disappointing paranoia, occulted labor.
“PARANOID STYLE”?
In the process of uncovering family trauma, I have been diagnosed with paranoid tendencies.
Now, these tendencies weren’t unwarranted reactions but aftereffects of abuse : there was a cause and a reason for them.
Looking back on it, I see a similarity (relation?) between my growing understanding of the interpersonal relations I was thrown into and the “politically rebellious” tendencies I had and would develop through my teenage years.
I feel like it’s perfectly reasonable to assume people/entities that are uber-rich and powerful would commit atrocities, 120 days of sodom style.
To (be able to) pay even the slightest bit of critical attention to everything happening all the time everyday and not have any fucking suspicion that the bourgeoisie is largely composed of moral monsters of nonempathy and stunted emotional processes is either being close enough to luxury that you crave that state of unempathetic shameless privilege or just being a fucking lamb, maybe ? I don’t know.
I feel like Lifexperience has blessed me with paranoia.
Paranoia ungrounds us from certainty, it entertains an atmosphere of doubt and questioning, it can be a useful stage in the process of escaping a belief system that’s gotten too comfortable but it does slip up every once in a while.
Paranoia offers a threshold towards [class/race/gender] consciousness, it invites to a work of connecting different events and recurrences as a means of uncovering the existence of (nefarious) processes : i know something is going on, i might not be able to fully express it but someone is doing something and that something is affecting me, negatively.
It is diametrically opposed to the mystical consciousness I discussed some times ago while retaining apophenic sympathies to it.
Where mystical consciousness escapes words and produces paralyzing ecstasy, paranoia is generally underlying and even if at first it manifests in a diffuse feeling, it will generally coalesce into words that can accurately describe the feeling, a target is picked, frozen and personified.
(there’s something Burroughsian about Mr. Alinsky)
The paranoid generates maps of the potential “Plan at work” ; having personalized the target of her feelings under the helm of a symbolic Them, she seeks data that she then coalesces into aggregates of information that always conform to her inner feelings. She maps out a theory and picks what fits with it in the world, without paying attention to what challenges it. Because paranoia is largely about belief.
“Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.” - Thomas Pynchon
It’s not religious, it’s spiritual.
Where mystical states can’t be communicated and seem to arise out of the inner world of the subject, paranoia has the quality of a memetic state requiring full immersion in its particular incubatory substrate in order to spread into others, one only needs to be exposed to enough propaganda in order to start believing it(s ideology) : paranoia is most often communicated.
The point of connection between the two is in the way insights are brought on by both states. These insights stay with the host even after “security” or “normality” has imposed itself some times after.
Paranoia lingers. Mystical states flee.
Where both states reveal to the subject an absence of control, paranoia still lets some measure of seeming agency to the host : the agency of looking into the object of paranoia and of seeking to elucidate the Mystery. Awareness is felt to be the most important thing and thus raising the awareness of others often becomes the political paranoid’s task.
The most visible political paranoias operate along the lines of populism, itself a hystericized version of liberalism: “the elites control the population and do bad things but if we do enough, they’ll turn around or maybe we’ll get better elites in their stead to rule over us and stop the bad guys”. The point is not to change a system but to get rid of certain people at the head of it, they’re the ones with all the agency, as if they’d stolen it from each and every citizens—and that’s where the problems of political paranoia lie : the dynamics of the personalization of threat.
DARK MONEY
The problems/features of the Systems-Being-Perceived-By-The-Paranoid are always attributed to the agency and will of a symbolic Them/They that’s immovible yet malleable enough that the conspiracy theory can keep growing within the paranoid’s mind.
While it is irrefutable that there’s a class gaining and maintaining power over the rest of the population, it’s important to realize that the atomizing forces of capitalism prevent people from making meaningful human connections that aren’t based in capitalist desire as well as restricting the focus of life to the pursuit of capital.
Rich people don’t have friends. They have assets. Anything is a potential route towards accumulating more capital and power, addicting behaviors start to emerge. Because of isolationist social habits, individual-worship and randian delusions, the emotional life rots onto itself, eating at its own emptiness yet seeking to fill that same void, hobbies and obsessions are picked, ideals are thought up as responses for the gap at the heart of their existence. The conflictual dynamics of the bourgeoisie skyrocket as the only acts of class solidarity to happen are temporary alliances the strongest are willing to forge to eat the weakest, juggling risks and attempts at one-uping each others at every turn. Rich people don’t have friends or comrades, they have shareholders.
In most paranoid’s maps the focus on Them occludes the entirety of the systems, plural. All the intricate Plans that structure our ways of interacting with each others are made to be a single blob.
The center of a paranoid delusion, its focus on a single monolithic cause (is one of the things that) makes it weak as a process of political analysis, and that’s why the illuminatus trilogy can’t be topped as conspiracy theory fiction.
There is not one Plan but a thousand of them, and all of them are crashing down on each others and recuperating each others’ strenght, the competitive “law of the jungle” is really just the law of the bourgeoisie. Because plans are not what makes the system go forward, the system allows for these plans to emerge, it simply crushes those that can’t hold long enough because of lack, betrayal or bad luck.
Now, the problem with a whole lot of conspiracies (fiction) is that they can quickly becomes racist and/or antisemitic, case in point :
The Black Monday Murders of : Jonathan Hickman - Tomm Coker - Michael Garland - Rus Wooton.
Mild spoilers for the themes and internal dynamics of the story, I try not to spoil the ending though.—I also talk a bit about the Safdie Bros’ excellent Uncut Gems which you should go and watch if you want to have a carefully enigneered panic attack.
TBMM, like a lot of Hickman (and Image) comics, feels like a comicbook that tries to be prestige tv for the american comics landscape.
The story goes like this : earth is captured by a financial singularity operating along the lines of oligarchic competitional distributions of power, governance happens through bargainings of assets between ruling parties, social formations emerging out of the material conditions of these totalities are shaped by the exchanges of power between elites. It’s a slave’s life for the proles under the thumb of the Market.
The notion of the (in)visibility of power is represented through illuminati, devil-worshipping aesthetics as Tomm Coker sculpts vivid statues of ink and paper. The story is told through decompressed, slow-paced storytelling that accentuates the “acting” and emotional component of the characters rather than their physical actions.
Like a mix between a detective story and a political drama, allowing for both an investigation of the mechanics of the world while generating conflicts filled with opportunities for grand speeches.
Interspersed with documentation-à-la-Watchmen exposing the story’s hidden history/structure (a staple of Hickman’s work), glimpses. It’s the kind of book where you’ll find dialogue acting as both banter and mirror to the themes of the story :
Dr. Tyler Gaddis : “Detective, every year for the past decade there have been more than thousand murders in this country. Do they bother me? Do i have empathy? Yes, of course. But i do lack compassion. […] I simply don’t have the capacity to self-identify with horror of that magnitude[…] i’m an economics professor. I just see the numbers.”
Urban fantasy comics like Hellblazer operated in the same genre-area where everyday horror is exagerated through a fantastic lens so as to make that horror more obvious : social commentary through an occult lens.
Hellblazer which by the way has a precursor to this idea of satanist yuppies holding the world’s souls in their hands : In “Going for it”, Jamie Delano and John Ridgway take the piss out of the 1987 black monday crash and the subsequent re-election of Margaret Thatcher to the position of prime minister. - “There’s more than one road to hell”. (Not spoiling it, you can find it here)
In Delano’s story the yuppies are maybe-humans changed by their demonic habits, or maybe they were always demons, no way to know. They’re without past or family or maybe they constitute one of their own, they’re not guided by emotionality or reason but by a vivid drive, a hunger, they’re go-getters. Their personalization as a threat makes monsters out of them and denies them the luxury of being distinguishable, they’re not people, they’re hunters.
Ridgway paints them successively as silhouettes, presences, disguised too-real-to-be-human bodies, alternating between coke-fuelled young sharks and uncanny apparitions.
There’s no antisemitic jewish conspiracy narrative in that story but that’s not the only reason why it escapes the failings of a number of other conspiracy fiction like TBMM.
The problem, as i’ve said before, also comes from the personalization of threat.
Ackerman, Rotschild.
The personalization of threat is a lame name i gave to a step in a strategy elaborated by Saul Alinsky during his political organizer years as he went from cities to cities trying to help communities organize themselves. In his book “Rules For Radicals” Alinsky terms the strategy, his 13h rule, as such : “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.“
The idea behind this strategy of organizing and political conflict is that people hurt faster than institutions and therefore the best way to affect institutions is through hurting the people at their head, thus the ceo of a certain company is characterised as a bloodsucker by the political organizer and their people so as to polarize public opinion between the camp of the evil elite and the camp of the honest have-nots just trying to survive, strategic manicheism. (Think of this as an effective “cancel culture” that would actually be reworked to enact change instead of just being mass-cyberbullying of random twitter celebrities.)
The (in)humanity of the target offers an opportunity for affecting the systems in place but one should remember that taking down one head is not defeating the monster.
Another example : The target of a tenant’s union will be their landlord, and thus it’s the one they’ll personalize as an evil uncaring slumlord so as to generate public interest in their case and use their newly acquired collective bargaining power so as to try and coherse their adversary into yielding to their demands. Even though the problem of landlords comes from a set of institutions and is not an isolated occurence : the state-government that is favorable to landlords, the mere idea that public property is morally acceptable and the laws built on that base, the complex dynamics of the “housing market” ; there is a set of necessaries allowing for the existence of landlords and there is another set of rules and projects allowing for their enrichment.
Grigoria Rotschild:”this firm has been in my family for generations. It’s more than a point of pride it defines who we are, it’s what we do.”
The Black Monday Murders, as a not-quite satire of the world of finance, makes use of certain tropes to personalize its characters, not with the goal of deriding them but to humanize them, reveal the very human, mortal and immoral nature of greed and power, unfortunately in doing so it still uses antisemitic trope : having jewish-lineage characters of high wealth engage in bloody (libel) rituals, controlling vast areas of society towards their own selfish end and engineering poverty at large scales to control the populations. A “fake news” that dates back to Middle-Ages era Christian and Roman antisemitic propaganda.
Now, does the narrative try and suppress the function of the trope ? (Which is to impute control and agency to a monolithic group “the jews” and to blame them as willful agents of the oppression of the rest of “the people”.) In other wors, is The Black Monday Murders a satire or subversion of this trope ? Nope, this is just Blood Libel but told through prestige tv hellblazer meets game of thrones meets wall street drama. It does make us sympathize with some characters but they’re still depicted as non-human almost-demonic masters who rule over humanity.
And, for the record, I don’t think hickman and his crew wanted to make antisemitic propaganda, i think they simply used tropes and ideas that seemed innocuous enough but when brought together mixed badly : evil rich people in dark rooms + family trouble + cursed bloodline + jewish name/lineage.
Looking at the richest families in america nowadays, the Koch bros would probably have been a better fit for the secret group of wizard-financiers but I guess the name Rotschild, as a staple of america’s self-made mythology felt right to Hickman and his team.
After all, heritage and family is also a big part of the story, notably concerning the careful management of succession and breeding. If that sounds like a gross way of saying “having kids” then rest assured, it’s (intently) just as gross in the book.
Besides that unfortunate choice of story-elements, the story seeks to exagerate the real-world horrors of finance : a few people own most of the world’s wealth and use it only to accrue more wealth and power rather than to help others. Something that is demonstrably true.
Then again, most crackpot theories TBMM could be taking its cues from also start from a place of truth, the problem is just that they then veer off into directions that validate the bias of the author : “it’s the jews”, “it’s the chinese”, “it’s the reptilian nordic aliens at the center of the hollow earth”.
In personalizing a threat in that manner one diverts attention away from what pushes people to the extremities of finance, control, power. The real enemy is the dynamics between these people and their slaves but within the story these dynamics are always being put to the side as certain people are propped up as the direct threat of the story, the one murderer, the one victim, the one monster.
In fact, the story of TBMM doesn’t make explicit the real horror of magic, it only makes obvious the horror of its practitioners ; in fact the most numerous victims of the story are barely if ever depicted, all the victims of crashes and crisis, all the exploited workers, all the invisible labor required for the profit of the characters… No poor people appears in this story as more than a few anonymous bodies and numbers, only people of a certain standing or function get to be named. Also: the most sympathetic character of the story is a fucking cop.
The only truly invisibles are the very rich and the very poor.
The personalization of the bourgeoisie as a bunch of old-blood dynastic entities infighting for power transforms the narrative from a look behind the veil of systemic oppression into a drama about who’s the most cunning magician. It becomes a story about willpower and betrayal in the pursuit of greed.
The only somewhat exception being Grigoria who is more characterised by vengeance than others but who is still willing to use others in order to obtain her revenge, still : She seeks and gains agency as the story goes forward, unstoppable but still human even as she allies herself to demonic entities in search of power, even as she dabbles into the filth of magic.
That is another problem I have with the story which might not be a problem but just a lack of information that could be implied and to-be-revealed in a later issue but the tone of the story puts a lot of weight and agency in the hands of characters when the true agent of these magical-financial processes is not one individual bourgeois or one group of bourgeois, it’s the social relations between them : it’s Capital and the drives it fosters. Greed, thirst, hunger.
Speaking of greed, have you seen Uncut Gems ?
Go see it. Yes you’ve already seen it, go see it again.
Like a bad memory, everything was always played out, Howie was always going to end up the way he went because the movie is not about winning, or even about losing. It’s about addiction, drives.
Now I might kinda spoil the movie but I promise I won’t reveal the end to all the people who wanna read this bit that won’t make them want to watch the movie if they haven’t seen it already :
In Uncut Gems, we follow Howie, a NY jewish jeweller, as he cheats, tricks, lies, bets, runs, fights his way towards gaining more.
More what? just more; more money, more thrill, more leverage, more bets.
It’s all for the thrill of it all in the end, everytime he gets a little bit of something, rather than play it safe or give money to his debtors to get some security, he bets it, or pawns it or exchanges it for the opportunity to get more. There’s nothing really greedy here.
Well, Howie is greedy, very much so. But what drives him is an addiction to risk, not wealth.
Comparing the protrayal of protagonists in TBMM and uncut gems : The jewish heritage/family of Howie is not some ancient dinasty of conspiratorial figures and powerful world agents, they’re just people, some innocent enough to trust him, some angry and weary at his faults and deception. On his side of the relation, his heritage and the heritage of others is only one more opportunity for more risktaking, for getting that rush, for betting.
Howie’s family are people. Who pray and play and cry and live and lose hope, just people. And they have no more agency than him over what underwhelms and guides him. Because it’s always already too late, it seems.
That’s the core of it, right ? Tragedy, predestination.
Howie is powerless to stop being distracted by jewels, by bets, by things, by sex, he’s powerless to escape a nature he might have manufactured so well for himself it seems to us viewers that he was born like this. The only seeming agency he has is in in pushing or pulling away from these distractions and even that is not something he’s intent on doing.
No agency. No control.
ADDENDUMS :
The things I couldn’t be bothered to incorporate into the larger text because editing takes time and it’s a fuck-ass week rn.
“…Perpetual Institutions…”
There’s a strange capitalist realism at work in the mood of the story. Not quite underlying but still totalising, there’s no horizon for a change that takes place outside of the capitalist/mammon paradigm here. No hope for any real change, only more awareness. That’s why our POV-character is a cop : you may solve a crime and find the murderer but will you ever find who made the murderer into one ? You can’t put cuffs on a society. Our hero is powerless from the start and the only agency he has is in looking and looking and learning.
Strangely enough, even with its underlying fukuyama-end-of-history subtext, the story lets on that capitalism is not the last stage of a complex process of ideological competition. rather, it is but a section of a cycle within bigger cycles, itself installed by Mammon through humanity so as to control and exploit it in an eternal expantionist rhythm. Hints of previous systems are evoqued, other gods who’ve maybe fallen to Mammon’s hunger. Capitalism as the ideology and system of greed is mammon’s project more than its body: mammon reveals scarcity to be a lie engineered to force people into the movement of capital. TBMM escapes the idea of continuous progress, the rich are not going towards something, they’re perpetually repeating the same cycles of crash, abuse, theft and exploitation. they engineer these events so as to augment their power. They’re not the result of evolution but of competitive optimization and aggressive individualised sociality: “A conspiracy is just rich people showing class solidarity to each others.” but there’s no solidarity here, is there? only temporary alliances, bonds of interest and short term gains. Being rich fucking sucks.
Now we get to the race panel where i talk about the mystical aspects of the slave trade, as a gigantic process that engenders the subsequent tradition of racism, the dynamics of objectification, capitalisation, exploitation, isolation all come from the first impulse to capitalise. A threshold is passed by the societies that start the atlantic slave trade, they summon the beast capitalism : there’s no capitalism as we know it without the atlantic slave trade and the spooky magic operated by dutch motherfuckers turning humans into property. Primitive accumulation goes from stealing commons to stealing humans, from the center towards the periphery : Turning people into blacks and into cattle. Transmuting subject into object, labor into capital.
“The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.“ - Adam Smith
“the one you started with, the one you’re paying for, the one for profit” : investment, cost, profit : surplus value explained by a magus.
Capitalist totality supposedly operates along the lines of equivalent exchange, in order for that to work it has to create and maintain a value-allocating tool : money. Once you know what something is worth, you can exchange it for currency which then allows you to gain other somethings of corresponding value. The social reality of the sharing of cultural artifcats, of sharing food, of exchanging products all become abstracted under the money-form of capital; furthermore capitalist projects generate surplus of capital, surplus that under a system of supposed totality means necessary expansionist habits, there’s always the need to find new markets for capitalism to generate more capital, to absorb more territories in its bubble. Furtherthanfurthermore, capitalist totality complexifies itself and ends up creating relations of equivalence between subjects and objects.Visibility is an important matter concerning the relation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Even more so today when occulted labor fuels the mecanisms of (at least)our current understanding of capitalism. Automation and magic machines and algorythms fill our heads with visions of data moving by itself, without the need for human interaction, seemingly effortless wonders and horrors appear in our field of vision. We should ask ourselves if shrouding authority and power in mystery and occult-aesthetics is not being oblivious to the multiplicity of power, its ability to disguise itself under morally superior grounded and very visible images, into interpersonal relationships, into relations of fear to the repressive state apparatus, etc. In other words : why would the rich hide themselves ? They’ve been fine so far.
And here we can point at the eerieness of Corporations. Lovecraftian formations, Corporate personhood reveals to us the presence of invisible, distributed, plasticly malleable entities that can have the same rights as us, but can afford to play at the level of true citizenship : Capital buys you a seat at the table but it’s not your table or your seat, you’re but a guest.
Places, spaces, cases :
-Very good podcast, very good episode, very good hosts, very good all: QAnon memes with Zach Phillips on the Art and Labor Podcast.
-”Motherfuckers are nonproducing, nonexisting…”
-In defense of Paranoia over at Homintern by L.A.Leere.
Send theories to ospare@substack.com / Shout out to the people who respond to these newsletters, you bring a warm feeling to my guts that's not like a crush but close enough that I get nervous about answering your e-mails. / take care