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?
Reconciling the Antinomy of Conspiracy
As we have seen, in order to continue to analyze the sublime as the mechanism responsible for our sedation in light of historical trauma, we have to posit some degree of conspiracy (a plan) toward the movements of history. We are left with two opposing dogmatic stances on conspiracy: a resolute anti-conspiracist stance, exemplified by Karl Popper, for whom social phenomena are unintended consequences of human actions; and the other, in which history is thought to, at times, be the result of planning by those in power to maintain power. If the latter option seems somewhat weak, we must take into account the fact it would ascribe an omniscient power to these groups: that history is something capable of being controlled, rather than influenced. That there either are no conspiracies or sometimes successful conspiracies (which can be taken to the extreme: it is all planned) is seemingly the conclusion we’re left with; an antinomy:
Thesis: History is never controlled by powerful groups working in secret.
Antithesis: History is sometimes controlled by powerful groups working in secret.
Seemingly both cannot hold at the same time. Yet when it comes to the question of whether we can ever ascribe a reason beyond our own, to posit a secret intentionality beyond sublime historical events, we have to be able to get to the bottom of these two stances. Both emphatically make a claim that seeks to understand a totality. The anti-conspiracist thesis rejects all questioning or suspicion of historical wrong-doing: thinking that nothing is happening behind the scenes, and that what we are provided by the media allows for us to understand what goes on, and that everything else is contingent historical effects. The antithesis, the paranoid conspiracist, believes that sometimes they understand the narrative behind a particular event: that its endless leads and nodes can be tied together in a determinate network.
The way to reconcile the two is to pressure the certainty with which both claims are made, and the extent to which a total understanding can successfully be arrived at. In the sense of the Thesis, history is never completely controlled/determined by powerful groups working in secret. In terms of the antithesis, powerful groups make attempts to control and determine history—yet often with unintended consequences. To once again mirror the Kafkan example, no one completely understands the organizations of power; the split between those who remain in the town as opposed to the civil servants in the castle is only a difference in degree, not kind.
And yet, to a certain extent we have no choice but to make judgments regarding some type of plan occurring behind the scenes. It is the nature of the event, which extends beyond that which we can cognize or know, that we attempt to make a judgment about it: the variety of judgments we make, as we will later see, determine our particular relations to this traumatic event. But in doing so, we must assume neither a secret plan behind what we’ve been presented with, nor a lack thereof: we must understand any attempt to understand the particular traumatic event as a subjectively necessary judgment for allowing us to continue, or go on.
In establishing such a position, one closes the door to the ugliest aspects of conspiracy: One emphatically cannot, on conspiratorial grounds, believe that they have gotten the whole determinate story. They cannot use this explanation of diffuse historical effects, this reflexive judgment of conspiracy, toward any acts of violence. Instead, it functions as a propaedeutic toward further research: an attempt to understand the ways in which they are subjected as historical subjects. If a conspiracy is verified (say, in the case of Watergate), then it is no longer subjectively necessary: but likewise, it loses its sublime aspect.
Essentially, in a Kantian vein, Conspiracy should be used as a regulative principle to make sense of a historical event that refuses to be cognized. Insofar as a theory is presented and assessed, without making claims to certainty, but rather as a helpful narrative for explaining these series of facts, it must be critiqued toward an ideal of what is most helpful in preventing one’s reduction to a helpless subject of forces beyond one’s control (who either emphatically decides to know the nature of these forces, or rejects the possibility of foul play).
But as we’ll see, the nature of the stance one takes completely changes the way you might relate to a historical event.
Dogmatic
- An identification with the narrative presented to us. One takes pleasure in their own reduction to bare life through believing instrumental reason’s published narrative. [One understands the whole picture, and knows exactly what to do]. Example: Fauci-Lover (i.e., The martyrdom of COVID warriors wiping down their groceries and sacrificing their social life toward a supposed higher good).
- An identification with counter-narratives presented in radical worm-holes. One takes pleasure in their humiliation by identifying with a knowledge superior to their material reduction to bare life. [One understands the whole picture, and knows exactly what to do]. Example: /pol cope, QAnon (i.e., The martyrdom of anti-maskers/anti-vaxxers who sacrifice their social life in pursuit of a higher good/truth).
Critical
- Identification with sensibility, reduction to bare life. No transcendence over the human part, solely humiliation by this external reason. [One doesn’t understand the whole picture, or what to do]. Resignation. Example: COVID Depression/alcoholism (i.e., the martyrdom of having one’s social life sacrificed, without transcendence).
- Aesthetic disinterestedness: judging merely the subjective play of the powers of the mind. Identification neither with narrative, counter-narrative, nor bare life. [One cannot understand the whole picture, and yet tries to, so they might one day know what to do]. Example: Conspiracist Manifesto, Giorgio Agamben, Nicholson Baker (i.e., attempting to step back and produce a subjective reconstruction of these events).
It might seem counterintuitive to posit conspiracy as an aesthetic experience. But the emphasis here is on the detached perspective that one might gain, allowing one to critically re-evaluate the narrative presented to you. Such judgments would have no pretensions to veritability, or truth, but would rather be a narrative posited in order to make sense of, and act in, the world.
The Sublimity of the Pandemic Lockdown
We will now put forth two authors as successful examples of this critical stance, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: the multiple publications of Giorgio Agamben throughout the pandemic and the Conspiracist Manifesto. Reading the latter, one quickly arrives at the fact that what we’re up against could never be represented as a whole. This is the fundamental theme of critical conspiracy and can be seen across the genre. A particularly great example is to be found in the image at the top of this article: Mark Lombardi’s link analysis pencil diagrams delineate the failure of representation to capture the power networks which run behind the scenes and shape capital-h History: no matter the research, no matter their complexity, what his diagrams fail to capture is precisely what the Fuck is actually going on. This is clearly also the case in the works of Thomas Pynchon, in which the sublime object which the entire narrative turns around is only ever implied, given possible determinations, but never the potential to succeed in being represented. The Conspiracist Manifesto successfully offers such a presentation in regards to our recent historical trauma, placing it into a long history of control and psychological operations.
The story they present is this: in the years building up to the pandemic, we bore witness to an unrest which threatened to erupt into global civil war (seen most notably in Chile’s protests in 2020, in Hong Kong, and with the Yellowjackets in France), and that the unified global response of lockdown procedures was an effort to quell this discord. As they consistently stress, this is not necessarily something directly planned, but rather the result of a process, of which the actors who carry out these measures are equally subject to these forces (Once again, akin to the civil servants within Kafka’s Castle). The great strength of this work is that it takes the merits of theoretical writing as such (bringing a particular social process to the fore that had yet to have been properly articulated. Essentially to make one conscious of what one had repressed as a first step) and take it one step further by placing specific agents into these processes, making them real—making things materialist by citing the work of, say, Gregory Bateson. They not only use his concept of a double-bind to display our current position, stuck between two irreconcilable demands, but by also by showing that Bateson was a member of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), ancestor of the CIA, and that he directly put his theory into practice as a propagandist. That these theoretical tools were used to place us in this position.
This notion of conspiracy as an antidote can be analogically related to the Freudian cure, the hope (or cope) that through making the unconscious conscious, representing the repressed, one might be cured, and analysis could be brought to an end. Yet in both, the idea of the terminable analysis, of a final cure, ends up being a myth. And the same with conspiracy: there will always need to be one, it is a necessary antidote to the symptoms of history that are at first obscure and nonsensical, and must be interpreted. The Conspiracist Manifesto identifies COVID as one such case. It is all too obvious that with COVID, we have seen a blatant repression and denial in society, which doesn’t mark an end, but a beginning of a whole host of other symptoms. It matters not if the current administration places themselves against the measures put into place—the state of exception that was started by those with ostensibly different beliefs has yet to come to a close, placing us in a bizarre historical moment of extra-legal indeterminacy. For this reason, even if the lockdown procedures were all completely necessary, there would still be a need to come to terms with the position it has now placed us in.
For it is inevitably the truth that there is manipulation, psychological warfare, and social engineering—which the Conspiracist Manifesto provides a comprehensive history of, and that the reality we live in is a construction. They correctly quote George W. Bush’s mentor Karl Rove on this:
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. (Conspiracist Manifesto, 179)
So, if we have even a smattering of knowledge about the history of propaganda and public relations (the former changing its name to the latter due to Goebbels giving it a bad name), of American psy-ops and Russian psy-ops and corporate psy-ops—then is it really that unfounded to begin to question things? To assume that there is some type of plot? This is the situation we’re faced with in what’s already become a truism, our “post-truth world.” What is so odd about the situation is the derision of conspiratorial reason as paranoid, irrational, in a world where we simultaneously know that our consent is being so thoroughly manufactured. The work poses this very problem (and one should hear its Kantian undertones):
For decades now, one has kept repeating in the least department of journalism, of management, of marketing, of postmodern philosophy, and even of military strategy that the real doesn’t exist. That reality is invented. That the human subject lives inside his epistemological bubble. That everything is a matter of perception and that perceptions are something to be managed, constructed, manipulated as one chooses. And things get to a point where one denounces as paranoid or conspiratorial the feeling that one’s society resembles a huge plot. (Conspiracist Manifesto, 179)
The epistemological bubble of the human subject is already to be found in Kant’s Copernican revolution, in which objects must conform to our cognition, following certain rules of construction in order to be experienced. Which raises the question of the extent to which this cognitive software is timelessly fixed, or is rather contingent on an ideology we inherit. The Enlightenment project kicked off by Descartes’ search for certainty and ran with by Kant’s Copernican turn, has led us into such a world where our perception and the cognitive tools given to us by our social surroundings (not by any choosing, but there a priori—in advance) are what construct our world. The end game of this manipulation is that we have been bombarded with the notion that our perceptions are not givens, but constructions—and that we are not the ones responsible for these constructions. And yet, the second one questions this constructed nature, one is denounced as paranoid or conspiratorial.
The upside though, is that things are now so thoroughly saturated with manipulation, that we at least should see through it. In a somewhat excessively optimistic picture they present this state of affairs as a “dialectic of mystification: the arts of manipulation have attained such a degree of circulation that they no longer function.” (Conspiracist Manifesto, 180). Their reading intends to use conspiracy in such a way that we don’t fall into the illusion: that those named agents who participate in implementing processes of control are actually in control, that this process which they are constantly carrying out is not itself extremely fragile. In doing so, we arrive at a serious contestation of a moral opposition to diving into conspiracy. However, if one embraces conspiracy critically, to not make any claims about a totalizing narrative between what happens (especially one in which a specific group is responsible), then one starts to mount an opposition to the status-quo morality that upholds this subjugation. It is for this reason that the work emphasizes the Latin origin of con-spire, as a breathing-with, an act of solidarity against the attempt to atomize us.
Let Us Now Praise Agamben
On February 26th, 2020, in advance of the implementation of lockdown measures, Agamben published an article in the Roman daily il manifesto titled “The State of Exception Provoked by an Unmotivated Emergency.” The article attempted to make sense of the rapid transition into a state of emergency by the Italian government, which appeared disproportionate in relation to a report by the Italian Research Council (Italy's largest council for scientific research) which referred to the infection as only slightly worse than a flu. For making this statement, he came under immense criticism, which is interesting given the fact the words were not his own, but those of the scientists at the time. In real-time, he worked with the information he had available, and put forth two explanations for the disproportionate response.
The first was “the growing tendency to use the state of exception as a normal governing paradigm.” It is worth emphasizing that this tendency shouldn’t be restricted to COVID, but should be viewed as having continued since then, even if ostensibly we returned to normal. Even if Agamben was incorrect about COVID being akin to a flu (veritably, it was more deadly), this in no way affects the point that he’s making, which is the willingness with which we accepted a complete shuttering of our everyday lives, founded upon a trust in the government. We could even say that the lockdown was justified, that the threat did meet the response, and the government acted as truthfully as they could—still, we would have to account for the fact that such a historical moment requires being on guard, requires a clearer point at which we return to normal. The lockdown was never really considered over, there was no celebration. Just a theoretical phasing in of what appears similar to our old forms of life (with constant refrains to a “pre-covid” world). Even if it was fully justified (and again, this is to be doubted), it played perfectly into the hands of our leaders, and as such, deserves critique. Agamben did so by comparing it to the response to terrorism of the ‘90s and 2000s. Even if terrorism existed, you’re putting yourself in a tough position if you think that it required the various security measures that remain in place to this day:
We might say that once terrorism was exhausted as a justification for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic could offer the ideal pretext for broadening such measures beyond any limitation.
There’s little reason to get caught up in his clearly polemical language, for the point holds. Given that this was written in February of 2020, when all remained uncertain, and the true lockdown had not gone into full effect, it is unfair to fault his reading for its inaccuracies. He was theorizing the pandemic in real-time, and was one of the few voices in academia to actually come out against the radical reinvention of our lives. For there is a certain value to treating the lockdown as an invention, if it allows us to get closer to describing the state of exception we still find ourselves in.
Agamben’s second reason for the response: “the state of fear, which in recent years has diffused into individual consciousness and which translates into a real need for states of collective panic, for which the epidemic once again offers the ideal pretext.” It would seem that, following this state of panic, we have fallen into a type of slumber. The immense expenditure during this panic, in which the supermarkets were emptied, in which people fled to the countryside, and the homeless crisis exploded, has wasted the energy that we had, and left us in a sort of bemused catatonia as our country is “revised.” Don’t be surprised if over the next couple years we see Agamben’s formula remain true: “in a perverse vicious circle, the limitation of freedom imposed by governments is accepted in the name of a desire for safety, which has been created by the same governments who now intervene to satisfy it.”
In a showing of absolute gutlessness, the academic world denounced Giorgio Agamben’s reading of the pandemic lockdown, in spite of the fact that his multi-decade work on states of exception, biopolitics, and bare life was built for such an application. Those who had happily cited his work for decades suddenly found his words unacceptable, not because his theory had changed, but because it actually had described the world, had taken up a certain level of stakes. It was here that many “leftist” academics revealed themselves to be entirely on the same team as the moral status-quo being legislated by the governments. A sudden faith in power appeared.
Publisher Verso put out one such response, the article “Agamben WTF, or How Philosophy Failed the Pandemic” by Benjamin Bratton. One may find in this article such worrying remarks as: “I argue that we need instead a positive biopolitics based on a new rationality of inclusion, care, transformation and prevention, and we need a philosophy and a humanities to help articulate it.” A positive biopolitics is quite literally a plan advocating for the state’s increased control over the entire lives of the population—Foucault employed this term for critical purposes, and yet in this supposedly radical publication, we see it actively advocated for. Of course, this polemic against Agamben thus perfectly proves his point, that this state of exception might be an even greater threat because of the total acceptance and complacency it elicited.
For Bratton then, philosophy, rather than being a critical enterprise, is supposed to act as a justification for the current framework of power and control: “I hope that philosophy will not continue to fail those who must create, compose and give enforceable structure to another world than this one.” In this clear embrace of a proliferation of “enforceable structure” across the globe, we see the line taken across the board in critiques of Agamben’s stance: philosophy is meant to be harmless, it can critique society, but not when the critique actually constitutes a threat. In an inversion of Agamben’s position, Bratton states that:
The pandemic is, potentially, a wake-up call that the new normal cannot be just the new old normal. This means a shift in how human societies —which are always planetary in reach and influence— make sense of themselves, model themselves and compose themselves. This is a project that is as philosophical as it is political. Failure is not an option.
Written in 2021, a return to the old normal might still have appeared possible. Yet what Bratton’s position fails to imagine is the possibility that the “return to normal” is constituted by the continuation of a state of exception. Insofar as it does, it is because the new normal coincides with a new authoritarianism that he appears to advocate for with his “positive biopolitics.” In this sense, Bratton has indeed gotten what he wanted, as have all of those who rejected criticism of the COVID response. We have learned to properly resign in the face of vicious forces of social control. It makes sense then that much of the so-called left and the Democratic Party has laid down in the face of Trump: if you were advocating for acceptance of the state of exception five years ago, you might now find yourself now complacently stuck in that same state.
**
Published May 2021, Where are We Now?, Agamben's collected writings on COVID, offers us a look into Agamben’s stance after having taken some time to process things. He is no longer live-theorizing, but rather analyzing the repercussions of these measures. What is so beautiful is that these writings present a picture of the world that even the liberal mind must accept, given that it perfectly describes the World-Under-Trump:
The age of bourgeois democracies is over, with its rights, its constitutions and its parliaments; but, beyond the juridical rind, which is certainly not insignificant, the world that began with the industrial revolution and grew up to the two or three world wars and the totalitarianisms - tyrannical or democratic - that accompanied them ends.
So as disagreeable as his ideas might be to those who still believe that our governments (or, at least, past governments) have acted in our best interests, they must be accepted for describing our current situation. What might have seemed unfounded, anti-scientific, conspiratorial; is now legitimized, in that the world created by the lockdown is the very same world in which America is undergoing its so-called “Common Sense Revolution.” In this sense, maybe too many jumped the gun in decrying conspiratorial thought. Maybe now more than ever, we must maintain this ethos; accepting its past treatment as erroneous, the result of a reactionary strand that masked itself with progressive ideals, all to usher us into the current desolation of the political landscape. A necessary antidote might be a certain level of critical paranoia, to attempt to draw out these types of connections that once presented a moral threat, without falling into the totalizing narratives of dogmatic conspiracy theories.
For today, we witness the sovereign quite explicitly suspending the law to implement a new one—and we must not view this as a new phenomenon, but a process that began with the Pandemic. Once you accept a state of emergency, you can’t get mad when legal rights disintegrate. This is the great lesson of the Pandemic that maintains such relevance to our current situation: the ostensibly leftist politics of the 2010s have aligned themselves both with an anti-universalism and focus on identity that we see prevail today, in a different form. Additionally, the liberal left’s moralizing tendency and willingness to accept the extra-judicial decrees of the government likewise has continued to this current administration.
If we had been willing to carry out these critiques in the past, maybe there is a chance the position would be different. And yet, the rejection of any opposition to Fauci has swiftly segued into a rejection of all opposition to Trump. If there is any reason to advocate for conspiracy theory, it is because the same forces that have long derided it are the ones who have placed us in our current predicament. Now, however, it is quite explicit that there are in fact plans at this higher level, and yet we’ve already been dulled out into resignation. We complacently accept things that happen now, as we did four years ago.
We are currently in a state of exception, so why accede to this new normal when our morals and laws are in a state of such radical revision? There is no space for pre-pandemic frameworks, from the Democratic party-line to even the supposedly radical academicized leftists, because they are responsible for implementing much of the logic that now dominates us. And if we admit depression, pessimism, and nihilism; we should at least not elevate this into a moral value, as was done in 2020. Theory has for too long been detached from all possible stakes and the pandemic lucidly staged this: the critical apparatus was shut down. Conspiratorial reason is a more promising response than the academic posturing that has clearly run its course.
I’d like to finish by quoting a poem from Agamben’s book. It’s a bad poem. But maybe that’s what we deserve, we haven’t yet earned the revival of aesthetics. To overemphasize the point: can anyone critique his stance on the Pandemic after reading the last stanza?
Love has been abolished
in the name of health
then health will be abolished.
Freedom has been abolished
in the name of medicine
then medicine will be abolished.
God has been abolished
in the name of reason
then reason will be abolished.
Man has been abolished
in the name of life
then life will be abolished.
The truth has been abolished
in the name of information
but information will not be abolished.
The constitution was abolished
in the name of the emergency
but the emergency will not be abolished.
continue reading from issue 03
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