or, Or, Drafting a New 21st Century Post-Dialectic
(5,638 words.)
I’ve decided to reconcile several divergent transmutations of the Dialectic and in doing so crystallize a true 21st century philosophy. I do not know what I am doing. You didn’t heed the title so you have surrendered all right to criticize this.
We’ll stretch our legs with a confession: I’ve been using the word “dialectic” incorrectly for quite some time. Nobody corrected me. This doesn’t matter that much because how often would it even come up? Regardless, this has lead me to believe that nobody else knows either, or they fear their fate falling into my clutches. Let’s begin by me projecting this crumbling estate of errors that is my life onto a general audience.
One of the most common conflations of political enthusiasts choosing to leverage philosophy to justify their wild assertions is attributing Dialectical Materialism to Hegel. This is historically inaccurate, as Hegel’s system was in fact Dialectical Idealism. Hegel’s original model posits that the engine of history was Geist (Spirit/Mind), reality is grounded upon the logical/spiritual, and that all material depends on ideas and principles. These constitute the acute pressure that causes reality to exist, nature to progress, and change to occur. It was very Platonic in its assessment.
Zooming out, the irreducible generative force behind all this was known as the Absolute: a self-developing Geist whose narrow manifestations are thought, culture, and nature as intelligible moments of a single rational whole. The dialectic was thus described as the movement through contradiction toward resolution, alternatively summarized as Thought realizing itself in the world.
On the other hand, Dialectical Materialism belongs to Marx, Engels, and developed gradually by subsequent Marxist theorists. Marx and Engels inverted Hegel’s idealist system, proposing that the dialectic was not a process centered around the “Idea” but of the real, material world. For Marx and Engels change was inherent in the nature of the material world, no shadow realm of forms necessary.
A secondary confession is that I also had the wrong idea about what Dasein is. This one is even more unforgivable because I had read quite a bit of Martin Heidegger years ago. My excuse is that I read all of it while drunk at the gym.
Some would say this is Nietzschean.
I bring this up because I view Dasein as the counterpoint to Dialectics, and while they share unignorable connective tissue there is a reason one is consigned to the political Left while the other on the political Right. Rather than speaking of the human being as a “self,” “soul,” or “subject,” Heidegger introduced the term which translates to “being-there”. By using Dasein as a replacement for “mind,” Heidegger wanted to convey that a human individual is in the world in the mode of uncovering: disclosing other entities and itself, rather than being sealed off within a specially designed inner compartment. This is a much older philosophy known as Empiricism, which centers the individual as a passive actor attempting to understand a world that would exist with or without him through sensory inputs. Dasein isolates the human agent but does not make him subservient to ecosystems of forms and ideas actualizing themselves. There’s a blurring of the lines, an interactive force beyond control that mediates change in both directions. A secret third thing.
It’s this essential divergence that will stabilize us during the oncoming mental breakdown.
The Oedipal in Parallax
I make a habit of exposing myself to intense ideas from the most turbulent waters of ocean of margins. I do this because to live is to suffer, and I’m living it up. This has introduced me to several Leftist thinkers that rose to prominence throughout the 20th Century. Much of Leftist thought has been a consequence of Hegel, and in most instances an attempted refutation of his Dialectic. Despite these rebellions, they are unable to escape the gravitational pull of the Dialectic’s influence, similar to how the most ferocious critics of Liberalism can seemingly never exit the Liberal frame.
A towering influence of its own right emerged from that exact space of inquiry by the name of “Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia” by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Deleuze’s entire philosophical project was, according to him, built in explicit opposition to Hegel. His assessment was that the dialectic seems to function on extreme differences alone, acknowledging them as the motor of history. Hegel has sided with the model and the copy – the geist and its manifestation – while fighting to exclude the simulacra from consideration.
The simulacra refers to the copy or imitation of a person or a thing, most apparent in the copy of a copy of a copy as a commercial phenomenon that defines modernity. It masks the real, perverts the genuine, and even makes us believe that it represents something real that never existed. Later intellectuals would isolate and center the concept of the simulacra as the nucleus of our modern existential crisis.
For Deleuze, history does not have a teleological element or a movement towards a glorious endpoint, he prefers the metaphor of the perpetually self-sustaining machine. In fact machines factor very strongly in his work, a consequence of being enveloped within a world of automation and mass production he and others seek so desperately to rise above.
Deleuze and Guattari outlined a “materialist psychiatry” modeled on the unconscious regarded as an aggregate of productive processes of desire, portraying a process desiring-production driven by desiring-machines we are all subject to. They identify this not as a psychological quirk of the human experience, but a universal primary process. It is the driver of everything. I was reminded of Schopenhauer’s exploration of Will being the causative force of the entire universe. It’s a spectrum of everything from meteors to insects driven by an innate directive force known as Will, of which consciousness is merely a higher order category.
We are not splashing in the brine of semantics here; carefully considering why it is we want to do things is as deceptively complex as Kierkegaard investigating the root cause of angst. Who cares about angst? Isn’t that DVRCC WIGGER shit? As it turns out it can be understood as an unnatural state of mind, something that the average person should not feel. It is triggered by profound knowledge of the field of choices presented before you as a conscious individual, a paralysis triggered by awareness. It is also (more related to the topic at hand) the comprehension of a deep incongruity between where you currently are and where you think you should be, once again informed by the field of possibilities. The operative plague is cognizance intersecting with desire, the common departure point for these flights into the ether. Returning to the more Marxist interpretation, human desire is simply a higher order of lack, an essential, desperate, yawning absence that drives the macro and micro alike.
Rather than a contradiction between thesis and antithesis being sublated into synthesis, the authors step outside the sum function of the dialectic and to portray a universe of flows, machines, connections, and cuts without a governing telos. They, however, never escape the fundamental arithmetic of the dialectic. While they refuse thesis meeting antithesis leading to synthesis, they leverage the triangular structure of Lacanian psychoanalysis of daddy-mommy-me. This channels desire through lack and resolution, which yet bears a striking resemblance to the foundational dialectic, describing a process of tension that unleashes forces which constitute everything we see around us while introducing a new power structure.
What is Deleuze’s way out of the prison of desire? Enter the “body without organs,” a hypothetical state where desire is unchained from morality inherent to homeostasis, a state we can glance upon when we behold schizophrenics. These are individuals free from the mental models – indeed, thought processes as such – and therefore meander in a state of purity. Free from the the oppressive strata of society, they pursue this idea even further towards the example of the bird developing in the egg, an encapsulated phenomenon of protein dispersal and pure process. It is pure creation orchestrating itself under an anarchic spell. A rebellion against the ambition towards order, ignoring how the entire biological function of the egg is to produce a body with organs.
As we have seen thus far, the most significant shift is one away from synthesis being the resolution of tension, towards tension becoming the foundation – or even inhabitable plane – that can never be overcome. Desire is the machine of existence, tension is the universe, the dialectic is the conflict that births reality.
The figure of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan features strongly in the work of Deleuze, a tissue connecting to the work of renowned Stalinist philosopher Slavoj Žižek. In his earlier work, Žižek traced a line of thought from Hegel to Lacan in which the human subject is split, divided by a deep antagonism which determines social reality and through which ideology operates. He famously asserted that ideology operates not by making us believe in falsehoods but by allowing us to act as if we do not believe while remaining under ideological sway due to a nefarious sleight of hand.
Žižek draws on Lacan’s concept of the objet petit a – the unattainable object of desire, a recurring idea – to explain how ideology forms. Other key Lacanian concepts Žižek centralizes include: the Real (the traumatic, non-symbolizable dimension of experience that resists integration into language and signs) and the divided subject (constituted around a lack and emerging through the failure of symbolic identification.) Once more we note the themes of psychoanalytic split, incongruity, suppression of reality. Žižek gathers these ideas along with other Lacanian innovations into the “parallax gap,” a theory that highlights the irreducible difference between perspectives, which he uses to reframe dialectical idealism.
A popular maxim in our shared political pressure cooker is “a system is what it does,” meaning you should not attach any value to what a system is intended to be but rather the result it guarantees. This works for ideological systems as well. These systems may be complex in structure and internal logic, but an effective way to slice through all the overgrown conceptual vines is to ask which components refuse to be removed. Some people can imagine an ideal form of Fascism without Antisemitism as a central pillar, others cannot. For our current investigation, it is relatively easy to imagine Post-Leftism without an economic analysis at all, but it is nigh-impossible to imagine any of these theories existing without a permanent debt to psychoanalysis, especially the work of Lacan and Freud.
The parallax gap describes the separating of two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an “impossible short circuit” of levels that can never meet. The impossibility of synthesis is the thing. This is an attempt to reconcile Hegelian Idealism with the psychoanalytic and technological revolutions that spawned Žižek’s predecessors. The dialectic becomes the labor of thought upon its own non-coincidence, the tension created by seeking to address the lack that grants both the two points a presence.
Wave-particle duality is one of Žižek’s non-psychoanalytical and unperverted examples of the parallax gap found in the natural world. He views light’s wave and particle descriptions as incommensurable perspectives on the same real object, with no neutral common ground. Like the skull v. brain or spirit v. subject, it’s all oppositional interconnectedness. It would be too simple to say that the very existence of light is the synthesis achieved in real time, to say that elements that appear to be in a dance of explosive negation are in fact simply dynamic indications that we lack the language to apprehend what synthesis really is. To appreciate what the Absolute actually looks like, or how it presents itself.
It would be too simple to say that the dialectical equation is reductive, chained to antiquated conceptions of linear time and anchored by pinheaded projections of the Yin Yang, and that the only interesting aspect of Dialectical Idealism is the movement towards a higher order which is denied in this and every attempt to refine the theory.
It would be too simple and serious. Unperverted. The parallax view thematically appropriates the pervasive meta-analysis which defines our times, itself a branch of simulacra which requires that the audience be aware of the fakeness of the reproduction as a component of its novelty.
“How, then, are we to revolutionize an order whose very principle is constant self-revolutionizing?” – Slavoj Žižek
I am reminded of a conversation I had with my friend Mark Trouble on the topic of Christianity, specifically the obstacles that emerge while using Rationalism to engage with, or draw a circle around, God. This is my bias that I must reckon with, the drive to dissect big ideas thereby draining the enchantment from them. It was under his guidance that I returned to the central mystery of God’s plan, and the faith required to inhabit the mystery without attempting to deconstruct it. This is why faith is such a powerful concept; it is not a cope of ignorance as some say but rather the resolution of a period of intense investigation, of soul searching. One could struggle in vain to sketch esoteric lines around and throughout it, or they could decide that the system is not there to be broken.
For Žižek, his gap is Hegelian: it is formations within the pressure of the subject/object mediation. Contrasted against Heidegger, Dasein is emphatically not a subject in the Hegelian sense. The dialectic (and all its twisting branches) is still treating Being as a property of present-at-hand things to be cognized, a product of the unreachable absolute, a diseased illusion created by psychology corrupted by capitalism, or a powerless node subjected to the whims of an alien Outsideness.
What we see in Leftist thought is a recurrence of separation of phenomena into entities that exert power over humanity as subject. It grants power through form to desire itself as an ontological machine that can only be combatted by destroying order – logic, rationality, consciousness – in totality. You can see echoes of this in products of the CCRU, Spinal Catastrophism being one such illustrative example, building a case that the human experience is a revolt against the trauma of the universe. The sole mission of humanity, therefore, is to continue along this evolutionary path, creating increasingly advanced armor and technics to breach our survival as a weapon against the screaming void of antilife, until we can achieve a level of power such that we can not only destroy the universe but destroy it in such a way that life is permanently prevented from emerging forevermore.
After a century of consideration, what now? The process of conceptual separation birthed infernal machinery and wicked intelligences and has shepherded us down a pragmatic path where a fork is presented: weaponizing schizophrenia to engage in a war with life itself, or develop bold strategies to interface with – perhaps even harness – these unimaginable forms.
The Tentacle of Capitalism
Mark Fisher was another source of anticapitalist reaction several ideological iterations removed from cohort’s progenitor, perhaps the most dire of the personages thus far. His work is not a monument of theory, rather more a reflective negative space that gives the rest form.His most famous work, Capitalist Realism, is an ideological framework for viewing capitalism and its effects on politics, economics, and public thought.
“It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” – Mark Fisher
Fisher centers an elementary theoretical distinction pulled from Lacanian psychoanalysis: the difference between the Real and reality. We inhabit reality, yet we are incessantly seeking the real. For Lacan, Fisher, and may of their ideological comrades, the Real is what any “reality” must suppress. Capitalist realism is inherently anti-utopian, as it holds that no matter the flaws or externalities, capitalism is the only possible means of operation.
Capitalism has ascended to totality, inescapable due to its multitudinous capacity for survival. This is a frequent admission in late-stage Leftism: the inevitable Marxist international revolution failed only because everything in the known universe is Capitalism, so their revolution was simply naïve in its scope.
Fisher’s relationship to dialectical idealism is largely mediated through Žižek and through his own reworking of Jacques Derrida’s Hauntology. Nevertheless, the Hegelian structure is unmistakable, as hauntology describes a pervasive sense in which contemporary culture is haunted by the “lost futures” of modernity, which failed to occur or were cancelled by neoliberalism. Like Luis Althusser – an inspiration to Fisher and many others – we are trapped within a superstructure of falsity that affirms its Realness by conjuring recursive fakeness. Nothing we experience is real, especially that which attempts to recapture nostalgia.
Fisher’s critique of capitalist realism is essentially a negative dialectical argument: the present order maintains itself by foreclosing on the negativity that would allow for genuine historical movement. We inhabit the tension of utopia denied. Of the examples thus far Fisher is the most clearly overwhelmed with Lack, and this unfortunately contributed to his suicide.
Fisher is still very popular amongst the most radical fringes of the Left, and he shares a counterpart on the Right. A former colleague from Warwick University, both members of a peculiar group called the CCRU.
The CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) at Warwick, where Fisher studied, had taken Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of deterritorialization and desiring-machines in an accelerationist direction, arguing that capitalism’s own tendency to decode and deterritorialize all social forms could be accelerated toward liberation. Fisher gradually broke with this, concluding that capitalism’s self-revolutionizing capacity was precisely the problem rather than the solution.
The dark reflection to Fisher, who broke from the CCRU but for different reasons, is Nick Land. I was always interested in uncovering parallels between Land and Fisher due to their prior camaraderie, especially as the gulf between them became publicly vast. They both beheld the horizon of Big Doom, and only one of them was saved by shitposting. Much to consider.
It would be easy to assume that Nick Land made a hard turn to the political right somewhere between the 1990s and the 2010s, when he reemerged as a neoreactionary blogger residing in Shanghai. But his propensity for saying The N Word is merely a recoloring of his consistent accelerationism and the realization that certain biomass was getting in the way of that. In his 1990s writing, the task was to liberate runaway capitalism from the “human security system” that was holding it back. This was an admission that it was the status quo we could never hope to either individually escape or solve through populist revolution.
Land criticizes Kant’s transcendental idealism for ideologically reflecting Western capitalist imperialism’s attempts to geographically distance itself from the very third world labor that constitutes it whilst also threatening to annihilate it through sublime, insurrectionary resistance. In place of Kant, Land assembles what he calls libidinal materialism, a non-dialectical, anti-humanist materialism that synthesizes Georges Bataille’s occultic assertion of the irreducible excess of matter over form, Freud’s death drive, thermodynamics, and cybernetics (information as a material flux).
“Libidinal matter” represents a chaotic, energetic excess inherent in reality that denies the coherence and stability that characterizes human conceptual systems, identifying it as external to human aspirations and ideals, thereby undermining traditional philosophical pursuits that seek to rationalize and structure the world according to human logic. Dasein is futile. The Absolute is staring back at you, exceeding human comprehension, unable to be domesticated into humanist frameworks.
With the founding of the CCRU, this libidinal materialism became fused with cybernetics, Deleuze-Guattari, rave culture, and science fiction into what was called “theory-fiction.” There was much slam poetry penned to break readers into new modes of thinking, ultimately to accelerate inhuman forces.
The key CCRU concept that directly bridges all subsequent phases is hyperstition.
“Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions – by their very existence as ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality. Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition, where confidence acts as an effective tonic, and inversely.” – Nick Land
Certain ideas and beliefs that are initially incomprehensible (akin to superstitions) can covertly circulate through reality and establish cultural feedback loops that then drastically meld society. The CCRU era’s central thesis was that capitalism is not a human institution but an alien intelligence invading from the future.
Some of his contemporaries, including Mark Fisher, would be willing to entertain this notion if it wasn’t for Land’s allegiance with the alien intelligence. The purpose of this assessment is to interrogate the break that validates the underlying assumption as a form of its own reverse dialectic: capitalism is the superstructure all humans inhabit, and it possesses the metaphysical power to make all revolution against it serve its interests.
The most distinctive feature of Land’s most recent output is the explicitly theological framing he now places around questions he has always been asking. The question is no longer purely “what is capitalism?” but “what is the providential structure within which capitalism operates?” — and the answer is increasingly located in the theological grammar of the Anglo-Protestant literary canon.
The English literary canon centering on the Tyndale Bible, the King James Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton is framed not as a mere historical artifact but as an operational scripture: the living text that constitutes “the English” as a people. Land highlights the connections between the Anglo cultural tradition, individualism, liberalism, and British Christianity as an operating system coalesced with his own interest in occult, Kabbalah, and cyberpunk.
Land has suggested that Protestantism and, by extension, the American project, rests on a hidden satanic grammar. Land cites Paradise Lost as a hyperstitional program, a text in which the English literary canon encodes a theology of unintended consequences, invisible hands, and inhuman providence that turns out to be structurally identical to his theory of technocapital acceleration. Satan, in this reading, is not simply the villain but the agent of acceleration: the force of deterritorialization, exile, and productive negation because it is unbounded by divine homeostasis.
The KJV is not a translation of divine truth; it is a machine for producing a people. Shakespeare is not a representation of human nature; he is a program that runs in English-speaking subjects, constituting what it means to think in English. Milton’s Paradise Lost is not a poem about the fall; it is a hyperstition that encodes the Satanic grammar of Anglo-Protestant rebellion and self-determination into the cultural firmware of every reader.
Land’s Outsideness is a repudiation of Dasein, although not stated explicitly. It is too humanist, too inward-facing, and insufficiently concerned with the inhumanity lurking past the furthest reaches of our experience. Humans are once again the permanent subject, and if Satan spoke the English into existence to create Capitalism then the direction of worship is not Satan himself but the mindbending forces that allowed that to happen.
Masquesideness
Where do Žižek and Land overlap, and where do they diverge? Žižek rejects any withdrawal from capitalism’s innately accelerative tendency. Central to Land’s account is the understanding that the fundamental logic of capital is the permanent intensification of development and the relentless overcoming of all stable forms of social life. But against Deleuze and Guattari, Land insists that there is no other deterritorialization beyond the logic of capital itself.
Žižek’s response was that Accelerationism is far too optimistic and Land’s theory of singularity is another all-encompassing figure of the big Other: an easy escape route opposed to proper consideration of the complexities, contradictions, and negativities of the human being today.
While Land vehemently rejects Hegel’s idealism and humanist foundations, the mechanism of hyperstition relies on a processual logic that mirrors Hegelian structures. It suggests that even in his anti-humanism, Land cannot fully escape the dialectical frameworks embedded in Western metaphysical traditions. His canon, and its God Is A Racist Protestant, is Land’s Absolute Spirit: an impersonal force working through human vessels without their full comprehension, making itself real through its own internal development. The difference from Hegel is that Land’s “Spirit” is not Geist but something more like scripture-as-code guiding us towards the omnipresent inhumanity that can be negotiated.
Nearly twenty years after the CCRU, Fisher penned a reply to Land’s philosophy called “Terminator vs. Avatar.” The late capitalist subjectivity that Fisher saw revealed in these films was, in his view, cynical and insincere, founded on disavowal of its complicity with the things it protests. Land’s Canon Wars are the opposite move entirely: not mourning the lost futures of the postwar Left, but consolidating the ancient hyperstitions of Anglo-Protestant civilization. To his credit, Land’s work is the most distant from a psychoanalytical framing compared to his contemporaries, even though they share the same gestation.
What makes Fisher’s analysis more interesting, in a way that is not fully developed in his piece, is the implication that history itself is fake. The future is denied the status as an inhabitable territory where malevolent entities can speak backwards, reformatted as a subservient state to the capitalist reality. This is what Žižek addresses when he says Accelerationism is too optimistic; people still believe, beneath all the cynicism and nihilism and occult nonsense, that the future can save them. That they can actually live there.
“The overall theme of the book is the disappearance of the future, at least in culture. For me, the failure of the 21st century is that the 21st century has yet to really start — so, in a way, it’s a disappearance of both the present and the future.” – Mark Fisher
For Žižek, neither Land’s Providence nor Fisher’s Hauntology quite grasps the dialectical truth: that the very antagonism between these competing hyperstitions/hauntologies is what drives history, and that no text, whether canonical or counter-canonical, can finally close the gap in the Symbolic Order that makes politics possible. The Parallax Gap explains how the Absolute does not reconcile contradiction. The Absolute exists only in the moment contradiction exposes it. We can never break through to The Real because it is the tension we are cursed to reside in. Call it the Quantum Mechanics of Copeitalism.
It appears to be one more system of oppression within with all other systems of oppression are contained, including utopias denied, malevolent intelligences impregnating us with thoughts, or desiring machines conjuring the pain of lack. It’s all interlinked systems of oppression, now ontologically inescapable.
These three most recent exemplars of the dialectic seeking a new format to remain relevant – Land, Fisher, and Žižek – they each share a single deep problem despite their divergent conclusions. What is the relationship between the bounded human subject produced by capitalism, social repression, the Symbolic Order, and the inhuman force that that subject both requires and can never fully contain?
With Žižek sliding alongside these other luminaries due to the extension of his Parallax Gap theory beyond human history into quantum mechanics and evolutionary biology, a conceptual throughline between all these concepts (including Deleuze and Althusser) is separation of phenomenon as organisms, now evolved to inhabitable spaces as divine intelligences under which humanity is enslaved.
What makes Dasein different from all other beings (rocks, plants, and animals) is that it takes its own being as an issue; for it is ontological being.Dasein is neither a subject nor determined: it is a way of being that is always already ahead of the subject/object distinction. The human subject is not tasked with the hermeneutics of apprehending truth through the realization of the Daesin; no, that is Far Right Extremism. We are at all times inhabiting a frame of oppression, escape, and choosing death before slavery. We are the subject attempting to escape a machine or leave a space. In Deleuze we arrive at the explicitness of embracing total metaphysical schizophrenia, but there’s echoes of it wherever you see a rebellion against the enemies of utopia.
How does one break the world and access the ethereal Antilife?
This is the problem The Mask dramatizes with more philosophical precision than most philosophy written in our historical period. It does so using Jim Carrey’s face. The Mask (1994) stands as an intersection of all previous dialectical permutations and it is through The Mask (1994) we can finally exit the 19th Century.
To begin we shall describe how each aforementioned philosophy intersects in the film. The film is what Žižek would describe as the fantasy of the unbarred subject, the subject who has recovered jouissance, who can do what the barred subject cannot. When Stanley dons the Mask and becomes the green-faced trickster, he achieves his own fantasy within the media product of our own fantasy everything that the ideological order promises and structurally prohibits: unlimited desire, unlimited energy, the girl, the power, the money. The Mask is ideology’s own fantasy of what transgression looks like, but by breaking the circuit of consumption by discussing it in an effortcaressay we have jailbroken it from the system’s control.
This would align with Fisher’s hauntological model. His central thesis is that capitalism has so thoroughly colonized the field of the possible that transgression itself has become a capitalist product. The film contains a few subtle nods to this, even if they are completely imagined, which we reserve the right to do. For example, the film takes place in Edge City, a name that captures Fisher’s concept of capitalism’s horizon. You can get to the edge, but you cannot go beyond. While residing on the edge, Stanley works at a bank where they store all the capitalism.
Fisher further defines The Weird as the intrusion of something from the Outside that disrupts the causal order of the mundane world. The Mask is a Scandinavian artifact of the Norse trickster god Loki found in a harbor in an American city; pure Weirdness beckoning to be found like the One Ring. It is the intrusion of the mythological, the pre-modern, the non-capitalist into the heart of a 1990s American metropolis depicted as a smattering of earlier eras. As the gradient of thought moves over to Land, we compare this to Outsideness representing itself as the Past as an Undiscovered Country. Not only does an ancient history of lost Gods and cyclical time reach out to impose an alien logic onto modernity, it appropriates a distinctly nostalgic American cartoon aesthetic, further compounding the unreality demanded to break the spell of the Edge of the Modern World.
The Mask is the Outside reaching in.
The Mask dissolves the human and replaces it with something inhuman, a figure of pure play, pure transgression, pure flux. In hyperstitional terms, it is a ghost from the past-as-alternative-future. In this framework, the Mask representing the Outside ought to have emerged victorious. It should have been embraced even though he would have eventually put on a dress to fool a henchman and then give him a big smooch smackaroo on the lips to secure the illusion, when other strategies would have been more germane.
Land overlapping with Fisher would see this rejection as inevitable: history-as-future trapped as commodity in the present, a pressure release veiled as a morality tale culminating in the heelturn from Outsideness to achieve Cameron Diaz’s vagina. During an era where that vagina mattered, internationally.
Land overlapping with Žižek would see this finale as philosophically correct as inhabiting Iutsideness especially for the purposes of acceleration makes Stanley subordinate to it: a false victory revealed to be a prison prohibiting the traversal of the tensions from which reality constitutes itself. But here we find the parallax gap between media and the observer, between subject and object where the obsession of the subject is the very relationship to the object. All of this is contained within the Absolutist Tension, taking the form of self-aware nostalgia, between consuming an unreal story about a man being consumed by the unreal and the awareness we are conducting this action in the form of media literate criticism.
It is through this parallax gap that Outsideness breaches into our world and that multitudinous awareness becomes a force – indeed a self-aware entity – unto itself. We are the contradiction, we are the exception, we are the failure of perfection to actualize itself. The dialectic dons the Mask of Loki because we have demanded such. The trick executed by the system is to portray the Mask as something that one can become infused with and ultimately reject as a ritual reaffirming the status quo. The explosion we seek is rejecting this premise and understanding we must instead shave our heads and tattoo our faces green. We must bug our eyes out and smash our opponents with giant bendy mallets.
This is where, at the awesome car crash of every dialectical rendition, we can step from the wreckage as an actualized dasein.
If we can break the stranglehold psychoanalysis has around us we can break the one its obtuse tentacles – warped by drug-addled appropriation and bombardment of cognitohazards – have around the observable universe.
We can transcend the limited arithmetic of inversions balancing themselves towards an ideal as well as the surrender to enslavement to the same architecture of oppositions preventing us in one manner or another of reaching the promised land of synthesis. From Lack to Hauntology to the Parallax Gap, reality is defined as the inability to be perfect and accounted as unrealizable at best and the product of a malevolent intelligence at worst. The quantum state of light is not a failure of synthesis, and the inability to jailbreak people from this vast cathedral of theory with this notion means the universe will always be viewed as paralyzingly antagonistic.
This is why The Mask (1994) is the first 21st Century Post-Ideology.