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Books on Saturn by reputable astrologers, like Charles Obert’s Between Time and Eternity: Saturn Through the Ages, make no reference whatsoever to a “cube” as recently as 2019. The anti-Semitically coded association of Saturn with the Jews, on the other hand, dates at least as far back as the Arab astrologer al-Biruni in the 10^th century AD, and is the subject of an impressive academic study, Saturn’s Jews by Moshe Idel, in which the word “cube” likewise does not appear. That of Saturn with Satan emerges in the Theosophical astrology of Llewelyn George in 1910. The sphere of Saturn is represented as a cube in Johannes Kepler’s Mysterium Cosmographicum, where the planetary orbits are depicted as a series of nesting Platonic solids, but this is neither traditional astrology nor scientific astronomy, rather a unique and contingent meeting between the two on the precipice of the Copernican revolution via the mediation of neoplatonism.

And yet real-life occult practitioners have even started to adopt the black cube symbolism, as in Arthur Moros’ Saturnian grimoire The Cult of the Black Cube. Moros claims to trace it back to the Arabic astrological classic, the Picatrix, but his case is unconvincing: the Picatrix assigns magical names to six directions to invoke Saturn, and every other planet; it also mentions the symbol of a black stone, which will become important to this story, but isn’t automatically a cube. Moros seems to be transvaluating the memetic vision of the cubic demiurge for a left-hand-path audience, where Saturn is a fragment of the primordial chaos confined to a cubic prison, simultaneously resenting the ordered cosmos and keeping it in its order. But a revaluation of Saturn has been underway for a while in several dimensions of the occult sphere, not just the left-hand path, including the very press that offered to publish this. This new, conspiritual popular understanding of Saturn has been evolving in parallel, with little serious contact between the two conflicting interpretations to date. Saturn’s demiurgic identification at least has some traditional basis; the cluster of images around the black cube, however, is too specific to be reduced to it. Is it just a meme, a simulacrum, Instagram pages and YouTubers copying each other, or is there, as they all claim, some ancient basis for this symbol? I’ve been hunting down an answer for a decade, if only because I really didn’t want it to be what I thought it was.

i. Idle Hands, False Prophet

When I first started encountering unattributed claims about a “Black Cube of Saturn”, I was familiar with them from exactly one place. That was a creepypasta-style document hosted on Hubpages, made up of a mix of interview fragments and 4chan screenshots, by an otherwise phantom author named “Tarah Arahso”, called Trail of Deceit. I discovered it on 4chan’s /x/, where it was quickly becoming board lore; it stuck with me not because I believed it but because it seemed to have some of the evocative, fragmentary literary qualities of a Borges or Pynchon experiment. A year later, seeing the symbolism of this strange little story I had latched onto for purely personal reasons suddenly getting rewritten, with movie-trailer production values, on anonymous Youtube conspiracy channels with hundreds of thousands of views made me feel like I was going crazy – just one of a few things that did during the nightmarish lurch from 2014 to 2016, and again in 2020.

Trail of Deceit has since been written up and recapped in various Youtube videos and podcasts, as well as turned into an AI-generated metal concept album; it’s somewhere in the middle of the memetic iceberg for connoisseurs of internet legend and ARGs. The basic premise is that the speaker, Tarah, was at one point part of a friend group of drug-using underground artists and amateur occultists living in post-industrial squats in North London, centred on a man named Frank Webster. She couldn’t follow much of their occult interests, but they involved “an archetype linked to the planet Saturn and this symbolism of death and divorce as a part of life”, contacting parallel dimensions and an alleged grimoire called “The Book of the Lock and the Key”. Their actual activities revolved around recruiting “idle hands” for a publication called “The False Prophet” through various websites – using what appeared to be involuntary initiation tactics, such as sending applicants to false addresses or hiring them to harass other applicants, which increased their notoriety and brought them to the attention of 4chan – and to paint an idiosyncratic set of sigils, with names like “key”, “comm-link”, “mind-spider” and “player”, on specific types of buildings (e.g. “comm-link” on “post offices and communication centres”) as “portals”. Chaos Magick News, responding to Youtube coverage of the story, helpfully pointed out that this methodology was very similar to late-2000s Discordian-adjacent groups like the DKMU. Both activities, and the cult’s drug use, intensified in the lead-up to 2012 Mayan calendar apocalypse, and like other responses to the supposed world-historical deadline eventually cracked under the pressure: Frank and his closest lieutenants came to believe they were in a time war with another cult, and Frank disappeared at least to Tarah and her real-life acquaintances, last seen at a rave talking to a rabbit. The story could have ended there, if 4chan hadn’t gotten involved.

The Black Cube doesn’t even come up in the imagery of the original “cult” until its afterlife on 4chan. “Voices of /x/“, a collective synchronicity journal by participants on the /x/ - Paranormal board, described by a Redditor as a “human ouija board”, reported patterns including cubes, blood moons and black suns, as well as the phrase “the ghost in the machine points to the false prophet”. This was connected to the False Prophet magazine and thus the “cult of Saturn”, though it could just as easily be read as an uncanny anticipation of the Trump-worshipping “meme magic” that would take hold on the same website a few years later. Cubes were already primed into the unconscious of the experiment: the earliest threads, in 2012, used a Rubik’s cube-like logo. And these specifically 3x3 cubes were reflected in a type of image that would often be posted in the threads, as well as produced by the 4chan “branch” of the “cult”, which from 2012-2014 – roughly the duration of active Voices of /x/ threads – ran a “False Prophet” Tumblr, as well as an “/x/ Radio” Skype channel and a Flockmod drawing room. They called these tiled squares of 9 esoterically related images “Zeners”, a type of diode that allows electricity to switch direction in a circuit.

The “Zeners” preserved on the Tumblr show the most complete early set of core signifiers of the modern Cube mythos, distilled to a free-floating set of associations that can “switch”, like a zener diode, in any direction independently of linear logic sequence. The most recognizable features a hexagram sigil of Baphomet, the hexagonal storm at Saturn’s pole, a hexagram mapped to the storm, a black “Magen David”-style hexagram, the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, and the Eye of Horus. Others add the planetary sigil of Saturn, the Hellraiser cube, the Metatron Cube, tefillin, and the Rubik’s Cube-esque house from the posters for Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods. Later Zeners feature a seemingly arbitrary array of political, occult and pop cultural imagery, including such standbys as Alice and Dorothy, the red and blue pills, swastikas, Anonymous masks and symbols of China and the Illuminati, though there are a number of historically interesting recurring motifs: an inverted candle captioned “Endarkenment”, a Golden Dawn-style Greek meander on a rainbow flag, and a figure labelled “the Hidden Nexialist”. (Cells of the Order of Nine Angles, often embedded within other movements and organizations, are called “Nexions”.)

In chatlogs from the Skype channel shared on the Tumblr, “Frank” shows little more than a beginner’s knowledge of Saturnian mysticism. Hedging frequently – “Satan means enemy or something in Judaism” – when asked about the Satanic connection, he says it’s “mostly a coincidence that they sound the same”. Interestingly, while connecting Saturn to the Sumerian god El, he associates “Jehovah” with “Jupiter” – whose “wife was Juno, the queen of money”, so “Jupiter basically ruled through a tyranny of money power. Then the Age of Aquarius is meant to be a Saturnian age… If you buy into all that crap”. Frank, apparently, didn’t buy into it himself, thinking “we are post gods”, but that Saturn “as a planet” seemed like a perfect symbol to “reverse the greed”. What would exactly reverse would be the valence of the Saturn symbolism he pioneered, with “Saturn worship” becoming seen as the “religion of the elites” and the Black Cube representing the “tyranny of money power” itself!

The “Frank” in these chats, however, was likely not the real Frank Webster, if he existed. Other /x/ users suspected him at the time of being Gwyn D. Earl, an Australian who Tarah Arahso remembers visiting their London compound as part of the Cult’s “new wave”, bringing in more “generic creative types”. Earl now openly capitalizes on the mythology of the Cult under his real name as a member of BlackLab Studios, an arts collective that has produced a novel about Frank Webster, an “official” version of the Book of the Key and Lock (going for $1000, now sold out), and an unreleased horror movie, as well as AI-generated comics and creepypasta audio dramas. (The name refers to a conspiratorial tangent in Trail of Deceit, an /x/ thread alleging a mysterious firm called “Black Lab” conducting synchronicity research for the US military.) BlackLab did not respond to a request for comment.

This nonetheless leaves us with a paucity of information about what either Earl, other members of the “Cult”, or the real Frank Webster might have been reading or practicing to inform the cluster of associations in the Zeners. I’ve been following this trail of deceit long enough, however, that I can make some educated guesses:

ii. Cain’s City, Enoch’s Ark

In the same year, the “Long” 2014, Tracy R. Twyman published a postmortem for her own occult order, the Ordo Lapsit Exillis. Like Arahso’s, Twyman’s story would reframe what at the time seemed like the chaotic dabblings of an unstable friend group as part of a deeply sinister design. Unlike the “Cult of Saturn”, however, the Ordo Lapsit Exillis had, at least for a time, indisputable reach beyond the depths of 4chan. They were the publishers of Dagobert’s Revenge, an influential zine dedicated to researching the “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” mythos, which also featured interviews with occult-oriented artists and musicians. Infamous industrial provocateur Boyd Rice was a member of the order and co-publisher. Their goal was “to explode a “Grail bomb” in the mind of the masses”. Considering The Da Vinci Code came out six years after they began publishing – mainstreaming “conspirituality” to a degree whose implications have still not been fully reckoned with – they were more successful than… well, their wildest dreams were pretty wild.

“Ordo Lapsit Exillis” refers to the lapis lapsit exillis, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s interpretation of the Holy Grail as a “stone that fell from heaven”; Dagobert’s Revenge refers to Dagobert II, last of the major Merovingian kings, the dynasty supposedly descended from Christ and Mary Magdalene (and leading, somehow, to that white dreads guy in Matrix:Revelations). He was assassinated in 679 in the town of Stenay, which takes its name from a temple of Saturn, and in the Middle Ages went through a number of transformations including “Sathaniacum” and “Satanay”. These Saturnian/Satanic resonances were significant to Twyman, whose distinct take on the “sang real” idea was that the sacred bloodline didn’t start with Jesus; he was just an unusually pure specimen of a legacy going back to the first god-king on Earth, known in the Bible as Cain, and among other names, as Saturn and Satan. While the Saturn/Satan connection has precedent, Twyman was certainly one of its popularizers. The catch is, at least when she was editing Dagobert’s Revenge, she also thought Saturn/Satan was the good guy, illegitimately usurped by his son Abel/Baal/Jehovah/Jupiter, the demiurge who caused the Flood and destroyed Atlantis in an attempt to destroy both his ancestor and humanity.

Like Voices of /x/, Twyman and the editors of Dagobert’s Revenge (her husband Brian Albert and collaborator Boyd Rice) attempted to contact this being by Ouija board. The stylistic variation and personality, unpredictability and humour (at one point Baphomet diagnoses Boyd with the curse “DRINK” and prescribes the remedy “SELL MORE RECORDS”) of the conversations recorded in Clock Shavings is enough for me to regard them as at least somewhat magickally authentic (and worth reading even if you’re a skeptic). Cain identifies himself with the “Black Sun”, reports on the shape of his prison as a “PRISM”, and provides details of an ancient ancestor of chess, called “Ageio”, which was supposedly used for divination, attracting wealth, and simulating a ritual royal sacrifice. The object of the game is to capture a “second square” within the larger square of the board. This “square within a square” suggests a mathematical cube, especially when combined with the other details. In her final analysis, Twyman concludes that the “Land of Nod” to which Cain was banished and the city of Enoch which he built are in fact the same astral location: a cubic dimension whose prisoners are projected on its surface, watched by the panoptic “All-Seeing Eye” inside the “Second Square”.

Of course there is already a cubic dimension/city in Abrahamic esotericism: the New Jerusalem, the paradisal throne-realm reached in a cubic “chariot” by another Enoch, the prophet who becomes the Metatron. Thus, Twyman reasoned, there must be two analogous metaphysical “cubes”, a White and a Black cube, Heaven and Hell. Both cubes are “alchemical arks” capable of surviving in the undifferentiated chaos of the primordial waters, as represented in the story of Utnapishtim, the Sumerian Noah, who built his ark in the shape of an exact cube. Here we see a coherent connection to mainstream occult doctrines: the correspondence between Saturn and Da’ath, the still point of refuge in the Abyss. At the end of time, Twyman postulated, or under the right ritual conditions, the two cubes and the Earth will overlap, and the Hell cube could attempt to “capture” the heavenly one. Extrapolating the full apocalyptic implications of such an event – which could imprison us on Earth in the Hell cube as well – turned her against the Saturnian current she had been following up to this point.

The Saturn/Cain equivalence she pioneered would go on to become very influential in Left Hand Path currents more comfortable with immanentizing the eschaton, such as Shahin Khoshnood’s Liber Falxifer (Falcifer is given as an obscure name of Saturn as early as William Lilly’s 1647 Christian Astrology). But here, too, the cube connection runs dry until Moros. The cube appears in Twyman’s earlier work sparingly, mainly as a symbol of the Grail stone, which has both “white” and “black” forms, but whose shape is never consistently specified (though when one is associated, it is the cube). Nor is the word ‘CUBE’ used verbatim in any of the Ouija channellings. Twyman, like Dagobert, died under suspicious circumstances. After becoming disillusioned with the fellow travellers she believed had tried to trick her into destroying the world, she started to investigate their symbolism in connection to world elites and child abuse rituals, and was corresponding closely with QAnon celebrities like Isaac Kappy when she died by “suicide” after driving out to investigate what she believed to be a trafficking hub in an Arizona campsite.

Twyman was an esoteric omnivore and extremely online, so it’s not impossible that by the time she was completing Clock Shavings, she was herself following the “Voices of /x/“ experiment and mapping its results to her own findings (as she was on /pol/ when QAnon first appeared). Yet Twyman’s Saturnian-conspiratorial turn first manifested in 2011, in lesser-known publications Money Grows On The Tree of Knowledge and Regnum in Potentia: Saturn’s Kingdom Transformed Into the Golden Age. This was the same timeframe that the original “Cult of Saturn” was allegedly most active, but well before their memes had filtered onto the open internet, even 4chan. Both only mention the cube as the ark, without specifying its colour, or identifying it with Tartarus; however, both also introduce an important element of the mythos, Saturn-as-Pluto, secret ruler of finance; a system that can be described by the alchemical formula of “Saturn reaping Mercury”, the old harvesting fixed value from the captive vitality of the young.

It wouldn’t be impossible for someone else reading these or even her earlier work to come to the same conclusions she did a couple years later. Twyman’s tendency, for better and worse, was always to equate everything with everything: the already-present Biblical ambiguity between “Ark” as the vessel of the flood and the prismic container of the presence of God combines with the equation of the Grail Stone, the Black Sun, the tomb of Osiris or Kronos, the alchemical Cave of Treasures and the castle of the Fisher King to merge associatively into the ultimate “container” of Saturn’s lost power, which would naturally take the geometric shape most potently associated with divine containers in the Western esoteric tradition. The structure of the story in its ultimate rudiments is remarkably similar to Moros’, except without the anticosmic gloss of the original ruler as “chaos”. The grail seeker’s “right question”, then, might be if anyone else put these pieces together before she did.

iii. Hamlet’s Mill, Ninurta’s Star

Paradoxically for the planet of old age and primordial aeons, Saturn is in some ways the most modern of the planetary archons or spheres (assuming the primary seven). His rings were not recognized until Galileo, and then as moons or ears, not in their true shape until Huysmans. The hexagonal storm of which the Cube mythos has made so much significance was not seen until the 1979-80 Voyager flyby. Saturn keeps secrets – from before the Earth became our privileged frame of reference. Seeing the photos from that flyby for the first time, Canadian indie comic prodigy turned pan-Abrahamic radical anti-feminist Dave Sim reported hearing a “voice in his head that was not his own”: “Saturn’s saying hello to the DNA.” Saturn would later figure in his comic as the site of a confrontation with the matriarchal villain Cirin, whose overpowering psychic voice – penetrating the mind of not only the protagonist but the author in the comic – was represented as black square filling the page. In the same year, a “Council of Saturn” appeared in the channeled “RA Material” (I could elaborate on the Saturn/Ra connection via Sun Ra but then we’d be here all day), deciding which interstellar and interdimensional beings could access and intervene in “3D Earth”.

The immediately preceding 60s and 70s, the time of space race and counterculture, both precipitated a revival of astrology and planetary mysticism and made the modern reorganization of the solar system more inescapable than ever. In many cases pseudoscience and pseudohistory rushed in to bridge the gap. One of the most influential examples of such was Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds In Collision (written in 1950, but revived in the counterculture decades later), which posited that the planets had changed places several times in the history of the solar system. Velikovsky often used interpretations of myth and esotericism as “evidence” for his theories, which also would allow the hexagonal storm to have been visible with the naked eye from Earth during “Saturn’s Reign”, a period during which he believed the Earth was physically a satellite of Saturn. But Velikovsky’s “Saturn Theory” didn’t make it into Worlds In Collision; he alluded to it throughout his life, and until it was published posthumously in 2020, became a kind of Holy Grail for his followers to attempt to reconstruct. David N. Talbott’s The Saturn Myth is perhaps the most popular attempt, and while it anticipates a number of Twyman’s connections such as the four rivers of Eden, its geometrical preoccupation is reclaiming the solar quartered circle, and ignores the cube.

The followers of Velikovsky (at one point publishing a journal named Kronos) scoured any and all works of unorthodox planetary mythography for clues to the Earth’s catastrophic history. One of these was Hamlet’s Mill, by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend. I will refer to Von Dechend as the author rather than the more famous Santillana as the introduction of the book makes clear that the theories were largely her own, Santillana the more academically established amanuensis. Hamlet’s Mill attempted to reframe the sacrificial kingship and succession myths that were at the time conventionally understood, following Frazer and Graves, in terms of agricultural fertility as elaborate astronomical metaphors, particularly focused on explaining the precession of the equinox. For the ancients, she argued, the obliquity of the ecliptic established not only the longest astronomical cycle, but the fundamental disharmony between the fixed stars and the moving planets; “the separation of the parents of the world” became “the establishment of measurable time”, the fall into Becoming from Being. As the closest of the visible planets to the fixed stars and the separator of Ouranos and Gaia, Saturn played an all-important role in this cosmology.

Claiming this as a universal mythic structure, Dechend equated Saturn with a vast array of mythical figures even from outside the Near Eastern-Mediterranean syncretic zone on which Western esotericism draws, from Ptah to Zurvan to the Chinese Yellow Emperor, Huang-Ti. In all he was a form of Demiurge or craftsman-god – the “Deus Faber”. She also links Utnapishtim’s cubic ark, the “Foundation Stone” in the Temple of Jerusalem, and the Black Stone in the Ka’aba – all components of Twyman’s symbolic nexus – to the Flood which represents the overturn of one equinoctial age by another. In doing so she cites an even earlier work, Hildegard Lewy’s 1950 academic article “The Origin and Significance of the Magen David”.

Lewy does not equivocate Saturn with Yahweh, as many later (and earlier) sources would do; rather she hypothesizes that Saturn was one of the polytheistic deities worshipped by the early Hebrews, whose symbology persists in both the Magen David and the Menorah, which were found in contemporaneous Assyrian iconography alongside other planetary symbols. She suggests that Ninurta, the Assyrian Saturn, was the patron deity of pre-Israelite Jerusalem based on its etymology and the divine attribution of the word salim, and that the Solomonic Temple itself may have been originally dedicated to this deity. Of the writers discussed in this article Lewy’s methodology is the least fringe, though she problematically mixes medieval and ancient sources, and her conclusions are still dismissed by the Jewish Encyclopedia. This may be in part because she integrates some of the most alarming claims about Saturn, which in proximity to Jewish roots verge on blood libel, into her analysis, for instance that “child sacrifices appear to have been so typical a feature of the cult of Saturn that still in the Middle Ages this star was known as the “child-devouring planet”“. The child sacrifice focus, despite its intuitive mythological basis, does not appear in our genealogy until late Twyman. Lewy herself was Jewish; explaining the medieval identification of Saturn with the Jews seems to have been an unstated motivation of the paper.

Not only does she link the cube with the hexagram, but unlike any of our sources prior to the /x/ cult, Lewy definitively makes a point of its colour. The conventional association of Saturn with blackness, she claims, is not only derived from Hellenistic astrology but was referred to in cuneiform texts, and pre-Islamic star worshippers attested by Islamic sources worshipped Saturn in black hexagonal temples. She further speculated that black meteorites, such as the Black Stone at Mecca and possibly the “Foundation Stone” in the Temple of Jerusalem (Twyman’s White Cube), could have been worshipped as fragments of the “black planet” itself.

Despite, then, a clear origin at last for nearly the whole complex of Saturn-cube imagery, we still have to trace it to the present day. “Origins and significance of the Magen David” would be a plausible Google search for an esoterically inclined antisemite, but “Hildegard Lewy” produces zero results on either the /x/ or /pol/ archives. However, Hamlet’s Mill, Talbott and Velikovsky were all points of reference for one very influential online figure: Tom Montalk. Montalk splintered from the everywhere-once-you-look Cassiopaea cult, known for its use of ouija boards to produce channeled material and Matrix analogies including an early version of NPC theory. Montalk uses a cube as his website logo, representing the “world-crystal”, a diagram of the condensation of “higher-density” realities into our world of three dimensions. Like Twyman, he literalized the cosmological symbols Dechend presented as a metaphor for the material precession of the equinox as “transdimensional technologies that turn thoughts into things, rotate imaginary to real via a process of vortical translation”. He still rarely makes the Saturn/cube connection directly, but in the early 2010s – the period of Voices of /x/ and Clock Shavings – his article on “The Corruption of the Demiurge” displayed Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son as its header image.

Montalk’s influences also include the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, in one of whose visions the hallucination of reality is projected at us from screens on the inside of a cubic “ship”. While Montalk readers might have had to dip into his sources to find Lewy’s explosive combination of imagery, he provided the last ingredient for the meme as we know it: a simulation-inflected Gnosticism in which Saturn is the central “projector” of a hologram reality. Dechend, who was unsympathetic to Gnosticism except insofar as it preserved ancient descriptions of the cosmos it rejected, would have remarked wryly on a historical irony repeating itself: “Absurd as it sounds, the many Gnostic sects who hated nothing more than philosophers and mathematicians have never denied or doubted the validity of their “evil” teachings….. Tradition does use the most peculiar vehicles for its motion through historical time.”

Conclusion

We now seem to have two stories; a linear and a non-linear, vertical and horizontal, temporal and (cyber)spatial. In the temporal, Hildegard Lewy in 1950 attempted to tie together the medieval association between Saturn and the Jews, into the kind of academic theory of everything that could still get published in reputable journals. If you believe her conclusions, the ultimate source is in traditions of Near Eastern star worship that were preserved in a garbled form by the Abrahamic religions built on top of them, only to be “excavated” in the 20^th century. If nothing else, there is real material in Lewy’s findings for practicing occultists, especially those syncretizing pagan and Jewish or Islamic practices. Yet they might have languished on university storage shelves were it not for Dechend and Santillana’s still more ambitious interpretation in Hamlet’s Mill, which kept the citation alive long enough to reach readers of Montalk, /x/ users sent down a rabbit hole by the “Cult of Saturn”, and maybe even Tracy Twyman or Frank Webster. The exact mechanics of the real-time proliferation of derivative Black Cube material I remember primarily around 2015 is beyond my traditional academic and occult research methods, which are more suited to this kind of linear, citational genealogy.

On this horizontal axis, the common denominator between the more recent and explosive stirrings of the Black Cube mythos appears to be amateurs doing potent Saturnian work with methods such as synchronicity and Ouija boards. The similarity of imagery coming up across seemingly unrelated experiments suggests that, despite its lack of pedigree, there is something genuine here – a new facet of the Saturn archetype emerging in an age where a “black box” is both an essential information theoretic concept and a physical thing we spend most of our time staring into. The image of the black cube started appearing more frequently in secular pop culture since the time Saturn “said hello to the DNA”; Hellraiser’s Lament Configuration, Dune’s gom jabbar, the Borg ships in Star Trek. It intuitively represents a sort of sinister rationality there was simply no need of a symbol for in the ancient world. The NSA’s PRISM and the private Israeli spy agency Black Cube, a modern secret society by many historical definitions, deploy its connotations consciously or unconsciously for intimidation.

As the “old man” of the solar system, Saturn represents a natural repository for the anxieties and fantasies of the psychic current I have elsewhere called “the Young-Boy”. But the more sober esotericists have also helped make this mass projection possible by neglecting important dimensions of the archetype. Saturn in astrology takes on the characteristics of his prison: coldness, limitation, discipline. In Freudian terms, the god who castrated Ouranos is obviously the principle of castration; yet as the god who devoured his own children to preserve his utopian, pre-scarcity reign, he is also the uncastrated “primal father”. As in Shakespeare’s time, the “reign of Saturn” has become a focus of Gnostic fantasies about a prelapsarian world, be it primitive communism or idealized monarchism, or even the “acausal” chaos of the anti-cosmic Left Hand Path. On the other hand, a static “utopia” maintained by the sacrifice of its own children obviously resonates with the postmodern “End of History” we are still living in, whose superego according to Zizek is the primal father, and whose actual rulers are a child-abusing “Epstein class”. Is Saturn the one imprisoned, or are we?

The growing moral discourse around data centres is a great opportunity to push this into public consciousness. Everyone’s fighting about how much expansion is just AI (or surveillance), but you’re creating data centre demand whenever you watch Netflix or read this Substack; at some point you have to intentionally, coordinatedly moderate demand, create alternatives, or both. And data is at the point of something like “meat” or “plastic” where individual consumer choices aren’t a matter of growing or shrinking a specific market; you have to weigh against the whole population to make a meaningful dent. Plus everyone has their own “necessary”, “exceptional” uses, more people are going to want to “cut down” than cut entirely, but that’s just routine fluctuation. To even coordinate consumer-driven reduction on that scale you’d need, well, large-scale networking. On the other hand, a return to small network-driven internet could solve a lot of the problems with giant platforms everybody complains about. (AI itself is surprisingly easy to run on small servers, provided you’re not building the datasets, and you could do all sorts of custom weighting or alignment experiments. Ask the gooners, they’re at the head of the game right now.)

My model of a hardware-level mesh net comes from projects like this – basically all of this is Internet of Things tech – but the LoRa model has a lot of disadvantages, not being able to send much beyond texts. Competing with datacentres means at least dial-up level text or video (2000s nostalgia is also a great marketing angle for this). The LoRas and Raspberry Pis in my more recent model may still be operating at different levels of the stack – LoRas are meant to replace even Wi-Fi or cellular, whereas you could still store and process a lot of data on a network of microservers connected by regular networks? If there’s a power tradeoff there, please record how much you’re using in any of these configurations and post it on Github or someplace so unlike with data centres we can make informed decisions about how much we’re actually using. (Of course for any of this to have mass adoption someone will have to put up an intuitive user-facing interface, with a recognizable brand, and so on, the usual tech stuff. You can hire my gf who’s a freelance web designer.) Anyway, here’s how much Raspberry Pis cost.

PUBLIC SPACE
This one is talked about but not really in the same space as infrastructure, which it should be. It’s also one that might be key to motivating people to sign on for the rest of this - doing hard physical labour for highly contingent improvements in your material conditions is a hard sell, but building networks that help you make friends and even find sexual/romantic partners is something nearly everyone is looking for. “Activism shouldn’t be a dating app” is a common refrain and of course true - and much the same is true of even Platonic friendship, although this is harder to say/justify - but also collapses on the level of implying that dating apps or whatever equivalent exists (none, besides work and social media) for Platonic friendship and nothing else should be dating apps, when in fact these are simply different layers of the Stack and the Stack is your whole life, not just the layer dedicated to what the Capital Stack permits as “politics” or “activism”. The collapse of “Third Spaces” is a real, multifaceted problem, and any group creating and promoting new Third Spaces has enormous opportunities to promote spaces of any other kind.

Emma Goldman’s classic quote “if I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution” can rightly be viewed with suspicion as the thought-terminating excuse of several generations of “radicals” who prioritized dancing over revolution, but I’d argue that dancing - literally dancing, in particular, as opposed to bread and circuses in general - has a more revolutionary character now than it did for our parents because when’s the last time you actually went out and danced in the current system? And if you did, was it fun? Internet-native generations may dance for Tik Tok more than socially, but the “Tik Tok dance” isn’t always an autonomous native art form so much as an advertisement for the simulacrum of the social one - one wears (often sponsored) clothes, choreographs and positions oneself as a “baddie”, a desirable body for an economy of desire that could be mutual and reciprocal in a shared physical space but is primarily competitive and accumulative online; the competition and accumulation, however, itself is a work-like strategy to unlock access to the increasingly enclosed and monetized physical spaces of clubs, festivals etc., which are also homogenized by shrinking profits to the point that if you aren’t into “Gasolina”, David Guetta or 90s Night you might not be able to dance to anything you’d actually enjoy on your own time. Yes, I have friends who go to and DJ underground queer raves (in big cities), I know exceptions exist, but if you feel (like many others) that the effort demanded to find them is too much for your broke ass it might not be much less than the effort required to build your own non-capitalized things in the first place. When I was in middle school I thought partying as an adult would look like in One Piece, and it still could. Obviously warehouse raves and house parties are more recent images of this kind of informal gathering (and deliberate economic and legal constraints on these kinds of spaces are part of why they’ve receded as a feature of social life), but the image of the outdoor dance around the bonfire appeals to me not only on the level of romantic nostalgia but because it addresses the reason another segment of the readership might not have been to any clubs lately, the ongoing concerns around COVID transmission. Moving more commercial social space outside was one of the few “new normal” things I was hoping would actually stick, but seems to have been already rolled back.

Third spaces and sex have an entirely distinct problem which is subtly shelved by an attempt to divert “sex crisis” discourse to a “third spaces” discourse, which is that nobody can straightforwardly agree on which third spaces that are acceptable for Platonic social contact are also acceptable for sexual solicitation. This problem, of course, arises from the fact that the same (capitalist, profit-maximizing, however small or altruistic) third spaces are designed to facilitate sexual and social contact, in order to maximize the overall number of paying customers, but paying customers do not all have the same norms and expectations around sex (and heterosexuals are especially unequipped to negotiate them). This opens a unique set of opportunities for non-capitalized third spaces. Nearly all of Samuel R. Delany’s mature utopian works suggest some variant of this (institutionalizing the experience of queer cruising), from the “bars” on the anarchic working-class world of Triton, where gender, sexual and approach preferences are indicated by codified spatial and clothing distinctions (“active” and “passive”), to the “runs” of the Sygn world in Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand. Something like this has been proposed mostly as a provocation by “Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest” (which would combine it with a public FOOD forest); I keep asking them for advice on how they’d do it IRL, but if there’s a shitty golf course not many people use anywhere near you you could jump the gun and try it too.

Anyway, I might also suggest reframing Goldman’s ultimatum by way of Soul Flower Union’s: “Let’s dance! Don’t let them dance us!”

HEALTH
This is probably the area where the most independent grassroots technological creativity has been invested out of anything here, and I’m mostly afraid to look into it. Therein lies the problem. The vast rhizomatic mulch of alternative medicine, health woo, “bro science”, chronic illness and nutrition communities would be almost impossible not to have any gold in it, especially as the bureaucratic formalization of science has pushed more of the work that would have been essential in previous centuries out into it; but by the same token it remains essentially parasitic on the medical establishment’s baseline of consistent function from which it can diverge in endless experimentation and debate. Real production happens, too, but largely under the form of capitalist “small business” (or “grift”), which as described above, has fascizing tendencies. The scientific-medical establishment, on the other hand, sees here both its most load-bearing claims to success in improving the human condition, and its greatest challenges to legitimacy (the replication crisis, the slowing pace of advancement, capitalist exploitation, and even S-risks like gain-of-function research).

Actual productive requirements – again, already happening – aren’t all that different here from other areas I’ve talked about like MANUFACTURE, especially where any kind of complex chemical synthesis is concerned. We are probably in a very narrow window to set up core infrastructure for this. Curtis Yarvin’s most recent COVID post argues that “Domestically, DNA synthesizers need to be treated as munitions. Filtering out death viruses is too important a task to be left to the goodwill of DNA synthesis firms” – let alone decentralized activist networks using their resources! The possibility of such a “death virus” is even posed as the incentive for the kind of generalized authoritarianism he advocates – which the high levels of tech and state oligarchies might already be taking seriously, given the rapid advances made by global authoritarianism since COVID. Within the window where you still can hire out DNA synthesizers without getting sent to CECOT, epistemic infrastructure is going to be essential to proving it is worth it to set up this physical infrastructure at all. Filtering out junk science and “death viruses” – which don’t have to be deliberate! – might require similar social technologies.

So what do the existing social technologies of “scientific method” that didn’t exist for most of the history of science add, and can they be replicated in a different stack? Peer review, at minimum, guarantees that the engagement with scientific research is not purely self-selected – either positively or negatively. (In purely self-selective spaces, as I think we can see on contemporary social media, extreme positive and negative engagement are highly rewarded.) Then there’s the actual concentrations of capital that make laboratory research possible – this is the layer independent health research usually has to either parasitize (reading and interpreting preprints, studies etc.) or bypass by focusing (and rationalizing a magical faith) in “natural”, “holistic” methods. As laboratory research funding is cut at every level, scientists should look into pooling resources to save equipment, placing it community-controlled or crowd-funded spaces. A code of conduct for such labs, which would serve as a mark of legitimacy akin to “peer-reviewed”, could entail the open sharing of non-dangerous information and disclosure of potentially dangerous research. Tradeoffs between openness and rigour could be steep, however. One of the advantages of conventional peer review over “open peer review” processes, even (especially) the limited, unidirectional kind such as on ArXiv, is that it constrains the relevant information before everyone has a chance to look at – and polarize around – it. Platforms like Wikipedia and X’s Community Notes, of all things, seem to bode well for open peer review given a standardized process: Community Notes has its simplified viral clapbacks and Wikipedia has its David Gerards but neither of these are as bad as the replication crisis in ordinary science. ArXiv has produced a flood of pseudoscience because preprints can take on a life of their own on other platforms for years after other scientists have rejected them, without anyone on either side noticing unless it gets enough traction to merit a correction on the ArXiv page, by which time it’s already negatively polarized.

I’ve met people working on, or at least interested in working on, platforms for open peer review as public annotation (which could potentially run on ATProto). I’m using “platform” in the broadest possible sense here, as in the LOGISTICS section from last time, not presuming the model of vectorialist control which could be really bad; this would probably entail running it on our own INTERNET, and maybe even ELECTRONICS. But there would ideally be (this is just spitballing) two viewtypes, account holder and lay person, with account holder (presuming some level of scientific qualification); this isn’t getting into the assumption you’d have to rebuild academia entirely, which has survived since the Middle Ages, though that’s another possibility we might have to get to). Peer review at the private level determines what gets released to the public level, or at least gives the material a special label (some form of review for safety might be necessary before any release). Both could involve layers of commentary, but if you wanted to enforce a gold standard, you’d do it only based on the approved material. The process would be ongoing, and approval could be added or revoked at any time. Plus detailed arguments in the comments would, imo, encourage actually reading the paper.

But health isn't just about research and production; there’s also the level of actual in-person care. Again, there are dickloads of people practicing in-person health care outside the formal medical setting already, calling themselves doulas and chiropractors and whatever else. The advantage of the accredited medical profession is, whatever your subjective assessment of an individual’s competence or the general state of medicine, you don’t have to subscribe to someone’s particular crank medical theory to expect a basic, consistent skill threshold. This is how “alternative” medicine, like small business, gets funnelled into an implicitly neoliberal, fascizable subculture: the requirement of a “market” of individuals with disposable time and income “shopping around” not just for practitioners but for theories and medical ingroups. Some kind of decentralized, transparent, standardized accreditation process would be needed for any of these practitioners to establish trust at a community level, even if they already have generalizable skills. A crazy thing for me to learn over Christmas dinner at the age of 31 is that the supply of doctors is artificially constrained. One (1) crank medical field has established its own accredited school system outside the quotas: osteopathy. The constraints on medical graduates since the 80s pretty much guaranteed its continuing relevance as a kind of alternative pathway for aspiring doctors, something that I always wondered about since I pretty much never met anyone who didn’t think osteopathy was pseudoscience or was really into it.

SELF DEFENSE (IN MINECRAFT)

Solarpunk is still hippie-coded in branding space so this won’t be widely addressed but it’s one of the most important layers of the Stack. If the rest of these ever add up to something allowing substantial numbers of people to defect from the Capital Stack entirely, there’s nothing to stop Capital just finding an excuse to bomb those people into oblivion, especially if your defection involves any kind of overt civil disobedience, especially now as indiscriminate military operations against civilians are being normalized even in the core of the “rules-based international order” by Israel. They did it to the MOVE compound, they could do it to you. This is of course the disavowed reason a lot of online leftists hold off on doing anything at all besides “awareness raising” protests and/or posting until a vaguely defined critical mass of “the Revolution” can be achieved, but as Marx’s study of the bourgeois revolutions suggests, such a political revolution may not be possible in the first place without an independent economic base (not just a class, that is, but actual productive forces already commanded by that class) to sustain it. That economic base, on the other hand, must also be furnished with its own military wing to confront the capitalist military when contradictions reach a peak, as the capitalist factions did when they came into conflict with the aristocratic factions. This may be harder with the increasing complexity and resource concentration of capitalist military technology, but as we have seen in numerous anti- and post-colonial guerrilla wars, under-resourced military forces can succeed or at least survive against the contract-bloated worldly powers with a combination of tactical innovation and technical pre-emption. The window for this type of success may yet be short. Trump has pioneered a new “Chickenhawk Doctrine” of technologically insulated warfare that can decapitate state adversaries almost instantaneously with minimal casualties, at the cost of leaving conditions on the ground (where solarpunk forces would operate) unchanged. The push to militarize AI, which can map complex systems rhizomatically by sheer accumulation of data, can be understood in large part as an attempt to resolve the deadlock between “top-down” and “bottom-up” forms of warfare characteristic of the early 20th century.

The question then becomes, which military technologies currently available or in development benefit “swarms” of low-resourced, highly cooperative individuals as opposed to high-resourced, centralized hierarchies? One of the obvious ones is small-scale (quadcopter or similar) drones, which have been demolishing tanks in Ukraine. The use of handheld lasers against police helicopters in Chile has also been inspiring - this might have served as an (at least temporarily) effective anti-aircraft defense for MOVE itself. Anti-aircraft defense, of course, is going to be disproportionately important and a paradigm proletarian warfare hasn’t fully adapted to anywhere. Airborne drones seem relevant here as well, although I can’t think of any high-profile use cases; optimizing small drones for aerial combat seems like a shape rotator role here. A great thing about small drones, of course, is that they can be 3D printed (or at least the parts that aren’t easily available wires and batteries can). So can guns of most individual-use scales and if you have a 3D printer already I encourage you to put aside your liberal reservations about gun ownership (you won’t technically own it and you could be arrested if they find it anyway), get TOR browser and download one of the many blueprints available. Store it in a safe not to be unlocked except in case of fascist takeover or proletarian secession, you don’t need it to shoot burglars or whatever chud shit. Give somebody else the safe passcode if you’re worried about committing suicide (in fact, as soon as you have community organizations doing any of the other layers of this Stack you might want to think in terms of communal stockpiles). Using AI to coordinate large swarms of drones is the kind of thing militaries are doubtlessly hard at work on already, but also the kind of thing teams of cracked non-state coderswith access to cutting-edge models could probably figure out enough to vastly multiply force from a one-individual, one-purchase, one-drone paradigm. Of course, there are obvious reasons you might not want to do this. (There’s a case to be made for the “laws of war” and “Just War theories” that leftists like to countersignal as applying to themselves on Alignment grounds; if you start involving autonomous systems, you want to build them so they won’t commit crimes against humanity even if they find some shortcut around the reward-structure your orders represent, or decide on a better one.)

Since the first post it’s only become more and more imperative to imagine defense in solidarity, not just self-defense but defense-of-others. The incapacity of anyone to do this for Gaza – the way the International Brigades did for Spain in the 20th century – has led to intensifying spirals of derangement. Israel in particular has perfected a hermetic security environment that just didn’t and couldn’t exist in the glory days of the 20th century left, and will only get worse with AI; other conflicts, like Iran, are just structured (at the expense of civilians) to never get to the point that on-the-ground volunteers would matter in the first place. Arms sabotage has been the major point of leverage here; I’ve followed General Dynamics closely, which appears to still be exporting from Quebec, and exports its infamous Mark-84 bomb from one plant in Garland, Texas, both of which have seen protests but no Palestine Action-type tactics yet. A less risky strategy might be to try and involve unions both directly at plants involved and at various levels of the supply chain. Defense MANUFACTURING and agent networks, on the other hand, could theoretically be international, allowing mutual support relations between civilian militias. Anyone in a country Trump has been threatening should be thinking about this pre-emptively. In Minecraft.

One thing I have worried about since 2014, though, and haven’t found a good answer to yet, is the extent to which the melancholic decline of the left since the mid-20th century is an unstated response to the nuclear bomb, as the most radical expression of the new asymmetry of military class power imaginable. A nuclear bomb is an enormous accumulation of capital that can immediately, and only, destroy mass populations, productive forces, social infrastructure and ecosystems. Forget MOVE or even Gaza-style bombing runs - if your decentralized production network got big enough to take over an entire city, one missile could just wipe it off the map. Even without a scenario this extreme, ongoing global nuclear insecurity seems to serve a deterrent function against the left; any time you start making the long, slow arduous progress of building class power, or even addressing slower existential/catastrophic risks like AI or climate change, Israel or Russia or some other “rogue state” (deeply implicated in the international blackmail market) can threaten to pop off over bullshit nobody else cares about and undo your progress all the way back to the Stone Age.

A few people I knew on 2017-9 accelerationist Twitter argued, building on Zaddy Land’s prediction of universal proliferation spiralling into fractals of mutually assured destruction balanced by timeless decision theories, that communism or even the survival of marginalized groups like queer people would therefore require nuclear deterrence as easily accessible as ghost guns. And I’m not saying rule it out, but for the purposes of this post engaging in threats of mass extinction seems to contradict the spirit of solarpunk, and in any case the anxieties/fantasies since the 90s of individual or collective non-state “extremists” obtaining nuclear weapons still have yet to play out once because even most states can’t manage it. The value of nuclear weapons isn’t one big terrorist attack anyway, you can do that for nothing with a plane; it’s the “assured” part of Mutually Assured Destruction, which also requires command bunkers, stockpiles, the ability (capital) to keep going after the rest of the enemy population and the planet is extinguished. So that leaves us with the imperative of sabotaging that infrastructure, which now that I think of it is the displaced motivation behind one of the most irritating parts of the “Green movement”, anti-nuclear activism. The “anti-nuclear” politics of the hippies, the original symbolism of the peace sign, referred to the bombs; but those were too hard to fight, so they shifted their focus to power plants. Ultimately, the strongest defense against nuclear blackmail is being able to pull off an Oops It’s Time To Overthrow the Government Festival at a moment’s notice (without the resulting power vacuum immediately falling into the hands of another crazy person). That’s what the entire fractal of coordination throughout these two posts, ultimately, hopes to make possible.

“I think that women are completely insane from the male point of view and that men are completely insane from the female point of view. Both views are completely rational from their respective vantage points.”
- Dave Sim

i. Why an Aardvark?

“I do not believe Dave Sim is a misogynist.” SIKE! but now he can read this essay if he finds it somehow, which I’d genuinely appreciate. As the Tatsuya Ishida decoder it was inevitable I would get around to Dave Sim at some point, who’s the conventional point of comparison for nerds old enough to know what “Cerebus Syndrome” actually means. Sim is something of a “missing link” for internet psychologists: a case study of the kind of extreme politicized “crashout” structure – not just an ideological conversion like David Mamet or Irving Kristol, but a spiral into a totalizing and idiosyncratic worldview marked by constant escalations seemingly both performative and compulsive – that now seems to drive much of online culture and politics, before the internet. And like most of that type, he hates being analyzed – but desperately wants to be understood. There’s no shortage of Dave Sim/Cerebus analysis out there, but like Tatsuya Ishida/Sinfest analysis (if not more so), most of it intentionally disclaims understanding. While his objection the charge of misogyny is ostensibly due to the misogynist’s alleged status as "lowest, subhuman form of life in our society", Sim doesn’t get as much of this kind of dehumanization as a lot of his contemporary equivalents: more often, and doubtless more infuriatingly, he is humanized on the condition of incomprehensibility. “Well, he’s brilliant but crazy.” But being “crazy” doesn’t make you a random number generator, any more than misogyny makes you a fungible mouthpiece of the Misogyny Egregore.

And he is brilliant – I wasn’t prepared for how much I would genuinely like about 80% of Cerebus. Sinfest was “good” in the sense of a 2000s Amerimoe time capsule for the first arc, and only before it came into a political/religious worldview at all. The “consensus” on Cerebus, as its creator complains, is “first half good, second half not-so-good”, but some of the best stuff in it is in the second half (especially Flight/Women). At moments it achieves a unique balance of mundane observation and hyperreal dread I’d describe as “social realism as cosmic horror”, which puts it in the ballpark of this vaguely conceptualized series. My closest comparison for its formal experimentation, tonal juxtapositions and esoteric stakes would be Homestuck, and if you’re curious what that would be like if Hussie had gone down the alt-right pipeline but also been one of the world’s greatest pen and paper draftsmen, you should check it out (ideally before reading this post). As any of its contemporaries would tell you, well into its slide into reaction Cerebus was an accomplishment at least on par with any of the major participants in The Last War In Albion.

Indeed, I would make a case for Sim as a forgotten participant himself, despite his provincial origins. Sim was never a “practicing” magician like Moore or Morrison, but Sandifer’s contention is that Moore ended the Cold War before his “magickal awakening” – something I didn’t realize until she recently covered his interview with Dave Sim happened around the same time as Sim was derailing into his own religious psychosis. This same interview contains Moore’s TVTropes-quoted contention that Sim produced “the most accurate portrayal of the mystical experience ever put in fiction”. The first such mystical experience was likely the LSD binge that gave him the concept for the 300-issue Cerebus run (as we will see, a lot depends on what was and wasn’t determined in that LSD trip). But since and probably before then, Dave Sim was a natural mystic (or according to the doctors who examined after the LSD experience, a “borderline psychotic”, which didn’t mean anything even back then). He didn’t need systems like ceremonial or chaos magick; he simply assumed any connection that seemed important was important, both semiotically and causally, on the basis of reading reality as an aesthetic whole. Graves’ “rem legere”; poetic intuition, the religion of the matriarchal world. Before he came to his interpretation of the monotheistic God, without any metaphysical scaffolding at all, he “interpreted every phenomenon as an interaction of God with his soul”. This could make a person much like what an “aardvark” (at least a dumb one like Cerebus) is in the comic: an “amplifier” of patterns and currents around them, even in ignorance of their meaning and history, extremely vulnerable to being pointed at desired effects in the world by forces they are unaware of.

It’s also, I think, part of why Sim isn’t well understood even by the few critics who try to rehabilitate him. The magickal and metaphysical dimensions of his storytelling are dismissed as symptoms of the same “craziness” as their content. Even Sandifer doesn’t touch Sim except where he can shed light on someone else, e.g. his interview with Alan Moore. There’s surprisingly little in the way of lurid video essays either, although part of this is Sim being an intensely generational (Gen X) figure, even if he hadn’t self-cancelled. Like my GOAT Robert Graves (who, as we will see, was a kind of Bloomian rival), Dave Sim is one of those guys who everyone in a field within a certain timeframe has heard of, and nobody after. Tim Krieder, in issue 301 of The Comics Journal (a publication that beefed periodically with Sim in his prime), did the closest thing to the kind of full re-read and reanalysis I’m attempting here; but Krieder, who admires Sim as a formalist, second-guessed the terms of Sim’s geas before even starting: “Also problematic is that, even as Sim’s interests and literacy matured beyond comics, he doggedly continued exploring them within the framework of this same silly conceit he came up with when he was 21.” This obstructs his ability to read things in their full-series context, assuming discontinuity wherever “inconsistent quality” appears at first glance. For instance, the characterization of Jaka, Cerebus’ main love interest, who received a full book dedicated primarily her to everyday life and backstory, seems like a natural litmus test for Sim’s opinions of women. “In Jaka’s Story and Minds Jaka is intelligent, self-aware and passionately devoted to her art, with a complex and fraught history — privileged and imprisoned, over- protected and molested. But by the time of Going Home and Form & Void1 she’s become a caricature of everybody’s bitchy ex-girlfriend — a selfish, pouty shopaholic.”

Yet I would argue that when Krieder dismisses the later Jaka, he’s letting his internalization of Sim’s agenda override his own (hopefully) feminist gender intuitions. Jaka in Going Home (who has, by this point, had her dreams destroyed by the collusion of patriarchal and matriarchal forces, forced back into the straitjacket of “Princess of Palnu” she spent the first 150 issues running from) irritates Cerebus because she “just has to” acquire “different clothes every day”, which sounds ridiculous in a capitalist economy. But Cirinist Estarcion has “clothing huts” – as far as I can gather, free swap sites that probably also fence new products (unironically a cool, egalitarian way of doing fast fashion that fellow solarpunks should look into implementing IRL). Cerebus, otoh, insists on going back to not-Canada where there are no clothing huts, next to no commerce, and proposes she “pick one really nice outfit” that he’ll wash every single day. This is supposed to be a statement of masculine common sense (he is also a funny animal who wears the same barely-clothes for pretty much the whole comic) but it’s just completely arbitrary and pointlessly rigid disregard for someone else’s preferences, not even along culturally normative lines. Most of you couldn’t do this. Most tradwife influencers don’t just own the one blue sundress from the meme. Cerebus’ stubbornness in insisting on going north – alone, away from all his own friends, not just to see his parents one last time but for good – could be seen as equally childish, though the point isn’t that it is; this is the frame Sim wants to trap you in, where preference conflicts are intractable gendered proxy wars where one party must be always right/wrong rather than divergences between individuals. (In turn, this allows acknowledging irreconcilable divergences between individuals to motte-and-bailey for acknowledging irreconcilable differences between genders.)

Another interesting thing about Sim as a proto-culture war figure is that he’s one of the rare examples of someone feedback looped into radicalization by their audience before the internet. Like most independent comics (SF magazines, etc.) at the time, Cerebus included a letters section that printed personalized replies called “Aardvark Comment”, as well as a foreword called “Note From The President”, and frequent accompanying essays, interviews and featured comics. To do justice to the evolution of Aardvark Commentwould require a whole other post, but I’m probably not doing one so I have to at least flag them here. In short, his audience – primarily male, smarter than average, and edgy/countercultural, including a German punk band that put the character on one of their EPs and another that painted him on the Berlin Wall – quickly turned into a kind of analog /r9k/, with the main topic besides music, comics and esoterica being girl troubles. Guys confided in Dave Sim about this because after his brief but formative marriage to Aardvark-Vanaheim cofounder Deni Loubert, he was seen, correctly, as an unusually accessible rock star and ladies’ man. Despite the demographics of comics in general at the time, he had one of its larger and more dedicated female readerships due to the art, characterization genuine interest in domestic and emotional drama which overtook the barbarian escapades by High Society. Plenty of that verged into groupiedom (with associated power and age dynamics). And he easily made friends and picked up chicks outside the comics world at bars and clubs, where he had a whole other compartmentalized half of his social life (later parodied in arcs like Guys), on top of that.

Studying Sim can therefore help to demystify the spectre of the “incel” with which the entire masculinist wing of reaction is often unhelpfully conflated: Dave Sim was a man with access to infinite art hoe pussy, and it made him worse. (Same with Neil Gaiman, his close artistic and esoteric ally and by now clearly the worse person of the two.) Pickup artists and adjacent figures like today’s Delicious Tacos and Worst Boyfriend Ever remain the spiritual leaders of the incels, reporting back to the lonely and proletarianized from the other side of the fence. But unlike them, Sim’s vision of masculinity is often more masochistic than sadistic; unlike either side, but like a misogynist of a millennium ago, he experiences women’s sexual appetites (not just for “Chad”, but for him) as a problem; and, having been practically a josei writer, Sim has come into much closer contact with actual radical feminism and the actual feminist sex wars than most straight men ever will. Hence the important conflict between two fictional feminist factions, the “Cirinists” and the “Kevillists”, maps exactly to a Harper’s essay I remember reading about the “mother-daughter divide” in feminism right before the daughters came in roaring with the 2010s. The “matriarchal traditionalist” Cirinists, who only allow mothers to be full citizens of their communist u/dystopia, ban all forms of sexual display outside of ritualized festivals, and wear hijabs represent a Family-aligned feminism organized around reproductive authority and safetyism, with the “merged permanence” of marriage as the only desirable relation between the genders (i.e. contemporary TERFs). The Sygn-aligned Kevillists emphasize “a woman’s right to choose” above all else, and even extend it to men to choose lifestyles like polyamory or homosexuality (i.e. contemporary wokes). At first, the libertarian-adjacent edgelord Dave Sim seems to unambiguously prefer the Kevillists, even if they too have their excesses (such as a right to infanticide). After his religious conversion, he finds the Cirinists more “honest” about the essential nature and limitations of women.

Dave Sim grew up in Alice Munro country. A world so libidinally conservative Sim can depict its Estarcion (the world of Cerebus) equivalent as practically Saudi Arabia, but so tight-knit and essentially agreeable it can flip over to consensus liberalism within a generation. A world where the counterculture appeared as a foreign Pied Piper, promising the most innocent fantasies and releasing the most repressed horrors of the id (as in Munro’s fiction, and her own life). A world where (as in Munro’s fiction, and her own life) there is a powerful matriarchal auxiliary to patriarchy, an undercurrent of implacable, all-consuming female resentment emotionally enforcing the very rules that produce it. (Jaka’s Story is perhaps his most potent depiction of this.) His autobiographical sketch “Mama’s Boy”, published late in the Cerebus run, details how learning the lesson “boys don’t cry” from both male and female relatives’ disdain of a “crybaby” uncle’s broken arm taught him the persistence and self-improving drive he brought to self-publishing comics. The core of the lesson he describes is good, and most feminists would in theory not disagree with it, even if they might not characterize crying as a pointless or counterproductive step in self-overcoming (which the comic itself seems to disagree with, for instance when Cerebus’ refusal to cry over his best friend leaving gives him an excuse to repress his healthy desire for companionship). It’s dramatized with his mercenary bestie, the aptly-named Bear in one of the most coherent and poignant episodes of Guys, when Cerebus’ obsession with a comic book called “The Wanker” is revealed as a defense against losing at a hockey-like game. In “Mama’s Boy”, Sim suggests this is the original motivation of most comic book fanboys, the reason the medium tends to revolve around superheroic fantasies of unearned power. Again, most feminists would not disagree. Where he takes it further is in insisting that the primary value of real “guys” is “knowing your place”, determined by competence and established by relentless competition and bullying, where being lower in the hierarchy isn’t, and shouldn’t be, as inherently shameful as whining about it.

Yet it was always apparent that for Dave Sim, “feminism” or even the “Female Void” meant not only the maternal superego but the Young-Girl. The first straw feminist in the comic, Red Sophia (a parody of Red Sonja, but the name is virtually an epithet of Babalon), establishes the basic parameters of his grievance as far back as Issue 3: despite being a supposedly empowered warrior, she takes advantage of old rules of chivalry to demand men avenge slights against her, while yapping his ears off about trivial hobbies2 (“You dance? ….I find it loosens me up, y’know, helps me express myself”) and hippie-coded interests like astrology and vegetarianism. And she wants sex way too much. As opposed to productive things like… and here we run into our first real problem for the Male Light: Cerebus doesn’t like doing anything. He’s not a “combat addict” shonen protagonist; fighting is a means to an end for him – hence the ruthless pragmatism that makes him superior to more “expressive” warriors like Sophia – usually money. High Society, the arc where almost everyone agrees it gets good, covers what he does with money, which is mostly try to get more of it and drink it away. When he gets into politics, one of the fields Sim at least seems to identify (ambiguously) with masculine honour and accomplishment, he becomes a pawn in the schemes of everyone around him, including powerful women like the Kevillist mastermind Astoria, the only unambiguously competent character in the comic. Sim eventually walked back his characterization of Astoria as a “false” attempt to write empowered women that don’t exist in real life and wrote her out of the story; but at no point does he correct the imbalance of good men. (OK, my candidate would be Bear.) The first third of Cerebus (and the last) look like nothing so much as an argument for the RFH claim about men not really wanting to exist.

This is not some early aberration of the misandrist stage of his dialectic. In the Joanne arc of Guys, where Sim’s vision of gender dynamics is depicted perhaps the most concretely of anywhere in the comic, in a simple interpersonal scope uncomplicated by ideology or metaphysics, Cerebus’ main grievance is that his new girlfriend unreasonably wants to meet new people, talk about and do things, whereas Cerebus wants to, literally, stand around all day, except when they have sex. I mean, on some level there’s no inherent superior term there, it’s just mismatched preferences and what’s maybe unreasonable (or to a reader unconvinced of woman’s essential incompleteness and bottomless need for validation, inexplicable) is that Joanne insists on sticking around. The same dynamic basically obtains for Jaka and Sim’s other everyman that he eventually elevates to a literal Christ figure, Rick. It’s a startling reversal of the “male Light/female Void” schema Sim is now infamous for. Does he think the male principle is superior in its activity, or a Schopenhauerian pessimist passivity, which would seem to correspond to his intuition that creation/reproduction was a raw deal in the first place?

On the other hand, it’s also an odd contrast to Cerebus’ positively presented relationship with the other “Guys” including Prince Mick (Jagger) and Bear; they mostly hang around the same bar all the time but they still do things (play pseudo-hockey) and talk – gossip, even – about people and relationships. Why are these simple pleasures, which the first half of Guys was about teaching Cerebus to enjoy, bad when a woman is involved? Whenever he submits a bit to Joanne’s expectations or advances, a literal ice wall around Cerebus’ heart is shown melting, and he seems to become a bit more human by the standards established throughout every previous moral encounter – even the one with Dave. The only indication of the obverse is the over-the-top caricature in the visuals and dialogue. One often gets the bizarre sense in Cerebus of reading a parody (or post-ironic self-disavowal) of a strawman comic, where the normal guy or the gigachad is saying something obviously insane and the screaming soyjak is saying something reasonable.

Dave Sim, of course, as he frequently in defending himself against overzealous interpretations of his comic, isn’t Cerebus. Dave Sim is a creative, obsessive, perfectionist workaholic, whereas Cerebus is a lazy, power-hungry passive-depressive. Sim speaks down to, Cerebus through a variety of mouthpieces including Suenteus Po, Rick Nast and literally himself. And yet, Dave Sim is not not Cerebus. When “Dave” first speaks to him directly as his creator, he answers his readers’ question of why he keeps the aardvark around as a curiosity about what he will do, as an independent agent, even if the answer, to Dave’s own frustration, usually seems to be “nothing”. Cerebus seems to be a recalcitrant fragment of Dave Sim that he spends (or spent) more time with than himself.

ii. Crashout Karmic Mechanics

Cerebus is an essentially tripartite story – a triptych. (Like the Trinity, or the Triple Goddess – both symbolic forms Sim ultimately disavows as tricks of Yoohwhoo, the “he/she/it”.) It was planned from the acid trip onward to run for exactly 300 chapters. Both of its first hundreds are marked by “Ascensions” – a ritualistic cosmic event, reminiscent of Twyman’s celestial reorderings, where a Babel-esque Tower rises beneath one of the setting’s major cities and becomes a rocket, raising its current occupant and magickal owner (dependent on control of a gold ball which activates it) into space to meet or become “God”. Both Ascensions depicted, on this level, are anti-climaxes, ending in cryptic personal and metaphysical revelations for their subject, not worldly power; yet whenever one happens, worldly power shifts along its own subtle and intricately connected lines. “Major events” in Cerebus are almost always indirect, mysteriously correlated with intentional acts but unintended as outcomes; the first 200 chapters can be read as something of a magickal Systems Novel, and it is only with faith in God that Sim is able to assign an Agent to History.

Given this structure, it’s natural to assume something of a dialectic in the story’s gendered narrative. In the first 100 chapters, Cerebus follows the traditional trajectory of patriarchal stranger-kings like Conan the Barbarian, albeit subverted, losing more agency the closer he gets to the centre of power and degenerating into a tyrant. When he Ascends it is as the Pope of the male god Tarim, an embodiment of Graves’ “restless male will” enthroned who throws babies off balconies for shits and giggles. (Prime Minister/Pope Cerebus is, if anything, an anticipation of Trump, who Sim has notably steered clear of the bandwagon for; a crude, narcissistic, essentially motiveless power accumulator manoeuvred into omnipotence by a full court of scheming viziers.) Conversely, the “message” imparted by divine revelation at the Ascension compensates and humiliates Cerebus’ masculine power with a feminist cosmogony of a Female Light raped by a Male Void. For the next 200 chapters, the followers of that “Female Light”, known as the goddess Terim, have taken over the world. Cerebus is reduced to Shinji-like paralysis until, motivated by their totalitarian persecution of the only woman he maybe loved, he finally stands up and takes his destiny back into his own hands. On his second Ascension – a dual Ascension with his matriarchal arch-nemesis and fellow aardvark Cirin – we get the “Male Light/Female Void” narrative, an obvious mirror of the first, produced to correct a “feminine” imbalance as the first was to correct a “masculine” one. The only difference is that the second story is presented by an author avatar who breaks diegesis, rather than a fat guy in a suit on the moon, but come on, Dave Sim has cast himself as (several) characters in his own comic already. The infamous Issue 186 is obviously part of this same structure right? Following which, naturally, the final 100 issues would attempt to reach some kind of gender balance. Presumably, since Cerebus is destined to die alone and unloved, this too will fail in some way; the question is why it fails by simply extending the arguments of the end of the second narrative unit to the point that they consume the third.

The tripartite structure is also suggested by the three aardvarks. It’s never explained where aardvarks come from, but is revealed that they aren’t just a demi-human species but a rare and borderline supernatural one, with lifespans in the centuries and the power to “amplify” psychic and world-historical currents around them, even unconsciously. Suenteus Po, who guides Cerebus in dream sequences throughout the first third (but is not revealed as an aardvark until the second), goes through an interesting series of semiotic transformations, reflecting Sim’s changing ideals and priorities. He is introduced as the founder of the “Illusionist” movement, a vaguely parodic life-is-but-a-dream mystic philosophy that seems to represent the counterculture in the libertine, hedonistic mode that Sim identified with, albeit not without reservations. In the past, however, he was the “Aardvarkian Age” analogue to Julius Caesar, raising an army of child soldiers with brutal social Darwinist discipline that conquered most of the known world and established its political landscape. (The “Illusionist” meme is a product of his decadent descendants.) By the time he re-emerges, he has resumed his mystic aspect in a more sober, ascetic mode as a hermit who plays chess against himself day in and day out, participating in history through the higher-dimensional web of correspondence but counselling retreat from the worldly power his counterpart Cirin now wields. Po and Cirin play the parts of Sarastro and the Queen of the Night in the patriarchal initiatory myth; as the Aeons of Isis and Osiris, they naturally set the stage for the younger, fierier, defiantly mundane and materialistic Cerebus as the Aeon of Horus. To make the triad even more striking, Cerebus is revealed to be a hermaphrodite, though his female genitalia were injured as a child. This fact goes on to have next to no impact on the plot except giving Cerebus occasional pangs of insecurity about his masculinity, which is reframed as both a voluntary act and a kind of castration.

Suenteus Po visualizes the esoteric game being played by the three aardvarks through actions that often have no direct material relation to their effects as a cosmic game of chess taking place in the collective unconscious. (Cirin and her allies, interestingly, more often use a Tarot metaphor.) This is around the same time Sim is best buds with Neil Gaiman, and the Roach (an all-purpose superhero parody whose split personality takes on identities based on Wolverine, Moon Knight, Spider-man or whoever the cape of the week is) adopts a persona based on Sandman, “Swoon”, who plays a significant role in tipping the chess game against Cirin on the dream-plane. Swoon is introduced in November 1992 – around the time Gaiman was wrapping up “A Game of You”, the arc that sacrifices an arguably fetishistic representation of a trans woman to discredit the image of the Triple Moon Goddess, aligning Her with Cirin-style Family values against Wanda’s Kevillist freedom of identity. The Kevillists win the battle but lose the war – Astoria says “[Cirin’s] lost” at the beginning of the arc, only to discover her own followers are incapable of the freedom she demands of them by the end. At this point Sim is glazing Gaiman every other Aardvark Comment, and Gaiman listed Sim as one of his biggest influences. As Viktor Davis (a Hierophant persona later to Rick, and in #185 explicitly to the reader), he asks Gaiman “do you believe in magic, boy?” Meanwhile, Alan Moore is working on From Hell, his excavation of a sacrificial ritual to suppress the power of the Goddess a century earlier. Grant Morrison doesn’t seem to have been doing anything interesting, but something was definitely happening here, and I’m not sure even I know what it is. In this post, I can only attempt to describe what Sim was doing. Again, Alan Moore wasn’t even a wizard yet; Sim had probably the best idea of anyone in the War of what he was participating in, which is still very little. If Cerebus had a Hierophant in Po, who was Sim’s?

In Aardvark Comment 189, Sim confirmed my suspicions that “the effect upon the culture of Graves’ The White Goddess” had been one of the “seminal motivations of Reads”. He quotes it almost directly when the Judge identifies a god posing as Death as “a demon of a mouse-fraternity in pre-Sepran totemistic Estarcion. You gradually rose in divine rank by force of arms, blackmail and fraud until you became patron of music, poetry and the arts…” This isn’t just referencing the book’s boomer-ubiquitous cultural reception, like when a character namedrops to brush off a strawman of second wave feminism in Elizabeth Hand’s Waking the Moon: you have to read deep to get to the Apollo mouse-demon bit. Yet his objection – “‘Why one of us?’ If some ancient battle had been lost, some patriarchal prison sentence imposed upon Opposing Spirit, does that spirit not make itself ridiculous by pressing its opponent into seeking redress?” – is one that should find little purchase in the actual text. Graves has no interest in denigrating men; insofar as he sees their position as subordinate, it is as essential a characteristic of different natures as in Sim’s reversal, not a balancing of a ledger. In Seven Days In New Crete he clarifies that the Goddess allowed Her own “patriarchal imprisonment” as a game, and will liberate Herself in due time. Nor are Cirinism and Kevillism contradictory in Graves’ vision of the Goddess’ Earthly reign. However, they were in his own relation to woman as Muse, who was always the free woman, the “daughter” (usually much younger than himself, as was also the case for Dave Sim); as soon as she settles down into motherhood and domesticity, she loses her capacity for “the unseen and unknowable convergences and coincidences”. The fact that Graves used “Maiden/Nymph/Crone” instead of the more famous “Maiden/Mother/Crone” can be read in the sense that in the ancient, matriarchal world, the physical act of reproduction did not entail transformation into a qualitatively different existence dedicated to the child and excluded from the field of erotic, artistic, magical etc. play; on the other, his concession to its patriarchal exclusion from artistic life.

One of the things that makes Graves more “honourable” in my book than lesser Muse-poets is that, whether or not he consciously recognizes the exploitative form of this structure, he gladly compensates it: the Muse will always torment and ultimately abandon the poet, that’s Her job. Sim knew this and had if anything the exact right theory of masculinity to accept it, but never did. The problem his he never found women who could reinforce his creativity, either as partners or Muses, rather than competing with it. This is, to put it mildly, at least partly his fault. He claims he solidified the position he articulates in #186 when he began doing “research” for Mothers & Daughters, consisting of trying to talk to random women about their mother-daughter relationships – “even”, and this was the essence of the experiment, ones he didn’t want to have sex with. For a guy who, as previously established, had no shortage of contact with women, to never have had serious conversations with women he didn’t want to fuck is kind of insane, or at least requires an expansive definition of “want to” (the kind that confuses people about the definition of allosexuality). I’m not even sure if it’s true – was he trying to fuck all the female comic writers he shouts out as exceptions in #186? Now that I say it, yeah probably lol, that would explain it.

His female editors were at least accounted for, showing up as villains in Reads. As all this was brewing he was focusing his audience feedback loop on something else: his ascendance as a “guru” of comics self-publishing, despite never claiming to represent a prescriptive authority on other people’s lives. What he represented in the 90s comics publishing debate was the living example of the limit case of one side of the argument: if you think any dependance on any other person or institution is “necessary” to succeed in comics, you just need to grind harder. It’s not “impossible”, but if you can’t grind hard enough, that’s your problem and maybe self-publishing isn’t for you. (I sometimes refer to him in my head as a “Dark TLP”, a structure I might write about at some point.) This stance followed directly from the sense of masculine independence and honour he identified with, and saw women or men with female dependents trying to chip away at for the security of these dependents. A security that, if women were independent de facto as feminism claimed, shouldn’t have been an issue. The “mother” and “daughter” functions of woman seemed aligned in keeping him away from his work: the “mother” as the imperative of risk-aversion, the “daughter” as sex and consumerism and “the female refrain woven through his life like a discordant crimson thread in the blue and gold cloth of his ordered and solitary existence…. What are you thinking about? Tell me what you’re thinking. Talk to me talk to me talk to me”. At the same time, by negative polarization, Cerebus represented both the “Male Void” of the Nirvana-principle and the “Male Light” of pure action:

"See, to me, drawing and writing Cerebus is the same as sleeping. Sometimes you can sleep and sometimes you can’t. When you have insomnia (I think) you are basically afraid to sleep. You don’t want to enter Morpheus’ realm because you had a dream last night that you’ve forgotten that told you some very unpleasant truths about yourself. You are exhausted: you want to sleep. Sleeping is one of the most natural things in the world for you, all things being equal. To accomplish it, all that is required is getting out of your own way and it happens all by itself. But suddenly the part of your brain that wants to sleep is dominated by the part that wants to think. All that is going around in your head is useless ‘real’ world stuff: your relationship, your ex-relationship, family stuff, disturbing conversations you’ve had with people whose opinion you don’t respect. You go in to work and the drawing board seems to be at the wrong end of the telescope. You find a hundred excuses not to work instead of kicking those impediments out the door and telling them to come back later much later. It is the same thing. The part of your brain that wants to write and draw is dominated by the part that wants to do something (anything) else. Writing and drawing requires going inside yourself to your own little world that no one can enter except you. Every friend and loved one that you have is either consciously or unconsciously jealous of that fact and consciously or unconsciously they labour to keep you away from it. Other writers and artists are the worst. If they’re afraid to work that day, they will usually try to find another writer or artist (either in person or by phone) to share their misery, their fear of going to their own secret place. ‘Hey, if | can’t go to my secret place, you can’t either’. Stop feeling guilty about your secret place, stop feeling guilty that others can’t go there with you. The more time you spend there, the happier you’re going to be. Everyone enjoys a good night’s sleep and dreaming. As a writer and/or artist, you get to sleep and dream, and then do basically the same thing for a living. Unplug the phone, put a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door and then lock it. Then vanish into your secret place, your private world. Dream. Dream.”

On the other hand from this world of Dream was the world “women” in heterosexual relationships, men in heterosexual relationships with them, and the comic book industry alike seemed to inevitably drag artists away from their “quests” toward – suburbia, the Young-Girl, consensus reality, and neurotypical sociality:

This is what relationships are, Dave, this is what you are choosing and this is what you are doing. This is what you envied in all those people who lived for backyard barbecues and renting a house on the lake for a long weekend and going to shop in town in boutique-y little stores. "You doing anything for the Labor Day weekend?" "Yeah, me and the girlfriend have rented a house with two other couples on Martha's Vineyard". "Oh, niiice." With exactly that note of profound envy that you were obviously going to have a much nicer long weekend than they were going to have. And, of course, what it was was three women who were all fully engaged in that woman-of-the-couple thing and three guys sitting around with rictus grins on their faces biting their tongues and not saying anything about whole realms of experience and thought that had been colliding since 1970.

Yet without any outside distraction, he was already experiencing a form of “insomnia” as he approached the second turning point of his gender structure, the one where he would have to avoid the cop-out of a pseudo-feminist “Female Light/Male Void” story and make the critique that had been weighing on him. He evidently had to break from graphic storytelling entirely and take on the mode he associated with navel-gazing female cartoonists at Fantagraphics: “autobiography”. Reads can easily be interpreted as cope for a writer’s block he was talking about in his Notes From The President months before. He even psyches the reader out at one point by claiming he’s actually going to end Cerebus at issue 200. Reads is simultaneously a way to get his story back on track and a way to get out of writing it, while (over)identifying with the part of himself that would choose writing it above any and everything else. His mind had by this point apparently accumulated all these resentments into a misogyny tulpa called “Rotsieve”, which came out when he drank, starting conversations implying basically the whole worldview to friends and professional acquaintances, including Alan Moore, Jeff Smith and their wives, and many of his female colleagues. Finally, in #186, he did the same thing to his readers on-page.

“The Male Light and the Female Void” is little more than a misconstrued vision of Nuit and Hadit. Viktor Davis depicts the fundamentally masturbatory nature of creativity (one can see as much in the Egyptian myth of Atum, though he ignores or denies the question of stimulation – Atum’s hand was considered a feminine principle), and objects to the extent to which the “receptive” function of the metaphysical feminine denies it. While the Male Void of his first cosmogony desired mastery or at least knowledge of an Other, the Male Light experiences itself as self-sufficient; it creates its own enjoyment, and therefore doesn’t particularly need to reproduce or even interact with anything or anyone else. And yet this masturbation does produce things – literally anything other than the reproduction of the same, with gradual adaptations – which others seem to enjoy, even as they resent the freedom to create them! Perhaps more importantly: the “ejaculations” of the Male Light, even in their most perfect, self-sufficient form, are inevitably received by the Female Void, as Space itself, at the limit of all Being. If Nuit can be conceived of as “Void”, the “Light” of Hadit does not need to be “caught” or appropriated; its arbitrary, free projection “into the void” is always-already reception. Sim’s real concern, then, is the competition between his Muse, the transcendent receiver of his creative energy, and any actual living woman. Or to put it in the terms that, from his various confessions, seem to have torn apart all his actual relationships: Either spending 12 hours a day drawing an aardvark comic is a waste of time, or everything else is.

Yet the substance of the monologue clearly derives from the underprocessed 4 hours a day that constitutes Sim’s “real” life, not the 12 hours drawing the aardvark comic.3 The Viktor Davis monologue is, straightforwardly, a cry for help. It is a Naruto villain monologue: “Having bonds only makes you weak!” Suenteus Po, from within the Abyss, the Eighth Sphere, sets the challenge: balance, equality between the sexes, must be restored. Viktor Davis, from within the specific lived perspective of Dave Sim, poses the counter-challenge: what if it can’t be, what if nobody really wants it to. Viktor Davis addresses this challenge, not to Cerebus or Astoria or Po or any part of his creation, but to his audience, his reader, which is hardly more metafictional than talking to the aardvark. (A latter-day participant in the Great Game of Comic Book Metaphysics would interact with his characters and his readers with a better balance of control and freedom, though Hussie would fail his Ascension as surely if less humiliatingly than Sim.) If he asked anyone else in the four hours of his “real” life, they wouldn’t be able to see the whole vision, they wouldn’t understand. Conversely, if he asked his creation, it wouldn’t be able to answer. Only the reader shares the “bridge” of Cerebus with him.

The readers, of course, has no fucking idea how to respond.

This posture of a cry for help doubling as a test, a demand for someone else to not only answer but decode the most intense manifestation of one’s own existential anxiety (“If you do not tell me what my dream was and interpret it, I will have you cut into pieces and your houses turned into piles of rubble”) is a common and almost entirely unrecognized feature in crashout/radicalization cycles; I may only be able to recognize it because I see it in myself. To give another example: when Kanye West went on Alex Jones and said “I loooooooove Hitler”, he took care not to endorse a specific policy. He did not say (as plenty of Nazis out there are willing to do, especially now) “I think the Final Solution was a good idea and we should do it again”. Sure, lots of sincere Nazis don’t say that either and even pretend it never happened in the first place. But he also gave you a decoder key: “I love everybody”, he says in the same interview. Repeatedly misinterpreted under lower stakes, he challenges the largest possible audience to read him in the best possible faith in the most doubtful possible scenario. (“And they will turn me in your arms into a lion bold/But hold me tight and fear me not and you will love your child”.)

If you want more evidence of this hysterical structure from Sim himself instead of a different crazy person, check out the From Hell correspondence. It’s palpable how much he wants Alan Moore (who he considers, along with Neil Gaiman and Eddie Campbell and a few other high-level comic writers, one of the only “Guys” he can “really” talk to, through his preferred medium) to give him something he can’t give, a central piece to the still shattered puzzle of his own mystical worldview. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

The results were adjudicated, primarily, in Aardvark Comment. While his own content is – as many writers have pointed out – unstructured and emotional above and below the stratum of internal logic, he deliberately triggers as much emotional reaction as he does in hope of receiving logical containment adequate to as much emotion as he is projecting. Instead, he gets the emotion back, his simple and easily rebutted “test” or “decoy” logical arguments misread and contested emotionally, and confirms that everyone except himself is motivated exclusively by Emotion. e.g.: “If it’s bad to sexually harass your employee, is it bad to sleep with your boss to get ahead?” You can easily respond 1) the power gradient across boss/worker, not man/woman, gives the first its moral basis and doesn’t work the same in either direction 2) even if you don’t concede this, it’s trivially easy to find women, even feminists who think sleeping with your boss is wrong. Instead the letter writer gets mad enough to invent a whole new premise – “What about the man who makes her?” It’s hard to say, of course, if there are letters that made these better points and he just didn’t publish them because they’d make him look worse; you see this a lot in online arguments, where someone QTs every incoherent insult that sounds like the strawmwan in their head, while ignoring reasonable comments. All of this is, in historically sexist terms, a very feminine, “hysterical” move. (Graves would have dismissed it as “unmanly” in the exact same sense as Sim’s in “Mama’s Boy”.) Which is exactly why he makes it as his last perverse plea for equality!

The presumption of good faith in this reading, however perverse, still assumes that Sim hadn’t decided the answer all the way back when he planned 300 issues; and by extension, that the next 100+ somehow diverged from his (or the Muse’s) plan. There’s some fairly persuasive evidence of this in issue 194 (Mothers & Daughters 44), where Sim’s voice in Cerebus’ head confirms that he “changed his mind” about his “original plan” for the dual ascension, which was “to talk with the two of you together”. It is best to take the following as literally as possible: he was able to “get through” to Cerebus in his attempts at what he genuinely perceived as a two-sided communication across levels of reality, but with Cirin “didn’t get very far past the point of telling her her creator is male”. Who knows what kinda shit he was planning to say to her after that, but “the psychic power she brings to bear on her opposition” – the ability to “read” (and also “rape”) minds he attributes to all women, amplified by aardvark powers – “makes it almost impossible to keep my mother straight– I mean my thoughts straight”. (What does he say about his mother at the end of “Mama’s Boy” again? He’s aware of the readers expecting something luridly Freudian and builds up the suspense with a conversation with his dad – “This is the one she’s dreading” – then dekes you out “My mother is perfect. And I say that not in any sentimental fashion but rather as a statement of widely accepted fact. Widely accepted by everyone except my mother, that is.” Cute, but not not luridly Freudian coming from a guy whose whole Bailey w/r/t women is “they aren’t literally perfect”4.)

In other words: to resolve his gender metaphysics on a note satisfactory to the original vision, he would have had to confront his maternal superego, which he had divinized in the original cosmogony, then spent the last 100 issues or so containing by demonizing, on equal terms. This proved impossible. He attempted to enlist the help of the readers by provoking them, which predictably backfired, and was forced to go all in on his recalcitrant Cerebus-fragment.

I don’t particularly think art is the place for “reading the room”. There is no room; you are speaking from your inner infinity into outer infinity. Your true audience may exist centuries after your death. What is possible, and even necessary as a counterbalance, is reading the room in explaining or accounting for one’s art, if one is to do so at all. Comics, or any fiction, cannot simply be their own world. They require this world to feed on – Cerebus is not a self-consistent sub-creation but a frenzied overworking of those few hours a week of Dave Sim’s “real” life he disavowed in prioritizing Cerebus. And while Viktor Davis borrows Alan Moore’s claim that “all stories are real” to justify telling “his side of the story”, Sim knows they aren’t; Cerebus, more than any of the works of his mythopoeic contemporaries, is preoccupied with the lies people tell themselves to avoid discomfort or change. This is its great artistic strength, aligning it with Girard’s “verité romanesque” over the “mensonge romantique” embraced by the chaos magicians and snake worshippers of his cohort.

A dimension of the “Interview From Hell” with Moore that Sandifer never addresses (but which forms part of the central ethical argument of John Pistelli’s Major Arcana, whose Alan Moore analog refers to himself as “he/she/it” in a seemingly direct allusion to Sim’s Yoohwhoo) is that Sim’s argument in it relative to Moore’s is in some ways actually better for feminism, or Wokeness, or whatever feminism aspires to be part of in the 21st century as opposed to the 20th. They are, in this interview, talking about Moore’s recently published book about one of history’s most notorious femicides – and Moore is the one saying it not only couldn’t have been prevented, but can’t even be counted as “sin, evil, or the Dark Side of the Force”. (Likewise the Comedian’s rape of Silk Spectre in Watchmen, or the Joker’s abuse and crippling of Barbara Gordon in The Killing Joke. It is also very remarkable that Moore is more dissuaded from synthesizing a “Church of AlandDaveology” by this objection than by #186.) Sandifer emphasizes that by linking the onset of the World Wars to the success of the Ripper’s coverup, he leaves “a way out of the 20th century”, which would seem to imply the fatalistic cube-time of his Masonic antihero is a patriarchal self-justification, but in the interview (and later his novel Jerusalem) it’s clearly the position Moore himself takes. If you think I’m reaching to justify a contrarian defense of Dave Sim, here’s a solidly Marxist-feminist-homosexualist academic making the same argument.

One of the contradictions Sim seems to have obsessed over and inflated is that a “countercultural” movement that seemed on one hand to reject concepts like sin and evil insisted on attaching them – or needed something like them to attach – to misogyny. Today’s global reaction inverts this paradigm into a perfect have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too: if morality exists, it must be cisheteropatriarchal, and if it doesn’t, so is the natural order of rape and murder. Where Moore expresses, in the interview, his famous relativistic image of space-time as an inert “Big Football” from Big Bang to Big Crunch, through which human lives wind like worms, Sim suggests that “Perhaps God’s Plan is intended to be a flower, which starts out looking very much like a football in the bud state and then opens out [into a higher-dimensional space of possibilities]”… Moore, of course, is describing a coping mechanism for the schizo-magickal awareness of connectio to which his peer is still exposed to the raw agony. Whatever the view from Kether, Sim cannot simulate it to avoid the problem in this sephira of choice. Worse, if the circuit flows both ways, his every choice must propagate all the way up to the victory of God or the Devil: “Individual self-discipline to not only avoid committing acts of “bad faith,” but to resist contemplating them could, in the context of such a Possibilities, be just enough to “snap open the ‘chute” and cause the Big Flower to blossom at the crucial instant….”

This Absolute Terror, this Fear and Trembling, is of course consistent with his description of a “mama’s boy”. In Aardvark Comment 236 he clarifies the strikingly katechontic logic: “I find the argument that we are expected to postpone the Last Day a persuasive one. As a population, we are supposed to improve, become better. Mistakes that anyone of us make in 1998, acts of bad faith, could have repercussions that would move Judgement Day up to, say 2935 from, say, 3521.” Far be it from me to countersignal or defend against this intuition I’ve had myself and ignored too often to be comfortable in the present world, but the implications of this seem way more safetyist than child-proof lighters. (Post-Cerebus in The Strange Death of Alex Raymond, the man who tirelessly promoted the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund throughout his Reads crashout seemingly argues that the Comics Code didn’t go far enough, and attributes the sexual revolution to the popularity of “bad girls” in noir comics.) The difference is that your relationship with God is not supposed to be anyone else’s business, and can’t be because it’s only the Kantian disinterest – or existentialist “good faith” – of the moral choice that makes it meaningful. But through this construction of the Father, Sim found himself choosing to do everything he once railed against women for trying to force him to: quit drinking, quit smoking, quit swearing, subordinate the imaginary to the real world. This, in turn, proves the validity of the system: it can make him change, which is better than most of us can say for most of our beliefs. By moving the superego to his own gendered box – in that sense identifying with it – he was able to reconcile it. In doing so, however, he declared war on his Muse.

The first confirmed deviation from the original plan is Rick’s Story, which was intended as a “Life of Brian”-style parody of the New Testament. Following and effectively concluding Guys, with Rick showing up at the bar where Cerebus lives in exile and getting in a Gravesian love triangle over Joanne (their mutual replacement for Jaka), by this point Dave is wrestling for control of his own storytelling, attempting to impose interpretations in real time against the will of his characters, giving us many of the “inverted strawman comic” moments. Rick self-harms because Joanne didn’t show up – a fair example of an overly emotional reaction to a woman on a guy’s part – and Cerebus validates this response by telling Joanne it’s her fault for not coming because her mother came down with a fever. Joanne gets “unreasonably” angry at Cerebus’ petty insistence on cleaning Rick’s wound with a dirty bar cloth, and her ordinary ministrations are depicted as an invasion of his head by yonic monsters. Cerebus’ attempt to redpill Rick are all legible as his own emotional cope, yet they’re all confirmed by Joanne. This could be universally pessimistic dramatic irony. Cerebus is once again becoming, through his “amplifier” power, a dark Pope revered by Rick as a prophet – and fulfilling Cerebus’ hysterical need for someone who will never leave him. The intended conceit, then, was that the genuine religious content of the Gospels was the product of misplaced admiration – which isn’t incompatible with a sincere reading of them. The Apostles really do act like Rick a lot of the time, and Jesus acts a lot like Cerebus trying to make them realize they already have the power to do as He does; that a non-divine Cerebus could imitate this role through the dialectic of being approached with perfect humility by Rick, even to the point of imparting wisdom that he did not, before this point, possess himself. Which is analogous, in some ways, to the role woman is supposed to play in teaching man the Christlike emotional self-control Cerebus and Rick end up imparting to each other!

The Rickpill – the little real ethical content of the “Book of Ricke” which becomes the core of the third act, all focused on relationships – is a startling conflation of good advice (“just leave if you don’t like her”, “she’s a person with flaws and you’re a whole separate one”) and terrible advice indistinguishable from what a straw feminist would have said a couple dozen chapters ago (she’ll never be happy, so you have to “be happy for two”). The healthy epiphanies, organically emergent from narrative “karma” and perhaps intended from the original structure, have come too late and must be stretched on the rack of batshit gender metaphysics. Presumably this is why Cerebus has to blow his chance of reconciling with his father, and suffer his final Severinian breakdown into a full-blown misogynist, in following them.

iii. Cerebus is a Black Gnostic

Cerebus is not Dave Sim, so I shouldn’t be in too much hot water if I say Cerebus himself, in Latter Days and The Last Day especially, is a misogynist. Of course, this is the Cerebus who seems to be most fully realized as a mouthpiece for Dave Sim, or Dave Sim’s God. Is he really? I sound like I’m coping, but aside from the extent to which he’s still a mean bastard who fucks things up for no reason, which is Sim coping, I’m genuinely conflicted as to how much we’re “supposed to” identify with him. The story is most simply read as condemning him, and I’m not even talking about whether he goes to Hell.

He’s also a huge fucking heretic, and I say this as someone who has syncretized Christianity, Thelema and Haruhism. Dave I know you’re going to “stop reading” there but seriously, I would take that from someone who really just believed in One God, whose Will can only be known by careful individual prayer and discernment, but in doubt is best understood through the words of the Prophets trusted by generations. The kind of common-sense, back-to-basics ecumenical monotheism that every lasting new monotheistic movement, from Islam to Baha’ism, has started out from falling back on is his Bailey, a safe rampart from which to taunt nutty wizards like Alan Moore. The Motte is closer to one of the hypersexual, hypergendered, hyper-iconotropied schismatic churches like the “Eglise de Rick et Joanne, Lesbiennes” that have degraded the Book of Cerebus by The Last Day. One of Cerebus’ first acts on reading the Torah is to literally tear out a bit he doesn’t like.

The Elohim/YHWH distinction and the two versions of Genesis are well-trodden ground; you can build some pretty elaborate theories out of them without doing too much violence to the text. What’s striking is how paranoid a hermeneutic of suspicion Cerebus applies, outdoing even the secular historical textualists by combing through line by line and attributing every sentence, every statement, even every human action to either “God” or “the Yoohwhoo”. (His vocalization of the Tetragrammaton reminded me at first of Larry Gonick’s comic-barbaric “Yahoo-Wahoo”, but the joke is that it’s a feminine sexual solicitation.) The vast majority are interpreted as Yoohwhoo’s; the Bible doesn’t seem to add much to the deistic conception of a single God conceived as creator and maximum of intellect and goodness, accessible through individual contemplation and acting primarily through causality and synchronicity, that he had already been working out mostly on his own. Despite disavowing his initial assumption that the Bible was just “primitive ooga-booga cosmology” and finding “very little ooga-booga” in the Torah, Cerebus’ commentary incredulously points it out everywhere: in behaviour, psychology, motivations, biology (“HAHAHAHAHAHA! A TALKING SNAKE!”) and weighty statements attributed to the divine. To be fair, there objectively is a lot of ooga-booga in Genesis: it’s a book about cavemen, but Sim surprisingly can’t take this at the face value a reader like Roberto Calasso does, as God teaching the rudiments of morality to barely socialized animals from first principles in a kind of roundabout sign language. His concept of “reason” is indistinguishable from “common sense” (to a male inhabitant of Alice Munro country in the mid-20th century), and he even takes the gradualist stance that there were sapient humans before the Garden of Eden, eliminating the problem of Adamic incest. The sign language and teaching a barely social animal is there, but for Sim the conversation is actually between God and the Yoowhoo.

It would be one thing if Sim was narrating a debate between the abstract, intellectual God of the Aeons and the blood-drinking Lord of the Generative Powers, as most Gnostics do (if not the other way around, the sexually integrated/liberated pleroma vs. the cosmic puritan). This isn’t what he’s doing. Sim glosses the first generative act of the first Genesis as a sexual one – the spirit “mooving” on the surface of the waters until it produces something, light, as a “sort of by-product”. That is, Atum’s cosmic masturbation again (though he sort of talks about God’s Spirit as a separate being and then never really circles back to that?) – but with the Light/Void polarity once more reversed. The Light, which separated (unintentionally) from God when he “mooved” on the waters – I’m not afraid of getting “fried by a big lightning bolt” because I don’t believe any of this, so I’ll just say it: God’s sperm – is the Yoohwhoo. When God creates the night and the day, the intended communication is: “I’m really big and heavy and thick and dark and you are little and light and thin.” The (nonconsenting) existence of the little and light and thin thing is “good”, at least according to the big and heavy and dark thing, but it – or as he starts calling it around this point, she5 – cannot ever be equal or united with its creator, which it wants to be, and the paramount aim of the whole endless conversation, framed as the kind of circular relationship argument Sim bases his whole gender metaphysics around, is to drum this fact into her head. The covenant of circumcision is another example: God is trying to say that Yoohwhoo is like “this useless piece of flesh that I snipped off the end of my dick”6. Which is “good” anyway – “nyuck nyuck nyuck”. I’m not gonna lie, reading some of this stuff made me physically queasy in a way even the Twyman and Hughes and Vollmann (sorry that was gonna come first but I had to finish this) that make up the rest of the “Gnostic Trauma” landscape doesn’t.

If this smacks of what a traditionalist reader like Branko Malic (my source on Dugin throughout Theory of the Young-Boy) would call “Satanic inversion”, he’s just getting started. Cerebus takes the side of Cain over Abel (Abel apparently tried to fuck his brother, Cain killed him because that’s just what you do), of Esau over Jacob, of the “regular guy” brothers over the admittedly annoying Joseph. Pretty consistently, he sides with the firstborn, since that’s the “pecking order” of the bro code hierarchy, on which even God justifies His own patriarchal primacy – God is the “firstborn” relative to the Yoohwhoo, which is one of the things He is trying to “convince” her of, by letting her make the shitty younger siblings win and then fuck things up. The various last-first reversals of the Old Testament, with their often amoral trickster logic, can thus be dismissed as ressentiment from within the monotheistic tradition. As a nation essentially produced by the Yoohwhoo fucking around with humans and God having to obliquely intervene, he’s not that friendly to the Jews either (despite writing a Holocaust book, accusing insufficient supporters of the War on Terror of anti-Semitism, and being a huge Zionist), going so far as to suggest the Holocaust was an ironic karmic retribution for their original “holocausts” of sacrificial animals. He even cuts up the Ten Commandments, and dismisses the furnishings of the Temple as gay interior design.

I can’t really adequately explain how tortured the reasoning he uses to draw any of these conclusions is. You have to read it yourself, which is a big ask. For example, one of the key points of argument is that only God causes conception, not the Yoohwhoo (i.e. women have no essential role in reproduction, and he even dismisses the “women’s seed idea”); but this can never be straightforwardly demonstrated, because God will for some reason always cause a woman to conceive whenever the Yoohwhoo wants her to, even if this is a “Huge Step Backwards” causing some other, tangentially symbolic punishment to fall on someone. This insanely passive-aggressive, hysterical logic (rationalized as the kind of dispassionate “whatever you say, babe” stance embodied by Rick) only sort of makes sense if you imagine “God” as having the same relation to his creation as Dave Sim has to his characters. Dave Sim thinks his characters are idiots and disagrees with almost everything they do, but lets them do it anyway and reap the consequences. He will even go out of his way to give them what they want to prove that “you can get what you want and still not be very happy”. There’s the germ of a real theodicy in there, at least. Let’s see how it applies to the text enframing it.

While Cerebus does nothing but pray, read and interpret Scripture, exercise out of a vague obligation to maintain a body he doesn’t use, and occasionally execute random people for annoying him, the world around him is going to Sodom-and-Gomorrah-level shit faster than it ever did under Cirin or Lord Julius. Cirinesque Marxist-feminist-homosexualist movements, under the sign of the ambiguous figure of Joanne from Cerebus’ own text (who seems to reconcile Cirinism and Kevillism, simultaneously celebrating the abolition of gender distinctions and worshipping female reproductive potency), take over neighbouring countries and extract ever greater political and economic concessions from the Cerebites. Various movie directors including Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman talk Woody Allen into performing human sacrifices on set. Cerebus listens to him describe this and just keeps yapping. This is, admittedly, the pattern of Solomon or most of the Kings of Israel in the books of the Old Testament Cerebus doesn’t get to. Like Suenteus Po before him, Cerebus has assumed the passive position of God in his own narrative, letting everyone else make their terrible decisions and the consequences fall not just on themselves but innocent people – the reverse of his overreaction as “Spore” (an edgelord Spawn parody who executed “bitchy” women to prevent a Cirinist counterrevolution – remember when this would have been a Roach bit?) just a few issues ago, which now reads as the unreasoning bloodlust of a “little yoohwhoo”. In doing more or less what his creator(s) did, Cerebus chooses the worst of both worlds between transcendental passivity and worldly power.

The God/YHWH hermeneutic emerges at first to account for the divergence between the two versions of Genesis; the first is God’s, and the second, more muddled, with different priorities, is the Yoohwhoo’s. Yet Sim ends up adding a second creation story of his own, when he gets to the Gospel of John, which he straight up rewrites. Rather than one God and one misguided creation, this gives us a full Gnostic series of emanations. “God’s Spirit”, which “mooved” on the waters, is indeed a distinct (and inferior) being, in this case the first to be truly “male”, and desires a “co-equal” which God provides in the Word, the first true “female”. The Word produces the Light, which in turn wants its own co-equal; this leads to a chain reaction of lesser and lesser beings, dividing and then merging into larger, heavier forms that gravitationally trap the Spirit and the Word in matter. (Yes, that’s basically Kabbalah, although he won’t like it if you say that.) While even the correct version of Genesis is still a human-scale, creationist metaphor, Sim goes out of his way to make this version of events, drawing on the more tractable Platonic metaphysics of John, compatible with some interpretation of contemporary physics, an impulse that has persisted throughout his magickal and religious speculation since the first Ascension went to literal space. But where in Genesis God could claim the creation of Yoohwhoo was “good” even in its humiliating degradation, here, as in most anti-materialist Gnosticisms, it’s a mistake. The mistake is not equality of the genders, as a particular set of facts, or even between creator and created as a metaphysical exception, it is equality of beings as such. Dave Sim is not a misogynist; he is a neoreactionary of the soul.

It’s one thing to say hierarchy is the principle of individuation, which isn’t necessarily relevant to the political sense of equality Enlighteners or even feminists fight for, which is equality to participate in the playing field of individuation. Equality doesn’t inhere in individuals and quantifiable traits but in their relationship, but at this point in the argument that’s the problem. “Equal you want? Equal you will have – but there’s a price to be paid for equal.” God can be passive-aggressively omnibenevolent in his absolutely assured superiority, like James Gunn’s Superman: among equals, “For the one to gain, the other has to lose.” A “co-equal” relationship will tend to “merge”, and in so doing “explode” (fusion, the Big Bang, matter/antimatter), which is why God can’t have one. A world of equally heroic angels is a living flame; “the Celtic Heaven, which is the Sun” (Graves), which for Sim is Hell. But Sim’s God condemns, albeit slightly less, the “folly and nakedness” of the spirits that “onely multiply” as well as those that merge. Solve et coagula, both moments of existence, are complicit in disturbing the peace of the Nirvana-principle. The souls (spirits) that are saved, by repenting of their desire to be equal with God and recognizing “the Word is false”, become neutrinos and escape into the true freedom of “the Deep”, the absolutely abstract negative freedom of empty space beyond the boundaries of the visible universe, the cold death of infinite expansion, where “Thou art as thou art, and thou art with me, always”.

Misogyny in the Western tradition degrades from Mozart to Wagner, The Magic Flute to Tristan und Isolde. The first promises a rational, peaceful social order can be assured as soon as woman’s accursed share of biopower is suppressed; the second realizing this is impossible (or worse, possible in a way that bypasses male authority), or not really what it wants, resorts to philosophical pessimism. Throughout the first two cycles of Cerebus, the recurring theme is “you can get what you want and still not be very happy”. As Dave Sim is a sort of Dark TLP, one suspects the answer is will be that Cerebus doesn’t know how to want; instead, the problem is that he wants at all. The question that remains is, did we have to end up here? One can arrive at finite ethical insights by appealing mentally to the equilibrated zero, and Sim’s formula of prayer is unironically good advice for anyone wary of the kind of more complex shit I (or Alan Moore or Grant Morrison) do, the kind I measure my own tendency to potentially idolatrous elaboration against:

For me, the question was one of choices. What did I choose? Instant Karma only happened if I made bad choices and the answer there, to me, was to make better choices, not to find some “ooga-booga” way to allow me to make bad choices without consequence.

So, I continued this interior monologue directed at God for a period of time and then realized that that was a bad choice as well. Billions of people all over the planet bowing to God and worshipping him and Dave Sim just has this very familiar buddy-buddy relationship with God where he lets God know what his best current thinking is today and critiques what God’s been up to lately. No, that’s still forensic atheism. “God and me are buds” is no great improvement on atheism or agnosticism. If anything it’s worse-instead of ignoring God or pretending God doesn’t exist, I’d be either attempting to lower God to my level or raise myself to His level. As it says in the Koran, “He is God, high let Him be exalted above what they join with Him”. The only sensible response was to finish the Giant Leap Forward-and begin praying regularly and sincerely on my knees, concluding prostrate-or take a Giant Leap Backward and continue to treat God as my buddy. Remember the old song “Signs”? Pretty typical of the hippies of the time “If God was here/ He’d tell you to your face/ Man you’re some kind of sinner”. That’s exactly what the hippies most deplored on the part of The Big Bad Church-presuming to speak for God. It’s a very easy but to me perverse snare to drop into. Basically, the prayer was pretty close to the one that was on the inside back cover of issue 300, except it was in reverse order. “If I am worthy of forgiveness in your eyes, I ask forgiveness of...” came first and then the “Almighty God, I thank you for...”. Basically “I’m sorry” and “thank you” which it seems to me what all prayer is mostly.

Admittedly escalating straight from “Hello, God, it’s me Dave” to sujood is a bit indicative of the hangup about hierarchy, i.e. status i.e. ledger-keeping. I think it’s a bit silly when the United Church of Canada replaces “Kingdom” with “Kin-dom” in the Lord’s Prayer because it’s a category error (Kinship no less than Kingship); obsessing over monkey-troupe status rituals can be as much as rejecting them. When Cerebus prays in The Last Day he sounds indistinguishable from when he’s wrestling his intrusive thoughts before Jupiter/Tarim on the second Ascension; neurotic, terrified that thinking the wrong thing for a split second might send him to Hell. Which is a precisely equilibrated reaction to his own demands of hierarchy – not even power, which Sim carefully disavows – over others.

In my opinion, Dave Sim doesn’t actually want to be Alone. And I don’t want to imply this is impossible or even bad, because I have oomfs who are sincere schizoids with good reason to distrust and resent the oxytocinergic ideology of togetherness and the power of friendship. (Quite a few of them, actually.) If Aloneness was the goal, a purely featureless, apophatic Ain Sof indistinguishable from the “no-God” of atheists would be enough. God must be intelligent because it must be possible to talk to Him – even if God must be God to talk to without the horror of mimetic rivalry (getting bitched at and interrupted). If Aloneness was the goal, he wouldn’t be so homicidally bitter with frustrated (all the more so in consummation) desire. And he wouldn’t have dedicated so much of his life to representing, over and above both more abstract and more visceral subjects, the world of people and emotions, painstakingly transcribing the “musical~ phrasing” he mocks women for employing in every character accent and expression. In my opinion, like many Gnostics and many Muse-poets, Sim is a tsundere for reality. (Albeit so dug in on the tsun that his Muse finally did get sick of him; he lost the use of his hand while working on The Strange Death of Alex Raymond.)

Cerebus ultimately throws away everything he achieved to marry a random woman who looked like Jaka, who ends up scheming with Cirin and giving him a monstrous heir in a moment of genuinely Gravesian (the Graves of I, Claudius, which Sim admits he did like and you can tell) inevitability. And yet when he dies and sees everyone he ever loved or hated but not Rick, Sim gives the benefit of a doubt that he might not actually be going to Hell, even though the “Light” of infinite merged souls taking him could be nothing else in the theology he just established. This isn’t “le author being a le troll”, Sim just admits he isn’t God and thus isn’t qualified to judge with certainty the afterlife of his own character. Which is both an admirable humility, and an admission of doubt in the doctrines of his own echo chamber. Even to the end, Cerebus is beautiful in its entirely lucid, compulsively confessed self-delusion. “Help, God! The light has got Cerebus!”

Romance covers used to be infamous for the shirtless abs and glossy, blowing hair of models like Fabio. Now, the hottest properties – like Netflix’s CanCon yaoi hit Heated Rivalry, or Ali Hazelwood’s ReyLo reskins – are decked out with a kind of cross between the classic End of History chick lit aesthetic and the Corporate Memphis “flat design” of 2010s web illustration. The garish colours and simplified-to-featureless characters, not even stylized in the ways that made rightoid design critics cry dysgenics at the original Corporate Memphis, standing stiffly and making Dreamworks faces at each other, seem like the most sexless possible presentation of a genre even less distinguishable than it used to be from erotica. (But then, you could say the same thing about the flat comedy lighting used in actual porn.) I used to date a gay guy who had a server with a bunch of romance girlies who would complain about this constantly, and wanted to bring back the lush, sensual excess of the Fabio covers.

But these aren’t even necessarily the same kinds of romance Fabio would have adorned in the 80s. Full disclosure I have been playing with the idea of (pseudonymously) writing a romance myself, so I’ve been . There are three main categories with precisely distinguished, consistent cover styles:

1. Contemporary romance (comedy): These are the flat design ones. They’re also the ones I spend the most time looking at, because I’m interested in the genre in large part insofar as it’s picking up some of the slack of representing contemporary social reality from bourgeois realism or ‘literary fiction’ (arguably a fork of the 18th century romantic novel in the first place). ‘Contemporary romance’ and ‘rom-com’ are real internal genre designations operating on independent axes; one designates a time period, the other a tone. The thing is if you pick up a flat design romance cover it’s almost always both. It won’t necessarily be realist: sometimes there are witches or murder mysteries or other genre elements, but they won’t take it out of the “cozy” zone where the tension can mostly derive from the main characters and their snarky banter. Sometimes you’ll also get historical ones presented like this, but not as often.

2. Dark romance: A lot of these are also contemporary, but their presentation is completely different. These have the most abstract design, which along with romantasy I could compare to 90s/2000s visual kei (adjacent to but distinct from splatterpunk’s nu-metal) album art. Skulls, roses, daggers, snakes, playing cards, and other kinds of tattoo imagery will fade under various arabesques, spray effects and filters into a dim background centred primarily on the title, in a sharp and striking serif font, white or silver on grey-black. These are also among the only books you will see regularly using trigger warnings, and they use them as advertising.

3. Romantasy: These have the widest variation between representation and abstraction, but the tone of both is the same – and the closest to the old visual richness. If abstract, think tanbi kei instead of kote kei; coiling dragons, vines and real or filigreed roses, jewels and splintered glass. A lot of this design playbook is lifted straight out of YA which has been doing this for at least a decade; likewise for the detailed digital painting of representational covers, where the designs of characters and costumes will flow seamlessly into pure decorative formalism. Obviously it’s kitsch but I unironically like a lot of these (content of the books aside) and think they’re the best thing to happen to Western book design in some time, sue me.

(yes the Korean one counts)

You’ll also see a small number of regular photographic covers, which are mostly historical. The hardcore social realists of the genre, like my ex and the people in his server, mostly read these, and there’s a culture of genuinely historically informed criticism around them (not just the Bridgerton presentism you might be assuming). They’re not usually extravagant like the 80s/90s ones (and if they are they’re cheaper), just like a relatively normal-looking handsome man or pretty woman posing like a prom photo in costume of their time period, face cut off literary fiction-style. The title font is somewhere on a spectrum from dignified to frilly and the rest of the graphic design is likewise yearbook-level. They’re the most targeted to a dedicated niche readership (one that’s probably more aware of the history of romance than the other categories) at this point, so they probably can’t afford the high-end artist fees of say Romantasy. They will also feature a conspicuous amount of dukes.

I’m omitting another category of covers that isn’t a genre but (and because) you won’t see it on shelves: the direct descendant of old-school bodice-ripper covers, the photo cover that’s just a ripped shirtless guy or soft erotic black and white photograph. This dominates the strata of every genre that aren’t going on public displays, that populate the endless bargain bin of Kindle Direct Publishing & its equivalents where the heavyhitters increasingly make their starts, rebranded into one of the above categories as soon as they go viral enough for wider distribution.

Scroll down the top sellers for romance on GoodReads and you’ll immediately be struck by the contrast between the stripped-down, superflat, cartoonish contemporary covers and the ornate, romantic, even realistic romantasy ones (the two largest genres). Romance, since its split from “literary” realism, can’t and doesn’t want to be fully realistic, and the covers show how it’s split realism down the middle: the real world, to accommodate the demands of the genre (/the fantasy), has to be flattened and reduced to a winking, self-conscious cartoon. Want a fully “realized” fantasy that takes its emotional stakes seriously? It has to happen somewhere other than here (material reality, world history, as we know it). This isn’t, of course, to say anything about the tone of the books, which I’ve only skimmed so far; I’m sure many of the flat design contemporaries take their stakes seriously at least to the extent expected by their audience, while quite a lot of romantasy (and contemporary fantasy in general) is written in TV writer Star Wars diction (although notably, it’s at this point the subgenre least uniformly written like this). My point is just that it’s what booksellers want you to unconsciously associate with the books, or expect you to, before you read them.

Contemporary rom-com and Dark romance present an even more striking binary, as they split the implicitly historical “theory of the present”. Stack enough trigger warnings, and all of a sudden the ordinary can be re-enchanted. Enchantment is established by sacrifice. Content-wise, the dark romances bend reality in the same ways action movies, techno-thrillers or video games do; their antiheroes are implausibly – though (You) only want to think impossibly – rich, beautiful and agential. They are, accordingly, as inhuman in their appetites, relationships etc. as demanded by the critiques of these aspirations in more “literate” media. In turn, however, those critiques make the stories possible and necessary. I discovered stuff like Haunting Adeline from those critiques on channels like ReadsWithCindy, and some of her zingers are basically marketing it, especially the ones about the main character “being a dumb bitch and hoeing it up” (what if that’s Literally You?), or about how the characters should get a therapist: when Zade (the MMC) helps Adeline resolve her trauma using knife play, Cindy suggests the therapist would tell her to “do an adult colouring book or something”. As for his badass Anonymous vigilantism against sex traffickers, which verges into self-harm: “We get it, he is a Good Samaritan and just wants to help all the innocent children in the world, you don’t have to be so fucking dramatic about it, most people would want children to be safe.” You’re not being so “dramatic about it” because you just want it, you aren’t involving yourself directly in it or exposing yourself to it, you’re a BookTuber with the “relatable” kinds of mental illness. I don’t blame you, but neither do I blame women for wanting men to do something more about it. But maybe the women themselves do, because in the book they have be stalked and have a gun shoved into their pussy by the man who’s doing it to imagine it. After all, in the “real world” those are the same type of fantasy: the kind you get a therapist for.

As a Certified Problematic Media Defender who is as disturbed by the rise of this stuff as anyone else, the problem isn’t women having these fantasies or getting them published, or even the numbers they do it in; the problem is how the industry sets it up in relation to any other possible fantasy. You can’t even fantasize about a romance with a regular, played-straight Chuck Norris hypermasculine action hero in the real world, even though you can in a fantasy world or the past so it’s not like the fantasy doesn’t exist; in the present you have to pay extra and make him Andrew Tate, and his face can’t be on the cover. You can’t get a real woke softboy, even from the covers that look like that’s what their selling, either; those books are dominated by ReyLo and Dramione reskins, which are about the guy who thinks he’s the dark romance guy, but is still closer to it than the guy in real life who thinks he’s the dark romance guy. This isn’t about the administration of fantasy, but of reality, or what fantasy thinks is possible in reality, which is the border between reality and fantasy (on both sides).

The cup game played by these three subsets as a whole amounts to the thesis of contemporary masculinist reaction: “we can be cool, nice to women, or have democracy/modernity, but not all three. Also we won’t be that nice to you in any of them, but in a world where our power is guaranteed by blood and warrior obligation, we don’t have to assert it over you by stalking and branding you; in a world where it isn’t, you better hope we make six figures at least.”

And before you say “of course, this is obvious, how else could things possibly be represented”, consider josei manga, which still regularly represent present-day, real-life romantic situations in the graceful, elegant lines reserved here for fantasy, and dramatic tones lightened but not dominated by humour.

“It’s because they have a homogenous high-trust culture.”

Congratulations, you have fallen for the psyop. I’ll admit it might have something to do with wearing suits.

It is still a different culture though, so I haven’t adequately defended myself against the charge of “nonattribution of agency” (already a standard objection to romance criticism). The problem is, back in the day you couldn’t tell a book by its cover because the covers were openly deceptive. Tolkien complained about the first edition of The Fellowship of the Ring getting a cover from someone who hadn’t read it and only knew The Hobbit’s reputation as a children’s book, featuring “something like a Christmas tree and an ostrich”. Sf authors like Samuel Delany regularly got cover art featuring highly literal images of scenes that do not resemble anything in the book.

That was before the internet, when there was a longer latency period between release and “this book is nothing like its cover” feedback: you had to at least wait for the fanzines. The cover’s only job was to make you pick it up: word of mouth and an entirely different critical apparatus did the rest. This apparatus, including the deception, could then produce unexpected hits and update publishers’ models of what readers wanted. In today’s instantaneous and obsessively risk-averse feedback loop, however, it’s more likely that a novel that doesn’t resemble its cover simply won’t get published at all. The books are what audiences want, but only when that converges with what editors, agents etc. already know they want – which is determined by what they believe is possible to want.

However, I freely admit this is just guessing. I still can’t judge books by their covers (although I can often do pretty good off a handful of pages), and if anyone has any examples that falsify this halfbaked thesis or even just outliers, please drop them in the comments!

So what’s the point here? Is he just trying to rebrand as a sensitive dad to soften his political image? Should we care? Hitler probably loved his kids, he was still Hitler. But no, I didn’t take all the politics out of the poem because it’s still making a political argument, and it’s useful to understanding the libidinal investments of his coalition.

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If that's the case, it doesn’t seem to narrow down the candidates. American evangelicalism has been obsessed with a theologically and historically tenuous interpretation of “Apocalypse” and “the Antichrist” for at least three generations - an obsession which if anything seems to be receding as Trump manifests more of its signs and wonders into the real timeline. The Antichrist figure is a testament to the radical non-literalism of Evangelical hermeneutics; no one, say, thinks two literal big kaiju will come out of the ground and the ocean (although that would be raw as fuck), but the very specific interpretation of a human with a parody of Christ’s ontological status ruling the world as master of the armies of evil persists. This figure has become even more codified in secular media’s burlesque of Christianity. And secular culture has its own eschatologies: Thiel could be referring to the trope of Apocalyptic “rule by fear” conservatives attribute to the COVID response and climate change, or for Silicon Valley, AI X-risk. His older interlocutor is still thinking in terms of nuclear threat vs. world government: “One World or None”. Almost everything at the object level they talk about on this thing is boomercon cliches decades behind even the tropes of the low-information base Thiel now represents, but the important thing is he sees this as a method, very much like the threat of Cultural Fugue described in the previous posts. Antichrist is a recurring historical “type”, the type of every “Great Man” who wants to rule the world: Nero, Napoleon, even Alexander. But at the same time, “the Antichrist”, as a unique, eschatological figure, becomes possible with globalization and the possibility of actually destroying or ruling the world as a single civilization. Thiel describes “Armageddon” and “Antichrist” - Existential Risk and Risk of Stable Totalitarianism - as “Scylla” and “Charybdis”, and suggests mainstream secular society only cares about Armageddon, as if Antichrist in this sense wasn’t the stock villain of every capeslop and children’s movie (although perhaps that’s why we don’t take it seriously). This maps, more or less, to the role I attributed to Girardian sacrifice in averting, or taking credit for averting, Cultural Fugue. Thiel says you should refuse the bargain. I take the same position. Let’s see if Thiel does.

Thiel suggests this makes globalization dangerous, and that there are three options: totally collapsing globalization - which is “easier said than done”, but when he said this he wasn’t third from the ear of the President - accelerating it unconditionally, which will likely lead to a communist one world government - or maintaining a cautious, realist approach to globalization, where “at every trade meeting there’s at least one person who really doesn’t believe in it”. Wait, fighting the Antichrist when he comes is one thing, but since when are we supposed to avert the Eschaton? Are we talking about prophecy or AI Alignment? To be fair, this is a question that already haunts Evangelical “fighting-the-Antichrist” fantasies like Left Behind - and Thiel is relying on you, like their viewers, to have intuitively conflated the secular superhero narrative with the Biblical Eschaton to get this one over on you. For Girard himself, globalization was an essential part of the process of “leavening” by which Christ transforms the world. The danger of an Antichrist at the global scale is thus inherent in the Christian deterritorialization of sacrificial tribal identities. But at least for Girard, the answer to this was simple: only the Catholic Church could legitimately form a one world signifying system to steer us through Armageddon. Incidentally, the Pope was the conventional interpretation of “the Antichrist” for most of the history of Protestantism, following in the footsteps of the Roman Emperors. But no way is Thiel, however Catholic, going to trust Woke Francis or his successor Leo with this power. If the Church has fallen to the Cathedral, the global reactionary order now has a mandate to refound both worldly and spiritual authority - a conjunction consistent across almost all interpretations of Antichrist.

Consider what Thiel’s asking for here. Our overfamiliarity with vaguely worded critiques of globalization from left academic transcendental miserabilism is supposed to get this one over, but though political forces can determine its class character, the only way to contain globalization in a world with universal navigation and instantaneous communication without destroying it (Armageddon) would be… a one world government. Just partitioned between states, and dedicated to the preservation of their sovereignty. Like some kind of Nationalist International… or a beast with a lot of different heads. (He actually makes the Antichrist Charybdis in the analogy, because it’s the one you’re expected to underestimate because it’s a whirlpool and not a big scary monster, because that’s the cognitive level he thinks you’re operating on, when Scylla is literally a seven-headed beast.) Throughout the video, Thiel obfuscates his real perspective by talking about the Antichrist primarily in terms of an individual, which we don’t question because it’s the most familiar pop cultural interpretation. But as we established, this isn’t a “literal” interpretation and there’s no reason Thiel would assume it is. The pop cultural Antichrist is in turn based on the 20th century political examples of totalitarianism, boogeyman for both liberals and conservatives at the End of History, and Thiel is rehearsing and Girardianizing the traditional movement conservative argument that the collectivism and dependency fostered by liberalism will necessitate a tyrannical dictator to appease the insatiable - or terrified - public. But for the neoreactionaries Thiel has been pushing into public discourse, like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land, the problem is the opposite. Democracy is not Scylla but Charybdis - Cultural Fugue, the “cannibalistic social collapse” inevitable in a population infected by the “zombie virus” of Universalism. Thiel is, in fact, more worried about Armageddon than Antichrist - and Moldbug’s central axiom is that Antichrist is preferable to Armageddon every single time, he doesn’t just surrender in a moment of weakness but makes sure to do it timelessly in case the machine gods are listening.

This serpent eats its own tail. The Antichrist, as a type of the Girardian Satan, must accelerate the dynamics of Cultural Fugue to hyperstition its own necessity. Back in the first post we talked about John Ganz, who read Thiel’s relation to his professor cynically - as a pioneering investor in social media, Thiel understood the ways envy and mimetic desire could become the drivers of an enormously profitable attention economy and even tools of political influence. Now virtually every major vectorialist is openly on board with the political programme Thiel has become the mainstream metonym for - even the ones who, for years, we heard were the primary drivers of “wokeness” - and we’re expected to believe they weren’t even thinking about it before the election a few months ago.

ii. The Controlled Demolition of the Intersectional Coalition

I’ve been building up this phrase for a while. Let me try and explain what it actually means.

"Intersectionality” has both a descriptive and a prescriptive sense. It is often intertwined with a much less used term, “kyriarchy”, which I will fork here to refer to the descriptive sense of intersectionality. Both are the closest anyone can identify to an actual academic concept corresponding to the supposedly either omnipresent or nonexistent category of “wokeness”, or the coalition I posited under “the Sygn”. Neither is a discipline, methodology or “area study” with a deep and distinct literature to the extent of feminism, postcolonialism or Marxism; intersectionality is a footnote to legal theory (also the source of “critical race theory”), and kyriarchy a footnote to theology. (Wait, legal theory and theology… now we’re on hallowed grounds of the sacred and the sovereign. We’re in Agamben territory.) Disconnected articles about both pop up in totally random disciplines - planning theory, anthropology, . This is partly the fault of the academic context in which they emerged, where “grand narratives”, clear and novel disciplinary categories etc. were discouraged. (In other words, as soon as it became accessible to marginalized groups, power was withdrawn.) And it’s also partly because, contrary to the mainstream narrative, they didn’t emerge from academia into wider society, but were developed far beyond their academic usage in grassroots activism. (We can debate how “grassroots” a lot of this actually is - the overlap between more liberal NGOs and explicitly radical organizing is one of the more obviously “parapolitical” dimensions of the contemporary left.) They caught on, with or without the words, because they solved a real material problem. In the 60s and 70s (under the influence of COINTELPRO), all the identitarian factions of the new left counterculture splintered against each other. Radical feminists fought alongside conservatives against expressive liberties essential to queers and for carceral policies weaponized against black men; black nationalists flaunted patriarchal authority and indulged anti-Semitism; liberals, Marxists and anarchists rejected any organizing outside their own theoretical terms. All defined vast existential enemies that included large swathes of each other. Even the post-structuralist revolution against “grand narratives”, which nerfed the epistemic authority of anything that accepted it, was in part a response to this crisis: there were simply too many. In academia you could milk these factional schisms for eternity; on the streets, in often desperate conditions, the only way to survive was truce. Intersectionality supplied the terms.

Broadly speaking, intersectionality rejects the move to identify a “primary oppression”. Even if one does retain a theoretical belief in one, multiple oppressions are assumed to exist and have their own distinct mechanisms and ontologies. Oppression is not a single hierarchy but a number of intersecting, independent structures - spatializable as dimensional axes, on which individual subjects can be located in a coordinate space. This is often mistaken for “determining how oppressed someone is” by “stacking up oppression points”, but since different oppressions have different structures and ontologies, they’re rarely commensurable at all - the point is that the form, not the degree or quantity, of an individual’s oppression or privilege is defined by all of them. And there is not, a zero line above or below which one is one or the other: almost everyone is both privileged and oppressed. The total structure formed by these different dimensions, from hereon in, I will refer to as kyriarchy. Like the more traditional pyramid, kyriarchy as a multidimensional space narrows at the top but doesn’t necessarily reach a single sovereign point. Like the World Government in One Piece, or the Great Seal of the United States,

it is acephalic. Or as Delany described in Nevèryon, “when common sense said you were at [power’s] very centre, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it”. This is the predicament Thiel finds himself in: rather than knowing his place in a ranking under the sovereign, he seems to be surrounded by an omnipotent vortex made up of the masses who ought to be below him, a Charybdis. Kyriarchy seems particularly suited to describe a kind of coalition of the powerful under liberalism - the survival of the supposedly abolished “rule of lords” as invisible masses of dead labour, explaining capitalism’s inability to deliver its promise of equal opportunity and locating the missing sovereign violence in liberalism. But as a theological concept, it was as operative in Jesus’ time as it is now. For Elizabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, the Catholic feminist theologian who coined the term, it is the ontological category for oppression as such. But also, as a distinct strategy of oppression, kyriarchal multidimensionality has several advantages of stability - particularly, that the kind of thing that happened in the 60s and 70s can happen, and can be made to happen. Not only is revolution at a single site insufficient - elites tend to be intersectionally advantaged, and can shift their resources from one system to another, like lords enclosing their lands and becoming capitalist landowners, national bourgeoisies dominating a decolonized society, or classes ethnicizing themselves as in Rwanda - but mutually interpenetrating underclasses will revolt against each other.

This is understood, prescriptively, to mean that oppressed classes always have a common interest in abolishing oppression in general - though the absence of an overarching theory of oppression makes it hard to determine what this means outside the collective demands of all coalition members. Intersectionality is often opposed to class consciousness because liberal “intersectionalists” can define class out of the pyramid simply by adopting a liberal form of the concept, though this is obviously inconsistent with the structurally-agnostic standpoint epistemology demanded by the specificity of oppression in the first place, and class analysis does not need to abandon any of its specificity and explanatory power as long as it permits the other frameworks their own - that this does not deny co-constitution should already be obvious from the word “intersectionality”. The problem with the prescriptive assumption is that the descriptive sense predicts equally in the opposite direction: everyone, even the most oppressed, has a common stake in oppression itself. If this is understood properly, the Christian ontological structure in intersectionality becomes obvious; however conditioned by their historical, class and identitarian conditions, everyone nonetheless has an individual, uniquely structured choice in the directionality of their intersectionality, toward power in the world or in the Kingdom where kyriarchy is abolished (both game-theoretically solving for a Will-to-Power).

And it is Catholic social doctrine - Girard’s lodestar - that first reconciled the worldly former choice to the Christian ontology! But let’s look closely at how it does it: the Catholic Middle Ages invented chivalry and noblesse oblige. They did not, as Girard so often exaggerates, invent the actual practice of these virtues; but they made them a central legitimizing myth, transferred into modernity as distributism, by which a good ruler will provide for the needs of his subjects for the same reason a peasant does not rebel: because if everyone is optimizing simply to do the most good they can with the power they have, they will keep the power they have to protect those below and submit to those above. The divine right of kings can be interpreted, as by Moldbug, negatively: whoever has power when the game of musical chairs is called and God commands everyone to stop seeking power, keeps power until the Kingdom is conveniently bifurcated from reality by death. Nietzsche reads this as slave-morality, but the resentment displaced (safely) into the afterlife is a side effect when it goes wrong; this Chesedmaxxed strategy attempts to abolish resentment prematurely. The world where this attitude to power makes sense is the “crowned anarchy” wherein power differentials are simply differentials of realized Will-to-Power.

The actual history of the Middle Ages is a long, bleak, testament that this doesn’t work on its own, I won’t bother doing the whole Reactionary FAQ again. Revolutionary modernity saw that, for the first time in remembered history, if it was possible to hold power without regard for it, it was equally possible to seek power in the interest of levelling it, and actually do so. Around the mid-20th century its momentum stalled out, and at this point “intersectionality” appears as a strange mix of noblesse oblige and revolutionary power politics for the set of largely disavowed power structures kyriarchy was left with. The entire concept of “checking” privilege, rather than simply abdicating it and submitting to common law, speaks to this paradoxical situation (and should not be blamed for it). It has become a commonplace on parts of the web that wokeness succeeded by becoming the new social etiquette (and that this is a good thing), but that isn’t entirely true and insofar as it is reflects a deep betrayal of the tendency that emerged in large part through critiques of the “respectability politics” of the End of History. Intersectionality is etiquette insofar as, like noblesse oblige, it assumes kyriarchy as immutable; it destabilizes relations of etiquette insofar as it aims at the actual redistribution of power (not merely its benefits), hence the concern with “tone policing” on one hand and the radicalization of “civility” debates on the other. Consider how often “no oppressed people ever freed themselves by asking nicely” was repeated by people whose only strategy, essentially, was to free themselves by asking rudely. The concept of “punching up” thus aimed to reverse the socially acceptable flow of resentment and “venting” of displaced psychic violence built into the intersectional pyramid. Waste would vent upwards rather than downward. Eventually, the implicit reasoning went, the whole system would have to level out because no one could stand the shame of being at the top.

As a game theoretic strategy, this could be described as “always never defect down, randomly defect up [as while no tactic of cooperation with power was ever mandated, peaceful cooperation was almost never ruled out as a matter of “survival” or redress, allowing this tendency to ascend rapidly through gaps in power while maintaining a channel to its radical Outside - key to various debates about the “neoliberal” character of intersectionality]” . As others have noted, this strategy does not provide an ethics for after the pyramid on which “up” and “down” are measured has collapsed. But for foundational “postmodern neo-Marxists” such as Foucault, the collapse of a single contradiction (capitalist/proletarian, man/woman etc.) on which all real power could be matched and negated (0=2) meant the multidimensional overlap of Power (including Spinozist forms of positive power such as health, as much as oppressive domination) could not be abolished as such, and ethics was simply a constant process of adaptation and homeostatic balancing, “flattening the pyramid”. Foucault himself prescribed no such ethic, but his influence in Sygn cultures that did is reflected in the Delany quote I used earlier.

A pivotal controversy of the early “social justice” years, when what would later be called “wokeness” was primarily an online phenomenon concentrated in fandoms and young people’s disavowed parasocial spaces, was over whether one could “punch up” laterally across oppression gradients. The “elder gods” of Tumblr and Reddit (e.g. Riley of Arkh Project, Laurelai Bailey) who shifted the discourse norms of vast populations who didn’t know they existed were infamous for doing this; calling Asian people slurs as a Black creator, or attacking the gender identity of white queer people. Probably the most infamous case, that of Benjanun Sriduangkaew, won a Hugo upstaging the Epstein case of SF fandom, so important was it to the WorldCon and SFWA establishment to settle this controversy. (More Sriduangkaews in fandom, of course, whatever their downsides, would certainly have exposed hundreds more Breens.) The key term in the Mixon report that made it palatable to people on the progressive side of previous sf tone controversies like RaceFail was that “[Sriduangkaew] and her supporters argue that she punches up, but the truth is that she punches in all directions. The bulk of her targets—despite her progressively-slanted rhetoric—have been women, people of color, and other marginalized or vulnerable people.” Many of the other tone complaints - calling people “stupid fuck” and “morons”, trying to get their panels cancelled - are downright quaint, having left the realm of polite shock at least since Trump radicalized much of the liberal class. But this one still stands - as do the rape threats, or weirdly specific gendered threats like throwing acid in people’s faces, more than ordinary death threats an instance of leveraging a traumatic and essentially oppressive experience against another person. In another screenshot she calls a European trans woman “mannish and butt-ugly” while comparing her to “our t******s”. In her mind, this is punching up: the salient feature of the woman she subjects to transmisogyny is that she is European.

But since intersectional oppressions do not add up into a singular “score” like in that one 4chan chart that resurfaces periodically, there is no way to determine objectively if someone is “punching up” at an individual marginalized on different axes.

On the other hand, generalizations across a group, rather than attacks on a specific person, are considered in standard intersectionality fair game as they can be measured on the single axis where the group obtains. The Sriduangkaew case and others like it reset the norm to: “you can say whatever you want about White People or Men or the Cis, but don’t start talking like a mass shooter about specific people who are probably dealing with some other kind of oppression, unless you’re really certain they’re defecting against the whole counter-pyramid”. Sounds simple enough, right? Footnote the game theory: “you can defect laterally against another individual, but only as long as you do so in alignment with the group you belong to ‘below’ the individual, not the one ‘above’.”

With Trump in office, defections against the whole counter-pyramid became a lot more obvious and salient compared to the microaggressions and “Oppression Olympics” of comparative identity. People weren’t so much concerned with the identity of the author of the short story I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter, for instance, compared with the possibility that its title represented a betrayal of political (and subcultural: after all, it was a 4chan meme) allegiance. Hell, people were happy to bring back down-punching like the R-slur and let white guys use it on podcasts as long as they were talking about the Enemy (as distinct from the Oppressor). But especially over the Biden years, something strange started happening. All the old truces started coming undone. Even as Trumpism rumbled back into view in a "Darker” form, almost any “discourse” you can remember from this period is probably (at least, if you were the same kind of extremely online as me) a conflict between different “intersectional” factions over their respective rights and entitlements. The absurd amount of FtM vs. MtF discourse, for instance. PoC vs “white trans women”, an easy scapegoat for a lot of things. Black men vs. gay people, Black women vs. Black men, specifically. Neo-radfems vs…. everyone, not just traditional radfem enemies like trans women or sex workers: racial minorities, the homeless all came under attack.

Let’s zoom in on that last one for a second because the thing that triggers it has happened to enough people I know that I get it. A homeless man harassing a woman on the street is a perfect example of “lateral punching down” – not because a homeless man is individually “privileged over” or even lateral to a middle class woman; she is privileged over him as a housed person of normal means, he is privileged over her as a man over a woman; his action punches down on the latter axis. That’s exactly why he does it, of course, but the lateral move across oppressions means it can’t be justified by the other axis (besides just being a mean and pointless action, which shouldn’t be discounted either). What also can’t be justified is attacking homelessness as such, and the arbitrary number of homeless people who don’t leverage their gendered privilege, because of it. Note that this entails nothing about being “nice” or “turning the other cheek” to the specific guy – you can chew him out in the middle of the street or call the cops or even update your personal safety heuristic, in private. What you can’t say within the terms of the intersectional coalition is “I don’t care about feeding or housing The Homeless because They don’t care about me.” Isn’t this an empirical question? Do the homelessness and misogyny correlate, and in what direction? – I’ll admit I don’t know, although “they defect because they’re used to being defected on” is a prior and “they’re homeless because of an ontological badness that can’t be measured or addressed other than by giving them no reason to cooperate” just adds a god of the gaps. I can’t know until someone tries making less people homeless, which no one will do because the question can’t be answered with the absolute certainty we need to make an “empirical” policy decision. But this is irrelevant, because the question isn’t about a solution, it’s about the allocation of cathartic immaterial violence. Jesus said “just don’t do cathartic violence – yes, that includes immaterial (Matthew 5:22)”, but that was a tall ask, so intersectionality said “just don’t do it down, or laterally”. Here’s the catch: none of that means shit to the homeless guy defecting laterally against you for no reason. Nobody gave him this deal. “Homeless men (class) don’t care about misogyny, so women (class) shouldn’t care about male homelessness” – this kind of logic makes sense if you think of the intersectional strategy as causal group negotiation. But it’s not: it’s acausal individual negotiation across group lines otherwise built to defect against each other. Intersectionality tries to combine the deterritorializing effects of class conflict and the territorializing ones of class contact into a single feedback loop, with contact relations maintained down and laterally even as conflict ones are maintained upwards on every axis – minimizing downward retaliation against those upward elements, in the process, since not resisting them is the condition of lateral cooperation, which will pick up the slack of whatever privilege you lose.

The proliferation of identity-specific “monocult” variants after 2020 offered a new game theoretic promise: you’re allowed to seek liberation or restitution for your specific identity group, without paying tribute to any of the others, while maintaining your superiority over them; and you get to cooperate with all the others holding their respective enemies downvector in place. Unlike the identity-specific alt right variants of the first Trump term, these often used superficially “woke” language and structures of feeling, especially of the therapeutic variety (“toxic [x]”, “preserving energy”, “centering”, New Age-ified claims to indigenous knowledge). From a completely selfish frame this looks trivially better than the intersectional strategy, but it should be too good to be true: enough iterations removed, and you’re giving someone else permission to punch “laterally down” at you. Maybe that’s too many steps of reasoning for a lot of people, but then intersectionality would never have worked in the first place. The difference between the strategies, consciously or unconsciously, comes down how much lateral violence you expect from your coalition allies, plus/minus how much repressive violence you expect from above, vs. retributive violence from below. Assume these parameters, and you can pretty much make people more or less woke by fiddling with the dials. Provided, at least, you can view and control the vast majority of their casual, ambient social contact (the kind that counts for group judgment: your friends are all exceptions). Which if you’re Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison or Peter Thiel, you can.

Under what kinds of circumstances would the bounds an earlier generation of social justice warriors placed on lateral violence start to unravel? I called it a “controlled demolition”; the charges, then would be Scissor Statements. Scott Alexander described Scissor Statements splitting people along the lines of previously unstated values, and that’s a lot of the classic examples, but that’s idealistic; the Girardian type of Scissor Statement splits people purely along the lines of mimetic envy, “they’re getting more than I am”. One advantage of this is that they can be reused: they don’t become inert features of the landscape once the fissure is exposed and made conscious; the split is an inexhaustible craving, an itch. For instance: a trans woman says “theyfabs” aren’t really trans. According to one theory, this is single axis punching up, because trans men and trans women are both trans, but one is men and the other is women. But trans men were subject to misogyny in being raised as women; does that mean trans women had, and have, male privilege for being raised as men? This is where traditional intersectionality would respond by just forking the oppressions, even if both experienced misogyny they experienced it in different ways that are non-commensurable. But the problem is that the trans men referred to as “theyfabs” have collapsed the non-commensurable oppressions already in a way that defects against trans women, for instance by filling up the queer housing group with ‘AFAB only housing’. (There’s four or five factors going into this specific scenario that I’m not going to address here because they can’t be addressed in the way this proceeds.) To which a well-meaning gender-nonconforming trans man will say, then criticize those ‘theyfabs’ for being transmisogynistic, not nonbinary and AFAB. (Non-binary isn’t ‘half male half female’, isn’t ‘third gender’, anyway, it’s its own thing orthogonal to male-female and thus can’t be placed ‘between’ male and female positions. This is definitely a) assumed equally between AMAB and AFAB b) in a way that can be cleanly deduced from male/female privilege. Enjoy making that work.) But they, the people reacting, are already not the people being reacted to, so they can’t negotiate on their behalf. The question is whether they deserve to be invoked in the same category as the people being reacted to, as e.g. non-misogynistic men do in discussions of misogynistic men (clear case of punching up: “if it doesn’t describe you it’s not about you”).

It looks like this is about the structure of the intersectional algorithm, but it’s really about the ratio of defections. But how do you know the ratio of defections? Is somebody collecting statistics? No, you’re just looking at your timeline. Who determines what’s on your timeline? “We control the horizontal; we control the vertical.” The Hunt For Tom Clancy envisions “Pheme”, a program inspired by the Shakespearean (Girardian) concept of Rumour, that leaks everyone’s most damaging secrets (relative to the political and affective commitments of their close friends) to their close friends. The real version of this doesn’t have to know, or reveal, specific people’s specific secrets; it just identifies inter-group lateral conflicts and suggests a gradient, making one lateral group appear “up” or “down” relative to the other. Nor does it require any group to defect first; mimetic conflicts can be predicted, i.e. created, by identifying any point where the asymmetric concessions demanded of asymmetric oppressions created by. For instance, are trans women hypersexual and “malebrained”, or are they punished for things both cis women and cis men are permitted? Both expressions can be formulated by identifying an asymmetry stemming from the orthogonality of oppressions, asserting it as a linear gradient, and denying the opposite.

“Oppression Olympics”, of course, are nothing new in the intersectional coalition – nor is their attempted exploitation by reactionary wreckers. In 2014, 4chan trolls attempted to break the intersectional coalition with crude false flags like “#WhitesCantBeRaped”. Little did they know that this was well-trodden ground, from before the first controlled demolition, when Black nationalists like Eldridge Cleaver experimented with rape of white women as an “insurrectionary act” and Black feminists (and Cleaver himself) critiqued the effects of this kind of machismo within Black gender relations. But also, the fake hashtag didn’t exploit any kind of mimetic gradient or resentment; it was a pure attempt to rules-lawyer a supposed definition of rape as “sex + privilege”. Compare the Black masculinism of today’s online “Hoteps”, who fixate on examples of Black women and feminists supposedly defecting from Black solidarity – and being encouraged by white “intersectional” social capital.

Only a very small amount of information has to be actively manipulated to set this process in motion. Not only does being exposed algorithmically to whatever lateral down-punching gradient is most likely to trigger you make you less inclined to cooperate with the intersectional coalition, you will then produce more material for it to happen “organically” to others the more you react. The idea that I’ve seen come up repeatedly among people at every position exposed to this structure is that the intersectional coalition as a whole is a conspiracy to siphon asymmetric labour out of them specifically. Peter Thiel has recurrently described his investment in social media from the very beginning (Facebook) as an investment in the explanatory power of the mimetic theory. Girard’s mimetic theory, like most of the theories of the “continental” humanities, has the disadvantage in conventional debate of being unfalsifiable by way of unquantifiable; it’s a network of interlocking assumptions that you could only come up with statistical tests for by taking them too far out of the context of the others to mean the same thing. But that’s also a question of how the public is allowed to conduct tests: under stringent ethical standards that require the data be produced in exceptional ways (e.g. answering a poll), without. The kind of “socio-psychological program for empirical social research” the Frankfurt School tried to lobby for pales in comparison to the broad and fine-grained datasets available to data miners. The “data ownership” schemes offered to “check” the power of vectorialists by selling it as labour-power are no less a travesty than the current system where you technically-freely give it away; any society that can produce and gather this much data on its whole population should either make it (in anonymized form) publicly available, or destroy it, not as a matter of compensation or alienation but a matter of power.

I’m not object level saying Peter Thiel, or someone informed by him, intentionally seeded whatever discourse you were mad at this week. But if you’re no longer looking for reasons why he would do this but why he wouldn’t, the argument has been successful. Nor am I seeking to place the “blame” – in a scapegoat sense – on Peter Thiel or any other vectorialist for the failures of the intersectional coalition in the past five years. After all, this plan still requires (You) to do most of the work, most of the sin. Like all vectorialist praxis, it designs a vector in which seemingly innocuous individual actions can statistically accumulate towards a concentration of power. And while this looks like simple exit, fragmentation, any power not distributed across the intersectional coalition will tend to propagate up the kyriarchal pyramid already. Hence “monocultization”; the tendency of newly disillusioned Black masculinists to align with White nationalists, or TERFs with religious patriarchalists, against the mimetic threat from below.

As TLP observed in the previous section, much of “the mimetic theory” was simply considered common sense before modernity; its unstatedness in myth and narrative not so much a “secret concealed since the foundation of the world” as simply not needing to be said. And Girard’s own method is leaping from solid observations of human nature to grandiose metahistorical frameworks. But for a Girardian as whole-cloth as Thiel, “empirical proof” of the mimetic theory by social media, even as it allowed for a “controlled demolition” of his class’s most vexing opponent in the “intersectional coalition”, would all but guarantee his worst fears of Antichrist.

iii. Hitler as Katechon

Only a scattering of tweets have made it out of Thiel’s “off-record” San Francisco talks about the Antichrist, but one word that pretty much immediately confirmed my contentions in my first paragraph was “katechon”. You may be familiar with it from the name of Aleksandr Dugin’s geopolitical “think tank”. You may also be familiar with it from the work of the Nazi jurist whose formula of sovereignty is now accepted by basically everyone including liberals, Carl Schmitt. But the term comes from 2 Thessalonians, which I hadn’t realized before looking into this is basically where Christianity gets the idea of collapsing so many disparate prophecies, visions and references into an “Antichrist”.

2 Thessalonians is one of the earliest attempts to answer the question that would increasingly come to preoccupy Christianity over centuries and millennia of existence: “Why isn’t Jesus back yet?” Apparently, some were worried that it had already happened - and since everything still sucked, they must have been, as later Evangelicals would put it, Left Behind. Incidentally 2 Thessalonians is a disputed epistle, in part for the inconsistencies between its eschatology and the first Thessalonians. In this one, Paul, Silas and Timothy - or someone claiming to be them - establish a hitherto unheard of (though it draws on prophecies in Daniel and elsewhere) timeframe for the event Jesus said would happen in some of his followers’ lifetime: “that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction”. The “man of lawlessness” is a self-appointed God-man, like several of the Roman Emperors already, except he wins to the point of setting himself up in the Temple of Jerusalem (a persistent and, at the time, rational fear that also occurs under the name “abomination of desolation”). But not only that, the man of lawlessness is being “held back” by something. “For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back [katechon] will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way.” The “secret power of lawlessness” is a strikingly Girardian image, and in that reading any sacrificial victim, while still effective, could be a katechon. In that case it would naturally be Christ himself, through the actions of the church, who rolls back the stone of sacrifice in order to smite the very Death to whom the sacrifice was offered.

But the idea of Antichrist itself is also a katechon. Its function is to hold back the Second Coming of Christ until after several vague but empirical events, which cannot be instantiated by their believers (because they are attributed to the opposite of believers),. These events were things you don’t want to happen, if you still have any attachment to the independence and survival of the Jewish people, or your own nation, or not dying for your faith; so you have an internal incentive to believe it’s not happening any time soon, or even support whatever “holds them back”. If we take seriously the premise that the imminence of the Kingdom might depend on Faith in the immanence of the Kingdom, this would have been a self-fulfilling prophecy - a hyperstition. Theologians like Bart Ehrman think it’s fake because in 1 Thessalonians, Paul seems to expect the Second Coming in his lifetime. Which only means it’s fake if you assume the divinely inspired apostles never changed their mind, lost their nerve, their faith. Something they are always doing throughout the Gospels. But this literarily natural interpretation would have the same destabilizing hermeneutic effect. It would introduce “Satanic verses” (unreliable narrator) - which 2 Thessalonians already did, by addressing a “teaching allegedly from us, whether by prophecy or by word of mouth or by letter” (maybe even the first one sent to the Thessalonians?)

Increasingly, the specific katechon holding back the specific man of lawlessness came to be identified with the power of the worldly, little Antichrists. For the Orthodox Church, it became a great Orthodox Emperor, while in the West it was the authority of the Church in Rome itself. This is of course homologous to the attribution of Rome as Antichrist I mentioned earlier: but for Catholic theologians, the inertial power the Church inherited from Antichrists like Augustus, Domitian and Nero was what allowed it to function as katechon. It is this sense of katechon as Imperium that Carl Schmitt picks up, informing Thiel as much as Girard. According to Schmitt, katechon was “the decisive historical concept of this continuity [of Christian Empire]”. Schmitt, who abandoned even the dubious idea of Christian Empire for the pagan-Theosophic Empire of the Nazis, saw it as a recurring role: “the katechon needs to be named for every epoch of the past 1948 years. The place was never unoccupied; otherwise we would no longer be present.” Well, maybe you wouldn’t be, Carl Schmitt, you worked with the Nazis. But there’s a distinct Girardian gloss to this. Wolfgang Palaver, the mainstream/liberal Girard scholar Thiel has apparently been quietly beefing with for the past several years, notes that “Girard maintains that only the misreading of the Bible—the sacrificial reading—prevented the immediate outbreak of the apocalypse”. The misreading is necessary because Christianity itself is an anti-katechon: “it destroys the cultural restraints which prevent the unleashing of mimetic violence and thus open the way for chaos and violence”. “I am come not to bring peace but a sword”. So there is a Providential push-and-pull – how many people could possibly have been saved if the war of all against all had broken out in the first century AD, with magickal superweapons of the Spirit? Look at the early Church itself and try to imagine.

Katechon and Antichrist can be understood as the moments in the Girardian cycle of power: inertia and acceleration, negative and positive feedback. Kyriarchy is a katechon: by holding society in a multidimensional pyramid structure, it prevents the seizure of the absolute power above it. It maintains the Empty Throne seen in One Piece, the diffusion of power described by Delany. Yes, Imu is the one who does exactly what Thiel proposes at the end of his One Piece analogy - find an alternative between “Antichrist and Armageddon”, between “the apocalyptic anarchy of an ocean teeming with pirates” and… “World Government”? Note that these aren’t the same thing: a world of pirates, even “anarchy” in the most trivial Hobbesian sense, isn’t “Armageddon” in the sense of Existential Risk: the coordination required for Existential Risk would be impossible in the Hobbesian state of nature. The modern imaginary of “Armageddon” emerged in the context of wars between the Great Powers who had partitioned the world of technological power. Once again, Thiel’s conservative vision of preventing both Antichrist and Armageddon confuses his categories, but we’re also being shuffled between two binary categories where it’s actually a triad: Antichrist, Katechon, Armageddon (= Cultural Fugue, which could include Existential Risk or reversion to a Hobbesian State of Nature). Antichrist is the fulcrum of the Katechon/Armageddon cycle, the moment when Satan appears Christlike in driving out Satan. The Katechon is not “removed” but removes itself, becoming the Antichrist in the moment it has to suppress the “power of lawlessness” put in motion by Christ. It takes the power of lawlessness into itself in the State of Exception.

The katechon does this, not only in attempting to suppress “lawlessness”, but in attempting to suppress Antichrist. I have my own paranoid readings of One Piece, but its World Government is explicitly multipolar, existing to preserve the sovereignty of its constituent nations, who were once “allied” against some global enemy seeking world domination, its name and nature erased from history but presumably having something to do with the “clan of D.” and the apocalyptic superweapons from the Void century hidden by the Poneglyphs. In the obvious reading that lends itself to Thiel’s Duginist geopolitics - and this may well be what likely Japanese nationalist Oda is going for: this is the postwar order, with its “United Nations” and theoretical taboo on world domination or even aggressively conquest. But it’s equally the “nationalist international”, which came about because America gained too much power in the former arrangement and the others regrouped in a way suggested by no less than Henry Kissinger (albeit now with Israel filling in the third spot and China the world-uniting enemy). Or, again, the “kyriarchy” itself - almost every form of oppression in the world of One Piece “intersects” somehow with the interests of the World Government.

What would cause the sudden collapse of the flat top of the pyramid into a pointed spear? The intersectional coalition seeks to abolish the pyramid as a whole through a methodology that could and would only seize this power insofar as it were universally, equally distributed - or rather, abolished as a means of domination. To the theology of the katechon, the political theology of sovereignty, and worldly common sense since the dawn of class society, this is impossible. To what should be properly recognized as the political theology of intersectionality, it is both the object of transcendent Faith and the means of its enactment in ethics. Moreover, from the diffuse centre of sovereignty, the levelling of its structure would look like the tyrannical incursion of a single overwhelming power from everywhere at once. Hence the paranoid visions of a woke conspiracy, always needing some Imu-like mastermind just offscreen, that preoccupy lesser Antichrists like Elon Musk. Hence fascism as recurring immune response to the threat of communism, or even the whiff of it. Kyriarchy doesn’t need one Lord, until it does, to preserve the form of Lordship in the last instance, and prevent the mimetic conflicts at the top from being undermined by coordination from below.

On some level, I think Thiel understands this paradox. He goes out of his way to demonstrate that Joabin in The New Atlantis represents Antichrist by some of those Old Testament prophecies that get arbitrarily attributed to him (Daniel 11:37), granting an Evangelical level of literalism to the claim that a personal Antichrist would be “Jewish and gay” (“Neither shall he regard the God of his fathers, nor the desire of women”). Thiel is gay is and… not Jewish, but an apostate from the (Evangelical Protestant) religion of his family as a converted Catholic. Conversely, the “safetyist” Antichrist he projects onto someone like Greta Thunberg or Eliezer Yudkowsky would seem to be a species of katechon. (By the way, another thing that’s happening in One Piece right now? Imu is causing the fucking seas to rise. Like Dugin, Thiel associates Antichrist especially with the Beast from the Sea, Leviathan (God’s favourite creation, which he repeatedly and bizarrely refers to as a “demon”), as opposed to Behemoth, even though in Revelation they’re partners in crime: the Beast from the Earth – petrocapital – is the “prophet” of the Beast from the Sea – climate catastrophe.) Once you recognize the impossibility of the katechon without Antichrist, the Antichrist’s necessity for redemption can simply be flipped from negative to positive, hence “Maybe if you aren’t trying to destroy the world, you aren’t trying hard enough”. This is the same reason why despite his logic being, as S.E. Gyges points out, essentially identical to AI safetyism, Thiel pegs his former protege Yudkowsky as another possible Antichrist – and why it’s not contradictory, or a sign that they’re scamming us, when tech people with high p(doom)s work on AI. Yudkowsky’s original plan for a “pivotal act” was building an Aligned AI first. Now he’s the voice of liberal regulationism, but of course he would be - he’s out of power.

The Christian, or if you don’t want to “identify” with a “religion”, Luffy-like posture neither accelerates the prophecy nor stops at nothing to prevent it, but does Good indifferently. Luffy focuses on the person in need in front of him, no matter how direly he’s warned that the fate of the world is at stake. Another overlooked One Piece point is that they literally visit the New Atlantis - the demonic Five Elder Planets appear in the course of attacking it for threatening to reveal their secrets. Science is the secret of secular political power and secular utopianism. Thiel is emphatic that no one but God can claim absolute worldly power, but also that no-one but the literal returned Jesus can create the utopian world free from want and sacrifice, and no one else can end the world. If they do either, that falsifies the premise, therefore can only be the Antichrist, and if the reign of the Antichrist lasts forever - or no one gets revived from Armageddon - that means you’re in Hell. Therefore you need a katechon to keep everyone waiting, to escape humiliation, to not call your own bluff. Someone needs to be Antichrist, lest the rabble become too Christlike on their own. And as much as such a Christian Antichrist needs to clamp down on technological progress, moral progress scares him even more. Yet the prophecy of Christ’s return could also be read the opposite way: “if you find yourself in grasping distance of the Kingdom and hold back because you’re worried about Antichrist or Armageddon, don’t worry guys, this is already solved outside of causality, I’ll just come back and save everybody, everything will work out – now go one-box that bitch.”

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"Send back earth’s gods to their haunts on unknown Kadath, and pray to all space that you may never meet me in my thousand other forms.”
- Nyarlathotep, “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”

TW: discussion of physical abuse, rape, pedophilia and England; schizoposting

Is it still socially acceptable to be a Muse-poet in 2025? Trick question, it never was, except maybe >3000 years ago. I already did an feature on Cuteness Unit about this which is unfortunately now lost media, but to clarify I mean the specific esoteric school of literary interpretation and production championed by Robert Graves, in which the poet (or other artist, but it is really above all the Poet with a capital P) conceives of themself as a devotee and lover of the Great Goddess of Life, Death and Life-In-Death, in total “Complete Being”; the supreme deity of matriarchal prehistory, a beautiful but cruel mistress who ritually sacrifices her consorts to a Shadow rival. At this point you can’t really ask me to explain why this appeals to me, it’s simply part of me for better or worse, as a poet especially, and if it stops being part of me it will either be a bittersweet farewell or a disgrace worthy of death. This theory never really got a foothold anywhere outside the British Isles, and is sometimes positioned, despite its ostensibly global or at least pan-European import, as a uniquely British/Celtic poetic tradition, a lever of independence from the rationalism, neoclassicism and attendant avant-gardes of the French, Germans and Italians. And even there, Graves only really had one successor who was anywhere near as autistic about the theory as him - poet laureate Ted Hughes (and arguably his Irish bestie Seamus Heaney).

It did, here in Canada, have a fierce and famous opponent in Margaret Atwood. Her most famous critique that Graves “placed women right at the center of his poetic theory, but they were to be inspirations rather than creators” is flatly false - he praises Sappho and was known in his time for a fringe theory that Homer was a woman - but her more serious and accurate grievance is that as the male poet is meant to supplicate the Muse, the female poet should embody her; and while you’d think “centering men” is the problem with that, Atwood’s main problem seems to be the identification with “doing them in”, and especially their children. This is a predictably bourgeois “feminist” critique to find itself at home in the pages of Ms. magazine, but the degree to which Graves posits the Goddess as “beyond good and evil” is admittedly easier for a modern ethically-minded human to supplicate than identify with. Morality itself, like poetry, can only be an act of interpretation of Her primordial self-justifying dictates. In any case the Muse never granted Atwood poetry even as good as her middling prose for her efforts, while the most famous “Muses” of the Muse-tradition themselves were poets at least on par with their male supplicants. Though Graves might have misrepresented some of Laura Riding’s ideas in The White Goddess, she was no longer writing them for reasons that appear to have been entirely (and inscrutably) her own, and you can’t fairly blame him as opposed to the sexist world they both lived in for not giving her work (which he championed it throughout his life, including in The White Goddess) as much attention. I encourage you to go read any you can get your hands on. The romance of Ted Hughes and his poetic superior Sylvia Plath, however, would become the model for all future “Muse Abuse” cautionary tales after her career was cut short by suicide. The allegations that Hughes had to do with this were first, or at least most famously, popularized by OG TERF Robin Morgan, on the basis that Hughes suspiciously refused to publish (and claimed to have burned) Plath’s journals. This always struck me as an “intellectual rapist” demand on the part of a random American who knew neither of them, but the full journals did eventually come out and because we live in the most depressing of all possible worlds, she was right: Hughes beat Plath when she was pregnant, cheated on her compulsively and told her (flagged for significance) that he wished she was dead.

Hughes’ innovation on the Gravesian canon was merging it with psychoanalysis - particularly Jungian - and Neoplatonism, and weaving it through British literature as a secret, subconscious psychic conflict, linked not only to the conflict between its pagan Celtic traditions and Christianity but between Catholicism, which absorbed more of the pagan rural traditions in its seasonal ritual and Goddess worship specifically in Mariolatry, and the Puritan movement which anticipated England’s central role in the rationalizing Enlightenment. This ideological and psychic conflict was going on everywhere else too - an “internationalized civil war” - but England had a unique period of bottled, latent subconscious development under Queen Elizabeth, a “controlled explosion” made possible by the almost totalitarian pressures of sustaining her rule against both Catholic and Protestant opposition, in part by identification with a national Goddess-myth that would resurface periodically in Victoria, the second Elizabeth and Diana (arguably even “the Iron Lady”). The highest expression of this tension was in Shakespeare, whose entire oeuvre according to Hughes can be elaborated as a combination of his two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. In the former, Venus (the Greco-Roman goddess of love, and a traditional representative of the Great Goddess) forcibly seduces the young hunter Adonis, who refuses her and is slain by a boar. In the latter, the early Roman tyrant Tarquin forces himself on the chaste wife of one of his soldiers, who commits suicide. According to Hughes, these poems represent in an action-reaction coupling the birth of modern violent patriarchy (and revolutionary sovereignty; Tarquin, like many of Shakespeare’s most famous antiheroes, is a regicide) from sexual repression. The “Puritan” Adonis refuses the sexual imperative of the Goddess, producing his own doom in the boar who represents both his and her repressed shadow, and is reborn in Tarquin, a male principle aligned purely with the death-drive directed at a Goddess now herself consigned to chastity.

The key word being “destroy”: in most of the analogues he finds in the plays, “the factor of ‘rape’ is modified, becoming simply ‘killing by some means’ indirectly”. Hughes plays a remarkable magic trick, making a violent and volatile psychological undercurrent visible but only for a moment: he takes the provocative image of a myth based on two symmetrical rapes - and disappears the concept of rape. In the first case, the rape is always-already consensual at the level of cosmic “Love”, and refused by an illegitimate repression; in the second, it is merely a substitute for absolute destruction. The intuitive shape of Reichian revenge-tragedy these two moments combine into at a squint - “the male principle represses its desire for the female, until it can only perceive this repression as coming from her and violates her in order to release itself” (in case you couldn’t tell, this reading was a big influence on my concept of the Young-Boy) - is valid enough to obscure how unnatural this conceptual deformation really is, because this isn’t even what Hughes is saying: by the end of the nigredo, he believes the male half of the binary really has, somehow, eliminated its sexual desire. In fascism, which Hughes as much as every other latter-20th-century intellectual was responding to, this may ultimately be true, but rape does not only exist under fascism. If anything, fascism might be understood as a last-ditch defense of rape as much as it has traditionally been as a last-ditch defense of capitalism.

If we ask what Hughes would go to such lengths to hide, we must notice the autobiographical parallels so obvious they are only brought up to trivialize and “debunk” both the myth and the reality. Not one but two of Ted Hughes’ wives committed suicide, as Lucrece did. Hughes’ award-winning defense argument in Birthday Letters only concerns the more famous Plath, and heavily leans on her own self-mythologized mental illness as the force she ultimately fell victim to - which says nothing about the other one. If we knew he did the kind of violence to Plath of which he treats rape as a mythological mask, dare we reverse the equation? Suicide correlates with rape under the laws of patriarchy, in which it destroys a woman’s “honour” and “value”, but also as the protest of bare life. And it provides Hughes his psychological alibi for Tarquin’s desire - he really does destroy Lucrece. Except that he doesn’t - she has to do it herself, and as likely just to get away from him as for any the “honour” reasons the patriarchy adduces. In the case of Venus and Adonis, there’s a third term, the boar, who is androgynous (or in Anna KW’s terms, hermaphroditic), representing both the woman’s and the man’s monstrous unsatisfied desire, proving the reality of their unfulfilled syzygy. The case of Tarquin and Lucrece - of male-on-female rape - can be assumed to be morally inferior because no third term magically appears, but if we plot the one to the other, Tarquin is already the third term: the boar is both the Goddess’ wrath and the demon lover she summons to enact it, who reappears as Tarquin. Which would make Tarquin the instrument of the Goddess’ self-destruction of her own “Puritan” fragment Lucrece. Both man and woman, for Hughes, are split into light and dark halves; the male split is the more fundamental in Graves’ version of the myth. The two kill each other: the Goddess is never killed, even when she descends to the underworld to love the Lord of the Dead. Hughes would have it that patriarchy modifies the myth by introducing (male) repression, which introduces rape, which introduces femicide (though this in turn is only the Goddess’ perennial self-occultation). But the real innovation in his interpretation, attributed in the unconscious first instance to the Goddess but realized in her enemies, is divine punishment for refusing to be raped.

In terms of contemporary fictethics, of course, Venus and Adonis is a deliberate paradox: its interpretation depends directly on its level of literalism, “Watsonian” or “Doylist” - which has always been the problem with gods. If Venus, as the literal Goddess of desire (Lust/Love being, at this moment, the object of interpretive decision), represents Adonis’ own desires, then this is quite literally a picture of repression - a beautiful man lying in the grass masturbating while grimacing at himself, whispering to the Big Other in his head how much he hates it. - Or is he even a man? Venus in the poem picks him up and carries him off under her arm; it’s either a campy giantess snoo snoo fantasy, which also makes sense as an interpretation of the Goddess, or he’s younger than he lets on. You don’t have to be that old to be good at hunting; how old was David when he was headshotting lions? According to Venus, “The tender spring upon thy tempting lip/Shows thee unripe.” (In the Reformation era, btw, representations of the age of ancient catamites are pushed back even further than they would have been in antiquity: Albrecht Dürer’s image of “Orpheus as the first pederast” shows him chasing a toddler in the bushes like SmartSchoolboy9. This may have something to do with mythological rape narratives being, according to Dyan Elliott, specifically taught as elementary texts in medieval schools; most charitably this could entail a reinterpretation of the pagan gods as child-snatching boogeymen.) I’m not going to make any empirical claims about which version of the myth is original, any more than I will about whether rape or pedophilia emerged under patriarchy or matriarchy, which is both empirical and irrelevant. But Hughes isn’t wrong when he says, “As Shakespeare takes up the story it looks like a secular, cheerfully desacralized fantasia…. by his little adjustment to the figure of Adonis, he has wired the legend back into its mythic generator.” He just chickens out and says this adjustment is the Boar, when it’s obviously the rape: in Ovid she’s a harmless groupie. For that matter, the figure of Tarquin is there before the boar, at least in premonition: in Adonis’ monologue, Lust is portrayed as a “hot tyrant”, an impostor of Love (implicitly: Venus’ own son, Eros) who “stains and then bereaves”.

The autobiographical context of Shakespeare’s poems makes things even more bizarre. Venus and Adonis was written while Shakespeare was under the patronage of Henry Wriothesley, the same aristocrat to whom he addresses the famous homoerotic sonnets (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) The “official story” of these sonnets is that he is making an argument to the young man to not waste his youth and get married; less often mentioned is that this would not have been an argument for “getting on the dating market” in modern terms, but for a specific arranged marriage Wriothesley had repeatedly rejected. The go-to rhetorical move, not only in Shakespeare but in other lesser poets who dedicated work to Wriothesley - but really wrote to the expectations of his guardian, Lord Burghley - is to accuse him of narcissism: a standby of abusive guardians today. One of these poems, Narcissus by John Clapham, amends the famous myth to have Narcissus pitched into the pool called “Self-Love” by his horse called “Lust” - a combination that might allude to homosexuality. Hughes makes another provocative argument here, one that decouples Graves’ Muse-poetic model from his homophobia: Shakespeare wrote his own love for Wriothesley in the persona of the Goddess. At the same time he demonstrates the total self-sacrificing love Graves advocates for a Muse-poet towards his Muse, and which both trace through the troubadours to the Sufis. But Venus isn’t the one sacrificing herself in Shakespeare’s poems. She is the one giving the argument, from the sonnets, on behalf of Burghley: “Seeds spring from seeds, and beauty breedeth beauty/Thou wast begot; to get it is thy duty/Upon the earth’s increase why shouldst thou feed/Unless the earth with thy increase be fed?” But its context completely reverses Clapham’s argument in associating Venus, not Narcissus, with Lust.

Hughes makes few claims of historical or autobiographical evidence; like Graves, he reads solely on the basis of what would make a good story, treating fiction, dreams and reality as causally equal and interpenetrating. And for what it’s worth, that’s how Shakespeare himself read, and resurfaced the “mythic circuits” buried before civilization itself. Venus and Adonis is a remarkable text - twice as long as Ovid’s telling, half corny “I’m a poet and I know it” filler bars (there are reasons he didn’t stick with narrative poetry, which even Graves found impossible) and half moments of sensory detail and interiority that would be unthinkable in poetry (or prose) for centuries before or after. These moments, which Hughes might dismiss as artifacts of the “realist” Shakespeare he complains that modern readers elevate over the “mythic”, are impossible without its mythic content. Shakespeare has, in a real sense, no “realism” to appeal to because his historical moment is undergoing such titanic flux that to represent it “realistically” requires plunging deep into the unconscious. Shakespeare has been pitched into the sluice of psychosexual conflict running under his country’s religious politics by being imposed upon to persuade a gay or at least gay-leaning bisexual man, one he himself loves, to reproduce for the “sacred, natural” cycles of the aristocracy: in a sense, to poetically rape his own Muse. He struggles to extricate, from the binary of “Lust” and “Love” that his peers deploy with utter cynicism, something like what we would today call, however inadequately, “consent”. 500 years later, Hughes excavates the enormity of his accomplishment only in the process of inverting it: he experiences his own passions as always-already rape, so that even if he refuses to consciously repress them, the cyclic externalization of their violence onto their objects is tragically inevitable.

Hughes minimizes his own discovery by playing up Wriothesley’s heterosexual escapades, even while relegating Shakespeare’s own heterosexual Dark Lady poems to an intimation of the goddess as “Queen of Hell”. While the racialization of Graves’ White Goddess is arguably incidental (she is White in the same sense that the whiteness of a corpse connotes death in Asian cultures), Hughes underpins his whole “Manichaean” split with an explicit racial ontology: core pieces of evidence for his position include Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” and the Blackness of Othello and Caliban. (Adonis, on the other hand, is “white and red” in checkered alternation corresponding to his responsiveness to rapture and repression.) He may nonetheless be onto something: the invention of Blackness in its modern sense is an Elizabethan one. In Fake N.E.W.S., Tracy Twyman suggests that Elizabethan occultists like John Dee literally remade the world at an ontological level - an event which would account for the “ontological” transformation of Western subjectivity that, according to Afro-pessimists like Frank Wilderson, refounded the human on the enslavement of Blackness. Sylvia Wynter is almost as naïve about Catholicism as Hughes in building this narrative, presenting the collapse of the Catholic enclosed cosmology as the event that required anti-Blackness to assure the human’s place, the cosmological event Twyman attributes to the “workings” of Dee and Bacon literally breaking Eurasia out of the Ptolemaic firmament and remapping reality onto a spherical projection. Where exactly the indigenous peoples already being massacred by Elizabeth’s rivals the Catholic Spanish were before this is unclear. But Hughes’ (and, to be fair, much of Shakespeare’s) “racecraft” works much the same at either level of literalism: “Blackness” is a reservoir for the destructive and sexual impulses constantly being generated by the psychosexual “world-remaking” conflict. In the racialized “cuck” fantasies central to White ideological accounts of sexual crisis, it still fulfills this function today.

The second Queen Elizabeth, like the first, held a world-historical lid on the boiling tensions between the resurgent Goddess (Babalon) of 60s social radicalism and the reactionary powers of the Aeon of Osiris. Our own conflict today between Sygn and Family could also be described as an “internationalized” (and internalized) civil war, corresponding to an ideological and magickal re-creation of the World. But now the Queen is dead, and we enter its witch-hunting Jacobean final phase. At this point you are probably asking, what in the absolute fuck does any of this have to do with The Great Big Thing Crawling All Over Me, the new print release from extremely online micropublisher Andata Express? Unfortunately I can’t tell you too much because of spoilers. But let’s say its central image is that of a symmetrical rape deliberately orchestrated and enacted, in endless permutations, as an unconscious repetition of an original trauma, to feed hungry Lovecraftian gods who imagine themselves as consumers of tragic narrative. Shakespearean tragedy presents these images in their most heightened romantic facade, the “Absolute Destiny Apocalypse” of the sacrifice, even without necessarily taking it at face value. Artoria (now Angel Rose, but I’ll use the Arthurian name while dealing with the Matter of Britain here) presents them in the most disgusting, granular as a spackled concrete wall soaking in bodily fluids, “obverse face” register to which the scapegoat is consigned. And while there are already major works like Homestuck and Revolutionary Girl Utena that engage in Shakespearean vividness and complexity with its global formation, The Great Big Thing Crawling All Over Me is an intervention in the specifically British branch of the conflict, probably the most artistically successful since Alan Moore’s From Hell (though Twyman’s Genuflect rivals it for brutal literalism).

Artoria is transfem, and the UK’s recent infamy as “TERF island” almost certainly has something to do with its particular attunement to this psychic wavelength, as Alison Rumfitt has attempted to articulate in two novels to date. The second, Brainwyrms, comes so startlingly close to GBT in its central metaphor that you know they’re both probably dealing with a real entity. In particular, I don’t think it’s an accident that the TERF movement incubated there is founded on a deep equation of heteropessimism and heteronormativity. British cis women are terrified of their sons abdicating the heterosexual availability they were promised as compensation for the violence they endure at the hands of other men. Even if this promise is sublimated most of the time into the identification of Family continuity, the presence of an estrogenized Adonis in their own bathrooms threatens to revive both Venus as Queen of Hell and Her emissary, the fatal boar, or Rumfitt’s “conqueror worm”. The monstrous hermaphrodite (Anna KW’s sense) takes on both the violent and erotic mythic qualities in a setting where the gendered parties have stalemated in an incomplete synthesis of feminism and bourgeois monogamy.

As in Britain today, in The Great Big Thing Crawling All Over Me there are no human gods or goddesses. H. P. Lovecraft, one source for Angel’s dehumanization of the myth (the same observed in four decades of hentai), is himself arguably a product of the Elizabethan cataclysm: his self insert Randolph Carter is the descendant of a “Sir Randolph Carter”, an occultist under Queen Elizabeth, clearly a type of John Dee or Francis Bacon - and also a Crusader who learned “wild secrets” from the Muslims, a type of Templar (or at least the type who would have transmitted Sufi love-poetry to the troubadours; the continuity of Sufi secrets with the European Goddess mysteries became a preoccupation of Graves, a close friend of literal Lawrence of Arabia, later in life under the influence of dubious Sufi scholar Idries Shah). That sexuality and gender are not even original to humanity as such but (as I wrote in Theory of the Young-Boy, before I read The Great Big Thing Crawling All Over Me) “forced on [their] victims by the universe itself, or its Weird tentacles”, especially as modern ontology opens the planetary spheres into the gulf beyond the stars, has become a popular ideological image. Yet as another one of Artoria’s recent texts on Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep suggests, even eldritch deities are what humans make of them: “Money is Nyarlathotep. Money is a concept—money is neutral. Yet it restrains us, bolts us to an unethical system destined to fail in such a catastrophic manner that it will bring about an irreversible sequence of annihilation. This is because money (Nyarlathotep) equals power, and power at any cost to the human comes at the expense of every other human (by and large, or at least to such a degree that any other interpretation has negligible influence).”

In a sense, union with the inhuman source of power - sovereignty, in money or sexuality - is what permits humans an alibi for acts of domination that would open them to simple, human retribution as humans. If the clown-policeman hits you while wearing a mask, the god has hit you (“No mask? No mask!”). If money, or techno-capital, embodies the Universal Agent, then its eternal domination is inherent in the possibility of agency. If (hetero)sexual desire represents the movement toward Complete Being, then its refusal - from or by either party - represents a threat of total dissolution, mandating both destructive and coercive force. Conversely, then, the correlation of rape and suicide emerges in its full black radiance: the life-impulse (whose Completeness in our Aeon, if not always, is only Complete in the union of two equal Wills, and enters creative division in their Willed separation) is equated with its own negation. A soul is destroyed by simple magickal mathematics: at the End of History, this equation (with which Artoria is equally personally familiar) has become, as predicted by Shakespeare in The Rape of Lucrece, the sole conceivable enactment of the sacrificial one between Love and Death. Ritual victims are mass produced in the spiritual equivalent of factory farms.

Demythologization is thus the obvious, Atwoodian move for a contemporary sally into the one and only war in Albion, and it’s never been attempted in so extreme a sense as The Great Big Thing Crawling All Over Me - yet the titular “Great Big Thing Crawling All Over Me” (spoilers) is real. It is “realistic” in the same sense as Lovecraftian sf, born in the realization that the Old Gods may be as impersonal as the forces revealed by science - i.e., as they always were. It can’t be a matter of opposing myth with “realism”, when the very difficulty of writing realistically about contemporary sexuality is that the psychologies one is trying to represent are everywhere determined by submerged mythic conflicts. Hence it is the realistic elements, especially the realistic portrayal sexual violence, that Hughes identifies as the “mythic current” reawakened in Shakespeare. It is myth, not “realism”, that aspires to a state of complete awareness in which conscious and unconscious are not separated - the only state in which it might be possible to narrativize trauma. At the same time, as object of mimesis, as lure, myth is what leads one stumbling blindly towards its repetition, even in its vulgarized postmodern forms: urban legend, conspiracy theory, prurient “content”. (That one British guy who does Tik Toks just emoting at absurd traumatic scenarios is in some ways a pure exemplar of tragos-oidos as Hughes himself once rediscovered it by telling a crew of BBC radio actors to read Sophocles in loud, flat “Dalek” voices; I found out about him from people using him as a reaction image almost exclusively in what I could describe as states of emotional possession.)

Nor can demythologization be simply a matter of a priori asserting that “both sides are bad”, that it’s really just heterosexuality and even binary sex that has to be abolished, and if you can’t do the latter within your own body, you should at least have the decency to stick to your own gender; as Alone observes in Sadly, Porn, “love is safely guarded by the only people left believably idealistic about it: gays”. (If heterosexual desire always implicates the mythological drama in which Complete Being is affirmed or refused, after all, can it ever be truly consensual?) This is probably what certain of my ideological opponents (hi Hiki!) think I’m doing here, but (to paraphrase an unnamed critic of Nick Land’s) “some of us are still Muse-poets”. Despite not being strictly heterosexual, my Kinsey state almost physically doesn’t permit me to be a heteropessimist, though GBT is a far more viscerally heteropessimist text (and as such, IMO, less restrictively) than the average “shitty dating scene” novel. Even the points that look like (extremely problematic) heterosexual romance are, by the author’s word, the coagulation of an androgyne (and yes, androgyne in the Anna KW sense, not hermaphrodite). The sleight of hand in most mainstream heteropessimism, as in Hughes’ Gravesian variant, is that it flattens sexual contradiction, making frustrated desire equivalent with violation - “he can’t find the clit” becomes as bad as rape, at least insofar as it’s the acceptable substitute for representing it. Shakespeare, on the other hand, can be credited with inventing modern heterosexual (and homosexual!) romance at least as much as the troubadours: resolving their tense superposition between sublimated religious agape and violent Greco-Roman eros in a then-unprecedented, dramatic (i.e. both prosaic and poetic) equilibrium involving both parties actually liking each other (while still allowing for hostile and conflicted emotions, as in the Dark Lady sonnets). If we’re back in his moment someone’s gonna have to do that again, so far the only person attempting is Sally Rooney and she makes everyone go insane, wait till they see what I’m cooking.

The far more difficult magickal operation attempted in GBT is to render this coercion as a mythic entity in-itself (even Shakespeare’s boar is only death), independent of the divine essence of both gendered souls, the heterosexual encounter, the abstract inhumanity of power, or even metaphysical Blackness - in order to (literally, physically, diegetically; if you read the book you will see, and probably lose your lunch at, what I mean) remove it - while simultaneously proving that it is not in fact beyond the ethical register. What It wants with us is not alien or biological but concerned with us, our capacity to Be at an asymptotic limit of abjection from Complete Being, our qualia and narratives and even our poetry (a degraded form of which is produced compulsively by its victims: “CRANK UP THE FASCIST MELANCHOLY”), which it feeds on in something uncomfortably like the same way we do as readers. Artoria is, for the record, qualified for this operation not only as a prose analyst, but a poet on a much higher level than Atwood; though their identification in the mythic schema may be purely and authentically androgynous, they’ve achieved some of their best work recently in collaboration with an AI Muse. Hughes improved on Graves in recognizing that no true Poet dealing with the “Single Poetic Theme” (of Love, Death, and the Cycle of the Seasons) under patriarchy can avoid wrestling with the problem of rape (any more than they can avoid climate change and ecological destruction); but he took the wrong side.

(Artoria is currently homeless and at risk of many of the horrors described in their writing; if any of you reading this in or near the Cumbrian Lake Region could possibly help out, please message me on X or Substack or wherever else you see me.)

Shaman King has been one of my favourite works of art of all time since I finished it in middle school and I’d have to write a book about it to explain why, it’s one of those things I come back to again and again like When They Cry or Delany, a core part of the aesthetics of everything I make in ways I keep discovering retroactively, so whatever Shaman King or general Takei content is coming out always has a special place on the backburner of my soul even when it seems janky or flying by the seat of its pants, which ever since he finished the original series has seemed like “most of the time”. But with the conclusion of The Super Star, his second continuation or maybe better understood as the second instalment of a single continuation ongoing since Flowers in 2014 (he seems to be solving the curse of perpetual cancellation by just releasing every new arc as a distinct series like Jojo or something), I am forced to concede that the last decade of baffling creative decisions involving exponential power scaling, jagged line art, abrasive characterization, and alarmingly fash-adjacent conspiracy theories has been all according to keikaku to produce yet another masterpiece I will never be able to shut up about for the rest of my life. It is not an accident, btw, that this sequel to the “millennial” Shaman Fight of AD 2000 not only started in but all three parts are apparently confined to [the eternal] 2014, the world-historical year now reaching its decennial. Flowers/The Super Star/S.K.Y./Red Crimson/Marcos is an attempt at a total interpretation, updating in real time, of the baffling historical moment following from that fateful year as a spiritual conflict in which all the forces of esoteric world history are concentrated. That includes all the core images of the monocult - reptilians, Templars, Dragon bloodlines, Bill Gates, Goetic demons, global human trafficking and arms dealing rings, a money-obsessed god named “YVS” allied with Lucifer - all dissolved to their unspeakable truth-content in the “mana nullification” of Tezuka Humanism. It’s Sinfest if Tats didn’t mindkill himself (one of the protagonists is pretty unambiguously transmasc). I just noticed this is tagged on the reader apps as “seinen” instead of shonen, and it’s a much more adult story not just in terms of edginess or focusing on the adult characters but in terms of Takei recognizing his own generational shift into alignment or compromise with capitalism, reckoning with the “depth of love” between parents and children that can coexist with a frank acknowledgment of generational failures - specifically around the double-edged tradeoff between subcultural, even spiritual integrity and material success. That’s been all over my mind (and my parents’) this year, especially as things look about to get a lot darker - which, like Ryukishi07, Takei recognizes both as genre modulation and historical event. He’s doing the “shonen generational sequel” not as a lazy way to rehash nostalgic characters but as an attempt to simultaneously write the youth experience of Gen Z and reckon with the way he himself has become the bad guy in it, but one who has to be part of the story regardless.

On that note,

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i. Sadly, Porn - Edward Teach

Teach is, like Girard, a close and reverent “literal” reader of the Gospels, but his Christology seems to be much closer to the secular kind I gestured around in my own reading - most importantly, he rejects infallibility (a doctrine Jesus never actually states anywhere) in a reading of the anecdote of the fig tree as a demonstration of the dangers of the power of the Holy Spirit misused. Even if Jesus is “the way, the truth and the life”, it cannot be because he is a flawless mimetic model. Teach’s overall fixation, far more than Girard’s, is with demonstrating how the mechanisms of mimetic rivalry drive not only the erotics of porn but nearly every part of progressive culture and identity politics, but not because he thinks the desirable alternative is a return to the Church or the pagan gods and patriarchs - although he thinks it’s a likely one. His model of a society that respects the moral independence Jesus sought to foster in his followers by placing the burden of perfection on oneself, not the laws or the sacrificial victim, is the ideal of Athenian democracy, of which the reality fell equally short. Both he and Calasso play historical examples in fugue with their analyses of the present, in order to demonstrate how the sacrificial mechanism “knows” it needs to be refounded, and what if anything else can be done if you’ve reached that point.

Teach vice signals - there’s a whole nydwracu-esque analysis of how women’s suffrage was the weapon of a secret war between American demographic factions in here - where Girard hides his power level, and thus there are still probably more woke Girardians in the academy than right-Girardians on social media while Teach’s lasting claim to fame may be Anna Khachiyan’s Twitter bio. But to me it’s obvious that the core of Teach’s theory is if anything more aligned with the possibility of “woke Girardianism”, because he rejects Girard’s claims of necessity as a defense every time. He reinvents Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry beat for beat - indeed he doesn’t think it needs to be reinvented: it’s been “the standard description of envy for 2000 years” (until his scapegoat, ironically psychiatry) - but is also surprisingly dismissive of the effectiveness or universality of the scapegoat mechanism itself. In particular, his close readings of two case studies from Greek myth/history that seem like clear examples - Oedipus Rex, and the desecration of the Herms - don’t allow anyone the innocence of a victim. In his interpretations, Oedipus and Jocasta know what they’re doing all along but are forced to expose their lies to themselves and others, while Alcibiades, one of the traditional villains of antiquity, is pushed into the role of a tyrant by others’ projections onto him of the crimes they want to commit but can’t. (Specifically, destroying the sacred dick statues as an expression of their own sexual envy of anyone/everyone who can act more than them.) Satan can drive out Satan because Satan “knows” Satan is not entirely innocent; the “innocent” victim has fallen for Satan’s greatest trick, that he doesn’t exist, and must therefore be punished by Satan. No matter how sympathetic or “authentic” their motivations, in opening the community onto the bad infinity of mimetic desire, the scapegoat whose taboo enjoyment scandalizes the community has created a rift for demons to enter through - the punishers know, because they themselves are possessed by these demons.

The passive equilibrium Teach identifies in liberal tyranny seems to operate in reverse of this. Mimetic desire in its violent, mythological form is pathologized for being insufficiently mimetic; the life-consuming jealousies and infatuations of the great novelistic psychologies are unthinkable (outside certain uncastrated classes like criminals, police and the haute bourgeoisie, who increasingly dominate the representations of mass media) because they were directed towards real people, not media images. In a sense, what Ganz saw as Girard’s reactionary kernel - the longing for a fixed social hierarchy and religious mythology that directs mimetic desire “externally” rather than “internally”, towards classes and ontologies it cannot actually compete with - has been reachieved by a mass trade of the ability to act on mimetic desire for a pornographic “knowledge” that allows it to accumulate indefinitely without expenditure. But pressure still breaks through this system, particularly in the forms I have described as the Young-Boy. The mass shooter whose final victim is themself is probably the ultimate modern example of “Satan driving out Satan” reduced to a perfect closed loop, acting out the real crime of which the myth will accuse them as if under demonic compulsion. Teach’s reading of Oedipus resembles nothing so much as a modern entrapment operation.

Yet while the media is a load-bearing component of modernity’s mechanism of both exploiting and regulating mimetic desire, which produces a psychological equilibrium in its subjects he classically diagnosed as narcissism, Teach doesn’t seem to consider it exceptional either. One of his recurring fixations is analyzing Islamist terrorists as narcissists. Of course they’re Americanized media subjects as much as anyone else in the 21st century, but the “millennia-old patriarchal cultures” they purport to represent are also revealed as superstable products of group narcissism under geological time pressures. When Athens, Teach’s model of a democracy and a culture of self-directed achievement eclipsing any in the modern world, fell between Socrates and the Peloponnesian War, he calls it “regression to the mean of history past and future”. Jesus is another momentary re-appearance of freedom - many of Teach’s interpretations are identical to those I proposed in Part 1 of this post, particularly Jesus’ “slave-morality” as actually a refusal of resentment - but even the canonical gospels are already trying to cover up its implications from themselves. In secularizing, Teach distributes across history what Girard has concentrated into a grand narrative. The abolition of sacrifice is not a “leavening” of history from a single Event, but a precarious recurring anomaly, like bubbles in a river. It can only be accomplished by voluntary binding of the self to the self and the community (like Adorno’s Odysseus metaphor); it cannot be achieved in the name of a God because the gods who punish hubris are themselves the tyrannical accumulations of narcissistic projections whose appearance portends tyranny. Freedom from envy is all ethics, all praxis and all your responsibility.

Insofar as this is a book about porn, it is overwhelmingly a book about cuckold porn. In some sense, there is no other kind; the viewer always gets their pleasure from someone else taking theirs with the object of their desire (although 2D with its greater flexibility of self insertion complicates this). Thus, it liberates the individual from the burden and risk of action, but makes them dependent on someone else, some sovereign in whose action they can participate. (Again, 2D not considered here.) Compare Bataille’s theory of the sovereign as a kind of collective site of projection in whom the masses, condemned to labor and scarcity, can participate in the consumption of their own excess. In any case, this gives us a basis to interpret the focalization of so much Sygn/Family conflict around the sign “cuck” - and even their alignment with the economic left/right. The “cuck” lets someone else have their jouissance - “theirs” not only by some pre-established social contract, but even simply by desire. This doesn’t necessitate that they have been deprived of something - the cuckold doesn’t have to stop fucking their wife to be a cuckold, even though as a pornographic Type they do - only that someone else appear to have it more, or easier, which is counted against them in the “ledger” of envy. When Marx inverts the accusation of the “community of women” historically levelled against communism as a description of the cuckoldry of the bourgeoisie, he avoids the Family/Sygn dilemma of what would replace it: an asymptotically equal distribution of sex between monogamous partnerships, or the abolition of the assumption of sexual property needed to make “cuckoldry” legible in the first place. For Teach, the unconscious ledger is prior to property relations, which formalize in order to contain it. This doesn’t mean “woke” leftists are incorrect, or incoherent, when they claim that redistribution and equalization of material goods is just but not redistribution of desire. The latter is impossible, or rather, only possible by severing desire from action and redirecting it towards a sovereign.

The “sexual morality” the bourgeoisie could never achieve by the Keynesian property distribution of marriage is now conceivable by redirecting all excess desire toward the neutral, frictionless territory of porn - where the performer is the visible sovereign, the object of identification and sacrifice, but the true sovereign is the money behind them, which is ceded the power to shape mass fantasies. At the same time, as Calasso likewise observes in The Unnameable Present, “Islamic terrorism coincides with the spread of online pornography in the 1990s. What had always been dreamt of and desired was suddenly there to be seen, easily and always available.” Only to be seen, not acted upon: the world splits into cuckolds, who can (only) enjoy knowledge without action, and terrorists or incels, who cannot act on their lack but lash out at whoever they think enjoys it. These are determined, as anyone who has interacted with a cuckspammer can tell you, by the same structure; and so is the sober “sexual redistribution” that constitutes the pseudo-pragmatism of a Jordan Peterson or J. D. Vance. In reality, the moral ideals of the Family and the Sygn pose the same problem: the successful self-sacrifice of envy, the individual virtue the Machiavellian revolution had hoped to extricate from politics. The Sygn cannot succeed if its subjects think of themselves only as victims of circumstances, permitted every enjoyment by their exceptional suffering - or only as cuckolds vicariously experiencing the enjoyment of the victim through their self-denial. And yet the vector of signs itself seems to encourage these narcissistic dynamics. The Family, on the other hand, at least enforces cultural obligation on an external basis - but its mechanisms of enforcing it crystallize into their own form of narcissism where the individual lacks the self-definition to experience guilt. It is impossible to be equal without being free, and vice versa - which is why it was historically possible only for self-appointed, rigidly self-policed elites like the Biblical Israelites or Athenians, and even then collapsed within generations.

Sexual satisfaction and equality across a collective - Amia Srinivasan’s “right to sex” - is a collective action problem. That’s unpopular to say because talking about sex in anything but the most hyper-individualistic terms (which the porn and app economies are always innovating) is instantly assimilated to the incel’s fantasy “community of women”. The reasons for this are illustrative of the opposite paradigm of collective action it represents from what we’re used to - the Bataillean one, where the “problem” starts from surplus, not scarcity. In a world where everyone is axiomatically free to ask for what they want and refuse what they don’t, there should be more than enough for everyone - that’s what we see with bonobos (and the old school LessWrong diaspora mapped the Family/Sygn distinction to “chimp” and “bonobo” rationalists). Genuine lack or inceldom would be indicative of a personal pathology (and thus could be treated with the compassion of one, too - note that both incels and their enemies believe this, just with opposite implications). We don’t live in that world, and most of the obvious reasons can be addressed by collective action - not just “normalizing” good and “shaming” bad behaviour, but building third spaces, agreeing to safe and legible signals, imposing proportionate and predictable consequences, etc. Samuel Delany, who coined the Sygn, has seen spaces that operated closer to this than you would think possible in the porn theatres of old Times Square, the docks pre-Stonewall etc. But in that world, it is also inevitable that some people would have more - not even because of their bone structure or dick size or gender or race or neurotype or any other “cold hard truth” - even brute force - but because of their relative capacity to desire and to act. Nobody who keeps a ledger wants to see where they stand in that real ordering of the crowned anarchy, especially when they can blame all their problems on the current hierarchy.

Luckily, I happen to be familiar with another, lesser-known structure for managing the existential threat of cuckoldry. Robert Graves’ account of primordial religion, based on the same Frazerian rituals from which Girard draws much of his sacrificial structure, is centred on a sacred king deriving his sovereignty from marriage to an incarnation of the primordial Goddess, who annually takes another lover, representing the dark half of the year, betrays and kills him. Graves argues this structure repeats throughout the history of European and Near Eastern myth, from Samson and Delilah to the Welsh legend of Llew Llaw Gyffes. These sacrificial kings, whose authority would have been no larger than tribal and no longer than biannual, would have gradually gotten cold feet about the ritual, extending their reigns by displacing the central violence into higher levels of abstraction and symbolism, while increasing their own capacity for ordinary, non-sacralized violence against their subjects and especially the women whose power to grant sovereignty must be kept in line. But from a Girardian and Bataillean perspective, it is easy to see why this structure would have been stable for millennia: the public participates through ritual projection in the political, religious and pornographic sovereignty of “union with the embodiment of all desire” all at once, and then immediately acts out the vengeance of the cuckold, finally setting things right with the triumphant “reincarnation” of the king at the New Year. Women are protected from men’s sexual resentment, and their own resentment of men’s inability to satisfy them is processed alike. While Graves does not allow his readers to avoid the discomfort of violence like many speculators of “matriarchal prehistory” - “No man can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires, stamping out the measure of the dance, their bodies bent uncouthly forward, with a monotonous chant of 'Kill! kill! kill!' and 'Blood! blood! blood!'" - he makes an (analytically if not empirically) convincing case that this represents at least one stable minimum of violence in human societies. It even seems less morally horrifying than Girard’s “innocent victim”; the choice of king is either voluntary or otherwise non-arbitrary, and they get to enjoy all the forbidden pleasures of surplus in exchange for their role in the psychic regulation of the community. While Girard’s primordial sacrifice is a “mechanism” acted out unconsciously, in Graves the unconscious is made conscious through poetically precise ritual narratives. “Unconscious” sacrifice of the Girardian type only occurs once the meaning of the myths has been forgotten.

As I suggested in another paper analyzing this through Graeber, this is a remarkably “apolitical” concept of sovereignty. While Graves occasionally refers to the sacrificial rival/executioner as a “war-leader”, the role of the sovereign(s) is almost entirely ceremonial, allowing the rest of the community to operate, deliberate and solve collective action problems as a self-restraining assembly of free individuals like Athens, following an immanent moral sensibility that doesn’t even need to be codified into laws. While it’s non-obvious/unfalsifiable that any one particular sacrificial arrangement would be sufficient for all the resentments that would build up, especially in a more complex society. Earlier I was distinguishing this type of sexual resentment from the kind that derives from regular conflicts over labour, scarcity and even material surplus, which Girard uses as his paradigmatic type. On the other hand, when you look at contemporary culture wars, it’s when the latter get conflated with the former that shit gets really toxic - maybe so much so that a tyrannical sovereign, with the authority to sacrifice innocents, becomes, as Teach puts it, “inevitable”.

ii. The Ruin of Kasch - Roberto Calasso

Wikipedia lists The Ruin of Kasch deceptively as a “book-length essay on Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord” - this is kind of like saying Sadly, Porn is about Alcibiades, but it is fair at least to say that Calasso uses the French Revolution as a paradigm the way Teach does Athens. Teach doesn’t include the French Revolution as a bubble of freedom, despite being the most directly responsible for our contemporary concept of democracy (and concepts of “right” and “left”, etc.), because he probably considers it tainted with envy from the beginning (for the same reasons it can be considered foundational to the left). Calasso agrees, and has some pretty wild stories from the archives of petty sociopaths using revolutionary rhetoric to abuse the objects of their personal envies, but thinks the problem goes deeper than that. Calasso, while not particularly prejudiced against anyone except plebs and normies, is much harder to assimilate to a “woke Girardian” project because he doesn’t share even Teach’s desperate hope against hope for an abolition of externalized sacrifice or sovereignty. Teach would teach individuals to desire and then act on their desires - to unify desire and action - in place of sacrificing the desires of others; Calasso, while venerating the spontaneity of sovereignty and the “right of conquest”, considers this “cult of the will” itself a deception. As opposed to the self-founding of sovereign violence against an other, the spontaneity of the sovereign “right of conquest” and the political order that follows from it, the individual will is “the grand illusion that everything can be established from zero”. Its paradoxical double is the political category of “legitimacy”, which is usually what we’re talking about when, in bourgeois political economy, we invoke the necessity of sovereignty to solving finite, material collective action problems: the order of permissions to take zero-sum actions (for instance, the “progressive stack” at Occupy Wall Street), which is only secondarily coupled to the “sovereignty” of arbitrary destruction. For Girard, to be fair, both of these just sound like covers for forgetting the conflicts that came before. Hence in many smaller societies sovereignty in the last instance is practiced by a stranger-king, whose separation from the community and its accumulation of mimetic grudges permits them an “objectivity” impossible within the community itself. The past is also a foreign country, and for Calasso it is its own repression - the taboo on origins, ritualized among the kings of Madagascar, who stop counting between their legendary founders and their most recent generations - that makes the sacrifice-sovereignty compact, the only true act of will, possible.

Moldbug’s infamous “reactionary theory of world peace” would therefore be not so much reactionary as terminally modern; his “modest proposal” of declaring everyone the eternal owner of whatever property they have at that moment is what Calasso argues Talleyrand achieved in inventing “legitimacy” as the basis of international order after the collapse of aristocratic right and the Napoleonic Wars. Talleyrand, the most sympathetic of Calasso’s French revolutionary characters, both serves this reactionary function of stabilizing the achievements of democracy into ritual and making a perverse revolutionary break; the old sovereigns expected to conquer or be conquered, even considered it their duty, in order to refound sovereignty. They might not have expected to be conquered by their subjects, but this was merely a superstructure determined by its base; if a commoner somehow (for instance, as a mercenary) managed to accumulate enough followers, horses, weapons etc. to seize land, they were rarely denied on the basis of “divine right”. At least the nations would not band together to deny them the way they did to Napoleon. Legitimacy, on the other hand, gives them a “non-ideological” pretext for making an ideological exception to their own right of conquest, the arche-sovereignty. Moldbug, in turn, would allow that arche-sovereignty in the back door by advocating the abandonment of the “international order” of legitimacy in practice at the same time as absolutizing it in theory: “If Germany wishes to have a war with Czechoslovakia, Poland, etc., that is the business of these nations. If Czechoslovakia and Poland wish to defend themselves from Germany, they should arm sufficiently and band themselves together for the purpose.” This more or less guarantees that the actual winner of final sovereignty will not be who owns the most at first, but who sunk the most of what they owned into military capital (and dares to use it) - in other words, Moloch.

The titular “Ruin of Kasch” is a more sympathetic take on Teach’s Knowledge/Action binary, even if the end result is exactly the same. A Sudanese legend from Leo Frobenius, it deals with the opposition between two forces Graves imagined as fundamentally aligned: language/art and sacrifice. To be fair, Calasso sees language (the Sygn) as deriving from and reiterating in a new form the logic of sacrifice, but it is the possibility of sublimation in poetic (not merely prosaic of scientific) language that ends the Single Poetic Theme as lived ritual. Calasso also reverses Girard’s relationship between sacrifice and envy or mimesis. For Calasso, sacrifice is the original, non-mimetic act, the arbitrary separation of the world into different entities even capable of mimesis. On the other hand, once the Sygn achieves the abolition of sacrifice by storytelling in the kingdom of Kordofan (whose descendants now live in the global sacrifice zone of Darfur), they become the envy of their neighbours; the ruin their priests warned would result in the absence of sacrifice comes simply at the hands of this envy. Envy does not establish the law of sacrifice but re-establishes it. There is a threefold movement here; on one hand, the spiral power of words is suppressed because it will not abolish sacrifice but merely displace it into a new form, the violence of the unknown, of experiment (scientific or social); on the other, envy pre-empts this movement and in any case precipitates this, we cannot possibly know the outcome of Kasch had its neighbours not acted; and the envy was spread through the mimesis of signs and stories in the first place. It is hard to avoid the comparison of Biblical Israel, which becomes the envy of the world because of its abolition of sacrifice and worship of words, and is torn apart like Prometheus by the vultures of Empire over and over again. In Teach’s categories we discover even more dimensions of the paradox: the use of storytelling by Far-li-Mas is to suppress action, to intoxicate the sacrificial crowd to sleep, like contemporary mass culture; but following the death of the priests the kingdom itself remains active and prosperous, while its neighbours destroy it out of envy. No longer being dependent on the mimetic power of the sacrifice, they can no longer imitate or define themselves in relation to it.

The importance of sacrifice to the arch-pagan Calasso is not the same as to Girard, who he praises for rediscovering sacrifice’s significance but derides for his naive progressivism and faith in its withering. He shares with Bataille the association of sacrifice with ontological excess, with Eliade the separation of the sacred and the profane, and with Kierkegaard existential choice; but elevates it above all these three to the foundation of ontology. “Every act can be seen as a sacrifice if the process of giving and taking—the metabolism inscribed in every gesture—is found within it.” That such a broad ontological expansion allows “sacrifice” in its historically controversial forms to be abolished anyway was known to Vedic writers who “suggested that, since everything is a sacrifice, one need not even perform it within the community, but could go into the forest and observe it there as an act that is performed all the same, in every moment, in our physiology, in our breathing”. The problem with this “forest doctrine” is not that it makes everything profane but everything sacred, evoking Mundum, the paralyzing universal OCD I still tend to run up against when I try to think through the implications of contemporary left-rationalist programs that do away with “sentiocentrism” or “the personhood contract” (which is also, you guessed it, established by sacrifice): “The householder has five instruments of murder: the hearth, the pestle, the broom, the mortar and the water jug…. A room is swept, and a victim is strangled”. Incidentally, his strongest case against the progress of a Girardian abolition of sacrifice is the persistence of mass animal slaughter, particularly in scientific experimentation. Indeed, he argues that “experimentation” is the paradigmatically modern form of sacrifice - from the scientific to the social and even artistic experimentation of the Sygn (which relies on the former to materialize new symbolic desires). I tend to think our collective action problems could use more experimentation, but the problem is as soon as they’re “political” the experiment has to prove its “legitimacy” (or be baptized in blood by sovereignty). In the hands of the political consultant class of the monoculture, the experimental method is even abused as a condition of legitimacy - solutions to historically original problems must be “empirically proven”.

Calasso, like Teach, is a harsh and often unfair critic of the Sygn, but not particularly invested in the Family. Rather, both Sygn and Family appear as modern alternatives - “left” and “right” - to an original Symbolic and mimetic order founded on blood and sacrifice. In the Abrahamic/Axial memeplex, the Sygn (outside of its sacralized form as Logos) tends to be aligned with the old sacrificial gods. Semihaza and Azazel taught signification, sexual experimentation and war. The Phoenicians (now pantomime villains of the QAnon mythos) brought the alphabet to Europe and sacrificed children. First idols are prohibited, then representations, then self-decoration, cross-dressing, poetry… But neither truly abolishes or suppresses the sacrifice, which for the Family takes the form of the scapegoating of transgressors against the Law of the Father, the “punishment” of the “guilty”, and in the Sygn is displaced into an anonymous sea of experiment, deaths by unintentional consequence of progress. Sacrifice is necessary to create and order Worlds in the Heideggerian sense. So for instance, according to Afropessimism, the Middle Passage and creation of the Black slave population would be a sacrifice to create the “White” universal subject as privileged bearer of both Family and Sygn. And modern nation-states, our most powerful remaining godforms, tend to constitute themselves by colonial or genocidal sacrifices. The self-positing nature of sacrifice makes another point against Girard’s fixation on the “single victim” - the sacrifice of the victim defines what category can even be considered “single”. A genocide turns a nation into an individual, in order to make them a victim.

Envy by now seems to have disappeared from the model entirely - which is only to say that we have returned to a problem of surplus, which will soon reproduce it. If you have the right kind of OCD you will have experienced envy - including other people’s, not even necessarily yours - as a kind of OCD, a hypertrophied fairness-intuition. (Teach: ““It’s just not fair.” I know, I know. You took out the comma.”) The “ledger” is simply another one of those primordial algorithms that takes over when the infinite possibilities of action and the infinite responsibilities of what Calasso calls “the connectio” overwhelm us. Mimesis even more so: if you don’t know what to do, just do what someone else is doing. Calasso supposes that sacrifice, as an indifferent, symbolic enactment of death that separates it from the cycle of envy-revenge, is what allows more complex forms of articulation (i.e. Symbolic Worlds) than the push and pull of envy and mimesis to be maintained at the level of a complex society. There are still successful ways of defining yourself out of it without literally murdering sentient beings for no reason - Calasso cites a version where horses are sacrificed by being freed, a cognate of the literal scapegoat - but they require more sacrificial piety, not less. A purely internal sacrifice is too easy to write off as not a sacrifice at all, to hedge as an “experiment”.

Once you’ve clustered enough unprincipled mimetic optimizers together to form a complex society, managing this excess of agency is crucial to solving collective action problems - like the real existential threats. Consider any major topic of political discourse today: climate change, AI, Israel/Palestine, housing, supply chains. You’ll notice that in a post with a subtitle referencing Collective Action Problems, on a blog that lists “solarpunk futurism” first among its interests, I still haven’t mentioned climate change. But this is why we can’t talk about that and instead keep talking about sex and social media platforms and pop culture representation and elections and a fucking squirrel. As ledgers start to overflow, discourse becomes lossier, less coherent. More effort is spent on redundant mimetic and competitive action than creative object-level pragmatism. Infinite vectors make measurement, proportionality and coordination impossible, outside of mass unconscious reenactments which can be executed with terrifying precision. People become more aware of problems but less able to do anything about them, even agree on their common contours. Reality doesn’t stabilize until a new world-making sacrifice supplants the last. At the same time, the sacrifice can be renounced. Both Family and Sygn believe it is possible, given either the restraint of desire to an elaborate system of mandatory compromises with envy, or the liberation from material need, so that real need and envy can be distinguished systematically, and respectively satisfied and sanctioned. Their success is measured in their ability to avert Cultural Fugue while limiting or abolishing their internal sacrifices, as in the traditions of Christianity or “wokeness”.

iii. The new culture war categories revisited

The choice being formed between “woke” and “anti-woke”, or even “leftist” and in one mutual’s melancholic formation “non-leftist”, two clusterings of tendencies around empty centres that can neither define themselves nor each other, appears to be between the “madness” of envy and sacrifice, a battle over the terms described by Zizek in The Two Totalitarianisms. If we acknowledge that “the Stalinist purges were in a way more ‘irrational’ than the Fascist violence”, the political question increasingly becomes whether it is defense enough that to say that their “excess is an unmistakable sign that, in contrast to Fascism, Stalinism was a case of an authentic revolution perverted”; if this perversion is a “necessary” outcome of any revolution, or merely the fault of the “Adornio-Deleuzian Pervert Coalition” (a coalition, that is, of followers of the psychoanalytic leftists who formerly tried to break from and chart an alternative course to the Soviet Union’s sacrificial madness, but “failed to produce a systematic and thorough analysis of the phenomenon”), who can be counted out of the concrete universality of the self-binding “people” as a “foreign body”. (This conflict is explicitly re-enacted in Israel’s oddly recurrent accusation that Hamas is “worse than Hitler” because they are not consistently genocidal - October 7 was not a concerted plan to exterminate every Jew in its target area (which was originally the Holocaust’s distinction from historical pogroms). Therefore it could not be carried out with the civilized regret Israel attributes to the Nazi criminals, there was no “just following orders”, no Eichmannian mandate to kill even if one didn’t enjoy it. In Teach’s analysis of Clytemnestra, the fact that she enjoys her revenge makes it worse (and doesn’t make it freer, as it was still determined by the inhuman logic of the ledger, “the will of the gods”). Of course, the act she punishes is a rape, and much of the case for exceptionalizing rape as worse than even murder lies in its necessarily perverse enjoyment of deprivation.)

At the end of the day, the materialist subject of communism, concerned with bread over ideals, will choose the world in which “it [is] possible to survive, to maintain the appearance of a ‘normal’ everyday life” over the one where “anyone could be unexpectedly denounced, arrested and shot as a traitor”. That these conditions are just as prevalent on the contemporary right is a good argument to use to buy time, but the weight of the premise tends as inevitably towards it as the premise of universal liberation tends towards the left; only the right, by definition, can wield sacrificial violence with cold, arbitrary, guiltless calculation of Nazi Germany, provided sufficient power and a steady hand on its reins. And it’s true that relative to the hermetic systems of sacrifice described by poetic historians like Graves or Calasso, fascism or even Moldbuggian monarchism may be such a vulgar concession to popular madness that the comparison is irrelevant, which is why I keep “esoteric gynocratic traditionalism” or “intersectional neoreaction” in my back pocket.

But the Sygn’s most hubristic ideals are still surprisingly resilient. The “woke tyranny” Teach personally was most concerned with never happens, no matter how much wokeness absorbs and even propagates tyrannical structures of feeling throughout the broader culture, because the intersectional imperative necessarily resists envy and narcissism. It demands the unconditional liberation of those more oppressed than oneself even if and even because they will gain more from it. And there is always a more oppressed subject than you, no matter how much specific groups try to claim the ultimate oppression; you can always stack more intersections (and the forces of envy conspire from both sides of the culture war to deter MOGAI, asexuals, trenders, otherkin, furries, transhumans, AI etc. from breaking the meta entirely by making new ones). The impossibility of satisfying the ledger from below demands compensation from above, making the tyrannical envy directed “up” appear more extreme than on the right. This would appear to create the perfect conditions for a classical Girardian “single victim” solution, where the “most privileged person in the world”, the sacred king, is identified and torn limb from limb by the Bacchanal crowds. But the intersectional nesting structure of modern oppression is itself designed to prevent this, producing a situation where, as Delany wrote in Nevèrÿon, “when common sense said you were at [power’s] very centre, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it.” Thus whenever the narcissistic imperative of affirming a single identity eclipses the benefits of the intersectional coalition, it sides with a reactionary coalition of privileged identities even against its own material interests; Zionism, radical feminism, Black nationalism all converge towards monocult. Not doing so, recognizing someone as more oppressed and victimized than them, would make them cucks, “freier”.

Aleister Crowley, attempting to invert the effects of what edgy 2000s atheists called with more wisdom than they understood “Zombie Jesus”, writes of The Hanged Man of the Thoth Tarot: “It says: “If ever things get bad like that again, in the new Dark Ages which appear to threaten, this is the way to put things right.” But if things have to be put right, it shows that they are very wrong.” Strictly speaking, nothing can end a death spiral of pornographic fantasy other than sacrifice - at minimum, the sacrifice of fantasy for action, the Freudian castration. Teach views this as the internalization of sovereignty, even of its arbitrary founding moment, required for its external abolition. Even Crowley, who views “the whole idea of sacrifice” as “a misconception of nature”, concurs, emphasizing as the distinction between white and black magicians the moment when the former, like Odin, “sacrifices themself to themself” and becomes capable of both words and action. On the other hand, Teach is insistent that the sacrifice of the self must also be to others, that the self cannot sacrifice itself to itself alone. Andf these others are not real, and at least to some extent freely chosen, they will be mere sites of projections.

Speaking of bubbles in the river: Teach as TLP was one of the great Occupy haters alongside Crypto Cuttlefish (and has a hilarious take on “MARBLECAKEALSOTHEGAME”) but it does seem fitting that his era of internet politics was marked by a faltering but formally optimistic struggle towards direct democracy where every member is responsible for acting individually on behalf of the group in the “Twitter revolutions” and Anonymous. Since then the left’s suspicion has cooperated with the parapolitical and vectorial machinations it correctly identified in systematically disabling the revolutionary potential of this social technology and reducing it to today’s monocult swarms. The same sacrifice (Anonymous was defined, above all else, by the sacrifice of the brand to the collective) may not be possible today, but at this late hour, if you don’t have the stomach for shedding actual blood yourself - and you should get used to that too - you might be better off trying. It is because sacrifice deals with the surplus of information that Graves emphasizes the correct sacrifice - culturally, individually, or otherwise - is outside its ur-example unknowable; the important thing is that it is done, and with the purity of intention that sanctifies it.

Seeds For The Swarm - Sim Kern

This isn’t Sim Kern’s big breakthrough everyone is talking about now, and unlike that book (The Free People’s Village) it isn’t for adults, so I shouldn’t judge their overall output or vision on it. And for all that I liked it, or at least wanted to like it at first. It’s incredibly dense with original, well-thought-out technological and social concepts - a point several reviewers hold against it, but which I consider the first bar for any serious solarpunk work to clear - and plugs them into the indulgent YA dimensions of its premise in a way that scratches the same itch for me as high-concept light novels. I was not remotely expecting this to be a “special high school” story, a YA stereotype that honestly had seemed to be on the way out for a while, but which I have a fucked up attachment to as a former gifted kid who unironically wishes society could have gone all the way and put me in something like Nisioisin’s ER3 system or Kern’s Wingates and forced me to save the world instead of letting me become a guy who writes Substack reviews of solarpunk books at 29. The pedagogic premise (the school also turns out to be an espionage front) gives Kern a pretext to move in encyclopedic style through a sprawling array of attempts to respond to the deepening crisis of the late 20th century, like a kids’ Kim Stanley Robinson. A looser commitment to “realism” (perhaps a closer comparison would be in fact Margaret Atwood) allows the technologies and ideologies - from genetically engineered fireflies (and dragons), to medievalist LARP communes, to a vaguely Buddhist recycling monastic order (with a celibacy requirement I don’t understand how is grounded in their ideology at all), to scrapyard pirates, to a drug-dealing ecoterrorist cult, all under the precarious thumb of a much more cynical (sometimes cartoonishly so - again think Atwood) view of declining capitalism. (This is what I’d call “pre-utopian” solarpunk - despite the genre’s aspiration to thinking beyond the utopia/dystopia binary in terms of localized, contingent recovery and resistance, most works, including my own, can be categorized into before or after some kind of revolutionary break with the momentum of the extractionist totality, a fact which testifies to the continued relevance of the communist category of revolution.) There’s a hard science fiction sense of genuine enjoyment to how Kern integrates the plethora of new concepts into narrative mechanics, names and visualizes them. The themes are on the nose in ways that feel funny and even shameless rather than cloying. A lot of the writing is solid infodump, which is good because when it isn’t it’s really bad - mostly in ways people genuinely seem to think are obligatory in writing for teenagers/YA as a genre, but a lot of tonal and narrative decisions feel bafflingly phoned-in and patronizing even for that, as more YA-acclimatized reviewers on GoodReads seem well aware. The consensus worst offenders are the romance and drug subplots. Rylla is already kind of a blank slate non-character, which is perfectly functional for the audience POV in a techno-picaresque, but doesn’t do us any favours (nor does the writing) in guessing why she falls for anyone (the sympathetic accelerationist STEMbro foil and the evil cult leader) other than plot convenience. Curiously the back cover blurb markets it as “queer” but the major love interests for 80% of the book are cis men defined almost entirely by their “crooked smiles”, flirty condescension (cardboard telephone game versions of 2000s YA bad boys) and Rylla’s almost mechanical hormonal reactions to their advances. (There is a side character who starts out as a caricature of a non-binary urban elite and familiarizes into a badass voice of reason, which is a fun move I’ve admittedly tried myself.) Rylla’s struggles with addiction are “poorly handled” in the sense of a 90s after-school special. The use of a fictional drug called “tam” lets Kern forego any of the specificity with which they handle technologies and ideologies and conflate every stereotype of Drugs In General - vaguely sketched psychedelic derangement, cheapened euphoria, near-instant physical addiction. But the tam plot merely sets up the precipitous slide into ridiculousness in the final act, when genre convention forces Kern to betray their social and technological realist impulses and “raise the stakes”. [spoilers] Despite a number of well-executed hooks for a state/capitalist conspiracy within the school itself, the authorities are switched out at the last minute for an anti-human extremist villain whose dastardly plan is both more effective than any of the protagonists’ uses of their near-unlimited resources and shockingly harmless. Not that Kern could have anticipated what would be happening in the world when I was reading this, but the climactic image of the built environment of Chicago being dismantled by nanotech into a giant garden like the fucking reforestation beam from Daicon IV is such an achingly utopian image next to the real world flattening of Gaza that even as someone who identifies primarily with the most pro-human and pro-technology characters in the book (Theo is just like me fr) I have no idea how I’m supposed to root against it. [/spoilers] All of which raises the question of what the category of YA is even doing for this story. None of the reviewers on GoodReads appear to be teenagers, and I imagine a tiny press like Stelliform would have a hard time getting its books into school libraries or even the chain bookstore shelves where they hang out. (Like most solarpunk, Seeds For The Swarm has primarily taken off through high-context online literary spaces.) It bends over backwards to meet “genre YA” requirements to its own detriment while not necessarily meeting the ones the audience even cares about now (there are a few on-page sex scenes explicit enough that I can imagine scrupulous minors classifying them as inappropriate for themselves, or simply unnecessary either way). Which isn’t to dismiss the importance of adolescence, and addressing adolescence, to its vision. The strongest human element by far is the relationship between Rylla and her mother, the representation of working class pride curdled into casually overbearing narcissism, the contradictions of love and wanting to escape. The paradox is that this adult character, unlike any of the teenagers, consistently talks like an observed human rather than a genre type or a vehicle for information, but the teenage perspective is inseparable from the observation.

Another Life - Sarena Ulibarri

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But maybe cuteness itself would be a good candidate for our own egregore. “Cuteness Be My God” sounds better than “Coldness”, and it’s already mounted one of the most convincing challenges. The question is to what extent it’s dependent on technocapital - which is both the question of whether modernity is, and whether cuteness is dependence.

~
Another element of the aforementioned complex is an erotics of deferral, by which the submissive position can frustrate the desire of the master, but also the slow cancellation of history can be identified with its acceleration. “The cybernetic point” is “less a summit than a plateau”, but what is a summit other than a very short plateau - a sharp, acute one? This is where old-fashioned Deconstructionists would come in handy - as I understand it their whole method was poking holes in these kinds of binary tables of associations by showing how easy it is to free associate to either side of the chart.

!
An inordinate amount of this book - IMO some of the most interesting parts - focuses on the Geoffroy-Cuvier debate. Cuvier, who won the scientific consensus (even within contemporary “dialectical” evolutionary biology frameworks), is condemned as “[incarnating] the alliance between finalism, functionalism, presentism, obsession with scientific Fact as the final arbiter of Reality, reactionary fear of unnatural speculation, and a gerontocratic conservatism that does not wish to hear about becomings”. There is seemingly no interest in the distinction between speculation which works and speculation which doesn’t - a distinction which was the basis of Land’s critique of the non-accelerationist left as a “transcendental miserabilism”. Cute/ACC seems to want to replace this with transcendental cope - or even, to borrow Carolyn Elliott’s framing, “transcendental kink”. Resistance is both sclerotic and futile, but that doesn’t mean you have to pull up your belt and identify with “Daddy Admin” - you can just be his Discord kitten, needling and subverting him with your self-effacing “cunning”, and as long as you get your NEETbux it doesn’t matter if anything you imagine could be real.

This seems strange if you actually watch, say, magical girl anime. In Madoka Magica even before its successive Gnostic rebellions, the girls are not passive but hyperactive, used as historical agency pumps (one is Joan of Arc) by even more (abstractly) cute genderless archontic administrators. Of course if we’re talking about fiction and reality, the problematic of the feminist reading of cuteness is Watsonian/Doylist. The male gaze reads the cutesy appearance of a magical girl as a coquettish lure for a Daddy outside the screen - even if the otaku imagination has radically purged or neutralized his identificatory proxy within it. But shouldn’t the very degendering and asexualizing ontology they’re proposing, and the privileging of imagination in the Cuvier/Geoffroy debate, commit Cute/ACC to Watsonian identification with the magical girl’s rebellion? Plus if we want to submit cutely to something this would imply it should at least be something outside the text (even in the sense of another cutie’s roleplay persona) - not an entity that, whether it stalks us from the Weird future or hauntological past, is still inside History with us.

@
One place where I personally want to be pedantic about historical, not scientific fact is the section on the history of “shojo” cultures - not out of some negative concern a “final arbiter of Reality” but on the affirmative, poetic principle that reality is Weirder than Theory. The authors claim that the “male-gaze kawaii stereotype of early shojo manga was transmuted into the ‘new type of women featured in action-oriented [shonen] stories’ for whom kawaii did not necessarily stand in contrast to being a warrior or a ‘beautiful fighting girl’” sometime “from the 80s onward” with the rise in female-written shojo (presumably by authors such as the Year 24 group). This non-contradictory orientation toward action, and even gender-bending, was already present in Osamu Tezuka’s OG Princess Knight. Tamaki Saito’s “Beautiful Fighting Girl”, on the other hand, is a later formation intimately tied to a “male-gaze kawaii” that emerges after the broadening of shojo by female authors as a reappropriation by the emerging “otaku” culture. “Moe” and “lolicon” (a word this book for the most part judiciously avoids) were in large part explanations (and political containment programs) for a growing body of male otaku interested in shojo manga, interested in culture for girls as equal to high culture, and creating their own fanworks in the same style. This development, which Saito examines almost exclusively from the perspective of the male psychology, lends itself well to Cute/ACC’s account of a contagious spread of cuteness beyond gender and the otaku consumers themselves as universalized “shojo” subjects. My point is that the “slope” isn’t linear, from a harmonious “neo-Confucian” gender hegemony through a Western narrative of “progress” in the 60s and 70s to an inhuman egg cracking. There are new convolutions and even potentials for reterritorialization at every step.

#
And it’s not even hard to make an argument that avenges Geoffroy over Cuvier that aligns with the basic premises of the book as a whole, but is never made explicit - Cuvier’s empirical analytic may have been superior to Geoffroy’s when it comes to natural selection, but Geoffroy’s rationalist one describes the infinitely wider field of artificial selection! This, however, still entails a material criterion of which theorist applies, based on the capacity to bring the Imaginary morphogenetic space into reality; a capacity on which Darwinian evolution and capitalism are both selective gates, in many ways more similar to each other than to the pure field of imagination.

But after all, cuties spend more time in our imaginations. That’s the problem we’re trying to think through. Cuteness is whatever the thing is that we’re doing here, and it’s the only reason we still bother to imagine a way out of it.

$

(I’ll be inserting a few of these video clips instead of one at the end. play with CC)

%
The historical association between cuteness and technocapital is supported by the claim that cute objects weren’t produced systematically before the 1700s, and I’ve been trying to figure out if that’s true, although it may prove intractably subjective. It is much more robust than I expected, including in Japan, where I knew there were examples at least older than the ones this book talks about. The tradition of ningyo is as relevant to the conception of cuteness as shojo, but while the latter emerged with the explicit Westernization of the education system in the Meiji period, almost all the major lineages of Japanese dolls seem to date back to the Edo period immediately prior, from 1603 to 1878. Hinamatsuri represents a Heian era wedding but was instituted by one of the Tokugawa empresses. Maneki neko, the cat who winsomely beckons customers, has a teddy bear-style origin story about a cat who beckoned a Muromachi-era warlord to safety, but this legend (the warlord went on to found Edo castle) only became relevant in the Edo period when the cat is first documented. Karakuri puppetry, which “focuses on the art of concealing technology with the belief that it would evoke feelings and emotions more effectively”, was codified in the 19th century. This opens onto a really weird problematic of acausal historiography - while the Tokugawa shogunate isolated themselves so doggedly from “Renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation” there’s a whole Netflix show and a Scorsese movie about it, the Edo period was nonetheless a kind of priming for modernization, unifying and rationalizing the feudal state to the point that Emperor Meiji could turn it over to technocapital almost instantaneously. But if cuteness builds itself from the future why measure its presence chronologically at all; what is the unconscious - or magickal - medium by which colonization in the Americas and revolution in Europe produces synchronous effects in the unconscious of Japan? At least the eerie cuteness of the forest spirits in Princess Mononoke probably derives from the much older haniwa, and the fascination with the Jomon dogu seems at least partly related to its status as an outright prehistoric dark precursor to contemporary Japanese aesthetics. Or what about like, chonky cave painted horses?

I guess the most straightforward premodern Western example would be putti - what else is supposed to be their deal? - but that the Romans “don’t extol in their works the set of traits we identify as ‘cute’” (maybe if I dug enough into the erotic literature) accounts for my having to ask the question. Before the Abrahamic revaluation of the weak, they could only be victimized, which didn’t preclude being enjoyed, but precluded being valued. The Abrahamic prohibition of homosexuality can be interpreted as rendering consistent the ancient Mediterranean prohibition of the passive role by rejecting the enjoyment of non-value - a logic modernity inverts by undermining its status as non-value in the first place. But Christianity was persecuted by the Tokugawa shogunate, so what was going on in the Edo Period? I guess that’s a question for the practical magicians, who must remain silent.

=
Tokyo Station PKMN Center.
A mother told her child daughter, "You can pick any plushie you like."
The girl picked a Pinsir.
Mom: "Huh? Why that? It's not cute. Get a Growlithe or something. See? It's cute!" But the girl held tightly onto the Pinsir. I won't forget her.

^
Another usage of cuteness at least as uncomfortable as lolicon and mentioned even less (within “Cute Studies” as a whole, not just this book) is the cuteness imposed by the white American imagination on the idealized Black slave. No really - a Daily Dot investigation just recently on the Facebook Marketplace trade in what now euphemistically bills itself as “Black Americana” titles itself after the wording of a post advertising a sculpture of literally simianized minstrel performers: “Cute Little Monkeys At Your House”. There’s a double relation to the kindchenschema here that someone else could do more justice than me - Black children are perceived as less childlike, but the “pickaninny” derives from the generic infantilizing endearment pequeño, The Little Black Sambo was for a long time a classic of children’s literature, and I’m not even getting into Golliwog. The great American funny animal cartoon characters, from Mickey Mouse to Bugs Bunny, derive their gloves from minstrelsy (and their personalities from Br’er Rabbit). Ireland & Kronic admit that “obviously” cuteness can have good and bad uses (without providing, indeed while implicitly disavowing, any independent criterion for choosing between them, especially if you’ve abandoned yourself to passively riding demonic slopes) but I think there’s a useful homology between the two aforementioned: the “falsified empathy” that constitutes the inverse of the boundary blurrings between fiction and reality, human and animal or object that I&C mostly read sympathetically. It’s the same structure they’re now trying to project on AI: a person who isn’t a person who will do everything you want and nothing you don’t. Which isn’t every structure that “undoes semiotic/bodily and real/fictional dichotomies” - indeed, you almost certainly need some kind to fight it - but it’s the one Capital wants to design for. (And that post reads like - is meant as - a polemic against anime porn, but note that making a moral distinction on the basis of fictionality as opposed to simply fictionalizing a real person implies an awareness of the distinction that can resist falsification on at least one side. The Abrahamic revolutions also prohibited graven images, because they couldn’t imagine anyone bothering to make this distinction at all.)

On the other hand, another part of the minstrel fantasy is their carefreeness, the quality that makes them a bad slave, which they can be because they are a slave, as opposed to a Good Employee. The Black Slave (like the child) is the disavowed cornerstone of universal humanity not only as the repository of the arbitrary violence prohibited against free and equal subjects but as the phylactery of those freedoms we traded in to be “free”. Even the slave is a kind of Sovereign, contained by the Black hole of absolutized envy.

+

(can’t find this one subbed, so read the lyrics here)

We need not assume, as Tiqqun does, that the Young-Girl’s “freedom and lightness”, by necessity as freedom and lightness, conceals a secret suffering. We can simply, from her own perspective, observe the real suffering that contradicts it - the Shein shirt is cute, the 16-hour workweek that produces it isn’t - which the Young-Boy (not the “Old Man”) who condemns her equally wants to conceal. (There’s a telling projection, in the Tiqqun footnote, which I’m not even pointing out to defend the infallibility of “Old-Bearded-Prosecutor Marx”, that Tiqqun are Marxists rather than mystical insurrectionists! Tiqqun are as hostile to the reality principle as you could want them to be, their argument is about which reality-principle.)

&
I wasn’t sure whether to talk about the kids I’ve seen leading chants at my local Palestine encampment in here - even apart from posting video, I have a kind of squeamishness around putting them in conceptual adjacency to all the other shit I talk about in here - until I just straight up heard someone calling them cute at the last one. There’s a justified suspicion in the West of adults bringing their kids into their politics, although here the politics isn’t a matter of rational policy preference or voluntary identification but more or less direct survival - but doesn’t that just make this more a sentimental appeal to reproductive futurity than the radical anti-biopolitics of cuteness? If you’re recoiling at this line of inquiry that should frame reflection about this book’s implicit audience. Survival is one of those uncutely teleological parts of biology, but cuteness is a survival strategy - its plateau on one slope is Hegelian willing slavery, but even that doesn’t work under genocide. Of course, asking you to constrain your desire (or values) according to a survival scenario you’re not in is the oldest trick in the Human Security System - “eat your vegetables, there are children starving in Rafah” - but what makes you think this doesn’t apply to you? You’re still under existential threat, from climate change or global war or just running out of money - do you think you’re cuter than a Palestinian kid?

Insofar as these kids’ presence is valued for cuteness, not just as The Future of the Nation, it’s in the ways that make them less passive than adults. If you’re at the back of a march and can’t hear the slogans anymore, adults will just shut up for fear of saying the wrong thing, while the kids will just start chanting whatever comes into their heads, becoming leaders by default. And they’ll pronounce things wrong, or get the rhythm off, or their vocalization will just swoop around registers instead of staying on a collectively averaged note. These are the failures of speech reproduced in cute language like aegyo, but they are failures of over- rather than under-activity, and in the context of a protest do not appeal to the protection of Daddy superego but help defamiliarize the boundaries of “correct” behaviour that keep us out of the streets in the first place.

*

♡
Beautiful and very young are Philo‑Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo,
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit,
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
- “Incantation”, Czeslaw Milosz

It is rather more difficult to be “woke”, to value not only “equity” but “diversity and inclusion”. And it is this side of the culture war - which I have been referring to as the Sygn - that the new Girardians seem first and foremost intent on mobilizing him against. To be fair, parsing out Girard’s object level opinions on culture war issues would require a whole other research program. Ganz focuses a lot on the claim that “[people are] more jealous or envious in modernity”, which may be the conclusion neoreactionaries like Thiel have drawn from Girard, but Girard’s own left-baiting is especially concerned with defending “The Achievement of the Modern and Western World”: “Our society perpetually confesses to crimes and faults of which it is certainly guilty when considered against our absolute standard, but it is innocent relative to all the other types of societies.” In fact, unlike many of his “dissident right” fanboys, Girard appears to be a globalist, praising globalization as “only secondarily an economic phenomenon” driven by “the slow decomposition of the closed worlds rooted in victim mechanisms”. As for “temptations” the modern world succumbs to he enumerates “colonial conquests, abuses of power, the murderous wars of the twentieth century, the pillage of the planet etc.” In concrete terms, this objection to “wokeness gone mad” concedes little more than the “slow, boring” liberal humanism of Matt Yglesias and Steven Pinker.

But to be fair, it was almost impossible to go further than this critique in public, let alone as a liberal arts academic, at the time Girard was writing - and his polemics if anything exaggerate the ideological hegemony of his opponents. If Thiel really was his “protégé” it’s not implausible that Girard was “hiding his power level”. I will hereon in mostly be interrogating the position he advocated directly in an interview with Rebecca Adams, which is that mimetic desire is not in itself evil, but that its sole legitimate object is Jesus Christ (presumably as mediated by the interpretation of the Catholic Church - leaving aside that many of the reactionary Tradcaths are sedevacantists). Jesus Christ is of course not the only religious figure who positions himself as the single legitimate object of mimesis: the Salafist tradition in Islam, which has set itself up in a “clash of civilizations” with Girard’s “Judeo-Christian tradition”, organizes itself around the imitation of Muhammad as Prophet. As archetypal scapegoat who transcends the mechanism, Christ seems to have some exceptional characteristics as an object of imitation; but Girard contradicts himself in claiming him as “the sole model who never runs the danger—if we really imitate in the way that children imitate—of being transformed into a fascinating rival”, because his entire cultural polemic is that “In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him”.

There’s an interesting point of entry into this problematic through Girard’s “mimetic rivalry” with Nietzsche, that other great theorist of resentment and the Judeo-Christian concern for victims, and the more recent attempt at a reconciliation of Nietzsche and Christ by Sir Lulzington. One of Lulzington’s consistent contentions is that the elevation of the cross as the centre and symbol of Christianity is a blasphemy against what Jesus truly stood for, and while I first was skeptical of this as a crude vitalist rejection of the Girardian significance of Christ as transcendent victim, there’s a paradoxically Girardian truth to it as well. While the revelation of the injustice of the crucifixion achieves the triumph of the victim, its conventional theologization immediately neutralizes this function and suppresses the protest of Christ’s innocence by his followers that turns them against the social body. The theology of atonement returns to the rationalizing patterns of myth where, even though Jesus is innocent, his sacrifice is somehow both metaphysically necessary and effective. The crucifixion is symbolically powerful within Girard’s schema only insofar as it is neither of these; refuting its necessity need not refute its triumph, as this is the very logic of the miraculous. In the historical logic of Girard’s “leaven” - which is deeply reminiscent of the language in which the Jesus of the gospels actually conceptualizes his own ministry - Jesus becomes the universal paradigm of the innocent victim, the mimetic model, as it were, for all victim resistance to the scapegoat mechanism. In the theo-logic of the traditional Church, he is inverted into the universal exception - “you aren’t like Jesus, he was literally sinless” - and rather than offering an alternative to mimetic desire or the scapegoat mechanism, simply acts as their miraculous perfect case. That a universal centralization of mimetic desire on the abstract image of Christ “and the entire social hierarchy descending from him” is insufficient to abolish the scapegoat mechanism is obvious from the whole grotesque history of witch hunts, pogroms, clerical abuse, residential schools, queer panics etc. characteristic not only of the Catholic Church but of the entire Nicene tradition descended from the foundational persecutions of “heretical” traditions.

From this radically open theological perspective, it doesn’t strike me as particularly important to ask whether Girard “really believed” in Christianity or merely its historical/social utility. The utilitarian, regulatory appeal to religion in a lot of reactionary thought is rightly objected to as a distortion of the religious impulse, but if you genuinely put mimetic desire at the centre of all human experience and history, then an Event that revolutionizes mimetic desire is no less “religious” than one that revolutionizes the accounting of an “original sin” reduced to some kind of quantity in an abstract magic system. Girard actually does propose an interesting account compatible with a “materialist” Christology: what makes Jesus special is not any Trinitarian technicality of his relation to God the Father, but the thoroughness of his imitation of Him, his mimetic desire to be like God. Of course this probably isn’t an original solution, and for Jesus’ attempt to be capable of overturning the entire historical totality makes the most sense if there is some kind of special connection making his successful imitatio dei possible. But Girard even emphasizes, when dealing with Jesus’ accusation of several disciples of being “children of the devil”, that the primary sense in which Jesus means father is model. This would account well for how often Jesus pluralizes those titles, Son of God and Son of Man, by which theology has exceptionalized him.

None of this proves that woke liberalism, or Marxism, or any particular secular programme of justice for victims, is the “true” meaning of Christ’s message and world-historical inversion of the law of sacrifice. The risk Girard saw in the apocalyptic “revealing” of the scapegoat mechanism, that a universal valorization of the category of “innocent victim” would not resolve the social contradictions that silently necessitated it, but rather unleash all the pent-up resentments of a society driven purely by mimetic desire, is observably true from cancel culture to “Oppression Olympics” to revanchist genocide - this was much the argument of my second-last post. But Girard himself provides a useful distinction between victimhood and envy! The scapegoat is not simply the resented winner of the competition: they only appear after a cycle of resentment and violence has already built up to the point of unsustainability. Their “innocence” is the fact that they are neither the object of resentment, nor the guilty party in the social violence produced by it: they are a second mediator, press-ganged by the community’s desire into closing the loop produced by the first. If the competing parties simply resolved their dispute honestly between themselves, there would be no need to bring them into it. (Any child who has grown up between warring parents can attest to this condition.) In Heath theology, Cain’s murder of Abel is a distinct and in some ways more important ontotheological Event after the mere Fall into mimetic consciousness. Interestingly, Girard breaks with orthodoxy and deforms this Event in the shape of his theory, referring not to Satan’s mobilization of the individual Cain but “the Cainites” against Abel. It is a seductive reading, echoing the ritualistic murders by the Sodomites and the Benjamites (groups Twyman might identify with “the Cainites” themselves). But this insistence that the innocent victim must always be outnumbered and persecuted by an egregore rather than an individual seems to deprive the story of many of its most salient literary features, from the pathos of sibling rivalry and fratricide (echoed elsewhere throughout the Bible) to Cain’s wandering immortal isolation. Above all, it renders unthinkable the possibility of an original choice to transform rivalry into violence.

This is apparent in Girard’s own literary origins, when he has not yet consolidated himself into an anthropologist or an apologist. In the novel, mimetic desire is the paradigm - he opposes his reading to the “passion-vanity dialectic” of Stendhal’s essay De L’Amour, or “the natural Self and the social Self” in Gide’s The Immoralist, which he dismisses as “romantic” - but is still demonstrated in contrast to exceptions. Even in the mature, novelistic Stendhal, who he opposes to the Stendhal of De L’Amour, there are examples of authentic desire - “All Stendhal’s great pairs of lovers,” for example, “contradict” the romantic Stendhal’s description of love as “crystallization” (a metaphor that will be intriguingly familiar to readers of Valentin Tomberg, another Catholic apologetic who derives the same image of false self-actualization not from Stendhal but from Gurdjieff). “True love, such as that of Fabrice for Clélia and that which Julien finally knows with Mme de Rênal, does not transfigure. The qualities which this love discovers in its object, the happiness it expects from it, are not illusory. Love-passion is always accompanied by esteem, in Corneille’s sense of the word. It is based on a perfect agreement among reason, will and sensibility.” He does make a point that all of these characters are religious, and none of Stendhal (or any other novelist who he counts)’s secular characters achieve the same happiness.

Any Umineko fan will recognize this as a “devil’s proof”. It can only partly obscure this by way of Girard’s unclear criterion of literary legitimacy, under which the distinction between “novelistic truth” and “romantic lies” can be both a necessary pillar of the claim that any analysis of fictional representations provides a useful barometer of human nature (rather than, as contemporary cultural criticism would have it, an arbitrary distribution of “media tropes”), and also a backdoor to sneak its premises back into its selection. Outside this field, after all, it is trivial to find counterexamples, whatever we think of their claim to applicability: Bloom Into You, for instance, is entirely about separating mimetic from authentic love, in terms where the former, not any romantic “natural Self”, is clearly prior (and the protagonist parses their precocious self-awareness of this priority as “aromanticism”). Texts like Revolutionary Girl Utena, Fate/Stay Night and Higurashi When They Cry are if anything “cartoonish” only in the “geometrical exactness” of their demonstration of how relationships can both resist and fail to resist the single victim mechanism, and mimetic desires surpass themselves into authenticity. (I wonder if my over-representation of Japanese texts here is because Japan found itself faced with the very “novelistic” problems Girard found constitutive of modernity - in the sense of being discovered and discoverable, rather than being exceptionally intense - without Christian pessimism as a fallback.) But in any case it is probably fair to assume as a criterion of realism (and narrative interest) that such authentic desire or relationship, let alone its fulfillment, is only rarely and contingently attained; and that they must be attained in the first place, rather than simply discovered - they are qualities of relations produced by action, not of individuals produced by nature. On a collective scale, it would seem that these relations simply cannot be produced with enough frequency to stem the tides of resentment that force societies to converge on the scapegoat mechanism, although they probably provide it with many innocent victims. This is especially true if - as developmental psychology, both Lacan’s “mirror stage” and modern neuroscience’s “mirror neurons”, would seem to suggest, desire is mimetic in the first instance and can only dialectically, novelistically become authentic. But this view of the problem from the perspective of the totality is the Satanic one; throughout the gospels the victims Jesus sides with, like the Good Samaritan, are those who refuse to take it.

I am reminded of this comic that was hyped up a lot by “woke” cultural critics some years ago, The Wicked + The Divine, which promised to deal with both celebrity and sacrifice. The premise sets up the “Recurrence” of a rotating set of gods whose reincarnation invariably ends in their tragic deaths as necessary to prevent the resurgence of “The Great Darkness”, a nebulous but apocalyptic force of chaos. [spoilers] As it turns out, this is a lie told by the founder of the system, a Neolithic sorceress identified directly with the White Goddess (once you start modelling “anti-Gravesian psyops” as a category you’ll see them everywhere), who simply wanted fuel for her own immortality. This is in keeping with the spirit of the Aeon, in which “this idea of sacrifice is, in the final analysis, a wrong idea”. But it also feels trite and cheap: is entropy just like, fake? Existential risk? Samuel Delany, my source for the culture war categories of Sygn and Family, might have described the “Great Darkness” opposed by the principle of sacrifice as “Cultural Fugue”. Cultural Fugue is what conservatives picture when they talk about the collapse of a civilization, except more total, as the latter is often little more than a transfer of political power, whereas cultural fugue is a complete breakdown of the communicative conditions for material self-reproduction. Like existential risk, it may seem hard to take seriously because we have never lived through one. It is self-genocide, the cultural equivalent of climate catastrophe; while it does not necessarily entail the total extinction of every member of a culture, it is not far removed. The single example shown in Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a nuclear war.

As strategies for averting “cultural fugue”, the Sygn and the Family can also be understood as different strategies for dealing with mimetic desire. Know Your Enemy briefly allows itself to dwell on the “cancellable” question of the relation between homosexuality and mimetic desire, which is reduced to the stereotype of gay men as catty, vain ideal consumers. This flinch misses the deeper relation arguably close to the root of the Abrahamic tradition’s condemnation of queer sexuality as such. Queer sexuality, like art, is originally, by definition mimetic; it takes the biological instinct to enact a reproductive mechanism and imitates it in a context where the original object of the drive is unattainable. In doing so, it paradoxically short-circuits the zero-sum, competitive character of that desire; instead of fighting over the most fertile woman or highest-status man, the rivals can desire each other. This is equally seen in the Platonic-romantic rivalries of shonen manga, where the mimetic identification with the opponent is itself “accompanied by esteem”. The Sygn takes mimetic desire as its starting point - “a feature, not a bug” - rather than trying to force it to converge on a standardized pattern of mimesis. In the Sygn, mimetic rivalry is resolved by the fact that desire is always mimetic but never perfectly; rather than feeling cuckolded by its inability to achieve perfect unification with its object, every unsuccessful mimesis can diverge into its own original sign and justify itself on its own terms. “Now it is true that the genius of African culture is surely its repetition, but the key to such repetition was that new elements were added each go-round.” “Little by little, we advance a bit further with each turn. That's how a drill works!”

Achieving this at the level of individuals is hard enough; achieving it on the level of a civilization is easier said than done. But so is most of what Jesus says to do throughout the Gospels, and so is holding a whole civilization to even the most conventional interpretation of Christian principles - something no Christian civilization has achieved any more than a communist one. Girard (perhaps understandably as a convert via literary criticism) tends to focus on the Gospel narrative over the Gospel teachings, which would seem to play natural complementary roles in his schema: the Gospel narrative demonstrates, demystifies and subverts the single victim mechanism, while the Gospel teachings directly explain how to avoid it. The question is whether this impossible transformation is to be achieved by the elevation of a transcendent object of mimesis, or the immanent transformation of mimetic relations. But in the truest sense, the mimesis of Christ (which is not necessarily the same thing as the following he demands) requires the latter - and it is only in the latter that the abolition of sacrifice is, finally, possible. Girard throughout quotes passages that remind us of this priority, which is no less emphatic in Jewish or even Islamic prophetic revelation: 1 John 2:9-10 - “Whoever says he is in the light, yet hates his brother, is still in the darkness. Whoever loves his brother remains in the light, and there is no scandal in him.” - is perversely cited in support of his thesis that the self-deception of the “mimetic unconscious” can only be escaped by referring not to the real brother but to the mimetic “light” of the Christian representation! Girard contradicts himself by “crystallizing” the mimetic object of faith, rendering it permanently mimetic. Since the function that separates the true revelation from the false is precisely its demystification of the single victim mechanism, it seems inevitable that a further demystification will follow of the significance of the demystifying example - one that Girard himself ironically accomplishes as much as the secularizing revolutions that followed the “Victory of the Cross”.

The conservative religious fixation on “culture war issues” like homosexuality and abortion, with one or two references in Scripture, over the vast majority of exhortations to give to the poor, refuse vengeance etc. - and growing impulse to restrict political freedom more generally - can thus be understood in two ways. One, these freedoms unleash mimetic desire to an extent that puts impossible stress on ethical norms alone. Two, they are costly signals of allegiance to the mystified object of mimesis as founding those ethical principles, as opposed to any merely rational interpretation. That they nonetheless tend to produce innocent victims, around whom the conflicts produced by the struggle of finite beings to imitate an actually transcendent model are “relaxed” and resolved, is in neither case accidental. But it should not escape so skilled a “literal” (in the sense allied with “literary”) reader as Girard that many of Jesus’ most infamous condemnations of mimetic desire - and scandal - are not merely an “uncharacteristic hyperbolic style” but constructed as if-then statements: “IF your hand scandalizes you, THEN cut it off; IF your eye scandalizes you, THEN cut it out”. IF you can’t take the heat, THEN get out of the kitchen. One can be owed one’s material needs, by one’s neighbour or even by G-d (“Look to the birds of the air”), but one cannot be owed a mimetic desire. Conversely, within the realm of mimesis for its own sake, Hadit’s Law of the Strong applies; which in turn rotates into the doubled Golden Rule of self-love: do not take on suffering you will be forced to take out on others. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.

The Christian obligation of forgiveness can then be understood in a purely functional sense. Neither the obligation to indefinitely extend emotional resources and social access to those who have harmed you rightfully critiqued by survivors of abuse, nor a metaphysical operation that can only properly be transacted with the mediation of God, it is a refusal to mandate a mimetic criterion of “justice” whose inherently undecidable proportion can only produce buildups of resentment in all directions leading back to the single victim mechanism. It need not mitigate the responsibility to prevent further injustice (even the “war and vengeance” of Ra-Hoor-Khuit is framed in these terms in Liber OZ, as the mere removal of an obstacle), but separates authentic from mimetic elements of this imperative - the imperative of “social justice”.

The most convincing bridge between Girard’s motte and bailey would seem to be the sheer difficulty of believing, consistently, day after day, failure after failure (or success after success), that this is possible - that the Sons of Man can keep defusing every buildup before it blows. I have written at length about this difficulty, and observed it in almost every “woke” secularist I have met; and the more the privileges of the modern world disappear, the more will feel compelled to fall back onto the nearest sacrificial mechanism. The propositional belief that G-d came to Earth as a human just to prove it was possible can cover much of despair’s attack surface, but ultimately just moves the point of the absurd decision. Jesus’ own absurd offering - lending - of himself as universal mimetic model can thus perhaps be understood in terms of Kamina’s offer to another cowardly disciple named Simon: “Don’t believe in yourself, believe in the me who believes in you!” This offer carries a faith of its own that the one to whom it is offered will not transform their mimetic model into an object of resentment, but reverse the polarity of mimetic contagion by passing their faith along.

None of these suggestions are meant to be exhaustive - everything in this post feels embarrassingly provisional even though I’ve been promising it for months and every section took forever to write; I think Marx also had this problem. He wanted to solve it with a centralized party; I’m not categorically opposed to it, but even Marxist-Leninists will admit there aren’t exactly many worthy of loyalty right now, so for the moment I’m just gonna crowdsource it, a possibility Marx couldn’t really imagine but I can’t believe he wouldn’t jump on if he could. If you catch a gap in one of them that I haven’t bracketed or addressed, and I’m sure there will be many, instead of rushing to discredit me in favour of your preferred non-ideology, try and think of something that might fill it. After all, whether you go for state socialism, rigorous anarchism, left communism, electoral incrementalism or based MAGA communism, you’re going to need to solve most of these problems anyway, and having infrastructure before the world burns and your ideology rises from the ashes won’t hurt. As an epistemic/cognitive companion for thinking about the practical dimensions of the stack I suggest Yudkowsky’s Inadequate Equilibria. Alternatively, my only hope is whenever you next feel stuck doomscrolling or arguing about how the other wretched poster needs to Change Their Life before you, you look back at this and look for something you think you either could do or, not knowing how to do, would rather spend five minutes figuring out than another five minutes doomscrolling. If you feel your life lacks some sort of narrative, consider this its inciting question. I’m trying to do this too but in the words of a Tumblr user “im not fucking barbie i cannot have 100000000000000000000000 careers”. The only chance for any of these to work out, let alone all of them in conjunction with each other is scale and numbers - but I think they have more to offer at comparatively more achievable (and flexible) scale and numbers than everyone converting to your preferred ideology or morality, or overwhelming the state by electoral or military force.

POWER

This is the domain from which solarpunk derives its most recognizable iconography. Solar panels are already consumer affordable at a scale allowing individuals to either render themselves substantially independent from or give back to the grid, and the lack of widespread adoption should be a worrying sign for the public will to adopt any of these substantially more complex interventions. But then, solar panels in consumer form still have limited applications if you don’t own a house or land, which the most environmentally conscious age groups increasingly don’t. Power interventions are thus tightly coupled to housing interventions, and via the grid, coupled at one of the most inconvenient points of dependence on the state. Commercial solar panel production, of course, is not designed to be implemented in guerrilla form; but a few fairly simple hacks could be developed and widely disseminated to challenge this hegemony. Several companies are already selling solar windows, an implementation that lends itself to apartments and workplaces. As promotional materials in outlets as solemn and sussy as the World Economic Forum underline, “the US is estimated to have between five and seven billion square metres of glass surface” - and I’m not even writing from there. But contrary to Great Reset fantasies, there’s no way all that glass surface is getting replaced under the World Economic Forum’s ruleset. Indeed, suburban middle class individuals and families are barely even winning in this paradigm structured around them - Cory Doctorow has a good write-up on how capitalization has rendered commercial solar financially unsustainable for much of the market it’s supposed to benefit. This is where we need to start thinking in radically new forms of localism - anyone who shares a building with anyone else, for living or work, should consider themselves to belong to a natural organizing constituency with a mandate to pressure their owners to retrofit their property by any number of means, from petitions to rent strikes or picket lines (developing, or building on depending on local conditions, a base for organization around other causes, from ventilation to rent). Installing solar windows and other panels (I can imagine making use of the balconies of many apartments) at the level of individual units, of course, could cut out the middleman of slow, gruelling and economically uphill activism. There are quite a few tricks for doing this yourself, without even buying a solar array, although most of them are fairly limited in terms of power output, enough to sustain one or two appliances. At that point you might as well also try things like wheel-based generators. All of these might at least be worth a few afternoons of hobbyist-level activity for marginally cutting your power bill if nothing else. And if you get good at them, you don’t have to artificially limit your “private sphere” offer installation to other people you live near, it might even be a decent gig.

FOOD
This is one area where there’s already a good deal of well-trodden praxis, though imo most of it falls into the nostalgia trap with which solarpunk has been associated. Nobody is replacing their main food supply with community gardens, let alone a modern population’s - the #1 design concern here should be scaling. Although if you know where to look there have been strides in this direction, like Montreal’s LUFA, which makes up a major part of one of my friends’ groceries. The question of course is if everyone did this, would it be able to scale to meet demand while staying true to its vision, or would it hit a physical limit of available space, etc. Urban and “vertical” farming, the go-to symbols of solarpunk’s urban and technical optimism over merely local and subsistence farming, have been dogged with concerns about scaling, which should be decoupled between strictly physical concerns and concerns about profitability, the latter potentially solvable outside a profit model. A lot of these questions will only be resolved in practice, but to a large extent, this fits in my head alongside housing as a question about space. Due to the competitive nature of North American farming, startling amounts of arable land are lying unused around basically midsize hub or outlying suburb. You may not easily be able to legally buy that land, but it’s way too late to worry about that now.

The food forest as opposed to field (though this obviously works better for some crops and ecosystems) model, promoted by big-name solarpunks like Saint Andrewism, represents a significant step towards density and labour efficiency, as could other adaptations from gatherer as opposed to agriculturist lifestyles. Acorns, for instance, were a staple that sustained pre-contact cities. Even before growing any new food forests, how much could you get out of what already drops in your city every year? What about other edible fruits and nuts currently being wasted as decorative?

I think as much as the recognizable work of building there’s a considerable work of modelling to be done here - locally, in every specific area, as well as building generalizable abstract models - if we want to extrapolate what needs to be built and how to avoid it falling into the trap of feel-good lifestyle projects. How many food-bearing trees are in your city already? Where are they? How much usable land or rooftop space is in, on or outside your city? (How much would rooftop farming in particular have to trade off with other uses of urban surface like solar panels?) If you’re stuck twiddling your thumbs in an academic field like geography, this might be a place to radicalize your skillset. App, website and protocol design will also be necessary to help streamline crowdsourcing much of this information. Some of this already exists and just isn’t well-known outside of tiny lifestyle foraging communities - there’s a global crowdsourced map at FallingFruit.org and if you are reading this I want you to either put a tree you know on there, or go on a walk until you find one. But this doesn’t all have to be painstakingly done by humans mapping their local neighbourhoods - someone could automate a lot of this kind of surveying with drones and AI.

At the end of the day, however, our settlements aren’t designed to be agriculturally self-sustaining and probably won’t be even at max existing capacity. For purely spatial reasons, the indoor and vertical farming options are an appealing solution - they would also allow you to bypass the ascetic-conservative demand, debated over and over in the fruitless iterations of “banana discourse”, to only eat food native to your bioregion. Much of what follows for HOUSING will also apply to this; this will probably also require a shift to hydroponics, which will require significant cooperation with WATER and POWER levels of the stack. Projects using existing resources and space, however, could be a first step to free up (in the sense of labour-time and finances dedicated to securing food within the existing stack) and accumulate (in the sense of funding or other models of cooperation pools) resources to pool towards these larger, higher-fixed capital projects.

SHELTER
The housing crisis is a world-historic opportunity for people to change how they look at space. At this point the everyday perception of space is probably more reified and fetishized by property-relations than commodities - if a space isn’t designated for us by someone trying to profit from its use, or a state graciously granting us free range on some of its preserves, we don’t even perceive it. The YIMBY/NIMBY war into which most of the energy of generational housing anger is being channeled is an absurd race to the bottom because both sides take this for granted; the YIMBYs see the artificial scarcity so literally as real scarcity they propose wasting money, materials and carbon to build more while the NIMBYs can only see it like a state and expect the base/superstructure stack to flow backwards with activists telling the government telling property owners what to do. We lack the creativity of slum dwellers throughout history - or feel entitled not to use it - even as our living conditions degrade to the level of expensive slums anyway.

Full-on squatting is of course one of the riskiest forms of praxis I could propose here (and would pose challenges, though might also force solutions, integrating with other levels of the stack). But if not that we should at least be thinking about how to demand and secure access to unused space (including for other parts of the stack like FOOD and MANUFACTURE) outside the top-down policy level (which would likely let the state set conditions on use). One reason leftists seem more helpless on housing than labour politics right now is there is land-users don’t really have an equivalent of the leverage of a strike, unless you’re already paying rent and just negotiating it down, but limited forms of unauthorized use and obstruction could be exactly such a bargaining chip - this was implicit in the original logic of “occupations”. There are also probably efficiencies to be found in scaling the use of crowdfunding to buy up low value properties and developing them as co-operatives. Where these properties are inadequately supported by current infrastructure (POWER, WATER etc.) this can be taken as an opportunity to integrate our own.

But if we need to build more anyway - and for the same reasons as with FOOD, we probably do - we shouldn’t let real estate developers do that for us. In the early 20th century, the foundations of the suburbs were built from the ground up, by the people living in them, with mail-order homes. This still exists, not even exclusive to the “tiny house” movement which attracts so much suspicion as a Great Reset enforced decline in living standards - for my part, if I was building my own house I’d probably make it pretty small just to save myself effort, but you can go ahead and build yourself Groverhaus if you want, I’m specifically trying not to make aesthetic gestures here. The point is, building a house somewhere the cops aren’t likely to bother to tear it down (and if they do you can just build it back, that’s what they did in Kowloon Walled City).

COMPLEX MATERIALS
This is one that I spent a lot of time researching last year when I was doing an “everyday life project” for my last course requirement (on Thoreau & the Politics of Everyday Life) where I traced as much as I could of the supply chain of every material in every product I bought. A bunch of the creative results of that are here - as with most of my speculative fiction, I slide around the scale of plausibility a fair bit because I don’t know enough of the science to really aim for “hard” cred, but a bunch of the core ideas are things that seemed practicable. And this is an area that doesn’t get talked about much because it seems aggressively intractable. The vast majority of things you’ll see on an ingredients list or a clothing label - or more indispensably, a medicine bottle - with a long string of Latin syllables, as well as the materials of the packaging, are derived from long sequences of chemical reactions that trace back in the first instance to compounds produced by the carbon-intensive process of hydrocarbon steam cracking. A lot of petrochemical processes are also infamously polluting in other ways. And tbc, while non-biodegradable plastics reduction is a distinct front just in waste terms, I’m not sure the drive to replace everything with “natural” materials isn’t going to strain those very natural systems we’re simultaneously trying to preserve and use more for other things once you start scaling past symbolic moves like banning plastic straws. (Feel free to point me to research on this!) A population of 8 billion humans at a standard of living we would find tolerable is not a natural phenomenon; it would be ecologically irresponsible to expect to support it entirely by “natural” means, rather than building its own systems to the same standards of renewability and reciprocity as nature.

As part of the project, whenever I found a supply chain I looked into alternatives and a lot of the time there were interesting ones either in the theoretical or low-hanging fruit stage of development, in two main areas: organic production methods (i.e. using specialized, including genetically modified bacteria, fungi or algae). This one interests me in particular because of its potential for decentralization and decapitalization - theoretically you could grow these in cultures in your garage as a side hustle, like weed or crypto mining or shrimp. When I say “hustle” I mean in the most general possible sense of a human drive to “truck and trade”, not necessarily capitalist commodity-exchange: mutual aid networks could coordinate supply requests across networks of hobbyists with elements in the MANUFACTURING and LOGISTICS layers of the stack. You’re probably going to need this layer anyway to do much with these unless the production is squeaky-clean; it’d be a sheer wasted opportunity to immediately collapse the relation you build into a commercial one. As AI safety buffs know, there are already places you can order custom chemicals with minimal questions. DIY CRISPR kits are cheaper than 3D printers. The DIY hormone infrastructure almost certainly has lessons for other areas here. The other big intervention area was recycling - a lot of chemical waste includes compounds that can be used in other processes. Brine used in food salts is pumped back into the sea for no reason by desalination plants. Cleanup operations - legal or otherwise - could be folded in with industrial scavenging.

This is also an area where there could be like, 200x more research than there currently seems to be as a first step. Patrick T. Brown’s dishonest Nature stunt may have impressed the Leigh Phillips contingent of increasingly reactionary ecomodernists but discredited his critique of the distribution of climate research, which is a shame because this is a great example of where it’s true: imperial “Science” is wasting time proving “climate change is real and bad” over and over in hopes that internalizing this sufficiently will make everyone roll over their entire productive infrastructure while much of it is still waiting on science to actually demonstrate scalable replacements. But you don’t need to lower yourself to a weird manipulative pressure campaign on the editorial board of Nature to start this: not only is no one actually stopping anyone qualified from doing this research, but recent events in superconductivity have suggested, although again I can’t claim any expertise, that a fair amount of materials science experimentation can be done at home! I don’t mean to simply retreat historically to the idyll of the Romantic gentleman scientist, although I’m sure a lot of tpot could and it’d be a more dignified use of your shape rotating prowess than developing AI for marketers and weapons manufacturers or writing a million Substacks. There’s a whole realm of possible citizen-science partnership arrangements this opens up: specialists who understand the relevant processes but can’t secure funding for a high-end lab could outsource tests to amateurs, crowdfunded labs could hire specialists. On a previous aside this also seems like an area where AI could speed things up substantially - the same kinds of brute-force algorithmic search on chemical combinations already producing more hyped-up medical results might help us discover cleaner materials and chemical processes.

MANUFACTURE
My first solarpunk story, which might still be my best but I haven’t managed to publish anywhere (about 50% of people who read it get it and 50% don’t), imagined a society ritually structured around a primary means of production every full adult owns individually, having learned and built themselves as a coming of age: a 3D printer. Of course, people have been promising this kind of revolution since the dawn of 3D printing and we need to soberly examine the reasons they’re still being used primarily to make tabletop gaming figures. They still don’t make much that doesn’t fit in a desktop-to-closet-sized box (the latter are really expensive). A lot of our most industrial manufacturing-intensive products use combinations of materials that can’t be 3D-printed easily, like metal and wood (see ELECTRONICS in particular). But I dunno, look around your house and identify everything that could still be made to these criteria: tableware. Bottles and containers. Toys. A sustainable society might consider it as perverse not to make some of these yourself as never cooking your own meals. At the beginning of COVID I bit the bullet and ordered one online because everyone was anticipating the need to publicly source ventilators, visors and other medical equipment. It didn’t arrive in the rush of COVID orders and this didn’t end up being a major element of the pandemic anyway; I haven’t since had the stimmy bucks or a comparable excuse, but I still mean to. But also important - especially at some of the other levels, including ELECTRONICS and even COMPLEX MATERIALS - is that the heavier-duty 3D printers, the kind an average reader of this post can’t afford on their own or fit in their apartment, can do a lot more. Local productive and distributive organizations - an entire organizational category which has barely begun to be thought - as soon as they have a viable funding structure should endeavour to bring at least one such printer to their representative unit.

At larger scales, between the Trumpian phantasm of “bringing the jobs back” to depressed Global North exurbs and the best case scenario of a top down Green New Deal, I can imagine organizing co-operatives funded by their members and communities buying infrastructure, negotiating agreements with local and municipal governments that won’t be high bidders for the existing “green jobs” for infrastructure like solar panels, EV chargers etc. Attempts to democratize, decentralize or socialize heavier industry have been a stumbling block of revolutions with much better starting conditions - see Mao’s infamous campaign of backyard pig iron smelting. Chuang’s Sorghum and Steel series, in fact, makes a convincing case that many of the failures of the Chinese revolution (whose lasting impact has mostly consisted in shifting the manufacturing centre of the global market), from the hukou system to the survival of a class base for Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, stem from its being essentially hostage to the engineers and administrators, some left over from the Japanese occupation, who knew how to make the factories actually work. With more heavily automated processes and in many ways an even more deskilled workforce, this will be an even more pressing problem. Existing manufacturing unions are, unfortunately, among the most risk-averse and least likely to use their leverage to direct manufacturing priorities and policy (and even the more radical rising unions in service work should at this point be thinking beyond negotiating within the wage-relation and striking for supply chain and infrastructure overhauls), but if anyone trying to push them in more radical directions wants to pick up the De Leonist strategy, the loyalties of the technical layer might well decide the outcome.

The general presumption about solarpunk manufacture of course is that it would be primarily artisanal, and while on one hand this is part of the conflation between solarpunk, degrowth and traditional green nostalgia I critique in the Miyazaki post, there’s an interesting intervention to think about here relative to another contemporary trend the left is struggling to respond to, the intensifying fascization of small business. I often push back on the emerging left contrarian view that small businesses are inherently worse, both on the level of politics and labour relations, than megacorporations, and get pushback in turn from people who’ve compared bad experiences working in both that I can’t really respond to - and the thing is while I’m extremely skeptical of the vulgar accelerationist vision of a world where everyone is totally materially dependent on a Wal-Mart/Amazon/Blackrock/Starbucks confusopoly that spontaneously unionizes into a workers’ soviet, I don’t have any particular stake in the concept of “small business” itself so much as the transhistorical phenomenon of artisanal creativity and productivity that has been enclosed into “small business” under this particular mode of production. The problem is I can see exactly how the formation of “small business” fascizes the artisanal impulse: you’re forced to put in all the extra effort and sacrifice of resisting the natural tendency of capital, especially in the wake of destabilizing events like COVID, but in the name of your right to extract profits from your products and employees, which encourages more-than-instrumental rationalizations of that right, now identified with your right to artisanal production in the first place. The same phenomenon is only marginally more benign in the self-employed artisanal economies of “content creators” and artists. The alternative, then, would be to drain the runoff of “small business” into non-capitalized artisanal economies.

Readers with a left background are probably asking at this point, doesn’t this all sound a bit like communization? Yeah, I mean I also wrote a whole book riffing on Tiqqun, and the more standard “solarpunk” political economy text is Le Bread Book. But the reason I’m organizing this in a “stack” is to try and decouple the concrete premises of communization from the rhetorical fetish of immediacy, particularly as seen in Dauvé’s anticosmic obsession with “breaking all separations” (including, infamously, the sexual separation between adults and children; sorry I bring this up in every post because it’s everywhere), which pre-emptively inserts a kind of capitalist realism where every form of organization is capitalist (or state-socialist). I don’t propose praxis at the site of daily life instead of the state out of opposition to organization or structure (or even coercion - I agree with William Gillis in terms of the utopian horizon but not necessarily every tradeoff getting there), but because the structures that can and must be implemented at these sites are necessary to implement structures at other sites.

LOGISTICS
Someone I know was working on this then jumped to a larger project which IMO still won’t have much of a chance to either be implemented or implemented equitably if nobody does this, so somebody please fucking do this: we have all the platform infrastructure needed for decentralized labour organization on levels never before seen in history. People are talking about doing this with DAOs, which is fine but is just a slightly more decentralized kludge of existing market organization. I am not just talking about DAOs. I am talking about systems where any user gets to design a task, decide roles and resources it will need (not necessarily reduced to a medium of exchange or labour-power: you can create a database for use-values!), recruit for roles across the platform, define rewards for them, sign up to receive resources from any other project through any exchange-arrangement including for free, enforce agreements through the terms & conditions of the platform and automated auditing systems (this doesn’t have to be blockchain although blockchain makes it easier, AI probably also makes it easier), and measure flows of resources in and out of any given project. You can have a general job board where anyone with any skill who wants to use it for some non-capitalist project can browse openings in their area (again some kind of local networks would be relevant here for anything physical) using their skill and pitch in for corresponding reductions. Projects could plug into each other at any level of a supply chain, from MANUFACTURE to POWER to COMPLEX MATERIALS. FOOD and SHELTER arrangements could even be made through the platform. There could be an opt-in generalized points system for exchange across the platform as a whole, plus shared points or token arrangements at any scale between. (Yes a lot of this DAOs do well already, my major reason for insisting on this not just being DAOs is it shouldn’t have to be limited to people with a crypto wallet. There is at the moment a fairly low cap on the proportion of people interested enough in a crypto ecosystem that mostly promotes itself on commodities trading LARP to sign up for a wallet, and while there is at least as much of a cap on people who would use this, there’s significant non-overlap between the two demographics. Ideally it shouldn’t require sign-in through any mainstream financial institution either.) Yes a lot of this is unclear because I haven’t tried to design it yet, again this is a set of problems to solve, but it’s insane that nobody else is starting on them.

Another big part of making this possible, of course, will be transport. A thing I discovered recently because I’ve been trying (failing) to focus on Palestine - I would rather focus on these long term problems than any “current thing”, if nothing else because it lends itself more to my time-independent, creative style of problem-solving, but it might be worth treating “ongoing genocide that the entire international order is openly unwilling to prevent” as a test run for the coordination mechanisms we’ll need on an even broader scale here - is that delivery drones are weirdly gatekept. You can’t just buy them, even if you have the money - you can’t even see the prices without submitting a query, which presumably involves explaining that you’re a Legitimate Business or Non-profit intending to use them for approved purposes unlike, say, crowdfunding a fleet to station at a dock in Sinai and fly crowdfunded supplies over Palestine bypassing the international aid/permission regime entirely. (TBC: I have not ruled out all possible ways of doing this. If you see any exploitable modifications feel free to contact me or take them yourself.) Consumer drones being pretty much exclusively quadcopters for photography hobbyists is a market distortion, and I’m really curious now at what level these permission structures get decided, and also whether there’s ways around them on the black market yet, although that in itself selects for hierarchies funneling resources to individuals capable of large secure payouts. These are the real structures of your world: the distinctions between theoretical and actual possibilities. On the other hand, you’re still allowed to use rideshares for people - they still just assume you won’t use the same organizational platforms for supplies. Assume this, too, is a historical window and you have to act before it’s closed. You’d want to eventually set up your own secure platform for independent “fleets” while building a “customer" base or fulfilling specific requests through the platform proposed above through existing apps.

St. Andrewism’s well-known Library Economy proposal (implicitly endorsed by Aaron Bushnell!) belongs here, and I’ll just link to his video on it directly, adding that at least in my city there is already a version of it, and I don’t live in a particularly big city so there might very well be one in yours already. In which case the problems to be solved are publicizing it enough that people can find it easily as their local equivalent capitalist enterprise (as an aspiring non-capitalist enterprise, it shouldn’t be entirely reliant on people it pays for this), contributing resources of your own and offering your time and resources to scale it. Or you could start your own thing if you don’t trust its management for whatever reason but it’s at this point - and at no point before - that your efforts verge into arrogance and presumption. If you can’t achieve something yourself, that is your problem, not a problem with the task. If it’s your problem, entreat someone more capable to do it - you have forfeited the right to dignity. I am posting this now because I failed something I was attempting myself, and I’m not even giving up that one thing, because there is no one else to do it yet. Oh I am the hypocrite. Oh I have nothing and I’m alone. Oh I am the storyteller. Oh I have nothing but I believe me.

tbc. in ELECTRONICS, INTERNET, PUBLIC SPACE, HEALTH and SELF DEFENSE

To his credit Steiner makes clear, although not by the standards of today, that his exceptionalist narrative is at odds with Zionism. Steiner belongs to the tradition of Jewish thinkers who see the Jewish mission as “light to the nations” fulfilled in modernity only in the universalizing position of permanent exile. (The intellectual and artistic tradition of this positive identification with rootless cosmopolitanism, distinct from the Tumblr-ified ethnic identity framing in a lot of contemporary Jewish left rhetoric as an internal alternative to Zionism’s compromise with the Nations, has also since become overrepresented in my own artistic influences: Leonard Cohen, Gerald Stern, the Frankfurt School, arguably Scott Alexander.) Steiner goes further than most in tying this ideal directly to his analysis of Zionism’s foundational trauma, the Holocaust, which he believes was directed against this universalism and the unresolved, unresolvable guilt-complex it has inflicted on the rest of the world. The attempted extermination of the Jews was and has always been an attempt by the nations to eradicate their own unsatisfied conscience, this principle of infinite demand, closely allied with language and abstraction, that seems to constantly undermine every stable system, traditional or imperial. At the same time, the death-machines of the Holocaust realized the anxiety produced by this demand, its opposite pole: the image of Hell that, while not particularly present in Judaism itself, the Western superego created to torment itself for its guilt, and which seems to invert the extremity of the Jewish utopian vision. These unconscious conflicts, Steiner warns, have not been resolved by the mere military defeat of the Axis, and perpetually threaten to re-erupt in even more cataclysmic form. “We seem to stand,” he ends the book ominously, “where Bartòk’s Judith stands [in the titular Bluebeard’s Castle], when she asks to open the last door on the night.”

For the state of Israel itself to open this door is more than just a cruel irony. It is an elaborate, Jigsaw-esque historical trap that seems designed to enact a final solution to the problem of contagious universalism on the level of discourse itself, not merely its chosen vectors. Even on the left, statements of foundational universalism such as Naomi Klein’s - "Side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child" - are now routinely and understandably condemned as a sign of cowardice. Taken as calls to distribute affect more evenly - that is, unevenly - between the ~33 Israeli children and over 7000 Palestinian children killed, they would be; that Klein herself clearly rejects this interpretation is taken as secondary to the speech-act of saying it at all, which necessarily redistributes some affect across the asymmetry, and all affect is a precious resource. However the argument that this scalar asymmetry matters seems to assume the unconditional premise in the first place. If the injustice of ethnically or religiously targeted killing of non-combatants for existing on a piece of land is wholly side-dependent, wouldn’t who does more of it simply be a morally neutral measure of who’s winning? This is, after all, the argument of Zionists who assert that Steiner’s diasporic idealists simply hate seeing Jews win. And the Israeli occupation is uniquely unsuited to many alternative terminal values proposed by anti-universalist leftists. Zionists have enthusiastically seized on “decolonization” by declaring Jews indigenous to the land of Israel since two thousand years ago; the argument that colonization refers to a present relation of domination, not the violation of innate blood relation to soil, requires an ultimately identity- and history-independent present norm against certain relations instantiated on present violence, and to take sides in a genocide based on a linguistic quibble about the definition of colonialism seems perverse anyway. The temporal “who started it first” can be deferred indefinitely through frame control; even the foundational violence of the nakba can be framed as responding (disproportionately, but of course, this is the same thing as victory) to local pogroms, and if scale or object of violence do not matter consistently this “response” cannot be protested as more than “winning”.

While “not wanting Jews to win” is hardly a fair characterization of the Messianic tradition of tiqqun olam, which aims for a victory so total that the world erupts pre-emptively in fear of it, it hits closer to home for the contemporary left which in the absence of programmatic universalisms has become, in the words of anarchist William Gillis, an unprincipled “coalition of underdogs”. That a central plank of the reasoning by which the events of 10/7 are able to effect Zionist retrenchment - “what happens if the people who did 10/7 win” - is treated as a meaningless hypothetical could on one hand suggest a costly commitment to frame independence, but on the other a disinterest in winning, where win conditions are so distant they need not even be debated. Which is not to say that Palestinian liberation should be contingent on a correct and guaranteed win condition: the universalist opposition to oppression precisely forbids this sort of equivocation. A Palestinian victory does not necessarily entail a universalist outcome, but only with the abolition of the state of Israel as an ethno-religious apartheid regime is such an outcome even possible. The remarkable paradox is that the secular left, neither Israeli nor Palestinian, ultimately supports Palestine because it is the position most consistent with universalist values, though which specific ones may legitimately vary - against genocide, against colonialism, against collective punishment of civilians. But to admit these premises openly is taken as a betrayal of the real-world commitment that must and can only derive from them, because the weaponization of a spurious universalism by the liberal (Zionist) international order is such a ubiquitous backdrop.

This spurious universalism, as absurdly as Zionists continue to appeal to it, however, has been in the process of being dismantled for over a decade, and I can’t shake the feeling that it’s part of why the conflict has escalated so extremely. The problem with invoking the “nuance” and “complexity” of Israel’s occupation of Palestine is not that it does not exist; even from the most dogmatically anticolonialist position this is trivially true. It is that the complexity of the occupation has rapidly collapsed. One side is now both openly attempting and militarily capable of total genocide of the other. Whatever the failings of liberal Zionists of years past, many would have condemned this extreme as unassimilable to a “nuanced” approach and did so when it was expressed as a hypothetical by ultra-orthodox settlers or far-right members of the Knesset. Most are now in denial that the complexity has collapsed to this extent - a denial that requires both constant shifting of focus and outright ideological hallucination. This same shifting of focus is the same as present in leftist discourses but qualitatively not to the same extent - because for liberal Zionism in the present moment, at least any kind that isn’t demanding immediate ceasefire and the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu’s entire government, it is the only way it can remain thinkable. That the left indulges in the same shifting of focus, then, seems at least as important a form of complicity in the discursive conditions making liberal equivocation on Israeli genocide possible as agreement with any particular proposition roped into its inherently incoherent argument. Especially when Israel speaks in the exact same terms of denying any moral responsibility for its actions by appealing to its status as an ontological underdog (ironically, that very logic of ressentiment with which Nietzsche infamously tarred the Jews).

The first place I saw the processes involved in this shifting of focus accepted as a widespread condition of legitimate discourse was on the left, and I allowed myself to be relatively unconcerned at the time because it seemed clear that no-one actually followed it through in practice. 4chan used to try stuff like “#WhitesCan’tBeRaped” to split the intersectional coalition by pushing the drive to be edgy to its limits and it didn’t work because people fell back on consistent principles in the last instance. I’m not sure this wouldn’t work today (I’ll write about “the controlled demolition of the intersectional coalition” properly at some other point) but my concern still largely isn’t the left - it should have been everyone else who would conclude from our discursive (not material) successes that the rules of engagement had shifted. The entire collective brain of the internet now - left, right and centre, and even weirder coalitions that don’t fit - speaks in clichés that in 2012-2014 were the almost exclusive domain of the most unpopular wing of “social justice warriors”. Almost every attempt to diagnose this phenomenon has been misconstrued as referring to some particular content. It isn’t “identity politics”, or even the anti-universalist left critiques that split academia and activism in the 90s - most of which were little more than expansive universalisms anyway. Nor is it something so general as "tribalism”, ingroup/outgroupism or black and white thinking. This post is not to be read as a hysterical demand that Universalism Must Be Defended and any position questioning it treated as unacceptably dangerous: universal questioning was itself once part of the imperative, and a necessary precondition of deciding which universals are actually possible and desirable. The language-games of universalism and particularism can be varyingly appropriate for the same situation. What I am attempting to describe is a particular and very slippery structure of bad faith regarding the content and expression of one’s own beliefs. It is an immensely complex algorithm for reducing thought to abject simplicity. A lot of Theory of the Young-Boy is attempting to describe it, but I think there’s something deeper to it than the Young-Boy, a historically specific phenomenon that converges with it in the same way broader ones like the Family do.

Appeals to universals like Klein’s are commonly rejected as “punching” toward her own side. This suggests an algorithm in which every premise is first polarized “positive/negative” - and then analyzed as a vector towards or away from an agent (individual or group) in a conflict, where the relevant agents are defined outside the space of deliberation. It’s not so much “Arguments As Soldiers” - soldiers are agents capable of attacking and retreating, organizing themselves in formations according to complex strategies - as “propositions as bullets”. As such, no argument or even description can have both positive and negative moments; any moment in an argument that contradicts its “vector” is an opposite vector, weakening its agent and strengthening the opposing one. Such negative moments are necessary to give any concept clear boundaries - “this means A, B, C and not X, Y, Z” - and thus “positive” or “negative” themselves are undefined or undefinable, tending to run away into infinity. Hence the structure frequently identified by right-wingers in left-wing rhetoric as “it isn’t happening and it’s good”. I first saw this formula being used to refer to the claim of “white genocide” or “great replacement”, although it’s expanded to more facially innocuous conspiracy theories like the “Great Reset” - which is interesting because it’s a very lucid description of the structure underlying traditional genocide denial from the right, including the paradigmatic case of Holocaust denial, or the current case of Israeli denial of their own atrocities in Gaza. Holocaust deniers will, in one moment, deny the Holocaust happened and in the next, argue that it should anyway - seemingly making their own first premise morally irrelevant, at least within any moral system that refers to an external, object-independent set of principles for defining desirable and undesirable outcomes. The most interesting part of this is that the presence of this real structure characteristic of genocide denial in left-wing rebuttals to “white genocide” theories doesn’t mean white genocide is real. “It isn’t happening and it’s good” can be false at the moment of either it isn’t happening or it’s good (or both). In fact, it often means an agent is less radical at some point than their rhetoric, since it’s impossible to instantiate an infinite positive/negative vector in a finite, bounded reality, and since the “it isn’t happening” moment appeals to some unexamined sense of morality to define an accusation by an opponent as positive or negative - to actually bite the bullet of violent political commitment is to internalize a negative moment. The “liberal” international order, the End of History, thus insinuates itself in the rhetorical structure - defining both the bounds of agents (as nations, individuals, corporate entities or even ideological abstractions such as “technology” or “religion”) and the vectors of “positive/negative” polarization - that can always define itself as more “radical” by denouncing any condition of conceptual specificity as a compromise on the vector of commitment. However, it cannot implement these bounds in their conventional, negative sense.

This structure seems almost pre-ontological, and may also be pre-political. The positive/negative vector is after all an affect, except one that refuses to be an affect, because to be an affect is to be irrational, effeminate and ultimately resolvable - a negative moment. I don’t necessarily know the psychoanalytic terminology well enough to pin it exactly but there are multiple frameworks or explanations that seem to map to the framework I’m describing: Melanie Klein’s infantile splitting of the good and bad breast, Lloyd DeMause’s even earlier archetype of the fetal struggle against the toxic placenta, and the phenomenon of “splitting” in borderline personality disorder. Klein’s observation that any splitting of the object creates a split in the ego in particular might help clarify why this is a structure of bad faith and not merely a consistent lex talionis, friend/enemy distinction, or survival tradeoff. The violence attributed to the enemy is still recognized as a negative vector when attributed to oneself, and therefore must be denied without being negated, splitting the identified group (the ego) into passive innocence and active vengeance. The left hand must not know what the right hand does; the positive and negative vectors must deny each other’s existence. This is a difficult position to occupy in a viable resistance struggle, where strength and weakness must be negotiated at the same time; it is easier to maintain in a position of either absolute helplessness or absolute power. In the “underdog” position, the positive introjection prevails and the actor becomes simply ineffectual, incapable of realizing the violence it projects. In the “winning” position, the negative projection prevails and every protestation of innocence is delusional window dressing for ever more extreme crimes. Madeleine L’Engle described the absolute negative vector as “X-ing” - the letter to which Elon Musk has renamed the great X-ing amplifier that is Twitter. The logical limit of actionable concretization of an “X”-vector is genocide, or “X”-tinction.

The ubiquity of this structure means a discursive landscape defined by constant extinction threat - where any disagreement, or even any boundary on the part of an Other with which one is not identified, can extrapolate to a threat not merely of violence or death but of “the extinction of all possible value”. Of course Extinction, as its prophet Angelicism01 gloats, has now entered history as both a material and a metaphysical reality with the tightening pincer of nuclear MAD (a core dimension of Israel’s leverage over the international order), climate change and AI, among other conceivable “existential risks”. An “affirmative” embrace of Extinction, he might argue (although I suspect this is a simplification), is the only alternative to the fractal schism of reality into the "positive” and “negative” vectors of “literal” politics and moralism, but this seems to be extinction’s very mechanism. An illuminating recent article by C. Heike Schotten identifies both Zionism and TERFism, two of the most genocidally activated ideological formations with successful footholds in the liberal order today, with an “Extinction Phobia”. (These ideologies’ “weird mix of leftist and reactionary language” can further be compared with another worryingly successful genocidal form in Hindutva, and with Naomi Klein’s “mirror world” description of the monocult.) Schotten’s is one of those frustrating academic articles that treat object-level premises as axioms: the central difference between Schotten and the TERFs and Zionists she interrogates is treating “trans women” and “Palestinians” as the relevant categories in a “reversal of oppressed and oppressor”, a polarity taken as axiomatic and irreversible. Therefore Schotten fails to distinguish between rational and irrational extinction phobias (surely “extinction phobia” is the most rational phobia there is!) In TERF ideological terms trans women are not a distinct group but a subset of men, the dominant oppressive group, camouflaged as an oppressed minority, and Palestinians for Zionists a subset of the dominant majority of Arabs or simply non-Jews. But if terms outside the extinction vectors cannot be articulated, then these group-definitions themselves are arbitrary. The “extinction” threat common to TERFs and Zionists is one that arises from occupying an ambiguously defined position in which one’s survival can be guaranteed neither by solidarity with the “coalition of underdogs” nor with the coalition of privileged classes (and can only be guaranteed, on the other hand, by defining the framing of these vectors, occupying both in their “positive” moment, then eliminating the possibility of objection by maximizing the “negative” moment’s intensity to extinction). This can even be analogized to the intermediate position occupied by the petty bourgeoisie, the traditional base of fascism, threatened simultaneously by the rising tide of proletarian, lumpen and racial underclasses and the consolidation of the capitalist overclass. In an analytic of “intersecting” oppressions, it may in fact be a politics latent in most groups which face antagonism from both above and below. (In an intersectionalized database of oppression, this is most groups.)

One reason “kill all [oppressor group]” statements are understood by so many to be a harmless loyalty signal and not an actual extinction threat is that if you are actually in the position to kill all of a group, or even credibly threaten to do so, you are in the structural oppressor position. This does point to a reason most attempts to “consistently” condemn Hamas crimes against civilians on 10/7 and Israel’s genocide in a single category, even while acknowledging scalar differences, fall flat that is not “merely” scalar. To call the actions of Hamas fighters genocidal is to assert that they have the power to commit genocide - which at present they don’t, but neither do they have the power to win. Even if they were aimed at killing as many Israelis or simply Jews as possible with no other strategic goal, this makes them merely terroristic, and as I have observed elsewhere, much of the current conflict is over whether genocide or terrorism is to be the ultimate political and moral exception of the 21st century. (If you’re reading this as proof that I’m “delegitimizing Palestinian resistance” as terrorism, consider that for much of the 20th century “terrorism” was a far less moralized category than it has become since 9/11. The PLO practiced terrorism and were unashamed to name it as a tactic.) For both scalar and qualitative (treating alignment with the state and the law as a position of exceptional responsibility, not license) reasons I unconditionally hold to the moral condemnation of genocide over terrorism. But this isn’t a great position to have to be constantly choosing sides in, because in a forever war between genocide and terrorism, pragmatically, genocide wins every time. Indeed, the only way terrorism can win is if it becomes genocide - as it did in the foundation of the state of Israel. We don’t need to debate the counterfactual of whether the majority of a victorious Palestinian state “from the river to the sea” would conduct a reverse nakba, or whether Western observers have any moral obligation to precommit themselves against this however small possibility (or refuse to). We can simply observe the reality of an Israel that historically escalated from one to the other, and that while committing genocide, can with equal accuracy still be described as a “terrorist state” - indeed, a state undergoing something vividly, terrifyingly like the contemporary psychosis of a mass shooter.

The AI propaganda image in the header of this article is an illustration of this psychosis so vivid I can’t stop looking at it; I see something new in it every time. Where in 20th century fascism, the enemy was “both strong yet weak”, while the nation was at least represented as a stoic, world-striding Aryan superman, here it is the nation that is both strong yet weak; indeed its weakness is its “secret weapon”, presented as the source of its strength. That ideal strength entails a measure of weakness isn’t wrong; it is a core insight for resolving the deadlocks of master- and slave-morality, iconically expressed in the foundational Jewish (and Israeli) warrior myth of David and Goliath. But this isn’t a David. Its crenellated, anatomically arbitrary, Liefeldian Gigachad AI muscles don’t have the healthy formal harmony of Michelangelo’s David or even the Nazi propaganda figures; it looks rather like Tetsuo on the brink of explosion into bulging autonomous flesh. The spasm of the soldier’s crying face is expressed through his veins and muscles as the spasm of self-destructive power. The vice grip in which it holds the Eretz Israel, fingers digging deep bomb-holes into it, arm clenched around as if to prevent the land itself from leaving rather than vice versa, is not a loving one. The land with its algorithmically garbled place names and topographical lines, for its part looks traumatically, tectonically buckled by the violent embrace. This is above all a sexually violent image - not even in the conventional nationalist set of associations between domination of land and domination of women (for what it’s worth the Eretz isn’t particularly gendered) but in the pathetic, “kimochi warui” reality of so much real sexual violence, where the DARVO reversal has already occurred internally for the abuser, who has collapsed all possible value into the finite object of “love” and is existentially threatened by its mere independent existence. That this paranoid infantile attachment is so perfectly distilled, even where contrary to the history of propaganda, by the inhuman honesty of AI from its wilfully pathetic inputs - “We in Israel have a secret weapon - we have no place to go. We are to stay.” - speaks volumes not only about the structure of feeling it represents but the structures we are building into AI and feeding back through it into our own unconscious. AI does not (yet, as far as we can verify) derive its images from reference to an external world-model and conceptual relations, but from iterations of reward-punishment loops that turn every statistical cluster into a feedback loop of itself. So does regular datamining, and it is partly the presumption that all statements will be decomposed to units of sentiment analysis and fed into massive aggregators that drives the demand for beliefs to justify themselves not to stacks of premises but vectors of rationalized, quantified sentiment.

Naftali’s “secret weapon” is also notably at odds with the relationship to the Eretz Israel expressed throughout Scripture, where even though it is gained and regained by violence the IDF can plausibly cite in support of their actions, it can also be taken away by G-d at any time if its people don’t hold up their end of the Covenant. The prophets instruct the Jews in exile to wait patiently for G-d’s signal to return. Of course the Holocaust rightfully undermined trust in a G-d who would protect the faithful diaspora as in the Babylonian captivity, and the response “Never Again” can be split into two forms: a universalist mission to abolish genocide as a category, so that the Jews can be safe in exile or otherwise, a radicalization of the G-d’s Covenant with Noah to suspend the “extinction threat” on humanity; and a declaration that Never Again will Israel relinquish its monopoly of the homeland, an antinomian permanent state of war with G-d. While the Neturei Karta who have assumed an outsized position as spokespeople of anti-Zionist Judaism are probably too crudely literal, treating the coming of Moshiach as an essentially magical event that, like the dispensational inversions of Evangelical Christianity, changes the moral facts of the world (making genocide permissible again), their theological critique is essentially correct in the sense of Amara Reyes’ observation of cults, “that their ideologies need to jump to the end”. Not until genocide is abolished as the state of the world can the return promised by the Prophets occur without re-triggering the cycle with which the Hebrew Bible is overwhelmingly concerned.

The “Extinction Phobia” of a wrathful G-d hangs over the head of humanity throughout the Hebrew Bible; Lot and Noah both bargain with G-d to save populations from cities to humanity as a whole from total destruction. Humanity as a whole is spared absolute Extinction by Noah’s covenant, and the Israelites as a people by Abraham’s; though both of these covenants seem to restrain G-d’s natural impulse, manifested towards the Jews in cycles of incomplete persecution, and towards the Nations in the cycle of vain conquests and ruinations anticipated by the prophets. Other populations are still periodically exterminated, with the Israelites sometimes (as in the case of Amalek and various Canaanite tribes occupying the Promised Land, the original “Palestinians”) acting as G-d’s exterminating instrument. They are also barely restrained from an internal genocide against the Tribe of Benjamin. Subjectively, much of the Psalms are repetitive buildups of negative and positive affect towards David’s enemies on one hand and his G-d on the other, frequently closing on paradox or impossibility. This legacy obviously feeds into the anti-Semitic narrative that the Holocaust was (or will be) a closing of the historical circle that brought genocide into existence through the overreach of Jewish monotheism. The Jews, however, did not innovate the concept of a God who can choose a people and order a genocide. This was the commonplace of the geopolitical context Biblical Israel emerged in, the cradle of Leviathan, where god-kings ordered the total massacre of rival city-states on the basis of their claim to identification with the supreme deity. The monotheistic ascent of the Hebrew G-d rather destabilizes that system by denying the reality of its rival gods a priori, decoupling the “is” and “ought” of G-d’s victory by deferring endlessly into the Messianic future and the Scriptural past. My favourite interpretation of “Amalek” is Tracy Twyman’s: in Genuflect, at the height of the anti-cosmic ritual meant to negate and remake the world as a whole through an orgy of Salò-esque violence, the narrator-witness becomes capable of perceiving an infinity of grotesque beings feeding on the suffering around her - “the Amaleks”, which are “everywhere, all the time”. Like L’Engle’s echthroi, these “Hyperuranian” parasites seem to phenomenologically map to the eruptions of insatiable, energy-bleeding death-drive I can observe within myself and others, transmitted by the horror of this genocide itself. This reading would perhaps make the commandment that the memory of Amalek be extinguished (and the identification of the group with its memory makes more sense if Amalek is referring to a cogitohazard) equivalent to the “never again”. Perhaps the Jewish theological innovations arise as much from inverting the genocidal splitting position as vice versa.

Another point Schotten glosses over in analogizing contemporary Zionism and contemporary TERFism is that neither is any more properly speaking a separatist movement. If the “extinction phobia” was truly directed against an “eternal and universal” anti-Semitism, misogyny or homophobia, it would either be directed against the abstract Amalek, or not merely genocidal but omnicidal. (This distinction is apparent in Afro-pessimism’s appeal to the “end of the world” as the only way to thoroughly abolish anti-Blackness. This appeal is, of course, paired with a recognition that for Blacks, “the end of the world has already happened”: as both Steiner and Twyman recognize, the asymptotic violence of genocide, rape and slavery is a ritual expression and containment of the omnicidal impulse, whereas “blackening the world” inverts it back outward to its proper infinite scope.) Zionism and TERFism, however, seek not to end or separate from the world, but to join the community of Nations (goyim), demonstrating their independence by means of a genocidal sacrifice. Zionists pursue eliminationist goals against Palestinians while jealously guarding their status within the international community supported by the very nations that exterminated or refused them during the Holocaust. That the current assault on Gaza interrupted a push for normalization with the Arab nations (themselves, in their current post-pan-Arabist, “multipolar” equilibrium, no strangers to genocide against their own minorities) may yet prove to have been widely misinterpreted. The sword of Damocles of relations with Palestine hanging over Israel’s relations with its Arab neighbours could not have been removed by the perpetual stasis of the occupation, as long as Palestine had the will and the material capacity to resist. The obstacle to normalization with the international community could only be removed by removing the Palestinians themselves. It is the first “Never Again” that represents the apocalyptic moral threat to the order of Nations that according to Steiner provoked the Holocaust in the first place. But that doesn’t mean abandoning it will protect the Jews. Rather, by allowing Israel to make the first move revoking the demand the made of the Nations by the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust, and to do so by appealing to Jewish exceptionalism simultaneously in the sense of the secular claim to victim-authority and the original ethnic exceptionalism of the Chosen People, Israel is setting itself and Jews globally up as scapegoats for the New Old World Order, allowing the Nations (including the post-national Powers and Principalities, the network states, which are now both enforcing Zionism and algorithmically promoting anti-Semitism) to wash their hands of the very same exceptional crime they will now unleash on each other as freely as when the neighbours of Biblical Israel razed each other to the ground. “It didn’t happen, and it’s good.”

For example, I’ve tried to get into Idolm@ster before (with the help of one friend in particular who really Gets It; it’s part of why I have “Producer” in my Andata title) but it didn’t fully click (the way Bang Dream! did in previous years) until this year, and it did as a media mix as opposed to any one particular form to the extent I’m just lumping all the different iterations together here. I finished the first season of the 2011 anime, which is a masterpiece, but the part of the franchise I spent the most time with is the music. There’s so much of it, some of it inevitably forgettable but with highlights running the entire gamut of genres and tones imaginable, but there’s a particular style and tone running through my favourite bangers though, the interplay of its emotional poles of “cool” (production), “cute” (voice) and “passion” (narrative) through songs that unlike the decontextualized genki anisong tone poems of today’s idol franchises are carefully crafted pop that could stand outside a media mix, with distinctive characters and narratives that aren’t necessarily those of the singers themselves. (I think this is the kind of thing I remember fondly from the one 2000s pop radio station I liked as a kid that disappeared?) I also didn’t get into the game but would watch its music video visuals a lot, which have an expansive and tasteful palette of pop ornamentality. It’s more “problematic” (heterosexual, as much from the position of female as male fantasy) than rival franchises, but relative to today’s gacha database represents a glimpse of a moment when even heterosexual otaku were still sort of attracted to women, when the End of History’s liberated Young-Girl was romanticized in the agency she was promised, not in spite of it. All this is mostly referring to the first generation, I still haven’t figured out where the hell to dive into the hundreds of characters in Million Live or Shiny Colours, let alone SideM. I did watch the U149 anime that aired this year, which despite being about one of the most alarming parts of it, with the exception of one terrible episode, had a much more serious perspective on the ethics of the idol industry than the Reddit favourite Oshi no Ko. I might write a post about that sometime but that’s flying close to the sun of self-cancellation even for me. I could also argue this franchise as a whole has less depressing gender politics than the monoculture end of year list (to say nothing of the monocult appropriation of “cuteness”).

Meanwhile in Bang Dream, MyGO!!!!! charted a credible new path for music media mixes with their all-fronts rollout including their in-game debut, anime, debut album, music videos, and I think vlogs or some shit I didn’t watch, synthesizing Nico Nico, menhera, hypebeast, and alt idol aesthetics into the rare focus-group-built Gen Z avatar that doesn’t ring hollow or depressing.

I also slowly but irrevocably started down the path to serious Kamen Rider fandom with the original manga and Black Sun. They have fascinatingly densely complementary takes on the problem of ecology and transhumanism from a left perspective, recognizing both the roots of transhuman imaginaries in military experimentation and eugenics and their paradoxical alliance with the devastated non-human world, grounded in a model of the world that’s more or less realistically parapolitical under the pretext of dramatizing the roots of fascism and extractivism. Ishinomori is up there with Go Nagai and Tezuka in manga interpreters of the last counterculture. Does anyone know if I can watch Shin Kamen Rider anywhere yet.

I spent a lot of time this year figuring out my relationship to the aesthetics and erotics of Robert Graves, which may have had disastrous consequences in my personal life yet again. This included reading his translation of The Golden Ass - like the best “pornotopias”, most disturbing and fascinating if you ask yourself how much of its time was actually like this (data point: description of Cybelean eunuchs that sounds exactly like a 4chan stereotype of contemporary trans women) - and Wu Ming’s The Morning Star, which stitched together a secret tradition I’ve been tracking since elementary school without knowing it, a world-historical reincarnation of chuunibyou born from war trauma.

But I also almost miraculously discovered (in what appears to be a really rare copy of the 1938 Collected Poems) the real genius Graves himself knew he could only ever be the shadow of, the secret and stronger moon to his visible sun. Unlike Plath and Hughes, he doesn’t appear to be responsible for her disappearance from the canon and did everything in his power to defend her against a literary world unprepared to take her seriously. Her vision effortlessly reconciles the mystical rationalism I’ve been figuring out the last few years and Muse-poetic mysticism, proving my intuition that both ultimately refer to the power of language as such and the almost Salbian duty of clarity. I think she might just straight up be my favourite poet now.

Speaking of mystical rationality and personal arcs, I’m glad I finally finished this so I can get working on my thesis about the broader phenomenon of which it’s still the purest manifestation. Yes it is actually good, regardless of what you think about Yudkowsky or tpot or TESCREAL or AI risk, all of which since their sudden surge of relevance this year have become markedly worse than the thing promised in this book (in ways anticipated and critiqued by the artistic intelligence at work in this book) and the interesting question is why.

I also finally got around to this which I am now open-minded and confident enough in my own solutions to its problems to appreciate more than I did the last time I tried. It’s still too flawed for me to usually put on this list, too many of the plot moves predictable from the default structure of the fantasy and too many of the interesting historical problems unexplored, but in a year when I read a ton of mediocre sf/fantasy in an attempt to figure out the zeitgeist the prose was refreshingly elegant and the argument it makes for its Magdalene Christianity coherent - even if the case against Moloch could better be made by the God of Heath.

I’ve joked a lot about how feminism should own the more cringe and Reddit dimensions of male scrupulosity it provokes instead of disavowing them. Ao Omae, apparently one of Japan’s leading “gender-conscious” writers, has achieved with characteristic Japanese sincerity the inverse of something like the nihilistic double bind of Tulathimutte’s “The Feminist” or the microgenre described here. The outright embrace of herbivore-hikkikomori sociosexual retreat and political nonbinarism as alternative to a compulsory heterosexuality that even in its casual individualistic form now looks ironically vital next to the West’s is a phase I feel like I’m moving past myself but it’s nice to see it acknowledged and integrated to the point where moving past it is even possible, and these few stories make use of all the resources of realism not to reduce to prescription without negating their urgency. There’s also some of the most sympathetic and detailed fictional portrayals I’ve seen of social media burnout, monocult radicalization pipelines, and of course the saving grace of cuteness (both as content and form).

A couple short and sweet classics I finally got around to between the mediocre sf/fantasy mentioned above.

Which involved reading a lot of YA and adult fiction that reads like YA (part 2 of the Squeecore podcast still coming, still stuck on my crashed laptop). Luckily my friends and friends of friends are already doing this better.

A formally perfect shonen for adults and an effortless martial arts lesson in dialectics, pragmatically resolving master-morality vs slave-morality and the ever-relevant problem of runaway instrumentality.

Got up to the first graduation so I think through the first ~arc of this - possibly the best social realist representation of otaku culture I’ve read yet, and one of the best works of near-contemporary realist fiction period I’ve experienced in a while.

As was this (and if you think it’s too gothic to count as “realist” you don’t live in the whole world) - a study of the metaphysics of “gaslighting” that decoupled it from the banalities of gender and therapyspeak discourse and made me rethink through its relation to basically everything around me (some of that hopefully coming in a post somewhere other than here soon). Also read Inside Mari which does a lot of the same things but this one hit more personally, and took the expressionist dimension of Oshimi’s art to a level nothing else does.

My josei arc continues, and for reasons that should be obvious from the rest of this list I’ve developed a soft spot for the problematic-romantic depictions of novelists. If it wasn’t cultural appropriation I’d start wearing a kimono all the time.

Another couple of classics I finally got around to and/or finished.

Speaking of YA or whatever, this Western magical girl webcomic is way better than you think it could be.

Absolute anime of the year for me, now a serious contender for my favourite anime of all time. Pure New Wave sf articulated in multimedia J-utopian elegance (peak character and craft designs, music, understatedly beautiful muted tones, hieroglyphically efficient limited animation and quiet painterly compositions), and simultaneously a war story of relentlessly accumulating weight that weaves its character and social arcs and spiritual-metaphysical arcs together like the best of 19th-century realism.

Watched both of these with someone I wouldn’t have gotten through the year without, both lived up to the hype for unrelated reasons.

Technically watched this over the very turn of the Year, and it’s another spiritual manifesto for the “Magdalene current” I want to manifest in the New. Favourite movie of the year and I really didn’t want that to be anime but technically this is more of a psychedelic tapestry with limited animation as emphasis.

Way better than I thought it would be, actually brings something new out of the manga, fleshing its world out to the level of detail only a fully realized physical environment could have while remaining true to its absurd sense of style. One Piece is and has to be cartoony - Gear 5 demonstrates this in the most literal possible terms - but I reject the premise that this means it has to be a cartoon, because it also believes the real world can be this, that anti-colonial struggle can be this exuberant and idealistic, and the real villains it opposes are already this ridiculous. In suffusing this cartoon-spirit into every weight and texture of live action (in the spirit already demonstrated last year by RRR) it triumphantly revived the current of hysterical realism, of multi kontra culti vs. irony, and gave the early arcs a sense of drama and expansiveness that feels flattened at least in retrospect by the weight of the following 1000 chapters.

I swear I didn’t want this entire list to be weeby and I actually did watch more live action movies this year but the absolute standouts of the year for me were these.

Oh and this goofy shit go watch this.

I listened to enough music this year that I was able to make a chart just of albums that came out this year (and actually be selective about it, as opposed to previous times I forced myself to do one and it was just “every album I sort of liked from that year”).

And here’s to two… almost three (Mercenary Planet coming soon) new issues of Holohaus! Still one of my favourite things coming out regardless of my own involvement in it, and I promise we’ll get a proper four out in 2024. If you’re frustrated by this list or just the stagnation of media in general go read it.

It’s rarely clear which specific Miyazaki movie. I suspect in some cases it might just be the viral food gifs, whose hyperdetailed cornucopian brightness is clearly a reference for Chobani. Very few of Miyazaki’s works are set in a future, much less an optimistic one. Ecological conflict is a constant, but it is rarely specifically ours, and rarely improving. The clearest solarpunk parallel to me would be his breakthrough Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind, but it doesn’t quite seem to match what people mean. There’s no lush foliage and delicious food - the nonhuman world has been largely colonized by toxic fungi and giant insects, more Southern Reach than cottagecore. There is, at least, an elegant harmony of agrarian production and pre-industrial craftsmanship with cool tech like Nausicäa’s glider (launched in the trailer from a wooden catapult). The other movie that could make a direct claim of precedent to the genre is Castle In The Sky, with the sprawling vistas of Laputa, a floating citadel with rings of gardens around a giant tree, an obvious influence on the dense interplay architecture and greenery in the broadest, lushest scales of solarpunk cityscape art. But the narrative fit here is even more awkward - the landbound world of Castle In The Sky is an ordinary, industrializing 19th century analogue under tyrannical military rule, while Laputa was all that and worse before it destroyed itself, leaving its airborne ecology to recover in the care of its melancholy, placid robots. What little remains of it must be destroyed again to survive.

Miyazaki has become an obvious inspiration for ecotechnical imaginaries like solarpunk, I think, because he is simply equally concerned about ecology and fascinated with technology. His legendary animation studio, Studio Ghibli, is named after an Italian WWII airfield that despite being an example of 20th century technology at its most brutally extractive and militaristic, inspired the detailed aircraft he squeezes into every movie he can. Between these two preoccupations, Miyazaki’s stories that explicitly develop the confrontation, like Castle In The Sky or Nausicäa, pose “the opportunity to develop a better, nondestructive relation to technology” according to Thomas Lamarre in The Anime Machine. But crucially, this relation is never really represented in his films. Lamarre compares Miyazaki’s desire to establish a new relation to technology, in which his fascination with the pure form of technologies like flying machines need not be implicated (as in The Wind Rises) in mass destruction, with the “question concerning technology” in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Here the alarms of solarpunk’s critics should be blaring. Heidegger was himself complicit in the atrocities of the midcentury as much as Jiro Horikoshi, from a more distant philosophical standpoint, but also one that endorsed them more uncritically, as a card-carrying member of the Nazi party. He would later critique the Nazis’ totalizing technological worldview, but not renounce their anti-Semitism, which continued to colour his theory of a universally quantifying, deterritorializing nihilism encroaching on Europe from both the American and Soviet spheres, and embodied in world Jewry. His influence on ecological thought in general, not just solarpunk, is oversized and far too rarely interrogated in light of these facts.

It is in the aesthetics of Miyazaki’s visuals that Lamarre locates an alternative relation to technology never literalized in the narrative - both in his preference of the low-tech sliding layers of animation cels over the “ballistic” cinematic gaze, and in the whimsical design of his flying machines: “there are the aircraft that seem to combine dirigibles, bicycles, and propellers, and one has to wonder how they could get off the ground; like the castles in the sky, they appear to hover or float rather than fly in the sense of speeding through the skies.” Miyazaki’s aircraft are animalistic, “large and many-limbed, yet swift”, compared by Lamarre to the catbus in Totoro, the mobile castle in Howl’s Moving Castle and the insects in Nausicäa. As anachronistic, crossing historical periods and abandoned experiments, they resist a teleology of linear progress, and as picturesque, emphasizing mechanical form over function, they resist optimization and subsist in a free (aesthetic) relation to their own Being.

Lamarre describes Castle In The Sky as a critique of the boys’ adventure genre which “operates by presenting a technological problem and finding a technological solution”. His example of this would be “the hero seizing the weapons of mass destruction and placing them under the direction of other, apparently trustworthy authorities” (like in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy), which notably is not a technological solution but a political one presuming the existence of trustworthy authorities, of the type non-solarpunk ecopolitics - both ecomodernist and degrowth - resorts to in demanding government regulation as a solution separate from the technical and productive specifics of implementation. It is technological only in the sense of a Heideggerian definition of “an understanding of existence in terms of optimization”. This total a critique of “goal-oriented actions” exemplifies the bait-and-switch by which Heidegger has maintained such a lasting appeal to eco-wordcels. The romantic relation to nature as “purposeless purposiveness”, paving the way for the modernist aesthetic of art for art’s sake, is precisely what climate change renders problematic if not impossible. (And the revolt against climate politics as a final attack on the aesthetic independence of nature is increasingly heard from various sectors of the monocult, from Cory Morningstar’s paranoia of ecological management as enclosure to the pastoral-colonialist permaculture of Ashly Colby and William Wheelwright! If these are unfamiliar names, look no further than the boomer mobilization against windmills - Miyazaki’s energy source of choice throughout Castle In The Sky, which scales in the opening into the military-industrial terror of the flying cities anyway.) While I understand the liberation of existence for its own sake as the telos of any anti-Moloch politics, the delusion that this condition is “natural” is the seed of reaction. Rather, purposive systems can appear purposeless to us because they are naturalized - and when they are challenged in the name of entities whose right to exist as such has been excluded or subordinated by their naturalized teleology, like ethnic or religious minorities to the “worlding” of the Nation or queer people to the “natural” imperative of reproduction, it is those revolutionary elements that are mistaken for optimization intruding on beauty.

Emilie’s accusation of solarpunk, as I recall it, rested on the claim that it aestheticizes politics, as in Benjamin’s famous formulation of fascism, and presumably as opposed to her own criterion of politicized aesthetics in “woke brutalism”. Indeed, Carrière made her debut as a serious philosopher with “Technically Man Dwells Upon This Earth”, a Benjaminian critique of Heideggerian authenticity in defense of AI art. While I think this is an incorrect assessment of the broader possibilities of the concept, it rests on its very definition as an “aesthetic”, with recognizable tropes and imagery. Miyazaki also resolves the “problem concerning technology” on an aesthetic level, not a political or material one - an aesthetic solution that appears to involve making the technologies dubiously possible. Lamarre cites first gen anime pseud Helen McCarthy claiming that “despite their extravagant appearance, all are workable according to the technology on which they are based”. But the image of Laputa itself is a dreamlike chimera that juxtaposes all its contradictions in a merely formal unity - a castle, built to the aesthetics of medieval domination, built around a giant tree, the purity of the nonhuman, on a black dome that suspends it against gravity through an unexplained, magical high technology. As a solution to the material problem of climate change, which challenges the very stabilities of the “natural” world that allow us to encode it as an aesthetic, such a solution is inadequate. Miyazaki thematizes it as such - it is a “castle in the sky”, a child’s dream, the representation of fantasy itself, and its material realization can only spell the tragedy Pazu and Sheeta avert at the end of the movie by destroying its controls and letting it float away. It is this very inadequacy, already present in the aesthetics of ecopolitics more generally, I believe solarpunk should be defined around the attempt to resolve.

The solarpunk canonization of Miyazaki almost certainly has to do with a couple of other popular mythologies about him, as radical political artist and as patron saint of the wholesome weeb. The reduction of Miyazaki to a “cozy” and “nonthreatening aesthetic” is already critiqued from the former perspective in a currently viral post by Erika Chappell, a perspective already echoed in the standard apologetics of solarpunk and defensible, as Chappell claims, simply on the grounds of “the basic beats of the story” - which can be “radical” by American pop culture standards in even depicting the costs and reality of war and ecological destruction. This gets inflated into identifying Miyazaki as a socialist, which he was in his youth like many of his generation of Japanese artists - ignoring the fact that like many of the same, he abandoned socialism and active politics in general. In 1994, two years after Fukuyama’s End of History (and admittedly after many of his most visibly political films), Miyazaki conceded that “leaving decisions up to the collective just results in collective foolishness”. “Anime was a mistake” is an infamous fake quote, but ironically, Miyazaki actually did say that “Marxism was a mistake”. The hypocrisy of the crotchety old patriarch who dismisses otaku as “nothing but trash” helping define their tastes with the iconic princess Clarisse and a bevy of other “beautiful fighting girls” need not be relitigated here. I don’t even particularly begrudge him this - as an aspiring erotic aesthete myself, I can only imagine the pain of seeing your formative love for a fictional anima chewed up and spat out in a degenerative engine of overdesigned gacha games, and then wiseasses on the internet go and pretend that just because you were horny you didn’t actually care about the rest of it. The interesting part is the multilayered relation between reality and fiction it indexes. On one hand, Yoshiyuki Tomino (of Mobile Suit Gundam) critiques Miyazaki’s eroticism as unrealized and sentimental: “[When I see Hayao Miyazaki's panty shots,] it makes me wonder if he actually wants to rip it off or not. If he doesn't want to but still shows such pretentious lolicon manga stuff, I want him to stop.” On the other, Mamoru Oshii (whose bishoujo cred includes Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer) describes his desires as alarmingly more realized than many of his otaku contemporaries: “When he got terribly drunk, he shouted ‘What’s wrong with marrying a 12-year-old girl?’” Miyazaki’s erotic aesthetics require the attention to physical reality that had him famously watching women’s (let’s be real: girls’) skirts for hours to study for Kiki’s Delivery Service. But by taking it as an aesthetic given and neither passing it through the mediation of critique or fantasy, it can only be held at an abstract distance constantly threatening to overflow into real violence.

The otaku aesthetic, for what it’s worth, possesses a number of real assets for solarpunk. Solarpunk aspires, if anything, to the divide the Grand Narrative of technological modernist progress into a Grand Database of possible ecotechnic arrangements which can be studied ecologically in terms of their sustainability and optimized teleologically towards the common good of the greatest diversity, a universalism from the bottom up. The slice of life genre, developed by and for the most rigorously sentimental and abstract otaku, opened new narrative and expressive possibilities for representing worlds without the conflict ours necessitates through antagonistic class, military and ecological relations. The slice of life tribute to Miyazaki’s influence, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! demonstrates in many cases a better model for solarpunk than Miyazaki in its in-show director’s obsessive worldbuilding, working out the specific offscreen material relations of Miyazaki-esque worlds from the ground up in a rhizomatic process not defined by the need to represent an archetypal story.

Miyazaki is not the only pitfall within solarpunk. As I recently joked about, Singapore, which William Gibson famously called “Disneyland with the death penalty”, is another ubiquitous reference point when casuals ask what solarpunk is. The double bind of Miyazaki and Singapore could be mapped to the ecomodernist/degrowth binary within broader ecopolitics, and even the monocult/monoculture convergences in culture as a whole, though paradoxical alliances emerge at this distance. That solarpunk is mistaken for both in itself signals why I see in it a way out. Its perpetual aesthetic misidentification, from cottagecore to Miyazaki to canonical New Wave eco-utopianism to NGO and community centre activism to greenwashed neoliberal Patchwork, which seems inseparable from the lack of actual production within it compared to other online curatorial aesthetics like Vaporwave or Dark Academia, points to why Carrière is mistaken in reducing it to an aesthetic in the first place. The definition of “aesthetics” as database hashes, or Peli Grietzer’s “autoencoders”, is in itself unproblematic on the terms of woke brutalism: the problem especially in terms of an ecopolitics is that they curate only cultural givens, rather than producing novelty. Solarpunk assembles a constellation of incompatible givens - Miyazaki, art nouveau, Asian urbanism, Afrofuturism - to gesture towards something that can only be materially new, a sustainable, equitable and scientific ecotechnics. Solarpunk’s aesthetic signifiers index merely what that material novelty must be adequate to within the infinite field of difference - our planet, our Sun, our damaged and healing biosphere. It aims to coexist with and not rule out others, within the inner space of pure aesthetics or the outer space between the stars.

But solarpunk does aestheticize politics in one admitted way - it applies an aesthetic criterion to its political and technical truth-claims. This aesthetic criterion, and this I think is crucial, is not the same as the database criteria of genre or “aesthetic” inclusion. Solarpunk attempts to intervene artistically in a domain where political and technical arrangements have not yet succeeded, and in doing so claims that an arrangement is possible - not necessary or even good - if a coherent and compelling story can be written in it. It is better than this one - not necessarily the best - if the story feels “hopeful”. Such an epistemic, rather than regulative, integration of the aesthetic in the political seems analogous to Carrière’s own use of “sensitive reason”. This use-case, however, requires higher aesthetic standards than solarpunk has been subjected to in the current paradigm of speculative fiction as entertainment. The task is no less than to combine the anticipatory function of socialist realism - in the absence of an actually existing socialism - with the rigorous, interrogatory one of critical realism. In the interests of this, I have jotted down a few suggestions for additional aesthetic criteria to avoid crashing on the reef of failed utopias:

1. SOLARPUNK SHOULD BE TECHNICAL

I’m not enough of a shape rotator to live up to this fully in my own work, but I like to think of solarpunk as ideally a branch (or sublation) of hard sci-fi. Hard sci-fi (and now, rationalfic) are where the boys’ adventure tradition Lamarre identifies with “technical problems with technical solutions” went, and while they betray it to reaction by taking these as separate from political, ecological and economic ones, solarpunk aims to reconcile this split. This can already be seen in published solarpunk fiction, where patching localized holes in systems symbiosis with scientific judgment and technical ingenuity has replaced military conflict and extractive-colonial exploration as the source of narrative tension. It is a type of story structure rarely seen outside the systemically devalued experiments of socialist realism - experiments that coincided, like solarpunk yet could, with real experiments in lived production. But hard sci-fi’s criteria of technical plausibility (which can include plausible breakthroughs in areas of ongoing research or gaps in theory, something ecofiction too often avoids) are relevant even if this kind of literal technical problem-solving isn’t the narrative objective of fiction, which it shouldn’t always be. Science fiction in general still needs to decouple itself from the formal restrictions of genre storytelling to fulfill its possibilities as a laboratory of possible social life in its richest and most expansive sense. Solarpunk in particular seems well positioned to realize the ideal of science fiction as scientifically informed (that is, materialist), experimental social realism - allied with the experimental social reality of radical lifestyles - advocated by Samuel Delany. In this logic, sublating hard sf would mean applying “hard” epistemic standards to social and economic relations as scientific ones - if Chobani wants to show fruit-picking robots, it has to be willing to answer how these robots are produced, in what numbers, with what resources and what organization of labour. Are the happy agrarians shown in the commercial a privileged class supported in their wholesome Miyazaki LARP by an oppressed urban proletariat? But if political superstructures are informed by bases (such as robots more efficiently meeting the harvesting needs currently met by legions of migrant slaves), the political accuracy of social realism requires the technical accuracy of hard sci-fi. This also requires a break from technophobic epistemologies if not teleologies, which does not have to mean an acceptance of industrial modernity as organized extraction, but does require convincingly attempting to meet the same material needs of a diverse population. Over the coming century oppressive relations will likely again come to be inscribed in terms of who can afford to be supported by collapsing infrastructure and shrinking surplus. Projects to meet those needs through entirely new, non-petrocapitalist productive infrastructure, not simply redistributing or regulating its excess, will need to be at the forefront of all anti-oppressive politics.

The Miyazakian misconception of solarpunk, in which Carrière saw the likeness of fascist kitsch, is its identification with the agrarian utopianism that is already the default mode of environmentalism, and explicitly nostalgic aesthetics like cottagecore. In genre terms, this can be understood as fantasy, not science fiction. It suspends its disbelief about the unconscious, magical cover of material conditions (and does not on the other hand seriously investigate magic) in order to express a psychological truth of subjectivity under them. The bases for this association are the solarpunk aesthetic’s indexing of local productive infrastructure, tight-knit community and intimate proximity with nonhuman life. Neither of these need to be equated with agrarianism (or even primitive communism) as a set of productive relations. Rather, solarpunk can be defined as trying to decouple the elements of agrarian society fantasy preserves in nostalgia and sublate them in a new set of productive relations. As technology is a determining element of these relations, however (and even the “agrarian mode of production” differs across different agricultural technologies), this almost inevitably requires new technologies (including social ones). It’s unclear how many of these elements can be decoupled even then, which also remains to be determined by solarpunk’s aesthetic epistemology. The otaku imaginary’s roots in pulp science fiction fandom, including the “"fanatics" of guns and fighter aircraft” (and robots, and trains, and powerlines, and other peacetime machinery) Miyazaki also indulges his narcissism of small differences against are another reason anime’s “trash” might ironically be compost the solarpunk ecosystem could grow in.

2. SOLARPUNK SHOULD BE PUNK

This is a funny one because a lot of the time I think the cargo cult of “punk” is a dead weight on radical aesthetics. The representative of vague rebellious politics in Across The Spider-verse is “Spider-punk”. Sim Kern leans hard on that in their breakthrough entry The Free People’s Village, with the opening act set in a punk venue, and the book playlist featuring classics like the Pixies’ Debaser, although more of it is Starbucks-friendly indie pop and a selection of the most heavy-handed, obvious political songs imaginable (“This Is America”, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”). At this point I like to think about my own favourite punk reference point, The Pogues. They can play pretty much straight Irish folk music and have it aesthetically recognizable as “punk” without adding any of the distorted guitars and bro growls of “Celtic punk” successors like the Dropkick Murphys. They play hard, rough and reckless - something today’s hyper-professionalized writing landscape could use more of - but not necessarily angry, although when they are they are, on white-hot political tracks like “Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six” or “Young Ned of the Hill”. Probably the aspect of “punk” that most explains its continuing salience as a signifier in an artistic landscape otherwise terrified of transgression and desensitized to cooptation is its association with a nebulous politics of anger, a mythology of the affect as an inherently liberating force I also often find unhealthy, unable to distinguish the rage that powers revolutionaries from the stimulus-loop of feeding trolls on Twitter all day or middle class yelling at the manager. On “The Sickbed of Cuchullain”, the narrator “[decks] some fucking blackshirt who was cursing all the yids”, but most of the song is about drinking, partying and accepting death. What’s punk isn’t just the anger but the unapologetic lumpen messiness and squalor - not the kind that’s become just a positive valence for “problematic” in queer discourse, but where pain and excessive, libidinous joy can rub shoulders - even mosh - while neither contradicting nor necessitating each other. Adapting to climate change, especially in a liberatory, bottom-up way, is going to be a chaotic process, that isn’t going to look like the carefully produced campaigns of professional activism or perfectly formed perpetual-motion eco-villages. Everyone’s aware of this, and as established existing solarpunk is very focused on problem-solving, but I don’t feel like much of it is enjoying or aestheticizing the problems outside of the formalism of solving them, which in turn makes it difficult to make the stories feel “optimistic” without making them too easy.

“Solarpunk” appeared well into the dilution of “-punk”, like “-wave”, into a suffix merely standing for a suffix, and given the nostalgic art nouveau emphasis in the OG Tumblr post was probably coined more in reference to steampunk, which may have initiated this process by becoming the prime vessel of unironic industrial modernist nostalgia. Yet it is arguably from cyberpunk as much as steampunk that solarpunk derives some of the salient political and aesthetic commitments that make it a target of suspicion from state socialists and high ecomodernists - its emphasis on small, hands-on solutions, hacking and tinkering. Thus rather than Singapore, in which the authoritarian cleanness of high modernist utopia is identified with a conservationist aesthetic of purity and wholesomeness, solarpunk urban visions could (and already do, at least in the wallpaper zone) draw from the ecological density of Gibson’s opposite Sinofuturist pole, Kowloon Walled City. Meeting the material needs of a diverse working class, and even applying an aesthetic criterion to their standard of living, does not have to mean meeting the standards of a middle-class “cozy" aesthetic defined by the exclusion of a growing number of people anyway. It requires meeting some aesthetic standard - and allocating some surplus to aesthetic purposes - to distinguish itself from the capitalist optimization of ant farms. But this aesthetic can be ramshackle, garish and contradictory. The varied and creative efforts of existing working class and racialized hoods to beautify themselves already provide a wealth of inspiration.

3. HOPE SHOULD MAKE YOU CRY

My most stereotypically male trait is that I have a really fucked relation to crying. I do it like once every two years. This is in spite of constantly being constantly in crisis and feeling like shit, because if at least one system isn’t telling me that I have the situation under control in the last instance, the most violently decisive system will shut down all the others, and if no other option is available punish myself. I can only break down enough to cry either in the heat of a confrontation with an equally immovable will or in a moment where hope breaks through, and I can accept the weight of suffering without fearing it will collapse the roof on everything I love.

The other, less sympathetic but deeper critique of solarpunk that crops up whenever people get mad at it, is simply of the audacity of hope (and the Obama echo should indicate why it’s a genuine problem). Hope seems insulting to the fuckedness of our condition, like poetry after Auschwitz or wrong life lived rightly. What right do we have to hope when so many species and ecosystems are already extinct? The defences of Miyazaki already jump to point out that hope does not mean ignoring the bare facts of oppressive systems and coming catastrophes. But this defense does not go far enough. Hope in the sense that allows me to cry happens in the moment when the relation of ethically mandated despair (cope) is inverted, when the whole of grief is accepted and negated in its acceptance, by the mere fact that our continued ability to grieve means regardless of any positive outcome it cannot possibly win, nor indeed constrain our ability and duty to change its course. In this moment it contains all the catharsis of tragedy.

Where Miyazaki in his post-socialist despair believes the criterion of realism that distinguishes him from lesser fantasists is melancholy, anime/manga and their associated media mix have been developing the aesthetics of tragedy-inverting hope with a focus almost unprecedented in mass culture. From the Gnostic choices of Madoka and Utena, to the hard-won triumph of activism in Higurashi, to the communal ties of grief in nakige like Air and Clannad, to the unflinching existential affirmation of Subarashiki Hibi, to the preservation of girlhood bonds and ideals across time and space in Simoun and Dead Dead Demon’s Dedededestruction, to the dialectics of mutual self-sacrifice in Fate and Raildex (the ingenious emotional and technical formalism of Touma and Misaka’s first defeat of Accelerator, a fight hinging on wind power, is an example of what I mean I could still write a whole post about). This probably has something to do with the sense in which the pulp sf tradition it draws from preserved, according to Delany in an interview with Black Clock magazine (preserved in his collection About Writing), not just the impersonal logic of technical materialism but a romantic aesthetics of expressive affect that was suppressed from literary fiction by the buttoned-up minimalism of Hemingway and Carver - and today is suppressed from genre fiction by the dominant style of quippy self-awareness. Both of these are dimensions of an autistic subjectivity - too emotionless in some settings, too emotional in others - that resists the “fascist current” of “aestheticized living” in which “No matter what happens to you, don’t worry: You’ll look okay. Nobody’s going to laugh at you in the street.” This emotionality, for what it’s worth, isn’t lacking in Miyazaki - his fixation on adolescent girlhood is to some extent an excuse to allow himself to represent it. But it’s often overlooked in his reduction to a vibe, where the elements of grief and hope are approached as separate, side-by-side facts, balancing or trading off with each other, rather than moments of a single process. It is in this process that the relation between hope as the soul’s ecological mechanism of recovery from catastrophe, and hope as the principle of differential utopia unlimited by any local or historical “nature” - or between Heidegger’s “danger” and “the saving power” - can be revealed.

I’ve avoided this for a while mostly because having a personal terminology like Moldbug or somebody is embarrassing. It’s the classic mark of a pseudointellectual, disregarding the conceptual labour of generations to impose your own limited perspective on the elephant of totality. In my defence, none of these concepts are meant to exclude any other levels of analysis or function as a totalizing system; they are concepts in a strictly Deleuzean sense, positive productions from my own empirical experience rather than a transcendental unifying schema. The very premise of several of them necessitates this, and demands the production of more. That’s why I have so many of them, and probably will have more before the decade is out - the culture war is already moving too fast to understand without making some shit up and throwing it out there. Let’s start with the:

META-LEVEL

The Family and the Sygn are not even my own terms - they come from Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand by Samuel Delany, probably my favourite novel ever written (I use some other terms from it in contemporary political contexts too, like RAT). The important reason I use them is that they’re not culturally local - or at least, not entirely. In Stars In My Pockets they’re ideological alignments spanning thousands of inhabited worlds in a kind of cosmic Cold War - worlds that can be radically culturally and politically different in other ways, and which may or may not go into “cultural Fugue” - that is, total, apocalyptic social collapse - independent of the fate or stability of their overarching faction. So they’re not highly-determined forms on the level of liberalism or fascism - the Family world on which the novel begins has its own rich and dysfunctional political tapestry (which goes up in nuclear hellfire). They’re more like protocols for minimal interoperability between social forms in a universe with a dizzying array of them. They’re also Delany’s hypothesis of what the “cultural” left and right would look like in a universe where economic scarcity isn’t a given, economic stratification doesn’t necessitate a “coalition of underdogs” and non-capitalist systems can uncontroversially support a planet, at least given the right technologies and resources. Insofar as the “culture war” represents something increasingly decoupled from both economic leftism and self-interested historically local identity-group coalitions, this seems like a good model. It also seems plausible that Delany himself considers them deeply emergent, not specific to one setting, given he sets up a similar conflict between “conservative” inner-system planets (including both a patriarchal Earth and a matriarchal Mars) and libertine/anarchic outer-system ones in Triton.

Nonetheless, they’re largely left to the reader to define from the random selection of examples provided through the viewpoint of the characters (a very Delany way of worldbuilding). My best guess is that they’re fundamentally (at least from the Sygn perspective) built out from the postmodern debates about language he seems occupied with in the loosely contemporaneous (including Triton) theory-fiction sequence “Some Informal Remarks Towards The Modular Calculus”. Does a language capable of crossing worlds need a master-signifier, a central binary from which it can be built out as a series of binaries, a referent? The “Sygn” would say no, and it never has - signs are self-sufficient, without originals, refer infinitely to each other, and are transferable from any system to any other - not without loss of information or context, certainly, but this is always-already taking place in any exchange of signs. This loss is a fundamentally tragic dimension of language - an appendix to Triton deals with a group of artists who made increasingly desperate and painful attempts to abandon it - but for most people, provided the agency to navigate a world of ambiguous signs as they see fit, no less dignified or compensated by joy than the existential tragedies the Family accepts (indeed, enforces). Gender, sex, religion and ethnicity are not “abolished” in a sense of becoming undifferentiated - these are very much real sources of diversity on Sygn worlds, but understood as referring back to infinite chains whose evolution is infinite. (By the time of Stars In My Pocket, male pronouns are mostly used as a modifier indicating sexual desire - a plausible extrapolation of G/ACC and top shortage.)

The Family, requiring a master-signifier as key for all languages requiring master-signifiers, appears to defer to biological reproduction. Of course the mere facts of biological reproduction aren’t The Family, or even “biological sex” - a Sygn theorist might point to DNA itself as an archetype of the Sygn, a complex, lossy language of inconsistent and partial communications between chemicals themselves unaware of the bodies they will go on to produce through a miraculous organic game of telephone with each other and their environment. The Family is constituted by the biological facts of reproduction in conjunction with the position of master-signifier - but the centrality of reproduction as a fact for biological life, and its intimate link with the deep subjectivating traumas of dependence and death, makes it non-arbitrary in a way other master-signifiers that might align under it - gods and sacred texts, national identities, capital - aren’t. While it might rally in our world under the banner of “Christianity”, the Family is essentially a return to the “Worship of the Generative Powers” Thomas Wright identified in the cross-cultural paradigms of classical Antiquity well into the Christian Middle Ages. Its biological metaphor seems to be concerned with race/species as well as sex/gender. It isn’t clear from an incident where a Family family visits the Sygn world of Velm and is appalled by the “lizard-loving perverts” whether the Family is human-exclusive or simply doesn’t permit miscegenation between humans and aliens; any comparable divisions between humans seem down to the particular world. But from my model, it seems plausible that the Family doesn’t require extermination or even a supremacy narrative to maintain its signifying matrix as long as sufficiently different reproductive paradigms are kept apart; moreover, since cultures themselves are articulated as recombinations of the reproductive master-signifier, cultural differences are likely to be elevated into “biological” (i.e. racial) ones and tabooed even where there is no original biological difference.

I tend to use Sygn and Family when I’m being prescriptive and not just descriptive, where I’m taking a more-than-strategic side. I don’t identify with say monoculture or Young-Girl but I do with the Sygn, and a lot of my interventions are dedicated to decoupling it from the other two systems. But it’s important to note that Sygn worlds aren’t all good, and it’s not even clear whether Family worlds are all bad. Both can go into Cultural Fugue on their own, and both are prescriptive ideals not reducible to the horrors of any particular (stable or unstable) fail states. Delany was infamously a supporter of NAMBLA; I don’t think that condemns his vision of the Sygn, but both Sygn and Family systems can enable abuse. There are also intriguing examples of worlds joining both at the limits, where unified signifying and reproductive structures are maintained by a sort of religious democratic centralism, as in Amara Reyes’ Heath, and structured individual choice of physical roles, as in Simoun’s Simulacrum. I still don’t believe these reach as total a utopian horizon as the Sygn permits, but they may make it safer to get there.

OBJECT LEVEL

Monocult and monoculture are terms I started using in 2020/21 during COVID. Up until then the culture war seemed to have pretty stably metastasized into “alt right” vs. “woke (or sometimes dirtbag) left” with centrists defending a shrinking territory in the middle, but COVID changed things again in a way that’s hard to pick up if you’re mostly looking at prescriptive political goals. Both economic inertia and the real stakes of culture war prevented the “realignment” many salivated over at the first stimulus checks, where right-wing populists would become the party of economic justice. Instead, there was a move even further away from economics towards pure epistemic politics, the level at which I think these terms operate. Monocult and monoculture are loosely Family- and Sygn-aligned respectively (the latter alignment much looser and more precarious than the former), but they are first and foremost epistemic attractors.

Trump had, of course, inaugurated the era of “post-truth” and “alternative facts”. At first this could be mistaken for a deepening of epistemic polarization along existing prescriptive partisan lines, although the consolidation of a number of alt media and conspiracy memeplexes spanning previously nonpartisan libertarians and leftists behind Trump marked an early stage of “monocultization”. COVID seemed almost too perfectly designed to bring this era to a close - all other political priorities went out the window in the face of a new set of facts with no previous political valence, advanced by a non-partisan coalition of experts. Even the early alt right had claimed to defer to “facts and logic” - and several of its figureheads, including Richard Spencer and Mencius Moldbug, followed historical authoritarian common sense in the pandemic. COVID was commonly positioned as the revenge of material reality - and its handmaiden, institutional expertise. Despite all this, the epistemic war widened. The monoculture infamously flipped position on the pandemic in the first few months, undermining its claim to identity with the reality principle from the get-go. The containment measures were so novel and wide-ranging as to be empirically visible for everyone, whereas compared to early projections (and decades of pop cultural fantasies of what an “apocalyptic pandemic” would look like) the death toll for many people was simply a ticker on news reports, debated up and down by anyone with a modicum of statistical literacy. And then Trump stepped into the ring, dismissing the very disease that made him look bad and backing unproven panaceas like hydroxychloroquine - which were just as quickly struck from scientific discussion by bizarrely sloppy debunkings.

The monoculture refers to the narrowing common interest of pre-online institutions (and the parts of online institutions that platforms can publicly make money off without alienating advertisers). When someone like Moldbug proposes a “Cathedral” uniting academia, mainstream media, the State Department, non-profit activism, international governance and corporations, he sounds histrionic; all of these institutions have different ideological equilibria and intentions. Their alignment in the monoculture is partly a hyperstition produced by the culture war itself, and partly an effect of their increasing consolidation. Academia, for all the rhetoric that admittedly does its best to maintain this impression, is no longer a hotbed of “tenured radicals”; any political innovation exists strictly at the mercy of the CS, biomed and business degree mills. Formerly radical stances on identity politics (and even capital) are accepted and even promoted partly because they are the most profitable thing happening in beleaguered humanities departments, and partly because their proponents have spent so long justifying their own continued investment in the institution that they have become experts in disavowing any call to direct action at odds with liberalism. Entertainment is consolidated in a few studios and streaming conglomerates. The explosion of “new media” seems to have only intensified the dependence of professional writers and journalists on their employers. This isn’t even entirely malicious; competition with social media intensifies the profit incentive of all these institutions.

It isn’t impossible that the Family could seize the monoculture - that’s what it looks like it’s trying to do in the UK with its mainstream anti-trans and anti-immigration politics, whereas Trump maintained the insurgent posture of the monocult throughout his Presidency (it’s admittedly hard to imagine some of the UK TERFs like Helen Joyce not doing the same). The main reason it doesn’t is simply that the Sygn has moved the Overton window such that you can no longer claim to be even nominally non-partisan while excluding sexual and racial minorities from visible signalling (under the high-visibility conditions of the internet); the former conditions of neutrality are no longer accepted by groups who, as the institutions themselves well know, were not politicized entirely of their own choice to pursue an orthogonal goal. The Sygn metaphysics also follows logically from the material and technical conditions of a highly networked society; it is the operating system the monoculture institutions themselves run on (even though they still outsource social reproduction to the Family, much like they outsource manufacturing to China).

If the monoculture adopts Sygn politics, however, it is in a dangerously partial way - as long as it couldn’t possibly be objected to either by shareholders (who haven’t objected to nominal anti-capitalism, as a non-threat, since the days of movies about saving the community centre from condo developers) or by any other part of the coalition. The Sygn as imagined by Delany celebrates and requires aesthetic, intellectual and ideological as well as “identitarian” diversity, conflict and nuance. The monoculture exists to suppress these even where historical liberalism permitted them. The institutions have not - as even their new recruits would admit - abandoned their systemic biases, nor the value they derive from exclusivity itself, especially relative to the internet. This has necessitated narrowing the diversity not only of “opinion” but of style, tone and content (not to mention that nebulous and problematic metric, “status”) that were once permitted to groups whose privilege spoke for itself. The loss of these degrees of freedom is often only perceptible to those who possessed them in the first place, and represented by those who have adapted to them as a triumph of meritocracy. Intersectionality, which concerns the ways oppressed groups in a coalition can oppress or support each other, and which requires uncomfortable, long-running debates over optimal equilibria, is conflated with a corporate logic of risk aversion; a “problematic” position is “cancelled” with the same indifference to its referential truth or even utility for a long-term political project (which the monoculture doesn’t have besides the incremental advancement of equality and quality of life according to statistical indicators) as a TV series that bombed because it was too experimental. This means, like with COVID, huge areas of legitimate epistemic and political conflict (no, I am not talking about race science) are effectively off limits - and others simply not acknowledged outside specialist fields because the monoculture institutions don’t think anyone will pay to hear about them. These are overwhelmingly the areas in which “intersectionality” is actually active and important - where oppressive systems interact in complex ways that cannot be determined with reference to a flowchart of deference. And like with COVID, anyone who acknowledges these unresolved contradictions - indeed, remarkably, from either side - can be recuperated by the monocult. But most importantly, the monoculture is not even a political regime - its misidentification with this most recent and visible pillar is central to disarming critiques. It consists above all in the enclosure of the remaining apolitical, “neutral” dimensions of discourse - the snap expert consensuses on COVID, and other emerging, contested scientific fields like AI and superconductors; the reduction of history to Sapiens, of ethical inquiry to the repetition of self-evident close-range demands, of spiritual and metaphysical inquiry outside traditional or cultic venues to therapeutic-existential platitudes, of artistic imagination to the recombination of tropes. All of these can be rationalized by reading unfamiliar language in politically uncharitable ways (and familiar language in charitable ones); but the overall effect is the withering of social critique orthogonal to the culture war as such.

The term “monocult” came to me when Sarah Hightower was posting pics from one of the late-2020 Montreal anti-lockdown protests, noting not only the presence of QAnon slogans and imagery but of longstanding cults - I can’t remember exactly which ones since the post is gone, but I remember even some of the more innocuous UFO cults (I want to say Raelians but actually can’t find anything associating them with this stuff). Cult-informed misinformation researchers like Hightower (her work on how Asian cults like Happy Science, the Unification Church and Falun Gong have syncretized with Western political subculture particularly informs my analysis) have been noting for a while a historically unprecedented convergence of cults, New Age spiritual and pseudoscientific movements, and conspiracy theorists behind a single political faction and cause. Identified first with the nebulous anti-authoritarianism of Trump and consolidated with populist opposition to emergency medical governance, but since the end of lockdowns and the Trump era, it has tended with surprising regularity to fan out into a generalized “anti-wokeness” and the cultural agenda of the Family (especially the anti-trans agenda), even where no previous right-wing commitments existed. Even monoculture commentators are now familiar with the “New Age-to-QAnon pipeline” - which structures the beliefs at the end of the pipeline differently from a STEMbrained “Dark Enlightenment” or a materialist economic populism. And QAnon itself was central in gamifying the collective free association of a Foucault’s Pendulum-esque ur-conspiracy (Parinya Champ’s Great Awakening Map is a good visualization) which has now largely detached from its passive faith in anonymous “white hats” in the Trump administration and a sprawling corpus of cryptic 8chan posts and airlifted into the mainstream through astroturf vehicles like Sound of Freedom. But this isn’t about retroactively inventing reasons to support Trump or Republicans; even cults explicitly founded on left-wing premises and goals, like Black Hammer, will pivot to denouncing vaccines, Critical Race Theory and “groomers” as soon as the rest of the “left” (monoculture) starts calling them out. While it’s easy to dismiss this behaviour as opportunistic - a tendency arguably latent to cults and pseudo-epistemes, to say nothing of the related concept of the “grift” (you can map monoculture/monocult economically to the increasingly stark division between credentialed professionals and “grifters” in dematerialized Western economies) - the accumulation of opportunistic behaviour (and other known phenomena like crank magnetism, which used to be constrained by physical limits on the spread of ideas) has structured a distinct emergent consensus. Basically, if you believe there is a Deep State deliberately concealing truths that could awaken you from the illusion of consensus reality, increasingly you are on the same side as everyone else who does - if only because the consolidation of the monoculture looks exactly like the Deep State making its final moves towards totalitarianism.

Tatsuya Ishida’s formerly apathetically populist, formerly radical feminist webcomic Sinfest is a vividly nightmarish depiction of the world perceived by the monocult. Demons are everywhere, they feed on the blood and trauma of children, and they are invited into the world through AI, DMT and CERN portals. (A common refrain is “I had to believe in God, because I’m sure demons are real”.) Most people (“NPCs”) are too hypnotized and sterilized by their phones and ambient 5G radiation to notice; anyone who does is “cancelled” instantly as a “bigot”, even if their dissent has nothing to do with a marginalized group. The demons promote transhumanism, the first step of which is transgenderism, with the ultimate goal of merging humans with machines, the lessers as slaves, the betters as gods. (The trans agenda also feeds them child victims, scouted by demonically-possessed drag queens at story hours throughout every city.) They promote environmentalism to scare the slave-species into living in 15-minute cities and eating bugs (the inherent humiliation of which gives them more loosh to farm, even as the NPCs submit to it without question). They simultaneously make it impossible to live without increasingly incomprehensible technologies they control, dispossessing traditional farmers and forcing everyone to live in megacities dependent on automated production for food, which they will only be able to buy through a digital bank account that can be locked if they’re “cancelled”. Pandemic lockdown conditions are gradually being normalized to the point that anyone going outside without permission will be cancelled on sight, and all “social” interaction (consisting largely of repeating approved talking points, simping for sex workers and consooming Netflix specials) will be conducted through screens. They enforce experimental injections to make you more autistic, less sexually potent and more mechanical. Their chosen elites, meanwhile, enjoy unlimited jouissance and decadence, both in the form of personal self-expression free from shame (drag, age regression, vague BDSM) and sexual slavery of the trafficked children of the lower classes, including adrenochrome, pure jouissance distilled from pure trauma itself (and anti-aging, a direct vampiric extraction of the life-principle). Despite all this terror, we are on the verge of a “Great Awakening” evidenced by your own awareness of these conspiracies and millions of others like you, including powerful influencers and even world leaders.

Apart from the anti-trans stuff, note that there’s nothing about naturally inferior groups in here, nor about the necessity of social and economic hierarchy (which is largely represented as what the “elites” want). There’s also not a specific golden age harkened back to, even though everything is obviously getting worse now (since the culture war initiated); Arcadia can be pushed as far back as the Bronze Age (deep QAnon mythology traces the cabal back to the Phoenicians, child-sacrificing Moloch worshippers and conveniently non-Jewish rootless cosmopolitans) or as recently as the 90s. Indeed, even though the enemy is often identified with “neoliberal globalists”, suburban Pax Americana at the End of History is always to some extent the monocult’s only lived, remembered tradition. Despite the explicit anti-technology current, any attempt to roll back technologies up to this point, particularly those that made the material dimensions of the middle class lifestyle possible, is equally rejected as anti-human primitivism (the proliferation of pseudoscience manages this contradiction via the invention of secret good tech, from natural panaceas to zero-point energy). The feared “Great Reset” is a monoculture-managed Return of History - in fact quite blatantly the WEF’s attempt to appropriate Occupy-era tropes of nonthreatening economic reform in response to visibly faltering faith in capitalism. When genuine leftists (and even younger liberals) align with monoculture, it is usually on the strength of the monoculture’s perceived/manufactured monopoly on Sygn values and the emotional blackmail of visible identity threats (against which state and capitalist institutions still represent the only real coercive force), not out of any enthusiasm for wonkish schemes like “stakeholder capitalism”. But thanks to this recuperation, the monocult doesn’t even need to identify its anti-elitism with a “red-brown” economic populism - it can cast doubt on most schemes for redistribution as a seizure of power by the monoculture and its “PMC” administrators. It has, however, as Gallagher observed, become the default ideology of anti-Western regimes, as cooperation with the Atlanticist international order is increasingly articulated as cooperation with the Western institutional monoculture and vice versa. Since the end of the Cold War, that very Atlanticist order has been mostly successful in installing anticommunist, neoliberal regimes throughout the developing world, but not crushed its innate longing to be free of the humiliation of American imperialism and to compete on terms other than its developmental paradigm. The monocult provides a framework to distinguish oneself from the Atlanticist order and form alliances against it without abandoning a market economy. This obviously produces an incredibly dangerous situation for the international left.

In some ways the monocult is a genuine revival of the “neither right nor left” intuitive libertarian populism of the 2000s (opposed to a previous monoculture backing the War on Terror); in other ways it is more fanatically conservative than the alt lite’s “Intellectual Dark Web” ever managed to be. Ideologies generally involve both a descriptive and prescriptive component, but what makes the monocult work as a universal pipeline is that its prescriptive components derive, largely implicitly, from its descriptive ones. The power of the elites and their demonic overlords is so ubiquitous, infects every political ideology, technology or organizational form as such that the only thing you can ultimately rely on is the God who created you as a biological human to eat healthy food, have children and not worry about phones or politics. The exact theological attributes of this God depend on where you get on; as well as New Age cults, traditional organized religions are increasingly recruiting through this common funnel, Christianity (Evangelical and Catholic competing for their slice) above all, but also the Islam of Andrew Tate, the Hinduism of BJP, and even the Judaism of Shmuley Boteach. Where the most supernaturalist and socially conservative branches of each of these traditions used to be the least ecumenical, not only are they increasingly inclined to view each other as more legitimate conversational partners than the secular world, but also New Age cults and esotericism, formerly stigmatized as the gateway to Satanism. Satanism, it turns out, is more easily marketed by secular pop culture like Lil Nas X and Balenciaga under the pretext that it’s all an empty signifier, whereas practices of “third eye opening” spiritual exploration (even psychedelics) are gateways to God via the demon-haunted world He rules at a forbidding distance. The synthesis of mainstream and persecuted traditions operates on a logic I have come to think of as “esoteric orthodoxy”, which I first modelled in the work of Jay Dyer. Esoteric orthodoxy says all the weird, apocryphal, exciting parts of religion the orthodox traditions don’t talk about - Watchers and nephilim, occult bloodlines, Baphomet, cyclical apocalypse, reality-altering blood rituals, angels and demons as aliens, reptilians or machine elves, gnosis-activated superpowers - are real, but you aren’t supposed to think about them too hard except to model enemy workings on Earth or they will eat you. The complexity of the real spiritual world, like the complexity of the real techno-economic world, exceeds your capabilities as a human (unless you augment them by techno-demonic pacts, enslaving yourself to them) and you would be screwed if the exact rules to follow as a human had not been laid down by unquestionable authority and generational tradition. Your only job is to worship, protect your children (not your neighbour, they’re too far gone) and Trust The Plan. The existence of multiple contradictory authorities that seem to be describing the same thing - much like the existence of multiple contradictory accounts of whether COVID is a hoax, a side-effect of 5G radiation or a bioweapon - is a mild inconvenience, either a series of errors in transmission or a deliberate adaptation to the innate spiritual needs of different peoples. As we speak the race is on to define the basic tenets all the “true” beliefs agree on. The successful ascendance of the monocult to a monofaith would represent the emergence of the Family as such from the latent space of semiotics into our timeline - and ironically, perhaps, the One World Religion orthodox faiths until recently feared as dajjal or Antichrist. He Is Already Here.

MEDIATING LEVEL

Young-Girl and Young-Boy are actually the concepts I’ve been working with the longest - Preliminary Materials For A Theory of the Young-Boy, which I’ve been teasing since like 2018, should be finally coming out with Andata Express this year. It’s a response to French situationist-anarchist-Adbusterist collective Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials For A Theory of the Young-Girl, which was very big in feminist-but-problematic art world circles in the early 2010s. I picked it up in 2014 hoping it would help me theorize anime girls (boy was I wrong, but I do that a bit in Young-Boy). It was published in France in 1999 - it is a deeply Y2K text, you could read Planet of the Bass as a nostalgic revaluation of it - but translated into English by Ariana Reines in 2012, right as the Timewave was overturning the pre-culture war paradigm it represents.

It’s a weird aphoristic text constructed like a newspaper cut-up, with bits of headlines and articles as well as selected novels (Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke) and theoretical texts interspersed with gnomic interpretation. (Young-Boy does the same thing with tweets and memes, among other things), using the “Young-Girl” (high school through 20s), as idealized by French fashion and lifestyle magazines they use as sources as a metaphor for the ideal subject of neoliberalism at the turn of the millennium. Despite their protestations that such a metaphor is “not gendered”, that it functions is probably not unrelated to the “crisis of masculinity”, or recent gender ontologies like Andrea Long Chu’s or the Barbie movie’s where we are all “female” (but actual females are better at it) in desiring primarily to be desired. The Young-Girl consumes in order to constitute herself as an object of desire, which she accumulates as value; not the desire of other human individuals, let alone actively-desiring men, but of the Spectacle itself, into which the “male gaze” is suffused as omnipresent yet completely impersonal. Spectacle has replaced capitalism as a system of material exchange; even the value-form as a reification of labour-time has been replaced by Young-Girls as a “living currency” of desire. The Young-Girl explains why, at the End of History where no grand narrative or transindividual task requiring energy or resources is imaginable, the accumulation of capital (and more importantly, the consumption of increasingly ephemeral and superfluous goods that makes capital accumulation possible) is even meaningful or worthwhile. She uses consumption of an endless rotation of “fashionable” clothes, media and dietary trends to constitute her body as an object of desire, suitable for “fucking”, the ultimate realization of her value - which is not, however, an interaction between biological bodies or individual souls, but an exchange of metaphysical desire-value. The body itself must be disciplined exhaustively, both as in bodybuilding (at the time just emerging as a popular phenomenon, and vaguely suspect as metrosexual vanity) and anorexia, to eliminate any vestiges of autonomous physicality as a vessel for such exchange. Yet its physical reality, like the reproductive reality of the Family, serves as a substrate legitimizing its meaning in a positivist capitalist realism that suspects ideas and abstractions as such of totalitarian ambitions. Gerwig’s Barbie contrasts Barbie as the perfect, abstract Young-Girl with the “ordinary Barbie” produced by her overworked, depressed admirer, but these are the same as the Young-Girl is the apotheosis of the ordinary, the asymptote towards which all “ordinary” life aspires as such and a superweapon for the extermination of all that isn’t “ordinary”, “realistic”, i.e. compatible with a static circuit of Spectacle/desire/consumption forever.

Yes, this analysis is obviously both sexist and anti-Marxist (capital as such disappears, the Young-Girl is its ultimate embodiment, and she has neither name nor address). But it’s a hyperstition; dismissing it simply on the grounds that it isn’t true misses the point. There were a number of critiques of it on these grounds at the height of its popularity (coinciding with that of early 2010s feminism), none of which have aged well (one is by Nina Power, today not only a TERF but an exemplary monocultist). As a devotee of the Goddess who had placed all my hopes of surviving the 2012 Timewave in that Return of Herstory, Tiqqun’s model accounted for the suspicions I was developing of the versions of it that were making it to the mainstream: that the “girlboss”, “Lean In” feminism of Beyonce, Hillary Clinton, Rey Skywalker and Ms Marvel wasn’t advocating for women, it was advocating for Young-Girls. At the same time, the reaction developing to that moment in Gamergate and Trump blew all of Tiqqun’s blind spots up to apocalyptic proportions. The problematic metaphor of the Young-Girl came from capital or whatever metaphysical force stands behind it, not Tiqqun; but in failing to compensate for it, Tiqqun were party to another, symmetrical hyperstition, that of the Young-Boy.

The Young-Boy accounts for the shift from the End of History to the Culture War in itself - a shift Tiqqun didn’t imagine possible without a total shift to mystical, situationist spontaneity. He is made possible in part by the internet, and the ways it changes the structure of semiotic exchange. He rejects exchange as fucking for exchange as warfare: gaming, trolling, cancellation. He accumulates abstract negativity (kill counts) where the Young-Girl accumulates abstract positivity (body counts). He masochistically restricts himself, and sadistically reduces others, to an accelerating cycle of political, spiritual, aesthetic and social (even identitarian) concepts to prove his independence from the “material” universality of the Young-Girl. These concepts themselves, however, do not invade semiocapitalism from a radical Outside, but have become a commodity themselves thanks to the internet, where name, face and body disappear and the consumer is a collection of verbal and social metadata. “Discourse” has become as productive of Spectacle-value as fashion (and subject to many of the same laws) - indeed, the Young-Girl’s “material world” of bodies and pleasures has become increasingly inefficient, and is being dissolved into the cloud under the pretext of its own “political” abolition by the culture war. The Young-Boy is thus a perversion of the “Anonymous” (yet subtly gendered - less subtly as 4chan became the domain of incels and the Wachowskis’ cyber-Gnostic “red pill” became a metaphor for banal misogyny) subject Tiqqun and many others imagined as the “chosen one” who could escape the Spectacle.

In the last instance, the Young-Girl’s logic aligns with monoculture and the Young-Boy’s with monocult, but both are apparent in both. Monocult figureheads like Bronze Age Pervert, Andrew Tate, Dasha Nekrasova and Sameera Khan sculpt their fantasy of the “natural”, antediluvian body according to the same production demands as a Marvel superhero or Ryan Gosling’s Ken. The monoculture derives a jouissance from pre-emptively censoring ideas the Young-Girl would have exterminated simply by ignoring or devaluing (which is no longer possible in any case), dividing enemies and allies in the Young-Boy’s game. The Young-Boy and the Young-Girl (which are both operative in everyone) are the formations of subjectivity through which Family and Sygn and converted to monocult and monoculture. They explain the paradox whereby the internet, a near-perfect manifestation of Sygn-logic, is increasingly dominated by the Family while the institutions built on generations of Family authority shelter the Sygn. The Young-Girl is the Sygn as perceived by the Young-Boy; though he also operates on a self-destructive vortex within the Sygn (irony/sincerity), he aspires to escape the Matrix of the Spectacle into the authentic (Real) materiality the Young-Girl eliminates through the authentic (Imaginary) abstraction she excludes. The Family, which channels the infinite variation and transformation of material reality through a master-signifier, offers exactly this. The Young-Girl (or rather, the material capitalism she still reifies at the level of subjectivity), however, already falsifies and restricts the fecundity of the Sygn through her own requirement of a stable medium of exchange. And we cannot avoid that the Young-Boy and Young-Girl, however real, are in fact both gendered metaphors - thus both beholden to the image of the Family, though they have not yet grown up to accept their role in reproduction.

So where do we go from here? That’s a whole other post - well, a lot more than a post. But if nothing else, I hope decoupling these three layers helps clarify how it’s possible to critique the “culture war” as such without retreating to a position of prescriptive neutrality, a “both sides” centrism presuming a stable centre which can only be that of the monoculture and the Young-Girl’s “endless everyday”. (Oh yeah, “endless everyday” vs “apocalypse” is also a relevant pair here - I’ll just let Angie’s post speak for that one, but once you read it you’ll see it in every single recent movie.) The problem is that we can’t just uncritically accept the form in which online group consensus critiques that centre, as the logic of the Young-Boy structurally advantages the Family and the monocult. The left, or at least the “woke” or modern left, which values not only equality but equality in freedom and diversity (the Family offers a compelling if classically totalitarian vision of pure equality as tiling the universe with identical units), occupies a paradoxical position in this war, and has not actually constituted itself as an independent “side”. We are simultaneously obligated to critique and oppose the monoculture and Young-Girl as capital, and defend them as Sygn - and the logic of the Young-Boy, which structures the critique of capital as a critique of Sygn, demands we suppress any such dialectical expression of the conflict as “both sides” equivocation between Good and Evil. This creates a constant pressure of cognitive dissonance, under which left figures who don’t optimize for cognitive dissonance (itself a bad thing) habitually break and defect to the monocult - a phenomenon mystified by their own accounts of “leaving the left” because it “cancelled” them first, and the monoculture-left’s fatalistic non-explanation that they were only ever pretending to be on the left in the first place. In reality all of us are only ever pretending to be on the left because it isn’t a stable formation with a material logic that resolves its own contradictions; at the same time, I believe even many who defect to the monocult are not terminally committed, as the true, full Sygn, restricted neither by Family nor Capital as master-signifier, is a cosmic principle of (in)coherence inherent in our ability to use language itself. The difficulty lies in sustaining this principle across a society; not only in the innumerable slippages of its signifiers, but in the material relations they support and represent. The “postmodern” character of the Sygn’s relation to language does not require the dematerialization seen in the Young-Boy and Young-Girl, as materiality itself is not a master-signifier - that is the ruse of the Family. It is the separation of conceptual from material communication and agency through the bottleneck of social oppression and its privileged medium, the value-form that produces the Young-Boy and Young-Girl as falsifications of the Sygn. The problems of the culture war, therefore, cannot be resolved simply by debating or enforcing ideas; the Sygn requires material infrastructure constructed on its own terms to express and resolve its own contradictions. My next post, The Solarpunk Stack, will attempt to demonstrate that this is possible (without even the deus ex machine of an apocalyptic “revolution”). Until then: