The trigger for belief is the precarious situation.1Note that “precarious”emerges from a sense of “given as a favour, depending on the favour of another, (of property) held by tenancy at will, uncertain, doubtful, suppliant” [“precarious, adj.”. OED Online. December 2020. Oxford University Press. (accessed February 15, 2021)]. L. prex is “prayer, supplication”. It pulls the agent into a ditch. It gives you a glimpse of the anti-naturalism. It works by a vigorous suspiciousness that throws externality into a wobbly chunk of singular dread. It organizes and synthesizes. And yet it foists up as its call-to-action a vector of meritocratic aggrandizement, of work and the labor of not-wanting-it-to-be-so-but-there-it-is-isn’t-it-horrible-and-shouldn’t-we-and-especially-you-be-ashamed. Into the futurity of its self-determined predestination, a furor. Something like “becoming”. Precarity is its pre-reflective abyss. The agent holds a mess for maximum reckoning against its enemies.
This is the magic of the “before” as it squints in both directions:
1) the yet-to-occur with its oscillating glee or dread;
2) the antecedent location.
Both chime in to create an aesthetic assemblage only fictive because it hasn’t yet occurred, only factual as an instance of cultural belief.
Michael Barkun, in A Culture of Conspiracy, refers to the aesthetic assemblages and poetic productions of improvisational millenialism as “act[s] of bricolage, wherein disparate elements are drawn together in new combinations” (pp. 10-11). In its cacophonous roar of interlinking and unlimited semiosis, its scrappy proselytizing and memecry, improvisational millenialism signals a holistic picture of the world available for the seeker to transcend. It sets up the rules of engagement. In its ritual passagenwerk of stigmatized knowledge and rebuffs of the cultural center, the only way is a frenetic lunge at salvation via the touch of some hidden architecture, glimpsed only by hearsay.2Stigmatized knowledge: “claims to truth that the claimants regard as verified despite the marginalization of those claims by the institutions that conventionally distinguish between knowledge and error” (Barkun, p. 26)
Barkun writes of two “conditions” that must hold in order for improvisational millenialism to take root: 1) access to a bounty of “motifs”; and 2) existing “authority structures” have been sufficiently “weakened” in such a way as to allow for these combinations “to be taken seriously” (p. 19). But why stipulate a parliament of ideas? Why pretend that there is some consensus against which the fringe must be measured? It is only via the narrow lenses of historians that anyone could believe in a monocultural discourse. Though there is a sense in which fleeting and decentralized yet significant “social reinforcement” is just a click away.
There are three elements of improvisionational millenialism:
- Rejected knowledge, e.g. claims that revolt against something like Euro-Christian normative values
- Cultic milieu, e.g. anti-authoritarian and suspicious imaginary of beliefs and practices that fluidly interpellate its adherents
- Stigmatized knowledge claims, e.g. New Age crystal healing causation and the like, those that have been rejected by well-funded and major institutions of knowledge.
A conspiracy theory functions by generating stigmatized knowledge and auto-marking it as “stigmatized”. This is the ouroboros or cyclical nature of conspiracy theory–its claim of truthfulness depends upon it being truthful for only those claimants who have been sufficiently marginalized. And (perhaps) the reason for their marginalization is that they believe in such theories. Round and round and round we spin. The quality of “stigmatized” implies to the seeker that evil forces have already tried to hide the truth from view (Barkun, p. 28).
What physics of causal interconnectivity, what spiritual forces would be required by such a totality, such a geist-like complexity the human comprehension of which fails, of course, to effect an epistemic stability–so we must have belief through textual production of beliefs whose production makes them truthful of the reality they set out to explain.