[Tokolosh]

Here's a hypothesis:

History (small "h") is a kind of chaos. Within history are embedded other chaoses, if one can use such a term. Late "democratic" Capitalism is one such chaos, in which power and control have become exceedingly subtle, almost alchemical, hard to locate, perhaps impossible to define. The writings of Debord, Foucault, and Baudrillard, have broached the possibility that "power itself" is empty, "disappeared", and been replaced by the mere violence of the spectacle. But if history is a chaos the spectacle can only be seen as a "strange attractor" rather than as some sort of causative force. The idea of "force" belongs to classical physics and has little role to play in chaos theory. And if capitalism is a chaos and the spectacle is a strange attractor, then the metaphor can be extended: -- we can say that the "Republican" conspiracies are like the actual patterns generated by the strange attractor. The conspiracies are not causal- but, then, nothing is really "causal" in the old classical sense of the term.

One useful way in which we can, so to speak, see into the chaos that is history, is to look through the lens provided by the conspiracies. We may or may not believe that conspiracies are mere simulations of power, mere symptoms of the spectacle-but we cannot dismiss them as empty of all significance.

Rather than speak of conspiracy theory we might instead try to construct a poetics of conspiracy. A conspiracy would be treated like an aesthetic construct, or a language-construct, and could be analyzed like a text. Robert Anton Wilson has done this with his vast and playful "Illuminati" fantasy. We can also use conspiracy theory as a weapon of agit-prop. Conspiracies of "power" make use of sheer disinformation; the least we can do in retaliation is to trace it to its source. Indeed we should avoid the mystique of conspiracy theory, the fantasy that conspiracy is all-powerful. Conspiracies can be blown. They can even be defeated. But I fear they cannot simply be ignored. The refusal to admit any validity to conspiracy theory is itself a form of spectacular delusion-blind belief in the liberal, rational, daylight world in which we all have "rights", in which "the system works", in which "democratic values will prevail in the long run" because Nature has so decreed it.

History is a big mess. Maybe conspiracies don't work. But we have to act as if they do work. In fact the non-authoritarian movement not only needs its own conspiracy theory, it needs its own conspiracies. Whether they "work" or not. Either we all breath together or we each suffocate on our own. "They " are conspiring, never doubt it, those sinister clowns. Not only should we arm ourselves with conspiracy theory, we should have our own conspiracies-our TAZ's-our ontological guerilla commando hit-squads-our Poetic Terrorists- our chaos cabals-our secret societies. Proudhor said so. Bakunin said so. Malatesta said so. It's anarchist tradition.