I was absolutely fascinated by Knight's article on conspiracy culture; I have always had a sort of wry interest in conspiracy theories of various shapes and sizes, from secret cults and mysterious syndicates to alien abductions and the attack of the lizard men. (I may even have to change my final project to focus more on this subject... If it's still permissible at this juncture.) They've always seemed to be examples of fantastically imaginative attempts to fit facts with intuitions--all in all, no matter how far-fetched (and sometimes idiotic) they tend to be, they make the world a much more entertaining place. Sometimes I think I would prefer to live in a universe in which some conspiracy or another was indeed the "truth", and I would even dare to propose that many conspiracy theorists actually experience their quotidian existence in a much more compelling, urgent fashion. There is more orientation to their lives than the average nine-to-fiver's, because they have been vindicated by the discovery of a thrilling "truth" that helps them escape dull deception and hoodwinked complacency.

But then again, there is this word truth that keeps popping up in a periodic manner. It is integral to any discussion of conspiracy culture that employs its native vocabulary, and moreover it cannot be substituted by another term. Take, for example, the catchphrase of the popular 90s TV show X-Files: "The Truth Is Out There". It's the truth that's being sought, the whole deal--conspirators are not after an alternative explanation, nor are they trying to make corrections to a general scheme that is in general acceptable. They feel as though the public has been profoundly duped and that strenuous effort (going behind the rules and hijacking bureaucratic institutions) is necessary to save ourselves from The Man. It really isn't a very modernist or post-modernist-flavored project; conspiracy theorists tend to be highly idealistic, at least on my personal interpretation...

Or, at the very, least, they yearn for the opportunity to be idealistic, to seek the truth, in a world that has been gutted of universals. I speak here of the ironic stance that I myself adhere to in relation to conspiracy culture; in fact, this stance moves beyond a simple humoring, a kind of bemused smile at the entertainment value of imaginative explanations. Even the very propagators of conspiracy theories may sometimes engage in this kind of irony: they know that they are producing fanciful notions and promoting illusions, but at least this kind of illusion is more beautiful and creative than the official stories that are fed to the public through conventional outlets (these being obviously less-than-veracious, as there is a widespread agreement that politicians never disclose their real agendas, that Washington is strife with unsaids and confidentialities). The show X-Files embodies this sort of ironic approach: its creators infuse the show with wisecracks and tongue-in-cheek remarks that subtly parody its own genre of conspiracy but nonetheless the storyline is based on two FBI officers that routinely stumble across (and almost unveil) the ulterior agenda of the government. I believe that it is indeed possible--through this kind of ironic world-view--to subscribe to conspiracy theory as such, contra Knight's assertion... As just another explanation of events, a preferred explanation of events (the actual explanation of events being irrelevant).

This brand of conspiracy culture is a far cry from the paranoiac totalitarianism of Stalin and Hitler's regimes: it has nothing to do with shaping society in a certain way. It is not a vindictive demonology:instead it is an individual choice for aestheticisation of the world in a certain manner, a useful aperçu into various individuals'/groups' relations to their living conditions.

Other short notes on the article: I am tempted to say that it was feminism that promoted conspiracy culture, instead of the other way around. Because feminism was a movement that emphasized the covert, malicious nature of the patriarchal superstructure and sought to bring it to pubic attention--the importance and success of the movement thereby legitimated conspiracy culture of a sort, just as the unleashing of the Watergate scandal via investigative journalism showed the world that clawing for hidden political dirt wasn't just the work of vagrants spies and rag-mags--it could be a genuinely valuable watch-dog endeavor.

It seems that food/diet/health-interest groups sometimes subscribe to a kind of paranoid conspiratorializaton as well. Some vegans I know personally are good examples of this sort of thinking.

The uncertainly algorithm discussed today in class proved to be--despite kind attempts towards enlightening my insomnia-addled brain--very confusing.
On the one hand, this can take the form of an objective prediction based on an analysis of vast amounts of available data: say, polling figures for an upcoming election, stock-market trend speculation, and weather reports.
On the other hand, this could be some kind of super-computer that provides resolutions to questions that are fed into it: for example, how can one bring about the peaceful reconciliation of North and South Korea with the least amount of bloodshed and the maximum amount of smooth socio-economic integration?
The first kind is unquestionably something that already occupies a large part of our social consciousness--perhaps larger than many even notice. Due to its pretensions to objectivity (and thus its claim to inevitablity), such predictions have an extremely seductive power, for they are beacons of hope and certainty in a world that become ever more complex and clamorous. It has a kind of institution force, a sort of reliability that we crave and need--now that we have more options than ever, we would find it overwhelmingly difficult to choose to do anything had we no guidelines upon which to base our actions. Given that we are also (arguably) in a post-ideological age, one in which secular skepticism is also gaining steam, these "scientific" predictions become the firmest pillar we can lean on. In fact, our social consciousness is not just informed by such predictions, but actually formed by them: by seeing how things will happen, inevitably, we tend to slide to expect the category of prediction to show us how things ought to happen. We has in fact gotten an ought from an is; take a look at how economic analysts are not merely commentators, but are in fact the people who actually have the most impact on market trends--the snowball effect. Once stock market sages announce their hunches, everybody flocks to make their predictions a reality.
Perhaps this is a bit of a stretch, but I tend to see film/book/culture critics as having similar roles in society. Their predictions are not only subjective opinions, but in fact do real work towards shaping the way in which certain works are received. The prevalent tendency to create "Top 10 Entrepreneurs" lists or "100 best vacation spots" may also have this kind of power: for they tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies. The very fact that someone has been included in such a list will affirm their success and exposure rate--just as the list predicted!
The second type is, I believe, a completely different kind of mechanism. It involves a prior commitment to certain values, one is responsible for what one has undertaken to make manifest in the world (whereas my intuition is that it would be more difficult to blame someone for investing in a stock based on a trumpeting endorsement from a top analyst--if it tanks, he obviously suffers the consequences, but this is chalked up more to luck or extenuating circumstances than anything else). I am of the opinion that ethical action may still be possible with such a contraption. The question is whether it will be used to uphold ethical action or whether it will merely be used to enforce certain ulterior motives.

I have found that existentialism is often conceived popularly as a bleak, cynical philosophy: the dying embers of a lit cigarette, the furrowed brow of a scowling figure in black. A type of hip nihilism, in fact, entirely preoccupied (in a flippant, dry manner) with the notion of mortality. A type of wiser-than-thou smirk that offers the response "we're all going to die anyway!" to every attempt to bring them to consider any other mode of being.

This is all the more worrisome in light of the fact that--for me at least--existentialism is ultimately about how to live, instead of deferring life, shrugging it off with the resigned sigh of a man who is constantly ready to drop into a coffin with nary a care. Existentialism is not about making life valueless because it will eventually come to an end: for is it not about hanging onto life at all costs precisely BECAUSE it will one day be terminated? The word for this idea, I have come to learn, is natality.

Natality emphasizes the opposite end of the process of life. It considers the meaning of being born into the world, instead of focusing on meaning of what it means to die. It does have a slightly old-fashioned flavor--of being born into this world for some purpose (namely: to live) is an idea that we have since become detached from, but it certainly became the crux of the father & son's existence. It enchants the desolate landscape in a singularly powerful way; "living for the sake of life" makes their journey down the road possible, when there is nothing else to live for.

This realization helped greatly to elucidate my reading of the book; as opposed to interpreting their journey as a suicide mission, I could now see The Road as something other than an exercise in pathos, an elegy to the last father on planet earth.

I have here just a small question (which may reveal the sad possibility of my having learned nothing from the book): would it be legitimate for a man to take his own life, given that he believes that he is the last person on earth and thus any possibility of natality (taken in the context of its communality, of interpersonality) was extinct? Would we forgive the last man's decision to extinct the species from earth?

Also, a final thought that I had about The Road was the way it puts into question the idea of "natural law". So many moral arguments are based upon a naturalistic conception of human nature, of how we would and therefore should behave if we were left to our own devices. As far as I understand, naturalistic theses attempt to spark the intuition that good and evil are intrinsic to the human make-up. Does McCarthy then question this naturalism by populating his world with perverse cannibals and mystifying characters like the old man (who is opaque to us as a character--one cannot fathom his motivations, cannot identify with him at all) or does he affirm it by way of introducing the young boy who is a model of ethical conduct despite his having only his father assurance of their "being the good guys" by way of moral education?


More on The Revisionists and politics later. I'm suddenly having to reconsider a lot of things.

 The saddest part is that the man and his boys believe, must believe, that they are "carrying the fire". That they are the "good guys". Yet under what form can goodness even be manifested in their time, when refusal to steal and cheat and bully will almost certainly result in death? The boy, especially, has no one other than his father to learn the notion of "humanity" from--and it seem that he must have made the choice, early on, to trust in his father's empty promises and bland optimism because that was the only alternative he had to the death, decay, and deranged cannibals he saw all around him. In this context, the rather trite idea of the man and his son--like Noah and Lot before them--being the only remnants of virtue in a world gone evil becomes deeply touching. Because it isn't even really the case that they are two lonely do-gooders surrounded by a horde of bloodthirsty maniacs: it is simply that the world has become purged of any system of value, it is devoid of any structure that can support a framework in which good and bad are opposed. So the man's insistence on having his son believe that there is still that proverbial "fire burning within him" is amazingly beautiful in that it is so futile. Sad, too, at the same time, because at times it become clear that the son is lead to question this: he is always powerfully affected when they come upon other people, and it seems that he is often disappointed in his father, or angry at him, for not being the good person he always insisted on being. For example, he stops talking to his father for a while after they leave the lightning-struck old man in the road, and he cries and begs his father to spare the person who stole their cart. When his father defends his actions and says that it's not as though he killed another man, the son solemnly replies that, by taking his clothes and leaving him utterly stranded, they effectively did kill him. But he has to believe his father's platitudes, for what else would motivate him to keep trekking down this desolate road?

(Also, on the interpretations of "godspoke". Does it mean spoken for by god? Or speaking as though one were god, speaking as the alleged mouthpiece of god? I am taken by both the interpretations presented in class--perhaps this is simply slothful evasion, but I don't seem to be able to, or even want to, come down and pronounce my alliance to one reading or another.)

Perhaps we still haven't been able to shake the comforting notion that we do, after all, live in the best of all possible worlds. How seductive to be seduced by the thought that everything happens for a reason, that there are organizing forces in world affairs that put into action comprehensive action plans that are always oriented towards an end--not even a benign end, necessarily. We have grown out of that puerile expectation, we merely hope and dream that events are not determined by erratic chance and are instead the product of concerted agendas. I would claim that, compared to a world in which large-scale decisions are wrenched out of frantic conversations and spontaneous impulses (our world, this world, so to speak), a world that is at the mercy of a syndicate of mysterious cigarette-smoking men is actually the product of a more idealistic mind. Such a world is more pure, more manageable.
In any case, though the process of executing this world-plan be unpleasant, even unbearable to behold, we would be able to withstand such hardship knowing that it is angled towards the ultimate fruition of something or another. We would be able to suffer centuries upon generations of abuse, held fast by such a doctrine.

In this light, it seems to me that is it all the more important to engage with narratives which create contemporaneous alternate worlds. Alternative dimensions and parallel universes are no new gimmick: but to harness these to the realm of recent socio-political issues rather than flights of sci-fi fancy is a distinct move, differentiable even from depictions of dystopic worlds insofar as they are firmly anchored in a time that coincides crisply with our own. As such, they give some kind of plausible reference point for comparison: we can determine, face to face with such alternate worlds, whether our world really is the best of all possible worlds. In the case of Paul Auster's novel Man In the Dark, we are presented with a desolate New York, ravaged by civil war: granted, the first reaction to such a circumstance must be one of horror and sadness. How terrible for the inhabitants of such a world, that they are stuck in the middle of a civil war with no TV and high inflation!
But then again, remember that in this world 9/11 never happened, and neither did the Iraq war. And so we come to realize that we cannot patronizingly pity the citizens of that other America. Their plight is merely different from ours, and it so happens that the decisions of our world come to take on a counterfactual dimension--"what if?" is no longer just a futile question unworthy of being addressed, it is a question that highlights the idea that our history can be constructed just as Auster constructs his fictional worlds.

Islands stand out against a vast embrace of ocean, a negative space, an unconquerable space--therefore unconquered.
An oasis, likewise, blossoms forth from a great arid nothingness that could never mean anything permanent to any human being other than death.
Both are paradigm examples of something in nothing. Islands and oasis are loci of privilege: looking out at the ocean or the desert, the inhabitant feels oneself fortunate, strong, for trees and houses and churches stand at his back as he confronts the emptiness without. And, being within the scope of "something", all the rich ambiguity and subtle tints of somethingness are possible.

An enclave, on the other hand, is enfolded by positive threat: on each side a frowning menace, you feel a grip around your throat at all times, an oppressive clutch that may any minute tighten with throttling finality. You live by repeating the phrase "by the mercy of", you feel smaller, always, keep feeling smaller. Then smaller. Then nothing.
A nothing in something.
Under the shadow of overwhelming somethingness, the inhabitants of the enclave can no longer see beyond the yawning contrast between this nothing, that something. Only yes and no are the modifiers that are left them.

Thomas Schell* has come to see himself as nothing but an enclave: was his wife wrong to have believed that he could have ever become an island again?

*Oskar's grandfather

The most striking comparison that I came across today, during my attendance at the conference, was that made by Derek Penslar: he spoke of Zionism as a kind of colonialism, and, for anyone who ever paid a smidgeon of attention in high school history classes, colonialism is a foul word the very sound of which should set our lips in a curl of the utmost disdain. Given that he did specify that there are many features of the Zionist movement that did set it out as a very idiosyncratic case, the very association of the two notions was--to me--a surprising and illuminating one. The story that I had tended to associate with the founding of Israel was more one of self-determination, of a nation of people gaining the right to exercise self-governance. This is why I was so taken aback by the comparability of Israel and Algeria or South Africa. Evidently, even when we think we are optimally placed as impassive observers (and often precisely because of the fact that we are so complacent in the fact that we could not possibly be held hostage by any specific ideology), the single explanation that we come to designate as the only objective account of facts eventually turns out to be wholly insufficient, to be unfair to some valid viewpoint or another.
On another note, there was a comment made in the aftermath of this presentation that I found very interesting--it was suggested that after five or six generations, the competing claims between Jewish and Arab people to their nativity would become irrelevant and fade away, seeing as everyone is now native. I was initially taken with the remark and felt decidedly more optimistic because of it, but upon reflection it seems to me that there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary that, even if we skip a few generations, the old prejudices do not tend to dissipate of their own accord, especially when the identities in question are so entrenched and so radically opposed. Take, for example, the situation in Tibet and Manchuria--these are regions that Han Chinese people have felt entitled to for several generations, having toiled to develop the land for agricultural and industrial uses, and yet there still exists a sharp demarcation between the ethic Tibetians and the Chinese-who-live-in-Tibet, just as there is a well-understood distinction between the Manchurians/ethnic Koreans and the Han Chinese who have evolved a distinct identity as the "North-Eastern Chinese". That is to say, both the Manchurians and the Han Chinese have occupied the same land for decades, and both have firmly established identities--any attempt to bestow primacy upon one or the other would surely end in great displeasure.