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Horror, as I’ve established previously, rests on a knife edge. It attempts to address an object it cannot, evokes a beyond it cannot access, and insodoing emerges from a schism. In what way, however, is it reasonable to think an aesthetic experience unmasks some kind of knowledge? If the theatre of horror plays out an imagined confrontation with a repressed truth, what can it tell us about its own fiction?

This line of questioning implies, if anything, an interrogation of perception, of our capacity to access the object of horror itself, what I previously addressed as “real” horror. The distinction here is one that is more difficult to describe than it is to feel. We know, where horror (and, curiously, comedy) is concerned, that deeply queasy sense of when a line has been crossed, where the playing out of a fiction has become indistinguishable with actual suffering and abjection. At some point, someone who is not strictly fictional has been hurt, and this point at which horror moves from abstract threat to real suffering is a sometimes indistinct and always discomforting transition from one horror to another. Horror in a theatrical sense concerns characters and props that exist only in a suspended frame of unreality. However much we believe something about it, we only believe it because we know it isn’t real; it is in a very true sense the artifice of horror that we seek. The “other side” of this affective façade is the horror that we don’t, even cannot, talk about at the dinner table, of personal and collective experiences of trauma, suffering and dejection. The question remains then, how do we reconcile this theatrical performance of suffering with its inaccessible, inconceivable referent?

The Anticipation of Abjection

The “real” of horror as I’ve discussed it resembles with no minor coincidence the real of Lacanian psychoanalysis. To Lacan, the real is something cut off from and in tension with the symbolic order of language. When we enter the structures of language, the real becomes inaccessible, at least from a direct standpoint; it remains, as Lacan liked to say, “impossible”. The key point to note about psychoanalysis is the way it makes a distinction between reality as it is experienced and the real as such. To think we are accessing the real directly then becomes a kind of deception, and we can only do so as some form of anticipation, through the indirect referents of language and its signifiers.

Real horror refers to something which exists, like the unconscious, as a negation. Julia Kristeva refers to abjection as a kind of expulsion, linking it to the foundational lack that Lacan places at the heart of the subject.

“The abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being.”

The abjection of a kind of confrontation with the truth of absence could be used to capture the horrifying, that feeling in which we encounter something that induces what seems at least like a kind of ontological revulsion; the fear of the inaccessible other then, the ultimate example being death, becomes a fear itself of our own primal failure, not just of our finitude and mortality but of the absence that structures our desires. Horror becomes something that induces a sense, not merely of fear, but of inadequacy, a complete lack of agency and even existence.

So horror, fictional or otherwise, continues to stand on a precipice, and insodoing, it invokes its own physical reaction, forever being on the verge of expulsion. This is why Kristeva places abjection under the rubric of jouissance; “One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it. Violently and painfully.” The seemingly comic example then of the haunted house seems apt here, as here we find something that is the height of knowing artifice, and yet seeks, through multiple tricks of the trade, to induce a physical jolt, induce a brief confrontation with our own fragility. It seems a million miles away from a sombre confrontation with the true horrors of the world, but this is surely the point. It’s already been remarked upon many times that horror provides a kind of safe re-enactment of fear and anxiety, but even at its most ostensibly stupid and artificial, it seeks to peel away a sense of certainty and solidity of our surroundings, even if only for a moment. The jump scare works like an electric shock, we have no real say in what our body tells us in this regard.

Horror operates by a certain physical absolution. I can’t control how scared I am of something any less than I can control a stomach ache after a bad lasagne, and neither is this the result of any kind of imparted knowledge. Our skin burns on contact with fire whether we know how it works or not. And yet while horror even at its most banal subsists on this kind of impossible confrontation with the inaccessible, it also rests on the ever-persisting anticipation of this confrontation. This is where the aesthetic experience of horror cannot cross the line into literal suffering, and any films that even provide too realistic or extreme a depiction of suffering in this regard retain a kind of stomach-churning taboo. There is something profoundly distasteful in presenting too realistic or, more aptly direct representation of abjection to an audience. While it throws us into a confrontation with what we cannot confront, it must also strike a pact with us, one in which we all agree on what is about to happen.

This pact, one that all fiction to some extent signs, and that is apparent in the outlines of its forms and structures, is one that horror must also attack. Horror strains towards the real even as it rejects it, pushing and pulling to see what it can get away with. This kind of constant trickery, the setup of anticipation and subversion, can be seen at its most direct in Thomas Ligotti’s fiction, which always revolves around a somewhat familiar “reveal” in which the emptiness of whatever lies behind everyone and everything in the story is laid bare. The most interesting example is possibly Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story. While the title gives us some idea of what to expect, the perspective shift from a discussion of horror genre conventions to the narrator emerging from the text directly, almost as if a shop mannequin were to suddenly turn towards us; this plays fast and loose with a sense of reality within and without the text. The horror of that story is one which eats away at a foundation, lays bear a kind of absence behind the formula initially set out, a mere front for.. something else. The aesthetic experience of horror, and its relationship to the real then, is not as comfortable as a straightforward playground of neuroses in which we can frolic to our heart’s content; if it is to function there must be a moment of doubt. For a brief second, you have to believe it.

The Overflowing of the Real

The real is akin to a repressed trauma in the Lacanian subject, it operates according to the logic of trauma in that it is too much in its absence, it cannot be directly accessed and has to be approached in veiled form, for Lacan often the signifier of the phallus. Horror plays a dangerous game with this trauma, trying to invoke the underlying, unterlagen of fear and anxiety but thereby risking a kind of pornographic spectacle if it strays too far into literality. Real horror, as the real in psychoanalysis, must be veiled in the manner of a masked play, evoking and pointing towards something while never simply describing it.

There are plenty of examples of aesthetic horror misjudging this tension and plunging into a profoundly discomforting sensationalism. The trauma of horror is masked for the performance necessarily, because we seek not to be legitimately traumatised, but a certain kind of thrill. The encounter with the real in this instance must remain at a level of abstraction, indirectness that never evokes the strictly mechanical. Jason Okundaye recently wrote about the phenomena of what has been questionably dubbed “racial horror”, horror that draws in its conjuring of aesthetic experience on imagery of the suffering of black people, and arises perhaps from a misunderstanding of the power of Jordan Peele’s Get Out as a horror film that addresses the specific horrors of racism. Writing on the recent amazon series Them, he observes;

“Where [Jordan] Peele’s work does grapple with racism, in Get Out, it is done so intelligently: attempting to reveal incisive but less visible truths about middle-class liberal racism, that racists can be “Good people. Nice people. Your parents, probably”, as Lanre Bakare wrote on its release. Them, however, forfeits the opportunity to make any sophisticated or penetrating appraisal of racism in the US beyond affirming its existence. Instead it is an exercise in gratuitous racial violence, both in the infliction of racial terror against the Emory family, and on the Black audience who are left without respite from visceral and degrading scenes.”

What this suggests is that Them, in ramping up the levels of shocking imagery, torture and degradation, has misjudged the delicate knife edge of horror, instead aiming at a kind of direct traumatization of its audience. This is the lie of what we can call “trauma porn”, that it presents some kind of direct unveiling as opposed to producing the sense of trauma in the guise of the practical joke. Horror can never lift the curtain on trauma any more than pornography can lift the curtain on sex, both are predicated on the production of affect, a phantasmagoria of desires rather than the grand realisation of truths. This is why I’ve made reference to the haunted house, often dismissed as the most superficial and baseline level of “horror entertainment” but one which, in existing on the same plane as the practical joke, captures a kind of primal desire in horror, that of the feeling, of being made to feel something that we can’t directly control. We laugh, cry and cower in fear despite our best efforts, and the shock of a clearly artificial diorama evokes whatever truth is to be found in horror. Once again, we find horror at the intersection of the said and the not said, in evocation and inference, the theatre of the real.

Violent Abandon

This brings us back to the Jouissance of abjection referred to by Kristeva. This kind of basic production of affect in horror is what we anticipate about it, but it is something we do not consciously invoke when it happens, but something we, as she puts it “joy” in. It is the physical impact of the rollercoaster, the breathlessness of laughing. Even the creeping sensation of threat evoked in a ghost story works only because it evokes in us a kind of real paranoia. A component of horror, one that its tempting to say is a universal predicate of it as cultural phenomenon, is the rejection of agency. In survival horror games, the player control and agency usually taken as an inherent aim of video game design is counterintuitively whittled away; Silent Hill 2‘s horror works precisely because you, the character, move in an often painfully slow fashion, that an intuited threat, when encountered, must be avoided with a kind of awkward lumbering gait. At every turn agency is constricted, you can’t see properly, you fight with the panache of someone desperately flailing at shadows, even the logic of events and encounters are disjointed and refuse to conform to our wishes.

In Silent Hill, the unconscious of the protagonist haunts, constricts and mutilates them, and you witness all other characters in some way become enslaved to something about themselves they cannot directly control. The manifestations that we find in the underworld, of the desire for punishment, or the inability to escape trauma, are uniformly mangled, twisted, vaguely formed terrors. The power of Silent Hill’s horror lies in the protagonist’s, and hence the players inability to quite understand what they’re looking at, what it implies, where it comes from. Just like James Sunderland, we, the player, are encountering things that evoke something, but we’re not quite sure what. The aspect of player control here is essential, in order then to take it away; the faceless things we encounter seem always restricted, tied up, caged in some way, as the player is hampered and straightjacketed in tight spaces and heavy fog.

Silent Hill gestures in many respects towards psychoanalysis; the characters are periodically thrust into a kind of mirror world in which indistinct, strange forms loom out at them, outlines of familiar things, sex, constriction, violence and smothering but never clear enough for the protagonist to make sense of them. All that is familiar becomes defamiliarized and fragments of something are twisted into something else. If we find in horror an encounter with the real in any respect, it is precisely in this dreamwork, the patching together of bits and pieces, indistinct at the moment of apprehension but disturbingly familiar. Horror, like pornography and comedy, must render itself a fantasy precisely in order to reference its real.

The Reality Principle

…we cannot conceive of the reality principle, by virtue of its ascendency, as having the last word.”

Lacan, Tuche and Automaton, The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis

For Freud, the pleasure principle, that part of our psyche which seeks gratification, is underpinned by unconscious drives, Eros exists in tension with Thanatos, desire with self-destructive compulsions, and so the analyst must go “beyond the pleasure principle”, beyond eros, to talk about desire. The focus by Freud in developing a theory of drives was precisely compulsive repetition. While the idea of a death drive might raise an eyebrow or two if we assume it’s meant in no more than literal terms, for Freud it seems to be an extension of the psychoanalyst’s encounter with impulse, the idea that we are often captured by an aspect of our psychology that we cannot be directly aware of, driven towards particular behaviours and tics. The question that Freud attempts to answer in Beyond the Pleasure Principle isn’t so different from one Deleuze & Guattari would eventually ask in different terms; why do we seek our own destruction, why do we so often find ourselves repeatedly engaging in self-terminating behaviour?

Many have taken this notoriously tricky and ambiguous aspect of Freud and run with it, notably for instance Marcuse in Eros and Civilization who weds Freud’s framing of a kind of constant interplay of Eros and Thanatos with a more Marxist tack, importantly bringing into focus another aspect, central to Freud’s Civilization and it’s Discontents, of the Reality Principle. The Reality Principle can be simplified in a sense to the deferral of gratification. It exists in tension with the irrationality of desire, a triumph of reason over the animus of our impulses. The reality principle resists pleasure and gratification, and Freud links this notably with the advancement of civilization, suggesting that civilization emerges through the imposition of the reality principle on the barbarism of untrammelled drives and desires. This is the source of “discontents”, an unending tension and conflict between the delaying and satisfying of gratification, in which the drives of Eros and Thanatos must be beaten back and reigned in.

Lacan takes these ideas, juggles them and turns them upside down. For Lacan, the reality principle, as an ordering structure that can delay gratification, requires at every turn the support of fantasy. Whereas in its early formulation, its easy to read into the Reality principle a kind of transition from the phantasies of children into the measured “common sense” of adulthood in which we “learn to control our emotions”, Lacan, and this is where he proves useful to any analysis of ideology, suggests that the reality principle should never be trusted. The “principle” element of the equation comes into focus here, for it has always suggested in psychoanalysis that it is not a reality as such, that rather than a direct perception of the order of the real, the rationality of the reality principle is something we construct in some way or another. Indeed as suggested with Lacan we can go one step further than the unreality of reality, to say that reality requires fantasy to maintain itself, that every delayed gratification and ordering structure relies on the fantasy of the imaginary. Indeed, he suggests in Tuche and Automaton that;

“the reality system, however far it is developed, leaves an essential part of what belongs to the real a prisoner in the toils of the pleasure principle.”

What is meant by this is not, as Lacan makes clear immediately afterwards, that “life is but a dream”, that we are condemned to a life entirely disconnected from reality perception. Rather, it is that however far we attempt to structure the drives according to a principle of reality, the real itself will always remain on some level subservient to the pleasure principle, the inscrutable joy of desire. Rather than discarding reality as such, Lacan suggests, as hinted above, that it is itself a veiling, something split apart from the domain of its referent. We can refer to it, and it can in some respect be approached through the domain of signifiers, but only in the sense that we can make out the form of a statue beneath the cloth draped across it. Like the unconscious itself, the real is made true by its absence, it is a structuring lack.

Horror is Fantasy

What this suggests about the fiction of horror, or what it can say about its own fiction, is that it relies on fantasy to work as an experience. Without the structuring fantasy, horror becomes a lie to itself, and the pretence of confronting us with the true horrors of the world becomes the unsettling spectacle of suffering being revelled in.

A core recent example that comes to mind is the video game sequel The Last of Us 2, a cultural artefact that arrived amid a great deal of “authority” in which its creators spoke at length about the importance of its exploration of violence, and the extent to which it isn’t supposed to be “enjoyable”. Yet the Last of Us 2 effectively picks up where other games left off, providing you with an arsenal of techniques and weapons so dispatch antagonists who remain fundamentally unimportant collections of code in an accessible and, yes enjoyable manner. The meticulously rendered and animated hyper-violence of the game works against its attempt to “say something” in the strongest terms, and rather than the grand unveiling of the machinic underbelly of video game violence, we find an experience in which we are confronted with multiple bloody frames of constructed suffering intercut with rather typical gameplay loops of stealth and assassination. The question hangs around the experience; What does this “say” about violence? Similarly to the discussion of trauma porn, what benefit does an attempt to create meticulously “realistic” and extended sequences of torture and suffering have beyond simply confirming to us that it happens, it exists, something many of us might say we are already all too aware of.

The Last of Us 2 is not what it claims to be, a revolutionary exploration of the horror of real violence in contrast with the cartoon violence of video games. Rather, it is a fantasy of this, a fantasy in which we can act out the perpetration of its in-game violence and revel in its discomfort, perhaps even patting ourselves on the back for having received the message while having noted how smooth and well constructed the gameplay was. The attempt to escape fantasy then ends in fantasy, because while it can draw lines and connections to its real, horror is a fantasy. Aesthetic experience finds its own truth in what it says about its lie. Adorno’s statement in Minima Moralia comes to mind that “In psychoanalysis nothing is true but the exaggerations.” Horror’s relationship to its real lies precisely in the construction of its fantasy, the indistinct forms and outlines, the grotesque and dreamlike stitching together of monsters within monsters. Horror, in this sense, is found less in the breaking through of some underlying truth, but the imperfect mimicry of the mannequin. Horror skirts boundaries, plays with them, but to work it must always anticipate rather than punctuate. Horror acts its own demise, unclearly, it only reveals the strings controlling the puppets as long as we act out the refusal to see them, and thereby provokes not real trauma but a kind of thrill.

We could counterintuitively suggest that in horror we seek not despair, but joy, an affirmation of something for and in us. Horror persists not in the directness of suffering and violence, but the sense that we are being controlled in a place of relative safety. It is the intoxicating feeling of possession.

An episode of the x-files, titled “Irresistible”, presents a conflict between the show’s fundamental preoccupation with the paranormal and real, actually existing horror. The episode, which revolves around a completely human serial killer, eschewing monsters and aliens entirely, ends on a voiceover from Mulder;

“It’s been said that the fear of the unknown is an irrational response to the excesses of the imagination. But our fear of the everyday, of the lurking stranger, and the sound of foot-falls on the stairs. The fear of violent death and the primitive impulse to survive, are as frightening as any x-file, as real as the acceptance that it could happen to you”

This episode is notable in that it attempts to draw a line between the fictional horror of the show and the real horror of the world, or at least does so more explicitly than the heavy symbolism employed elsewhere. It questions whether the aliens and monsters that reside in its mythology are more of a consolation to distract from the terror that plain old human beings are capable of perpetuating, and is something the show returns to at various points [and unfortunately undermines], asking whether Mulder, the ultimate believer, is holding onto his convictions that the paranormal exists as a comfort, a way to cope with his own demons and inadequacies. There is often a tension in the x-files here, between Mulder as valiant truth-seeker and Mulder as somewhat pathetic obsessive, lost in the search for an object that he has to believe is real against all reasonable doubt.

This tension is analogous to the tension of horror itself, something that can seem baffling if it’s avoided; why would someone seek out the horrifying? Could it be for instance, that when we find something chilling, when that sense of terror seeps out of the screen and the darkest corners of our imagination are sent into overdrive, we are simultaneously seeking the comfort of a threat that is contained, to some extent known, something that has parameters? Are horror films an escape from the real horrors we can’t face, a kind of consolation of understanding? On the other hand, it could be said that horror, and its replication, is a kind of excess, an attempt itself to explain the unexplainable, and that it is this which produces horror, the gaps in understanding. It is often said, and often true after all that the most effective horror eliminates context, and resolutely refuses to explain itself. It is often what we don’t see that scares us, the connections we make from outlines and hints at some kind of beyond.

So what purpose, aesthetically, and in fact politically, can horror serve. Is it a kind of salve, a constructed nightmare world of demons and apparitions we can use to occlude the incomprehensible horror of the unknowable, or can it in fact draw our attention to the unknowable itself? Something we can ascertain from both of these is that the kind of horror we seek in cinema is something quite different from the kind of fear we experience through being in the world, and a distinction can, or must be made here. It’s not enough to simply assume that horror can serve a distinct political purpose without interrogating its relation to real terror. Rather than a kind of strict embodiment, a mimetic translation of fear into a fictional setting, it’s fair to say that horror pulls on psychological threads and appeals to real or perceived threats in the popular consciousness. There is a process of translation between a social shock, or a moral panic, and the tropes that emerge in contemporary horror, but this still tells us nothing about what it does; we have a process by which popular fears are codified, but to what ends? 

The Unknowable is Known

“What is hazily imagined can be imagined in its vagueness”

Theodor Adorno

To leave it here would be to regard Horror as some kind of salve on the fears that stalk our lives; there is a clarity to demonic possession that reality never gives us. It’s here I want to turn to Adorno and ask what he might be able to offer an aesthetic of horror, how it might relate to our current predicament. The problems Adorno might have with horror are abundantly clear given any familiarity with his work. Beyond its obvious incorporation into the culture industry, its formation at the hands of mechanical reproduction, Horror codifies and draws deep from the wells of its own traditions in a way that stands in stark contrast with Adorno’s doctrine of negation. If the only way to render effective politics and ethics within art is the “violence of the new” in which tradition is not simply rebelled against but completely erased, then horror, indebted as it is to the Gothic, grand guignol, tragedy and any number of past ideas, can be entirely discounted from the modern.

A thread I want to pull on, however, is this statement from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory;

“The ideal of blackness with regard to content is one of the deepest impulses of abstraction”

Adorno’s modernism then, is one in which content is actively erased, the process of abstraction here becomes an emptying of content, and it’s only through this form of erasure that a work attempts to surpass the commodification of its production. This aesthetic negativity is something that seems to actively contradict the codification of horror, in which a number of abstract notions, feeling and ideas find their home in established symbolism and a ritualised diorama of violence and pain. And yet I want to return to what I said earlier, that horror arises not purely from this codification, but from what it doesn’t contain; rather than simply seeing nosferatu and running for the hills, its more accurate to say our skin crawls imagining everything beyond the screen, beyond the costume or the shadows engulfing the monster itself. The strange impact of practical effects in horror is often brought up in this way, that the more you can tell it’s not real, the more real it appears.

This provides us with a kind of “gap” of content inherent within horror, something that, rather than making the unknown known, attempts a sketching out of the unknowable. Mark Fisher remarks on H.P Lovecraft that by describing the indescribable, his writing traffics in the unimaginable, and this is in part the way affective horror operates, through incoherent glimpses and inferences. The haunted house theme park ride works not simply because of the gaudy jump scares, but the gaps in between, everything that lies beyond horror’s literal representations. This is why the slasher movie villain is more effective the less fleshed out they are, why Ridley Scott’s Alien works so much better than later iterations, horror cannot be generated through straightforward, unblemished presentation, but in the aporia between the known and the unknowable of real horror; rather than simply occluding real horrors, effective fictional horror prises apart the gap in comprehension and allows something else to flood in. 

Safety in Fear

This does not, of course, address the clearly reactionary undercurrents that can and are found in horror. The tropes in slasher films for instance of violence arising from sex, and the tendency often to demonise the freak, provide the outsider as something to be inherently afraid of. Lovecraft’s deep and enduring racism for example unavoidably reflects a particular tendency to seek the safety of the known in the fear of the unknown, a general impulse in horror to provide more of a solace to the inward looking white man than an engagement with the gaps in understanding, or fear itself. This suggests, more than an inherent problem within horror itself, a kind of precarious edge on which it rests. Horror as reactionary salve presents elements of reality that are in fact knowable as a black box, a foreign land that can never be understood, a “heart of darkness”. This is often the case in popular representations of voodoo and horror as a kind of exoticism, whereby another culture is uncomfortably translated as a nebulous threat to unsuspecting westerners [a recognisable non-horror-film example can be found in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom]. 

It shouldn’t be suggested however, that this is the beating heart of horror, an inescapable truth of our taste for monsters and demons in popular culture. While its possible to unfortunately transform the knowable into the unknowable simply because it is unknown, it is also possible to find in the safe parameters of fear horror provides a kind of staging of conflicts, a production of affect that unseats and unsettles rather than wrapping us in the warm glow of assurance. What this comes down to is whether the production of horror, functionally, rather than through intent, re-asserts or deconstructs the reality it threatens. Horror is something that crawls beneath the skin of reality, the smudge at the bottom of the painting we cannot directly acknowledge a la Holbein’s ambassadors, and yet fictionally it takes form. The question is not whether we should represent this smudge in direct form but whether, in the lurid scream-topography of horror, we can find in its blemishes and cracks the horror of the everyday itself, the dark world lurking beneath the suburbs and normality we cling to for safety.

This is not something horror itself can achieve; needless to say, the production of fear in the abstract cannot be reduced to a single tendency. It cannot, and should not, be tied into some unifying interpretation by which all horror can be judged. The production of fear instead can compel us to confront our own relationship to it, rather than taking comfort in the idea that we are justified, that reality and normality needs to be protected at all costs. Horror in basic form creates an affect, a sense of abjection reigned in through popular forms, but something that still cuts through to some kind of confrontation. It exists at the dividing line of solace and discomfort, and whether its menagerie of spooks and grotesqueries serve merely as a kind of warning signal against an ill-defined outside or as a gap opening into it is the knife edge on which every evocation of terror rests.

“Do more stuff” was what I said to myself at the close of 2020. Unremarkable aim perhaps, but the best I can muster as the consensus of decades has a panic attack outside my window. The kind of sickening optimism Boris Johnson was hawking at the opening of the year seems to have heralded in, or more aptly accentuated, a slow collapse of liberalism; in fact the cheery faced visage of death that welcomed us into the last 12 months stands now as one of the most grotesque creations of British Politics, a figurehead of mounting catastrophe that oversaw thousands of needless deaths barely hiding the casual flippancy that defined Johnson’s career thus far, the self-aware clown who greeted us on television all that time ago.

The insistence that things will get better soon is an understandable one, but all too often an irresponsible fairytale. In many respects the covid-19 pandemic has seen peddlers of false hope stretched to their absolute limit, defenders of the status quo driven to increasingly absurd feats of contortion to maintain that their beloved institutions are performing as intended, it’ll all work out if you listen to your betters. The cascade of rationalisations has been almost impressive at times, were it not so repulsive. The notion that we let governments off the hook “because they have a difficult job” is, rather than a plea for human sympathy, a corrosive in which abuse of power absolves itself; the fact that the Prime Minister and those in government sit in positions where what they decide impacts millions of people should at no point, and at no stretch of the imagination, be a cause to excuse them. On the contrary, being in positions of power is precisely what should condemn their decisions. The Churchill-esque keep-calm-carry-on bullshit isn’t just a harmless act in a comedy routine, its been used to undergird a lethal programme of pseudo-libertarian economic fairytale-logic, in which the spectral, unified presence of “the economy” is supposed to justify putting ourselves and everyone else at risk, sometimes mortally..

Its fair to say in retrospect this is where things were going to end up. The political-economic thread running through Thatcherism, Blairism, all the way to our present moment always presumed a kind of persistently OK society, the boring dystopia. This reality was all there was. Economic myths like the “national credit card” were repeated so much that it was Laura Kuenssberg’s immediate port of call when it came time to talk about the economic circumstances of the moment. Rather than blowing a hole in neoliberal myth-making then, covid-19 has tested them to breaking point, and it remains to be seen how far they can be taken. The very simple idea, in no way radical, that the state can offer help, has been resisted at every turn with immeasurable cost; at this very moment, prevarication is the name of the game lest the fortress of ruthless individualism starts showing cracks and the squared circle of libertarian conservatism forced to come out of hiding as the deeply authoritarian regime it always has been. State violence as a well-worn fable told through gritted teeth.

What this doesn’t mean is that things will get better, we shouldn’t say it can’t get any worse, not simply because it tempts fate, but because it encourages the kind of passivity we can ill afford. Socialism will not just arrive neatly packaged and fully formed on our doorstep, people will not just rise up when things get bad enough, these are just as much fairytales as those of a self-righting capitalism, or free markets. Left politics is in an… ambiguous place, one where its ideas are more evidently necessary than ever, but lie in obscurity once more. A key lesson of the last few years is perhaps the simplest, that patience is required along with anger, that a movement cannot survive or succeed on enthusiasm alone, that no matter how urgent and immediate things seem, the immediate break with the norm must be coupled at every turn with a longue durée strategy, a recognition of the complexities of the situation in which we aim to bring a new society about, and an honest confrontation with the challenges it faces. Perhaps it really is futile, and it’s a thought that has often hung at the back of my mind, a constant doubt as to whether an emancipatory politics can even be achieved. All this said, it is also important to note the widespread impact of the black lives matter movement in the last year as a demonstration that people can still take action in a meaningful way. Whatever its successes and failures it proved to me that things can still happen, that when push comes to shove we can still “do stuff”, and that is something, if anything, I want to take with me into the future.

One of the most powerfully unsettling moments in Bloodborne occurs during the latter half of the game. By this point, the Bram Stoker gothic trappings have largely given way to increasingly cosmic implications, and it’s quite obvious that one, multiple or all voices leading you through the world have been misleading you. The Healing Church, and all major institutions here, have been hiding their purpose from the citizens of Yharnam, and it’s at the point you reach the upper echelons of the church that this comes to a head. Walking out into the choir of the cathedral, you can almost feel an immediate wind at your back, a creeping, discordant score reminiscent of Penderecki accompanies you, and the overwhelming sense emerges that something unspeakable has happened, something incomprehensibly immense lies locked away somewhere up here. All of this beast hunting, blood ministration, the strange lycanthropic plague that appears to have spread through the city seems to have been seeping out from some crime committed here; a hand was stretched out into something beyond out of the desperate wish to ascend, perhaps even the discomfort with the idea that powers existed beyond their purview, that knowledge might lie there that they cannot access.

Bloodborne, as an entry in the “Souls” series of games, has been something I’ve arrived at possibly at the ideal time, though for reasons unclear. The way its arched gothicism opens up into a retooled Lovecraftian mythos is both an elegant transition and a violent one, and there’s something exhilarating and strangely comforting about finding this moment to become intertwined in the colossal mechanisms of one of these games again. Dark Souls always holds a special place for me, but in this sense of a world that sits and waits for you, a magnificent, complex series of intimations that unfurl upon contact the more you find yourself receptive to them, Bloodborne is nothing less than a revelation, and the series most obvious masterpiece. Yes, the world of Dark Souls is often praised for its interconnected design, but for my money the somewhat nested levels of Bloodborne capture a particular nightmarish progression, as your character finds themselves delving further and further beyond “known” realms. Seamlessly interconnected design may be impressive, but as you descend [or ascend] through various planes of the nightmare, it would have seemed incapable to capture this strange sense of disconnection between one part of the world and the next. There are certain points where the tone of the game changes without notice, that something feels noticeably alien to what came before, but sometimes the move has to be a sudden one, as is the moment you are forcibly dragged off to some unknown prison in an unvisited area earlier in the game. The “video game” quality of progression through a series of levels, rather than being ironed out and eliminated entirely, is heightened and engineered for maximum effect. The central area to which you return to level up, upgrade and so forth is not for nothing called the “hunter’s dream”.

Something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot recently, while playing Bloodborne and other games, is the extent to which video games are uniquely placed to tell narratives or to effect their audience. It’s struck me that the most effecting moments I’ve had in games have nothing to do with this flat, empty and outdated query about “Games as art” than in truth was dead as soon as it was asked. What’s remarkable about the ways Bloodborne has acted on my mind, wormed its way in there like the Eldritch truth that writhes in the heads of its denizens, is that its done all of this by being a game. Increasingly I find myself captured by this realisation, that the video-game-ness of a game is a facilitator rather than an obstacle.

There is something of a tendency to point to games like the Last of Us 2 [to give a recent example] and proclaim that games have transcended their form to become true art. Finally, they can be included in the vague and undefined category of artistic expression with all the other offcuts of genius mouldering in museum hallways. It is at this stage however, that the question we fail to ask is what inherent value is gained by becoming art; like the robot with pinnochio syndrome, what’s so great about being human anyway? Not to say that video games can’t be treated seriously, analysed or seen as narratively or emotionally/psychologically formed as other mediums, but if they don’t do so as video games, that is to say, mechanically, through the very act of playing through levels and doing video gamey things, what do they have left? The Last of Us 2 might be cinematic, high budget, trying its hardest to be an art house thriller/hollywood drama, but as a video game it can’t help but be cynical and empty in its conviction of superiority, transcendence over its own form.

Not to belabour the point too heavily, but no Naughty Dog game, neither Uncharted or the Last of Us, has managed to get into my head to even the fraction of the amount Bloodborne has, a game which takes full advantage of the fact that you are playing it, not sitting down to analyse it or be dazzled by its cinematics. It is perhaps an irony that the video games I find most fruitful to talk about, pick apart or consider are those who don’t always explicitly seem made to do so. Games-as-art often remain unfulfilling, like they’re holding me at a distance, where the act of memorizing attack patterns, figuring out strategies and learning the rhythms of gameplay throughout the souls series has been a profound experience, something that is demonstrated at its height in Bloodborne, where simply reaching a new area, finding out what’s behind that locked door, sucks you into an unspeakably beautiful and horrific sea of dreams.

Star Trek: Discovery could quite easily be the most succinct example of every stylistic quirk and pre-packaged emotional telegraphy that most irritates me in modern television. To clarify, I don’t give any credence to the constant needling of unimportant reactionaries who have a problem with there being gay people in star trek, bleating about “virtue signalling” and similar platitudes until they turn blue in the face; this said, I don’t think discounting these tiresome and grotesque excuses for critique means Discovery is a good, or even socially progressive series in the slightest. Even if we get past its insistence on marvel-esque winking to the camera and constant quips, which rather than an endearing humour instead imbue the show with the sense that it really thinks all this Star Trek stuff is a bit silly, or its clumsy emotional signals which practically slap you full force around the jaw with “THIS IS A SAD MOMENT” without really letting such inconveniences as writing or acting get in the way, it is completely trapped within a kind of inability to escape its own referential abyss. Even as the show transports itself 900 years into the future, it still pines for and grasps at the star trek we all know.

When, in season 3, we find the cast transported so far into the future that we would assume star fleet and the federation to have passed into ancient history, instead of fully embracing this unknown, perhaps shifting the parameters of Trek further from their axis than they ever have before, things descend quickly into a profoundly boring and I would venture to say mildly reactionary pining for the great old institutions of days past. The federation and starfleet, by this point established at quite a few points as more complicated organisations than the boy scout visions Gene Rodenberry conjured in the 60s, revert here into the old, wise, unambiguously virtuous old order that needs resurrecting; in other words, the Jedi from Star Wars. It’s difficult to avoid the feeling that this direction has been taken partly at least as it’s the most comfortable for viewers; the old “keep the dream alive” injunction where the federation stand in for the real world belief that a wonderful past has been corrupted is an easy emotional hook, but feels like the largest thematic regression star trek has seen since its formal reversion to next generation-lite with Voyager.

I’ve made intimations so far, but to make it explicit, I think my dislike of discovery has intensified after making my way through Deep Space Nine, a series that, over its seven year run, exploded the notion of what Star Trek could be, weaving complex, serialised narratives and constructing more layered geopolitical relations than Trek has ever seen before or since. The Dominion, as a series antagonist, will always blow the Borg out of the water; not only are they gradually introduced and built up over a very long period, allowing us to really get a sense of how they operate through different components, how these components interact and how they feel about each other, but their influence is felt as far more than a straightforward military conquest or immediate horror/destruction. The dominion manage to encapsulate the insidious and subtle crawl of power dynamics and occupation, tying into broader, complex themes surrounding the other forces in that area of the galaxy; i.e the Cardassians as ex-occupiers and the Bajorans as ex-occupied. There’s far more here but explaining it all would require an entire in depth catalogue which isn’t my intention. The point is to demonstrate why Discovery seems so trite in comparison, as a show that displays copious amounts of reflexivity without reflection, spectacle without inspection.

This isn’t to say I think a simple retread of old trek would work today, it wouldn’t, but that is partly what fails the most in more recent attempts at revisiting it. They rest so distinctly on the recognisable, that vulcan hand signal that everyone knows is star trek even if they don’t know the details, Spock, and all the other old favourites; the bits you all know even if you have no time for any of it. At the same time, they seem perpetually afraid of ridicule, in a similar way to some recent comic book adaptations, which can’t go any length of time without winking and having a laugh about the stupid costumes or premise. There is a certain kind of corporate self-awareness that has become de rigueur throughout many forms of popular media traditionally subject to some degree of ridicule or seen as niche/nerdy pursuits. Can’t wear a fancy suit of armour without somebody mentioning sarcastically how ridiculous it looks, can’t fly a starship into a wormhole without someone wisecracking about it. This isn’t a problem with humour per se, lest I be accused of being anti-comedy, more this kind of perpetual fear of its own premise that shows and films like discovery tend to exhibit; it’s perhaps safe to assume this is here as some kind of defence mechanism against anyone who might tune out because they think all this sci-fi nonsense is too fantastical or silly for them, but in doing so it suspends proceedings in formaldehyde, dessicates them and ensures a perpetual distance between itself and the audience that must be replaced by constant stuff happening; supposed emotional payoffs thrown at the screen multiple times an episode, Spock! (you all know him) and various simulacrums of star trek that side-step around the tricky task of thinking what a 21st century star trek might look like in favour of an all-too-predictable retro-speculation of a vacuum packed, ahistorical past that never existed. Rather than boldly going anywhere, or deigning to stretch its own premise into perhaps uncomfortable or even interesting territory, Discovery finds Star Trek mouthing all the words without really being alive, unable to escape its own inertia and trapped in a subspace anomaly of its own making.

It’s been far too long since I wrote anything here, and it’s about time I rectified this. Some of the reasons are typical, perhaps too boring to go into, and I have no particular wish to sit here on a self-constructed couch and recount my worries to an imaginary therapist. Suffice to say, things have been a bit sideways for the last few months in ways that I have struggled to channel into writing, and the process of moving flat is draining at the best of times. Despite all this, my thoughts have turned to something I wrote a while back about the need for an analysis of masks; of superficiality, in other words. When I wrote this I was riffing off a kind of deleuzian artificiality channelled through some of Mark Fisher’s insights on glam/goth aesthetics, and it reflects some of the broader fascinations that I think I should probably define on this blog before I really trouble myself with anything else.

A year ago or so, I read through Agnes Gayraud’s Dialectic of Pop, but I think it’s fair to say it’s taken about this long for my reflections on it to properly crystallise. Since finishing that book, I’ve read my fair share of Adorno and my views on cultural criticism have shifted in a few different directions, but its framing of pop as a kind of formally “porous” category has stuck with me. The notion of an aesthetic framework which provides a practically open ended possibility of incorporation and reuse, something which effectively can draw anything into itself to be regurgitated in new forms, is something that exists in constant tension with pop as standardised commercial practice. The implication here leads to a feeling I’ve had for some time now, something that similarly has defined my aesthetic tendencies; that the avant garde and pop/trash/pulp have never been as different as they appear.

Hints can be found in Dadaists love of puerile jokes and disregard for good taste, something that has long characterised the self-styled far reaches of cultural exploration. Experimental and “high” culture begets trash, and vice versa; beyond this however, and to avoid falling into any tired and by this point entirely uninteresting debate about the boundaries between high and low art, Trash here becomes a unifying principle of excess. Excess is defined often via the needless or unwanted; it’s something that is entirely surplus to requirements, thus of no consequence to the whole; excess is that which can be safely discarded or destroyed without a conscience.

So, if we’re going to define Trash in a meaningful sense, we have to start beyond the aesthetic, and its implications reach far beyond the constrained world of the artist, of the aesthetic for its own sake. What else is the dream of the avant gardist, seen most explicitly in the transition of the situationists from aesthetic to political strategists, but to demolish the artist as solipsist and interject upon the world, change it. The implications must lie outside simple analysis of the object, and in shifting its very molecular structure, changing its place in the world. The trash analyst delves into the wreckage of history and pastes their findings on the wall in a garish and ill-fitting collage, not for their own faith in the work, but to draw out the valuable detritus of communication. Trash only makes itself known historically. It emerges after the fact, similar to hindsight, regret and reflection, leaving behind and illuminating its own form.

So, to analyse trash is, rather than to scour some kind of ongoing subconscious root of subjectivity, an analysis of surfaces and masks, of tracks in the ground left by the rumbling engines of history. Trash is that energy sloughed off and reconstituted as a patchwork of bad taste and colour, pooling on surfaces and accumulating in mounds. The by now overused language of “lost futures”, as useful as it can be, might resolve into a future never truly lost, but simply buried in a kind of chemical accretion on the edge of accepted space, reconstituted as quaint homage or irreconcilable nostalgia, the domain of those looked down upon, the fantasists and paperback fiction writers for whom, at least we are led to believe, superficiality rules all.

This superficiality is the domain of mass reproduction, the same mass reproduction that Walter Benjamin addressed in his famous essay on the subject. The problem with Benjamin’s essay over time has been less the essay itself but the purpose it serves to artists. It too often serves as a kind of crutch for the contemporary, a way for anyone with a fine art degree and a background in pseudo-theoretical fluff to convince themselves that what they do has more “immediacy”, that they are conducting some kind of noble quest to restore the aura to cultural production, to inject some magic back into art, simply because what they’re doing isn’t going to some kind of production line and won’t end up on anybody’s mantlepiece. This however always naively sidesteps Benjamin’s most important claim, and that is that our human perspective is a historical one, as opposed to a simply natural or given one. The age of mechanical reproduction is a historically produced one, which reflects an economic and social reality, not simply some kind of commercial rot that’s set into our artistic standards; in other words, we can’t just reject it, any more than we cans simply reject any other fundamental historical cultural and economic shift in society.

Something Dialectic of Pop emphasised is that Benjamin’s “Aura” the distance that exists between the art and the audience, has more complex implications than we might realise. The problem of distance begins at conception, as soon as we start to express ourselves, as soon as the song is recorded and pressed into a record. The fantasy of the pure expression, the bluesman sitting on his porch pouring his heart out, is unfolded into just that, a fantasy, the more we look at it, acknowledge its historical formulation, its social tracks. We find a world of commercial demands, structural racism and the simple invention of recorded sound driving us further and further from the mythos beloved by Led Zeppelin and Eric Clapton so much later; the irony here becomes that the very mechanical reproduction that Benjamin claimed eliminated aura produces its own distance, its own weird magic. Not for nothing did people attribute spectral qualities to musical recordings; the idea, similar to a photograph, of suspending a moment in time, tearing it out of its immediate context, simply reconstitutes the aura of the work.

This is what trash-analysis excludes first and foremost, the possibility of a final and ultimate demystification. It’s true that the nature of mass-produced fiction, music and cinema allows us more immediate access to a work than ever before, but it also emphasises the immense, and potentially indefinite gulf between its conception and our perception of it. All that’s left to us are masks, makeup, various skins stretched over some kind of noumenal promise that we often maintain still lies at its heart. This said, the analysis of these historically mediated accretions requires a process of demystification. To specifically deal with trash is to poke around in the cracks, to extract from these marks and openings the abandoned remains of mass mediated communication itself, haloed in paper, cardboard, cathode-ray nightmares. The trash-analyst is the grave robber of communication.

A bit of a post-script; I’ve recently been playing more video games than I have in a while, and while perhaps an obvious candidate, I have quite a few things to say about Nier Automata, which I will probably put into writing before long, a fantastic title that pays more than lip service to its intellectual references.

Having seen the recent Nicolas Cage starring adaptation of Lovecraft’s Color out of Space, I was… pretty impressed. It acknowledges that a completely straight adaptation of Lovecraft in the 21st century probably won’t fly without a few changes, but when it comes to the cosmic implications and the weirdness of his work, it’s a film that I find “gets it” more than anything I’ve seen, particularly revelling in the pulp [trash, perhaps] of Lovecraft, the closest parallel here being John Carpenter’s magnificent and often overlooked In the Mouth of Madness. It’s no coincidence I find that a lot of the most successful Lovecraft adaptations [another example I think is the film that introduced Jeffrey Combs to the world, Re-animator] dabble in bad taste and straight out horror, rather than attempting any kind of explicit high brow messaging. Excellent stuff.

I have also watched my way through the entirety of Star Trek Deep Space Nine. It’s perfectly evident to me that it’s the best Trek has ever been, and I have many reasons why that’s the case, which I’ll probably also write about here in due course. Moving on to Voyager afterwards reveals a Star Trek series that seems… perfectly ok, but quite the disappointment considering the immense possibilities Ds9 opened up for it. In fact, I might end up writing quite a bit more about star trek in the coming months..

How much of your time is spent defending the honour of the dead? This is the question that often arises when some brouhaha about that corpse accelerationism arises in the twittersphere, because it seems to me that more than anything it revolves around ideas that no longer have much purchase, or are sputtering along somewhere in the digital backwaters. I’m not going to engage in some of the admittedly hilarious personal beefs that have come to my attention recently, because ultimately, who cares, but as someone who about a year ago stuck my face into this particular cesspit if only to sever a link, it struck me that not only am I not an accelerationist, I am profoundly uninterested in being one.

This is only reinforced by the sheer amount of effort that is expended by self-identified high priests of acc in defending its name, quibbling over minor distinctions and worrying perpetually about their moral character and intellectual curiosity. I can’t deny the profound influence of Mark Fisher on my work, but I also acknowledge that my time is poorly spent arguing with anyone about his legacy, as I have done in the past; that really, neither me or anyone else should really claim some kind of genuine grasp on the “real” Fisher, something that undoubtedly, no matter our stage of removal, results in a reified construction, an idealised fantasy that crams his body of work into whatever mould we have set for it. This isn’t unique to Fisher; every dead, and even some living thinkers, writers and philosophers of all stripes seem to garner followers to which they act as a kind of patron saint, whose body of work is a fixed whole with a singular message…

This is the frustration with the accelerationist narratives that ooze out of the woodwork when some supposedly spurious definition of accelerationism makes the headlines, usually in connection with a white supremacist shooter. That isn’t accelerationism This is, and if you believe otherwise you are a sucker and a fool. The problem compounds itself when we look at how it is actually defined. A contradictory network of justification emerges. Accelerationism isn’t an aesthetic its a philosophy, it’s not a philosophy its an aesthetic, it’s a theory of capital, no it’s a theory of time, no it’s a counter-cultural current from the 90s, no it’s a philosophical tradition, Marx was an accelerationist, accelerationism is anti-praxis… and so on. And all of this is said under the apparent augur of importance, as if this is of major concern to debates in either philosophy or politics.. the question I posed a year ago, why?, still hangs in the air like an unwelcome odour. Everyone asks a million questions, writes a thousand articles, a hundred tweets, and yet never stops to ask whether they are worth writing, whether its all a bit of a waste, and whether it’s all simply been a ploy to gain a few more followers, to please someone else or to retain a circle of friends. The rejection of acc as aesthetic simply loops back into itself, as it reveals itself to be an entirely meaningless and open ended construction unified only by a common aesthetic, a particular valence. Only then can anything and everything be thrown in the acc-pot and boiled to smithereens.

It should be the question that precedes any discussion or exposition, what does this bring to the table. What fails to become clear after aeons of valiant defence of the accelerationist name, whether it is covering for Nick Land’s grim racist outpourings under the name of free thought, or in the next breath denying any connection to racist killers, is why these contortions are worth making, what is to be gained from them. Especially at a time in which the socio-political hegemons of the world seem to be reaching boiling points of desperation, in which reactionary prejudices of all kinds seem to be flowing freely from every crevice, what does accelerationism possibly have to say? If it has nothing to do with politics, it had better thereofore have something to offer elsewhere, but beyond a kind of dark aura what else is there? The passage of time, the opposition to it? Neo-Kantianism, Anti-Dialectics? Could it be that all we find is a resuscitation of the post-68 malaise?

At the end of it all, we find ourselves back at the beginning, and there is no real benefit to fighting the case for or against. It becomes an irrelevance, a dead horse, against which a small community measure themselves but which merely succeeds in standing somewhere on the sidelines looking smug like a cartoon nihilist. Given all of this, maybe it’s better if all we see in it is sonic the hedgehog.

The conspiracy is a channelling of unbound paranoia. The figure is a stark one, a lonely silhouette surrounded by an ever-expanding patchwork of figures, scraps and immaterial connections, furtively checking the street outside for shadowy figures, helicopters in the sky, strange sounds through the walls. The conspiracy addled paranoiac is an entrenched figure in popular lore, a kind of modern archetype, a mythological construction born from the union of confusion and fear and catapulted into the sprawling networks and undercurrents of the mediated now. The conspiracist themselves subsists on a kind of solipsistic construction of truth and duplicity; their paranoia channelled into every surface and every edifice they encounter beside their own psyche. Everything ties together, every theory is valid, every self-cancelling assumption and wild leap feeds further into its own loop. To construct for oneself an all-consuming conspiracy is to freeze-frame every coincidence and abolish process.

The conviction of the paranoid is that the world is not as it is. The idea that, as the tagline of that great receptacle of modern paranoia the x files has it “the truth is out there” is at one moment the root of every conspiracy, yet remains far too conclusive, and far too ambiguous; if we accept that the truth is out there we also accept that we don’t have access to it, it is an epistemological problem the 9/11 truther would never consider for one moment, preferring instead to maintain their own access to this truth. It is not just “out there” it is in my hands, and I have exclusive access to it. The proliferation online of the “pilled” suffix has become a byword for the kind of unveiling of a truth nobody else can see, to which the majority population remains irrefutably blinded, shuffling about in their shopping malls and buying into government propaganda. It is suddenly revealed to us that behind the facade of presented reality was something else the whole time, a secret that we have chanced upon in a sudden revelation, or that has been delivered to us in a gentle cascade of rhetorical certainty. The initial suspicion of duplicity is one that unravels into a host of certainties, truths so abundant that they escape the need for referents entirely, and can happily co-exist and indeed reinforce one another in contradiction.

In a famous passage, much cited, Jean Paul Sartre described the experience of engaging with an antisemite as an entirely fruitless exercise. He mentions the extent to which anything we may confront them with will only ever serve as further justification for their views, and any view, no matter how contradictory, will be fair game to their end. This is probably the clearest exposition today of the conspiracy mindset, and applies just as much to the antisemite of Sartre’s day as it might to a Qanon poster now; it demonstrates how, rather than a carefully pieced together web of connections, the conspiracy enthusiast’s worldview is incoherent from the bottom up, and it is precisely this which provides cover for any and all ideological positions. The truth, for any covid/9/11/pizzagate truthers out there, is no single truth, but a soup of garbled truths, origin myths that cancel one another out into infinitely deferred justification. If any model is used, it is simply in opposition to received wisdom, and as much as received wisdom can be worth opposing, the enemy of my enemy is not my friend, and just because everyone disagrees with me doesn’t mean I’m right…

This is the flipside of justified paranoia. On the one hand, it should be de rigueur, always, to question authority and orthodoxy, and yet there is an approach, common not only to straightforward conspiracists but reactionary provocateurs and fascists of all stripes, whereby anything, no matter how dubious or harmful, is fair game as long as it positions itself against what we’re told, the word of the government or the media. It is a trap, whereby in opposition to it we are tempted to point to any accusation of systematic wrongdoing as the utterings of a deranged crank. To even suggest that those in charge might not have our best interests in mind is automatically to surrender yourself to the fringes of society with all the straightjacketed lunatics.

These two positions are, as we might see mirrored in the liberal-fascist ratchet, complimentary. One provides the opening for the other, and the more one protests, the more the other benefits. The conspiracy, seen in everything, thrives on it’s own incoherence to the same extent as liberal capitalism, and it can do so due to its conviction. The red/blue pill analogy has to operate under the assumption that what it unveils is in fact not just an extension of the illusion, or that the situation is in fact as Morpheus says it is, that the disseminator of the conspiracy is not in fact their own whistleblower. Paranoia, taken to these extremes of faith, is a neverending rabbit hole of nonsensical, garbled connections, assumptions made on the basis of nothing more than hot air but with the weight of hard truth. Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo, close to the white hot light of being, Plato’s Cave, the incomprehensibility of reality is distilled into a simple opposition.

Badiou speaks about the process by which the lone figure, upon exiting Plato’s cave, must go back in to free the others. The conspiracist’s solipsism precludes this entirely, for their paranoia is simply the construction of what they believe must lie behind the shadows, the conviction of the ideologue that they have the answer with no confirmation. They may tell themselves that the cave wall is actually a cinema screen, that this is the truth that they don’t want you to know, that they are aboard an alien spaceship, or subjects to government experiments, and yet cannot possibly confirm these thoughts, or even consider exiting the cave. Indeed, their singular idealism requires them to remain seated. Even if they were rescued, or gained the opportunity to escape, each new discovery would have to be justified with regard to these long gestated realities. The real world outside would simply be an extension of every dreamed up illusion, something they want you to see, the shapes casting shadows on the wall mere instuments of their will.

The philosophy of paranoia is collection of gaseous states, in the same manner as Baudrillard’s confounding and obscene text on Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics, on reality as a gigantic intestinal complication. The state of the paranoiac is always in some respect justified, they are always to some extent aware that things are not in fact as they seem. And yet where the conspiracy emerges is in the prescription of intention(s), in the exposition of aims, the veiled presence of a villain behind the scenes. What remains unthinkable to the conspiracy theorist is that reality simply is, in their perpetual conviction in the direction of travel from what may be both a group of people or a single automaton, their truth precludes a search, but is also a perpetual treadmill of justification, everything must mean something, lead back to a certain point.

If we are to think through our paranoia, it must be in the form of process, as a complex relation between contingency and determination. There are links to be made, structures and systems to be felt and sketched out, but they adapt and change in relation with one another, the outside world does not exist in a kind of symbolic stasis for an ulterior motive. To construct something solid out of gaseous paranoia is to root it in the immanent logics that underpin strategies and plans, rather than the omniscient or omnipotent vindictiveness of a constructed deity or demon. Rather than the masked director controlling the show from behind the curtains, we might look to an unmade x-files script written by Thomas Ligotti, which culminates in Mulder and Scully finding behind a theatre curtain not a reason, a purpose, or a person controlling events from beyond, but a void.