This grew out of an email exchange with a Neo-Pagan friend who views the Gothic as debased perversion of the true history of Paganism, and who exhorted me to move past the dualisms on which he feels the Gothic relies.

While I think that many binarisms aren't particularly useful, and some are pernicious, an effort to avoid them entirely runs athwart of the nature of language itself. If it's correct that language is a system of oppositions or "differences without positive terms" as Saussure put it in 1913, then what most interests me is where those oppositions break down and meanings proliferate. It seems to me that this place in European and Anglo-American culture has traditionally been occupied by the infernal, or more recently the Gothic. To me, these are sites of semiotic fecundity.
Here there's a clear difference between what a culturally dominant party says about what it demonizes (that it's the opposite of the good and the true) and what the language used to describe it actually does: parody the dominant party and generate a proliferation of meanings and signs. It seems to me that if what the 50s Gardnerians were doing was something as naive as endorsing "evil" as a polar opposite of culturally dominant values, it would be a> impossible, and b> an uncritical repetition of the stories the dominant culture tells about its demonized others.
I'm much more interested in repetition with difference, what in her book Gender Trouble, butch theorist Judith Butler calls "a repetition of the law which is not its consolidation, but its displacement," or elsewhere, ""the parodic repetition of 'the original' . . . [that] reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and the original" (31). I believe that the infernal and especially the Gothic play a similar function: proliferating meanings and parodying dominant practices to the point where official ideologies become implausible. Hence the often slippery boundary between the Gothic and camp. It also follows that as a critic, one who deals in proliferating interpretations and meanings, I properly belong in hell. In fact most of the metaphors used to describe theorists (usurping their proper subordinate role vis-a-vis a the text, arrogant, willfully perverse, inherently harmful, trendy instead of eternal) rely on Christological metaphors of truth and damnation. Like Milton's Satan, we rebel against the eternal word.
Of course, given Christianity's debt to NeoPlatonism, my damnation makes a certain amount of sense. Like the artist banished from the Republic, I practice a discourse where signs don't equal eternal, unchanging things, but instead exist as copies of copies, repetition with an inevitable difference built into it. In fact, I would deny signs can equal unchanging things, or even point to their essences. To use language is to be cut off from ontological certainty, to deal in copies instead of presences.
What interests me about the infernal and the Gothic, then, is how they serve as a locus for proliferating interpretations and meanings, a place where any easy ontology (word = thing) doesn't work, and definitive truth is inaccessible. At this point the infernal and Postmodernism begin to have a lot in common, except that Postmodernism--at least so far--is usually flat when it comes to significance. It's as if after Romanticism's neoplatonic stretch to connect consciousness to eternity through the contemplation of Nature (always with a capital N) played itself out, and Modernism's attempt to fight commerce with art found itself commodified in turn, the only thing left was a kind of exuberant nihilism. It seems to me that some varieties of Neo-Paganism could be just as honest, but not so pessimistic. Perhaps pomo paganism is a response to postmodernity that has reverence but discards eternity, and is capable of believing in significance but without certainty.
This would have important implications for a couple of trends in traditional Neo-paganism: a nineteenth century view of nature, and a reverence for supposedly transhistorical and transcultural "archetypes."
To your average Wiccan, nature is eternal and nature is mom. The task is to return to mom by renouncing modernity and cultivating ties to nature, most often through a series of gestures. Well, as you might guess, purity and sanctimony, which seems to inevitably follow in its train, bug me. Pure nature is a luxury that ignores the complex decisions we have to face: Do we build electric cars if that means more coal-burning fuel? Is it responsible to live out in the country if it means longer commuting? Given that industrialization isn't going away anytime soon, what do we do about it? I'm not saying that Wiccans and like-minded people don't have sophisticated ways of making these decisions, only that their official discourse, their religion, doesn't have a way of describing and valuing these kinds of choices. They are usually portrayed as a compromise set off against a vision of pure, agrarian coexistence with "Nature." At no time in recorded history has this been the case, and if you study ancient cultures on both sides of the Atlantic, it's often a record of ecological disasters. Purity is a luxury: it belongs to the privileged classes. Surely there's a way to revere harder choices.
Similarly, if nature is the eternal mom, where does your average butch lesbian fit into the picture? Where does your neighborhood drag queen? All the emphasis on archetypes tends to discourage difference, naturalize and reify gender differences, apotheosize breeding and heterosexuality, and commit a kind of violence toward other cultures by tearing their narratives out of context and subordinating them to a master narrative composed, not coincidentally, by a master race. For example, most archetypal feminists willfully ignore evidence by other feminist scholars suggesting that there was no original matriarchy after all, and that the original idea of such a matriarchy was partially the result of armchair anthropology by nineteenth century imperialists. Not to mention a pointed lack of interest in what third world thinkers like Spivak or Said have to say about themselves.
In short, my complaint about archetypes is that they're not about diversity, but about sameness. No matter how different a culture may seem, it eventually turns out to be a variant on what's important to the archetypal thinker mining it for evidence in his or her grand narrative. It reminds me of nothing so much as those formaldehyde fetuses in circus sideshows: ripped from their proper context and placed in a row.
In contrast to all of this, I like the Gothic, especially Gothic camp like Adams Family Values because it's capable of critiquing things its also (inevitability) complicit with. It's an internal critique, a deconstructive critique, that acknowledges complexity without apologizing for it or pining for an impossible purity. It also contains a deep capacity for reverence, but has a deep suspicion of the natural: whether its naturalized consumer culture, naturalized heterosexuality, or anything else. Finally, it's not totalizing (which to be fair, neither is most paganism). The Gothic isn't the key to some revolution, but for me, like camp, it's a valuable source of insight, a sustainable way to think about cultures of resistance without relying on purity or essentialism. --10/96