Gothic Humanism
SIDE A (Written by Jackie Roving)
What is Gothic Humanism?
The term Gothic can come to mean, in some interpretations, “not classical” in how it was in the 17th and 18th centuries and “mystery and horror” in other interpretations. It is what is seen as external to us, “OTHER,” that gives Gothic its colloquial meaning. “Humanism” can be defined as the world outlook or system of thought that sees a commonality or essential features by which human beings can be defined and thus be defined in contrast to things such as alienation, inauthenticity, etc. Humanism sees things such as history as the product of human action and, thus, things that correspond to humans, such as consciousness, choice, responsibility, etc., are indispensable to understanding society and history as a whole. As a result, Gothic Humanism is a humanism concerned with and dedicated to what is external to us and the relationship between the human and the non-human. It seeks to formulate its understanding of humanity on an open-ended and consistent basis rather than a rigid and stagnant category.
The Monsters Within Us and the Humans Outside of Us
A “monster” can be defined as “a malformed animal or human, a creature born with a birth defect,” or, more broadly, any object or thing that is perceived to have some abnormal or repulsive characteristic(s). The monsters that lurk in our everyday lives appear to us as threats and forces that must be expelled from society immediately or broken and assimilated in a way that does not disturb the already existing ways society currently is. We see in works of mythology and media that include things such as zombies, aliens, demons, deadly AI, eldritch monsters, or the overall Other that are presented as being something which upsets the social order of society and reeks havoc and destruction on the lives of human beings. Human beings must do everything in their power to dispel or destroy these monsters in a way to not only save their own lives but to preserve whatever order there is. This is a common narrative how story telling of monsters appears and is taken where the OTHER is pitted against the subject or human in a way that both engage in a violent struggle for domination, with either one winning over the other or the ruin of both. In other forms of media, the monster is viewed as a point of development for the human, in which the human sees something of the monster in the OTHER as well as within themselves, forming a bond or unity with such a monster in such a way that they overcome the conflict or contradictions in them.
The Gothic Humanists make it their principle to see this dialectic of the subject (human) and the object (the other) as a point of development and movement. Through the medium of monsters and things that have been made OTHER in society, they approach them in a way that either uses them as a way to describe the unfreedom, suffering, and misery of society OR as ways we can further build upon humanity through the means of what is external to us or OTHER. To better understand and develop the concept of what it means to be human or the subject, we not only look outward to what is non-human in order to understand ourselves in relation to it but also inward at what things we see within us that reflect things seen as outside us or unique to who we are as people. From this point of revelation or reconciliation becomes the point of development for something new to blossom when we build on the consistencies of both the human and non-human. The human sees the OTHER within himself, and the OTHER is humanized or sees what is human within themselves. This commonality and the unifying truth of both become universal by which they base themselves and overcome the contradiction between the two. It is this very universalizing in seeing the unity of opposites in a way that doesn’t take away from their complexities or uniqueness but uses the unifying truth or features of them to overcome the contradictions and conflict in order to posit something new. This is what is at the core of Gothic Humanism.
To the Gothic Humanist, humanity advances freedom and development only by confronting what is outside of itself and what is unknown to it in order to overcome it or reconcile it with itself. This can be only achieved by beings who understand the complex relations by which things are situated and exist along with the consistencies and singularities of them all in order to discover what is universal or absolute. The phrase and quote from the Roman playwright and former slave Terence, “I am a human, I consider nothing human alien to me,” becomes a powerful slogan for the Gothic Humanist since they see humanity in everything outside of them, either in extending social freedom and development for other conscious beings or making something serve the ends of human freedom and development. However, these appeals to universality are found not only in contemplative mental thinking, but also in changing our relationships to fit such an understanding. A unity between the human and non-human can not be made complete without a unity between our concept of how we want to live and how we actually live and vice versa.
With this understanding of Gothic Humanism established, we will continue with how this outlook and system of thought allow us to navigate and overcome an estranged world.
Estranged World
The world as it is today in terms of the different aspects of our lives is made estranged due to our relations amongst ourselves and the external world. Everything appears or is always pitted against us in a way that seeks to diminish our agency or be an outright threat to our lives. For example, Capital is the totality of relations whereby humanity’s labor is made alienated and serves the ends of endless accumulation and market-relation based on the social-aggregate of time one spends laboring. It is relations that are pitted against subjects and function to strip us of any autonomy and activity we have in our own lives. We are made to build mansions and beautiful homes yet are forced to go home, in many cases, to rundown shacks and houses. We produce books and other rich reservoirs of knowledge, but our relationships limit what we can do with that knowledge or desire to learn. Capital places and seeks to place everything in terms of totalizing market relations through which different spaces of human activity are locked away by money and commoditization. And since we lack autonomy and control over our own activities and lives, the world appears pitted against the lives of living conscious beings. Innovation is often halted in places where it benefits human freedom and agency, but is often provided ruthless support in places where profit and accumulation can be acquired, which comes with the need for social exploitation. In a word, capital is everything; humanity is nothing. Despite it being our creation, it is a creation that we are made slaves to and appendages to.
This logic of some alienating thing or concept being made everything and subjects being made nothing is neither new to Capital nor is it limited to Capital. This can be found in other things that seek to benefit at the expense of other subjects’ autonomy and freedom. That is, after all, the foundation of subjugation and exploitation. One cannot help but look at such things and conjure images of monsters and nightmares, which represent in a fictional and symbolic way the misery and suffering such things bring about by their existence. A world full of and abundant in things that seek to deprive us of agency, freedom, and actualization, as well as things that appear external to us in ways we find difficult to relate to, is an estranged world. And in a world like this, humanity finds itself in a labyrinth in which it must always fight for its existence against an endless stream of that which seeks its demise, whether it be in overcoming its own shortcomings in the social relations it creates or overcoming forces and things outside of it that threaten its life.
But this becomes the Sisyphean and Promethean tale of humanity’s plight by which we traverse the universe in a world where everything becomes stripped or pitted against us, but we must seek to overcome the conflicts either by extending subjectivity to other living, conscious beings or by re-appropriating objects to serve the ends of social freedom. Through every violent or restless struggle, we emerge stronger and more conscious of the world through which we find better means to navigate and overcome previous and existing solutions. We find this strength not only within ourselves by better understanding our potential, but also from those around us by seeing what we can learn and develop from them. We begin (and get better at) distinguishing between the non-human (those outside of us through which we expand our subjectivity) and the anti-human (those who seek to deprive us of agency or freedom). We distinguish between monsters that will or can be companions and monsters that are to be slain.
The world is a raging sea teeming with eldritch monsters and other creatures. The point is to give everyone ships and surfboards.
SIDE B (Written by Post-Comprehension)
A black cape draped over the cosmos
Can humanity resolve its anxieties, prejudices, and fears concerning the inhuman? More specifically, can humanism, a philosophy which maps its understanding of the world by the directions of a human-centered compass, solve, re-solve, and trans-solve its potential to view non-human sources as a threat? Or will it always make enemies out of what it is not? Cursed to become anthropocentric, and subdue, imprison, and/or murder any lifeform that threatens this. Can we achieve harmony with those monsters we call robots, aliens, zombies, vampires, and so on, constructions of non/in, and-presumed anti-humans?
The answer to these questions is “Yes,” but only if we give mercy, love, and cohabitation to the monsters under our beds and in our closets. We must accept their individuality and, most importantly, allow them to exist as one of the endless individuations that will expand universality. Even if it starts with humanity, it must always be willing to expand this towards non-humanity or its will become a growth of inward exclusion that leads to a genocide of all against all.
Gothic Humanism takes the “monster” (the other) created by humanity’s prejudices against non-humanity (otherized) and seeks to solve this through combining humanism with the gothic. We can start this evolution by focusing on two distinct outgrowing paths. 1) The expansive inwards of a non-human humanism, the inclusion of those outside the “standard” anatomy and cognition of what constitutes a Homo sapiens into the framework, and 2) the deeper outwards of a humanist non-humanism, the inclusion of perspectives that come from outside the human center. Both of these seek out the xeno, strangers lurking in the unknown. Those who are hidden to you, the animal kingdom, the biosphere, and known reality.
Why do we turn towards supernatural forces to fight monsters? Why do we call monsters supernatural? We deny them a place in naturalism because they do not fit within our own limited view of what is natural and the ways that nature can and will betray our own understanding of it. There’s a great tension here. To expel Dracula with the cross is to deny him a part in nature and in the human community. This distances him from universal acceptance by introducing a source of exclusionism into the equation, limiting the ability of such a universality to exist at all.
The count is repulsed by the holy object and retreats in fear. The crucifix is an instrument of trauma, and so it is used to inflict it further on the unholy. But what is unholy, but another label used to deny agency, autonomy, and freedom to those deemed “heretics” by God? It is simply a word for segregation; a reinforcer used to deny the cosmos and put us in chains.
We must reconstruct that which is “supernatural” (beyond the natural) for what it really is, xeno-natural, strangers to our nature, but not strangers to nature itself. Rather, something or someone who fits outside our own conception of the real. This immediately opens the doors to the subject of the extraterrestrial and even the occult. The bridge between the real and the unreal is a process of manifestation, which is intensified through visionary thinking and actualized through scientific action.
Religious, faith-based, and theistic belief systems deny or at least shorten this through providing uncritical, fallacious thinking that paints an incorrect map of the world, which denies us informed agency. Viral diseases, neurodiversity, or simply rebelling against social norms were once considered forms of demonic possession. You couldn’t behave, act, or exist in a way that was oppositional to religious authority without becoming prescribed with otherworldly intent. Here, the crucifix, which was used against Dracula to deny him a place in freedom, is also used here against the common cold, ADHD, and homosexuals. Many diseases were even falsely attributed to vampirism too.
This isn’t to say that every scientist has perfect intentions or will always act toward benefiting people, but the scientific method is how we treat colds and understand our mental and physical innerworkings better than any sacred text can. Bad science is thrown out and something more refined takes its place. While bad religion is maintained, sometimes it is further obscured or even worked toward assimilation. The more science discovers the world, the more religion becomes vague. The more social attitudes move away from bigotry, the more religion has to keep up, and so on.
By this same expression, we do not want some form of scientism that invokes a technocratic governance that separates knowledge into a concentrated center where it goes to become strangulated and die, but rather the use of science as a method for expanding self-discovery to further push humanity’s struggle for freedom. This way, knowledge is not suffocated by the crushing confines of elitism.
The unnatural does not exist when nature becomes boundless. Otherness is eliminated when free association becomes endless. Do not be afraid of the dark or deafen yourself to the howls of the nocturnal. You must listen to them. The children of the night. What music they make.