The Work of Conspiracy Theory

[Joseph Tracy]

This is an odd little trip, but I like it . Anarchist tradition. I think the 60's was full of the poetics of conspiracy or counter conspiracy. Chaos however is a weird word. Is life a conspiracy against chaos?, is chaos a conspiracy to bring forth life ? Is chaos a dream, the allure of dissolution and death?  Are the rules of the language we inherit a conspiracy against meanings we truly need ? 
 The bottom line is I deeply agree that we have to act as if conspiracies work or we will be abused by those who think they are running a primo conspiracy.  My conspiracy is pretty simple. Keep trying to be nice and honest at the same time until I learn how, don't plan violence, do plan for peace, harmonize with beauty, sink into and understand fear and ugliness, hug people on a regular basis, love your lover/s, keep the body healthy, grow food and flowers, get into the water.
On Mar 10, 2014, at 8:36 AM, alice malice wrote:

> 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 empty, "disappeared", and been replaced by the mere violence of the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?
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l