Conspiracy...

Widespread belief that the 9/11 attack was coordinated as a government conspiracy is more interesting as a symptom of something than as a claim in its own right. As with most statements the claim is less revealing about a society than the nature of the society that must be necessary to allow such a claim to be produced. Questions of truth and untruth wind around in vexing arguments, suspending viable action in favor of intrigue and paranoia or neurotic repression of conspiracy claims. Paranoia or neurosis, these are the options allowed us when we focus too heavily on a claim in itself instead of considering the forces that generate the space in which the claim is constructed.

More on this later.

To consider a major political claim, one bound to enormous emotional reserves of a large and diverse society, we must consider how a charged meme can spread across a body politic rapidly. We focus on means of rapid communication, i.e. the internet, but this alone is insufficient. The mechanism that allows communication does not maintain the will of that communication, it does not describe how people reach a state of willingness to search out and accept a fairly radical idea (such as a grand conspiracy in high places).

We should consider for beginners that this trend, this belief in secretive conspiracy, has accompanied power in America since its founding. At the very least, it is a constant thread of suspicion, waxing and waning in moments, only rarely reaching the level of political action. They seem to accompany the revolutionary periods of a society especially, as large constellations of people break and remake the narratives by which they define power and opposition in society.

Do they take on a particular flavor in a bureaucratic society?

My own claim: our bodies, interpreted as constellations of affect, habits, emotional conditioning, etc-i.e. the body as motion and rest- are effectively routinized, circumscribed. There is little real freedom in living, at least in living as a member of society. There is a very natural need to feel oneself a participant in the narrative construction of the world in which we live- it is how we learn, how we communicate, how we invent and create and repair and adapt. We feel disconnected from that in the present day, as we become disconnected from the production of legions of artifacts we depend upon daily (who can fix a new car today?) and disconnected from the institutions that gird our society. Workplaces, schools, hospitals and medical practices, scientific and academic knowledge production, political life, sensory life, entertainment, and systems of sensual desire, all of these are regulated now by mass codes. These codes adapt but we can feel little real power within them, and each innovation prompts an immediate reincorporation into a vast public bureaucracy that leaves no shadows, no privacy, no realm of personal expression. Everything is weighed down by numbers, by money and laws and public fascination.

Our bodies-in-motion serve as a the repositories of this vast inertia, and we experience this inertia as a profound detachment from the artifacts that populate our world and the institutions that construct and manage them. Our bodies quake with a freedom that is allowed no object, no Other for reciprocal engagement.

There may be no conspiracy, but society impinges upon the body/mind now as though there were. The conspiracy is not necessarily with a quiet junta. It lies in the fabric of our day to day relations, the thoughts and feelings we experience constantly, the limitations put to our movements and desires and will by an increasingly rigid society weighed down by a mixture of stability, commercialism, and war-fueled neurosis*. The conspiracy lies in the structure of daily experience, as the form taken by experience in an alienated society. Every second in a thick bureaucracy is a conspiracy holding down free thought and motion, with a thick morass of conformist and prescribed patterns and policies.

Bodies that experience conspiracy in the structure of innumerable experiences are bodies ready to accpet a meme of grand conspiracy. And they are also bodies ready to reject all of experience ina chaotic, destructive revolt. They are bodies that gain pleasure from fantasies of the end times or the collapse of society, precisely because their bodies are ready to reject ALL conspiracy in the name of fighting against the grand named conspiracy.

In fact, this shows that conspiracy theory is not necessarily unhealthy, that it is a symptom of something completely valid. Its inaccuracy lies in projecting target. That which impinges upon people is evil, and must be given a name so that it can be attacked, struck down, removed. Conspirators function as a sort of anti-God, the projection of all that constrains and debases man.

Unfortunately, this will to find and hunt out conspirators, this will towards grand explosion, armed revolt, battle and death, this reactive morality swings wildly in finding targets. At the moment, the left has a certain tolerance of this because the focus is on the President and his cronies. Yet this is mostly a happy coincidence of history, and could have easily gone towards other targets for more vulnerable...

...and yet I wonder. Revolutionary times are full of these conspiracies, these massive narratives of power and contestation that take on otherworldly qualities. We go back and color in lines of reason and clarity but we find when we dig very deeply that there are far more intimate relationships between communists and occultists than scientific minds might prefer.

I wonder if the real dynamic here is mythic. That by fashioning a power as a grand evil, a grand conspiracy, naming it, people are able to actually fight it. If the key point of battle is narrative, if people must first have a background for conceiving of a terrain of battle and possible defeat or success, perhaps this is exactly what must occur. People must build a man into a myth so that they might make him ready to defeat symbolically. This defeat must parallel literal expulsion from power.

The narratives of conspiracy double an opponent, and by binding that opponent to a mythic double, allow people a symbolic system for attacking it. Without this mythos, the man is too concrete, too subject to the vacillations of truth and untruth, of argument and responsibility. Responsibility at the level of the state must be fixed by mythic reconfiguration before it can be forced back upon the concrete avatars of the state.

perhaps...