Conspiracy theory is a practice of aestheticization of premeditatedly lost objects. I want this to be the case and wanted it to become the case and now it is the case because I say so. I have always said so. I shouldn’t need to say it and yet you keep soliciting the same old tune. I shouldn’t have to say it again yet I do because you keep forgetting that such and such is the case.
Conspiracy theory reminisces about the present, already full of possibility, and then of injury and loss because this spontaneous messianism is a cluster of nihilistic ossification. It feels like an argument about time.
Conspiracy theory attributes a point zero arbitrarily, and its arbitrariness is unstable as a locus of epistemological attention, and when it wobbles, it tends to sway, knocking itself out of alignment, its entropic shove, its diminishing returns.
A conspiracy theorist traces and theorizes their own conspiratorial activity. The “theory” is theory reverse-engineered into practice.
The poet thinks of its poetry like a conspirator. Its writing takes an apopheniacal economy for granted, as part of the equipment of language listening. The poet believes strongly and ambitiously about intentions, and as the authorial intent becomes the ghost in the text machine, the poet’s longing for its own intention becomes part of the ghostly mouthfeel of the reading practice. Quickly practice now as a metabolism of history. Fits of history that pretend to be art. Words like toys or blocks or songs or weapons.
The inability to distinguish inner projections from outer messages flourishes in conditions where interpreters have to bear the weight of the entire communication circuit. This inability, psychologically conceived, is called paranoia; socially conceived, we should call it mass communication.
(John Durham Peters, Speak into the Air, p. 201).
Liberal reaction to conspiracy is like a deposition of the enlightened subject. The liberal marshals a majority education. No information can be true that issues from belief or aesthetic inquiry. The doctrines of the hillbilly and the corporate sycophant align in the politicization of the word virus. The martyrs of a lost america run up to their brethren in terminator elite guard to be once again defeated at their own private alamo.
One phenomenon that plays out between the liberal establishment and conspiracy theorists is in the desire for counter-discourse. I think you are a reptile. You say “I am not a reptile”. I counter, “That sounds like something someone would say if they were trying to avoid admitting the fact that they were, in fact, a reptile.” It’s not only the glossy reptilian horror at the end of the tunnelvision, it’s also the shadowy journey you go through, draped in the impossible, the fantastic, the so unbelievable it must be true (for what else could it be since everything is so false).