“What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?” Jacques Lacan famously posited. Grounded as it is in a neosemantic paradigm, Lacan’s discourse elides the more contextually utilitarian premise qua Baudrillard, i.e.: what do these hypothetical lovers matter if none of them gives you a universe of righteous, booming 5.1 sound?

As we consider the Gateway GMAX 5100 5.1 Speaker System, we encounter a mythopoetical paradox, a fluid tension between masculine and feminine, between figure and ground, between totally heavy and way lame. It can only be resolved – or, some would say, suborned – through invoking a nonconstructivist textual interpolation.

In vulgarly mechanistic terms, this speaker sextet centers on an 150-watt subwoofer augmented by five 30-watt satellite speakers, “pumping out some seriously bitchin’ thump & crackle” (Heimerwein, M. (1973) Morphogenetics Come Alive!, University of Alabama Press).

Further, magnetic shielding on the speakers prevents interference with monitor picture quality, and a wired control box allows the user to adjust the levels of each speaker. The implications for postconstructivism are, to say the least, obvious.

The predominantly semanticist approach of the Hamburg school fails to address the primary issues of class identity, psychosexuality, and the unresolved need for brain-blasting surround sound to fully appreciate F.E.A.R.. Through a close prediscoursal reading of the context/metacontext surrounding the Gateway GMAX 5100 5.1 Speaker System, we at once subsume and transcend the strictures of neodialectic theory and enter a mediated landscape of epistemological flux, emancipatory postconstructivism, and “bumpin’ noise pounding your eardrums from all directions” (Forsch, B. and Andujar, J. (1982) Rotations: The Failure of Presituationism in the Works of Herzog, Milwaukee University Press).

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