#but yeah hmmm the gendered aspects of this are kind of wild too tho

[queen-mabs-revenge]

so this post by @ardentlake about the references to the drowned towns of wales in the way set all my neurons firing, because for real the way that the series takes these real and overwhelming violences on marginalized people (the drowned towns, industrial injury and death, systematic deprivation and alienation) and tells their story through surreal myth recounting is so fucking....

all i keep thinking about is how the way is in reality a work of gothic marxism? which margaret cohen describes as:

(1) the valorization of the realm of a culture’s ghosts and phantasms as a significant and rich field of social production rather than a mirage to be dispelled; (2) the valorization of a culture’s detritus and trivia as well as its strange and marginal practices; (3) a notion of critique moving beyond logical argument and the binary opposition of a phantasmagorical staging more closely resembling psychoanalytic therapy, privileging nonrational forms of ‘working through’ and regulated by overdetermination rather than dialectics; (4) a dehierarchization of the epistemological privilege accorded the visual in the direction of that integration of the senses dreamed of by Marx in The 1844 Manuscripts….and (5) a concomitant valorization of the sensuousness of the visual: the realm of of visual experience is opened to other possibilities that the accomplishment and/or figuration of rational demonstration.

like it's almost a textbook case?

(1) the ghost of denny driscoll as a literal ghost of himself but also a ghost of welsh working class struggle crushed by neoliberal capitalism exemplified by thatcherism. every time geoff sees denny's ghost or thinks about his death by suicide you see the past flashes of the miner's strike struggle being violently suppressed. but also their very first interaction is geoff clinging to 'rationality and sensibility' against denny's 'romance' and 'the fight' to try and maintain a fingernail grip on any remnants of bare survival in the miserable status-quo

owen seeing denny's ghost in the labyrinth of the drowned town in his dreams handing him the gift of united working class struggle against oppression - that if we're in conversation with our ghosts instead of dispelling them, we can learn key parts of our own present liberatory process - that we will then hand down as ghosts to the generations coming

(2) the valorisation of the "cultural detritus" - cohen talks about cultural detritus as the things that are seen as extraneous or superfluous to the capitalist ruling class - that can be anything from entire people as in the case of colonized and indigenous peoples at the sharp end of capitalist imperialism, down to the fragments of communal human existence that serve no capital gains - so like everything from our folk arts and narratives to the human experience of communal kindness and help.

you see this in the deep scars of alienation in the way from the drowned towns that were literally made into detritus by the English ruling class being the link between wakefulness and dreams and understanding, the red monk standing over the detritus of the walls of the original abbey smelting works, the pilot light of the factory as a bit of superstitious detritus cast away by the owning investment company even and especially in their attempt to 'better the factory and the town' (their profit margin).

how all of these things when embraced are can fuel the fight against emiseration and alienation

(3) the phantasmagorical staging of the dreaming, the withdrawal hallucinations, the ghosts, and the way those aren't discarded by the narrative. that they give insight into the waking moments of the escape, and even in the terror of the unknown ahead of them give them strength even as oppressive forces close in. how these moments of surrealism aren't removed from the characters' experiences but inform and hone their decisions.

(4) not discarding the sensory experiences of the characters that lie outside of the senses accepted as relevant to science and industry (how the characters start to become unalienated when they reclaim those sensory inputs). the ideas from marx's 1844 works cohen's referring to are that marx talks about alienation as an expression of how under a system of private property, the senses that confirm ownership are prioritised as not just all-important but the limitations of sensory experience. that in order to have a truly liberated human sensuality, we have to get rid of the system of private property.

you get nods to bridging that alienation in the way from how geoff can't shake the feelings churning in him from seeing a fellow worker's self-immolation, to the senses of comradery towards Anna that extend beyond the rigid bourgeois family unit even in the face of possibly being disappeared, to the feelings of wrongness and instinct that are leaned into by the entire group as they make their way through the dangers of the violent state surveillance hurdles of 'illegal' migration.

(5) but also embracing the senses that are seen as valid and rational but bringing them into their full expression by removing the false binary with the other possible senses of the phantasmagorical, psychological and dreaming, putting the characters as a direct opposition to the nostalgic rigid regurgitation of the repressive violence of the state. all of that as an antidote to the alienation that all of the characters feel as cast-offs of capitalism, imperialism, xenophobia. a way to make these broken characters take a step towards finding a measure of wholeness.

there's so much more there and i'm just vomiting out my immediate thoughts, but yeah imo the way is def a work that uses ideas of gothic marxism in its surreal speculative fictive narrative to tell the story of oppression from the point of view of the marginalised