Game Structure

Both in SUPERHOT and Ruiner, the game places a distance between the mechanical interactions of the game and the text occuring within the game world. In SUPERHOT, the gameplay revolves around performing actions which are not resulting as they are made, where actions are performed in the stilted, careful time of play, but then received back in a seamless, realtime fashion, the replay player is shown after death or completion, the “real” of what actions they were performing. In Ruiner and SUPERHOT, the player is divorced in the story from the character, with the player operating the character not in the name of the character, but in the name of some outside other, with both games taking time to remind the player their lack of control in their own actions.

In these instances, the nature of the game is broken down into its components. In Ruiner and SUPERHOT, the structure is such that the game is drawn into three separate layers of text, the Reader, the Mechanics, and the World. The Reader interacts with the Mechanical, performing the actions of the game, actions which are then interpreted from the player’s actions and then applied upon the world. In Ruiner, the player character has no free will, controlled by a hacker who mediates between the player’s input and the player character. In SUPERHOT, in addition to the ending of the story being the player killing the player character, the player performs actions which then produce a secondary product of the final replay. Of these, the Mechanics make the text function by governing the player’s interaction with the World and thereby making the World into a coherent text, putting it in some logical order. The Reader meanwhile is a position which must be fulfilled in order to make the text function, in order to experience the game, there must be some entity which the Mechanics plug into in order to deliver input upon the World. In Anodyne and SUPERHOT, the game requires actions which break the story and narrative, Anodyne in particular holding the entire second half of the game behind the player’s willingness to openly utilize glitches to boundary break to access additional content and secrets required for 100% completion. This boundary breaking has been a part of games, intentional or not, since the beginning of gaming, with the Mechanics asserting their dominance over the World, as the determiners of the World. The World is created anew in being broken, just as the Mechanics attempt to create the World in one form or another in their intended routes.

As I discussed in my commentary on Alice, game structure is not unique to works constructed purely as “games”. I only refer to it as such due to its most potent expressions being in games, just as I refer to its other-half as “novel” structure, that distinct by being a text which is driven by a central character, the text being structured around a reality being written in relation to this character. The game is distinct here, with the structure being of a world structured through the mechanics. The sitcom shows this duality interesting, with the cases of Bojack Horseman and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia as contrasts of being more easily read in the two categories. In Bojack Horseman, the sitcom as a character driven text works through the characters as the central components, the content of the show being towards writing a relationship of events and characters, with both affecting the other, and this spiraling relationship writing the text. It’s Always Sunny works in the opposite structure, where the characters are plateaus just as the levels in a game, and the content of the show is organized by the mechanical concerns, such as the episode’s topic and length, which dictates the characters interacting with each other.

Appropriation or Radicalism?

The identity of “male” as constructed in the Enlightenment imagination carries with it a double facedness, wherein it retains contradictory aspects as both a non-existent rational objectivity possessed of an access to reality to which everything outside is excluded from, the sick, the female, the racially other, etc, and as a masculine self, wherein it is the outside, the everything, the female here imagined as a specific object which is constructed, such as in the case of a gender neutral silhouette being gendered as “male” and requiring some additions to be made female, such as a bow or skirt shape. The result of this allows an identity to be constructed which solves the man’s internal problem of dualism: he can be both possessing of the “mind” in the former and the “body” in the latter, hence allowing him to sustain his position in society through the “mind” without fear from the overcoding world of the “body”, saving him from the insecurity of lesser developed men towards the enemy-animal, the body embodied as a threat. By doing so, the man is able to enter and push forward the enlightenment-capitalist project, wherein he submits himself to inhuman machines of capital and language while believing himself to hold phallic authority over those actions he performs in his submission, the capitalist or scientist, working in total devotion to the market or to the method, yet by signing his name or emblem on every package or paper. It is through this double-action that the logic of imperialism functions, wherein it is both the objective, impersonal, civilizing mission, and the European conquest and domination of the world.

This equation is taken for granted in the struggle of feminism, in an ideological fashion, wherein it is assumed this is not only unchangeable but the desired “liberation” state that women should aspire to. In de Beauvoir’s writing, woman’s lack of access to this default is written as being a deprivation, a lack which woman must overcome, a schematic that takes for granted the basic terms of there being a default at all. Doing so empowers women, but only to an extent, with its end result if successful being that the original sins of the Enlightenment Man will be repeated by women. In doing so however, women are robbed of the very thing which would allow for them an escape from this terminal rationality, their femininity. This femininity - here imagined as nothing more than a prison which must be overcome (hence the feminist tradition of celebrating their own version of the male celebration of their body as grotesque), thereby making themselves as accessing of the default-masculine as men themselves are. The feminine in feminism has to it, no positive attributes at all, but is only a series of arbitrary attributes forced onto them by an abstract enemy, a spectral devil of whig religion which is slowly being cast off as women transcend to masculinity. This casting off of femininity requires women to repeat the same violence which occured to grant men their masculinity originally, a repetition of the same construction and then oppression of the feminine, committed a second time, against a new other.

It is here that the erroneous assumption that TERFs are merely “appropriating” feminism in the “FART” acronym is false - TERFs are not appropriating anything, they’re taking a more popular approach to the same ideological path that all feminism assumes as an axiom. The difference of TERFs and trans-friendly feminists is an ontological disagreement on what creates one as a woman, with the TERFs being one with a more natural conclusion. Unlike the trans-friendly feminist, who relies on womanhood being constructed by some mentally based subtle, spiritual essence of womanhood, the TERF relies on that same subtle, spiritual essence constructed through the very same medical and sociological languages which construct the entire rationalist project of feminism. The feminist is unable to respond within feminism with any strength therefore, because the project of feminism requires woman to be constructed in a way referring to some real core and not to any femininity or attributes, a construction of womanhood that has stark few variations that include transwomen.

The end goal for transwomen therefore should not be to take up feminism in a new direction - to do so is a false errand, but to abandon feminism as yet another project of the Enlightenment and instead promote femininity as the quality which is to be uphold, against a masculine rationality. It is this femininity which transwomen are in fact more capable of access to, the feminine being the “mind” itself, not as an alien, but as the matter which creates the total self. While man is firmly tied to the physical, purely a creature of the body who must construct of his renunciation and then reintroduction of that body, woman is capable of acting purely outside the body, with woman needing to be constructed in the first place, evident in the example of the women’s bathroom sign or Ms. Pacman. Transwomen, having their entire womanhood constructed, are therefore naturally more akin to this quality of being cyborg between the human and the ahuman artistic, cultural, linguistic, technological, etc, through which womanhood is constructed, thus granting them a more intimate experience of the feminine.

Reflections on Photography

After the discovery of the third dimension in painting came a second, silent discovery, of the fourth dimension, time. The ancient genre of portrait painting quickly gave way to genres developed through the brand new techniques developed in Italy and the Netherlands through the 16th and 17th centuries, where a single instant was frozen in time in the same form as photography, preceding photography. In previous art, the goal of the painting (or woodcut or drawing or etc) was always to represent more than simply an instant, to show a holistic image that cuts across time by showing multiple events on one continuous plane, the whole of the narrative being rolled out to be shown at the same time, as in the Bayeux Tapestry. With the discovery of the third dimension and all its attendant realisms (lighting, perspective, size, texture, etc) came the silent and slow discovery of the third dimension’s ability to operate in the fourth as well, capturing a scene in its motion, thus capturing a scene situated in time. Just as realism itself was perfected with the invention of the camera, so was this, with the camera being perfectly able to capture a scene in the single moment, a frozen being, which is always, forever, perfectly being as it can suffer no change or alteration forward or backwards.

This work of being which emerges from the hand of the creator is now forever severed from the creator. It has been born and frozen while its creator and subjects move on. To be able to return to the image or to go inside the image is to enter a location where at minimum, time has been shifted back, if not stopped all together. The Painted Worlds of the Souls series and the levels of Mario 64 both show this, with their worlds being contained and still, frozen as a moment that is forever cycling through prescribed motions, with time only marked by the subject entering it and modifying events. When Max Caulfield enters her polaroids in Life is Strange, she returns to that moment, the exact stage of motion all things were in when they were frozen into an eternal moment of being in the photograph. The photograph freezes a moment but is fleeting forever from both sides of the camera which created it. The both sides is vital, as the photograph sits between, the photographer and the subject, or the creator and the world which is captured, both of which are moving in time and captured to a single instant of being in the photograph.

This entity, between subject and object, when divorced from both, is hereby capable of communicating with both. The choosing of what is shot declares the movements of the creator, the position of all subjects declares the world around the shot and both directions of investigation can be taken by a reader from the frozen entity. Through this, the entire network of interconnected systems which make both creator and world appear are unveiled in examination. In this way, photography, in freezing time, in fact creates more time than the traditional style of timeless composition did, where the frozen moment implies time far beyond would could ever be grasped by a creator attempting to put it all onto paper. The weather extrapolates to a year of patterns of rain and sun and wind, the grass and ground to eons of geologic time, the composition to the entire story of the creator’s day and week and month, and etc. The aforementioned frozen worlds, entered through paintings all show this, Life is Strange and its timeline-switching, Souls and Mario 64 with their contained worlds.

Working backwards is of course possible as well. Richard Brautigan in Trout Fishing in America performs this, reverse photography where all details of creator and world are laid out, leading into the central image “Trout Fishing in America”, the details all spiraling again and again to that one phrase. In working backwards, Brautigan is able to explicate what only occurs in the unconscious of a photograph. In doing so, Brautigan reveals the nature of the “natural” and “artificial” distinction and its inherent instability in comparison to the creator/world distinction. In Brautigan, the artificial and the natural meld seamlessly, with the two being treated as unified as one half of the details moving into “Trout Fishing in America”, with the other half being the “I” who speaks through the text. The human is as alienated from the natural as the industrial and vice versa, with both acting as the world and thus one in the same. Codependant on each other and out of control of any one individual person, the distinction is revealed to be meaningless as the world speaks for itself in separation from any creator which may seek to inflict meaning upon it.

With this model explicitly drawn so as not to divide the world, the model that’s been created is one of a presence and absence, in both directions, where the world makes the creator by the absence of the world and the creator makes the world by the absence of the creator. The only thing which separates the two is the ego being capable of distinguishing itself from the world around it, thereby creating this division at all. The ego must eventually come to recognize itself as having frail boundaries, which shift and grow based on conditions. The final understanding of this is to understand the ego itself as being placed only in the moment itself, with the ego of the past being made by its world and the ego of the future being made from the past, and finally the ego of the present being made only by the past, including the ego of the past. The ending is to realize the unity of the self with the world, with the ego only being preserved in the momentary experience. It is through this momentary experience that the ego is capable of being, just as a photograph is being, a single instant, forever.

Sexual Legalism

In both Don Juan and the works of De Sade, the horror that sex elicits is not in the sex itself, but the way the sex is removed from sex. For Don Juan, sex becomes an accounting scheme, for De Sade, an exercise in bureaucracy. Sex is reduced to something which is alien to sexuality, with libidinal desires channeled into the inhumanity of something alien to the emotional irrationality which is sexuality. The body upon which this type of sexual legalism is done becomes thus completely desexualized in effect, but then creating a jarring dissonance between the sexuality supposedly pointed to beneath a surface of remarkable asexuality, knowing the existence of the desire which is wasted as its funneled into engines which annihilate desire in their operation.

Such a concept of desire is vital to understanding sexuality. Desire is never consensual because desire is a process of sublimation. A sexual fantasy or kink is never about anything as simple as the object in itself inspiring some lust, but about the unconscious sublimating some libidinal energy into a narrative. It is for this reason that the narratives driving and determining the sex act are so vital to making a sexual fantasy have weight. The sexual fantasy is the sublimation of desire, so the various narratives not only allow for the movement of that energy through the system created that is the desire, but also the energies being weighed in its relation to morality, where now the desire assimilates into the worldview of the individual as both the desire and its prohibition are codependant, the desire being sublimated into the sexual in its indulgence and the desire being sublimated into the political in the moral, both in being moral and immoral.

Unspoken here is the exact nature of the desire. Desire in its sublimation creates a posthuman mediation, some linguistic machine, which is created from the individual’s energies. Machines are thus required to speak to each other in order that any relationships can be had, with two persons equally participating in their own machines, which may or may not be capable of plugging into eachother’s. When compatibility occurs, the individuals are not having sex with each other - as communicating with the other is impossible - but having sex with a desire which is compatible with their own, both communicating, a pair of machines now melding into one.

It is for this reason that legalism of sexuality inspires horror. The machine of legalistic-sexuality is one which is alien to desire, yet perfectly compatible with the end plugs of the desire. The desire is perverted to mean not what is truly desired, but to mean the very thing which results from the fulfillment of this desire, the acts which result from the linguistic movement that truly takes place. Legalistic sexuality is horrifying not only in being alien to all, but also in being parasitic in its ability to latch onto the mind, as one unaware of their own desires will be only able to chase the results of their unconscious machines and may see the legal machine as being one in the same as the result.

Being an alien machine, legalism of sexuality is thus able to be commodified in an eternal number of ways. The only true successor to De Sade, the webcomic Oh Joy Sextoy has this in its very title, with sex having been reduced to only its results (anatomy and objects and motions), it can thus be made into commodities and then plugged into machines which operate on commodities moving as nothing except free-moving props guaranteed by some force, ie, the body without organs of capital and the bureaucracy of finance. With these objects able to be commodified, the mind is thrust with it, dragged along by endless machines far and beyond that which could ever be fueling the desire, tearing the psyche apart as desire is channeled into more and more futile paths through the various perversions of capital: silicon valley “polycule” culture, dating apps, or “kink”. Each of these imitates the end result of something which has at some point been genuinely expressed. Polycules legalize polyamorous relationships, dating apps legalize casual sex and matchmaking, and kink legalizes sadomasochism.

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.