(h/t to @swan_meat for the title)

I have been thinking about paranoia and conspiracies lately.

On twitter we all agree Epstein killed himself, domestic terrorism is gladio, Jared Leto is a part of whatever the new iteration of MKULTRA is (alright maybe I’m almost alone in that one) and on and on.

Then I talked to someone in real life the other night who thought the idea of any of these conspiracies was absolutely ludicrous. Adopting her view I felt insane.

I believe in a lot of conspiracy theories that I think are true. Maybe not every detail and perhaps even important ones are actually false, just conjecture or even misdirection put there by other parties.

When I try to think of them all and then look at the world, and my daily life, the world stops making sense. Some kind of strange Christian feeling comes over me. Everything in the grip of Caesar or Anti-Christ. Of course it’s crazy to feel that way. A brilliant piece from Homintern sums up the kind of political consciousness paranoia grants, and the pathologization of that consciousness:

The end result of the discourse of political paranoia, perhaps even its goal, is the complete naturalization of American political life and the world that it has produced. To suggest otherwise is pathological. To look at the class interest of the Founding Fathers and the subsequent curious affinity of the United States for capitalism is pathological. America is a colonial project whose government is still controlled by the colonizers, a country that could easily be spoken of in the same breath as Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, but because we are in America and not Africa this is by necessity natural, unless you’re paranoid or something.

Many, many images become recontextualized by belief/knowledge of conspiracy. Example: Manson was a COINTELPRO agent. Charles Manson is a part of American popular culture in deep and inextricable ways. To me, the first thing that comes to mind is his place as a supposed subversive, a charismatic schizophrenic who through pure chance, force of will, and the pliability of the world ended up cementing a unique place in history.

Now we know he was an informant, COINTELPRO, even MKULTRA, a brain damaged creature of government agencies and counter-counter-cultural programs run by sinister white men in sunglasses. I was never that interested in Manson but he was such an icon to the industrial music groups I worshiped as a teen, who defined what I thought of as a counter culture (as absurd/silly an idea as that is). Manson’s Rasputin stare on Psychic TV’s shirts a monument to successful psyop, a little bit of my teenage imagination revealed to be a CIA production.

Karl Rove’s famous fascist declaration ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. … We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’ as true on an even smaller, more petty level. More crazymaking, more personal. Life as strangulation, entangled by scenarios, plots lifted from fiction, blending with fiction, insane fantasies covering insane plots, government actors who don’t know they’re government actors (Jim Jones?), mind control and drugs and cancer guns and heart attack guns. Noise and entropy, with actual information in the same state.

Crazy making again when I noticed that Srnicek and Williams quoted the “Ad Hoc Society”, a Maoist group created by the FBI, in their book Inventing the Future. This Verso/E-Flux/trendy approved book already compromised). Who knows how many more books are full of misinformation, bad tactics, bad praxis like the bad bomb making tips distributed to kill would-be terrorists.

From Stanislaw Lem’s brilliant “Memoirs Found in a Bath Tub”, a senior agent telling his junior his brilliant new form of opsec:

“But just imagine, what if there were more than one plan? Not two, not four—a thousand! Ten thousand! A million! Could they steal that? Yes, they could, but then the first plan would contradict the seventh, the seventh would contradict the nine hundred and eighty-first, and the nine hundred and eighty-first would contradict all the others. Each one says something else, no two are alike—which is the right one, the real one, the one and only one?”

Boris Groys writes in the “Communist Post-script” about suspicion as being one of the beginnings of developing a political and anti-capitalist consciousness. That suspicion is also extremely ugly:

Revolutionary suspicion is the effect of paranoia. But this is not a case of ‘subjective’ paranoia, which could be cured psychiatrically or psychoanalytically, but rather of an ‘objective’ paranoia, the conditions of whose emergence lie in the object itself, which arouses suspicion by appearing as an obscure object, one that recoils from the coherent arguments of reason. The whole world appears to us in this way as just such an obscure object, one that necessarily arouses the suspicion of harbouring in its interior a diabolical reason that rules through paradoxes.

Stalin’s conception of politics is that it emerges from the contradiction between superstructure and base, so society attempts to change economics, half fails and succeeds, while economics deforms society. Neither can win. This interlocking of forces that ultimately produces what we live in and to understand it we must think paradoxically, because only a paradox can hold the totality.

I wish, and know it is impossible, to see it all. To see every factor and interaction and transformation and so have a knowledge of why things are what they are. To know the truth behind every conspiracy and then to see what was produced by the after shocks. To just know what it all is, have it be intelligible. This is the Million Pronged Seesaw of the World I’d love to sit on for a moment, to have God’s view of what seems a totally obscure world. The paradoxical and baffling nature of the world and the ideology we are taught to interpret the world produces the paranoia itself.

It could easily be said that such a suspicion is paranoid, unfounded, unprovable and ultimately a slanderous lie. However, every revolution begins with a lie, as Alexandre Kojève justly remarks in his commentaries on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. With equal justification, Kojève also points out that the responsibility for the emergence of such a slander does not rest with those who formulate and utter the slander, but with the rulers, who, by virtue of the obscure and opaque aura of power that surrounds them, first create the possibility of allowing this suspicion to emerge.

I choose to take Groys quoting of Kojeve, the idea that a revolution begins with a lie, to suggest that you just make up a narrative. Sorel said that revolutions can happen for irrational reasons and need irrational fuel. For him fuel is myth. The reality doesn’t matter if it’s spurring people to action such as in his description of primitive Christians believing that they have been delivered into a world ruled by Satan. So maybe there’s a Gordian Knot approach to take and instead of trying to understand them all instead invent new ones, new narratives and new misdirections to cut through it all and make some kind of difference. For Stalin language was a productive force capable of acting upon and with both base and superstructure.

This sounds dangerously close to Acid Communism, Hyperstition, Nouvelle Droit appropriations of Gramsci, and probably a dozen more ideas and tendencies that resulted from atomization and the seeming impossibility of revolution and any hope of affecting the base directly. We are allowed to play very limited games within the domain of “culture” and media. The attempts to make media and science intersect seem like a pathetic and desperate attempt to make what we say and do matter in a way that can be felt materially. The cult of the Influencer an apolitical phenomenon that does the same thing. Stalin’s idea of language also required a state that could be created to enthrone language, to give it its full power and expressivity. You cannot talk your way into such a state.

Groys has said that politics operates within the realm of art but we should not be fooled to think that art is operating on the realm of politics.

…politics has also shifted to the domain of media-produced imagery.

Nowadays, every major politician generates thousands of images through

public appearances. Correspondingly, politicians are now also increasingly

judged on the aesthetics of their performance. This situation is often lamented

as an indication that “content” and “issues” have become masked by “media

appearance.” But this increasing aestheticization of politics offers us at

the same time a chance to analyze and to criticize the political performance

in artistic terms…But in reality, the diversity of images circulating in the media is highly limited. Indeed, in order to be effectively propagated and exploited in the commercial mass media, images need to be easily recognizable for the broad target audience, rendering mass media nearly tautological. The variety of images circulating in the mass media is much more limited than the range of images preserved, for example, in museums or produced by contemporary art.

Groys also writes about the differences between political art and art made for consumption. Liberal discourse places paradoxical images as art. What is contradictory and paradoxical is art. What is straight forward and clear, what is “propaganda”, is not art. It is excluded from the art market and thrown into the realm of kitsch.

At the same time, the revolutionary/revolutionary movements (which Groys identifies as being “totalitarian”, echoing Schmitt who said that the only truly totalitarian organization is a political party) resemble artists. “The modern

revolutionary, or, one might say, totalitarian movements and states are also

aiming at the balance of power, but they believe that it can be found only in

and through permanent struggle, conflict and war. ”

The totalitarian speaks in “commands, prohibitions and decrees. The language of the revolutionary subject is purely performative. The credibility of this language arises solely from its paradoxical nature. In this, the revolutionary subject most strongly resembles the artist, whose language is likewise purely performative.”

How to perform paradoxically in such a way as to enter popular discourse is one good question. As ever leftist cultural politics resembles a failing company trying to figure out how to rebrand. The call then is to lie, or if we are going to be craftier (who coined “cunning” as a political buzz word in these parts?), then we are going to “fabulate”, to “world” (“It matters who worlds worlds”), to invent the future through the control of the past.

To create and perform seems all that is given to us to do, in the hope that as our performance enters history so might it inspire those with the ability to act, in the future or elsewhere.