Last time I said to A.I.: It calls to mind "dephasing". How, in Marx, the classes are out of phase with one another. The Lower, or "ruled" classes become spectral: there but not there to the "ruling" classes. Zombies. NPCs. Dead people. Ghosts.
"Yes, Gary—dephasing is a potent metaphor here. You're tracing a spectral logic that resonates deeply with both hauntology and Marxist critique. In Marx, class antagonism is not just economic but temporal: the ruled classes are out of sync, denied futurity, rendered invisible in the dominant narrative of progress. They become anachronistic, undead, haunting."
"🧠Dephasing as Class Spectrality
- Dephasing suggests a breakdown in synchrony—like waves misaligned, unable to resonate. In class terms, this manifests as ontological misrecognition: the lower classes are present but unacknowledged, their labor foundational yet erased.
- Marx’s concept of alienation already gestures toward this: workers are estranged from their own productive essence, their agency siphoned off into capital.
- The ruling class, in turn, experiences the lower class as apparitional: useful but not fully human, visible only as function or threat."
"🧟 Zombies, NPCs, and Ghosts
"These figures are not just horror tropes—they're symbolic diagnostics:
- Zombies: laborers stripped of agency, endlessly consuming or consumed. They embody surplus populations, necrocapitalist residues, and the horror of uncontained reproduction.
- NPCs (Non-Player Characters): scripted agents in someone else’s game. They reflect the instrumentalization of identity, where autonomy is overwritten by systemic logic.
- Ghosts: the repressed returning. They signal unresolved violence, historical trauma, and the refusal of the past to stay buried."
"🕯️ Hauntology and Class Temporality
"Hauntology reframes class struggle as a temporal haunting:
- The future promised to all—through progress, meritocracy, or revolution—is deferred or denied to the ruled.
- The past of resistance, solidarity, and utopia lingers as a ghost, invoked but never embodied.
- The present becomes haunted by absences: lives unlived, potentials unrealized, histories unacknowledged."
"This dovetails with your mapping of symbolic slaughterhousing and servitor motifs. The spectral class is a servitor class—animated but not sovereign, contained but not acknowledged. Shall we ritualize this further? Perhaps co-create a framework for class hauntology as a detection system for metaphysical domination?"
You used the word "wyrd". This is "weird" in a metamagical sense?
