The Overweening Generalist is largely about people who like to read fat, weighty "difficult" books - or thin, profound ones - and how I/They/We stand in relation to the hyper-acceleration of digital social-media-tized culture. It is not a neo-Luddite attack on digital media; it is an attempt to negotiate with it, and to subtly make claims for the role of generalist intellectual types in the scheme of things.
Overweening Generalist
Showing posts with label guerrilla ontology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label guerrilla ontology. Show all posts
NPR's version of the story likens it to something out of Eco's Foucault's Pendulum,which seemed like a decent riff, but I had immediately thought of the w.a.s.t.e underground postal system in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, a postal system that has operated successfully for centuries and under the radar of The State.
There's still a lot we don't know about these three Masonic police-persons. Unlike those silently awaiting Trystero's Empire, they eventually introduced themselves to the cops in Santa Clarita, a noted home of many LAPD officers. They had enough police equipment and accoutrements to "pass" as cops. How? I'd like to know.
This Pynchon symbolic meme has long had legs
This story seems made up by a Pynchonian mind, but so far it looks real. Is it a cargo cult of some sort? They seem to have pulled the 3000 year old Knights Templar dealio out of thin air. This made me think: performance art? More like guerrilla ontology. Or, operationally put: this is currently acting like guerrilla ontology in the nervous system of the present writer.
It's probably a mere coincidence that Pynchon's birthday is tomorrow, 8 May. He'll be 78.
Unless there's some bizarro small number groupthink led by a charismatic goin' on - many, if not all, religions start this way - I'm not sure what to make of it. They seem to have not practiced any real police work, although if you Google "impersonating police officer" you can read articles for days on end. In Latin America and other parts of the globe, where there's a narco-state or some form of military fascism, often real or fake cops knock on the door of some "dangerous" journalist, book writer, or activist, and they're never seen again. So pretending to be a cop is an under-appreciated thing. But these Masons don't seem nefarious or after "I'm a bad ass you'll have to reckon with" kick. Nor do they seem to be trying to deal or score sex or drugs, although maybe we shall see.
It gets better when you realize one of the three was on staff for the California State Attorney General Kamala Harris.
They have a website. They protected - or planned to protect - Masons in 33 (there's that number) states, including Mexico, which reminded me of Emperor Norton of San Francisco, who was also Lord High Protector of Mexico.
There's something so cosmically hilarious about this it really made the day of an asthmatic down with a nasty case of bronchitis (me).
The line that they were "here first" smacks of either Art or Delusion, if there is any difference.
I was also reminded of Robert Anton Wilson's lines of thought about mass hallucination and things like money: the Mob can print $100 bills that take a group of experts to tell that they're not "really" money; the Federal Reserve can print money and it's okay. Only their paper is "real." Or: Andy Warhol signing his autograph on Campbell's Soup cans bought from the supermarket, immediately changing the can of soup to a Warhol with some value. How Elmyr got away (for a time) with forging all sorts of famous Modernist artists, and art "experts" were fooled.
The idea of a non-"legitimate" police force can be very serious. History is rife with brutal, fascistic, racist thugs pretending to act in the interests of the locals. But these Masonic cats seem to have done no harm, and in the glaring light being shone on "legitimate" taxpayer-funded Gestapo-cops all over Unistat over the past two years, I think I'd rather take my chances with a self-styled Masonic force with a "bloodline" (!) and no record of fascist, racist mayhem.
(Or: a "legit" cop, well-trained and sensitive to community standards and needs, with the use of force as last resort: gold! That's what I think most anarchistic communities would want...with total accountability for their status. And far far far less a number of laws to maintain. Is someone selling LSD? Okay, it better be up to community standards, pal!)
bogus, sexy, dreamboat cop "Damon"
I hope more information comes out about this police force. My first guess is they're a very creative repressed people's movement, who want the feeling of dignity and participation in some noble process. And maybe free food at restaurants.
I hope they don't turn out to be criminals on the grift, 'cuz that would just be boring and ruin my buzz.
Finally, the Walter Mitty in me (and today I have a fever) wants to find out this is just the very tip of the iceberg: there really ARE multiple Masonic police forces, interested in Brotherhood and science. Ya never know! We Await Silently Trystero's Empire! DEATH = Don't Even Antagonize The Horn!
Streaming on Netflix as I write this, this documentary about Abramovic's 90 days of sitting in a chair silent at NY's MOMA in 2010. The film also covers parts of her long career as a performance artist. I loved the film.
Marina Abramovic: Balkan Baroque: Dozing Consciousness (1997)
Definition of "Performance Art": Dicey at Best
The definition of "performance art" is famously contentious, and when I read the Wiki on it one of the further links is to an article "Classificatory Disputes About Art," and this very nebulousness is one of the things I most like about performance art. Read a few textbook-like articles that explain what performance art "is" and you will very likely run into a sentence or two that could easily apply to why people use psychedelic drugs. Some people really don't like the effects of performance art; it wigs them out. I'll return to this subject below.
(I wish the filmmakers in the Abramovic doc would've gotten responses from some of the people who were caught looking on quizzically and then turning away with a semi-disgusted look as Abramovic sat still and gazed into the eyes of fellow museum-goers, but maybe that's just me.) The eminent art critic Arthur Danto sees Abramovic's sitting a New Thing in the history of art, because it's well-known that most museum-goers spend about 30 seconds in front of the Mona Lisa, while lo!: they sit or stand all day watching Abramovic sit and gaze. Taking in The Artist Is Present makes Waiting For Godot look like a Jet Li flick...or Cirque du Soleil. (Only if you feel like it, no pressure: think about that?)
I found Abramovic's family background edifying vis a vis what she ended up doing with her life. Some writing on her suggests that performance art was a big deal in the Eastern Bloc because of its transitory nature, which makes sense to me.
One thing I think of immediately when someone says "performance art" is "nude bodies?" Indeed, there is a lot of Marina and others nude in the documentary. And in performance art in general. Why? Well, how else to make claims for a relatively new form of art? Shock people. How? Nudity, violence, blood, gross-outs, and outrageous speech acts, for starters. In my personal aesthetics, shock is rock-solid legit in Art. I want more shock from Art. (But is it all tapped out by now? As one young Abramovic-watcher at MOMA says, "Pretty soon you'll see someone shoot someone else in the face and they'll call it art." I paraphrase from memory. Let's hope Art doesn't go there. But: it has come pretty close.)
You Say All Performance Art Is Bullshit?
How close? In an early performance in Belgrade, 1974, Abramovic decks out tables with all sorts of implements, tools, gadgets. 72 items. The audience can do whatever they want with her. The audience can walk up to her and pick anything from the table and apply it to her body. She has her clothes ripped off rather quickly. Among the 72 items: feather duster, olive oil, whatever. Some cut her body with sharp instruments Abramovic has supplied. Someone else drinks some blood from her neck. She just takes it. The kicker: the audience is informed the pistol over there on the table is loaded. Someone puts it to her head but doesn't pull the trigger. Someone else pushed rose thorns into her stomach. There was always the chance some suitably deranged individual could have shot her. But they didn't. Many did do vicious things to her. She was tearful but elated (and laughs!) after the six hour piece because she wasn't shot or mutilated beyond repair, and she got her point across: a group of people can take on a nasty tone and do some fairly heinous acts to someone else's body, just because it seems it they have carte blanche to do so. I know people who think performance art is bullshit, but you have to admit: this seems compelling.
William S. Burroughs, in one of his apocalyptic moods, wrote about Art spilling off the pages, escaping the frames and filling the streets, becoming Writ Large. In a way, certain performance art is a step towards this, but it is still "framed" by the various notices and literature that performance art will take place at a certain venue, a certain time, admission is $16, parking can be found in a number of lots nearby at $20 for three hours and the subway is just around the block, etc.
As I write, Marina Abramovic has just arrived in Australia and is "like the Beatles," as a promoter waxes hyperbolic.
Zen Shit
But let's not be cynical. I love her work. But I also laugh at almost all of it, because she's able to carry it off. Someone once said that "Art is what you can get away with," and I have to agree. Abramovic also seems genuine to me. She's 68 as of last November and in the documentary, in an interview at age 63 she states her age and - yes, she's in makeup for the interview - but she's astonishingly gorgeous at 63. Now here's some cynicism on my part: would she have attracted as many followers if she didn't look like a Slavic Goddess archetype? (Maybe...)
Abramovic has done a few pieces in which nothing happens; she just sits there. One of the main reasons for doing this is to test the limits of her body. Indeed, much of it seems brutal, grueling. But she also hints there's a political component to these pieces: in the West, it's anathema to Do Nothing. Just sit there; it's provocative!
To prepare for these works, she does "zen shit." There's a sequence in the documentary where she takes thirty or so young artist-recruits to her house in upstate NewYork, where they prepare mentally and physically to perform some of Abramovic's past pieces at MOMA, along with performance pieces by other artists. It all looks like very zen-retreat-ish with a dash of surrealism to me. (Yea, maybe you wanna see the film.)
The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson
Not long ago I read this novel and let me just say that if you're a performance art junkie who also likes to read novels, you might want to look into this one, which addresses serious items about the possible damages parents may cause their children, if the parent-artists take this sort of art too seriously. And I found it quite hilarious and entertaining too.
One of the ideas highlighted in this book is this: if you live with these sorts of artists - or actively seek out that which constantly challenges your ideas about what's "real" and who or what to trust, etc - often the most mundane situations you find yourself in can be fraught with High Weirdness. 'Cuz now you're on your toes, more than most people. About the whoopee cushions of "reality."
Toward a Taxonomy of Performance Art
Is a Marilyn Manson show "performance art"? I leave it to you. What about Christo's various monumental environmental installations? What about pranks? Guerrilla ontology? Hoaxes? Art "Actions"? Flash mobs? Fluxus performances? Interventions? Happenings? Neo-Dada? "Manouevres"? Circus freak shows? Yes, I take your point that hoaxes seem to be done for gain, and that generally the hope is that no one will catch on. And all of these things might fall under "guerrilla ontology" in that they hope to make the audience re-think what they thought was "real." Must the Work have an intended agenda or message? When, if ever, is a well-thought-out prank not performance art? (There are certain performance art aficionados who will not allow pranks in their club.) Sometimes those who take part don't know they're part of the Thing. To what degree is the audience necessary or complicit in the art-form? "Happenings" in the sense of Allan Kaprow's works seem to begin with a few parameters and then, like a scientific experiment, wonder how it will all turn out. In this sense they remind me of magickal workings. Does ceremonial magick belong somewhere in this taxonomy? Must there always be disruption? The possibility of danger? An overtly (or semi- ) political statement? Nudity? Profanity? (One would hope so for those last two...) One of the most pervasive ingredients in these things seem to be Indeterminacy, which has me buying it if only for that, because, ya know, life's too short.
Some of this stuff seems mostly to want to delight or entertain certain types of cognoscenti, and to piss off the philistines, which is all good to me. I've yet to see a very convincing taxonomy. Anyone got one?
Children
In an ideal world, children and other innocents would be spared exposure to violent ruptures in "reality" but we all know a few hearty kids who thrive on this material from the get-go. Clearly there were children entranced by Abramovic just sitting there. There were adults who looked outraged that this was A Thing. At some point in our lives, we can go on enjoying the shock or the surrealities of these things; others shut down. It's genes plus environment plus memory and experience plus a few other things I can't remember just now. Which brings me to...
Drugs and Performance Art
Abramovic is against drug use, and claims to have smoked a cigarette in the 1970s, because it was supposed to be cool. I think her work is about zen, the body, endurance, and facing fear and overcoming it. (Much of her earlier work with her lover Ulay seemed to be about incommensurability between men and women, too.) I see her work as having a drug-like effect. It works this way for me; it may not for you. What I want from any altered state is a novel perspective on some phenomena. I look at all art as a chance to enter into what the phenomenological sociologist Peter Berger calls a "finite province of meaning." I exercise a lot and enter a non-ordinary state. I meditate, smoke cannabis, read Finnegans Wake, listen to Bach/Stockhausen/Coltrane/Sun Ra/Vilayat Khan/Balinese Monkey Music/Pink Floyd, have sex, do math or logic puzzles, eat very spicy foods, sit in a hot bath in the dark with earplugs and eyeshades on, engage with sophisticated technology, watch films: voila!: non-ordinary states. I think this came with the Instruction Manual for the owner of a Mind. Many seem to have displaced their manual. Personally, I model all of these wonderful gimmicks as sorts of things and of a piece with the practice of magick. Your Mileage May Vary. To me, it's all Drugs. Try to stop me from doing my bathtub routine, DEA!
Some people do not like many (or all) of these sorts of things, and they should not be forced to engage with it, much less endure it. As with Timothy Leary's Two Commandments:
1.) Thou shalt not alter the consciousness of thy fellow men.
2.) Thou shalt not prevent thy fellow men from altering their own consciousness.
With the First Commandment and taking into consideration the somewhat fugitive nature of much of "performance art" in the wider senses of the term, sometimes we cannot help it. It could be the Times we're living in?
Other Perf-or-mances/Other Arty Mental States
A lot of the enjoyment of this - if enjoyed at all - seems idiosyncratic, a matter of taste. I have gotten my rocks off watching sword swallowers and gorgeous mostly-nude babes walking barefoot on a bed of broken glass at freak shows like the CIA in North Hollywood. Then again, I would return again and again to David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology because I was never sure what was a put-on or what was legit, and it was all so incredibly well-done. (And I liked not knowing for sure what was a put-on or fancy; I love the indeterminacy.)
If extremes with the body is the subject, many artists come to mind. Like Bob Flanagan. Or Martha Graham stuff I've seen. Ever heard of Fakir Musafar? His stuff set a mind a-wonderin', aye.
Some of the best altered states I've been in were when I flew to Tokyo or London or Amsterdam or Lisbon or Kathmandu...and jet-lagged, I got out and walked aimlessly around those metropolises. This is not art, but it does seem linked to Abramovic's body-based work. Yet no one else can enjoy it but myself. And then I get back to my hotel room and collapse from sleepiness and the dreams extend that overall weirdness. The worst part of this is the actual flying part, hands down. What, in these scenarios, is the Art? I say to you: the cities and their inhabitants. It's yoga, a connection: my blitzed nervous system and the new city's overwhelming info-density and novelty.
I remember getting high off the hijinks of Andy Kaufman. I could rely on Andy to knock me into the finite province of wonder. There's a funny put-on/performance artist alive today (not saying you're not still alive, Andy!) named "Hennessy Youngman" who cracks me up. He seems like Sacha Baron Cohen ratcheted up a notch, and he makes Modern Art seem a lot more fun than some overly serious staid lecturer at Uni. I've seen lots of video of the robot anarchy from Survival Research Labs that really blew my balls to the far side of Eris. I recall when, around age 20, I read and delved like a madman into John Cage and Lamont Young, and felt a quite visceral thrill when I read that one of Nam June Paik's "serious" music performances consisted of coming out to applause, and, instead of sitting down at the piano, he took an axe and a chainsaw and cut the piano in half. Because...it had yet to be done?
As far as pranks go as a possible subset of performance art, here's one of my all-time favorites:
If you aren't familiar with this prank, please READ HERE. Effing genius.
With some introspection (okay, a bowel movement): definitely maybe.
Ken Cuccinelli (my friends and I just refer to him affectionately as "Cooch") is quoted very recently thus:
“My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong. They’re intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law based country it’s appropriate to have policies that reflect that … They don’t comport with natural law. I happen to think that it represents (to put it politely; I need my thesaurus to be polite) behavior that is not healthy to an individual and in aggregate is not healthy to society.” Robert Anton Wilson writes in his book Natural Law (Or Don't Put A Rubber On Your Willy): "It appears that the reason that the term 'Natural Law' is preferred to 'Moral Law' may be that many writers do not want to make it obvious that they speak as priests or theologians and would rather have us think of them as philosophers. But it would seem to me that their dogmas only make sense as religious or moral exhortation and do not make sense in any way if one tries to analyze them as either scientific or philosophical propositions." Two recent articles on Cooch and his moralic acid-laced Low-Medium Level Bullshit: Katie McDonough's "Ken Cuccinelli Keeping The War On Sodomy Alive" Amanda Marcotte's "Ken Cuccinelli Really Wants To Ban Oral Sex" Are the voters in Virginia really this retrograde? We'll see. At this point I'll believe anything. Also, no doubt Cuccinelli as a Republican in 2013 agrees that government is intrusive on the rights, liberties, and freedoms of his corporate sponsors. Robert Anton Wilson often said he not only wanted government "off our backs" but "off our fronts, too." This latter proposition would seem to exclude Cooch. Are You Naturally "Unnatural"? -------------------------------
RAW with his old friend and fellow heretic Timothy Leary, circa 1992? (if you know who took this pic I'll be happy to give credit) One of the weirdest interviews RAW ever did was in November, 1996, with someone named Nardwuar; RAW seemed to think it was a put-on but he played along with good humor. 17 years later, Mark O'Connell at Slate has crowned Nardwuar as the "pop music's best interviewer." (Neil Strauss on Line 1!) Anyway, I was very surprised that anyone would raise Nardwuar to such lofty heights. But as RAW often said, "Different lanes for different brains." ----------------------------------- A link between quantum mechanics and game theory seems to have been found. Yes, the two areas seem far apart, and RAW did not accentuate Bayesian games, but from the age of 16, in 1948 (!) he was interested in the findings in both areas and how they may interact. The article I cited doesn't mention John von Neumann, but JvN was an early theorist in both areas, and RAW wrote about John S. Bell, Norbert Wiener, von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Erwin Schrodinger and the philosophical implications of the wave equation, the interplay between The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior and multi-valued non-Aristotelian logics, semantics, the ontological basis of math, the EPR gedankenexperiments, Einstein's disagreements with Niels Bohr, how information might play in biology, and psychological theories of interpersonal communication and "games" and how quantum mechanics, language, information, games, and the human nervous system all interact in social "reality." ---------------------------------- A few weeks ago, Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse advocated for Philosophy to go public, for the public good. They consider "repackaging" philosophy - by which they mean: the stultifying and dull Thing that philosophy has become in the Academy - and make it more accessible. They reject this as impractical. I disagree with them here, mostly because their arguments using specialized philosophy-language is pretentious in the first place, and they ought to realize that if they unpack their epistemology and ontology and hook it up to their Wittgenstein and other turns of language, they'll see that their use of the copulae "to be" (i.e, use of "is" "am" "are" "was" "were" and "be") seems inconsistent with their overly technical language in the first place. They're writing for each other in small journals, hoping for citations and to keep their jobs as the Humanities wither under the Leviathan of corporate capitalism. If they can't write about their Big Topics for the intelligent layperson, maybe they aren't as fine thinkers as they suppose themselves "to be"? Take more English courses, academic Philosophers? Aikin and Talisse then consider that philosophy should go public by addressing the concerns of the public and not arcane subjects. But then they look at the journals and see that philosophers have been writing about immigration, surveillance, human enhancement technologies, the biology of race, the nature of lying and the ethics of torture. But while they don't bluntly say it: those articles are impenetrable. To quote the Beat poet Jack Spicer out of context, "My vocabulary did this to me!" Circling back around, these advocates for a public philosophy finally realize that philosophy must be repackaged nonetheless, and I wholeheartedly agree with them here: "On this version of “public philosophy,” what is called for is not a change in what philosophers do or in the topics they address; rather the call for public philosophy is call for better spokespersons for philosophy. It is a request that those who are especially skilled at presenting complex and difficult ideas come forward and speak publicly for the discipline. It is also a call for the profession at large to acknowledge the need for such spokespersons, and to find ways to recognize the scholarly importance of public outreach. But, importantly, it is also implicitly a call for those philosophers who are not very good at representing the discipline to go back to their offices." And many of us who are longtime readers of Robert Anton Wilson would argue that RAW was doing this in the 1960s, but the exigencies of rising in the Academy, together with an iron curtain put up by mainstream media and the "counterculture" concerning identity and publishing and who gets reviewed and what topics are to be considered out-of-bounds, and "style" (and other Damned Things)...militated against RAW being taken more seriously by people who think public philosophy is important for a healthy democratic society. A "science fiction writer" was not to be taken seriously by Serious People, the guardians of True Philosophy. A writer who wrote so candidly about sex, drugs, Timothy Leary and Aleister Crowley and Wilhelm Reich and Ezra Pound and Alfred Korzybski (all banished to the Region of Thud by the curators of Official Culture) could not be taken seriously. A writer who speculates about the phenomenology of UFO contactees, who mixed genres (too irresponsible and promiscuous?), who openly declares himself an "anarchist" and who chronicles a 14-odd-year odyssey of self-experimentation to probe the vast reaches of his own consciousness...this was something not fit for mainstream Philosophy. And then there is the ludic play with deep researches into conspiracy theory, a subject so demonized by the True Knowers of Unistat, there's no way this Wilson should be allowed anywhere near the Conversation about true Philosophy. Best to ignore his work until he finds himself living in the marginalist's milieux, where he properly resides... So I argue: RAW was at least 40 years ahead of Aikin and Talisse. But RAW's readers found him anyway, and they think his unified field hypotheses about media and language extremely interesting, philosophically. RAW's ideas about the acceleration of culture, propelled by technological innovation, and its sociological fallout: paranoia, alternate religions, a Nietzschean multiperspectivalism, and the analysis of Conspiracy Theories as a way to test one's own epistemological plasticities? His readers enjoy these philosophical ideas too. Indeed. While we may model the worlds we inhabit as "texts" we know these are only models, and that language does not map directly onto any sort of "reality" in a one-to-one correspondence, as RAW wrote about starting in the 1960s, largely influenced by discarded thinkers. I would like to suggest to Aikin and Talisse that their world has finally caught up with Robert Anton Wilson's but after many years of talking to academics, I'm afraid the response would be, "Who?" I asked Prof. George Lakoff of Berkeley if he knew of RAW's work, and he said, "I once had a student who was really into him." That's the only admission I've personally ever heard from a True Serious Thinker that RAW even existed. RAW can never serve as a "spokesperson" that Aikin and Talisse advocate for, because he was not from academe. However, I strongly suggest that their sought-after spokespersons take into account the playfulness and sense of humor Wilson brought to philosophical topics, especially the officially outre topics of conspiracy, altered states, and pop kulchur. And because humor is difficult, the Aikin and Talisse plea may not gain traction. If so, 'tis a pity. (I'd like to once again suggest George Carlin as a sociolinguist for any who'd be interested...) --------------------------------- Coming back around, Tom Jackson wrote a concise and cogent piece on the occasion of the death of Holy Blood, Holy Grail co-author Michael Baigent, and defended a court's findings in favor of Dan Brown, who the authors of HB,HG sued. If you like the OG and you haven't read RAW's The Widow's Son, consider adding it to your Summer Reading list. It might be instructive to compare its literary qualities to Brown's Da Vinci Code, and even more revelatory when you realize which one the public clamored over and which one is the "obscure" novel.
First off, full disclosure: I know Ms. Maddow prefers the ladies, but O! what I wouldn't give to just snuggle up with her for an hour or two. (Rachel? Call me!?)
I'm feeling a bug coming on, I'm watching my DVRed Olbermann and Maddow very late last night, virtually gargling with strong beer to bathe my throat in numbing ethyl alcoholic splendor. And Rachel - the smartest pundit on Unistat TV - by a very long margin, no one's even close - began her show with her thesis that, all along, Herman Cain's candidacy has been one long bit of performance art. She's kicking herself for not seeing it ALL sooner. The gnomish hints were there from the earliest Republican debates, when Cain read his prepared final remarks by citing the words of a "poet" who turned out to be Pokemon. And the gorgeous Ms. Maddow goes on to marshal quite a lot of data to support her thesis - Cain's numerology, the absurdist responses to questions about abortion, surrealistic campaign ads, etc - and it was very entertaining, but I'm not convinced, for reasons I'll get to after this clip - the one that lays out Maddow's thesis/interpretation:
What I found particularly interesting about Maddow here: this is the sort of pattern recognition that very intelligent people use to make artistic and scientific breakthroughs. It's also a mode of thought that brilliant minds can use to convince themselves that some sequence of data that supports a hypothesis is cogent, each piece of information suggesting a "fit" in a puzzle in which, following the logic of the original abduction, reveals the hypothesis as "true," when it will later be found to not be true. There's an overall plausibility when you're "in" the hypothesis and excited about the robust richness of your overarching idea. It's seductive, and encourages the brain to continue on, deeper into the thesis, making connections.
If anyone takes issue with me implying Maddow has come up with a "conspiracy theory," please be aware that I admire conspiracy theories for their artistic components, whether the theorist(s) see themselves in their own act of creation or not. To be blunt: my stance towards conspiracy theories is by and large Ironic, and I'm not sure of this could be helped, after so many years of reading the works of Robert Anton Wilson so closely.
And besides, many conspiracies contend in the night, despite what Academia tries to tell you. Watergate, Iran-Contra and the buildup to the Iraq War by the NeoCons are all recent examples. History is filled with conspiracies, and when you re-read Shakespeare's oeuvre take note that at least half of the plays involve conspiracies, especially the history plays. Q: Where did Billy Shakes get these ideas? A: From history.
Rachel (Notice she's "Rachel" to me. I am a deluded heterosexual male, but I can dream, can't I?) can't make sense that Cain, despite not knowing anything about taxes or foreign policy or even basic geography, coupled with the fact that he's had to pay settlements for sexual harassment, is currently more popular than ever with Republican voters in polls. There must be some explanation that we're missing. He's clearly a motivational speaker with a book to sell. Why a run for President? Ahh...that's just the tip of it all. You need to have an IQ of 150 (or whatever Rachel's is) to see It.
This business of very intelligent, witty, whip-smart people (Rachel was a Rhodes Scholar) seeing something that might not be there is a phenomenon that has long fascinated me. For anyone interested, the thinking processes of smart people making errors in trying to make sense of the data in a complex sequence of events, is displayed in baroque detail in two novels, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's 805 page book The Illuminatus! Trilogy, and Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, tallying a mere 641 pages in my hardback copy. (Readers are invited to add other titles or films in the comments section.)
It was either Nietzsche or Oscar Wilde who said, I paraphrase probably, "We are all far greater artists than we realize." And this was derived from the observations of the propensity of the human mind to see puzzles when there may not "be" a puzzle in the first place, or at least not as assumed by the thinker trying to solve the Mystery. In tandem with this, we need a Narrative to explain to ourselves what we're doing. We need Narratives - at times rather ornate ones, apparently - like a junkie needs junk. The classic Occam's Razor can probably be seen as the obverse in this overall cognitive conceptual schematic I'm groping toward.
Why don't I buy Rachel's thesis? Because my intuition tells me this guy is more of a bumbling phony out to enrich himself. A shameless huckster. A classic American Type. Occam's Razor, folks. I admit Rachel's thesis seems far more intellectually interesting. (See the Isaiah Berlin quote at the bottom of this page?)
I think maybe stupidity can look artistic if placed within certain preconceived assumptions and within certain domains of "reality" in which we are not used to seeing stunning ineptitude. Art seems to me to require conscious intent. (IF Cain's consciously, intentionally doing art, I think how he ends the "piece" should be telling.) Rachel says something about three-four minutes in that Cain's level of gaffes don't occur "in nature." I like that line, but I'm not sure it's true. How easy it is to forget GWB43's daily idiocies! (See my faves, #5 and #1 HERE.) I think Cain's probably just a banality who knows he's full of crap politically, but may be surprised he hasn't dropped back into the single digits in the polls yet. He figures it's only a matter of time, and he sure as hell ain't trying. But the money is rollin' in, the Koch Bros keep throwing cash at him, his book's selling.
But consciously artistic? I don't see it. I have to wonder about the mentality of people who hear, "Don't blame the banks and corporations. If you're not rich it's your fault!" and cheer loudly. Unistat is brimming with mindless drooling fascists, lapping up every other sociopathic "motivational speaker" who comes along. I see THAT as a major problem...And Cain probably has a lot of people working for him who don't believe he's viable, and they're sub-mediocrities he met on the pizza circuit at some point. It also doesn't hurt that the mouthpieces representing the mainstream media seem dumber every year. (This thesis begs the question: how come so many saw through the females Bachman and Palin? Is there somehow a gravitas that aids a verisimilitude that attends a dapper, glib African-American MALE, no matter his vacuity? And if so, what does this imply about some sort of unconscious sexism in our culture?)
I find Maddow's thesis provocative and highly entertaining, and also hold a steady suspicion ever since seeing her lay out her explanation about the Herman Cain Conceptual Art Experience/Put-On, that she's in turn ironically putting the thesis forth. She has her reasons. (This might constitute a meta-conspiracy theory?) One only need understand that Maddow's politics are very very far away from Cain's putative dumb-show, I Know Nothing and I'll Try To Act Like I Care and I'm Proud of It Act. To float out a proto-meme that might go viral, that Cain's making you look like a fool if you take him at his word, could have an effect on the race. IF Maddow is consciously doing ironic art herself here, I applaud her. Who gets it?
Finally, my understanding of the sociology of knowledge and neuroscience and the logic of perception and reasoning from an abduction and other areas requires me to admit Rachel Maddow may be right and I'm wrong in asserting she was earnestly putting the pieces together in a brilliant, artistic Fool's Errand.
Another reason for her side: she's smarter than me.
I may be the Fool here. But if I am, Maddow is once again the Smartest Person in the Room, the first to "get it" and millions of Republicans will be shown to have been duped in a new way, the most artistic con yet. If anyone out there has on record a date before November 4th in which someone else declares definitively that Cain is pulling some sort of prank, let me know, please! As of the date above, millions of Republicans are apparently being "taken" in a way that seems a distant cousin to Jerzy Kosinski's Chauncey Gardiner, from the novel Being There. I will admit that I hope Rachel turns out to be right and I'm wrong. If only for the entertainment value of the reactions of fascist morons like Limbaugh, Coulter, and Bozell, who spent the past week defending Cain against the "liberal" attacks on him. (As if his settlements for sexual harassment weren't FACTS!)
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Politics as Art. If it's something like Maddow is suggesting, then what's the worst that can happen? We all realize there's another conceptual frame that may be used in politics. Art has had overt and covert political messages for eons. Maybe now it's time for Politics to use Art as a pinprick for our perceptions?
