(We would like to thank the estate of the late Ms. Fehta Murghana for the use of her accumulated papers on conspiracy and allied areas; t[his paper originally appeared in hard-copy only in Perforations 2, Aesthetics/Conspiricies/Politics.rc] The following paper is a compilation by the staff of Perforations of Ms. Murghana's notes and marginalia as well as more extended writing which were evidently meant as chapter beginnings of a book in progress, primarily on technology and the occult. We have not attempted to discern her organizational plan and have effected only minor grammatical changes. The title we have taken from her margin notes. There is still a vast amount of material which we have left out, particularly on Germany, but which may find its way into future issues. We are sure that the community of folklore and Islamic scholars mourns her passing.)
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And (bethink you of) the Day when We remove the hills and ye see the earth emerging, and We gather them together so as to leave not one of them behind.
sura 18, The Koran.
THE PUNCTURE EFFECT: ENCRYPTED SPACE,
MODERNISM AND THE HOARSE MEN OF THE APOCALYPSE
Look at all these rumors
rumors everywhere
I'm sure there'll be rumors
rumors on Judgement Day.
current pop song
Strictly speaking, the messianic era would most definitely not allow for rumor on Judgement Day. In that time (which would be the beginning of the end of time--or at least history as we have known it) the very structure of rumor would collapse, as would all conspiracies, as would all 'shadow' events, or para-events (on the surface at least, deconstruction and information theory propose a similar, secular collapse)---all that is opaque is made transparent, all that is hidden is revealed, logos would become act, performance, gesture, (the Word made Flesh); all would be reconciled, revealed, and redeemed. There would be no place for rumor and no need for conspiracy.
But meanwhile, back at Gotham City: while the messianic impulse has not come to fruition, neither has it been liquidated (and if it seems to have disappeared it is as a subliming rather than liquifaction). All cultures have some form of shadow/event relationships and in the course of time subtend theological or mythological spheres. The dissolution of those arenas (making the big assumption that they ever truly do dissolve) does not mean the dissolution of the rumorological or the conspiratorial. In fact we might observe that with their disappearance as active agents and with the rise of informatics and technical media structures, the shadow has found a new base of operations and, in telematics, has found a new body: an old Word made into a new Flesh, the restitution of the daemonic in the heart of the transistor. (...The daemonic as this inexorable, pre-millenial split between shadow and event, the uncollapsible degree of difference which the messianic would erase and which techné seeks to elucidate by giving voice to all particles.)
In the contemporary information-rich arena all events generate informational doubles as the primary event cascades through layers of information services and processing, at each stage of which hermeneutic processes come into play. This iterative process is a ramifying complexification unlike the computational process which is one of simplification and algorithmic composition (the point being that the latter gives rise to the former but in an incalculable manner).
We can only weave a web here that imbricates the simultaneous necessity and disavowal of necessity of rumor/conspiracy with the western ontotheological impulse which Heidegger identified, and the affiliation of such dialogue with action-at-a-distance schemes, starting with language and moving to technology. The displaced centrality that conspiracy represents is a battle for meaning and interpretation that virtually defines western culture and which, in every era, finds manifestation in marginalia, occlusion and reason's appetite for parsing the world into the acceptable and the unacceptable (while neatly eliding reason's own justification for being). Here is the home of conspiracy, rumor, the occult, the paranormal, art, mesmerism, spiritualism, UFOs, certain forms of horror, invasions of all kinds and the general cacophony of meaning and interpretation which, discredited by the scientific attitude and reason's razor, refuse to go away, refuse to lie down and play dead: or rather, promptly get up and claim to be ghosts.
·
the apparitional, the conspiratorial, the aesthetic; the hunger for signs created ex nihilo, for portents: nothing is more emblematic of the current age than the transferral of the 'apparitional impulse' to the billboard: the movie screen type surface combines with commodity fetishism to reach its completion as an apparition which veers hysteresistically or orthogonally on the surface. The fecundity of the apparitional impulse is enhanced, we can now see, not diminished, by the image. The idea that "the fissure of the image ruptures myth: it provides evidence against it" (Benjamin's Images, Ackbar Abbas,New German Critique 58) is a somewhat forlorn hope. The cathected, problematic, error-ridden nature of the image, which Benjamin not only assented to but agreed was the source of the image's power, is the very thing that allows many fractures--not only materialist---to develop (fissure/fracture not being solely a linear development). This is the only toe hold that the apparitional requires. In fact it may now find that its entry into the world is facilitated and need not be forced but instead begins to ooze more or less continuously, seeping through a million cracks, every commodity, artifact, every media interface providing a sort of Josepheson Junction where the apparition can tunnel through apparently solid imagery to appear (of course, the artifact, just like the junction, has been carefully 'doped' or prepared beforehand by the minute addition of a foreign material. Its channeling capabilities should come as no surprise since that is what it was designed for, although the site of this preparation is in the subconscious and whatever that subtends.)
The 'moment of danger' (an ethical danger, no doubt) for all hermeneutic acts, regardless of ideology, lies here because here (which is really an infinitely deferred 'there') is where 1) ideology tries to control and define itself by interpreting its own imagistic 'misprisions' and 2) where it confronts its perpetual other (which it is 'doped' with), that which threatens the coherency of its world view, the point where it makes contact with--threatens to fuse with--its opposite.
·
The apparition--the nucleus of Marianism in the absence of scriptural 'facts'--has invariably been an instrument of conquest, 'evangelization', revival and agitation.
Under the Heel of Mary, Nicolas Perry and Loreto Echeverría
Conquest and religious imagery has seemingly always been a part of the western tradition; however, the esoteric and empire seem, in general, to be co-terminus and a continuous part of human history. Secrecy, apparitions and domination seem to be cut from the same cloth. For example, see Demons, Imagination, and the Incas, Sabine MacCormack, in Representations 33, for a brief examination of the forces involved in contact between radically heterogeneous groups. Of course, there is a vast amount of material on contact between the West and the very early Americas.
(Computer scientist and UFO researcher Jacques Vallee presents this interesting piece of information in his book revelations: "As early as World War I the German military actually used artificial smoke on which to project an image of the Virgin Mary, her arms outstretched in a gesture of piece. This was projected over the trenches in an attempt to confuse the French. [See the catalogue of Special Effects Services of TRI-ESS Science, Inc.] p. 163)
The hope of the political is always punctured (de-flated). But what is the nature of 'hope' (as destiny), the 'political' (as the gathering of the energies of the social in its most overt ramifications of the implications of its groupings and alliances), and, most mysterious of all, the 'punctum' (explosions, reversals, misprisions, sheer incomprehensibility) which seems to tie it all together and makes everything work even as (or because) it is falling apart?
In order to think a multiplicity of power without totality, there must be a necessary reference to an absence that allows for 'the experience of a difference which is not yet at the disposal of human beings. whose advent does not take place within human history and which cannot be established therein'.
Claude Lefort Permanence of the Theological-Political?
in Democracy and Political Theory
quoted by Birmingham, Time of the Political in Grad. Fac. Jour. Phil. v.
14#2/v.15#1
To the genealogist of normative representations, philosophical hubris declares itself in legislative, not transgressive, acts.
R. Schürman, Ultimate Double Binds in Grad. Fac. etc.
What would public life be like under the disparate versions of universalizing principles and of the singular subverting them---the version whose functional origin is the "event turned against itself"? Faced with the apparatus set into place by the univocal law, this tragic knowledge hardly ever has a chance. It may even lack legitimacy in the polity.
ibid
Concerning the law, the other thinking no longer traces the genealogy of epochal nomethesis, but its origin in the event of appropriation-expropriation. From that other viewpoint, the law remains traversed by the nocturnal retraction denied to it by the attraction of diurnal order.
ibid 220
Marked by technicity, life becomes impenetrable to experience to the point that a thick mutism covers the originary condition.
ibid 223
Walter Benjamin has written quite a bit on the fate of experience in the modern era: "...if today 'having counsel' is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence we have no counsel either for ourselves or others. After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding. To seek this counsel one would first have to be able to tell the story." and "Every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information...The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks." [p. 86 and 89. The Storyteller in Illuminations.] It seems increasingly clear today that this babble of information has found a counselor and its name is Conspiracy. The dismemberment of the world under the sign of information finds re-assembly--which is simply a continuation of the old assemblies--under Benjamin's melancholic sign of Saturn "which 'as the highest planet and the one farthest from everyday life, the originator or all deep contemplation, calls the soul from externalities to the inner world, causes it to rise higher, finally endowing it with the utmost knowledge and the gift of prophecy.'" [quoted by Benjamin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 149] )
But how are we to think of "experience" here? Certainly the senses are working and impacting on something called the self or personality etc.? Yes but the senses are conveying a carefully crafted constellation of sensory impulses which have been brought into existence in a 'technical' sort of way via the media. Don't we think of experience , in its purest form, as being, not necessarily un-mediated, but in large part, un-pre-meditated?
This "mutism" (the subjective expression of this would be autism which "...symptomatically constitutes a part of the social fantasies of advanced capitalism: withdrawal, desocialization by depoliticization, individualism, autarkic communities as 'reterritorializations.'" [Gérard Raulet, The New Utopia: Communication Technologies, Telos, #87] is one source of that reverse movement or retraction (another being the inexorable 'doubleness' of language and consciousness. The technicity/life doubling echoes that fundament.) Or perhaps it would be better to say that another system of experience is put into place, a system based on systematicity, schematic-ness, planning, mediation, etc. (e.g. Lyotard's explication of a Leibnitizian expanding monad: "The electronic and informational network spread over the earth gives rise to a global capacity for memorizing which must be estimated on the cosmic scale, incommensurable with that of traditional cultures. The paradox implied by this memory resides in the fact that in the last analysis it is nobody's memory. But 'nobody' here means that the body supporting that memory is no longer an earthbound body. Computers are ceaselessly able to synthesize more and more 'times', so that Leibniz could have said of this process that it is the way to producing a monad much more 'complete' than humanity itself has ever been able to be.
The human race is already under the necessity of having to evacuate the solar system in four and a half billion years. It will have been the transitory vehicle for an extremely improbable process of complexification. The exodus is already on the agenda. The only chance of success lies in the species adapting itself to the complexity that challenges it. And if the exodus succeeds, what it will have preserved is not the species itself but the 'most complete monad' with which that species was pregnant."(Time Today, Jean-François Lyotard, Oxford Literary Review #11)
However, for Lyotard such a state of "complete information means neutralizing more events." Such a complete stabilization of the environment by the techno-scientific apparatus would mean that ..."among the events which the program attempts to neutralize as much as it can, one must, alas, also count the unforseeable effects engendered by the contingency and freedom proper to the human project."
Lyotard opposes this 'expansive monad' of control, forestalling of the event, storing up time through capital, the substitution (which Lyotard designates as the post-modern break) of the human project by the techno-scientific program and the construction of a universal symbolic language, to a poetic ontology:..."ought language rather to be thought after the fashion of a field of perception, capable of 'making sense' by itself independently of any intention to signify? Sentences, in that case, far from being under the responsibility of the speakers, should rather be thought of as discontinuous and spasmodic concretions of a continuous 'speaking medium',... Among these language modes...free conversation, reflexive judgement and meditation, free association (in the psychoanalytic sense), the poetic and literature, music, the visual arts, everyday language. What matters in these modes is clearly the fact that all should generate occurrences before knowing the rules of this generativity, and that some of them even have no concern for determining those rules....What these diverse or even heterogeneous forms have in common is the freedom and lack of preparation with which language shows itself capable of receiving what can happen in the 'speaking medium', and of being accessible to the event. To the point that one can wonder whether the true complexity does not consist in this possibility rather than in the activity of 'reducing and constructing' language, as Carnap proposed to do." (Time Today, Jean-François Lyotard, Oxford Literary Review #11)
For whatever the problems in such propositions and oppositions, Lyotard's formulation of a poetic ontology does point to the shadow realm where conspiracy, rumor, the under-cut of the socio-political take on aspects of resistance to the 'expansive monad'. The fact that it is unformulated (and unformulatable except at considerable distance, thereby losing its efficacy) and trickster-like quality only add to its power to define by blurring and failure to identify itself as 'strategy' (that is, politics).
(Rumor, conspiracy, etc. has something of the mythical 'Trickster' quality around and about their workings, albeit on a somewhat more 'normalized' scale. "Wherever you encounter trickster phenomena, they cause surprise, dismay, amazement, irritation, angst, joy, or shock. Something is going on that is fishy, that is 'not right.' You no longer know what is going on; you lose your composure and your 'footing': the existing system of consciousness is jeopardized and distorted."
"This is the reason why Karl Kerényi identifies Trickster as the spirit of disarray, the enemy of boundaries and limiting systems. As a violator of boundaries, he appears wherever we find borderline conditions, dissolution, and change. His realm is the dubious and ambiguous, the nebulous, the uncertain, and his main characteristic lies in his contrary, polar nature. By means of this paradoxicality, he transgresses and breaks through any established, unambiguous, and thus one-sided system of human consciousness and norms of societal organization." Lutz Müller, Psi and the Archetype of the Trickster, in Artifex, p. 32. In the realm of theory, we could now proceed to Derrida's The Law of Genre [actually much of his writing points to the nebulous realm of boundary conditions] and also to the work of Russian theorist Mikhail Baktin and his theories of carnavalization and heteroglossia.)
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Only a fiction can make us believe that laws are made to be respected...Illegalism constitutes an absolutely positive element in social functioning, whose role the general strategy of society includes in advance.
Foucault quoted in Ultimate Double Binds p.233
·
event and shadow
diurnal attraction--nocturnal retraction (see Reading Chiasms: An Introduction in A. Warminski, Readings in Interpretation: In his introduction, Rudolf Gasché explores the indeterminacy of borders through the figure of reversibility known as chiasm and Jacque Derrida's concept of double invagination. Both figures act to thwart totality and enclosure while still giving an appearance of unity. Reason's dialectical process, which continually brings concepts to visibility, briefly, before pushing them 'upwards' is undone by a figure which is determinative of the borders of the dialectic [which makes it indeterminative]. The significance of this for a theory of the para-event--the conspiratorial--should be obvious.)
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"The reification of time not only has eroded the capability and communicability of experience--experience as memory, as awareness of temporality and mortality--but the very possibility of remembering, that is imagining, a different world."
Miriam Hansen, Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience : The Blue Flower in the Land of
Technology, New German Critique
the anomaly, the apparition (the appearance) if we can imagine such a thing, comes to seem as a de-reification--against all the odds--and a re-temporalization (that is, set up the viewer against or in relation--to a temporal flow, making it visible again out of the morass of technical media--stasis equipment which 'ends' history) by de-spatializing the subject,i.e., opening a 'time-less' mode--or Benjamin's everyday shot through with shards of Messianic Now Time (Jetztzeit).
(Is it possible for modern art to, willy nilly, re-impose this 'aura' [which would be a sort of reflectivity of the human gaze] on its products? No. It (art) was not the agent of its removal in the first place. It was a horse that was ridden.)
However: the connection with the sublime and Benjamin's landscape gazing back? Does the technological gaze back? It should, even more so than the landscape, given its production in the human arena. The fact that it is not perceived to do so (for the many reasons than Benjamin recounts) or that when it does gaze back only the red eyes of the daemonic is seen and is seen as due to techne's clthonic origins of humankind's relationship to materiality (and why Marxism was doomed to failure from the beginning even though Marx did notice the 'theological capers of commodities'.)
The governable aspect of materiality seems to always generate a shadow aspect, a wildly un-governable constellation which manifests a (not necesssarily dialectical) Other. In other words, under the close scrutiny of a philosophy of groundless conditionality, materiality itself becomes problematic and falls away as a 'given'.
It is perhaps possible to link the dissolution/dismemberment of social arenas (and the subsequent 'filling-up' again--the conspiratorial) with the modern reflective (and post-modern hyper-reflective) moment just as that loss of centricity is reflected in personal introspection. "...the process of introspection begins to dissolve the initial feeling of centricity so that the self appears merely as a range of physiological and kinetic activities with no determinable source; introspection becomes a dizzying process in which an intent observing ego undermines the sense of self in the very act of searching for it. The challenge such an observation presents to a tradition of psychiatric practice which has assumed absence of self-awareness to be one of the chief aspects of the disease process is radical" and presents us with a "vertiginously self-referential abyss" which somehow reveals (in schizophrenic writings) "a watching presence that is terrible, charged with mysterious intentionality, and that exercises a relentless lethal power." (p. 574, Becoming the Alien Protagonist: Dramas of Dementia and Gnosis, J.R. Goodall, in New Literary History, #22) The release of technical media worldwide provides an increasingly reflective undersurface to Baudrillard's hypersphere. Here the red eyes. Here the new gnosticism. "The idea of gnosis is radically involved with the idea of conspiratorial drama in gnostic mythologies as distinct in their genealogies as those of Valentinus, Mani, and 'Hermes Trismegistus.' The consciousness which has achieved gnosis sees itself constrained by inimical powers whose vested interest is in maintaining the boundaries, systems, and rules of a civilization under the control of nefarious metaphysical authorities;..." (ibid). Wakefulness--so often exhorted in both esoteric and rational systems-- (which amounts to extreme vigilance by the cogito) itself becomes the source of invasion (decay, dissolution, boundary disorder) and another order becomes apparent: "Against the proud and somewhat superficial confidence of Stoic psychology in the self as complete master in its own house, enjoying complete knowledge of what is and what occurs therein, the terrified gnostic glance views the inner life as an abyss from which dark powers rise to govern our being, not controlled by our will, since this will itself is instrument and executor of those powers." (Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 49, quoted in ...Dementia and Gnosis, Goodall, p. 569)
The increasingly collectivized and controlled nature of performance--specifically through film and video--de-values and undoes the 'apparitional moment' of Appearance, the 'tiny spark of accident' which Benjamin speaks of in his essay on photography. Unlike the photographic or artistic 'moment'-- that bit of movement which is then frozen and re-invested with value--the performative 'moment' is not a moment at all but a linked set of moments which strive to eliminate all seams and links (or at least their readily cognizable appearance). No feature of this second-order environment is unplanned. All elements must contribute to the narrative flow. (Perhaps even the avant garde attempts to disrupt this flow only feed it. Perhaps all that is needed is a frame for a control event to happen. Is this frame the same as Heideggerian Ge-stell?)
Historically, the apparitional moment might be seen as a puncture in the sphere of human affairs, depressurizing the frail vessel of human hopes by providing for their escape into yet another vessel (see Lyotard again) Yet the puncture does pull in its wake a stream of debris (Hilary Evans anomaly spill) which effect (and undoubtedly psych-social 'affect' also) socio-political formations of considerable power and control, the Marian cult in the Catholic Church being the best historical example.. Perry and Erria (in Under the Heel of Mary) give ample evidence of the power , at least until recently, of the apparitional moment and, in their view of its relation to the Church at least, profoundly conservative nature of, if not the event itself, the perceptions and controls which are almost immediately, as soon as an institution enters, laid upon it. It is almost as if the event were viewed as a puncture, releasing air, threatening both, strangely enough, asphyxiation and release almost at the same moment.
technical media as a virtual puncture.
·
(The pharmakonilogical effect-what I have been calling the puncture--is not only artificailly produced by technical media, but also by a great number of other 'strategies' on a varying scale of efficacy and autonomatism, the most potent being, no doubt, drug ingestion. Many books have been written on drug usuage in connection with various forms of ecstasies as well as technical manuals (for the medical and psychoanalytic professions) for the suppression of punctured states. In fact the industrial countries exist by virtue of a tight web of chemical dependency and psychotropic displacements induced and monitored by the Economic State. I include alcohol and tobacco addictions as well as prescribed psychotropes such as tranquillizers, etc. These drugs are more in the nature of blockers to cover perception of the new technologial sublime, to prohibit access to the old sublime-based on going past the 'end of the line', into the Beyond [which is where the dead 'live', isn't it/?] The contemporary sublime exists to block thoughts of the Beyond/dead while substituting an evacuated, desmembered, planar version -a topological sublime. Psychoanlaysis, blocker drugs and technical media block off one puncture only to open another, onto another vista: addiction and conspiracy. They become the signposts to let us know that we have entered the twentieth century. Up ahead, not even the Twilight Zone but:
Carlo Ginzsberg, in a much longer time span than we are accustomed to, traces certain ideas of the witches sabbath : " The trans-cultural diffusion of myths and rituals revolving around physiological asymmetry most probably sinks its psychological roots in this minimal, elementary perception that the human species has of itself-of its bodily image. Anything that modifies this image on a lieterary or metaphorical plane therefore seems particularly suited to express an experience that exceed the limits if what is human: the journey into the realm of the dead..." p. 242 [Ginzberg is here referring to the predominance of a motif of 'lameness' or 'ambulatory anomalies' in certain religious, mythological and occult traditions] and:"...in all situations in which society divides into two groups, has been recognized the expression of the supreme opposition-that between the living and the dead. p. 262. and: "In a society of the living-it has been said-the dead can only be impersonated by those who are imperfectly integrated into the social body."..."Rattles, coloured wheels, amnniotic rags, an excessive number of teeth stignmatized lepers, Jews heretics, benandanti, táltos [peasants from different areas who have ecstatic dreams-we would now say perhaps 'have out-of-body experiences'] and so on, as being situated, depending on the case, on the border between social cohabitation and confinement, between true faith and false beliefs, between the world of the living and the dead."..."At the root of the image of conspiracy was a very ancient theme reworked in new terms: the hostility of the recently deceased person-the marginal being par excellance-for the society of the living." [all on p. 300. Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches Sabbath, Carlo Ginzberg. For another view of 'death/beyond journeys'-the more modern, techno-sublime view would be 'beyond/death journeys'- see Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times, Carol Zaleski.] The puppet universe of technology confounds these dualitiesor perhaps we should say further overlaps them. At any rate, traditionally, the conspiratorial space is the space of the dead/undead and the socially dead-the marginal- and remains that to this day.
"Let me make this perfectly clear..." In a conspiratorial atmosphere, this is a statement which is impossible to bring to fruition, unless the origin of the statement can be fully identified. Of course this is precisely the problem: the agencies responsible for making the statement are also the only ones capable of tracing the statement. If we could not trust them in the first incident, why should we trust them in the second instant? Then perhaps another, outside, agent can be brought in. But who will validate this one and be sure that there has not been a contamination, that this agent has not been bought also? In fact, in a strong enough conspiratorial 'scene', only those who have a prior interest, would be interested in being an agent of investigation, but of course that very interest, either negative or positive, would be enough to disqualify that agent. This sort of vertiginous paradox is a well known one in philosophy (the barber who shaves the town folk but not himself, Socrates was a wise man, etc.) but once it becomes enacted in real, social life, a shadowy realm is released and a free-play arena is established--and once set up, it cannot be disproved. (in philosophy, Russell's theory of types is often invoked to dispel the paradoxes. In a social, political, cultural arena, however, escape to another level of explication only widens the problematic.)
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Modernities two antithetical moments:
"fabulous inventiveness and sudden evaporation of meaning."
James Rolleston, The Politics of Quotation: Walter
Benjamin's Arcades Project
Nothing characterizes the conspiratorial moment any better, with the proviso that the complete saturation of meaning comes to the same thing as evaporation of meaning (and, strictly speaking, evaporation is simply a change of state, one form has turned into another, albeit of a drastically different type. This is an indication that we are operating at the threshold of meanings, at the boundaries where meanings are constituted, where sense and nonsense merge. see the trickster.)
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"Whether we can grasp it or not, there is still the stubborn problem of what, through all demystification, may fulfill a desire for mystery."
Herbert Blau
Conspiracy fulfills this mystification, fiction-making, in that most visible of spaces, the public space. Here, in conspiracy, there is always more than meets the eye, in an inverse relation to the evidence for its presence. The lack of evidence even becomes a positive force of legitimation in a bizarre inversion of Popperian falsification. The new Cartesian space: "You can't see/prove me, therefore I am." The confluence of fictiveness (the performative, the theatrical) and the real (the banality and stability of the everyday) assures, through the extremely powerful mediating agency of technical media services, the predominance of the fiction/desire constellation. And it is not a question of choosing either the staleness of everyday life or the superheated, condensed, instantaneous world of film or television: it is that the everyday has been "saturated with theatricality" so that "...what we see of behavior is always subject to doubt, or as if a curtain were always rising on our experience. Or falling." [Blau, 97} And although the Brechtian theater that Blau points to seems often to say,'There is more here than meets the eye,' (while pulling the rug out from under all other 'mores' but one) this does not seem to help us, enmeshed in the everyday, to "put aside the feeling we might have, in an age of simulacra, that there is nothing to be seen except what meets the eye, which does so in such profusion that it has cancelled not only the social but any graspable sense of the real. " [Blau, 97]
It is not that the Aufklärung of the Enlightenment has failed and the transparency of communicative praxis has become clouded, again, with the old superstitions and myths. If such were the case, a new enlightenment, within the old enlightenment (a born-again enlightenment, as it were) could be called for: a new windshield installed, we could continue our drive toward that bright future underwritten by Kant, Marx, Habermas, etc. However, we can now see the faint cracks that are so multitudinous, caused by stress on the frame no doubt, that it appears as a screen and to replace it, and we do replace it from time to time, would simply mean to put into place a more reflective screen, such that the illusion of transparency is more fully exploitable.
The desired transparency of the public arena/political action and the communicative efficacy of its connection with the private sector has suffered a similar darkening with the difference that Shakespeare's refrain of "all the world's a stage..", when connected to the Brechtian chorus of "beware, there's more than meets the eye", leads to a rapidly escalating skein of conspiratorial belief-making, the province of which is further widened and deepened, but not clarified, with the introduction of technical media: rather than mediating various forms of distance (spatial, temporal, psychic, social) they introduce a rider clause.
·
If princely secret, or that of lobbying forces, is really the enemy of democracy, the utopia of transparency is just as disastrous to democratic representation as the disappearance of decorum is to feudal representation. Contrary to the Rousseauian ideal of the transparency of the general will to itself, the functioning of democratic representation also requires distance, delay, opacity. Kant understood this when he distinguished a democracy from a republic: the people do not know how to represent themselves immediately, but do so through the intermediary of representatives, whose representativity varies as the ratio of their number to that of the people they represent. [G. Raulet, The New Utopia: Communication Technologies, Telos # 87]
That opacity and lack of immediacy (and necessity of mediacy) provides the rumour field, a non-equilibrated, non-totalizable, yet finite, set of points, any one of which is capable of 'breaching' or puncturing the field as a whole: a rupture, always possible in the social space but seldom visible, that the 'ecstasy of communication' exacerbates. Clear channel communication merely provides more points of possible rupture; it certainly does not prevent the possibility of rupture (Derrida's point in La Carte Postale), which would be the Habermasian position, as well as, incidentally, the general managerial position. It would not be the Lyotardian position which Raulet somewhat misstates. "The rupture (Spaltung) has become the most general category for designating the different forms of schizophrenia: incoherence of thought and action, fantasmatic delirium, etc.--the sort of symptoms that turn up in the postmodern expressivity of the new communication technologies." ibid.
Any serious exploration of occult, surrealist, phantasmagoric gifts and phenomena presupposes a dialectical intertwinement to which a romantic turn of mind is impervious. For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. The most passionate investigation of telepathic phenomena, for example, will not teach us half as much about reading (which is an imminently telepathic process), as the profane illumination of reading about telepathic phenomena. And the most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is imminently narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the loiter, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug--ourselves--which we take to solitude.
Walter Benjamin
Surrealism p. 190, in Reflections
Such a view--which I applaud and probably agree with--nevertheless says that Benjamin probably never had such an experience--other than the hashish to which he equates occult phenomena. There is undoubtedly a transformative aspect on those so affected. However, I would differentiate, to some degree, the drug experience and the paranormal experience, if by nothing else, by intentionality.
Of course the idea of experience is crucial here, as it is in many other of Benjamin's writings. Benjamin's valorization of writing/thinking over the experential aspect of the 'drug' event or the 'occult' event is interesting but not unexpected. The force of the idea of mediation is a constant in Benjamin's writings, sometimes more, sometimes less so, as in the millenialistic writings. In those, as with the experential, its hard to tell whether hope or fear has the upper hand.
Schreber----evacuated experience, 'cursory contraptions'
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Schreber's father----physical education development
development of Freud's concept of paranoia
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development of Bell's telephone apparatus (speaking with the dead, body parts---connection to absent chora )
(The technological device as instrument for channeling the dead---a long legacy here. The late sixties and early seventies marked the emergence of so-called Raudive voices, basically being voices, of the unknown and of the famous, recorded on blank tape with the recording head disabled or recorded off radios set to channels for which there was no known signal then transmitting. [See also Telephone Calls From the Dead by D. Scott Rogo for more apparent telephonic interventions and channeling updated from Bell for more efficient contemporary packet transmission. One could also recall Derrida's story of refusing an apparent wrong number from Martin Heidegger. "What status of otherness can be ascribed to the Other somehow located in the telephone? The telephone has no site as its property, which makes it break down the limits of spatiality-this is what makes it uncanny, the inside calling from an internal outside. To what degree has the Other become a technologized command post, perhaps even a recording?The telephone appears to have procured a subject who in a Lacanian way, may well be headless, but only because the technoid headset doubles for a head that is no longer entirely there." The Telephone Book, Avital Ronel, p. 82.] Of course, the "discoverer" of these voices, Konstantin Raudive, was Latvian/German. I say "of course" because the Germans have a long history of channeling the dead as well as conceptual breakthroughs. If one wished to press a little harder rhetorically, one could say that the twentieth century was a German invention/discovery/breakthrough: Freud, Wittgenstein, Schoenberg, Nietzsche, Heidegger, rocketry, surveillance, total mobilization, WWII, you fill in the rest. [Raudive's book is entitled Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication With the Dead.]
connection of the idea of dis-memberment and the anatomical gaze as necessary correlates to technological development:"Technological instruments like the telescope and the microscope, the telephone and the television, the automobile and the airplane, are not merely or even primarily instruments which bridge distance. Rather, they are instruments called into being by the distance we have created, by the distance we have put between ourselves and the world, between our senses and the world of which they make sense. They become possible and necessary only when the distance between us and the world has increased." (Robert Romanyshyn, Technology as Symptom and Dream, p. 97) In Romanyshyn's view this distance is a result of a certain way of viewing, literally, the world, what he calls the anatomical gaze, the dispassionate, fixed gaze (which we might call analytical) which takes the world apart but in order to put it back together again must revert to Frankensteinian strategies of suturing together the disparate parts. This, in his view, is a 'masculine damnation' and inevitably joins us up with not only monstrosity but other "figures of the abandoned body (corpse, machine, reflex, robot, etc.) and its shadows (witch, hypnotized and mesmerized bodies, hysteric, etc.)..." Of course, he is well aware of the male/female dichotomy here. (Is the public space of conspiracy likewise gendered?) Back to Daniel Paul Schreber and his famous father the physical education teacher, inventor of gadgets to train the body and the gaze in a certain uprightness, a fixity if you will: "Schrebersche Geradhalter (Schreber's straight-holder) to force children to sit straight....This was an iron crossbar fastened to the table at which the child sat to read or write. The bar presses against the collar bones and the front of the shoulders to prevent forward movements or crooked posture. He says the child could not lean long against the bar 'because of the pressure of the hard object against the bones and the consequent discomfort.' 'I had a Geradhalter manufactured (says the elder Schreber) which proved its worth time and again with my own children....'" (Schatzman, Soul Murder:... quoted in C. B. Chabot, Freud on Schreber, p. 60) And now Romanyshyn again: "The fixed gaze, like the gaze of infinite vision, is the abandonment of the body, and what begins here as a spectating eye cut off from movement will become the style of a self divorced from the living, moving body. ...The irony here is that in time we 'reincarnate' this fixed gaze which has left the body behind. The computer will give flesh to this eye which, in abandoning the body, has dreamed of a vision of the world unmoved by the appeal of the world, a vision no longer moved by the allure of things." (Romanyshyn, p. 99) Poor Schreber: a visionary without porfolio, with symptoms instead...but with plenty of visions and miracles, a cosmology where rays from God and from other nervous systems can have undue influence, where nerves themselves take on an anonymous existence and are merely nourished by the body so that when the body dies the nerves go into hibernation until called forth again by another body and of course "God does not really understand the living human being and has no need to understand him, because...he deals only in corpses." (Schreber/Memoirs... quoted in Chabot p. 15). It was from the book, not Schreber himself, that Freud found confirmation of the concept of paranoia. In fact, Freud goes out of his way to assure us that he already had the idea for paranoia, before he read the book. He wants to reassure us that he has not been looking over someone's shoulder to receive his ideas. It is his idea not Schreber's. He's not being paranoid about this he just wants to set the record straight.
techno-body
keep in Mind:
1) the aesthetic state (in its german formulation)
vs 2) the modern aesthetic state (or its possibility)
and 1) the old sublime as overfilling, awe-full
2) the new sublime as empting, dissociation, multiplicity
blurb for new (age) book by David Spangler and William Irwin Thompson:
"A book that punctuates our place in history." (My emphasis)
de Man on Hegelian sublime and the aesthetic state and its relationship to politics:
"The aesthetic moment in Hegel occurs as the conscious forgetting of a consciousness by means of a materially actualized system of notation or inscription."
(In Hegel Man takes over his own self-determination from God in the form of the legal system of reward and punishment however) "...before blaming or congratulating Hegel for this conservative individualism, one should try to understand what is involved in this passage form the aesthetic theory of the sublime to the political world of the law. Recuperation is an economic concept that allows for a mediated passage passage or crossing between negative or positive valorization: Pascal's pensée on human grandeur and misery that has just been quoted is a good example of how an absolute lack can be turned into an absolute surplus.("In a word, man knows that he is miserable. thus, he is miserable since that is what he is. But he is very great inasmuch as he knows it.") But the definitive loss of the absolute experienced in the sublime puts an end to such an economy of value and replaces it with what one could call a critical economy: the law (das Gesetz) is always a law of differentiation (Unterscheidung), not the grounding of an authority but the unsettling of an authority that is shown to be illegitimate. The political in Hegel originates in the critical undoing of belief, the end of the current theodicy, the banishment of the defenders of faith from the affairs of state, and the transformation of theology into the critical philosophy of right. The main monarch to be thus dethroned or de-sacralized is language, the martix of all value systems in its claim to possess absolute power of position. Setzen becomes das Gesetzen as the critical power to undo the claim to power, not in the name of absolute or relative justice, but by its own namelessness, its own ordinariness." P. 149, P. de Man, Hegel on the Sublime, in Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. Mark Krupnick.
'public secrets' (La Salette and Fatima) associated with marian apparitions: any correlation with ufo abductees? "It is important to remember here that there had been a proliferation of apparitions in the postwar years, with a peak between 1947 and 1954 when, according to one estimate, approximately fourteen cases per year were reported to Roman Catholic authorities." Encountering Mary, Sandra L. Zimdars-Schwartz p.214 We should note that these are precisely the dates that are generally accepted for the beginning of the modern era of ufo sightings worldwide. For conspiracy theorists, the years between 1947 and 1954, especially '47-'48, seem to be pivotal years, for both apparitional conspiratorialists as well as political conspiracies. And of course they are now merging.
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Apparitions and 'Public Secrets'
.....for the ancients the secret is the form in which meaning makes its appearance: it is a word for meaning or, more exactly, it is a way of figuring meaning in the absence of the thing itself, or even a word for it...that which is most important to understand could turn out to be that which never gets mentioned.
Gerald Bruns
The thrust of development of '20th century' methodologies and techniques is toward the dispelling of secrecy and hidden-ness, whether the 'secrets of the universe' or the secrets of the human mind and society. However, it is entirely unclear how this dismissal of secrecy (and the idea of 'difficulty' , as a somewhat poetic concept, in all its realms also) could be implemented.
In one way, secrecy is so galling to the Enlightenment mentality, not because it signifies an ethical aversion, but because of its resistance to systems of control (subversion,conspiracy, rumor: "Secrecy presupposes someone to be kept in the dark; it is a category of power rather than thought." Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History, Gerald Bruns, p. 17. The chapter entitled Secrecy and Understanding should be read by anyone interested in conspiracy theory.). That which we know of but do not know in itself always threatens the stability of systems (at least systems in their pre-chaos theory formations--and of course chaos and catastrophe theory are attempts at restabilization and prediction).
Difficult texts and events have the same character in that they seem 'un-get-at-able' on the first approach and in order to approach them at all they must be either translated, that is, inserted into a highly generalizable system of communicational efficacy (in which case something seems lost, almost as if 'difficulty' itself conveyed something); or, the approach is made on the event's/text's own terms. The latter scenario is not exactly modernist but it may be post-modernist (especially if we divide it: Modernist as concerned with epistemology, postmodernist as concern with ontology which only means that our entrance perceptions are organized, initially, by either questions of knowledge, or of being. It does not mean that post-modernism is not concerned with knowing, or modernism with how it is to be. It is perhaps the fusion of onto- with techné (excluding -ology) that marks postmodernism. This means the re-emergence of 'the secret' in a technological guise and the everyday such that "It is not something to be penetrated or opened up but, on the contrary, it is what everyone (even without knowing it) manages to keep hidden--a sort of unspeakable danger like the lie that threatens to turn into the truth." (Bruns, p. 17)
Art/aesthetics is one of the carriers of both secrecy and difficulty and of course conspiracy theory\rumor as its correlate in the body politic. (Virtual computer space and paralogical space-the space of poeisis-'public' secrets)
The best known and oldest public secret is sexuality, a fact which psychoanalysis is very aware of and which constantly makes public at the expense of the secret. However, it only adds the secret at another level, like Lucia of Fatima passing the third secret to the Pope.
It is not the necessity of the Secret which is of concern but the inexorableness of it, the constant decoding and re-inscription which takes place. The idea of utopia embodies the confused imbrication of these two processes. Thoreau upon being told of the first telegraph line between Maine and Texas: "It may be that Maine and Texas have nothing to communicate." Yes, but what if all secrets, even, are essentially hollow (that is, have nothing to communicate)? After all, utopia means 'nowhere'.
(George Steiner (in the essay On Difficulty in On Difficulty and Other Essays) categorizes four types of difficulty: 1] something, a word,is difficult because we don't know what it means so we have to look it up, a contingent difficulty; 2] Modal difficulties are difficult for us because we don't feel any real connection to, or sympathy with the subject matter,e.g., misogynist or misanthropic works; 3] tactical difficulties entail the will of the novelist, poet, artist to resist ready, too-easy interpretation by encoding or allegorizing the text. "He will reanimate lexical and grammatical resources that have fallen out of use. He will melt and inflect words into neological shapes. He will labour to undermine, through distortion, through hyperbolic augment, through elision and dispacement, the banal and constricting determinations of ordinary, public syntax." [p. 35] 4] "Ontological difficulties confront us with blank questions about the nature of human speech, about the status of significance, about the necessity and purpose of the construct which we have, with more or less rough and ready consensus, come to perceive as a poem." [p. 41] In speaking of shadowy realms of the occult, the hidden, the conspiratorial, tactical and ontological difficulties merge.)
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Allegory as Concealment
"Allegory is the name of a figure whose emphasis is concealment, and so it is the preeminent figure of the veil of words, the more so when it becomes clear that concealment is not quite the right word for the kind of hiddenness that the veil achieves. We may figure allegory as the curtain that conceals (in order to be made radiant by) a sanctuary. The curtain mediates the light of what is hidden--mediates, because the light would blind us if we were able to look at it directly. Without the curtain we would be unable to see anything at all: it would be as if nothing were there. Allegory is an instance of darkening by means of words. It preserves us from annihilating vision, yet does not leave us so entirely in the dark that we cannot work things out on our own, adjacently or by means of interpretation. We cannot assimilate the light, only dissimulate it, or enlighten ourselves as to what is present by darkening it or turning it into a meaning (something we can understand)."
Gerald Bruns in Inventions...p.5
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Many things can come to seem (and in conspiratorializing appearance is everything, since it depends on free-associating surface textures, and yet ,paradoxicaally, such surface level meaning must be discounted in favor of deeper, hidden meaning not available to the surface) conspiratorial. Difficulty itself can come to denote conspiracy with the right mind set. Extreme hermeneutic difficulties in interpreting texts can lead us to believe that there is an intelligence at work on the other side of the text, as it were, resisting our efforts at decoding by some hidden scheme of encryption. The common sense, popular attitude seems to be that the only communication worthy of name the displays an almost-immediately graspable transparency that gives us what we want and withholds nothing from us. Anything that eludes our immediate comprehension is suspect of hidden power relations. Modernism itself has been accused of control by various secretive cabals: as a joke perpetuated on an unsuspecting public, the imposition of maleness, of jewishness, of irrationality (surrealism), of rationality (minimalism), of revolution, of academicism, etc. The difficulties of interpretation evidently bring out the inkblot in all of us. (see Steiner on difficulty)
The difficulties of everyday life can come to be indicators of plots against us.
And, as Benjamin points out, from a certain perspective the everyday is impenetrable; and the obdurate is not someplace else, it is always right here.
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In passing, it might be worthwhile to mention one of the most interesting psychoanalytic studies in the area of paranoia and conspiracy (alongside Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs...): Victor Tausk's On the origin of the "Influencing Machine" in Schizophrenia (Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1933 #2). Here, Tausk enunciates what will become the standard by which psychoanalysis examines not only certain forms of certifiable schizophrenia but certain forms of hallucination and suggestion, having been used in the explanation of ufo sightings, conspiratorial theorizing and paranoia. In brief, Tausk states that "The construction of the influencing apparatus in the form of a machine therefore represents a projection of the entire body, now wholly a genital." Not a surprising finding to those familiar with the, ahem, thrust of pater Freud's own work. Nevertheless, Tausk's paper is interesting for those examining the relation of contemporary psyche to technology in its encrypted dimensions. Here he categorizes the pathological dimensions of that relationship:
The schizophrenic influencing machine is a machine of mystical nature. The patients are able to give only vague hints of its construction. It consists of boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries, and the like. Patients endeavor to discover the construction of the apparatus by means of their technical knowledge, and it appears that with the progressive popularization of the sciences, all the forces known to technology are utilized to explain the functioning of the apparatus. All the discoveries of mankind, however, are regarded as inadequate to explain the marvelous powers of this machine, by which the patients feel themselves persecuted.
The main effects of the influencing machine are the following:
1. It makes the patients see pictures. When this is the case, the machine is generally a magic lantern or cinematograph. The pictures are seen on a single plane, on walls or windowpanes, and unlike typical visual hallucinations are not three dimensional.
2. It produces, as well as removes, thoughts and feelings by means of waves or rays or mysterious forces which the patients knowledge of physics is inadequate to explain. In such cases, the machine is often called a "suggestion-apparatus". Its construction cannot be explained, but its function consists in the transmission or "draining off" of thoughts and feelings by one or several persecutors.
3. It produces motor phenomena in the body, erections and seminal emissions, that are intended to deprive the patient of his male potency and weaken him. This is accomplished either by means of suggestion or by air-currents, electricity, or x-rays.
4. It creates sensations that in part cannot be described, because they are strange to the patient himself, and that in part are sensed as electrical, magnetic, or due to air currents.
5. It is also responsible for other occurrences in the patient's body, such as cutaneous eruptions, abscesses, and other pathological processes.
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(a) The ordinary influencing machine has a very obscure construction; large parts of it are completely unimaginable. In cases where the patient believes he understands the construction of the apparatus well, it is obvious that this feeling is, at best, analogous to that of a dreamer who has a feeling of understanding, but has not the understanding itself. This characteristic may be discovered whenever an accurate description of the apparatus is demanded of the patient.
(b) The apparatus is, as far as I know, always a machine; and a very complicated one.
Tausk goes on to discuss the symbolic nature of this apparatus, its relation to machine dreams, masturbation, genitalia and inhibition. He then goes on to give what could pass in some respects for a description of post-modern culture, in Fredric Jameson's figure of pastiche:
"...the introduction of single components of the machine is not accompanied by the simultaneous disappearance of the other components for which they are substituted, the new components being simply added to the old ones. This is how the hopelessly complex machine originates. In order to strengthen the inhibition, the symbol has been made complex, instead of being displaced by another one; but the result is the same. Each complexity draws the attention of the dreamer to himself, rouses his intellectual interest, reciprocally weakens his libidinal interest, and effects in this manner inhibitions of instinct." (p. 528-9) This seems to be virtually a restatement of the enlightenment dream as it has made its way into modernism and now begins to emerge on the other side as Deleuze and Guatari's anti-oedipus and schizo-analysis. It now begins to seem, as astrophysics has it, that the universe is constructed of at least equal measures of dark matter as light. "The technological and the cryptological are the parallel fast tracks along which the techno-future unrolls." Lawrence Rickels, The Case of California, p. 151.
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Encryption, secrecy and coding become the governing mechanism in that thing which follows modernism and which becomes ever more modern every day. The spectacularity of society, of world society, its performativity (which amounts to specular generativity, the injunction for all to perform, performance as labor, information posing as labor, understanding standing under the sign of the stage and the staged, TRUTH gone the way of a baby with wet diapers, irritating, loud and soon to be changed.
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constellation change (episteme?): traditional sublime--transcendent conspiracies..........pseudo-sublime--immanence, technological conspiracies.... hierarchical power relations versus foucaultian micro-power? fits with previous distinctions however--conspiracy theory always holds to a hierarchical structure for an explanation of events. A shadow organization mimics this primary structure, entwines it, reversing terms of primary and secondary since, in the conspiracy theorist's eyes, the primary organization is the shadow organization and the visible (what a skeptic might term the 'real') organization is merely a facade. The aims of these two structures are perceived as being at odds with one another (e.g. while the visible government espouses ideals of freedom, democracy and individual autonomy, the shadow government is composed of an elite which must rely on subjugation of the masses to achieve their goals). While the pure configuration of conspiracy is not a staple of everyday thinking, conspiratorial conjecture has come to wider prominence, perhaps starting with the spate of assassinations in the 1960's and continuing in the recent deluge of global malfeasers (BCCI, savings and loan, etc.). 'Forces behind the scenes', in the mundane sense of smoke-filled rooms, has become an accepted part of the common person's analysis of political events. The more extreme shadow versions of events are not yet mainstream.
Part of the reason for this lies in the nature of the origin and evolution of the modern news media, especially the newspapers. Richard Terdiman traces the processes of normalization of public discourse and the attempts at subversion of such in nineteenth-century France as the citizen was evolving into the consumer with "the result ...that the discourse of political opinion which had been a primary content of the traditional paper tended to be replaced by a flattened, 'objective' discourse of information....Given its ideology of inclusiveness and of 'objectivity,' a cultural object conceived in this way tends to represent in its form the neutralization of contradiction..." (p. 131, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France, Richard Terdiman). Thus, Terdiman represents newspapers in the following: "In its routinized, quotidian recurrence, in its quintessential prosaicism, in its unrepentant commercialism, the newspaper almost seems to have been devised to represent the pattern of variation without change, the repetitiveness, autonomization, and commodification which, since the twin revolutions of the nineteenth century, have marked fundamental patterns of our social existence. As such the newspaper becomes a characteristic metonym for modern life itself." (p. 120) In the next series of quotes Terdiman points to what has become, in the work of Jean Baudrillard, Guy deBord, and others, one of the prime problematics of late twentieth century life--the performative and its hidden injunctions. While the dominant discourse seems to do work, "counter-discourses at times appeared to occupy hardly any space at all." (p. 79) Thus: "Any programmatic discourse is in essence performative. But for the dissident intelligentsia after mid(nineteenth)century, recommending action in a period so suspicious of the active-a period in which the realm of the practical seemed totally to have been colonized by the 'practical' men of the dominant middle class-must have appeared the absolute contrary of what one ought to do. ...Later nineteenth-century counter-discourses will therefore insist upon appearing resolutely nonperformative. It is this fact which liberates their protean multiformity. In the absence of a 'program,' they gained the enormous privilege of what we might term 'discursive fantasy.'"
"...Much of what we know now about the ideological-the infrastructural, constitutive, transparently lived and previously unarticulated basis of social existence in a given conjecture and within a given social formation-we have learned because the counter-discursive impulse was driven out of the realm of the programmatic and the performative after midcentury."
Terdiman goes on to say that the literary revolution was a way of continuing the indefinitely post-poned projects of the nineteenth century and earlier in the absence of a material base capable of supporting such revolutionary activity.
Conspiratorial theorizing, and allied states, can be seen as a way of continuing counter-discursive activity albeit in a way which directly feeds off the energies of the dominant discourse in a parasitic fashion, as a paratopia rather than utopia. (This is not to say that revolutionary, utopian energies do not feed off of dominant discourses; they do but in a fashion which struggles to disclaim such affiliations.)
Automatism as a consistent (at least in its presence, if not in its form) element throughout history, both as a formal discourse (surrealism, spiritualism, various occultisms) and as something that appears apparently spontaneously (apparitions, manifestations, hallucinations, dreams, etc.) and even as explanatory force, such as Julian Jayne's bicameral mind hypothesis, hypnosis and its allied states as well as various other psychoanalytic interventions, such as the uncanny and unconscious. And is the constitution of any particular political force exempt from such automatisms? National Socialism--better known by its 'automatic' appellation Nazism (like the letter X, the letter Z often seems to herald such automatisms)--is the best known example; but are there automatisms present in all mass formations, even liberal, humanistic, enlightenment democracies (the key word being mass or group). The most efficacious space for the free place of such automatisms must have a public manifestation and yet secret sources. It must seem to be everywhere ("always already" in Heideggerian language) with no (visible) means of support. The topography of this space must be that of a Klein bottle, a mobius strip: confusion as to inner and outer. This is the rumorological, conspiratorial space.
Mannequins, dolls, robots, the golem, puppets: the resilence of the doppleganger concept becomes increasingly of interest in an age of autonomous technology. The idea of a twin to the human essence is a standard of mythology and religion and the concept of gods seems to be some variant of this. But puppets, robots, etc. appear to be the distaff, material side of this ventriloquizing tendency of consciousness, more dissociative than integrative. As such, the emotional affect associated with such doubling imagery seems itself to have a dual moral character. The created monster in the novel Frankenstein embodies many of these puppet/robot/golem characteristics and is virtually archetypal of the modern approach to the doppleganger. However, Frankenstein is not exhaustive.
Earlier in the twentieth century the surrealists, led by André Breton, began to imagine the materiality and mechanicalness of the world in alliance with autonomous, automatic action, specifically automatic writing. For many surrealists the mannequin embodied this spectral state of affairs:
As the simplest imaginable unit of representation, the mannequin is the body that is its own veil and so is mysterious without being otherworldly. It is a body among others, a veil in a world of veils. In its impassivity and banality, the mannequin us the spectator of otherness within the spectacle of the self. It murmurs of irrational authorities that hold sway over our representations of ourselves and our world; it describes an impersonal structuring of the most intimate, individual, human things. Inanimate, it is nonetheless a stormy vortex of meaning, a snapshot of the dialectic in the moment of its transfiguration, a transcription of frozen panic or convulsive beauty, a sign of vital imagination. In the modern world, in which God is no longer seen as lending support to institutions that must themselves support the word of truthful consciousness, the veiled and motionless statue gives way to the brash and pushy mannequin...
(The Abyss of Reason, Daniel Cottom, p. 201-2)
The mechanicity of the mannequin also represented for the surrealists death ("By representing death, the mannequin would show how authority could insinuate itself into forms far beyond the obvious figures of the teacher or master". ibid, 204), not as a simple event but as ambiguous, almost like the Hegelian Aufhebung or sublimation: things disappear into other material forms where the weight of their authority differs also.
The association of the surrealists' mannequin with sexuality is not as paradoxical as it may seem if we recall Tausk's paper linking fantasies of complicated machinery and apparatuses with male genitalia. ("Precisely because it was so unmoving and so alien to human emotions, the mannequin could speak of unconscious instinct in a way that disturbed the image of conscious decision and vocation. It would suggest the living organic body because it was so mechanical, so clearly a physical thing." ibid. 206)
It should come as no surprise, then, that such thinking applies to the para-verse of conspiracy: in the form of "organic robotoids"; electronic implants (by both extraterrestrial aliens and earthly intelligence agencies); aliens as a form of doll or puppet (controlled from elsewhere, or -when); hypnosis as both memory retrieval and creation of a suggestable 'double'; out-of-the-body (OBE) experiences functioning as explanations, featuring the inert, yet living, body left behind by the more mobile etheric double; in UFO conspiracy theories, the arrival of the Men-In-Black, stiff, robot-like persons (interestingly enough, usually in groups of three) at the scene of UFO 'puncture' events; cloning as an explanation for various types of expendable agents.
One of the most bizarre doppleganger conspiracy theories has been offered by a Dr. Peter Beter (given the Freud/Tausk comments on sexuality/apparatus/masturbation discussed earlier, the good doctor's name, pronounced in a certain way, takes on incredible resonance):
An organic robotoid is an artificial robot-like creature, it looks and acts exactly like a human being and yet it is not human. A robotoid is alive in a biological sense but it is an artificial life form. Robotoids respond to conventional routine medical tests in the same way humans do; they eat, they drink, they breathe, they bleed if cut; and they can be killed. Robotoids can also think, but they think only in the sense that a computer thinks. Like any other computer, the brain of a robotoid has to programmed for each assignment it is given; but unlike many electronic computers, the biological computer-brain of a robotoid possesses an enormous memory. As a result, robotoids can be programmed to communicate and think in such complex patterns that they act human...They have a very limited life span, measured in months or even weeks, depending upon how they are utilized....A robotoid is produced within a matter of hours, and it simulates a human donor at his current age.
Matrix II, Valdamar Valerian, p. 384
In his audio newsletters, Dr. Peter Beter reveals an incredible scenario whereby the entire government of the United States has been taken over by organic robotoid doubles, which were created by soviet genetic technology. Of course, Dr. Peter Beter could be mistaken, given the recent course of events, and come to believe that extraterrestrial aliens are the source of these doubles. It makes no difference as regards the efficacy of the conspiracy but it is a stroke of luck in that the alien hypothesis places proof in a forever-deferred position, an essential for a well-placed conspiracy theory. This seems to be why the alien scenario has come to be the Mother of all Conspiracy. Its placement in a secular society secures a transcendent base of operations, transcendent yet material, very powerful yet vulnerable, able to be virtually (a key word) anywhere yet unseen by most. And of course, most valuable of all, it carries the imprimateur of scientific speculation on possible life in the universe as well speculations concerning the nature of technology and its relation to the biological organism. All these factors point to how and why the Alien Hypothesis is primed to become, if it has not already in some circles, the prime generator of conspiracy in the years approaching the millennium.
Another example from Matrix II:
In electronic space societies, learning is accomplished by forceful means such as by electronic implant. There are several means of rapid inculcation, depending on whether one uses a Doll Body or a meat-body for identification.
A) One dons a helmet which has wires and needles attached to it, and a crystal cube is put into a niche in the top of the helmet. A strobe flashes at the subject's brainwave frequencies and a series of images are impressed into the subject's consciousness. Individuals are trained to perform complex tasks in a short period of time.
B) The subject is hypnotized or made to sleep and a high frequency microwave emission is used as a carrier wave on which to send encoded data into the RRS (Ridge Response System). Here, the data can be triggered later by a pre-arranged stimulus-responce signal in the environment.
C) The subject can sit facing a screen and interact with images on the holographic display.
D) The subject is made to lay down on a table and face the inculcation monitor, a bar of flashing colored lights, and is reprogrammed to serve the Confederacy in some new capacity.
ibid, p. 93
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Implicit in puppetry is ventriloquism, the live speaking, in an occulted fashion, for the dead, the animate causing the inanimate-to-be-animate, at least in this way: fashioning a logos for that which is incapable of carrying a language; and having to create one not just because it is difficult for there to be one (in the first place) but because it is impossible. (This is completely different from, and in fact might even be opposed to, current notions of encouraging the marginal to speak...or even 'allowing', or 'forcing' such an event. A Foucaultian analysis of the power relations of the three terms is possible, at any rate, involving center and periphery but can the puppet master be said to dominate his puppet? Can the ventriloquist be said to be speaking for his dummy?)
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Two ventriloquated interludes, one from Giambatista Vico, on the origin of language:
For that first language, spoken by the theological poets, was not a language in accord with the things it dealt with, but was a fantastic speech making use of physical substances endowed with life and most of them imagined to be divine.
the other from Walter Benjamin, the opening meditation from Theses on the Philosophy of History:
The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent on all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet's had by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called "historical materialism" is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.
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However, as we know from numerous movies, it is all to easy for the causal pairs to become reversed in such situations of creation ex nihilo : The dummy begins to dominate its master. What began as a one-way street becomes a thoroughfare then a one-way street again going in the opposite direction from the way it started out. This is the secret life of the modern technological moment: the retreat of the puppet master as the dummy stands up, speaks and begins to move toward the retreating master. Two things we must know: what is being spoken? (How can we possibly not know what is being said? where is our decoding ring?) and: is the dummy moving to crush its creator or to simply walk past him? It doesn't matter: the other dummies with secret lives are beginning to stand up.
