How not to know
James Meek’s recent LRB essay on conspiracy theories pivots on an implied theory of political knowledge. At the end he asks, of a “conspiracist acquaintance” who links lockdown with New World Order narratives:
How did it get to the point where a smart young man like Dominic can believe in a binary, red pill-blue pill world of epistemics, in which there are only two hermetically distinct streams of knowledge to choose from, his preferred ‘truth’ and the other, ‘mainstream’, ‘official’ version, which all those who reject his truth believe without question? Where they can warn of the dangers of confirmation bias even as they practise it?
In The Matrix, one hand proffers each of the options. There’s the blue pill, the anaesthetic whose consumption allows the apparently waking senses to continue to slumber to the “noumena” (to use Kant’s expression) that connect puzzling phenomena; there’s the red pill, which deposits the subject in “the desert of the real” at last. These forms of knowledge, ways of structuring and making legible what each constructs as, in Wittgenstein’s famous phrase, “everything that is the case”, are metonymised in pills, capsules of chemicals not present in the human body or in different levels. You can only take one. That a ‘smart’ person would adopt, to the point of unmoveable conviction, a framework in which there is one order of reality, whose explanatory force indicates the presence of Platonic Truth, and an order of appearances whose phantom reality obscures and dupes the vast majority, is for Meek a sign of epistemic rot. His argument operates at the level of a meta-epistemology that, once upon a time, encouraged or guaranteed a different system of political knowledge, which made it the most likely or robust or popular way to know things about politics - namely, the post-Enlightenment rationality baked into the modern state and civil society. That, we might surmise, is thoroughly weakened, a pandemic of “conspiracy thinking” spreads through collective knowledge, and we should all be very worried/disappointed (delete as appropriate).
Although he never states it, Meek’s model of knowledge is, by contrast, one where the capacity to know resides originally in the individual—the Rousseauian conception of inherent Reason. It doesn’t “delegitimise the idea that institutions – courts, parliaments, the education system, the salaried media—can be anything other than malign”, not basing itself in a “complete cynicism about the institutions themselves” and instead adopting an attitude that takes in and assesses evidence about them and the people that compose them. It would thus be able to question “authority about society’s real problems”; the epistemic health of society would be bolstered by such a process of knowledge, whose opponent of conspiracy thinking drives “large numbers of people from engaging in political action, leaving the field clear for the cynical, the greedy and the violently intolerant.” An easy, and not very satisfying, pleasure could be had from mounting a post-structuralist high horse, conveniently tethered for such occasions, and, from that lofty position, swinging at the legs of Meek’s argument: that the model of reason he sets against conspiracy is historically defined by excluding certain kinds of evidence from consideration (the body, affect, women, racialised subjects, etc etc etc), that it’s rooted in the domination of the object of knowledge, blah blah blah. Meek seems to know this himself, when he says that sticking to his guns in the face of conspiracy leads to him being “pitied as a credulous centrist”. A nourishing critique might stick with that worry. The centrist, who usually displays much less self-knowledge than Meek, famously defines himself by the rejection of certain premises of both left-wing and right-wing politics, which converge in his mind in a horseshoe: that the institutions of the state and media are contested and used as instruments by classes; that the people, that “great beast”, need to be tamed and kept away from the levers of power, for their lack of knowledge. The centrist doesn’t absolutely reject such premises: they have a certain explanatory power—New Labour’s centralising contempt for its own base certainly proves it took the latter seriously - but they leave a residue of their object unknown, uncaptured by the concept. Yes, the centrist says, I know that billionaires at the top of our institutions shelter (at best) sexual predators; I know that an authoritarian instinct lurks in the deracinated and deindustrialised communities that make up the electorate; but… the ruling class isn’t utterly deformed by power and good administrators can right the institutions; human perfectibility persists beyond the actual cruelty inflicted by institutions and the shifting interests they serve.
We encounter here our old friend, the formula of Freudian disavowal: yes, I know, but still… And this, indeed, is what links conspiracy and its purported opposite. Most conspiracists after all, as Meek acknowledges, don’t precisely believe in conspiracies. How many people subscribe to some version of ‘Bush did 9/11’, implying that Western governments are capable of mass murder of their own citizens, but continue to carry out their lives without even touching the kinds of action—without committing the Kierkegaardian leap of faith—that such a reality would require? Knowledge, in this sense, is impossible without a blind spot, a part it obliterates or cancels from its purview, the hidden magma of self that Freud thinks of as the unconscious, that lurks behind the spotlit system of knowledge itself. The burden of the red pill—the horror that, in Pepe’s catchphrase, “feels bad man”—isn’t the madness of false lucidity, the understanding of an apparent reality that can only otherwise be apprehended in fragments, but the tacit understanding that knowledge doesn’t get you very far, that the story of an explicable world is really a trade-off for the loss of a different form of knowledge—Meek’s valourised form—that isn’t even worth anyone getting silenced or bumped off for. The assumption that institutions persist in their useability beyond the misdeeds of their handlers—an idea back in full force with Joe Biden headed for the White House to deepclean out the Cheeto dust—is, like the idea of the red pill itself, another way of keeping the blind spot in place, of not seeing what you’ve placed directly in front of you, like the anamorphic skull at the feet of Holbein’s Ambassadors. For it’s institutions—that is, power—that make knowledge possible and impossible. To find new ways of making new knowledge, and maybe even new power, will require pressing on that blind spot.