machine while celebrating ourselves building better worlds while inside: as “unholy” in ways they can’t control, mobilizing us to challenge, hence change the status quo through sex work and art as more or less the same, as far as that goes; e.g.,
These boots are made for walkin’
And that’s just what they’ll do
One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you (Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” 1966).
It’s free-love sass, a threat with a wink to the pimp, but wrapped into Vietnam war songs by Hollywood directors recuperating sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll for Pax Americana. Two parties, different goals, same language: dark, fertilizing, of the night as alienated by capital and reunited with workers by workers out of the closet, kissing and telling[13]. It’s fun, natural, energizing and magnetic—the dark, earthly stuff of Medusa/Gaia unchained that rebellion and recuperation build on; i.e., oppositional praxis pimping demons out or liberating them in equal, warring measure!
To it, we sluts live for any theatrical tensions that arise, doing so to create in ways we can control; i.e., watching weird canonical nerds clutch their pearls, fearing our dark suggestions of damnation and delight making them sweat bullets. Trouble in paradise? That’s just our game! We live for it, but also camp canon to survive; re: watching them crap their pants something of a special treat, but likewise entirely necessary during revolutionary cryptonymy: when reading the room to sus out who’s good and bad faith using our Aegis!
Furthermore, torturously disabusing them of such harmful notions—i.e., by radicalizing them through ludo-Gothic BDSM (often sex)—is, unto itself, tremendously validating. Sex and force, pleasure and pain, metal and pulp media at large—modular and united, each works like a charm, the whore using her bag of tricks (“Wind! Fire! All that kind of thing!”) to heat their client up and strike while the metal’s hot. Pent up, we release tension, fight stress, and have fun on top of catharsis. This house is clean, babes!
To that, while certainly drug-like, we don’t owe chudwads (who certainly feel owed sex) an enabler’s taste, nor personal instruction/a benefit of the doubt, be that roleplay or sex. But people are seldom black-and-white. The state, being straight, enforces straightness in its own image, meaning we can corrupt that. Any work-in-progress, then, can promote its own potential to improve, and if we see that potential on someone’s surface and choose to act on it—to mold it like clay into something better than before—well, that’s our choice, isn’t it? “I like them. Let’s put in the work; but regardless of what happens, I’ll have fun!”
So while demons constantly transform, pushing towards a “final form,” they generally shift forever under surveillance, and always towards new growth and understanding. Amounting to perpetual evolution occularized, and furnished by competing natural and socio-material forces, revolution is a journey and a cycle, not a destination (the state will always resist development). To it, relationships don’t exist in vacuums; workers must adapt and, as REO Speedwagon puts it, “Keep pushing!” To learn, then, is to keep learning regarding labor and sex, gender and activism as demonic. Like a birthday party with friends, one happens followed by another amid fresh growth and maturity! Applying that to Gothic, so many breakthroughs, demon “cakes” (muffins, pies, etc) and splashes of wet rapture await (so much yummy frosting to eat and paint ourselves with)!
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
Furthermore, any teacher who passes sex-positive knowledge to a former entitled dumbass is going to love seeing their work bear fruit; i.e., making the world better according to what we put into it—through what we give back to workers and the world (versus taking endlessly from workers as the state does, watching us). The gift is both an item and a lesson, fighting alienation with demonization: to promote reunion with the never-was to engender what could be.
This goes for sex, but also social practices tied to power exchange through sex work and gender expression; i.e., applying to “devils” among sex workers, lovers, and drag queens, all trying like Sisyphus to get people to abandon harmful ideas by having them watch and learn from us—gazing upon our Aegis’ surfaces and thresholds. Few things are as uphill as rewiring dogma to regain meaningful connection through alien, fetishized things (re: Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything pursuant to profit, thus rape and genocide). So when it actually happens, that frankly feels amazing! “You’re doing it, babe! We’re doing it!”
(artist: In Case)
Sex is forbidden/anathema under capital, but also sold in conspicuous, highly-watched ways we can recreate, abjuring privatization and breaking Capitalist Realism; i.e., through praise, scorn, or anything else we want to roleplay and give back, on and offstage. It’s not something to fear above all else, but overcome fear about and welcome accordingly back into our lives: letting “Satan” and “darkness” into us as holistic unto suffering-as-comorbid, but also healing through commodity! That’s good praxis, and ideally it should mobilize workers into loving the exchange of/doing away with bad knowledge and lies for good knowledge and lies, thus restoring confidence by synthesizing it. In true demonic fashion, then, these translate to any form of power/knowledge exchange you could dream up; i.e., any relationship or fantasy thereof that can be had between two or more workers; e.g., me meeting Zeuhl and them delighting at the power we shared, and which they often dictated the terms of (often at my expense, though I learned a lot, and savored their fat, hairy “deli-cut” pussy—similar to the one in the illustration, above): something to see power play out as, through sex in common, socialized, artistic forms.
Sex is power and power takes work to, well, work; you have to juggle this with that and while it is generally a lot of fun, it doesn’t always last. And it, as power always does, takes many different forms from cycle to cycle. In turn, complex ideas should be able to be communicated as simply as possible through playtime exhibited! The optics consist of fun, but also profound, demonic change had in life-altering ways—giving and receiving through poetics lenses, liberty and license; i.e., whose licentious ardor can shape how we profligates wield power and see through it as something to operate and articulate unto others: through play reclaiming humanity as “torture.” Churches, after all, are classically prisons of faith people escape inside themselves.
In BDSM, this is called “a scene” or “a negotiation,” and combines imagination with playfulness to marry fun with Gothic conventions/reinvention; i.e., to make us not just horny/cum, but able to navigate/negotiate and give/receive power out in the real world: as half-real, trapped between the fiction and rules, the fantasy and the reality as forever in flux! While physical abuse is something you can disassociate from, emotional abuse is ongoing and participatory in ways that cannot be ignored so easily. Seeing how such games involve people who don’t want to play but are concentrated into tight, cramped spaces that not only surveille them, but force them to participate, the only way to escape segregation is by subverting the flow of power while being subjected to it!
For workers or the state, the aesthetic (and chiastic dualism) of dealings with the devil remain largely unchanged: in punitive systems that would seem to both discourage and encourage said behaviors! To litigate better boundaries, you must break down old ones and learn what works and what doesn’t, using whatever “clay” you decide as you do. Short of total genocide (with ethnic cleansing designed to wipe capital, thus the state, clean[14]), this eventually becomes second-nature on a community level: to work with thiccer and juicer variants of the same-old “clay” formulating new tasty (and backdoor, Hannibal-the-general-style) propositions! Churches classically construct through front-facing façades flanked with not just with divine sunlight, but shadowy confessionals, choir screens, and straight-up torture dungeons speaking to repressed desire under a cloistered existence that expects people to court and breed, but in modest, highly controlled forms (e.g., Mormon “soaking” rituals allowing for PIV penetration, but not thrusting in and out of the vagina—requiring a third party under the bed to assist in the motions by kicking upwards into the mattress): a recipe for worker blue balls, but also resenting those controlling sex for the state.
(artist: In Case)
In Case, for example, specializes in demonic art, of which they express in earthly-to-hellish forms using a variety of costumes (e.g., nuns, left); i.e., tied to different institutions of power and knowledge exchange whose barriers demon(strate) and transform, sure enough, in disguise: tit for tat, changing shape and dress to liberate ourselves through fantasies of transgression that, however gross in excess and provocative they seem, cannot actually harm anyone!
This is not a new idea (though it is a “novel” one, haha). Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796)—a story written by a twenty-year-old gay man in a time when queerness was expressed entirely in Gothic fakery instead of medical documents—gleefully has Matilda imitate/profane the Madonna to excite Ambrosio, the story’s star dupe. From Rosio revealing himself to be Matilda and later Matilda as a crossdressing servant of the devil styling herself as a painting of the Madonna that becomes simply the devil, period, “he” becomes “she” becomes something without shape—all according to a hidden devilish urge that Ambrosio both loves and fears, and which Matilda brings out in him to critique and expose the church: as mendacious and rapey through him! As such, Ambrosio becomes a slave to faith; i.e., a house of God that houses jailors who are, themselves, jailed. They preach austerity but do not practice it, are ignominiously ripped apart instead by gay devils in God’s absence!
In Case’s art speaks to indulgence overshadowed by God as someone to defile with relish. In turn, doing so teases a campy, bad-echo, crossdressing power game well at home in Gothic fiction before, during and after Lewis’ work; i.e., nuns dressing in black and white, misbehaving under God’s roof (above): “Heaven holds a place for those who ‘pray'” (Simon and Garfunkel’s “Here’s to You, Mrs. Robinson,” 1968). All constitute ludo-Gothic BDSM, thus precious opportunities to subvert and transgress against canonical, thus policed, pernicious forms of demonic power exchange felt within churchly spheres; i.e., through heretical, “almost holy” games, we gay demons play with things we shouldn’t. Speaking to a profound and ceaseless delight, iconoclastic liberation from inquisition affords fresh, vital perspective, mid-instruction; e.g., “Suck on him like this! Learn what he likes and respond to each other in kind!”
In doing so, you learn how to relate as people do, but in sex-positive versions thereof: through psychosexual rituals of sex and force, thus power exchange on a two-way street. Making people “come” to earth-shattering revelations—e.g., about sex and gender uprooted from biology but able to play with it anyways—is one of a sex worker’s biggest joys: to “see the light” by playing with “darkness.” Attached to morphological and cosmetic freedom, good sex and BDSM can radically change your perception of canon’s unironic aesthetics of torture; i.e., power is control during feelings of no control, paradoxically acted out during calculated risk regaining said control (for us, not the state).
Per my arguments, then, such tutelage and the demonic power it affords remain entirely rooted in performance and play “dressed up”; i.e., in the abject language of power and death, putting “harm” in exquisitely “torturous” quotes; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM! We’re all toys to play with, lessons to learn! Power is plastic, so assume whatever form/combination of forms aid in passing good instruction/demonic flexibility along while collaborating inside inescapable shadows/shows of state rule (necessity is the mother of invention, worker counterterror challenging the state’s throttling of creativity vis-à-vis state monopolies, trifectas, and qualities of capital during class-culture and race war). In doing so, watch your horizons, minds (and other things) expand!
To that, there’s certainly multiple iconic standbys—e.g., the red devil with a pitchfork, pointy tail and horns, or the phallic-woman dominatrix succubus whipping naughty boys inside her retro-future dungeon, infringing liminally on holier grounds. As things to pilot and perform, such dominatrixes take endless forms per the Gothic aesthetic and its “sweet spot” between pleasure and pain (often confusing them on purpose); e.g., Chun Li hyphenating Amazons, slutty mil spec/cop uniforms (the character is a cop, thus crimefighter dressed up, often enough, as a weightlifting whore), all-purpose (and endless) Halloween costumes, toys for boys and honeypots: muscle inside scantily-clad outfits, where the avatar’s thunder thighs, stockings and tell-tale spike bracelets let players police the slum during kayfabe-style Amazonomachia! Sex is literally a weapon, dogma dressed up as fun and games!
(source)
True to form, friendly-looking demons have darker doubles, then; e.g., the cackling, histrionic and leather-clad dark mistresses from the Dungeon Keeper franchise (next page)… which really aren’t all that different functionally from xenomorphs, cenobites, or Lewis’ Matilda dominating through frog-like amplexus; i.e., torturously phallic, faux-medieval poetics hyphenating sex with vaso vagal penetrative violence, queerness with needles and medieval-to-modern medicine/malpractice, etc. Enemies of the state enjoy one “luxury” afforded to them, in this respect: alienation as humanization (re: Said’s pleasures of exile).
To exist in this sphere is grounds not just for dismissal or arrest, then, but termination of a more exterminatory sort. Until then, it’s constant containment, surveillance, and torture; i.e., the Radcliffe-style[15] rescinding and deprivation of rights, dressed up as justice per the Spanish Inquisition reimagined. It’s moralized, an argument unto itself that leads to generational remorse, regret, and for our purposes, roleplay reversing such axioms through the same basic aesthetics and their associate actions: selling ourselves for workers versus taking state pay to punch down! Prurience cannot be stopped, so the state surveilles it in brothels as prison-like and paradoxically enough, highly publicized and “ecclesiastical.”
In turn, all require us whores, suiting up, to blend in/stand out onstage and off, and whose poetically sexualized weaponization comes with various broad strokes to paint with and larger arguments about demons to keep in mind. We’ll cite some of these next (as block quotes), then close the symposium out with some thoughts about religion (which demons play with)!
(source)
Broad Strokes; Some Larger Arguments about Demons
Concerning the Demon Module as a whole, the holistic demands of Gothic Communism (and sheer poetic multiplicity and potential of demons) all but require me to paint in broad strokes, going forwards: if something is a “demon,” it emphasizes power/forbidden knowledge exchange and transformation (which basically makes the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers quintessential demons, per a neoliberal power trip; re: “teenagers with attitude!”). We’ll cover all our bases, through ludo-Gothic BDSM, but there won’t be as many close-reads as the Undead Module (at least, not for the first edition, v1.0)!
As usual, our aim is intersectional solidarity during a pedagogy of the oppressed—one meant to raise the degree of public knowledge and power when spectated about; re: expressed liminally as emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness during praxial synthesis (class war is race war, race war is culture war, etc): to locate the expression of worker traumas (queer or otherwise) and subvert their canonical, punitive forms. In doing so, we want to reverse abjection along the ghost of the counterfeit felt through our daily lives—the rules and games we install and play out versus those of the state (church or not).
By examining zombies, vampires and ghosts during the Undead Module, we’ve already looked at the many different ways that monstrous persecution and creation go hand-in-hand with conditional monsters; i.e., monsters that imply a status or affliction assigned to them by Cartesian powers (we’ve also examined the “feeding” vector of each monster type relative to this condition). Except, it also applies to demons through forbidden knowledge (thus power) exchange often being sexual: “flow” something to go with and induce/indulge in; re: undead take back when they feed on trauma, demons give back when they teach forbidden knowledge to transform.
(exhibit 43e2b: Artist: Mugiwara Art. “I want you to cum all over me!” Cum = data, darkness, and seeds, but also where to “sow” them. As things to give, commands are powerful, insofar they consider power through sex as, from the French Revolution onwards, relegated to the bedroom [re: Foucault]; i.e., as a side of power exchanges/knowledge checks and gaps both forbidden outside of such areas and canonically advertised everywhere as “terrorism,” vis-à-vis Crawford. Amateur porn showcases that in ways that stress how worker can transform through knowledge exchange as “guerrilla”; e.g., angel in the streets, demon in the sheets. It becomes power for workers through knowledge as something verboten to share: through globs and globs on one’s fuzzy mound and squishy body as delicious—not just forbidden sodomy-style knowledge, but tasty fruit as darkly Satanic per revolutionary practices enacted and witnessed during the summoning of “rape”; i.e., establishing boundaries independent of state dogma.)
To that, specifically keep our modular thesis argument in mind, as I won’t have time to set it up and stress it neatly per monster type as demonic:
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; i.e., psychosexual trauma (the regulation of state sex, terror and force) and feeding in decay as a matter of complicated (anisotropic) exchange unto itself, but also shapeshifting and knowledge exchange vis-à-vis nature as monstrous-feminine: something to destroy by the state or defend from it using the same Satanic, darkness-visible aesthetics/pandemonium.
As such, demonic transformation and knowledge/power exchange are anisotropic;
(artist: In Case)
trauma makes us decay/corrupt as monstrous-feminine or fascist (token or not), albeit in ways that cause us to develop demonic habits that are to some degree sex-positive or sex-coercive inside and outside the bedroom as canonically abjecting such things. Said flow of power is seldom clean, too, lurking in the odd, spicy and grey liminal area of the theatre stage, the monster costumes viewed there hardly exclusive to neoliberal Capitalism; re: with past poets closer to death, rape and raw sexuality in ways we’re currently alienated from (save in fetishized forms that serve profit inside the state of exception). Persephone, once in Hell, can stay there if it please her (dualities in full effect, of course); she can “crown” fresh abortions—to witness and play with the mighty and grotesque, but also Numinous afterbirth.
Fortunately, hauntology lets workers brush against the past; i.e., as nostalgic in ways that never quite existed, yet push towards Communism anyways: as canonically aborted by capital/the process of abjection (and other Gothic theories). Exploitation and liberation sit in the same shadow spaces, as do pro-state and pro-worker apocalypse arguments that fend off or expand the state of exception (and state forces using DARVO and obscurantism to muddy the waters): the state is incompatible with life, consent and workers, and we are with it! We must hug Medusa, not fear her, but there can still be Gothic thrills/doubles; e.g., the xenomorph is basically a sex demon threatening alien rape[16] against token Amazonian maidens, but whose immortal design ditches the red for all waspy[17] black: pure death that sometimes covers itself in human blood and gore!
This speaks to an honorary third quality of demons (though it relates to unequal power): sin, but especially desire (commonly expressing in religious forms as “burning passion”). From Radcliffe’s menacing demon lovers and Black Veil (re: Wolff’s “Radcliffean Gothic Model,” which came out the same year as Alien, 1979), we can see the pursuit of a vulnerable party (classically framed as white, cis-het and female, in Neo-Gothic literature) by a dark, arrested/Oedipal, wholly murderous slasher to, if not outright overcome, then at least survive: a killer’s reputation that permeates the dark out-of-doors and castled, churchly and/or graveyard environments to equal measure! Nigh elemental, these are deeply ingrained, well-established-if-partly-founded/unfounded fears with tell-tale classic embodiments (usually big men with dick-like knives; e.g., Jason Voorhees’ machete from Friday the 13th, above) predicated on concealment and revelation occupying the same infernal, golem-esque bodies: “darkness” as a trigger to throw and experience calculated-risk sensations.
Historically within Gothic, a dialectic of the alien and of shelter orbit around a privileged liminal group, white women; i.e., going from property to proprietor amid a state of transition, speaking to the only idea of “affection” they’re ever known—pursuit and abuse from someone for whom restraint is a myth, rape is automatic, and for which sex and harm overlap (rape being an act of total domination): a transient, regressive/reductive violator-inflictor of harmful, psychosexual pain. Doing so per transaction, the class character is one of white, middle-class women demonizing poor people/immigrants/slaves through liminal expression since Radcliffe’s Italian (or Lewis’ Monk, minus that story’s camp)—as abject, hulking maulers, invaders, trespassers in alien likenesses to their homes instead of their husbands and actual houses: getting their knickers in a twist over supernatural-tinged highwaymen (or castle knights) ravishing them.
Though it’s a toy-like, evocative simulation of mutilative, life-or-death exchanges—and Freudian analysis isn’t something Gothic Communism endorses (favoring dialectical-material scrutiny)—the fact remains that genuine feelings of fight, flight, fawn, freeze and flop regularly leap to mind when facing slashers (and the Halloween-grade, mad-science-meets-black-magic, holiday superstitions associated with them and their haunted lands). That’s arguably the point, but these human, or at least humanoid, bugbears sit alongside fearful sightings of state enemies; re (from Volume One):
The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse. Trauma, in turn, survives through stories corrupted by the presence of said abuse. There is a home resembling a castle, where a ghost—often of a woman—lurks inside having been met with a sorry fate. But undeath is something that can be felt through echoes of ourselves that aren’t diegetically spectral; they feel spectral through an uncanny resemblance, like standing over our own graves. This becomes something to play with, akin to an (at-times) humorous, even trashy gallows theatre rife with dark, forbidden language: sin, vice, violent sex, all-around death, and other taboo subjects (source: “Healing from Rape”).
In short, these orations of rape/demonic poetics and play are cathartic and criminogenic, educating and agitating to pacify as much as to rebel (re: controlled opposition). They’re chilling and dogmatic, praxially inert in canonical forms that see white women fetishizing those they commodify and police (re: Jameson’s “boring and exhausted paradigm“): the “help” as outsider but also strong-thighed bargeman, lycanthrope, sperm donor for lady what’s-her-name to fantasize with.
As far as demons more broadly go, mortal combat is a huge part of medieval theatre (the duel, Beowulf-style). Obviously this carries over into the adrenaline and ambrosia of modern-day BDSM/vice theatre; i.e., playing for laughs, thrills and cryptomimetic, legitimate-to-illegitimate boundary-breaking and setting exercises; e.g., Mortal Kombat‘s dark ’90s rock ‘n roll, sold-on-CD aesthetic—its arcade-style forces of darkness, outworld shenanigans, and the passing of order into chaos, videogames into celluloid. It’s a place to play and preach in equal measure, for the state or against it using the same demonic, hitman’s stabby-stabby language; re: courtly love, the way of the warrior as lovable scoundrel (e.g., Trevor Goddard hamming up Sonya Blade’s evil foil, Kano below, as part-meathead, part-phantom-of-the-opera). Better to have the language to play with than not; i.e., to play is to think about power through Gothic poetics (and their live-bur-al conventions) for cathartic purposes, making us strong enough to push back—often by killing our rapist in pure trashy schlock with a dark, genuine and swift undercurrent.
At their most basic, then, demons of all kinds operate sex-dungeon clubs/toy-like novelties replete with music, action and gory theatrics laden with an important asexual element: investigating all of the things listed above, granting them an artistic, social, campy/gallows-humor component that concerns healing from trauma versus simply getting off to this or that; i.e., interrogating our confused predator/prey responses, seeking death/the void in ways that speak to our rapturous survival: establishing control during feelings of us lacking control, generally on the cusp of almost-certain temptation, doom, delight and ecstasy! Part of that denial and indulgence (a mentality that embodies the West), the dominatrix is all-at-once inaccessible and forbidden, and very front-and-center! “You want this ‘rape,’ don’t you, slut?”
Do we? It’s complicated, but excluding battered housewives and other comorbidities during ongoing abuse, survivors of abuse like to put “harm” in quotes; e.g., to be spit-roasted by masked men provided there’s an element of control merged with the self-destructive theatrics (and provided no harm takes place)! Humans are messy and trauma only makes us messier (for which there’s the paradox of Gothic oxymorons, too; e.g., Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition threatening people with comfy chairs to make them confess)!
This forbidden sight extends to world politics, on and offstage. From Israel to America’s Vietnam or any other settler colony project, the problem of demons remains one of police violence; i.e., the deliberate and systemic abuse of demonic language to serve state aims; re: raping nature as monstrous-feminine to harvest it through settler-colonial means. But, to reiterate, they have to essentialize these monopolies of demonic sight to hold onto those territories, which is impossible.
Indeed, as Asprey writes, “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” (source). State monopolies seek to decay rebellious forces (and their perceptive vision) and present them, vis-à-vis Parenti, as false versions of themselves: as open fascists, but also moderate, disguised forms of the same police agents (often playing as “guerillas,” themselves). We are devils in disguises versus the state’s devils in disguise. There’s no avoiding that duality. The sooner we accept that and modify our cryptonymy’s weaponized sex accordingly during the dialectic of the alien, the better!
(artist: Homare Works)
Keep that in mind throughout this module, as I won’t overly stress it (we’ll rehash it, but won’t discuss police abuse to nearly the same extent as the Undead Module did; e.g., the “Bad Dreams” chapter). But also keep in mind that, like all monsters, the paradox of class, culture and race war through demonic poetics owes to how all demons use the same base aesthetics of power and knowledge, but also transformation hovering nakedly on the cusp of Great Destruction (the maiden/sub threading the labyrinthine castle while avoiding/seeking the demon lover); i.e., to anisotropically reverse the usual flow that power and knowledge travel in, often through transformation/the presentation of something standing transformatively in for something else, a “blinding” that sees forbidden things with; e.g., xenomorphs for Communists; re (from Volume One):
I’ve repeatedly said that function determines function. Another way to conceptualize this is flow determines function. That is, during oppositional praxis’ dialectical-material struggles, terror and counterterror become anisotropic; i.e., determined by direction of flow insofar as power is concerned. Settler colonialism, then, flows power towards the state to benefit the elite and harm workers; it weaponizes Gothic poetics to maintain the historical-material standard—to keep the elite “on top” by dehumanizing the colonized, alienating and delegitimizing their own violence, terror and monstrous bodily expression as criminal within Cartesian copaganda: […] subjugated phallic women castrating a female master rebel, once she visibly tries—through a dissident question of mastery—to reverse the status-quo binary (and flow) of terrorism and counterterrorism by showing her trauma, anger and willingness to fight back against a presumed overlord (source: ” A Deeper Look at Cartesian Trauma in Rape Culture”).
Demons—in all their shapes, sizes and colors—obey the same rudimentary principles for or against the state as straight, putting nature-as-monstrous-feminine to work. Those who shift power towards the state will be viewed as “counterterrorists” (cops or deputized forces); those who don’t will be seen as “terrorists” (re: Crawford’s “Invention of Gothic Terrorism“) or criminals for cops to punish and victimize per the Cartesian, heteronormative and settler-colonial process, mid-abjection.
The same is true for us in reverse, then, our doubles and their paradoxes’ food for thought illustrating duality mid-opposition and inviting troubling comparisons that, for us, break Capitalist Realism and reclaim our lost humanity in the eyes of state forces; e.g., David in Alien: Covenant being a terrorist in the eyes of the company but also occupying that giant shadowy space between Nazi and Communist. Pastiche can be perceptively “blind,” or just blind unto enslavement through the same darkness.
Conclusion: New Eyes, Forbidden Sight (and “Religious” Concerns)
So ends the symposium. There’s plenty in here we could only touch upon, and much of what we introduced here we’ll return to/unpack later throughout the entire module. This starts with how demons alter our perception using the forbidden knowledge they give; i.e., operating as a kind of forbidden sight—a poetic gateway or keyhole to darker realms of repressed knowledge, thus exchange:
As such, we shall further consider demons’ anisotropic flow of power and knowledge moving forwards, but also their whore-like shapeshifting abilities. Demons can change shape, often through illicit, occult forms of sex like Matilda’s clothing but also her skin; i.e., as a psychosexual, oft-violent summoning ritual invading sites of godly surveillance projected onto secular doubles: to summon, show/conceal and disseminate forbidden knowledge about violence and sex under state influence (thus abuse). This remains our poetic focus, not the eating of trauma as such. Yet demons-as-modular intersect with the undead to comment on nature-as-alien/monstrous-feminine; i.e., in oft-composite ways that feel hellish and undead (re: Skeletor), but also quasi-religious; e.g., Giger’s Gothic surrealism one of many dark churches, mise-en-abyme.
The Gothic and its psychosexual theatre thrives in the counterfeiting of religious things (re: Walpole’s Otranto) to speak in code, and I would be absolutely remiss to not mention that. For the rest of this conclusion (seven pages), I want to consider something popular about demons that we haven’t touched upon, yet, but will come up in the module ahead: the “religious” elements!
Churches were schools of the medieval world, and continue to spread dogma through shells of their former canonical greatness (re: Hogle). Per Cartesian dualism, capital divides in service to profit through emotional manipulation, gentrifying and decaying anything it requires to do so. This hauntology/canceled retro-future includes Christianity’s endless dominion/schisms and denominations ordering nature as such: to mask genocide as “charity” using the order of power-as-pecking-order instructing us-versus-them violence, mid-crisis-and-decay (the state rots, tolling its Pavlovian alarm/funeral bells; the menticided holy regress like gargoyle cops—to defend said order’s laws under attack by Satanic criminals).
Apart from canon, though, demons offer up a wild cradle for release and resentment alike, allowing for new apostatic regrowth in Gothic spheres camping the canon; i.e., to safeguard nature from state forgeries, the Madonna winking at whores in the audience waging class warfare liberating all workers through intersectional solidarity as, to some degree, out of joint. Tailored through “almost holy” prostitution, their second-coming resurrections (and gooey rapture, below) surround the nun or the Madonna as anything but immaculate; i.e., normally ransomed by capital holding everything hostage, releasing vital fluid and “fatal” knowledge about nature-as-pimped-out under state control: through the kinds of storied, performative, and panting ahegao, all-too-hungry lessons (about lust and the other deadly sins) that demons in particular are known for (e.g., naughty nuns—again, below)! Sinning gloriously to release ourselves from state influence, we flirt with “danger” to release police-like holds on our fear-addled brains! God is blind to our nightly trespasses, the evil eye a myth but the church panopticon watching us like lepers! So we demon sluts bloom like fungus inside their blind spots, making our own poetic arguments that refute theirs—through Neo-Gothic paradox, our seditious “organs” working in concert!
(artist: Bec Santus)
Simply put, demons are born-again whores; i.e., threatened with rape by state forces and relieving stress by burning their churches down, then and raising pandemonium from the euphemistic ashes’ calculated risk. Thirsty for knowledge-as-forbidden, these euphoric, promiscuous instructors grant comparably prurient lessons meant to trouble blind faith coded into workers by state copaganda; i.e., by playing with the virgin/whore binary through the world’s oldest profession as normally policed in demonic psychosexual language. By joyously scorning dogma, sluts secure special sight surrounding spoiled subjects, their policing of which Satanic atheists/Gothic Communists lampoon by example: to unspool us before installing new demonic threads in the place of older tapestries, seeing the light our Paganized darkness emanates! It’s code, the corruption a data unto itself upsetting state boundaries-for-me-not-thee! We’re not doing it to enjoy special privileges—e.g., nuns playing as ninja vigilantes (exhibit 48b)—but fight for equal rights granted unto all peoples; i.e., as brothel espionage, our impersonation a revolutionary cryptonymy for those who know! Canon is like a light switch, one we can flip on and off framed as “fake,” giving another dimension to our coded pornographic missives: hiding in plain sight, smuggling Satanic rebellion inside faux reliquaries! Espionage is a Gothic utility through the femme fatale playing as naughty nun (someone paradoxically able to infiltrate a patriarchal space because she’s a slut).
Missionary brides are victims of prescription, segregating themselves to submit to state enforcers. Classically expected to turn into demons—to spread their legs and dutifully have babies, then become the things that holy men ward off in pubic, but indulge in private (from doggystyle to sodomy of all kinds)—such women are kept, thus trapped. To be a good little Communist whore, then, is to be a good teacher/code-switcher pointing state (and token) hypocrisies out! Revolution is to get off the fence—to get ourselves off, period, motivating good praxis during oscillating positions of master and apprentice, sinner and saint, giver and receiver using Gothic language! We give and accept fresh knowledge in all its neo-medieval forms, such “data” including hot cum; i.e., using our abject open mouths (and other body parts/tissues) to poke fun of organized religion/capital’s Protestant ethic. Often through ritualized cannibalism, blood libel and other sodomy double standards normally enjoyed by the state, we turn them into a crown of thorns—a thorn in the elite’s side whose agony delights us to no end!
From hustle to gratuitous heist, any despoiling by us of virgins (and other such modesty/virtue arguments) is to emancipate them from holier-than-thou state forces; i.e., the latter raping women, children and minorities on a daily basis, instilling fear-and-dogma ignorance over the former to preserve the nuclear model’s “purity” through impunity! From Rome into “Rome” under capital, the state is morally bankrupt. Steeped in controversy and scandal, such hypocrisy becomes endless crises of faith to leverage against them; any bastions to the contrary are merely a giant lie we can turn on its head. The iconoclastic idea, then, is camping harmful norms, breaking from their police traditions to install liberatory devotion through demonic porn/sex work at large; i.e., unto sex positivity as earnest, genuine and educational towards those revelations breaking Capitalist Realism (and canon’s sex-coercive myopia) like a stained-glass window—into pieces!
Per Weber, capital is Christian “in spirit”; i.e., of a Protestant work ethic, which reliably runs aground by operating merely as it does. So whereas Christianity evokes power in language both historically grand, vivid, and vague, the state has since hollowed out churchly house and occupant alike: profit trumps true belief, blind faith becoming bad faith cashing in on demonic doubles. It’s an easy system to retailor along state deceptions; i.e., built on the past as copied into Gothic doubles (re: the ghost of the counterfeit).
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
In response, demons of all forms generally constitute a half-real pact or offering—one that, in our hands, demolishes dogma through the reclamation of state poetries inside “found documents” (from Walpole onwards): as “castles” (above) antithetical to status-quo bodies waiting to be exposed! Concerned with churchly “donations,” and felt onstage and off, our showing of the ass (a mea culpa) promise/promote a Gothic-Communist “beyond.” Perceived according to linguo-material exchanges that cryptonymically achieve step-by-step development in the present space and time, these Holy Grails suggest a better world through corporal data, even psychosexual violence dressed up as “death” incarnate. Extracted through calculated risk (re: convulsionnaires, demon lovers and exquisite “torture,” etc), whores communicate with pain, as often as not. In turn, the state penalizes its martyrs, driving them into psychosexual rapture. Making them writhe, the elite cannot fully monopolize such agonies. Harmed, we hypnotize others by placing our “harm” in quotes! We make it gay but also demonic and undead! It becomes a pornographic, visually weaponized/vaso vagal and politically charged, inflammatory spectacle no elite can fully control.
I’m not religious (and ironically am not the biggest fan of nuns, in Gothic), but find much to subvert in religious language/canon. Furthermore, I remain entirely serious when saying that such a palliative Numinous can change us—i.e., how we see the world—by demonically playing with codified trauma; i.e, that which the state tells workers to either completely ignore, or to play with only in particular ways: “flesh and the power it holds.” The price is canonically envisioned as “steep,” exorbitant, and fatal. In truth, it’s simply transformative, vis-à-vis the shadows of a Hell reclaimed by workers seeking revenge through demonic escape; i.e., from Plato’s cave by using a massive cryptonymic ass, tight pussy or asshole, what-have-you, as priceless: there being no price the state can put on them to sell ourselves (and our fellow workers) out!
Instead—and per liminal expression’s surfaces and thresholds (of forbidden exchange)—revolutionary whores unchain themselves “on the cross.” Gaining paradoxical access to capital’s usual voyeurs spectating sacrifice (always unto others), we point out various double standards that apply uncomfortably to them; i.e., those that—once exposed by us, smiling through the happy pain (and rough, worker-dictated sex)—strip the state bare and lay them naked on the altar! Guilty pleasure becomes liberatory unto realizations the state wants to vault: that their usual fixtures of power are not so holy or fixed! Faced with that, one grows defenseless against temptation and seditious reeducation!
Indeed, the heretical, naughty sense of conjuring mischief expresses through the whorish Mephistophelean; i.e., the so-called “nun” as bent, being up to no good during ludo-Gothic BDSM—that one is breaking state rules/canonical laws to free one’s mind from bourgeois dogma and illusions, thus interrogate state trauma. This happens through similarity amid difference, strung vicariously together by willing allies playing games of a restorative, debriding sort: the pedagogy of the oppressed as a shared, oft-naked activity—gettin’ down with the devil in us as abjected by state forces! We reverse this ghastly procedure on our Aegis, gorging and gouging this with that. “Stare and tremble!” becomes an invitation: to play with power yourselves, following the white rabbit as demonic whore.
Regardless of whom, subverting state conventions—reclaiming and humanizing their fetishes and clichés—should feel “dangerous,” hence intimate, intimidating and fun; i.e., hooking up free of judgement, mid-disco, delivering the goods for two (or more) people indulging in deep, bottomless appetites; i.e., of all shapes and sizes to share with those looking in (often ourselves, watching the footage in private)! To see how the other side lives, “destruction” means giving ourselves to each other entirely—to hold heaven in a wildflower!
(artist: Mugiwara Art)
Through poetic license, we Gothic Communists aggregate and solidarize, exchanging holistic tit for tat through ludo-Gothic BDSM as churchly pun, live burial; e.g., burying the bishop (the church and its dimorphic expressions of power are full of sex puns)! Like demons, Hell and true rebellion are what you make of them: through biomechanical trigger responses; e.g., piercings, tattoos, sex toys, knife play and so on as body-horror “new flesh”; i.e., relating to people as animate-inanimate objects, recipients of closeted rage whose diaphanous permanence expresses across bodies the only way it can, short of just filming it “as is.” Demons express autonomy amid damage and healing sharing the same spaces. These become a confusion of this with that; i.e., as language exists naturally and soupily in the brain and across history’s space-time: to tightrope lightning and be full of it as PTSD, which can trigger in martyred, dualistic, accessibly gargoyle shorthand ways we can dialectically-materially channel to thwart capital’s dire historical materialism.
So often, the palliative Numinous communicates through ludo-Gothic BDSM, in this respect; i.e., mixing erogenous pleasure and non-harmful pain haunted by harm living inside-outside us: dogma on churchly walls. It, in turn, expresses during various relationships to sex and force through others; i.e., clawing power back any way we can, taking control of out-of-control situations per the human condition as such: to feel social again through anti-social/alienating tendencies we can socio-materially rewire through safely chaotic outlets (the collocating of power that translates so readily and accessibly in religious forgeries; re: “Gothic”). The code-switcher’s idea/preference is to appreciate and understand psychosexual dysfunction as a spectrum; e.g., the Tin Man versus Ryan Gosling in Drive (2010); i.e., doing so in coded spectral ways that divorce from actual psychosexual harm, but manifest through demonic echoes during liminal expression! Love is a package deal, but not a ball and chain; i.e., that, once triggered, our trauma lets us transform our past (and the “past” of churchly spheres essentially the present as “stuck”), learning from and facing it without shame to lead to new exciting destinies (rewriting the church and our place in its theatrical in-betweens)!
So keep everything we’ve discussed in mind, up to this point; i.e., staying vigilant and perceptive as we forge ahead into the Demon Module’s object lessons: weighing our linguo-material extensions that we embody in turn, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Exchange all the essence that you can, use all the toys you can; i.e., the larger ones giving you an element of control that often has an enormous size/alien element to its design, for calculated-risk purposes; e.g., less “murder dick” (what my ex and I would call period sex) and more freaky toys for cuties of all walks seeking to regain agency through infernal, demonic play! Both loose and tight, erogenous and painful, closeness to power can be incredibly medicinal, but also revolutionary! “Oh god, it’s growing bigger!” Our sleeves hunger for God’s rod and Satan’s shaft (“I can be your angel or your devil!”)!
(artist: Ashley Yelhsa)
Ludo-Gothic BDSM has a reclamatory function, in this respect; e.g., words like “invalid” or “alien” have as much a legal, medicalized usage that dehumanizes sex workers (with Ashley reclaiming her disabled status to fight back against people unironically using those terms to pity or prey on her). Through ourselves writhing restlessly and rapturously during ludo-Gothic BDSM, they become a kind of forbidden sight we can weaponize to mobilize and activate pastiche as paradoxically perceptive: to see with darkness (eyes and ears on the walls) as only demons can echo it! Switching code, we whores reclaim the church; i.e., as a conspicuous site of forbidden knowledge that, far from being empty of whores (and other demons) is positively full of them. All to speak to the faithful’s fragility (thus tendency to turn coat) in eye-catching sites of powerful orders! Power is perception, something for the desperate and eager-to-believe do so out of convenience (the promise of sex) that we can expose, thus manipulate inside its own panics. If you kill us, you will have to face the reality that we are human; i.e., as you try to pimp, police and persecute us (denial being the final stage of genocide).
In a world that canonically watches for sin and suppresses it—whose criteria for care is unrealistic—we become ready the moment we gain a voice, a valve, and ultimately a value that can discuss things by reifying them as demonic sight: a reversing of virtue and vice similar to terrorist and counterterrorist, legitimate and illegitimate or possible and impossible (or any other binary you possibly could imagine). This linguo-material reversal takes effort to synthesize, but it remains, as we shall see, playful, vital and fun. To it, building such churches of “rape” should be fun; i.e., to offend those institutions that unironically rape us. To spite any who isolate and harm us in dualistic blindness, nothing can be more holy than intimating world’s without them; i.e., where we are free of their malign influence!
Of such “secret sin,” Walpole’s Mysterious Mother (1768) described an untold tale “that art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse.” For us psycho sluts from outer spaces, it’s time to sin in public; i.e., through art in ways that expand on Walpole’s genderqueer echoing of “religious” (from Lewis’ Matilda into present-day varieties of the same spoofs, above)! A popular façade to forge anew, we aren’t slaves to quasi-medieval/religious symbols and erotic puns if we don’t fancy them (they are a bit done-to-death), but they nevertheless remain popular and productive; i.e., in overt forms to include among our holistic, Evil Cupid’s imposturous GNC quiver (we’ll consider “subtler” seemingly secular varieties when we look at Giger’s xenomorphic disguises)! Whatever the whore’s outwardly form, the state will call her exposure and witness testimony “violent,” then automatically compel/advocate for heteronormative violence against anyone humanizing the whore-as-harvest; so we, existing already as violence incarnate, must refuse to be quiet about what the state does to us every waking moment!
“Hogle argues that modern Gothic is grounded in fakery” and fake works (re: Dave West). From Walpole onwards, the Gothic predicates on encryption in ways we whores can hijack, mid-oscillation; i.e., the camping of Catholic orthodoxy through twilight “historical” documents: a paradoxically faithful ornamental approach/churchly embellishments to celebrate modern life by sarcastically aping the past. The joy of the Neo-Gothic author is being entombed in holy places to defile them, badly imitating them to deliberately rewrite history as-living-document (re: the historical Gothic tradition). Such reinvention speaks to organized religion historically organizing itself around lies, which our black mirrors can utilize to upend state monopolies/dogma; indeed, there’s never been more of it, thus a need for workers to get creative in this respect! An equal and opposite reaction, we push back; i.e., making cops recoil and scamper away from the thing the state has alienated them from, making them fetishize/fear the most: nature and sex!
When normies make, they fit in; we stand out, enacting and embodying activism through iconoclasm reinventing language where power is stored and controlled (doing so while appearing as cool things, ourselves—like spies, assassins and whores/demons hiding in plain sight: as “maidens”). Indeed, it’s our God-given right to double and camp the canon through this ghost of the counterfeit, our “secret” found documents’ gloomth-y archaeology of the future sarcastically defending Medusa from the state by reversing abjection amid public excoriation; i.e., as whorish guerillas, ironic masters of disguise covertly concealing camp as “canon” to liberate sex work (thus all workers and nature) while relieving stress. We can change the past, thus the future (commonly expressed in hauntological media as retro-future); i.e., by using our bodies as church-like mise-en-abyme (the graveyard sex of demon whores, hauntologically embellishing in medieval miracles). This is our land, something to infiltrate and reclaim from unironic missionaries passing themselves off as “locals.” When cracks start to show, we push it to the limit, using darkness visible holy hell (sex and force; violence, terror and morphological expression) to blow the lid off state power as hollow!
In doing so, our reclaimed Wisdom of the Ancients/proletarian Superstructure happens through iconoclastic art to paradoxically build trust in/with: as concentrically cryptonymic/framed, code-in-code, pornographic camouflage, and trashy (thus cheap), toe-curling mise-en-abyme (no spies, here, just whores pretending to be nuns)! Furthermore, doing so becomes something to organize and fund between workers illustrating mutual consent through rebellion as silly-serious, like Zorro; i.e., a Communist Numinous both difficult to prove but easy to spot: hiding a sword in her bosom/up her “sheath,” or her bosom as “sword-like” on its dark surface carrying its own demonic power (up the bungus)! Espionage is the romantic language of the past brought forwards to serve us, here and now! If the church is a brothel, our best revenge is fitting in to transform the church while spying inside it. Profaning Madonna to take Medusa back, we use every toy at our disposal (natural or manmade): to pass off and pervert in equal measure!
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
Medusa’s not without fans. Everyone loves sluts, especially monster mommies with knock-out assets; we want to free them (thus workers and nature) from state bondage/Original Sin (and other persecution networks, such as Orientalism). To double dogma as bad-on-purpose is to invite troubling comparison, our doing so to change power as workers utilize and perceive it, hence how it linguo—materially emerges on all registers and in all poetic forms; i.e., to alter the course of history through ourselves as things to ironically watch and learn with/thick differently about than ever before: having control over our bodies, labor, sexualities and gender identities/performances despite state insistence to the contrary! What is rigid, “pure” and dogmatic can darken, becoming loose enough to change not just shape but polarity—demonstrating those at the top as not being exempt from such poetic realities. As above, so below! In any hole! Sell your soul (and your bodies)! Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll! It’s forever a game of constant underestimation and embellishment, hiding our power on artifacts thereof: as known for both their (un)reliability and cloak-and-dagger potential, but also coded, uncanny ability to have fun with it all! Rebellion is life-or-death, playing on dogma as undead, demonic and animalistic.
The line they walk is, at times, razor-thin. Just as nuns haunt churches, whores haunt castles and the nuclear model’s imperial shadow at large—doing so in hilarious, horny showboating ways that work to our advantage, mid-prison-break; i.e., sex and force, per Gothic invention/imagination, as limitless energies that can drive any rebellion through hauntology and cryptonymy (such euphemisms combining the language of sex, danger and war, food and death, etc): churches are brothels ordained by a false fallible god, reaping paradise and caging its almighty power for greedy men (and token sell-outs loyal to profit, thus policing and raping nature-as-demonic). Keeping with venal paradox, Gothic maturity is mature when rebellion encourages universal sex positivity on a cultural level through such processes swapping state fakeries out with ours. But this, as Walpole and Lewis gleefully showed us, is often immature/campy on its face!
Power isn’t absolute; it’s an illusion that maintains its legitimacy through performative appeals, not objective reality (re: canonical essentialism). The state polices power as a language it wants to monopolize and arrange as it sees fit; i.e., of power diegetically policing itself through Capitalism Realism finger-wagging iconoclasm as “childish” and “vain,” criminal and illegitimate; e.g., American exceptionalism. So do we whores have hearts of gold (what the Ancient Egyptians called “the breath of god”); i.e., worn deliciously on our “orthodox” (unorthodox) sleeves, echoing across the centuries: to help you have a last-ditch change of heart, yourselves! Not to smite us as enemies, but embrace (and “smite”) us as human, like you! In doing so, demon power is notoriously unequal. Perhaps you’ve gotten perhaps more than you bargained for, then but will have still received a far better deal than the state would ever give you (they don’t negotiate with terrorists, which is precisely what Satan is). Such games, then, belong to our natural unalienable right to defend ourselves from the state; i.e., with it (and the bourgeoisie) as incompatible with life, with mutual consent as defined by us. There is no god; we are legion!
So no rest for the wicked! Dynamite coochie, let’s weaponize demon sex, “raw dogging” its liminalities for workers! Reclaim Catholic excess and Protestant reformation (“Methinks the lady doth protest too much!”). Raid the church for ammunition, then give ’em hell (and other puns)! Misbehave! “Rape” ironically and jizz on dogma, danger disco—doing so to take the edge off and inject the holy prim-and-proper with the wilderness of the not-so-holy! Camp the canon, then watch state anuses implode (sending their own bad-faith doubles to mingle and imitate ours)!
(artist: Mimsy)
This concludes the “religious” portion, and by extension, the demon symposium. We’ll continue unpacking this idea of “forbidden sight” more vis-à-vis the Promethean Quest (the quest for the Numinous; re: transformative, ostensibly self-destructive power), unraveling each in the next chapter!
Onto “Forbidden Sight and the Promethean Quest: Knowledge and Power Exchange (opening and part zero: a Rape Reprise)“!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!
Footnotes
[1] Nature is demonized by Cartesian forces; i.e., becoming something to fear to the point of ridicule. This includes the ultimate weapon of counterterror against occupying armies: their own fear of nature, which the elite expect them to police out of fear. They see nature as wild, hence must be raped to serve profit. Think of a twig snapping in a Vietnam jungle, one that sends the “brave” occupiers into a shooting spree with their surroundings. They think themselves invincible, but also spook easy. This also happens at home, during military urbanism; e.g., acorns, as this Florida deputy discovered (The Guardian’s “US Officer Fired at Handcuffed Man in SUV After Mistaking Acorn for Gunshot,” 2024).
Demons generally aren’t tied to the land, undead are. Except demons are tied to a Cartesian othering which demonizes nature and conjures it up; i.e., as a curse of “the past” to attack the inhabitants of a settler colony from within; e.g., animals, Pagans, and ritual sacrifice being of “somewhere else”: as within an unheimlich according to a forged division of sovereignty whose “historical” counterfeits remain haunted by the ghosts of actual atrocities (re: Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection). Viewed as “past,” state forces abject systemic abuse, then and now, to an imaginary place dug back up: demonic dead.
To that, Sam Raimi’s titular Evil Dead (1981, onwards) possess self-styled “civilized” persons on home turf with a spirit of childlike black revenge; i.e., one that mortifies the flesh (a melding of torture and rot) according to a demon of nature-as-undead, of Cartesian enemies ferried into the present through Gothic reinvention. It’s Capitalist Realism suspended through Gothic animations—of various stolen myths, language, and monsters. The pact is the colonizer’s; i.e., with a world they are born into as inherited according to a system that distracts, overwhelms and confuses them. Like Evil Dead, it’s paradoxical: silly and serious, inside-outside, secular and superstitious, fearful and fascinating (re: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness [1899] and racist fascination with the abomination).
Moreover, such power cannot be killed, only used for specific aims; re: “Bushnell’s Requiem“; e.g., Victor Frankenstein, the Cartesian man of science, is hunted by the ghosts of the dead he stitches together from clay/things he disinterred from the dark earth of Germany and calls “demon” (something to fear and enslave). Except, he made what he feared to maintain his own sense of power according to the land around him. We can reverse all of that to serve our own aims; i.e., dismantling the state versus it conjuring us up, Radcliffe-style, before ripping us apart to serve profit.
[2] Gentrifying war in D&D cartographic refrains, but also demons and evil nature canonized by him: orcs, Balrogs, Dark Lords, previous Rings of Power (the pure Three standing in for the Holy Trinity versus the others as less as less pure, good, and correct) and giving of gifts. We’ll revisit Tolkien some more, moving forwards. To those interested, though, my PhD explores his refrains at length, and Volume One his BDSM expressed pointedly through vampire and the giving of rings.
[3] I.e., graveyard sex in “ancient” mighty ways; e.g., Capcom’s Menat, below, as a catgirl and mummy (with cats being holy guardians of the Ancient Egyptian underworld, and mummies generally being important figures wealthy enough to have tombs, thus leave their legacy behind, preserved into the afterlife). Such antiquated abjections’ imaginary forms work similar to European progressions; i.e., merging sex, rapture, sacrifice and death into comparable spaces/bodies “from elsewhere”: as, to some extent, dating back to Biblical times and Ancient Egypt, but generally reimagined to a hauntological degree. In short, it’s a gimmick, and a lucrative one; i.e., calculated risk to uphold the status quo during Capitalism in decay, middle-class predation and tokenism! Our liberation reverses these pimp-like devices, giving “ancient” power back to whores! No gods, no masters! Just sluts of darkness owning the means of shadowy production. Dark Pharaoh mommy pussy a kind of “mil spec,” power and darkness assume many forms!
(artist Reiq)
[4] L.A. Beast’s “Best of The Worst (Failed Video Ideas),” (2024); timestamp: 11:48.
[5] For more work on predator and prey per Amazons and knights, refer to my chapter from Volume One, “An Uphill Battle, part one: ‘Predators and Prey,’ or Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy and the State’s Medieval Monopolies on Violence and Terror through Animalized Morphological Expression.”
[6] An effect shared with other videogames we’ve examined, like Metroid and Castlevania as giving the hero, per Cartesian thought, quantifiable means of mapping and destroying a built world; i.e., with a numbered, arcade-style element per what can be taken from the world and absorbed into the hero, or thrust by the hero into the world—a health bar and ammo counter as they kill the state’s demonic enemies in vampiric fashion.
[7] There’s a mix-and-match, conglomerate quality to Gothic that’s nearly as old as monsters, kayfabe, theatre, dolls, and combat itself (we won’t have time to do more that flirt with the idea, but my PhD discusses it at length; for a fun, shorter example, consider Napoleon Blownapart’s “A Brief History of Freakshow Fighting,” 2023).
[8] I.e., Bill Gates syndrome, such privilege having fascist components when the punk elements, if ever they even existed, decay into pro-state forms playing the rebel/victim; e.g., Tool’s Maynard James Keenan (from Volume Two, part one):
capitalizing on being a cynic, as Maynard from Tool does in “Ænema” (1996) should be wholly discouraged:
Some say the end is near
Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon
I certainly hope we will
I sure could use a vacation from this (source: Genius)
This is fascist rhetoric delivered by white priviliged men, seeing the “end times” as a “vacation” that is anything but a natural disaster (though Capitalism profits off manmade interference assisting in so-called “natural disasters”); it’s an apocalypse to shoot “zombies” with until things “go back to normal.” Except they won’t during state shift, and the fascists and moderates will eat each other (unable to farm or tend the land around them, much like the original American colonists/so-called “Pioneers” were unable to). The only imbeciles who would say this is a self-centered cunt who paradoxically thinks it doesn’t apply to them; i.e., a white boy’s charmed life posturing as doomsayer and preacher cashing in on their own Kool-Aid to sell to the kiddies (source).
It’s white people disease, specifically that of violent, disingenuous white boys who never quite grow up, save to kill state enemies in their own victimized hero complexes. It’s not just dumb for its own sake (re: “Army of Darkness: Valorizing the Idiot Hero,” 2020), but complicit in the face of genocide; i.e., as something to turn your back on and blind eyes towards while raking in money through the usual mechanisms geared towards weird canonical nerds to begin with (a concept we’ll unpack in Volume Three when we critique said nerds). There is no win condition, just necrometrics and lies committed by whitey playing the victim time and time again. Until then, it’s business-as-usual, shutting anyone out who doesn’t conform/toe the line.
I’m speaking from experience here; i.e., I used to work with white cis-het male streamers in my different interview series about Doom and FPS in general; e.g., the “Hell-Blazers” series (2020) with Byte Me, Under the Mayo, Your Mate Devo and others. However, the moment I began to research the games these men played in ways that critiqued them in a genderqueer/postcolonial manner (as I slowly left the closet and challenged Capitalism in the process), they ghosted me. It was as though a cone of silence, an omerta, had been enacted upon me when I said the quiet part out loud (from a now-defunct 2020 piece, “Postcolonialism in Doom,” featured on Marilyn Roxie’s also-defunct blog, Video Hookups):
Like Ripley, the Slayer unwillingly serves a powerful, corporate employer—in his case the slippery Dr. Hayden, head of the UAC corporation. Faced with an energy crisis “the world had no answer for,” Hayden has colonized Hell to harvest its energy. Who inhabits this unlucky 4th world? Demons, of course—monsters, whose only purpose is to be slain. Of course, it’s entirely possible to see the demons of 2016/2020 as an extension of their 1993 forebears: heavy metal piñatas. Smash them; have fun. However, it’s hardly the sole interpretation, even if the makers intended otherwise. It’s even possible for the player to see his enemies in-game as piñatas, but for this to reflect a parallel viewpoint held by him outside of the game.
In this video at AGDQ for example, the livestreamer Byte Me pauses Doom 2016 to thank United States military members for their service. When I heard this, I found myself unable to view his words as neutral praise; an army has orders, after all. This remains true despite AGDQ being a charity fund-raiser where Doom is just another game being played to generate cash. Soldiers, or people who support them, still play Doom to revel in its slaughter and jingoistic camaraderie. It might pale against the reality of military service, but it still reflects said service through a videogame made for a larger audience. Not all members of this audience are soldiers, but those who are can revel in the game for their own reasons.
Perhaps it’s better for those who benefit from Doom Eternal’s gregarious qualities to avoid having it stamped as a military recruiting tool, a la America’s Army: Proving Grounds (2015). Even if Doom Eternal wasn’t built strictly as a recruiting tool, its imagery can, at the very least, be adopted laterally for this purpose. People with similar views can arguably flock to the same banner and say it belongs to them, not unlike a national flag. Already there’s a sense of division, wherein someone like myself who enjoys Doom feels divided from its more warlike customers. I’m against war, so politically we’re already of two opposing camps going in. Doom is still being marketed to a larger, heterogenous group: the old-school shooter crowd. Not all shooters shoot things in real life, but when gamers openly support the military “slaying demons” around the globe, the door for postcolonialism gets thrown wider than the gates of hell (source [repost]: “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning”).
This cold shoulder extended to anyone in the industry—from John Romero to Nick Newhard (the former whose wife answered my emails but never followed up, the latter who acted interested until I mentioned my left-leaning political lens).
A similar thing happened with British Brat, who expressed an interest in being interviewed… until I mentioned my genderqueer politics. Like Byte Me, Brat is a military man and acted friendly to my face (as white moderates generally will do), but ceased all contact the moment he released I was who I was: queer and against war in videogames—in short, an encapsulation of Gamergate attacking anyone who isn’t “neutral/apolitical” by icing them out; i.e., segregating dissidents to enforce said neutrality in service to profit. It becomes all about them—their music, their toys, their guns, their land—taking it all for granted as Man Box thinking enslaves them to the same-old cruel grind; i.e., violence always being the solution, graduating from kiddie violence to grown-up forms per soldier, per generation.
[9] E.g., Clerks 2 (2006): “There’s only one “Return” and it’s not of the King, it’s of the Jedi!” A cop’s a cop, Kevin Smith (also, you’re a giant homophobe and Mark Hamill’s a Zionist cunt, regardless of how he plays out in your stupid He-man reboot).
[10] The show is highly regimented/militarized—so much so that it’s hardly a surprise to see the ways its “gargoyle mil spec” plays out; i.e., through bodies that can assume any material, color and shape, but also the power-as-performance that comes with them. Always to some degree, essentialized, this happens in ways that can be played with, thus entertained and/or challenged in-text and out (so-called “head canon”): through different roles/positions of power and status borrowed from older forms; i.e., from play without shifting shape, or shifting shape merged with said play as a half-real game that juggles power and positions of power between multiple parties and stages, or even across several cartoons in and out of real life; re (from the Undead Module’s “Playing with Dolls to Express One’s Feeling Undead,” 2024):
(exhibit 38c1b: Artist: Boner Bob [amazing]. Heteronormativity frames anything beyond PIV sex as alien, thus worthy of attack. Meanwhile, the idea of the hero’s reward after emerging from the Abyss during the monomyth is both conversion therapy and compelled love that promises them PIV sex after killing the monstrous-feminine [e.g., Jung’s female chaos dragon] as part of a normalized cycle of queer, thus Gothic-Communist repression.
In truth, the descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation of gender-nonconforming relationships presents the group as a negotiated affair that isn’t divorced from sexual desire as doll-like; it merely conducts it ironically in relation to the status quo’s harmful standards. In other words, the monomyth—as we have discussed a fair bit already—is a highly prescriptive and harmful device and needs to be challenged; i.e., by going into the abyss of gender-non-conforming lovemaking and modes of relation that allow for all parties to exist through reclaimed implements of shame, hatred and domination; e.g., Scott Pilgrim [above] as “made queer” through camp: in ways that highlight its queer potential, which also applies to Steven Universe [next page] as more overtly doll-like, thanks to a steady reliance on the golem myth.
Beyond children’s stories or cartoons, though, the same basic idea applies to more overtly “goth” poetics; e.g., like Rob Halford’s “Isle of Domination” or some similar genderqueer zone; i.e., occupied not by “the Ripper” as a queer-coded gay man in xenophobic canon but a sex-positive example of the gay party animal/favor as a twink-style sex doll: the usual object of total annihilation that isn’t taken literally as a matter of psychosexual performance. Such irony reclaims the harmful imagery of the death fetish and its associate, doll-like tortures and sodomy—doing so for the better of society at large by progressing away from their historically unironic usage. Often, this sits on the cusp of actual exploitation, the harm it presents as always adjacent to a given performance as made to heal from feelings of inadequacy that seek out domination as a matter of interpersonal bonding through BDSM:
[artist: Doxy Doo. Their 2015 “Gem Dom” comic of Steven Universe elides the “futanari” hentai genre (the feminine body with a penis) within the broader Amazonomachia of the militarized BDSM scenario. The liminality of the scene evokes the “prison sex” culture of dominance and Spartan-esque culture of war (which has a pedophilic history to it) as overshadowing a means of doll-like catharsis: the golem. Its legitimacy of violence, terror and sexuality is of the state versus workers seeking sex-positive subversions of the former operating through various BDSM/theatrical tropes: the phallic woman (of color, in this case; i.e., the Medusa) and the non-white goblin taming our white “shrew” (note the long nose) through stereotypical discipline-and-punish exercises: overpowering through brawn, verbal commands, degradation, hyperbolic/painful sex and/or double-penetration, bukkake, collars and bondage, open mouths eagerly and obediently awaiting their reward.
Within a military culture and centrist framework, the idea isn’t far removed from its historical counterpart as unironically abusive, being a forbidden sexual outlet/guilty pleasure whose predatory interplay between superior officers and subordinates would have been a historical reality (and one whose inversion within tokenized, girl boss bureaucracies would emulate their male counterparts under Capitalism).]
Catharsis, post-rape, always walks a borderline [the victim is always afraid of future abuse, thus relies on calculated risk to release tension by emulating rape up to a point]. There’s clearly room to perform this irony further than the centrist, post-fascist overtures in Steven Universe. But doing so requires actively using ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., to make an earnest interrogation of the dialectical-material role—the context—of everyone beyond mere wish fulfillment/the novelty of golems ambiguously bullying one another for the Maze Gaze [which under centrist circles extends to tokenized queer people “acting like men”]. The danger of the sadist is always the advertised lack of compunction making them a frankly good dom, but also someone who can just as easily take advantage in ways that reduce the individual they control to putty in their hands [source].
Capital and its systemic abuses create strange appetites, requiring workers wanting to field said appetites to work within power as a language; i.e., to critique its harmful generational effects on us by playing with it ourselves. To critique power-as-demonic, you must go where it is, generally by making fetishes of it that you can play with; i.e., doubles standing in for us as demons do, expressed as dolls but also through doll-like games played with people as dollish, thus demonic.
First, even without changing anyone’s bodies, the likes of Scott Pilgrim have near-endless ludic potential; i.e., in terms of who is on top/the bottom, the dom/sub, and the activities and duties portrayed that everyone arbitrates/agrees to. Second, the corporal uniforms of demons like Pearl or Garnet take on a variety of physical shapes, sizes and sex organs, but also BDSM roleplay tied to said morphologies and associate ludo-Gothic freedoms. This arbitrates according to preference, allowing for endless morphological/poetic expression tied to ludic expression in classic demonic forms: actual or figurative golems doing BDSM for the purposes of expressing and playing with power to heal from power abuse; i.e., “What we get to do within the rules and roles we reify outside of state forms!” Demons are clay and can be as strong or shapely as you like:
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
The only limits that exist are those our imaginations already have, which can be imposed on us through Capitalist Realism (and its notions of false power), or rejected and challenged by iconoclastic forms playing with toys/toy-like things for liberatory and ironically cathartic means.
[11] Faustian bargains are one-way and express in game theory as “zero-sum.” Implements of trickery aside, they harm one person to benefit another as receiving all of that person’s power. Faust, by the end of the bargain, is completely disempowered and—in Marlowe’s version, at least—pulled limb from limb (a gruesome fate that would play out through Clive Barker tearing the villain from Hellraiser to pieces with hooks and chains).
[12] E.g., Uriah Heep’s “Rainbow Demon” (1972).
[13] “This gal suggested… maybe I should have some attentions paid to my butt’s hole!” (Letterkenny’s “It’s Impolite to Kiss and Tell,” 2016).
So often, cis-het men are afraid of non-normative sex, but want it anyways; re: virgin/whore syndrome; i.e., getting it from those who are more used to being treated as sex objects/advertisement props: women (or those forced to identify as/act like women). Framed as “closer” to nature all its forms, and routinely sold under capital as such, women both a) live on the fetishized and cliché, “wild side” of things, and b) appear as chaste maidens or ordinary people (the “angel in the streets, freak in the sheets” paradox). Cryptonymy is something to enact all of these things with; i.e., it becomes a game of show-and-conceal, repressed agents speaking to what they normally mark as swallowed by Gothic’s usual vanishing points: castles, whores and other such event horizons. “On the ashes of something not quite present,” we demon sluts become ghosts in spectral castles that come and go like dreams, the latter dictated by socio-material turbulence!
For example, I once worked with someone from Norway who was making a graphic novel: about a redhead named Madikken (reillustrated by me, below). The story concerned the original author’s closeted sex fantasies, which they wanted to celebrate and bury in the same breath. As such, the “vanishing point” was in full effect, here; i.e., the closer the author got to the sex scene, the less detailed it became! The color all but vanished from the pages’ pastoral scenes, and the quality of the art disappeared as well. I could see their shame unfold in this respect; i.e., clearly embarrassed by their own desires, the author closeted them mid-novel on account that they were basically MAGA in that part of the world (they loved Trump and Gamergate was in vogue)!
Out-of-text, this had a censoring effect on the actual book, as well. We originally published the novel in 2016, only to have them scrap it/the main character entirely. Except, entropy needn’t be a censoring force. Picking up the pieces, I took Madikken and won her in a legal dispute, putting her squarely out of the closet! For me, Madikken’s strong and out there—having an ass and body that don’t quit. She puts in work and is proud of it!
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
[14] Such erasure is impossible. For one, language is always haunted by echoes of trauma; re: palimpsests and cryptomimesis. Furthermore, the state cannot afford to completely erase monsters, because profit requires them to move money through nature. God needs Satan to justify his empire.
[15] As Nick Groom writes (from the Oxford World’s Classics of The Italian, 2017):
Ann Radcliffe may have not been a revolutionary, but her work is far from being conservative—she repeatedly tested the boundaries of orthodoxy at a time of revolutionary foment. This may explain why everything is under scrutiny in The Italian. It is a novel suffused with secrets and mysteries, and pervaded by scrutiny, examination, and interrogation. […] It looks forward to a society in which order is enforced by institutions keeping individuals under perpetual surveillance. As such, The Italian [is] very much a novel for the twenty-first century.
So often, play is couched within abuse (or vice versa), concealing itself as “just games.” We’ll return to Radcliffe and Groom deeper in the module; suffice to say, she wrote her stories in the wake of the French Revolution and before women could legally own property. In doing so, she helped provide unique perspective through Gothic fiction, speaking to state abuse and control felt then and now in and out of such stories.
[16] We’ve already discussed the chimeric, “ancient” qualities of the xenomorph in the Undead Module (e.g., the tokophobic, queerphobic, and racist elements to the monster); but will return to examine it even more moving forwards (especially tokenism/witch cops attacking nature, in “Derelicts, Medusa and Giger’s Xenomorph“).
[17] Arguably a Protestant ethic pun as much as insectoid life-cycle metaphor.
