Traverse Fantasy

The phallus is masculine in the same way a penis is masculine. I wrote a primer on Lacan’s concept of phallic desire a month ago, and I realize—although my blog is mine and my target audience is one at least superficially familiar with concepts from Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, so I don’t feel particularly motivated to write introductions for people totally new to those fields of discourse—I kind of did that XKCD bit about how familiar the average person is with niche obscure bullshit. Again, it’s not my problem necessarily, but then people talk about how literal or abstract the phallus notion is supposed to be from Lacan’s mouth or my own. Is the phallus masculine (to quote WFS ) “the way a horse [think equus in Latin] is masculine”? Is classic D&D more “literally phallic” (by way of being masculinely horny) than I had “intended” in my critique of it ? Is usage of the word “phallus” a mere birthmark of a discourse originally grounded in bioessentialism from which it...

Dear Reddit: am I the asshole? I jumped into a conversation on the OSR discord about how people often write TTRPG adventures (or texts more broadly, I think) with such a utilitarian mindset geared towards play that they often neglect to write anything actually interesting or pleasurable to read—you know how often the pendulum swings one way or the other. This inspired something in me, so I was like “Yeah!!! And isn’t that the fun part anyway?” Some people agreed, but for the most part it was like that reaction picture of girls staring at you because you said something weird at a party, but instead of girls it’s a bunch of sweaty guys because I forgor what server I was in (no offense— the OSR will be the OSR ). I thought it was a bit and then I kept posting Lacan’s sexuation table as if to point fingers and be like “MALE!” (boom) “PHALLIC!” (boom) “CASTRATED!” (boom) Oh God. I am the asshole. Shit. Fuck. Damnit. But I thought it was interesting when I DM’d someone about it and was lik...

Creationism doesn't get enough credit for being an essentially (post)modern ideology. "Evidence does not speak for itself," Jason Lisle and Ken Ham and others always say. The interpretation of evidence requires one to filter it through their own particular worldview and thus—since we can never comprehend the things themselves but only mental models of them—every interpretation is situated within the symbolic cosmos of its analyst's worldview. Of course, we're over 200 years past Kant's critique of reason, and we should know by now that a worldview has overstayed its welcome if it cannot reconcile evidence with its fundamental premises without (speaking figuratively or literally...) divine intervention. In other words, interpretation is also always an opportunity for immanent critique. Lacan's discursive algorithms illustrate this point well, but I'm not going to dig into that here ( borrowed illustration below from another blog ). Just gesturing. ...

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...

This is a paper I wrote for my first semester of undergrad in 2018. I actually wanted to expand it into a thesis about the economics of online platforms (business people say stupid shit about it) before I shifted my research wholly into Greco-Latin poetry, but I still like the analysis and sometimes wish I could refer to it. So, here it is! Sorry for any eighteen-year-old bullshit. Also I removed the footnotes because they were annoying to reformat, but the works cited section is still there. Shout-out to my professor who was an English literature guy forced to teach engineers how to write. He was very entertained by me, I think. And he was a great professor! Very patient with the STEM freaks.  Introduction Social media is a mode of discourse specific to the information age, an evolution of the personalization of commodities and the commodification of personality where users relate to each other in a manner not unlike celebrities and brand images. As a new means of communication...

There's a cliché quote often falsely attributed to Oscar Wilde: "Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power." Thankfully, this isn't a boomer's Facebook page, so we can have the same point restated by Deleuze and Guattari and seem all the more intellectual for it: "The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused. A revolutionary machine is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much force as these coercive machines have for producing breaks and mobilizing flows." I've been ruminating on a handful of things lately, which I realize are interconnected. The angels ...