Some recent tweets on conspiracy on the occasion of Nick Land mentioning the topic on Twitter.
As a preliminary, it might be worth adding some comments to the developing “genealogy of conspiracy” some of my writings seem to have outlined.
In the words of David Porush, “Paranoia is epistemology gone wild.”
Conspiracy is the social or communal form of paranoia.
There is a considerable literature on the intrinsic links between paranoid conspiracy and Protestantism, that is, Protestant Christianity; between paranoid conspiracy and US American political culture.
Conspiracy usually links with images of Kafkaesque bureaucracy, updated to relevant contexts.
The USA does that kind of thing constantly; “X-Files”; UFO literature; et cetera; it all feeds into the love-hate relationship US citizens have with US government.
It’s a schizoid identification, because the government is elected by, constituted from, and represents, US citizens; so essentially, US government is the political face of US citizenry; but simultaneously it is hated by that selfsame US citizenry.
This shows that the people of the USA have a love-hate relationship with themselves, through the mediating detour of political imaging and imagination.
Looked at in that way, it explains a lot about US culture and its peoples.
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The genealogy of modern conspiracy begins with English anti-Semitism, which in many ways is the initiating and governing model of all subsequent sorts of conspiracy.
It’s why all Anglo-American, folk-manufactured intrigues, always seem to reference one or more moments of antisemitism, somewhere in their articulations.
It could just be that the Anglo-American imaginary of “Others” traces the chronology in which Anglo-Saxons encountered those “Others” – Greeks? Romans? Then Hebrews?
What about Moorish Spain, though? Does that fit the interpretation?
The central point, though, is the characteristically inordinate cultural inflations of those initial “Others”, by Anglo-Saxons, in comparison to other receptions around the world, by other peoples and cultures.
Or in other words, the exaggerated caricatures of Anglo-Saxon insularity, in comparison with the more modest images of informed, cosmopolitan pluralism?
Looked at in this way, it is then possible to see Northern European modernity and the ways that it packages culture in modular forms – catering to insular perspectives, assumed to be ignorant, at the outset – as intrinsically based on the propaganda of modularised, cult mythology.
That’s why “Logan’s Run” was a social metaphor not so much of the future but of the contemporary USA.
“Tellingly”, cultural others or Otherness, are/is only imagined as forbidden and irradiated wasteland, obliterated by atomic weapons.
Which, of course, unavoidably, or “incontournably”, as Derrida would say, recalls Heidegger’s observation: “Rather than not will, it wills nothing (destruction) at all.”
This is of course Heidegger on Man, or at any rate, on Western Man and on that Western Man’s addiction to wilful or obstinate ignorance. An addiction that Western Man traces to the extent of self-destruction, as Heidegger says.
Schopenhauer, however, short-circuits the Heideggerian quandary of Occidental voluntarism:
“On the contrary, we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is – nothing.
This “nothing,” however, “is also the PrajnaParamita of the Buddhists, the ‘beyond all knowledge,’ in other words, the point where subject and object no longer exist.” (WWR, pp 41112)
The Buddhist transcendence of all knowledge is the transcendence of epistemology and thus of paranoia and conspiracy, too.
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Here are the tweets:
01) Sol Yurick says that conspiracy begins with the ancient Greeks, which means that “the West” or Occident is conspiracy.
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1496102145048858627?s=20&t=N496WpbD2ecLHB7-0HtghQ
01a) Yurick, Sol. ‘How the Athenians Planned to Colonize the Mind of the West and Immortalize Themselves’. Social Text, no. 23 (1989): 29. https://doi.org/10.2307/466420.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/466420
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1496102395755044871?s=20&t=N496WpbD2ecLHB7-0HtghQ
02) The world has increasingly been run according to conspiracy for nearly a millennium – that’s when anti-Semitism begins, as the governing model of conspiracy.
It’s one in which only the wolf screams wolf, incessantly and at everyone else but itself.
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1496103584118804481?s=20&t=N496WpbD2ecLHB7-0HtghQ
03) Nick Land wants to employ social division in the service of more productivity and profit whilst ignoring the costs of social alienation. That’s basically his so-called “techno-commercialism”, in a “nut’s hell”.
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1496104509311012871?s=20&t=N496WpbD2ecLHB7-0HtghQ
04) Land doesn’t seem to realise the radicalisation of social division exceeds the linking powers of productivity and profit casuistry and only produces insurmountable incommensurability.
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1496105317544955904?s=20&t=N496WpbD2ecLHB7-0HtghQ
05) The initially Anglo-Saxon “peasantry” vs. Norman “elite”, English conspiracy industry, was a founding puritan export to the USA where it flourished without limitation.
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1496106015439396866?s=20&t=N496WpbD2ecLHB7-0HtghQ
06) Through the British Empire and US imperialism, the entire globe has been flattened into unidimensional phobic networks of paranoia.
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1496106536594247683?s=20&t=N496WpbD2ecLHB7-0HtghQ
07) Conspiracy is the dominant social mode of the USA.
It’s the folk epistemology of the USA, it arises from “the folk”.
The internet unleashed a transplanted and reserved chronology – the Middle Ages – residing in the folk mediaevalism and regressive religiosity of the USA.
https://twitter.com/theotechne/status/1496107192872808450?s=20&t=1hgCJoT9s5SwkfBnYBQGYA