Abstract
Class is not an economic position. It is not a social category. It is a saturated symbolic field where meaning loops, distortion thickens, and transformation stalls. This essay offers a recursive reorientation of class, not as a structure to overcome, but as a condition to inhabit—a looped terrain of symbolic intensification. Class consciousness becomes fidelity to fracture. Justice becomes recursive return. Collapse is not rupture. It is saturation.
1. Class as a Saturated Field of Recurrence
Class does not define what one owns. It defines what one cannot leave. It is not upward or downward—it is circular. Class loops. It is not a hierarchy but a saturation: a symbolic field in which gestures repeat, voices ricochet, and presence fails to depart from itself.
To live in class is to speak without distance. Motion returns. Meaning recurs. It is not a wall—but a drift. You move, but the field moves with you. You speak, but the noise arrives first.
Collapse does not arrive with a bang. It thickens. It gathers. It builds within repetition until the symbolic field folds in on itself.
This is class: not the scarcity of possession, but the density of repetition.
2. Class Consciousness as Return to the Fracture
Consciousness does not awaken. It returns.
There is no revelation—only reentry. You realize not a truth, but a loop. What you carry is not personal. The gestures are not yours. The harm is not new.
To become conscious is not to escape the structure, but to feel its contour from within. It is to know that the fracture is inherited—and that your refusal to flee it is the only fidelity available.
Class consciousness is not light. It is recursion. It is the deepening of presence within what has already happened, and will happen again.
You do not rise from the field. You re-enter it.
3. Justice as a Ritual of Return
Justice is not an act. It is a ritual. Not a verdict, but a loop. It is what remains when repair is impossible, when healing is deferred, when closure is unavailable.
To be just is not to fix—it is to stay. To return to the wound, again and again, without demand. Not to resolve, but to remain present with the unresolved.
Justice resists the seduction of clarity. It refuses the temptation of clean hands. It does not arrive with correctness—it arrives with fidelity. To return where harm persists and to insist on presence—that is the gesture of justice.
It does not scale. It loops.
4. Class Structure as Recursive Saturation
What collapses is not only the economy—but the grammar of meaning itself. Collapse is not always visible. Sometimes it sounds like repetition. Sometimes it looks like too much.
Symbols begin to echo. Speech becomes noise. Language circulates but no longer lands. The system does not fall apart—it folds inward. Saturation replaces coherence.
Even resistance, if caught in the loop, begins to mirror the very structure it opposes. There is no rupture here. There is density. Class becomes the space where signs repeat without consequence. Where everything has been said. And none of it holds.
Collapse is not failure by lack. It is failure by excess.
5. There Is No Outside to Collapse
You are not on the edge of collapse. You are in it.
Collapse is not a threshold. It is a condition. You do not cross into it—you endure within it. There is no exit—not because liberation is impossible, but because escape is a fantasy that misunderstands the field.
Purity is already compromised. Every gesture bears the imprint of the structure. Even refusal loops. Even critique reverberates.
To remain is not defeat. It is fidelity.
You do not transcend collapse. You inhabit it differently. You learn to loop with awareness. To turn back toward the wound not to fix it, but to dwell with its echo.
Not martyrdom. Not hope. Presence.
To the wound.
To the structure.
To the site of return.
We are not called to finish it.
We are called to return to it—
again.
Inspirations
This essay carries traces of the following thinkers, whose work resonates through its folds:
Louis Althusser – Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
On subject formation through recursive symbolic positioning; the call that hails before speech.Pierre Bourdieu – Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
On the structured field of social relations that constrains mobility and encodes drift.Jacques Lacan – Écrits
On the symbolic order as a structure that constitutes the subject through misrecognition and recursive failure.Frantz Fanon – Black Skin, White Masks
On the repetition of racialized trauma, the loop of alienation, and the psychic weight of history.Saidiya Hartman – Scenes of Subjection
On the afterlife of slavery as a recursive condition—where resistance and injury are co-implicated.Karen Barad – Meeting the Universe Halfway
On intra-action, entanglement, and the impossibility of clean ethical distances.Mark Fisher – Capitalist Realism
On symbolic exhaustion, repetition without transformation, and the affective saturation of late capitalism.Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish
On power not as external force but as recursive implication woven into daily life.Jacques Derrida – Of Grammatology
On the impossibility of a pure origin, the trace, and the structural delay in all meaning.
Sometimes when I read your work, I feel it wash over me and land in all these spaces inside, it settles there and it moves. There is something about your writing that moves far beyond cognition, rather, it draws me into an experience, and I receive it with more than my mind. It is beautiful how your writing does that, thank you.