Monsters, Metonymy, Metaphor

There was a certain graffiti during the attempted 1968 revolution in France: "Structures do not walk on the streets!" Žižek summarizing Lacan (haven't read Seminar XVII unfortunately) submits that the opposite is true, and this is where one might appreciate his relative conservatism: that the street fights between the student revolutionaries and the police were in fact expressive of and overdetermined by the social order, which is in a constant and dynamic process of self-definition (comparable, I think, to Marx's analysis of the circuits of capital in Volume II which I summarize here, specifically in that the circuits represent logical moments of a process which really occur simultaneously; that being said, my interpretation is heterodox because many Lacanians act like discourses are individually constitutive of a symbolic order, which I feel like is analytically stupid and useless but whatever).

Prismatic Warren (the guy) posted today on Prismatic Wasteland (the blog) outlining a taxonomy of 'monsters', that is, people against whom violence is sanctioned by the game-logic, the fictional setting, or the play-culture which interfaces between them. He defines monsters not in terms of their literal being, but with respect to the rationale of their sanction. Below is an outline:

• Zombies: Mindless killing machines.
• Wizards: Powerful heterodox practitioners (necessarily of magic?).
• Robots: Personification of technology.
• Orcs: Inhuman savages.
• Neanderthals: Uncanny near-humans.
• Mutants: Deviants by nature.
• Infidels: Zealots of a rival faith.
• Guards: Personification of law.
• Druids: Personification of nature. 
• Cultists: Heretical horde.
• Bandits: Personification of chaos. 

Two caveats: first, that I summarized these so as to emphasize their relationality; second, that the implicit relations encode conflicts which may co-exist and co-determine each other (e.g., as Warren suggests, robots can also simultaneously occupy the position of zombies, just as well as I think they can occupy that of neanderthals; and, perhaps, it's at the intersection of multiple conflicts where a monster can develop interesting character), meaning positions are not mutually exclusive.

Although I think this is interesting—essentially deriving mythemes out of games, settings, or play cultures—I also think there is an analysis missing which would animate these terms and put them to use. One of my earliest posts was about vampires, or rather about the semiotic logic which animates the vampire by situating it within a socio-symbolic context. Essentially the signifier of "Vampire" is interchangeable with others, which we can describe as a set (e.g.):

Vampire ≅ {Aristocrat, Jew, Twilight}

Simultaneously and unfortunately, the term "Jew" is also a term interchangeable within another set (according to the logic of more-or-less structural antisemitism, depending on how literal one is):

Jew ≅{Goblin, Lizardman, Vampire}

For Lacan, there's two orthogonal operations which generate significance (or meaning) in a symbolic system: metonymy, the diachronic (sequential) combination of signifiers; and metaphor, the synchronic (positional) selection of one signifier over another. Let's go back to our term Vampire: let's take that as our base term, and put an empty spot X in front of it.

X—Vampire

The potential signifier referred to by X is "clamped" by its association to the term Vampire, whereas the selection of the term Vampire implies a possible multiplicity of X ("What do you think of when you hear the word 'vampire'?"). Now if we select a particular term for X, that clamps the term Vampire in turn. The specific images of the Aristocrat-Vampire, Jew-Vampire, and Twilight-Vampire are determined (made "significant" by clamping and thus encoding a more specific meaning) by the selection of individual signifiers and their mutual combination with each other. Just as well, Jew-Goblin and Jew-Lizardman produce different images than Jew-Vampire. This can be thought of as wave function collapse for symbolic content (and, relatedly, this is where LLMs tend to break down, since they only operate on the level of grammar rather than symbology—even if they both operate by linguistic logic).

Returning to the point (I promise I have one) I feel like Warren's post could be taken beyond taxonomy, into relationality. When I was talking with him, he was surprised by the association of vampires with antisemitic caricatures, as well as by my own "insight" that Neanderthals are structural Italians (European but not Anglo-Saxon, Christian but not Protestant; almost like "us", if by "us" we mean perhaps Gary Gygax, but not quite; in contrast to the utterly "other" orcs who occupy the same symbolic position as indigenous people within the framework of colonial ideology—key to the point of all this, not Italians or indigenous people per se). By atomizing terms, even if not mutually exclusive within their taxonomy, we're isolating them from the very context in which their meaning is determined, and also not considering those terms in their unfettered multiplicity.

In other words, rather than "What is orc?", we should ask "Why is orc?" What do the terms of a setting and the relations between them suggest about the setting's deeper themes or "truths"? What relations does it allow the player to enter with other terms, and thus participate in one fantasy or another?