Conspiracy : James Martel

For Benjamin, insofar as the material world remains untainted by idolatry, even as it serves as the ground upon which idolatry is projected, conspiring with material objects helps to thwart and overcome our own complicity with the phantasmagoria. In thinking about the upshot of this view of conspiracy, we need not necessarily put things in as mystical terms as Benjamin himself tends to do. If we think of resistance to liberal capitalism (and other variants of capitalism as well, including fascism) as taking place within a material and semiotic context, we can see that enhancing the ways that liberalism fails to be true–the way it fails have access to divine and natural sources of authority–serves the purposes of resistance. By aligning our own conspiracy with an inherent material resistance to the phantasms of a particular (western, liberal) sense of political order, the idea that liberalism is bound up with fate, progress and destiny all are disrupted.

For Benjamin, no one is uncompromised by the phantasmagoria. The power of commodity fetishism is so strong that even the most ardent leftists amongst us remain complicit, in ways that are often unacknowledged. At the same time, no one is so thoroughly complicit that they cannot be redeemed. The phantasmagoria is powerful but it is not absolute; insofar as it is based on an attempt to control reality via language and semiotics, it always reveals itself as failed. Conspiracy works, in Benjamin’s view, to enhance and take advantage of that failure, leaving us with only what he calls “pure means.”⁴⁵ Where head-on attempts to radically alter the world tend to reproduce the phantasm that they seek to destroy (hence the failures of the many leftist revolutions of the past 200 years), conspiracy works to resist and subvert that power; it always remains as an option to find alternative forms of politics within the maw of phantasm.

9. Conclusion

If we think of the legacy of western thought as a set of political practices that promote inequality, domination and obfuscation (as Benjamin does), we can see that Derrida’s notion of an “immense rumor” is an answer to this dark heritage. If western philosophy and thought is responsible for at least the rationalization of, if not the actual promulgation of contemporary political and economic practices, it simultaneously offers redress in the form of a tradition of countermanding conspiracy. As I have argued, this conspiracy can be read in and through many central authors of the western canon (and some not so central figures as well). As already noted, Socrates could perhaps be read as the first conspirator; even as he set down–or Plato set down in his name–a model for reason as ruling over the rest of the body (and hence a model for political hierarchy more generally), he also gives us the notion of how the concept of truth itself can serve to undermine and unmake false political regimes, even regimes that have been set up ostensibly in truth’s name. Some thinkers, like Machiavelli, directly address the question of conspiracy. Others can be read conspiratorially, drawn into a conspiracy that they may or may not have actively sought. Hegel seems to offer a conspiratorial view in his idea of the “cunning” of history, the way that secret machinations are transformed into political and social realities. Nietzsche is clearly one of the greatest conspirators of all, although in his case, his conspiracy is quite openly declared, as is Foucault’s when, for example, he famously tells us that we have not yet learned to “cut off the King’s head.”⁴⁶ In all of these cases, we see the ongoing presence of Derrida’s “immense rumor” (and, of course, Derrida himself must be given his place in this counter tradition). We see the workings of a multigenerational conspiracy to unmake the damage that western thought has inflicted on the world. If that conspiracy remains on the level of a rumor, if it supplies only the potential for political remedies, we can remain appreciative of this effort to develop, in the heart of the western canon, the means for both resistance to and overcoming of this legacy.

Of course, as also previously noted, there are other conspiracies, including conspiracies on the right to maintain the status quo. There are no guarantees that a conspiratorial reading of Machiavelli or Hobbes will ensure that these figures are useful for leftist purposes or that even Benjamin’s work will lead to radical and substantial political change. Yet, these other ways of reading and responding to the western legacy remain available. The very possibility of reading this way creates, at least potentially, a community of readers who receive from these texts a sense of their own authority and possibility. Whether such a conspiracy succeeds or not is unknowable but its potential cannot be removed and remains a feature of the western tradition as much as any other aspect.

James Martel is a Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University

Published on October 5, 2015

^{45. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 1, 1913-1926 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 239.↩}

^{46. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 121.↩}