The Work of Conspiracy Theory

[alice malice]

History (small "h") is a kind of chaos. Within history are embedded
other chaoses, if one can use such a term. Late "democratic"
Capitalism is one such chaos, in which power and control have become
exceedingly subtle, almost alchemical, hard to locate, perhaps
impossible to define. The writings of Debord, Foucault, and
Baudrillard, have broached the possibility that "power itself" is
empty, "disappeared", and been replaced by the mere violence of the
spectacle. But if history is a chaos the spectacle can only be seen as
a "strange attractor" rather than as some sort of causative force. The
idea of "force" belongs to classical physics and has little role to
play in chaos theory. And if capitalism is a chaos and the spectacle
is a strange attractor, then the metaphor can be extended: -- we can
say that the "Republican" conspiracies are like the actual patterns
generated by the strange attractor. The conspiracies are not causal --
but, then, nothing is really "causal" in the old classical sense of
the term.

One useful way in which we can, so to speak, see into the chaos that
is history, is to look through the lens provided by the conspiracies.
We may or may not believe that conspiracies are mere simulations of
power, mere symptoms of the spectacle -- but we cannot dismiss them as
empty of all significance.

Rather than speak of conspiracy theory we might instead try to
construct a poetics of conspiracy. A conspiracy would be treated like
an aesthetic construct, or a language-construct, and could be analyzed
like a text. Robert Anton Wilson has done this with his vast and
playful "Illuminati" fantasy. We can also use conspiracy theory as a
weapon of agit-prop. Conspiracies of "power" make use of sheer
disinformation; the least we can do in retaliation is to trace it to
its source. Indeed we should avoid the mystique of conspiracy theory,
the fantasy that conspiracy is all-powerful. Conspiracies can be
blown. They can even be defeated. But I fear they cannot simply be
ignored. The refusal to admit any validity to conspiracy theory is
itself a form of spectacular delusion-blind belief in the liberal,
rational, daylight world in which we all have "rights", in which "the
system works", in which "democratic values will prevail in the long
run" because Nature has so decreed it.

History is a big mess. Maybe conspiracies don't work. But we have to
act as if they do work. In fact the non-authoritarian movement not
only needs its own conspiracy theory, it needs its own conspiracies.
Whether they "work" or not. Either we all breath together or we each
suffocate on our own. "They" are conspiring, never doubt it, those
sinister clowns. Not only should we arm ourselves with conspiracy
theory, we should have our own conspiracies -- our TAZ's -- our
ontological guerilla commando hit-squads -- our Poetic Terrorists -- our
chaos cabals -- our secret societies. Proudhon said so. Bakunin said
so. Malatesta said so. It's anarchist tradition.



http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-the-ontological-status-of-conspiracy-theory



On Sun, Mar 9, 2014 at 11:40 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> When did P not "take on" conspiracy theorists and paranoid thinking?
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l