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  pdftitle={Conspiracy Culture},
  pdfauthor={Florian Cramer, Münster lecture 6-2021},
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\title{Conspiracy Culture}
\author{Florian Cramer, Münster lecture 6-2021}
\date{}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

I have been invited to talk about conspiracies and the larger culture
surrounding them. Since we are here at an art school, I will do my best
to make my talk specific to you, as artists and as people interested in
the arts, using as many references to contemporary art as possible.

It seems as culture and society around the globe are currently
witnessing an explosion of conspiracy narratives. Typically, this is
being linked to the rise of reactionary political populism: of among
others Trumpism in America, Duterte in the Philippines, Putinism in
Russia, and of the milieu of AfD and Corona deniers in Germany. Their
typical populist campaigns and conspiracy concern:

{[}slide{]}

\begin{itemize}
\item
  immigration and globalization; such as in the conspiracy narrative of
  ``The Great Replacement'' or ``Bevölkerungsaustausch'';
\item
  the Corona pandemic and environmental politics; such as in the
  conspiracy narrative of the ``Great Reset''.
\end{itemize}

(Explanation of memes: first is a fake EU billboard, second shows George
Soros, who's a main target of right-wing and antisemitic conspiracy
narratives)

{[}slide popper{]}

In such a situation, it is tempting to simply side with a rationalist
ideology that discredits any talk of conspiracies as epistemologically
invalid and socially and politically dangerous. Actually, the term
``conspiracy theory'' itself was coined in 1945 by a scientific
rationalist and political liberal, the philosopher Karl Popper, with
exactly the intention to discredit conspiracy discourse as such. His
book ``The Open Society and Its Enemies'' blames idealist philosophy
since Plato for a development that ended with both fascist and Stalinist
totalitarianism. Popper's book does not differentiate conspiracy theory
from conspiracy mythology, but equates and disacknowledges both on the
grounds of a rationalist political philosophy.

{[}slide Mont
Pelerinhttps://smhttp-ssl-53905.nexcesscdn.net/catalogue\_images/auction//large/10126-2\_1.jpg{]}

(Although one could argue that the political movement of neoliberalism
in which Popper participated as a member of the Mont Pelerin Society
operated itself in conspirative ways, namely through being organized in
such a society.\footnote{Mirowski/Plehwe, The Road to Mont Pelerin})

In my talk, I would like to argue in favor of a more cautious and maybe
ambiguous position that avoids the framing of conspiracy culture as
purely an issue of either belief or disbelief. Instead, I want to shed
more light on the gray areas in between (a) conspiracy mythologies, (b)
conspiracy theories based on at least partial evidence, and (c) proven
conspiracies.

\hypertarget{qanon}{%
\section{QAnon}\label{qanon}}

{[}slide diagram x3{]}

The following diagram comes out of the conspiracy culture of QAnon
diagram. It was made by Dylan Louis Monroe, an art-school educated
graphic designer who describes his work as follows:

\begin{quote}
``In 2017, Dylan began the `Deep State Mapping Project' in response to
the changing political climate in America. {[}\ldots{]} aced with
unrelenting Orwellian censorship, Dylan's work has been banned and
deplatformed by Facebook, Instagram, Shopify, Mailchimp, Square, and
Patreon. As a ground operative for Ashtar Command, and the Galactic
Federation, Dylan is also known by the call sign A-145: `The Mapmaker.'
In 2019 he channeled, through automatic writing, the Orit-B Codex, an
accelerant to the Great Awakening, and an epilogue to the disclosure
operation known as ``Q''.\footnote{https://www.dylanlouismonroe.com/biography.html}
\end{quote}

In other words, this map and his artist comes out of the subculture
known as QAnon. QAnon originated, as you may know, on the website 4chan,
an open forum which has been the main breeding ground of Internet meme
culture since the early 2000s, of the Anonymous movement {[}wearing the
Guy Fawkes masks{]}, major parts of the extreme right ``Alt-Right''
movement and finally of QAnon.

{[}slide pizzagate{]}

QAnon was preceded by an ``Alt-Right'' meme, or fake news story called
``Pizzagate'' during Donald Trump's election campaign in 2016, according
to which Hillary Clinton's campaign team and top-ranking Democratic
politicians were part of a satanist conspiracy that sexually abused
children in the basement of a particular pizza parlor in Washington, DC.
This story was spread by major Alt-Right and pro-Trump social media
influencers, including the conspiracy website and YouTube channel
``Infowars'' run by the extreme-right influencer Alex Jones. (According
to Wikipedia, ``the InfoWars website receives approximately 10 million
monthly visits, making its reach greater than some mainstream news
websites such as The Economist and Newsweek'',
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfoWars ; in Germany, KenFM could best be
compared to Infowars.)

{[}slide alex jones{]}

There are at least two links to contemporary art here: First, Alex Jones
used as his legal defense in 2017 that he is a ``performance artist''
and ``playing a character''.\footnote{https://www.businessinsider.nl/lawyer-alex-jones-infowars-playing-character-acting-2017-4/?international=true\&r=US}
(In 2001 and 2006, he also appeared as an actor in two movies directed
by Richard Linklater, ``Waking Life'' and ``A Scanner Darkly''.)

{[}slides Abramovic{]}

Secondly, one of the pieces of evidence for the supposed child-abusing
satanist conspiracy were pictures of Marina Abramovic's ``spirit
cooking'' with John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential
campaign:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EsJLNGVJ7E

``Pizzagate'' ended with a man entering the Washington D.C. pizza parlor
with a shotgun to free the supposed sex slave children from the basement
- only to find out that the building of the pizzeria didn't even have a
basement.

{[}slide{]} This debunked the conspiracy fantasy only temporarily. One
year later, in October 2017, an anonymous poster on 4chan, identifying
as Q, relaunched the mythology by claiming to be a secret agent working
for the U.S. government, and having insight into classified information
on satanic pedophile liberal elites in the ``Deep State'', and into
Donald Trump secretly fighting them behind the scenes of his presidency,
with an imminent end battle of a ``Storm'' and a ``Great Awakening''.

{[}slide{]}

Next to Pizzagate, this story was riffing, copy-pasting or sampling
three other narratives:

First, the widespread American evangelical belief in a ``rapture'' and
endgame fight of Jesus Christ against Evil before Judgment Day. The term
``Great Awakening'' had already been used in U.S. evangelical
protestanism of the early 18th century, and had its immediate parallel
in what is called ``Erweckungsbewegungen'' in Germany at the same time,
particularly in Southwestern German Pietism. (It's therefore not
coincidental that many ``Querdenker'' and German QAnon followers come
from this region and milieu.)

{[}slide LB, Q{]}

Secondly, it was almost certainly plagiarizing the novel ``Q'' by the
Italian leftist-countercultural activist, artist and writer collective
``Luther Blissett''. The novel appeared in 1999 and plays in the German
reformation and peasant wars, and tells the story of anonymous messages
by an alleged government agent called ``Q'' who calls upon the
revolutionary peasants to go into an end battle against the aristocracy
- only that in the course of the novel, these letters turn out to be
disinformation that lure the revolutionaries into a trap and tragic
defeat. {[}Disclaimer: Luther Blissett operated as a
collective-pseudonymous movement similar to Neoism, which grew out of
the 1970s Mail Art movement and underground performance art, and which
collectively used the identity Monty Cantsin. I've been personally
involved in both Neoism and the Luther Blissett project. The
``Anonymous'' movement of the early 2000s used a similar strategy, but
probably without being aware of its precursors.{]}

{[}slide{]}

Thirdly, the QAnon mythology brought back the old antisemitic myth of a
secret world elite that drinks the blood of children that has existed
since the Middle Ages.

{[}slide: woodcut from 1475, the caricature is from the Nazi paper ``Der
Stürmer'' from 1934{]}

The storming of the Capitol in January 2021 ended up becoming QAnon's
``storm''. It was prefigured by the attempted storming of the Reichstag
in 2020 where German QAnon followers were prominently involved, and a Q
flag had been waved. Just as the Pizzagate temporarily collapsed after
the actual storming of the pizzeria, it remains unclear how the QAnon
subculture will continue after the failure of storming the Capitol and
reinstating Trump. But since QAnon's social media channels had several
million followers in the U.S. alone, and since 15 Republican congress
candidates for the 2020 elections had QAnon affiliations or sympathies,
one can safely assume that this culture will not go away, but adapt and
perhaps even become something bigger, just like in the morphing of
Pizzagate into QAnon in 2017.

{[}slide{]}

Just a few months ago, there had been speculation whether a Berlin-based
contemporary artist would become the new leader of QAnon. One of the
fastest growing subnetworks and social media channels of the QAnon
culture, with more than 1 million followers, was called ``Sabmyk''.
Investigative journalism revealed that the person behind Sabmyk was the
Polish-German performance and conceptual artist Sebastian Bieniek, a
former master student of Katherina Sievering, who names Abramovic and
John Armleder as his major influences and has been featured in a recent
issue of the art periodical ``Kunstforum'' {[}vol.~268{]}). {[}slide{]}

{[}slide{]} In 2011, Bieniek wrote a self-published book ``REALFAKE'' in
which he describes fake, according to the book's blurb, as a
``sense-making `bridge between people' {[}\ldots{]}, which gains
uncheckable authority through exaggeration and repetition in space and
time. All success, fame and power are based on the repeated
glorification of miraculous deeds of the identity founder by those who
profit from the resulting group formation''.\footnote{``Und eine Fake
  genannte, sinnstiftende `Brücke zwischen den Menschen' ist der
  Ursprung solcher Gruppen, der durch Überhöhung und Wiederholung in
  Raum und Zeit unüberprüfbare Autorität erlangt. Aller Erfolg, Ruhm und
  Macht beruhen auf der wiederholten Glorifizierung wundersamer Taten
  des Identitätsstifters durch jene, die an der daraus resultierenden
  Gruppenbildung profitieren.''}

{[}slide{]} In the meantime, Bieniek denies that he has been a serious
actor in QAnon's culture, also denies allegations of having spread
antisemitic messages in his channels, and claims - similar to Alex Jones
- had been a conceptual art performance.

{[}slide{]}

Aside from performance artists, literary writers have reflected on or
even created conspiracy culture narratives in their novels: Thomas
Pynchon in the ``Crying of Lot 49'' (where a secret postal system
operates as a world subcultural conspiracy whose reality remains
doubtful), Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea in the ``Illuminatus!''
trilogy (which became a major inspiration for hacker culture, including
the German Chaos Computer Club, and the hacker Werner Koch who worked
for the Soviet KGB in the 1980s, committed suicide and whose life story
was adapted in the movie ``23'') and Umberto Eco in ``Foucault's
Pendulum'' (which can actually be read as a comprehensive historical
encyclopedia of European conspiracy theories and esoteric movements,
including Rosicrucians, Freemasons and Illuminati).

\hypertarget{conspiracies-at-large}{%
\section{Conspiracies at large}\label{conspiracies-at-large}}

{[}slide Beuys{]}

There are, in other words, blurry lines between conspiracies, fake and
disinformation as conceptual and performance art, or as literary fiction
on the one hand - and actual political conspiracy cultures. And the
question remains to which degree art tendencies can cater to conspiracy
cultures. For example, there were subculture of fascism as aesthetic
transgression in 1980s and 1990s post-punk and Industrial music culture
that formed a, in some cases: direct, pretext for the contemporary
``Alt-Right''. (For lack of time, I cannot go into details here.) And
you may have read the speculations of whether Joseph Beuys might have
been, because of his strong affiliation with Rudolf Steiner's
anthrosophy, be a member of the Querdenker/lateral thinker movement of
anti-vaccers and Corona deniers today. (Which itself could be called a
conspiracy narrative or speculation, unless we channel the dead Beuys
via spiritist seances.)

Conversely, this begs the question about the degree to which any
esoteric belief system can be called a conspiracy narrative; what the
difference is between an esoteric belief system and a canonical
religion; to which degrees religion (or the belief in gods or spirits)
qualifies as a conspiracy - in the literal sense of a coming together of
like-minded spirits - and its scriptures as conspiracy mythologies. (If
you are in the camp of radical atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Steven
Pinker and Christopher Hitchens, the answer would probably be a yes.)

{[}slide{]}

But the same question applies to art: Jean Baudrillard was the first
theoretician to call art a conspiracy. His book was written after 9/11
and questioned the complicity of art with politics, economy and media
spectacles. Baudrillard's points are further substantiated in the more
recent economic critique of the contemporary art system by Luc Boltanski
and Eve Chiapello from 2017, and before that in Ben Lewis' documentary
film ``The Great Contemporary Art Bubble'' by Ben Lewis. Shot shortly
before and during the financial crisis of 2008, ``The Great Contemporary
Art Bubble'' is a piece of investigative journalism into the most
expensive part of the contemporary art market - particularly the gallery
sales of Damien Hirst's work - and how they have been rigged by a small
group of collectors, gallerists, auction houses and Hirst himself in
literal insider trades and what one could call a market-rigging
conspiracy.

{[}slide{]}

Another example of an art-related conspiracy is American Abstract
Expressionist painting that scholarly research has revealed to have
received substantial sponsorship by the CIA in the 1950s as part of Cold
War soft politics, with Jackson Pollock and critic Clement Greenberg
even having been members of the CIA front organization ``American
Committee for Cultural Freedom''.

This proves that conspiracy theories are, as opposed to what Popper
claimed when he claimed the term, false or to be dismissed on the mere
grounds of being conspiracy theories. (Another example is the global
surveillance of the Internet through the NSA and its befriended
agencies, which was a common conspiracy theory in hacker and media
activist circles until Edward Snowden proved it as a fact.)

When talking about ``conspiracy culture'' at large, we are talking about
intersections of (a) politics, finance, and other power structures, (b)
the arts, visual culture, literature and storytelling and (c) belief
systems, speculation and esotericism.

Borrowing from and merging Carl Schmitt and aestheticism (and my former
teacher Gert Mattenklott's ``aesthetic anthropology''), conspiracy
culture could thus called the product of an aesthetic political
theology. {[}And we are close to fascism, as defined by Walter Benjamin
as tending ``towards an aestheticization of politics''.{]}

The ground assumption of conspiracy culture is the existence of esoteric
power structures in a hidden narrative that contradicts the official
narrative of exoteric power structures.

However, the boundaries between the esoteric and the exoteric, and
between fact and speculation, can be blurry. To return to the example of
NSA's global Internet surveillance, it only existed as speculation prior
to Snowden, with a mix of probability, mythology and (still sparse)
evidence, and solidified into a fact-based narrative through the leaked
evidence. The same is true for CIA's financial support of American
abstract expressionism, for which there was weak evidence since the
1970s, and which was solidified through the scholarship of Frances
Stonor Saunders in her 1999 book \emph{The Cultural Cold War}.
{[}slide{]}

Conversely, some factual conspiracies have been revealed which were, in
my opinion, wilder than even the wildest conspiracy fantasy: In Germany
for example, through the opening of the Stasi files after 1990 which
among others revealed that the shooter of the 1967 student protestor
Benno Ohnesorg had been a Stasi agent and secret member of the East
German communist party (or that the West-Berlin pimp Otto Schwanz, who
had been a member of the Christian Democratic Party and involved in a
real estate corruption scandal involving local politicians in the 1980s,
also worked for the Stasi and the East German foreign trade coordinator
Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski).

{[}slide diagram{]}

Going back to the initial diagram, we learn from it that QAnon has
grown, - or perhaps even was designed - to become a meta-conspiracy
narrative that potentially contains all other conspiracy narratives,
including all those that are included in novels such as
\emph{Illuminatus}, \emph{Foucault's Pendulum} and Luther Blissett's
\emph{Q}. Possibly, it is the feature of all conspiracy mythologies that
they strive to become universal, or in other words: world explanation
models.

{[}slide Lyotard{]}

Such conspiracy narratives then could be characterized as both
postmodern and anti-postmodern: postmodern, because they are networked,
have rhizomatic structures and are the collective products of a
multitude, with no identifiable origins and no traditional authorship,
and constantly shifting meanings and floating signifiers;
anti-postmodern because they are ``grand narratives'' and thus exactly
that which, according to Lyotard's original philosophy of postmodernity,
the ``postmodern condition'' has left behind. Perhaps one could state
that conspiracy narratives fill the void left behind by the abandonment
of grand narratives (such as Christianity and communism), but themselves
in postmodern ways.

QAnon now seems to be undergoing a process of emancipating itself from
Trumpism and its original narrative, becoming a more generic conspiracy
mythology of child-raping satanic world-ruling elites. Other such
narratives exist: next to those of ``The Great Replacement'' and ``The
Great Reset'' that of ``Cultural Marxism'', but also on the left,
``neoliberalism''. I don't have the time (and sometimes not even enough
expertise) to dissect all these narratives and their respective varying
degrees of mythology and fact. But with the Wu-Ming Collective (which
succeeded the Luther Blissett collective of the novel ``Q''), I share
the opinion that kernels of truth can even be found in most absurd
conspiracy narratives. For QAnon, my colleague Felix Stalder (media
researcher and teacher at the art school ZHdK Zurich) rightfully pointed
out that the narrative of liberal elites drinking the blood of children,
while nonsensical on a factual level, has a kernel of truth on a
figurative level, if one considers that the extreme social divide and
high cost of college education in the USA destroys future opportunities
for children - and that a former executive of Walmart, Hillary Clinton
was part of a vampirical system that accumulates wealth on the cost of
future generations.

\hypertarget{art}{%
\section{Art}\label{art}}

While this all may explain the relation between esoteric and exoteric
politics, or more generally the political theology of conspiracy culture
- what about the aesthetic dimension? Why does conspiracy culture even
where it is not literally affiliated to art systems or creative
industries, have such a close affinity to arts, visual culture and
literary storytelling?

The arts seem to be attractive for conspiracy culture because
mythologies needs a narratives, and a mythopoeisis needs a poiesis in
the literal sense of making. As we see in the initial diagram, there is
a high degree of connectivity in conspiracy narratives, and a high
degree of creativity through both seeing and drawing connections. Any
narrative, any visual, any cultural product can potentially become part
of conspiracy culture and conspiracy narratives:

{[}slide V for Vendetta{]}

whether it's images of a Marina Abramovic performance or a 1990s
countercultural Italian novel, or products of popular visual cultures
such as the comic book V for Vendetta that inspired the Anonymous
movement,

{[}slide 300{]}

or the movie comic book adaption ``300'' that inspired the logo and
iconography of the extreme-right ``Identitarian'' movement in its fight
against the supposed ``Great Replacement'' of the white European
population through non-European immigrants.

{[}4chan{]}

It is telling enough that the so-called image board 4chan became an
experimental development laboratory of contemporary conspiracy
mythologies. 4chan is perhaps the most essential medium of contemporary
popular visual culture. Originally, it was the Western equivalent of a
Japanese website for exchanging manga and anime images, and then became
the place where visual Internet memes were invented. Anonymous, the
memetic Alt-Right movement and QAnon all grew out of its meme culture.

This is still a recent development, for which art, art history and
visual culture studies lack literacy. Today, nearly 20 years after 4chan
went online, there are still no art-historical or visual culture studies
books on Internet memes.

\hypertarget{history}{%
\section{History}\label{history}}

However, the phenomenon of anonymous conspiracy mythologies spreading in
networks is historically not new. I will be brief in my summary in order
not to exceed my time:

{[}slide{]}

\begin{itemize}
\tightlist
\item
  A significant forerunners was the 17th century ``Fama Fraternitatis'',
  literally a ``rumor'' or ``conspiracy narrative'' (to translate the
  Latin word ``fama'') that launched the mythology of Rosicrucianism and
  the secret Rosicrucian brotherhood bringing spiritual enlightenment to
  the world. The text had originated in the milieu of Southwestern
  evangelical theologists and alchemists, and can on many levels be
  studied as a historical precursor to the so-called ``Q drops'' that
  established QAnon. (It also plays a prominent role in Eco's
  ``Foucault's Pendulum''.)
\end{itemize}

{[}slide{]}

\begin{itemize}
\item
  Georg Büchner's 1837 drama ``Woyzeck'' documents that paranoia of
  conspiracies and secret societies already existed in this time, among
  working-class people. In the drama, Woyzeck thinks that he hears
  Freemasons speaking to him from underground tunnels beneath his
  feet.\^{}(``Siehst Du den lichten Streif da über das Gras hin, wo die
  Schwämme so nachwachsen? Da rollt abends der Kopf. Es hob ihn einmal
  einer auf, er meint', es wär ein Igel: drei Tag und drei Nächt, er lag
  auf den Hobelspänen. - Leise: Andres, das waren die Freimaurer! Ich
  hab's, die Freimaurer!'' (Georg Büchner, Woyzeck, 1837)
\item
  Conspiracy mythologies have been constructed by artists as part of
  blurring art and life, as it had both been advocated in romanticist
  aesthetics, and performative art movements since the 1960s includeing
  happening, fluxus and performance art.
\end{itemize}

{[}slide{]}

Examples include Richard Hambleton's project ``Image Mass Murder'' from
1976 to 1978 in which he created chalk outlines of fictitious murder
victims in 15 cities of the USA and Canada;

The Berlin-based project ``Story Dealer AG'' by Hans Geißlinger \& Ernst
Handl in late 1980s Berlin which created complex staged situations in
public space; Geißlinger had been heavily influenced by (and published
writing on) the philosophy of radical constructivism. Today, it operates
as agency that offers its staged situations as staff workshops to
businesses.

{[}slide Watzlawick{]}

Paul Watzlawick's 1977 book \emph{How Real Is Real}, a key work of
radical constructivisim which describes reality as a subjective
construction and its creative manipulation, became a manual for
interventionist and reality-manipulating artists.

{[}slide Burroughs{]}

The literary writer William S. Burroughs, a major protagonist of the
American Beat generation and influence on underground and
countercultural artists until today, wrote a literal conspiracy poetics
inspired by the Watergate scandal. His 1970 book ``Electronic
Revolution'' is manual for creating fake news and conspiracy mythologies
as forms of subversive art and activism, in which he for example propose
to create tape recorder montages of a politician with sex tapes in order
to spread false rumors about the politician: ``So his teen age daughter
crawls all over him while Texas rangers and decent church going women
rise from tape recorder 3 screaming `WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN FRONT OF
DECENT PEOPLE.'\,''. This suggestion was taken up in a comic strip drawn
by the experimental musician Chris Lunch and published in the German
music magazine ``Sounds'' (whose editor-in-chief was Diedrich
Diederichsen) in 1981:

{[}slide Chris Lunch, Nu-Punks{]}

(Burroughs' book contains a hilarious yet somewhat dubious anecdote how
he supposedly ran a coffee bar out of business that had served him
poisoned cheese cake, by standing in front of it with a tape recorder
and camera for two months driving its owners and guests paranoid, and
ultimately forcing it to go out of business.)

{[}slide Stang{]}

In the larger orbit of 1980s Mail Art and counter-culture, the founder
of the parodistic ``Church of the SubGenius'', Ivan Stang, published the
book ``High Weirdness by Mail'' in 1988, which is an analog networking
compendium of fringe movements and activists, published in the times
before the World Wide Web existed. The book is a mail directory of
fringe and conspiracy cultural movements, including the fringe religions
and the extreme right, that fully anticipates and predates the Internet
conspiracy culture of today (sometimes even with the same actors). The
book thus proves that conspiracy culture is \emph{not} a product of the
Internet, its social media platforms and their algorithms. These
platforms have only helped these discourse to grow from lunatic fringe
to mainstream, by latching on network multiplier effects and weaponizing
the Internet's participatory structures.

Even in the 1990s, the Internet didn't play a major role yet when the
discourses of Burroughs \& Co were taken up in British and Italian
subcultures, in the larger orbit of what today is known as ``culture
jamming'' and which often also referred to the Situationist concept of
``detournement'' and of countering mass media spectacles.

{[}slide Tes Men{]}

Examples include the German film ``Decoder'' (in which Burroughs has a
cameo), and the Italian magazine and book published ``Decoder'' named
after this film, the Luther Blissett Project of the later 1990s followed
by the mass media pranks of artist groups like Ubermorgen and The Yes
Men.

Much of this work was literally about spreading disinformation and fake
news, for example with Yes Men publishing a fake edition of the New York
Times on the day Barack Obama took office. A major question would be
whether artists from that generation would still use those means of
expression today, or whether they have become tainted through
right-extremist fake news campaigns (such as Pizzagate). (This also
concerns our curriculum in Rotterdam where we have course modules on
culture jamming and hacking as artistic strategies.)

\hypertarget{conclusion}{%
\section{Conclusion}\label{conclusion}}

In this retrospect, the contemporary Alt-Right, QAnon and lateral
thinker movements simply continue a long history of conspiracy cultures
and poetics. My proposal was to characterize conspiracy culture as an
aesthetic political theology - for which the 17th century Rosicrucian
``Fama Fraternitatis'' would already meet all criteria.\footnote{With
  due credits to Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann in whose seminar I studied
  and presented the Rosicrucian `Fama' as political theology in the
  1990s.} I proposed to focus its political theology on a dialectics of
``esoteric'' and ``exoteric'' politics and religion.

The model I would like to propose for describing the aesthetic dimension
of conspiracy culture would be that of the sublime {[}/des Erhabenen{]},
according to its textbook definitions by Pseudo-Longinus, Edmund Burke
and Immanuel Kant, namely as that what is overwhelming, overpowering,
and infinite or shapeless. )

To use Kant's concept of the sublime, conspiracy culture involves both a
dynamic sublime and a mathematical sublime: i.e.~a sublime of dynamic
forces - such as literally in ``the storm'' of QAnon - and a sublime of
static size or dimension - such as in the myriad of names and
connections on the diagram that I showed in the beginning, which (on
closer inspection) could not only be used for QAnon's particular
conspiracy culture, but just as well as for Woyzeck's paranoia of
freemasons or hacker cultural conspiracy mythologies of Illuminati world
power, up to antisemitic conspiracy mythologies.

Interestingly, to return to my earlier discussion of postmodernism,
Lyotard applies the sublime to his definition of postmodernity. Lyotard
characterizes sublime experience as ``the transport that leads all
thought (critical thought included) to its limits''. This, I think, is
exactly what is happening in conspiracy culture.

Being caught in these sublime nets and powers is both the romanticism of
and the trouble with conspiracy cultures, because they seem to leave no
way out except with violent force. The answer, however, cannot be to
fundamentally discredit as critical rationalist would do, sublime
experience and aesthetic political theology, because this would be no
less violent in shutting out subjectivity, imagination and alternative
epistemology.

\end{document}
