This short piece was written today to provide my book with an important summary of how canon is sexually dimorphic in relation to Cartesian thought; i.e., heteronormativity and maps as they routinely manifest under Capitalist Realism: monomyth power fantasies whose assorted, us-versus-them cartographic refrains (especially videogames; re: Tolkien and Cameron) divide, then fetishize, alienize and ultimately rape nature (and workers) as monster-feminine—all to serve profit as something to map out and repeatedly enact (often through revenge, though we won't discuss that specifically here). I'll be including it in the latest editions of my book volumes, which I'll be updating today.

About my book: My name is Persephone van der Waard and I am currently writing and illustrating a non-profit book series on sex positivity and the Gothic. Made in collaboration with other sex workers, the project is a four-volume set called Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism: Liberating Sex Workers under Capitalism through Iconoclastic Art. As of 2/14/2024, my thesis volume and manifesto volume are available online (the other volumes shall release over the remainder of 2024). To access my live volumes, simply go to my website's 1-page promo and pick up your own copies for free. While you're there, you can also learn about the yet-unreleased volumes, project history and logo design/promo posters!

A Note on Canonical Essentialism

…latitude, like genetics and ecology, is not destiny. We echo earlier
concerns about the perils of single factor explanations and suggest that
chance, and perhaps factors that promoted colonial empires, need to be more
seriously considered as potentially important drivers of human inequality (source).

—Angela M.
Chira, et al, "Geography Is Not
Destiny: A quantitative Test of Diamond's Axis of Orientation Hypothesis"
(2024)

Watching Rebecca Watson first
discuss the widespread critical backlash received by Jared Diamond's Guns,
Germs and Steel (1997) after its debut, then offer up various counter studies since
the book's publication ("Study: Guns, Germs, and Steel was Wrong,"
2024), I thought of my writings on Capitalism and canon; i.e., as things to
oppose through iconoclastic art when developing Gothic Communism, mid-opposition.
For the next four pages, I want to quickly mention and reflect on the essentializing
nature of canon within Capitalist Realism—both why the latter requires the
former to succeed, but also how it manifests in ways we should routinely keep
in mind.

Per my thesis statement, Capitalism sexualizes
everything in a heteronormative (vertically arranged, sexually dimorphic) scheme;
canon achieves heteronormativity by essentializing biology, ecology and geography
(economics, etc) in equal measure in order to achieve and maintain a Cartesian
outcome: domination of the natural world (and workers) to serve profit. This
happens through the routine gendering of Nature vs Society (vis-à-vis Raj
Patel and Jason Moore) by Cartesian thinkers; i.e., in ways that men like
Francis Bacon and René Descartes started,
but continue to remain relevant under Capitalist Realism as a more recent
affair that neither patriarch lived to see: a raping of nature as Promethean,
meaning in this case "primed for abuse, ad nauseum." Nature is
Medusa; Medusa must obey and die (over and over).

In turn, said Realism yields neoliberal fantasies
(often videogames) that present nature as good or evil in essential terms, and
by extension, gendered ones that are biologically and ecologically divided
along problematic moral categories whose territory is geared towards a
settler-colonial outcome: the mapping and execution of conquest, thus genocide
through us versus them, reliably framing "us" as human and
"them" as inhuman through various black-and-white binaries that serve capital, thus empire (or humanizing inhuman groups—e.g., white
cis-het women [above]—to recruit them harmfully into a centrist story that prolongs
settler-colonial conflict; i.e., for profit's sake, instead of permanently ceasing
hostilities by actually addressing the socio-material conditions that historically
lead to them: pro-state workers triangulating through the equality of
convenience ["boundaries for me, not for thee"] to unironically punch
down in defense of the state against intersectional solidarity
and workers, animals and the environment at large).

It bears repeating that said execution of conquest
involves a map of a location, the latter filled with enemies (e.g., orcs) who
must be cleared by human agents or token enforcers, doing so step-by-step,
person-by-person, room-by-room to effectively "sweep" the entire area
of perceived hostilities. Doing so is meant to achieve one cycle of capital in
miniature; i.e., moving money through nature to achieve profit as expressed
concentrically on all registers. Likewise, the basic categories of land,
sexual biology and ecology manifest in a variety of refrains canonizing
Cartesian dualism (and its harmful divisions) through Capitalist Realism. My
book pointedly highlights two: Tolkien's and Cameron's; re (from "Scouting the Field"):

·
top-left: Tolkien's refrain,
"Thror's Map" from The Hobbit, 1937

—source: Weta Workshop

·
top-right: Thomas Happ's map
of Sudra from Axiom Verge, 2014

—source: magicofgames

·
bottom-left: Team Cherry's
map of Hallownest, from Hollow Knight 2017

—source: tuppkam1

·
bottom-right: Bungie's map
of the West from Myth: the Fallen Lords, 1997

—source: Ben's Nerdery

[…] Under Capitalist Realism, Hell
is a place that always appears on Earth [or an Earth-like double]—a black
fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial
body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during
the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion…)

*A canonical misunderstanding/misquoting of Plutarch written by neoliberals needing an evil bad guy to chew the fat. As Anthony Madrid writes in "And Alexander Wept" (2020):

Remember Die Hard? I don't. I saw it right around the time it came out, and all I remember is Bruce Willis, barefoot, running through broken glass. That, for me, was a metaphor for watching the movie. Fans of the film, however, will recall its dapper German villain, Hans Gruber, smacking his silly lips and gloating at some private victory. He puts his fingertips together and says in facetiously tragic tones (clearly quoting something from High Culture and referring with cozy irony to himself): "And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer" [that's a misquote]. Then he smiles with evil-genius self-satisfaction and says: "Benefits of a classical education." / Yeah. Except that quote would never come up in the context of a classical education, unless the instructor happened to be taking a jolly detour, nose in the air, to attack a piece of legendary crap that no student of his must ever traffic in. […]

A few facts. The monkeys who wrote Die Hard did not invent that quote. […] It comes up in certain classic English poems from the seventeenth century [e.g., Edmund Waller addressing Oliver Cromwell in 1655 …] The quote is a hash of three passages in Plutarch, first century CE. Two of the passages were made available to English speakers (most notably Shakespeare) in 1579, in the translation by Thomas North. […] Look at this rather nicer version [of Plutarch's "On Tranquillity of Mind"] by everybody's favorite courtier, Sir Thomas Wyatt [for Catherine of Aragon]: Alexander, whan he herde Anaxarchus argue that there were infynite worldes, it is said that he wept. And whan his frendes asked hym what thing had happened him to be wept for: "Is it nat to be wept for," quod he, "syns they say there be infynite worldes, and we are nat yet lorde of one?"

[…] Alexander is not weeping in sorrow that there are no more throats to cut. This is not a picture of a man at the end of a career of world conquest; he's at the beginning. "Look at all these throats—and I haven't even cut one!"

[…] And therfore, seing that his fathers dominions and Empire increased dayly more and more, perceiving all occasion taken from him to do any great attempt: he desired no riches nor pleasure but warres and battells, and aspired to a signory, where he might win honor. Now that's from Plutarch's Life of Alexander. No tears, but definitely the guy Gruber had in mind, the Godzilla he'd heard about in German day camp. Here's a prince who wants to conquer for the sake of conquering; he doesn’t care whether Macedon comes out on top or not, except insofar as it's compatible  with his personal glory (source).

In short, Gruber's misquoting of classical history is a kind of bad education that invites the fash-coded baddie in a neoliberal copaganda to steal from the fictional elite, while the real-world elite rewrite the past along these historical-material lines; i.e., neoliberal apologia regarding war as essentialized through men just like Gruber.

Tolkien's refrain gentrifies war in a fantasy-themed cartography
(the map of conquest in novels, movies and games, video or otherwise), which neatly
and consistently divide land and occupant between good and bad, human and orc
(or spider, demon, ghost, etc). Cameron's refrain, the shooter and the
Metroidvania, was first inspired by Robert Heinlein before likewise being injected
into popular media as conducting military optimism[1] abroad: insectoid places to go and bomb/shoot
into oblivion. Doing so happens while simultaneously popularizing it back home
through military urbanism and urban warfare inside the Gothic castle (versus the
land around the castle, as Tolkien tends to do; i.e., the open
battlefield). There is always an enemy of nature to kill and destroy in ways
that fetishize the larger alienating process, turning "empowerment"
into a Promethean Quest through a Faustian bargain. It becomes Romanticized,
nostalgic, endlessly remediated (a Cycle of Kings, ruins, graveyards). By
extension, war is dimorphically sexualized as us-versus-them, the hunt (and its
associate tensions, reliefs and anxieties) celebrated with a lucrative fakery
to maintain the lie of Western sovereignty through the ghost of the counterfeit's
usual process of abjection. The West, including its fantasies, remain haunted
during the liminal hauntology of war as a routine appearance within a structure;
e.g., Dracula's castle.

On this generic spectrum and its assorted cartographic
architecture, one thing remains constant between the two refrains (and their imitators
and offshoots): nature is monstrous-feminine, queer, non-white and non-Christian,
etc. This includes its land and various human and non-human occupants being deliberately
prepared for endless invasions and harvests by Capitalism's architects and
usual benefactors: white cis-het men (and token agents) of various monomythic positions.
There is a good land and a bad, a good people and a bad, a good nature and a bad,
and the centrist nature of the larger structure sanctions and essentializes canonical
violence by the good against the bad; i.e., reliably justifying the former
invading and brutalizing the latter to move money through nature by cheapening
nature. Nature becomes Hell by design, amounting to a documentation process required
by Capitalism to function in essential perpetuity.

In short, nature becomes canon, a mandate for how to
think, thus behave regarding the usual benefactors and victims within a settler
colony and the state of exception found in or between its surrounding areas of influence.
There must always be a good and bad land, but also good and bad occupants
according to biology as essential (and connected to gender) in terms of a
heteronormative ordering of workers within nature as something to control, thus
dominate; i.e., there are white cis-het men and anything else is alien to
varying degrees; e.g., white women are alien, but not as alien as trans
people provided they behave within the structure. "Rocking the
boat" through intersectional solidarity against capital invites collective
(and selective) punishment through reactive abuse to keep these dichotomies not
only installed, but constantly enforced through physical, mental and/or socio-ideological
forms of menticidal violence; i.e., dogma insofar as canonical essentialism
aids and abets in Capitalist Realism concealing capital functioning as it
always does. As something to criminalize and dominate, nature is always alien,
fetishized, incorrect, criminal, outside, black, etc…

 

 

The proof is in the pudding. Or rather, it appears in the
"pudding" of people as expressed through commodities that—when
reclaimed by active, emotionally/Gothically intelligent and conscious workers
synthesizing praxis—assist in said workers' chaotic liberation (camp) as part of the natural-material
world enslaved and exploited by Capitalism through routine, orderly conquest
and genocide (canon); i.e., by dissolving the very boundaries, thus binaries, that trap and exploit us in home as foreign: a settler-colonial project for which we are not strictly welcome and for which internal and external tensions hyphenate clean divisions like inside/outside or correct/incorrect into something far more liminal, messy and grey. "There is no outside of the text," insofar as people and
their interactions with each other (and the various cultural markers of coded
behaviors that lead to or resist genocide) become something to acknowledge ipso
facto. We see the aesthetic of torture, for instance, in calculated risk
as a proletarian function; i.e., a Gothic fetish that aims to express power
through its theatrical absence/disparity as an informed means of negotiating state
trauma. In viewing it, we must learn to recognize the human, thus autonomous,
person involved in defense of nature, of workers, of our land, sexualities,
bodies, genders, etc, as constantly under attack by capital.

My friend, Harmony
Corrupted, is but one example. Consider how this book is full of similar people,
places and things. Seek them out, but also recognize the ones I do not have
time to list. Do so to achieve class and culture war yourselves; i.e., as a cathartic
sexual undertaking with non-heteronormative (thus non-Cartesian) results. We're
in this together, comrades!