CONSPIRACY AND THE SUBLIME
by ANONYMOUS
It’s clear now that the sacrifices of the COVID-19 lockdown, carried out in the name of community, were instead a sacrificial offering-up of community itself. In an act of final resignation, we submitted to the rationalization, desocialization, and digitalization of lives that had already long been infected by these forces. We chose, by way of complacency, to give both the government and pharmaceutical companies the benefit of the doubt (to put it mildly). Already deeply enmeshed in the decay of our older ways of life, we shuffled off this rot in order to embrace a total faith in control. A trust-fall down an abyss.
It is already banal to criticize COVID—as if we had actually processed this historical trauma. In March, two Ivy League academics said as much in the New York Times (!) Daily Podcast; there’s a strong chance the lockdown had no effect on the death count. And yet while it was happening, such remarks were simply verboten. The aim here, however, is not to carry out some critique of the Pandemic, but more so to argue that our current state of affairs can be traced back to the repression of “conspiracy theory” and critical thinking during the Pandemic. If we complain about the current atmosphere of repression in the United States, it would be absurd to think of this as a wholly new phenomenon. It is in light of our current state of exception that we must think of its origin. To do so means thinking the Kantian Sublime.
The Triumph of Reason
For Kant, the sublime experience is the first shot in a violent struggle between our inhuman reasoning apparatus and our fleshy animal sensibility, occurring within the contested territory of imagination (the faculty where these heterogeneous rivals meet). Kant separates these experiences into two types: the mathematical and the dynamical. The former, exemplified by the infinitude of space, presents us with a magnitude beyond our comprehension: our imagination fails to grasp the infinite, which cannot ever fully display itself in our sensations. The latter, paradigmatically an erupting volcano or devastating hurricane, displays a power beyond human resistance: our imagination cannot outwit nature at its most destructive. The mathematical sublime then exposes our insignificance, the dynamical our frailty—these are experiences of humility, of our limitations. And yet, in spite of this, they elicit a pleasure (albeit a negative one),
a rapidly alternating repulsion from and attraction to one and the same object. What is excessive for the imagination is as it were an abyss, in which it fears to lose itself, yet for reason’s idea of the supersensible to produce such an effort of the imagination is not excessive but lawful, hence it is precisely as attractive as it was repulsive for mere sensibility. (Critique of Power of Judgment, 135)
Reason establishes its superiority over our outdated meat-suit hardware, by lawfully carrying out its duty of transcending the sensible domain to instead think a higher unity, achieving completion where the imagination had failed, all while taking joy in the imagination’s descent into the abyss. The sublime then, is not to be found in the object itself, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious of being superior to nature within us and thus also to nature outside us. Everything that arouses this feeling in us, which includes the power of nature that calls forth our own powers, is thus called sublime. (Critique of Power of Judgment, 147)
Though Kant speaks only of nature’s exhibition of the sublime, this same framework can be extended outside its domain, insofar as it is a war between our faculties. We intend to argue that in certain historical moments, one may identify such a relation between the faculties, those moments when our human limitations are humiliated by a violence which reason unleashes upon the sensibility with a view to extending its own domain and letting sensibility look out beyond itself into the infinite, which is an abyss for it. (Critique of Power of Judgment, 148)
Certain historical traumas then take on this sublime quality, breeding conspiracy theories which attempt to suture and determine this abyssal gap in our understanding (akin to Reason’s attempt to unify where imagination fails). The JFK assassination exemplifies the frailty of the human body even when designated with an immense sovereign power, the Moon Landing displays our mathematical insignificance by juxtaposing immense scientific achievement with both a supposed limit on our capabilities: it’s either that we can’t even get that far, or that even such an achievement doesn’t scratch the surface of space’s infinitude. 9/11; the vulnerability of global finance, even the sturdiest monoliths subject to contingent acts of destruction. As we’ll see later, COVID as well. In such moments, we experience this struggle internally, and our attempt to come to terms with it mirrors our experience of the sublime. Whether one accepts the New York Times or the 4chan schizo telling, one feels superiority over this abyssal gap, and is able to take a negative pleasure in their impotence regarding the convulsions of history, their insignificance against the non-cognizable networks of power that appear necessary to keep this all churning.
In Kafka’s The Castle (and most of his other works), we see the fantastical mechanism which allows for this: Law and its power need not actually be infinite and all-powerful for us to view it as such. If a bureaucracy is convoluted enough, it reaches a point at which we can no longer “picture” the whole thing. Instead, we are forced to make a jump: to let reason fly where the imagination cannot go, and as a result, it takes on this sublime aspect. In the face of this sublime, we feel the domination of our animal parts by our rational apparatus, leaving us in a state of dream-like paranoid speculation in the hopes of understanding what it exactly is that we’re up against. And due to its convoluted, uncognizable sprawl; even those lawyers, judges, and civil servants who work in it, who “do the subjugating,” remain left to ascribe to it a magical power. And yet as Kafka demonstrates, it is this sublime aspect, this negative pleasure, which keeps everyone playing the game, leading them to get caught in the cogs of power as they seek to find a determinate idea of what they’re up against.
It is here we’d like to put forward the negative pleasure of the sublime as a mechanism which keeps people going, to derive enjoyment out of their own subjugation. The idea here is that, in the face of the immense rationalization, be it of Global Capital or the US government, we identify with this force at the expense of our own bodies, our “animal” sensibility. The formula here is: Adorno and Horkheimer’s Instrumental Reason subjugates Agamben’s bare life—and we keep going on by identifying with instrumental reason, taking pleasure in our own domination.
In Kant’s writings, reason is a compulsion toward an ever-more unified experience that we must found our knowledge and ethics upon, yet must constantly be kept from going beyond the realm of possible experience. It is an inhuman force which we are all subject to, with ends that very well might diverge from our own. Adorno and Horkheimer’s instrumental reason emphasizes this quality: it is a tool that we use to make sense of the world, that instead obfuscates our reality and affirms the status quo:
Power confers increased cohesion and strength on the social whole in which it is established. The division of labor, through which power manifests itself socially, serves the self-preservation of the dominated whole. But this necessarily turns the whole, as a whole, and the operation of its immanent reason, into a means of enforcing the particular interest. Power confronts the individual as the universal, as the reason which informs reality. (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 16)
Rather than offering us a way out, reason then acts as a straightjacket, ensuring that we enforce our own domination. And what is that dominated part other than our animality, or sensibility? That part in us which is humiliated, and which, in sublime moments, we take a negative pleasure in subjugating, is precisely our animal nature, captured by Agamben’s concept of bare life: the reduction of a population to a state of pure biological functioning, with no care whatsoever for the quality of that life, by a sovereign decree:
It is even possible that this limit, on which the politicization and the exceptio of natural life in the juridical order of the state depends, has done nothing but extend itself in the history of the West and has now—in the new biopolitical horizon of states with national sovereignty—moved inside every human life and every citizen. Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being. (Homo Sacer, 139-140)
The sovereign decides that the population it rules over exists only as a biological entity: one is guaranteed the right to live, but voids any claims to quality of that life. What they are left with is a pure play-thing for instrumental reason, which then continuously exploits the domain that extends beyond that bare life. This senseless submission to a law that cannot be articulated, that remains indeterminate, is for Kant a necessary condition for morality: “law ordained function...is the genuine characteristic of human morality, wherein reason must violate sensibility” (Critique of the Power of Judgment, 151). So we see this structure of violation as integral to the experience of the sublime, and also for the maintenance of human morality. And as we see, this violation creates a sort of pleasure—but the question is: on whose behalf?
It is here that conspiracy arises. If we are subject to instrumental reason, has this all been planned in advance? If we try to come up with such a “plan,” to point the finger at specific actors, it would seem that the historical event would lose its sublime quality: it would become cognizable. Here, we’re faced with an issue. On the one hand, it seems quite clear that such a relief from the negative displeasure of the sublime would provide an impetus for conspiracy tout court, that it is simply a coping-mechanism to regain a sense of power in “seeing through” one’s own domination (and often at the expense of a some marginalized group, said to be truly responsible). On the other hand, this drive toward demystification seems to be a necessary path to cutting through the fog of ideology. Such a source of this domination must necessarily be an ascription of intentionality: a conception of a plan by which these new mores are implemented. Carl Schmitt’s state of exception and Giorgio Agamben’s extension of this concept consist in the fact that the state always establishes its rule of law by extra-legal means. Conspiracy can then quite clearly be defined as a plot by a group, of which the public is unaware, to carry out an unlawful act. The plot to establish a state of exception then, is a conspiracy. However, to say that there are conspiracies seems to then ascribe a determinate cognition that we’ve already said no one has access to. It seems, in typical Kantian fashion, we’ve arrived at an issue: how can we know if there are conspiracies when they are by definition beyond what we can know?
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