This chapter argues that conspiracy theorists make impossible knowledge claims because they suffer.
But if conspiracy theorists were suffering from a broken mind or body, they would simply be ill. Their impossible knowledge claims should have deeper roots in the in-between space, in which individual bodies and minds converge or diverge, conflict or synchronize. In a word, their suffering should have social roots.
Of course, some diseases affect populations rather than isolated individuals, and conspiracy theories were once indeed considered a sort of epidemic that spread through the contact of dangerous minds like the far-right extremists or the communists. But the conspiratorial narratives gained such wide currency in late modern popular culture that their conceptualization as an epidemic or even as a pathology no longer seems adequate.
Conspiracy theories have been explained by the suffering caused by the flawed social order of late capitalism.
Since the concept of order is often used as an empty abstraction, let me illustrate its concrete stakes by means of an example discussed by Michel Foucault in the introduction to The Order of Things (2002, xix–xx).
After World War I, Kurt Goldstein and Adhémar Gelb invented a test for abstract thinking (Gelb and Goldstein, 1920; Finger et al. 2009, 248–9): the subject was asked to sort a large number of woolen skeins of varying color and texture. If the subject was suffering from color anomia, she would endlessly arrange and rearrange the skeins; for example, she would group them according to hue, but then she would scatter them again in order to group them according to brightness, only to start shifting them about from one place to another in a fraught attempt to take into account their texture, until she would heap them up again in the center of the table.
Neurologists explain color anomia by a lesion of the brain. But Foucault used the color sorting test as an illustration that any order rests on a ground, without which words and things fall apart. So, from a Foucauldian perspective, what is wounded in the case of color anomia is not just the brain but the ground of order. If the anomic subjects cannot stop ordering and reordering the skeins, it is because any order they manage to produce seems to be ungrounded, a thin foil of orderliness covering an unfathomable disorder.
Foucault’s example also demonstrates that the ground of order is not a given; it is a product of labor. To order a heap of woolen skeins means to put them in their places, but to do that one needs to divide the multiplicity into elements, to decompose the common space of the table into different places, to differentiate the time of ordering into moments like ‘first,’ ‘second,’ ‘next,’ ‘after that,’ etc., to assign a proper place and moment to each element, to decide which elements belong or do not belong together, to decide which elements are similar or dissimilar, and – since they are linked not by binary relationships of equivalence or opposition, but rather by an intricate web of resemblances and differences – to define the threshold between relevant and irrelevant resemblances and differences, to decide on the threshold beyond which the differences between two elements become too much to put them together or the resemblances between them are enough not to pull them apart, to organize the differences between the elements of a group into an open series of variations of the same, to take into account the distance and proximity between the different groups of elements, to set up residual and hybrid groups like ‘the rest,’ ‘unsorted,’ ‘to be taken care of later,’ without which any order is impossible or at least impractical, and so on.1
In a nutshell, the ground of any order is the work of ordering. Although in the case of the color sorting test, ordering is a relatively uncomplicated work for one, it can be much a more extensive, sustained, sophisticated, collective effort which involves a multiplicity of agents and intricately organized and stratified apparatuses of power, production, signification, and subjectivity (Foucault 1988, 17; Agamben 2009, 2–15).
Many critical theorists have interpreted conspiratorialism as a symptom of a flaw in the late capitalist social order identified with its incomprehensible totality, complexity, social contradictions, powerlessness, and injustice.2
But if we take into account that conspiracy theories make social totality even more incomprehensible, that the critics who explain them as symptoms of the social situation do not take into account their heterogeneous functions in popular culture and often sound conspiratorial themselves, then such diagnoses would justifiably seem nothing but theories of conspiracy theories which are too powerful for their object, which reduce power to repression, and which are themselves inscribed in the grand plot of class struggle (Knight 2000, 20, 74, 225, 2003, 23).
I argue that it is more productive to read such theories as arguments that late capitalism affected the very ground of social order, the work of ordering.
Even if we admit that the social order is a given, it will not be incomprehensible if we cannot grasp it. And to grasp it means to order it for ourselves, from our perspective. Of course, that does not mean to draw an accurate or detailed map of the social order, just like we do not need a map to understand indexical expressions like ‘here,’ ‘now,’ or ‘we.’
For an ordinary actor, to comprehend the social order means to find one’s place in it. But in order to do this, one needs to sort out a multiplicity of elements that are quite more complicated than a heap of woolen skeins, at least because of the following reasons:
Comprehending the social order is a sophisticated practical accomplishment, even if it depends on fuzzy categories like ‘us’ and ‘them,’ on questionable figures like ‘the aliens,’ or on heterotopia like ‘the Balkans.’ Late capitalism has made this accomplishment increasingly difficult, for at least the following reasons:
Of course, social order is still comprehensible, if not to the ordinary actor, then at least to a critic like Frederic Jameson or to his critics. But such critics have at their disposal the powerful discursive apparatuses of social science and critical theory. The poor3 do not have access to such sophisticated and expensive apparatuses of knowledge production, and if they do not develop faster than late capitalism, they are unable to put their social world in order and they become socially anomic.4 However, that does not mean that they give up and live in disorder, but rather that just like the color anomics, they are consumed with an incessant, desperate, increasingly productive work of ordering which is never arrested in a finished product, an endless reordering disentangled from any order, an act without knowledge (Foucault 1988, xii).5
To be socially anomic means to be unable to find your place among the others. But this does not mean to be excluded, to lack a place and in that sense to be free. It means that your position is constantly sliding, that your place is always becoming something else, that you are always elsewhere. And although that can be invigorating, since you can always hope to end up in a different place (Jameson 2009, 595), it can be also frustrating because you will always be displaced and misplaced (Dean 1998, 11).
How do impossible claims of knowledge articulate social anomia?
Almost two months after the start of the occupation of Zuccotti Park in 2011, Occupy Wall Street made no demands. The mainstream media reproached the protesters that if they demanded nothing, the authorities could not offer them a thing, so they could achieve nothing and they would be responsible for their unavoidable failure.
A special working group discussed relentlessly the list of demands of the movement. A few days before Thanksgiving, at a decisive but not very well attended meeting, the group reviewed the final version of the list, which was now reduced to creating jobs. In the course of the discussion reemerged other demands, like nationalization, reduction of student debt, and establishment of a party. Then a new member of the group known as Elk said:
Of course, we’d love to get rid of debts, and have jobs. But people in this country with money and power are deciding policy outside of government, in a way to support people with money.
(Demands 2011a)
Was this a conspiracy theory? Or just a general dissent? Was it different in kind from the demand to nationalize the banking system proposed by a communist a few minutes before? Itzak, an older member of the working group, asked Elk what people he had in mind and how he came to know about their secret dealings. So Elk explained:
This is through my own research… . My understanding is that [they are] members with a lot of money, and they tend to be members of the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations, members of these groups are often members of other groups, and they are the people coming together and committing treason, because they are creating policy and not allowing the two party system to work.
(Demands 2011a)
Now, this was obviously a claim about a small group of powerful people conspiring together to advance their interests by means of secret manipulation of public institutions (Knight 2003, 15). Conspiracy theory, commented Itzak later on, and in response Elk made an even more impossible claim:
The problem with conspiracy theories is that they are not just theories. These things are true. They are conspiracy facts. That is something that the general public doesn’t know much more about. There needs to be education. I think this movement is about everyone taking personal responsibility for choices that we have made. Therefore we all need to educate ourselves. So we understand that these aren’t conspiracy theories. When you look at Building 7 and see what architects and engineers say, there’s no question that the government had something to do with 9/11.
(Demands 2011a)
Elk’s claim was impossible not simply because of its contents. Its subject was constituted by impossibly idiosyncratic knowledge. It was addressed to the potential ‘we’ that would emerge out of the transformation of his idiosyncratic knowledge into social norm. The actual listeners, the members of the working group, were reduced to ears that should hear his address to this actually nonexistent ‘we.’ And Elk was demanding the impossible, in a language that made the others doubt his seriousness or sincerity, in violation of the accepted procedure, as he did not wait for the proper item in the agenda and spoke too long. But is not this the formal structure of any revolutionary discourse?
Nevertheless, the claim was made by a subject unable to speak properly, to a subject that could not hear, through the channel of tens of ears that did not want to hear. And because of this triple impossibility, the truth of the claim or the right to make such a claim was not even questionable. The claim was not even wrong (Bratich 2008, 3), and the only question was how could one wrong the truth so much, how could one violate the right to speak this much?
And since the claim seemed a wrongdoing, the question was not what Elk wanted to say, but what made him talk like that. Suffering, perhaps.
Conspiracy theories can be explained as an attempt to repair the anomic situation brought about by late capitalism.
In general, such theories postulate an order hidden beneath the social order. But the hidden order should belong to the social order, because otherwise it would be irrelevant. At the same time, it should not be included in the social order, because otherwise it would be carried away by the incessant displacement of social positions.
Conspiracy theorists solve or dissolve the paradox of belonging without inclusion by representing the hidden order as a totality (Jameson 2009, 603, 1992, 3, 1991, 38). Indeed, the totality of a multiplicity of elements belongs to the multiplicity without being included in it, just like the totality of a city belongs to the city without being a part of it (Jameson 1988, 353).6
But if totality is hidden, if it is lacking from the present social order, it cannot be represented, hence it cannot be communicated, even if one believes strongly in it. In fact, if one believes strongly in it, this would amount to a delusion. Therefore, in order to curb the anomia of late capitalism, conspiracy theorists need to represent the unrepresentable. And because of that, the mechanism of their theories can be captured by the concept of sublime (Jameson 2009, 594–5, 1991, 5)
Sublime is precisely the representation of what cannot be represented. Take for example a storm, the power of which holds one in awe. If one would try to represent its power, she would fail because she had been overpowered by the storm, and even the greatest power would not be an overpower. So, she can represent the absolute power of the storm only negatively, as a failure of her power to represent it, indeed as a failure of her faculty to imagine it. Yet, precisely because of that, she will be able to experience in herself a powerful faculty which exceeds even the power of imagination – reason, which ideas can only posit an absolute power or an all-encompassing totality. As a result, the storm will trigger a deep and ambiguous affect which will combine both pleasure and pain – the pain of the failure of her faculty of imagination and the pleasure of the experience of her faculty of reason (Lyotard 1991, 98–9, 1994; Žižek 1999, 40–1; Kant 1961, 109ff ).
Conspiracy theories have developed two modes of representation of the unrepresentable totality of the social order (Jameson 2009, 603). The first mode represents it as a system which controls or consumes everything and everyone, a machine of power that makes one lose any hope (Jameson 2009, 603, 1992, 5). The second mode represents the hidden totality of social order as an event that makes one experience history itself – a crisis or a revolution in which anything seems possible. Each mode of representation brings about a characteristic type of affect – melancholia and horror in the first case, pathos and enthusiasm in the second (Jameson 2009, 596).
However, the conspiratorial sublime has fundamental flaws.
Are affective oscillation, dystopic temporality, and virtualization of social landscapes merely flaws of conspiratorial narratives, or are they cracks in the narratives, gaps opened up by the narratives, which uncover a deeper layer?
I do not know much about Elk.
Elk is just a nickname. I could not trace it even to an #Occupy forum user, and it does not appear elsewhere in the proceedings of the Demands working group of Occupy Wall Street, or the New York City General Assembly.
If we follow the contextual clues, we can assume that Elk was young, that he did not come from money, he did not have a college education or a steady job, and he could be called a gentleman with a touch of irony:
John: What this young gentleman, god bless him, he’s here, at least people come out to be heard. Doesn’t matter if you agree or disagree. When I make a statement I try to base it off some facts.
(Demands 2011a)
Elk can be probably categorized as a member of that particular stratum of the working class which Marx called the reserve army of labor, possibly of its deepest layer called the paupers, whose labor is depreciated to such an extent by the development of technology that even if they manage to sell it, the value they will get will not cover their costs of living (Marx 2003, 703–10).
However, to categorize by social position means to describe a place in the social order, and thus to prescribe a part in a community, to ascribe a part of the common good, and to inscribe a life trajectory (Ranciere 1999, 5–6). If Elk was indeed a pauper, the price of his life would be paid by others, perhaps by his relatives or by the welfare system; the most valuable part of the common good he would get would be retail credit; and the trajectory of his life would gradually but steadily decline together with his vitality. Should we be surprised then that Elk was trying to escape his social position?
Elk argued that social order was merely superfluous because the real class conflict was hidden underneath its surface. Marxists define classes by their relationship to the means of production. If we simplify, capitalists own the means of production, landowners and financiers own sources of rent, and proletarians need to sell their labor in order to live. Late capitalism has washed out that grid of concepts because the most important means of production and sources of rent became intangible, they are owned mostly by multinational corporations, and even the most successful senior executive officers sell their labor. So, Elk claimed that the real means of production was the money and the real class conflict was between those who owned the money and those who needed money. And since the class of money-owners is sociologically inconceivable, since it cannot be even named properly, Elk represented it by means of an allegory (Jameson 1992, 67), as a list of names like the Bilderberg Group or the Trilateral Commission associated by a web of small resemblances, for example being non-governmental organizations that bring together people with power and money for informal discussions closed to the general public, in houses with the reputation of influence.
Hunter, a Marxist member of the Demands working group, was understandably frustrated. He argued that the core problem was who controlled the means of production, that it should be controlled by the people, but since the people were not awakened, the #Occupy movement should establish a political party. Anything else would play into the hands of the capitalists, said Hunter (Demands 2011a). Yet his counterargument depended on the categorization of the social position of those who owned the money as capitalists. Elk believed that the counterargument missed the point because, to Elk, those who owned the money did not occupy a definite social position, as they were the machine of power which controlled everything.
The sublime power of this total or totalitarian machine was difficult to represent because it could easily indicate depression rather than oppression. In trying to avoid that risk, in his short interventions Elk oscillated between his anger and the enthusiasm brought about by the #Occupy movement, an event that seemed to interrupt the course of time and made one feel that history was happening now, that what was happening now was of global significance, a sublime event. Elk claimed passionately that we should educate ourselves, we should take responsibility, we should change the world, I had expected more of you. And it would soon turn out that his enthusiasm was counterbalanced by a utopia – to discard all the money and distribute the global resources according to the needs by means of a sublimely intelligent computer, whose artificial nature would free it from self-interest and immunize it against injustice.
From the perspective of Frederic Jameson, it should be somewhat surprising that the utopia of artificially intelligent non-capitalist economy did not undermine the dystopic theory of an elite that secretly controls everything through money but rather operated as an associated milieu which provided a source of additional energy (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 51). However, overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of the sublime event of a potential revolution, the Marxist Hunter abandoned his opposition.
Still, why was the map of the hidden class conflict between those who owned and those who needed the money unreliable? Was it because, although it was good enough to lead Elk to Zuccotti Park, it would not help him return to a different place after the end of the occupation and would not change his social position? Or was it because Elk tried to map out the unreliability of social order?
The impossible knowledge claims of conspiracy theorists can be also explained by anxiety (Boltanski 2014, 15, Dean 1998, 7, Adorno 1994, 127, Fenster 1999, 40–1).
Anxiety is perhaps a feature of any social order. However, in modernity it was shaped by the national state, in particular by its instruments for settling disagreements (Boltanski 2014, 20). In order to explain that, let me turn once again to the color sorting test (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006, 32–3).
Imagine that instead of passively following the directives of the psychologist, the subject starts to argue that the color, which the psychologist deems to be green, is actually brown. The classification of a woolen skein in one category rather than another depends on associations, and the psychologist and the subject of the experiment have associated the same skein with different colors.
In natural situations, every element holds together, and the associations of all the elements of the situation are shared by all (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006, 35). But this is obviously not a natural situation. How could the psychologist and the subject resolve their disagreement?
Firstly, they can both relativize the situation by ignoring the presence of the other and by focusing on the circumstances (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006, 32). Secondly, they can settle on a common association like greenish brown or brownish green (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006, 33). But the first approach would break up the common situation, and each would be alone even though they are before the eyes of the other. The second approach would imply that the psychologist had cast aside her authority and started to negotiate with the subject on an equal footing.
If those approaches do not seem feasible, the psychiatrist and the subject can try to transpose their argument to a more abstract level (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006, 33). Of course, that could lead to an infinite regression to ever more abstract categories. But the parties in the argument can avoid the infinite regression by settling for a more general principle, for example, that the color of the skein should be defined on the basis of its difference from the color of other skeins, or that the color should be defined on the basis of its dominant hue. And both general principles will be essentially regimes of equivalence between the skeins, the color of which differs in the same way from the others, or between the dominant hues of a group of skeins (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006, 40).
If the psychiatrist and the subject refer to different general principles, they can resolve their conflict by means of a test. And in this context, to test does not mean to make an object reveal its truth. It rather means to use objects to reveal whose principle is truer, to establish the truth-value of each principle against the other, and hence to estimate the ability of each party to evaluate the object of the test against the ability of the other party. Normally, the principle that wins the test is considered justified, and this resolves the disagreement. If, for example, the subject manages to justify the general principle according to which the color is brown, then this is just the color of the woolen skein. But to transform a disagreement into agreement about what is just the case means to do justice, and in that sense the psychologist and the subject accomplish justice (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006, 34, 40).
Now, the modern state has aspired to be the ultimate test of reality, and the conspiratorial anxiety is generated by the defects of its test. To make that more understandable, let us make the following distinction between reality and the real: the real is a lived experience, and therefore it is open, incoherent, ambivalent, in a constant state of becoming; the reality on the other hand is tested, and therefore it is articulated as a set of justified general forms, norms, and procedures (Boltanski 2014, 15).
The modern state needed to test reality because, unlike the premodern states that crystallized around the problems of war, peace, and justice, it was driven by the imperatives of maintaining order, accumulating wealth, and intensifying life (Foucault 1997, 94). And to test reality, the modern state needed instruments which would enable it to arbitrate between competing claims, to measure values, and to identify risks. Driven by that need, the modern state developed such powerful instruments as bureaucracy, the sciences, and statistics (Boltanski 2014, 17).
However, the general principles justified by such instruments never came to be powerful enough to become the only versions of reality (Boltanski 2014, 21). And the order articulated by the instruments of the modern state was being constantly destabilized by the tensions between the territorial nature of the state and the deterritorialized flows of capital, between the volatility of economic positions and the stability of social positions, between equal civil rights and social inequality, between the public interest pursued by the state and the conflicting private interests (Boltanski 2014, 22–4).
What was more, the reality, which was guaranteed by the modern state, was framed as a totality that transcended any individual experience, just as the administrative protocols invented by bureaucracy or the public opinion produced by statistics transcended any individual state of mind. In order to be represented, this totality had to be communicated, and so it depended on words. But the words of the representatives of the state were inherently ambivalent because, although their subject of enunciation was the state, they were uttered by individuals, which entangled the questions of who was speaking, in whose interest, or whether those who spoke in the interest of the state were actually speaking in their private interest (Boltanski 2014, 20).
The tensions invited the public to question the reality of reality, to look for tests intended to establish the truth about the gaps between individual and institutional experience, about the risks lurking in those gaps, about the vulnerability of the social order produced by the modern state or the need to protect it by self-imposed states of exception, and ultimately to prove the truth about the real that escapes the state reality (Boltanski 2014, 18–20, 202).
In effect, the tests of reality developed by the modern state became increasingly inconclusive, and distrust and suspicion were progressively extended to cover the whole social order (Boltanski 2014, 21). That produced social anxiety about the reality of reality, which was tapped first by detective novels, then by spy novels, and more recently by conspiracy theories (Boltanski 2014, 39, 198). Later all those genres of suspicion, particularly the conspiratorial narratives, infused popular culture, gained wider currency than the state version of reality, lost their overtones of crying and raging from the margins (Fenster 1999, 50), and shifted their function from articulating identity to articulating risks that hide in the interstices of the reality produced by the state (Knight 2000, 32, 229, 2003, 23).
How is it possible to test an impossible knowledge claim? And what if the tests of reality fail?
In October 2011, the facilitators of the Demands working group gave a couple of interviews in which they mentioned the creation of jobs through an extensive public works program as the principal demand of Occupy Wall Street.
The facilitators of the General Assembly accused them of trying to take over the movement, deleted the page of the working group from the NYC General Assembly website, and denounced it in a post on the #Occupy forum (Occupy 2011; Richard 2011).
The working group tried to justify the demand by using the instruments for production of reality, on which the late modern state had long ago lost the monopoly. At first the facilitators resorted to statistics, but the data were inconclusive (Demands 2011b). So, at the meeting on November 17, one of the working group members, Susan, reported that she had consulted the demand with three economists, who were “broadly supportive.” Then Elk interrupted the organizational talk of the facilitators:
It seems like a moot point for me… . It seems like jobs will correct themselves when other things are taking place. Like getting money out of politics. When we see that trilateral commission (and other actors) agree with the way the economy is run. My question is that, I feel it’s important for us to address questions that are the root of the problem. Getting money out of politics.
(Demands 2011a)
The discussion was sidetracked by other interruptions intended to propose other demands, until Elk interrupted it again with a claim about what was real:
Hi, while I love what is being discussed here, I am kind of shocked because I feel they are very naive, because they will all be taken care of when we get the government back from corporate interest. The core issue is getting money out of politics.
(Demands 2011a)
Now the attempts of the facilitators to settle their disagreement about what was to be done were transposed to a more abstract level, the level of general principles. But how was it possible to justify the principle that money should be out of politics?
One of the working group facilitators, Jay, objected that such a general principle could not be tested because testing it would require a series of impossible objects like capitalist enterprises which maintained their production without any prospect of profit, or clandestine elite groups submitted to public regulation (Demands 2011a).
Since the principle of getting money out of politics could not be tested, the facilitators could not resolve the disagreement by a reference to the version of reality already justified in the context of #Occupy, by expert opinions, or by statistical instruments. Their disagreement with Elk was whether a problem that escaped their attention was real.7
And as the disagreement made them question the reality of their reality, it brought about anxiety, which added to the initial anxiety of an unexpectedly unattended meeting. Since anxiety is objectless, unlike fear, it can easily overflow, and it seems that this soon affected even the young Elk, who took the floor once more to express the general worry that the next meeting would be even less attended because it was close to Thanksgiving.
However, anxiety about reality cannot be contained without resolving the question about the real that escapes it, and such a question cannot be resolved without a plot (Boltanski 2014, 24). Another facilitator, Erik, wrapped it in yet another question implicitly addressed to Elk: what was the source or the organization that came up with his demand?
The question implied a secret group that tried to hide its clandestine agenda behind the face of Elk. Was that another conspiracy theory? If we go beyond the celestial realms of literature and social theory, is the disagreement produced by one conspiracy theory resolvable only by another conspiracy theory?
One last problem: was not the potentially conspiratorial question, articulated in the mode of debunking, actually a form of violence, to the extent that Erik did not recognize the need to justify himself (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006, 38)?
In our everyday lives, we need to make calculations. But they are more like correlation functions rather than like arithmetic operations on constants. Our calculations involve open series of variables which are inscribed in a complex grid of covariation, depend on confounding or latent variables, and can rarely be represented as stable categories or reduced to measurable quantities.
Take for example someone who wants to be competitive at work. If she is not exceptionally talented, she has to work more than the others. But then she would be stealing time from her family, and if she takes away too much time, the family would probably fade away. However, in her efforts to be more productive, she would be also stealing from her free time, and she would need to compensate for it by more intense forms of pleasure. Let us assume that she starts eating more sweets because that makes her feel that she is doing what she is not supposed to, and in that sense, it gives her the additional enjoyment of emancipation. Still, she could not afford too much enjoyment, because it would erode her health and her labor power, and in the end it would cost her too much. Yet, on the other hand, if she does not get enough enjoyment, she will soon become frustrated, which will erode her vital force and labor power just as unavoidably as the excessive enjoyment, and it will also cost her too much.
Everyday calculations are usually founded on intensive variables like ‘more,’ ‘too much,’ ‘not enough,’ and ‘probably,’ which often depend not on only the current state of affairs but also on potential events characterized by the probability of some gain or loss rather than by the presence or absence of some fact. In other words, everyday calculations often depend on risks.8
Although everyday life has always been exposed to dangers, risk is a modern phenomenon (Foucault 2009, 89; Ewald 1991, 201–5; Hacking 1990, 105–12). Let us take again the example of sugar. It is not a direct cause of illness; it is only a factor correlated with a series of health problems ranging from diabetes to accelerated aging, which are not actual but potential events. In order to evaluate the health risks of sugar, one needs to calculate their probability. A number of brilliant mathematicians after Pascal and Fermat developed methods for calculating probabilities, but in order to work, their methods have to be applied to long series of occurrences like thousands of coin tosses, or in our case, to hundreds of thousands of instances of disease, which were registered systematically only after the advent of the administration of public health in the 18th century (Foucault 1997, 139–41). However, the administration was interested in the instances of disease not so much because of a sense of pity toward the afflicted but because it considered the population a valuable resource, and the insurance market already provided regimes of calculation of the value of lives or working hours lost to disease (Ewald 1991, 205). Also, public hygiene and sanitary science already offered techniques of intervention that would curtail the loss of human capital (Foucault 1997, 150–1).
In sum, knowledge about risks involves a sophisticated apparatus composed of techniques of calculation, methods of administration, regimes of capitalization, and practices of biopolitical intervention that are inherently modern.
The apparatus of risk management seems able to put in order not only an actual situation but also open possibilities, and even if it cannot make the risks disappear, it can make them governable (Foucault 2009, 69). In effect, it has been incorporated in many modern and late modern mechanisms of security, production, or government. The products of risk management have come to be so widely distributed that now even our daily meal is wrapped in risks.
The modern and late modern apparatuses of risk management are also pedagogical devices. They have taught us that our choices are associated with risks.
Of course, in our everyday calculations, risks are not usually turned into numbers because we rarely make use of probability calculus or public health registers. We use the knowledge produced by the apparatuses of risk management as many other apparatuses, on which we rely in our everyday lives – without knowing exactly how they work.
Nevertheless, we know that if we do not know the risks, we are irrational, and if we do not want to know about them, if we want to be irrational, that does not free us from risk; it means only more risk. Then what does it mean to be rational? To behave as if we know what we do not, or to behave as if we do not want to know what we already know?
The problem is further complicated by the fact that if we want to know our place in the social order, we need to know the social order, but late capitalist social order is in a state of constant reordering. If you think that knowing your place is not that important, you should consider at least three further ramifications of the problem:
It seems that late modern rationality has run amok (Adorno 1994, 46), or that it became autoimmune (Derrida 2005, 34–5). A person with a strong ego could be expected to overcome that autoimmune disorder of rationality by clinging to the concept that she molded her fate, at the price of implicitly accepting the general principle that to be rational means not questioning the irrational social conditions (Adorno 1994, 58).
But what if one’s ego is weak?
A person with a weak ego will still calculate risks, but she will be constantly upset by the irrationality of her calculations. Since she will not feel that she is in control of their outcomes, the outcomes will appear as accidents of fate (Adorno 1994, 57).
Feeling abandoned to fate in a society that calculates even force majeure will probably cause a complex form of suffering, which involves at least the following layers:
As many other forms of irrationality that have permeated popular culture, for example secondary superstitions like mass-media astrology, conspiracy theories can be explained as defense mechanisms against such ambivalent suffering (Adorno 1994, 47; Habermas 1992, 120):
However, conspiracy theories are flawed defense mechanisms because the suffering they are trying to relieve is caused by the autoimmunization of rationality in late modern societies, and they operate at an individual level.
It is perhaps understandable that, being unable to change the outside world, conspiracy theorists try to change it from the inside (Adorno 1994, 78). But they alleviate suffering by the double move of interiorizing it as a personal fear and exteriorizing it as a hidden order that defies representation. In consequence, they increase the irrationality they are supposed to chase away.
Is it possible to fully explain an impossible claim as a defense mechanism?
In the context of #Occupy, the demand to get money out of politics was often associated with a surreptitious collective subject, the Zeitgeist movement (Coatesy 2011).
The movement emerged out of a 2007 performance by Peter Joseph in which he staged the truth about Christianity, the September 11 attacks, and the banking system. The performance was surprisingly successful, so he made a documentary. The film was available online, and soon it got more than two million views. He tried to channel its popularity by making two more documentaries.
In 2009, Peter Joseph established the Zeitgeist movement. Initially, it was intended as an activist group in support of the Venus project developed by the architect James Fresco. Since I would not like to simplify its conceptual framework, I will use the account of a member of the movement, Nick, who gave an interview at Occupy Chicago:
The monetary paradigm is basically the foundational structure of our civilization as we know it right now… . This monetary paradigm as we know it, as unfortunate as it is, is collapsing as we speak. Now the reason why I say this is because this is obviously apparent anywhere you look if you take the time to look around the world today… . As far as the monetary structure goes, the capitalist system that we have now, when we talk about representing the 99%, we talk about representing the vast majority of people who this system does not sustain; (the people) this system does not want to sustain. This system is basically set up to sustain 1% or less of the population, which in this system is the extremely wealthy class and people who just have money, like the owners of banks and stuff like that.
(Faye 2011, 11–13)
In the fall of 2011, #Occupy seemed a potential revolution. As many others, Peter Joseph tried to lead it. In October 2011 he published a video address to Occupy Wall Street, and a week later he gave a lecture at Occupy City Hall and visited a couple of other occupations. The members of the movement created dozens of threads at the #Occupy forum, published innumerable posts, and perhaps communicated even more actively during the occupation.
Joseph’s address did not generate the expected response. However, the members of the movement tried to defend his ideas at the working groups, and in the course of the debates they endorsed the demand to get money out of politics. We do not know much about Elk, but we can assume that he supported the demand for reasons similar to Nick’s:
The Zeitgeist Movement is a social awareness movement to educate the public towards the idea of moving towards a research [i.e. resource] based economy… . We need a system that sustains all people on this planet. The resource based economic model, after years of researching it myself is how I arrived at this conclusion… . It’s based on the idea that we have certain human needs to fulfil. If these needs are not met then it leads to deprivation, mental health issues, heart issues, and issues in general. It also leads to problems with inferiority, the class system, structural racism, which are all foundations of the society as well.
(Faye 2011, 13–14)
One can certainly read this justification of the demand to get money out of politics as an account of a real problem that undermines the reality of the state. The hidden order in the interest of the people who own the money probably operates as a cognitive map of sublime power represented both in the melancholic mode of the system that controls everything and the enthusiastic mode of the event that would change the world – the global revolution triggered by the #Occupy movement. And perhaps Peter Joseph has fueled Nick’s narcissistic desire to know more than the educated in spite of his self-education, or his sense of belonging to a global and abstract collective subject.
Yet how are we to explain Nick’s passion for a utopia that promises him an unreachable future, or his allegiance to a cognitive mapping that gives him only invulnerable enemies, or his belief in universal education that depends on nothing but desire? In other words, how are we to explain the intensity of his enthusiasm? By the intensity of his suffering?
Are the accounts of suffering enough to explain Nick’s anxiety about what will happen to the world, which grows exponentially to his hope for the resource-based economy, or his claim of knowledge about an event that would inevitably happen? Is that event Occupy Chicago, which barely outlasted his interview, or it is yet to come, the global awakening or World War III he mentioned in passing?
And if the event is yet to come, how can he claim to know what is coming? After all, he should justify his claims not only before the others, but also before himself, and he does not even imagine himself as a prophet. If his claim was grounded only in suffering, would he not hear in it a groan rather than the silent steps of the future? What other grounds can a claim of impossible knowledge have?
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