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 ofthe 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 techne seeks to elucidate by giving voice to all particles.)
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 Echeverr a Conquest and religious imagery has seemingly always been a part of the western tradition; however, the esoteric and empire seem, in general, to be 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 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.'" [Gerard 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-Francois 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?
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 Gasch 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.)
"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 are-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 (Jeitzeit).(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 Ôtheological capers of commodities.) The governable aspect of materiality seems to always generate a shadow aspect, a wildly un-governable constellationjelements 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.
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 dialecticaljfrom 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 andjgrandeur 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."
Sandra L. Zimdars-Schwartz
Encountering Mary, 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.
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 Brunsj
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.)
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
Many things can come to seem (and in conspiratorializing appearance is everything, since it depends on free-associating surface textures, and nothing, since 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 thatj3. 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.......(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. ÒThe technological and the cryptological are the parallel fast tracks along which the techno-future unrolls.
Lawrence Rickels
The Case of California, p. 151.
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...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. 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 Ôdouble; 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 Ôpuncture 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.
MatrixII, 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 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.
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.