A Commentary on Alice: Madness Returns

Game-Plateaus

Predating and founding the ground upon which all subsequent material such as this is produced, is the nature of the text as shown in the novels by Carroll. Alice travels through Wonderland, making the text chronologically by going to sovereign plateaus of Wonderland, wherein she encounters the games which form the text of the two novels. Each chapter of the text is Alice encountering a new character, where she observes this character’s scene, where Alice’s presence acts as a camera, producing a scene and thus the text, from an observation of the character acting out. The character acting out in this limited time allows for a presentation in temporal space of the atemporal root of the text, the game-logic which each scene operates on. Each chapter of the novel is a portrayal of a game and its rules, with the novel only having order by Alice’s random and unimportant order of movement between the various plateaus of games. It is with this influence that Alice marks one of the first in a textual structure (or rather, reading structure of any text if sufficiently warped points of view are taken for more rigidly structured works) which can be seen textually in A Thousand Plateaus and now, in nearly every video game. On each level of a game is “world building” to create the narrative text - a non-linear or semi-linear collection of information encoded in the surrounding level, details, music, art, etc, and the player then moves through this text with an order of their own free will, restricted only by time itself (through the way time is constructed through the rules of transmission, the game’s mechanics) determining the order in which the rulesets are encountered/read. It is therefore important to mention that Madness Returns is rooted in Alice not only because it has direct reference to the Alice canon, but because as a video game, it traces its structural genealogy back to the Alice novels.

Hatter’s Domain

The Hatter, from his brick fortress, seen floating in ruins outside the tea factory, is obsessed with customs and rules of an old, antiquated way of power. His concern is with the aristocratic manners and etiquettes and upholding these traditional powers. He is drowned in the end when he attempts to save those which have destroyed him - the inhuman machines of industry, turning tea from a complex game of manners and ritual into a brutal machinery where the very body parts which once made up the old order are now acting as mere components of the machines. These machines however did not come from nothing, but as an evolution. The clockwork existed in minimal form already, the train tracks were laid before by the Mock Turtle’s Looking Glass Line, to allow for the Infernal Train to run rampant and the tea factory to grow monstrous. In the end, when Alice allows all to drown, she completes the arc she made by sinking into this world through the skyline of industrial London, washing up in the underside of the city, the water and the wharf. Here, she moves through the progress of industry and its destroying power, seeing Wonderland give way to the tea factory through the level. By the end of the level, she has been reinitiated into not only Wonderland and its ways and methods of travel, but has witnessed firsthand the destruction that may come to it by the inhuman forces threatening it. In her travels through the city (from top to bottom) she has as well fully grasped the direness of her political situation and when she emerges from the water, is fully committed at least in recognition of the evil posed by the order surrounding her, embodied in Dr. Bumby.

Deluded Depths

Preserved in death, there is a museum of ice which is fought through before Alice enters the theater, where two movements take place as one, in the artistic and the carnival. In the artistic, the theater is the resistance of Eros against Entropy, movement against stagnation. All things under the ocean are slowly moving towards the same fate as those imprisoned in the arctic ice above, though deep under the ocean it occurs through rust and barnacles and rot as opposed to cold and freezing. Alice awakens the artistic in all these things and rescues them from immobility, entropy and decay - the octopus wrested from his impulses to drink to nothing, the sleeping clams awoken, the pipes freed from their corruption blocking their musical ability. It is only through the impulse of creation can there be any resistance to the entropy so hastened by the deep ocean conditions. In the movement of the carnival however are the figures of the Carpenter and the Walrus, where Death comes not as Entropy but as Thanatos in the Totentanz (Dance of Death). The Walrus proclaims “sword and crown are worthless here” as he ushers in the carnival (as in Bakhtin) of equalization, at least as it appears after the carnival’s purpose and context has long gone. Civilization, having lapsed into an eternal carnival since the French Revolution or its various child-movements to spread the eternal state of carnival that revolutionary spirit ushers in. The carnival’s function is as support and reassurance of the current hierarchy, just as before, but now its power is not as a pressure valve but as continual refreshment of the revolutionary ideology. Natural ideologies must be continually beaten down, equalized and re-equalized in the Totentanz, with the celebration of death reducing all to mere resource - food - stripping away the counter-revolutionary spirit they had in pursuing the artistic.

Oriental Grove

Alice descends first through the ruined home of the lawyer, known for his collection of foreign artifacts, then from the ruins of the Vale of Tears. She finds in this world a foreign yet familiar mimicry of the Vale, a lush world obsessed with tea, and filled with miscellaneous objects and things scattered about. It is in here that she constructs a narrative for herself, to reclaim her own self-assurance. This copy of the Vale, in its oriental difference from her familiar, is a space where she constructs for herself a myth of saving the grasshoppers from the wasp tyranny, in tandem with her own ascent up the mountain to caterpillar. It is only through creating this imaginary mini-world and then descending into it, going through a miniature, self-contained myth cycle, can she reclaim herself. The nature of myth is that of a cycle, a process, which can be entered and created again and again should it be needed. A myth emerges as the theogenesis for a posthuman entity such as a nation or peoples or land, creation and establishment, laying out not only the constitution of the entity, but the outer bounds, rules, ends, limits, etc, of it. Alice, in ascending the mountain, has deliberately made herself go through a myth-arc, making for herself a struggle which reforges her into something capable of reclaiming Wonderland and thus herself, as evidenced by this world’s memories focusing intently on violence and the fire, as she removes the veils she once had and descends directly into confronting the memories of that night, preparing her to find the final knowledge and then ascend to the final defeat of Bumby and the train.

Queensland

When Alice defeated the Queen in the previous game it was, as is said again in this game, not a true destruction as that would mean destruction of her own self. The Red Queen is for Alice, a manifestation of her Madness as Madness means to Alice, not to those around her, who classify Madness as the entirety of Wonderland. The Queen is a part of Wonderland and thus Alice herself, and only through Alice is this specifically identified as “Madness” while recognizing Alice and Wonderland as being worthy of a continued existence. The Red Queen as a flowing out of organs and gore, anatomical horror spreading across Wonderland and colonizing it, a wave of blood tellingly ushered in by the event of Alice attacking another inmate and herself immediately preceding the events of the first game. Just the same, when the Infernal Train tears through Wonderland, its symptoms show up through it (red versions of the usual enemies) but the Red Queen herself is as much a victim of its destruction as Alice. The Red Queen is not a cause herself, but a representation of symptoms, of pain and violence abstracted to a cancerous outgrowing of the physical body, an “other” enemy which causes pain in the abstract sense, hence the Queen’s association with both one side of a chessboard and the playing cards - the other player in the games. When Alice is threatened with slipping into madness, what she is threatened with is a removal of Alice herself. The Red Queen herself states that she will remain when Alice and Wonderland are destroyed, because of the nature of madness, as it is presented to Alice. In the policing eyes of psychiatry, all production is madness, energy not plugged into economic machines while in Alice’s eyes, madness is not a positive but negative end, of the self being annihilated until all that’s left is an unconscious existence of random chaotic pain, such as that of a comatose individual. In the figure of the Red Queen, Alice subverts the equations of her captors and asserts her own freedom in choosing the directions of her libidinal energies, into the creation and movement through of Wonderland, as opposed to either being totally reformed or reduced into a practically dead prisoner.

The Dollhouse & Infernal Train

While Bumby’s evil was sexual, it was never a sexuality of his own which was predatory. In the final fight, Bumby/Dollmaker’s appearance is through sexual violence, the long serpentine tongue, the oversized teasing hands, the corrupting ooze, but never violence which is committed for his own pleasure. Bumby’s evil is an evil beyond the traditional definition of “evil” as simply a person committing actions of immoral character, a quality he does possess, but which is only given further definition by forces beyond the character of any individual free will. Bumby’s traditional crime was that of murdering Lizzie, and it was through the path of pursuing traditional evil that Alice is able to annihilate him, but his truest crime was in simply existing. Bumby’s action, brainwashing and then prostituting children, was not an act of malice or sadism, but of economic production, as he puts it, “fulfilling appetites”. When Alice fought Bumby, though she fought him with the tools and narratives of the malicious evil of his murder of her sister, she did something far larger than herself, excising a cancerous growth beyond common control. Bumby’s actions were taken in no name, for no reason, simply a product of the market, which would have been fulfilled by anyone. His evil was irredeemable, for the reason that it was beyond evil, it was an evil which is committed out of amorality, not immorality. It was only through reclaiming herself, her own productive power to determine morality, by submitting his amoral and rational actions under an anti-rational moral discourse that she constructed slowly as she rescued her Wonderland from psychiatry’s annihilating instincts, that she was able to be free from his corrupting power and to reassert herself as independent, fully constituted and safe.

Victims and Revolution

Surrounding Alice on all sides are fellow victims, perpetuating and suffering through the same machinations which Alice fights against. Alice’s uniqueness amongst them, the only one to attain any true freedom at all, is to achieve her freedom through her isolation and supposed-madness. Alice’s reconstruction of herself and resulting alienation of herself to an entirely internal existence is an act of rebellion against a system of oppression which has subsumed any traces of face and simply become omnipresent, an inhuman monstrosity as impersonal as the natural world. Alice strikes against it by making it into a narrative of her own and by making her own self productive and generative. It is this call to revolution, against the Enlightenment’s abominations, a call to arms for delusion and imagination, that Alice strikes up when she exits the train station to Wonderland.

Linguistic Politics

During the election season for 2016, the liberal-left media was continuously perplexed by Donald Trump’s ability to be strengthened by supposed scandals, speaking of him in the same manner which ended the careers of politicians previously. Slandered on all fronts for the entire season, his negative coverage instead carried him to the presidency. The same lessons which were taught - though not discovered - by Trump have time and time again been put into practice with great success over and over against the liberal-left media as they react in identical ways with no reflection on their mistakes. An attack meme - Trump, Pepe, the okay hand sign - is sent with no authoritative relationship beneath its point of origin, but with semiotic linkage to its point of origin by way of context and usage of symbols and references. The symbol itself is sent, possessed of an unseen power, where the basic template appears to be apolitical but acquires politics through context repeatedly given to it. The core of the meme itself, the green frog at the center holds no power whatsoever in the meme-image, the frog itself rather functions as the carrier for whatever is attached upon it. The meme is thus not as a work of art, but as a discourse through which works of art are created within, which is infinitely redistributable, wherein every iteration of the meme carries with it a “proof of work” due to context and reference to other works of art contained within the discourse that is the meme. As this operates on additional dimensions of communication accessible through the increasing of scale and intensity of communication, when applied to traditional media, the meme-image spawns the entire context of the meme from its existence. The traditional media encountering it are then sucked into it, attempting to find the phallic symbol at the core of the meme-image and end up in an eternally elusive quest, where they have been fully inducted into being a subject of the meme, having raised the meme’s symbol to a transcendental signifier, just as that which flows through the meme has the meme as the transcendental signifier.

At the individual level, what occurs here is the conflicting of the individual goals with the post-human which the individual exists within - Meditation as I’ve referred to it previously (Objects, Subjects, Entities). The transcendental signifier is a position which only exists to constitute the complete form of the post-human entity that the individual is entered into, an organization of the discourse which the individual has made themselves a part of. This process works in both directions however, as it can be used from without to attack and affix-define those which it targets, such as in the case of a slur, or it can be used from within to create a post-human entity, the signifiers of which have more controlling relationships with those who wish to control them, such as in the case of reclaiming a slur.

What has henceforth been referred to as “traditional” however is only “traditional” in the current context, it has, in many times and places, been revolutionary. The cleft in the left’s competing ideologies illustrates the gulf between accessing and being foreclosed from the post-human, at least in a productive sense. Communism has at its core entities, the revolution, the utopia, the state, the imperial cults of Stalin and Mao, which allow it to operate on the same post-human registers of religiosity which create political entities. Anarchism demonstrates the inverse, the self-destructive inward-looking tendency of the rational to annihilate its own chances at success at accessing the plane of mediation, the plane of the post-human which all human communication takes place on, in its continual rationality. By a slavish devotion to the real, or the pre-human, anarchism and rationalism generally is eternally doomed to infinite schisms and splits, as more and more is discarded until all that remains is the individual and their solitary connection to the real.

Using their linguistic capabilities to foreclose themselves from operating on the plane on which linguistics origins (the plane of the post-human), the left’s failures to have a positive project become obvious. The left emerges from the rationalist impulse to tear down all that which is outmoded and irrational, seeking to restore some natural order to things, or at least to create a negative liberation wherein the artifice under which people exist is torn away. This is explicitly shown in the current attacks of the right on the left, where the continual assertion of a construction such as “race” being “real” shows this split - the left has no positive project, only a terminal splitting until they arrive at that which cannot be split further, while the right is obsessed with the positive projects, the gods being birthed in the symbol of the Sonnenrad, now transmuted from its obscure origins as Sun-Wheel to the neo-swastika Black Sun. Such is shown in the left’s inability to learn from the lessons taught to them in the 2016 election cycle. Forever concerned with submitting to the real, they also submit to their means of accessing the real, the linguistic, which they are foreclosed from attempting to control or use for their own ends. When a positive vision is thus presented, it becomes part of their real and they must submit themselves to it, commenting only to comment on that which their enemies say and never commenting to speak for their own sake.

Rebellion

When the liberal-left spectrum of thought reacts in horror to the far right, they desire to, before anything else, identify the figure as being “Nazi”, or a similar synonym. More sophisticated versions may be more or less exact, but the construction of the sentence remains the same - identifying the target as being possessed of a particular quality, at which point the discussion ends. “Nazi” is used in the same form as “Sin” is used. Their takedowns of particular figures are attempts to demonstrate not primarily the wrongness of the statement of their enemy, but the self-evident wrongness in their target as being “Nazi”, with the exposing being in showing how this figure is possessing of the qualities of Nazism and then terminating the analysis. This draws the same schematic as the famous article “Who Goes Nazi” and has been drawn by conservative and puritan authors through history. There is the known category, that which is included and allowed, where the speaker sits in the position of, not only in the center of, but in being able to adjudicate the inclusion or exclusion of a particular target inside this zone of inclusion. The diagram drawn is that of an enclosed inclusion and an infinite exclusion-space. Such is the recurring themes of conservative neurosis - hell as exclusion in Augustine, “out of state agitators”, and the language of identifying someone as “Nazi” by not being in line with specific principles and then “cancelling” them.

Such is not an aberration however, of some alien form of communication, but a fundamental fact of the linguistic’s role in making a group of people into a community. When a community is formed, whether through geography or ideology, that community must be held together by becoming greater than the sum of its parts, which is its collective dream that makes it up. This dream is a linguistic machine which determines the health of the community by not only defining the constituents of the community by its constituents, but determines and selects what is included or excluded from the community. Through this mechanism, all communities produce natural conservativism, which should be confused as a right wing political inclination, but the natural outgrowth of a person who has gained an existence which has value in the context of others.

To rebel for the individual is therefore to strike back against this dream which makes the community what it is and to assert the individual’s existence, but also to abandon the self to be lost within the wilderness. To leave the community and their dream is to abandon oneself not only to being unmoored in any central axioms of language to orient oneself (the dream as political ideology or religion), but to be the lost in the ahuman wilderness, whether this wilderness is the ahumanity of nature or the ahumanity of technological and urban assemblages. Rebellion therefore is not an act of revolution or democracy, but a profoundly asocial action carried out with sorrow by those excluded, who find themselves becoming-lumpen in their inability to integrate into any community. This asociality is an action which is facilitated by the internet, which does the first action of separation wherein it allows the rebellion to be done cleaner than it was done in earlier eras by famous isolates and hermits, but also allows the rebellion to be the entering of a new community, where communication technology allows for language to create connection no more different than it does face to face. It is the former part of this motion which forms the majority of reactions to the internet, with its horror in confronting many being the horror of its ability to facilitate the rebellion process, as shown in the liberal commentary on “online radicalization”, the “video game violence” debates of earlier eras, or in the self-destructive deterritorialization-comedy of Sam Hyde.

Numbers as Expressions

While a number is clear cut and exact in what it states, the fact of it stating means it as no ability to have a stable meaning in isolation. A number states something else and as such, only emerges from some process behind it which causes the number to exist. The number itself thus has no meaning except as a summary of a larger object which it emerges from. Meanings of the number 13:

1. A system is generated which continues logically and operates on a specific set of rules. This system is an infinite multiplicity consisting of points, which can be used through various operations to reach other points on the line. Such is the nature of the real numbers and corresponding arithmetic. Another set of rules, based on this is created, which states a certain set of conditions that mark out a selection of points on the line. Such is the nature of a prime number. 13 exists by nature of this rule system, wherein the rules for a prime number cause 13 to be found as one such prime.
2.  An amount of a multiplicity (water, identical objects) is entered into a situation wherein it is measured. The multiplicity is divided into units of an equal size which are then calculated by creating a number-line system as before. 13 thus comes into being by the quality of this multiplicity which reaches 13.
3.  An object (equation or geometric figure) is drawn, where the constituent components have arbitrary sizes whose shape is codependant with all other shapes in the object, such as “x+y=w”, or the lines of a triangle, where all components (variables) are sizes by their relations to each other. A number-system is created outside of this object and then applied onto the components of the object through measurement, which then allows for one to convert relative size to “absolute” size, sizes which are points on the number-system of the tool used to measure. 13 exists because w was found to equal 18 and x was found to equal 5.

Protestant Witchcraft

 

Foundations

As stated in the gospel of John, pre-existing the creation of the world was the Word. With the Word God descends to be the final signifier, in both the world’s creation and God’s name spoken - “I Am” - the unknowable and undefeatable real which asserts existence without any possible argument.
The Word however is not fully yoked to being dictated by God. In the exclusion of humanity from Eden, God withdrew and granted humans free will or selfhood of their own. God now faces humanity not as creations, but as equals, possessed of a will and self, the same as previously only God possessed. Hence all dealings between God and Israel through the old testament narrative being done through covenants, contracts. With humanity possessed of a selfhood and independence, there are now two who can access and use the Word. The Word now becomes a mode of transmission in both directions, with both God and humanity using the Word in transmission between each other. Humanity prays and in doing so, the reverse of the action occurs as when God speaks the Word - Earth transmitting to Heaven and Heaven transmitting to Earth.
This communication produces entities in transmission. From interactions with God, emerges the hierarchy of angels experienced by Ezekiel, just as from interactions with humanity, emerges “The Accuser” of Job, such is the nature of the Holy Ghost, which descends upon from the perfect dual movement of the Word embodied (Jesus) speaking back to Heaven in his baptism, according to the Gospel of John.

Solae

Unified motion between Heaven and Earth is the dual form of movement and from such, emerges the Holy Ghost - an entity arising from perfect communication, as it did in the ecstatic moment of Jesus being baptized (the Word from God partaking in the Word’s transmission back to Heaven by way of ritual). The ideal state of things is thus to be in the state of the Holy Ghost,  perfectly situated, participating in dual transmission. It is this where Faith (Sola Fide), referred to in earlier texts as Gnosis takes place. It is within this space of Faith where Scripture thus becomes vital as the means of accessing this space. As Hamann wrote of on poetry (Aesthetica in nuce), language can be method of inhabitation of Faith by functioning as a space where interpretation can be made through covenant. Such is the meaning of Sola Scriptura, which contains in itself a nature of the text of scripture unique to itself. This nature is that of Hamann’s poetry, where the text possesses authority of its own, by virtue of simply existing. This supposedly circular logic (as Papist critics have pointed out) in fact makes Scripture into an independant object which has the ability to be holy. Without being yoked to a larger body which grants it meaning - such as the rationalistic scholarship of Roman Catholicism, with its emphasis on legalistic interpretation and source archaeology - Scripture is instead allowed to function as pure communication. To engage with Scripture thus is to engage in pure Faith, with the words of the text no longer being the central meaning of the text, but the very nature of the text as the object “Scripture”. The discourses of Scripture are therefore no longer texts to be interpreted, by a room to situate one's mind in. The bible itself forms the Cloud of Unknowing.