As these questions of abstraction, affirmation and negation circulated around the blogosphere, they began to resonate with an already well-established discussion online concerned with the implications of positive negations in the realm of popular culture. Since at least 2005, particularly in the orbit of Mark Fisher's K-Punk blog and Simon Reynolds' Bliss blog, the blogosphere had been attempting to affirm a critique found in the work of Jacques Derrida. In his major 1993 work Spectres of Marx, Derrida coins the term hauntology, a pun, more or less a homophone, in a French accent at least, of ontology, to describe a kind of logic of haunting that is innate to Marxism. The very first line of the Communist Manifesto, after all, declares that a spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism.
What is strange about Marx's declaration, however, especially from the perspective of the end of the 20th century, is that communism haunts us even prior to its political ascendancy in the form of the Soviet Union. For Derrida, this suggests that a post-Soviet Europe is not a new Europe, but a repetition of an old Europe, and so we find ourselves haunted by spectres of spectres. It is a pessimistic philosophy of the event that takes Bidoux's previously discussed concerns about our crisis of negation as its very foundation. The question for communism, from the perspective of 90s neoliberalism, becomes, how do you exercise an exorcist? And yet, in the realm of popular culture, this negation of negation was still unalive and kicking.
Since all recorded music is innately spectral in its non-diegetic nature, the mass production of music inaugurates a commodified culture wherein processes of abstraction have come to broadly define the art form. This is undoubtedly the source of Adorno's notorious and somewhat ironic hostility towards both popular music and the avant-garde, which he saw as fleeing from the philosophical domain of truth and into the abstract chaos of a mechanically reproductive and therefore inauthentic modernity. The development of this process is well documented. The invention of recording technologies not only made music more readily available for home listening, they also led to new forms of experimentation in contemporary composition with, for example, Pierre Schaeffer's development of a musique concrète in France in the 1920s.
At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, recording technologies were increasing the availability of various other forms of music as well, hitherto unknown beyond a specialist audience. Most notably, this included the blues. Whilst the blues had, of course, already been popular for some decades, transmitted via sheet music and the oral traditions of black music in America, it was the initial recordings of the genre in the 1920s that arguably made it the first truly new popular music of the 20th century. As the century progressed, in an intriguingly inadvertent cross-pollination between music concrète and black music. Hip-hop's ascendancy in the 70s and 80s instigated a new and positive feedback loop where the recordings of the past were mined for fragmentary treasures
to make the hits of the future. For many, the indelible sound of these recording technologies, the watermarks as it were of their materiality, soon came to define these sounds to such an extent that, by the 2000s, many artists were exacerbating or playing with the idiosyncrasies of recorded media to enhance their own digitally produced sounds. Jay Diller's 2006 album Donuts, for instance, its name and nod to the donut-like form of the seven-inch single as much as the popular sugary treat, has become an iconic example of black music concret in the 21st century. It is today renowned as a celebration of the materiality of DJing and the cut-and-paste poetry of sample culture, but this celebration is inevitably entangled with Jay Diller's own death.
Jay Diller, real name James Dewitt Yancey, had been diagnosed with a rare blood disorder in the early 2000s, known as thrombocytopenic papura, contracted as a result of his lupus. The latter is an autoimmune disease that leads the body's immune system to mistakenly target healthy parts of itself. The former is a side effect of lupus, in which the immune system specifically attacks blood vessels and the enzymes that enable blood clotting. Diller battled the two conditions for four years before succumbing to his condition in 2006 Donuts had largely been produced from his hospital bed and it was tragically released just three days before his death With this tragic synchronicity in mind it is intriguing how the negative processes of these two illnesses
that lead the body to attack itself and break itself down are mirrored positively in the cut-up sample culture of hip-hop itself the negation of negation in musical form Over in the UK, at around the same time, record labels like Ghostbox were making the plundering of defunct technologies and media formats into a nascent new genre, as seen through an acutely British surrealism, representing artists with genericised names that connote clandestine societies of neoliberal lobbyists who worship brutalist architecture like New Age travellers revere Neolithic monuments, names like the Advisory Circle and the Focus Group. The label described themselves as a home for a group of artists exploring the misremembered musical history of a parallel world.
In what is arguably the first article on sonic hauntology, published in late 2005, Simon Reynolds profiled the ghost box label for Freeze magazine, noting that whilst their name is primarily a metaphor for television, it could just as plausibly be the name of a historically real, if scientifically fraudulent, contraption invented by 19th century spiritualists. It could also be an ancient nickname for the gramophone, evoking as it does the sheer uncanniness of phonography, Evan Eisenberg's term for the art of recording. Thomas Edison, after all, originally conceived as records as a way of preserving the voices of loved ones after their death. It is precisely due to the medium's innate melancholy in this regard that made these new technologies for recording music so innately cyber-gothic.
This is similarly Mark Fisher's attraction to hauntology on his K-punk blog. Since the blog's beginnings in 2003, Fisher had been writing about the sorts of 1970s BBC television programmes that the likes of Ghostbox were inspired by. He frequently wrote about the work of Nigel Neill, for instance. In one particularly prescient post, he discusses Neill's 1972 series for the BBC, The Stone Tape, in which a group of scientists set up shop in a haunted research facility, and for whom hauntings and ghosts are particularly intense phenomena that are literally recorded by matter, by the stone of the room. The scientists managed to summon recordings of ancient sacrificial rituals, ghastly screams of pain and horror, but what at first seemed to be recordings from the past are also revealed to be horrifying premonitions of the scientists' own futures.
Fisher writes, To begin with, it seems that the ghostly screams are passive and inert, as incapable of exerting urgency as the dry rot that afflicts the haunted room. It in the end is the human beings who are revealed to be caught in a terrible compulsion to repeat. In this sense, the haunting phenomenon offers the possibility not only of a new recording medium, but of a new player, the human nervous system itself. He adds succinctly, foreshadowing Reynolds' appraisal of Ghostbox, that, in this sense, all recordings are ghosts. It was this same temporal overlap of past and future colliding that had come to define the sonic hauntology of the 90s and 2000s. The uncanny nature of low-fidelity recordings was now as evocative of the ghosts of the past as it was the holograms of the future.
It was this same overlap that led the writer Owen Hatherley to comment on his blog that when listening to the 1920s recordings of blues guitarist Robert Johnson, you have, rather than the expected in-your-face earthiness and presence, layers upon layers of fizz, crackle, hiss, white noise, as if it's been remixed by basic channel rather than recorded in a room in some mythologised beep south. As a result, pop music at the end of history becomes a strange ouroboros, with the brand new biting at its own beginnings. It is this same cultural process of abstraction that had defined much of Fisher's exploration of what he first termed the cyber-Gothic rather than the hauntological. For Fisher, this strain of Gothicism was everywhere in the last few centuries of human culture,
from the Gothic architecture of Renaissance France to the Gothic novels birthed from the dark side of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, right up until the body horror of the films of David Cronenberg and the cyber-gothic novels of William Gibson. However, as Nigel Neill had demonstrated, the Gothic was going through its own process of abstraction in the 20th century. Indeed, the spectral nature of the century was shifting the focus from the materiality of the body to the subject in itself, or rather onto that new player, the human nervous system. The horrors of the new science of biology were usurped by the horrors of psychoanalysis and the unruliness of our own desires. Fisher made no qualms about his admiration for Neil, emerging from the writer's implicit grasp of the horror of Freudian psychoanalysis.
As he writes on his K-Punk blog, Fatality, the law of total quiescence, the human appetite for auto-destruction. Even before Ballard, Neil brought Freud to bear on science fiction. No, not the super-ego, ego-id, Spock-Kirk-Bone's triad of Star Trek's cuddly psychodramas, Niels Freud was the dark magus of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the pitiless explorer of the death drive's intensive hydraulics. It's in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that Freud reminds us that in trauma, time breaks down. No time at all in the unconscious, with its terrible compulsions to repeat, its circuitous journey back to where and when it had never left. What we want most is not to be, never to have been. What we are most is alien. It was this view of our cultural landscape that led Fisher to his most famous critiques of capitalism,
extending Adorno's pessimism into a foreclosure of our own unconscious. If you are continually repeating something, he writes, it's because you want it. Does that mean that we want capitalism? And yet Fisher's cyber-Gothicism also uncovers a negation of the Gothic's negation. What does this compulsion to repeat say about the unconscious drives of capitalists themselves? Marx had already made it quite clear that the capitalist drive to accumulate is precisely the death drive of the system itself, and just as Noyes suggested that the real abstraction of late capitalism could offer up new potentials, so had Fischer wondered about the potentials left to be excavated from the real human abstraction, central to the 20th century Gothic. In his PhD thesis, submitted to the University of Warwick in 2001,
Fischer considered a form of Gothic abstraction theorised by the German art historian Wilhelm Woringer. In his 1911 study of form in Gothic art and architecture, for instance, Woringer imbues the very process of history with a Gothic tendency, declaring that the earnest endeavour of the historian to reconstruct the spirit of the past from the materials at his disposal in the present is at best an experiment conducted with unsuitable means. Woringer may have been speaking generally of the historian's eternal dilemma here, navigating the impact on one's own work of an innate contemporary bias. But the Gothic in particular, with its architectural beginnings, its literary peak and its sonic finale, presents the cultural historian today with a shape-shifting,
disconnected and amorphous movement that may be easy to recognise, but is in fact harder than ever to define. This is to say that, as a collection of disparate movements and mediums brought together restlessly under a single banner, this problem at the heart of the Gothic today may seem like an exemplary postmodern affliction in which genre is dissolved within itself. But such an experience has been central to the Gothic since it first emerged as a popular mode of architectural expression in 12th century France. This is because the problematic that the Gothic first attempts to contend with is fundamentally a problem of time. It is an expression and affirmation of our own fallibility as the inevitably blinkered subject of a given moment, be that in the age of enlightenment or capitalist modernity. Indeed, as far as Vorenger is concerned, it seems that historiography itself
is the ultimate Gothic pastime. After all, the Gothic as a cultural movement, in all of its forms, not just in the television plays of Nigel Neill, has always been a creative exploration of the past's influence on the future from the knowingly flawed perspective of the present. In the 20th century, this initially reactionary form seems to eat its own tail. As the political climate and the stalling of late capitalism become the norm, the polarity of the Gothic shifts. In fact, this is precisely how Simon Reynolds relates the musical subculture of Goth to its predecessors in his 2005 book, Rip It Up and Start Again, whilst highlighting the subgenre's initial inversion of the Gothic forms of yesteryear. He writes, The original Gothic movement in literature had been anti-modernist.
It represented the return of the repressed, all the medieval superstitions and primordial longings allegedly banished by the Industrial Revolution, all those shadowy regions of the soul supposedly illuminated by the Enlightenment. It was only when the dark satanic mills appeared that ruined abbeys came to be considered picturesque and alluring. Goth was based on the idea that the most profound emotions you'll ever feel are the same ones felt by people thousands of years ago, the fundamental eternal experiences of love, death, despair, awe and dread. Describing this same essence more recently, in his 2014 book on the genre's literary and visual aesthetics, Fred Botting writes that the Gothic is, in this sense, more than a flight from nostalgic retrospection, or an escape from the dullness of a present without chivalry, magic or adventure.
Instead, it is a movement that remains sensitive to other times and places, and thus retains traces of instability where further disorientations, ambivalence and dislocations can arise. It is from this same position that Waringer begins his seemingly paradoxical evaluation of an historical Gothic. The solution to this strange paradox for Waringer is to note how the true essence of the Gothic is its will to form, that is, its will to speculatively give form to the presently formless. For instance, we may note, as Waringer does, that the Gothic's initial instantiation as an architectural form was an attempt to grapple with the so-called Dark Ages, during which the Gothic came to dominate the facades of churches in medieval France before spreading throughout the rest of the European continent.
For many, this style may have accurately given form to the beliefs of the time, representing another unseen world where dark forces fought for dominance over civilisation's god-fearing congregations, kept at bay by imagined gargoyles and the community's liturgical faith. However, as the style was transformed into a popular collection of motifs, that is, we might say, institutionalised, the Gothic was later widely dismissed by many for its cheap horror and reactionary affection for darker times. The French playwright and poet Mollier, for instance, famously derided France's besotted taste of Gothic monuments in his 1669 poem La Gloire du Val de Grace, echoing the fashionable opinions of his time, claiming that these Gothic facades depicted little more than odious monsters of ignorant centuries, from which the torrents of barbarity spewed forth.
Apologies if I butchered the pronunciation of the title there. with its initial popularity waning over the centuries following its initial explosion across europe many nonetheless continue to find gothic architecture and later gothic art more generally to be illustrative of a new darkness found at the limits of an emerging age of enlightenment a new age of reason indeed a recognition of the power of this unknowable darkness is closely tied to one of the founding principles of enlightenment thought as found in the philosophy of emmanuel Kant, for whom humanity is forever trapped by its own experience, by its own contemporaneity. As Voringer writes of his own historiographic task, echoing Kant, the exponent of historical knowledge remains our own ego, with its temporal limitations and
restrictions. This is to say that the persistent darkness of the Dark Ages was not assuaged by a new institutionalised reason, nor has it been assuaged today by the domination of capitalism. Gothic darkness remains an important symbolic void, constituting the event horizon of contemporary knowledge. Continuing his description of the effects of the Gothic as an art historical genre on the temporal subject, Botting writes, evoking the temporal displacement of Neil's weird tales, that in seeing one time and its values cross over into another, both periods are disturbed. The human subject and its ego remain caught in a chaotic middle. it is here that the blogosphere's cyber-gothic obsession with hauntology comes to the fore, by describing the peculiarity of a contemporary gothic disturbed by the apparent arresting of its own process of disturbance.
A truly postmodern affliction, otherwise epitomised by Francis Fukuyama's declaration that we have reached the end of history. A time during which, as Fisher once put it, the future is always experienced as a haunting, as a virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating cultural production. This is to say that the start of the 21st century has been defined by the failure of our own speculative imaginations, our once wildly psychedelic tendency to construct new futures for ourselves. The implications of this situation for the Gothic have the potential to exacerbate its initially reactionary mode. In an already reactionary present, however, this suggests an abject normalisation of the Gothic mode, which is used to structure human existence rather than propel it forwards into the unknown.
As a result, we might ask ourselves today, does the Gothic still disturb us as it once did? Has the Gothic not become a victim of its own will to form, losing its transgressive essence as it is historicised and consolidated into a recognisable aesthetic mode? has the gothic not become entangled in its own crisis of negation? It's as a result of this that the gothic once again, albeit subtly, shifts its focus. Whereas gothic expressions of a fear of a post-human subject were once a reaction against rampant technological process, the speed of which seemed to outpace the intellectual development of post-enlightenment reason, as dramatised, for instance, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Today, rather than a fear of what we might soon become, it is a fear of our own ontological capture that seems to terrorise the modern Gothic subject.
It is our limitations, our susceptibility to control, our prejudices, our addictions and a blind reason that stalks the Gothic subject today. Barbarity does not emerge from a deep past but from right here, from the persistent system of capitalism itself. A tendency dramatised most effectively, perhaps, by David Cronenberg's 1983 film Videodrome. As such, we find that the rapid consolidation of the present into a seemingly final human form has turned the Gothic on its head. Today, in response to this, it seems that a new Gothic is emerging once again. Beyond its eventual European capture, are cultural movements around the world now asking themselves, Is this all that we are? Is this really the moment we should choose to arrest ourselves
in our self-destructive mediocrity? However, all is not lost. Even from the depths of capitalist co-option, there are Goths who continue to glide along the edge of a shifting human frontier, quietly exploring our ontological and aesthetic limits. We might consider the recent work of Gazeltwin, for instance, the current queen of British Goth, who, on her 2014 single, belly of the beast, sings menacingly, I'll beat them all at their own game, bite the hands of the fingers that feed. She snarls these words over the infernal bleep bleeping of supermarket self-service checkouts, bringing a violently gothic sensibility to the banality of contemporary capitalist consumerism. It is a revolutionary anthem for the unassuming mall goth of the 21st century, and epitomises a xenogothic tendency that may be far less visible today, but which has still never
truly died. This current prevalence of the questioning of our own standing is a symptom of both a dormant gothicism and a maligned progressivism. It is the perpetual shimmering of the xenogothic and it's precisely our infinite questioning that pushes us forwards. But forwards into what? Perhaps into a realm of real abstraction. After all, the 20th century gothic already includes an innately Marxist undercurrent haunted by the spectre of communism or we might say a collective subject beyond the limits of that which is presently imaginable to the individualised capitalist subject. This is a gothic worldview arguably introduced by Karl Marx himself who writes repeatedly of spectres and vampires in this seminal critique of political economy. You may even wonder if the collective subject called for in the Communist Manifesto
is not a positive view of the terror that populated the gothic fictions of Marx's era. Whereas the bourgeois writers of the day feared the disenfranchised masses and the unreason of an oppressed peasantry, Marx sought to cultivate a new proletarian solidarity that might truly frighten the ruling classes. Today, this process comes to bear upon the ruptured homogeneity of capitalist individualism. We are all individuals. In similar terms, discussing the state of the Gothic on his K-Punk blog, Fisher notes how this subversive shift was epitomised by Susie Sue and her band The Banshees. a central influence on the tribalism of goth makeup and dress. In particular, he writes about the Banshee's track Painted Bird from their 1982 album A Kiss in the Dreamhouse
a song based on Jersey Kaczynski's 1965 novel of the same name noting how, contrary to the individualist existentialism of a 21st century gothic it is a song about the triumph of collective joy over persecuted, isolated, individuated subjectivity. Fisher relates the song's message in this regard to the message of its namesake. In a scene which provides Kaczynski's novel with its title, the unnamed young protagonist encounters a bird catcher whilst wandering through war-torn villages and towns during the Second World War. Painting the bird with vibrant colours, he throws it back to join its flock. However, no longer recognising the bird as one of their own, the birds attack and kill it. Fisher notes how, unlike Kaczynski's bird,
symbolic of the abstraction and persecution of European Jewry by the painterly Nazis, Susie's Goths are not painted by another's hand, they are painted birds by their own design. For Susie Sue, as well as Mark Fisher, this apparent paradox of Goth belonging, a hypocritical collective that goes against a herd mentality whilst all looking the same, is still a shot fired across the bow of neoliberalism's mandatory individualism. Other forms of collectivity are possible. The point is not to be wholly individualist, but simply different from the prescribed type. The violence that Goths often wreak upon their bodies is exemplary of this. Fisher writes, Goth is in many ways an attempt to make good this symbolic deficit in postmodern culture,
dressing up as re-ritualisation, a recovery of the surface of the body, as the site for scarification and decoration, which is to say, a rejection of the idea that the body is merely the container or envelope for interiority. If body modification is a step too far, the extreme fashion of the Gothic is an ample alternative. Clothing recovers its cybernetic and symbolic form as a hyperbolic supplement to the body, as that which destroys the illusion of organic unity and proportion. The body has always been and remains the Gothic's primary terrain of interrogation in this way. From the literary body horror of Frankenstein and the strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, to the make-up and extravagant fashions of late 20th century goth. At every turn of our civilisation's cultural development,
the gothic has seized upon the prostheses of any given age, extending their relevance beyond the fields of medical science and standardised aesthetics. It is a cultural sensibility that understands by extending the body, we also extend our collective conception of what a body can do. To extend one body is to extend the potential of them all. This is a framing that has garnered considerable attention in recent decades and can be found everywhere from sports science to science fiction. It has also been central to modern philosophy. Gil de Luz, for instance, commenting on the writings of Baruch de Spinoza, most famously decried our post-Cartesian fixation on the mind at the expense of the body, writing we speak of consciousness, mind, soul, of the power of the soul over the body. We chatter away about these things, but we do not even know what bodies can do.
Deleuze's interest in the body was directly influenced by the medical knowledge of his day, and more specifically, his first-hand experiences of certain medical procedures. Like Spinoza before him, Deleuze suffered greatly from respiratory issues, undergoing a thoracoplasty in 1968, and later taking his own life in 1995, having reached a limit with his continuously diminishing quality of life. However, whilst his poor health may have been physically restrictive, he also found it to be philosophically liberating and was repeatedly drawn to philosophers who suffered like he did For example, throughout his works, he would echo the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud thinkers who were also plagued by ill health throughout their lives, both physically and mentally
but who were nonetheless fascinated by the direct impact of bodily suffering on cognitive potential It must also be said that for Deleuze, as with these influences, explorations of the body's limitations were not in themselves limited to its particular anatomy, but also included the limitations put upon the body by the state, and by hegemonic understandings of the body more generally. Nietzsche is perhaps the most famous explorer of such a worldview. He wrote at length on society's deliberate limiting of human potential, and championed those who would tunnel and mine their way through the strata of daily life, giving a specifically proletarian and industrial agency to the descendants of Plato's cave, driven by the belief that, as a result of their toil, they will eventually overcome their circumstances, or, as Nietzsche put it, acquire
their own daybreak. The innately unreasonable nature, that is to say, the madness of such a pursuit, was also championed by Nietzsche who, foreshadowing the thalassic geopsychology of Sandor Firenze, saw insanity as something in voice and bearing, as uncanny and incalculable as the demonic moods of the weather and the sea, and therefore worthy of a similar awe and observation. This is to say that for Nietzsche, madness was not simply a deviation from an otherwise natural reason, but rather a powerful undertow of human cognitive activity. To ignore and suppress it, at a societal level, would be the same as ignoring the grandeur of the climate, or the sea, and its impact on our own shores. Bataille, heavily influenced by Nietzsche and sharing
with him a traumatic experience of familial mental illness in childhood, also wrote many philosophical tracts on human anatomy and its deviations, writing that mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters and exclude human anatomical abnormality from any philosophical ontology due to some prejudiced adherence to the constitution of the perfect type. He explored the disgust evoked by even the most fundamental and normal of human body parts and appendages, describing the mouth, for instance, as the orifice of profound physical impulses. Elsewhere, and more famously, he described the big toe as the most human part of the human body, and yet deplores its reputation for the most nauseating filthiness, believing that man's secret horror of his foot is one of the explanations for the tendency to conceal its length and form as much as possible,
describing women's high heels, for instance, as an attempt to distract from the foot's low and flat character. He sees the lowly reputation of the human foot, as well as its sexual fetishisation, as an embarrassing measure of how fundamental bodily restriction is to an apparent human civility. Antonin Artaud's plays and writings expressed many similar concerns as the writings of Nietzsche and Bataille, and he was a particular influence on Deleuze, providing him with one of his least understood concepts, the body without organs. As Joshua Ramey explains, writing on the esotericism of Deleuze's philosophy, Artaud believed that the decadence and debilitation of 20th century Western culture were linked directly to the technoscientific apparatus, military, industrial, nutritional
and hygienic, continuously marshaled in the name of God and order to stultify the human body. Artaud's works, his writings, radio plays and performances, constituted for him a theatre of cruelty that was designed to disturb and terrify its audience, but also the stultified human subject as such, to shock and shatter its organs, and to force the body to react otherwise than in accordance with the habitual limits of sense and sensibility. Artaud's theatre of cruelty was, in this sense, a gothic assault on the sensibilities of his time. Along with the paintings of Francis Bacon, his works were to Deleuze as the Dionysian music of Richard Wagner was initially to Nietzsche, as the Ling Chi photographs were to Bataille. Each describes and brings forth a subtle body accessible at the extremes of experience
in suffering, delirium, synesthesia and ecstatic states. Here we might proclaim Deleuze, Nietzsche, Bataille and Artaud to be Gothic philosophers par excellence. Each has explored the wonder and horror provoked by the unknown capabilities of our own bodies and, as we have already suggested, this is more than familiar territory for the Gothic in its own right. By deploying the evolving signs and signifiers at the edge of what we know and understand about ourselves and the world around us, the Gothic is a prosthetic mode that has consistently extended its own reach, out beyond the horizon of human knowledge and into the weird, the eerie, the grotesque. Whether extending the limits of the body beyond reason, beyond nature, beyond society's aesthetic standards, or, most fundamentally, beyond life itself, the Gothic provides forms with which our imaginations run amok,
and it is this tendency that has allowed the Gothic to proliferate through cultures around the world for almost a millennium. Now one of the oldest and most persistent artistic movements in human history, in being constituted by a virulent unlife, we might assume that the Gothic will never truly die. However, this sensibility within the Gothic that pushes towards its own outside is presently under threat and at the constant mercy of capitalist commodification, a process that has already found some success in rendering the Gothic culturally inert. The Gothic's contemporary influence is nonetheless pervasive. Indeed, the Gothic is, in some respects, more popular than ever. However, whilst the emergence of the 21st century Molgoth may signify a new Gothic dominance, for many it sounds the death knell of a movement finally thwarted by capitalism's apparatuses of capture,
making the Gothic into a type that has become synonymous with a largely outdated and aesthetically conservative subculture. The Xenogothic is a term we might use to define a future Gothic form, always already contained within the Gothic itself. It is a name not for a Gothic telos, but for a witch's flight. It is a term for the Gothic's escape from itself, and the limits placed upon it from outside. It is a form of movement, according to Gilda Luz, that never ceases to change direction, that is broken, split, diverted, turned in on itself, coiled up, and even extended beyond its natural limits. Here we find Voringer's Gothic line inverted. The 21st century Gothic is not only a will to form, but also a will to deform. To return to the prosthetic ontologies with which we started,
it is in this way that the Gothic is the true drive behind Deleuze and Ortoad's call for a body without organs. Though it is a phrase that may conjure up images of evisceration, it is also a demand for a body beyond organisation. A body which is defined by the sensation of its own experience, and is therefore able to define itself through the intensity of its being rather than through an essentialist adherent to an anatomical type. For Deleuze, it was the 20th century expressionist painter Francis Bacon who depicted this body without organs most viscerally. For Bacon, the human form was often rendered as amorphous liquid meat, a horrifying image perhaps, but a phrase that connects the reality of the human body to its anatomical objectivity. Bacon captures externally the experience of becoming body,
and it is this that Deleuze defines as the essence of a Gothic art, which dismantles organic representation by adhering instead to a realism of deformation as opposed to the idealism of transformation. It is the manner in which the body exceeds the organism or makes it fall apart. This is how the Gothic pulls our contemporary understanding of the aesthetic, which, according to Terry Eagleton, was born of a discourse of the body into new areas. by generating its own prostheses. The Gothic, then, is always one step ahead, even of itself. Whereas many artistic movements and fashions have come and gone over the last thousand years, now contained within historical periods or momentary artistic trends by historians and critics alike, the Gothic has instead undergone nine centuries of extension and reinvention,
always mutating the last form to define it in the popular imagination. There is still a Promethean fire that burns within the Gothic to this day, an outsideness that eschews a commodification by capitalist forces and continues to speak to a prosthetic sensibility that considers capitalism's ruination of the modern subject and finds ways out of it from within we must embrace anew this ruination of the modern subject and its insufficient armour against a capitalistic idealism of social transformation to find ways out is always to let the outside in only then will we be in a position to discover what our bodies can really do