Shadow Dancing
By Erik Davis
When I was growing up, my first introduction to the nation-state that lay beyond the world of home, school and playground came through a curious obsession with Watergate. Years before I could parse the front page, I was a devoted fan of Paul Conrad, the implacably liberal editorial cartoonist of the Los Angeles Times, whose biting, single-panel compositions infused an elevated sense of tragedy into trenchant take-downs of the Pinocchio-nosed Tricky dick. My first memory of TV news was Nixon's resignation, which seemed more like an abdication to me. When All the President's Men got into paperback, I read it over and over, as both myth and mystery. My adolescent inability to entirely follow the book's networks of motivation and cause only deepened the thing's enigmatic hold on my imagination. Even today, the names of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, G. Gordon Liddy and Deep Throat (the latter a triumph of conspiratorial 1970s nomenclature), carry a trace of phantasm, as if they were the minions of some Dark Lord far more complex and broken than Sauron of Mordor.
My impression of Nixon and his nefarious doings occurred primarily on the plane of images, not just in the literal sense of Time covers or Mad magazine cartoons, but in that deeper, more resonant sense that brings us to the borders of allegory or dream. The primal Big Daddy of American politics was, in my archetypal mind, shifty-eyed, mendacious, and mean, a fallen king up to his neck in Dr. Seussian oobleck. Just as the mole above your first lover's upper lip can render you a fetishist for life, so did my shadowy, half-mythic sense of the Nixon administration inscribe a primal paranoia and cynicism in my political unconscious.
I reflect on this because my experience of America post 9-11 has forced me into a kind of dreamwork. Like a number of us I suspect, I have more than occasionally found myself half-awake at 3am, facing hypnagogic bouts of fear and paranoia induced by current events. Sometimes these apocalyptic spectres slip into my dreamlife proper. Once I found myself outside of Berlin at night, on the side of some wet and nameless interstate. The city was hosting a gathering of national police forces from around the developed world, there to show off their latest tech. With a steel roar, a stream of the latest urban tanks careened out of an underpass, bulbous cartoon things festooned with the baroque weaponry of Japanese mecha and designed, clearly, to control domestic unrest. "My god," I thought, "it has begun."
On one level, my late-night fantasies can be explained as symbolic narratives that organize far more basic and inchoate fluctuations of helplessness, futility, and mounting alienation -- feelings that have been growing post-9/11, and that only amplify the typical mortal baggage of dread. Moreover, the paranoid feelings stirred up by our current regime's cavalier attitude toward civil liberties are well mitigated by my awareness that millions of Americans, impoverished and/or dark-hued and/or enamored of pot, have far more immediate fears and justifiable suspicions than any I could legitimately claim. Millions more are terrified by the specter of anti-American terrorism, fears intensified to an almost criminal degree by our alarmist media. But the magnet for my late-night fantasies and fears has almost always been the U.S. government. Only rarely do I flash on the terrorist cells that have no doubt pulled their mighty beards over the possibility of blowing up the Golden Gate bridge, or gassing BART, or wreaking other mayhem on my home town of San Francisco. Instead, my nightside mind is struck by sinister fantasies about the current federal regime, and the powerful systems of control and surveillance they are now installing in the name of fear.
The forms these narratives take are hardly unique to me, or even to that subaltern zone demarcated as "conspiracy theory." Beyond the ledgers of truth or falsehood, these plots shape minds, not to mention Hollywood movies. In this sense, they are collective dreamtexts to be cracked rather than bad ideas to be rejected. They emerge on the borderline between fantasy and scenario casting --in other words, of "real" possibility, the Maybe Zone of contingency plans, war games, and logistical simulation.
Take the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act (MSEHPA) that the Bush administration's Center for Disease Control has been pushing into state legislatures. This act empowers governors to declare a coordinated "public health emergency," at which point a massive degree of coercive power may be deployed in order to forcibly test and vaccinate citizens, to seize medical records and private property, and to ban firearms. Like any reasonable person, I intellectually understand arguments for the MSEHPA, and can envision scenarios when its implementation saves lives. But we must remember that the "saved lives" game is in many ways rigged in advance, a party to the same concern for security which has elevated the spiritual privation of fear to the driver's seat of policy. Moreover, it turns on at least a basic sense that the new powers are unlikely to be exceptionally abused, or at least that they will only be exceptionally abused when the situation is already pretty fucked. But I really have none of this trust in my heart, and especially at 3 AM. I sense a void instead, a vasty deep wherein creep images of genetically engineered psychoactive "vaccinations," of bible-thumping apocalyptic payback, of murdered senators, Manchurian candidates, and carnivorous Echelon spy computers compiling dossiers of sin.
When faced with such fears and suspicions, in our own heads or in the heads of others, we commonly step back and rationally assess their actual likelihood. Such judgments are foundational to basic sanity. We cannot hope to understand our situation if we do not attempt to rule the imagination. Of course, we are likely to discover, at a later distance, that our rule is itself another form of imagination. But we do the best we can, knowing that the inability or unwillingness to even begin to ask questions and make judgements helps sustain the current, deeply disturbing swerve of national consciousness towards archaic fight-or-flight mechanisms.
I am not interested here in critically judging the validity of such scenarios, of assessing their actual possibility or likelihood. These tactics put the conversation on the same rational middle-brow plateau that defines, and in some sense imprisons, so much public discourse. In this way they help keep delusion at bay and maintain consensus reality, which is probably not a bad thing at this stage of the game. But these tactics also allow us to dodge the heart, to ignore the multiple dimensions of political consciousness and the magic spell of control. Sometimes, in order to find your way, you just gotta dive in deep.
That does not mean that I empower these spectres with the energy of belief. As Robert Anton Wilson has warned, belief is a sucker's game in conspiratorial realms. Still, I can't just sweep these scenarios under the carpet of daylight. That's what I mean about doing political dreamwork, about the willingness to engage the imaginary that shapes our sense of the shifting landscape of power and control. In the days following the death of Paul Wellstone, I approached a number of protestors at one criminally under-reported anti-war rally in San Francisco about the tragedy. I asked them, not whether they believed that Wellstone's timely untimely death was the result of foul play, but whether, in the few seconds after they first heard the news, they simply thought "Foul play." That so many of them did says far more to me than the semi-solid rumors or suspicious reports I later dug up on the Internet.
The paranoid strain is a famously venerable component in American politics, although usually we see the schemes hatched from the right. (Where is the gun-totin', New World Order-fearin', anti-guv'ment rabble when you need 'em?) What has been less discussed is the distinctly occult strain to paranoid politics. On one level, this sense of mystic powers is simply structural, since conspiracy implies a fundamental split between the exoteric level of public discourse and the esoteric forces working beneath the surface. As the distance between these two planes of power widens, the opportunity --the "space" -- for paranoia and conspiracy expands into a realm that leaves the quotidian behind. This distance has never been wider in my adult life. The Bush administration so nakedly deploys lies and gross fear-mongering that one cannot help but experience a growing sense of unreality, a vaporization of substance aided and abetted by the coarse virtuality and rightward turn of our increasingly concentrated and spineless corporate media. When trying to imagine the real intent and purpose of these people, you are fencing with shadows.
That's why it's actually a relief when you get curious flare-ups like the back-room logo for John Poindexter's Office of Information Awareness (now no longer carried by DARPA's website). There, on our browsers, hovered a pyramid topped with a massive Masonic eye, blazing like some scatter-beam ray gun from Sirius onto our poor totalized planet. The image almost seemed design for people like me, a little more fuel for the fires, but not too much. It is too easy to imagine a naïve policy wonk, or a young web designer with a weird sense of humor. However, the speed with which the public imagined a larger connection between DARPA's research and the Patriot Act than apparently existed, only shows how ready we are to glimpse evidence of the more magical side of 21st century power.
By magical politics, I am not talking about Luciferic rites in the bowels of the Pentagon (though I am convinced that far more cohorts of the Bush regime believe in the manifest reality of Satan than our secular commentators acknowledge). What I mean by magic here is the manipulative deployment of imaginative possibility. Humans have always faced an unknown future, and we use our brains, at least some of the time, to anticipate and plan. We are always scenario-casting, directing knowledge and imagination towards possible futures: "If all of us gang up and chase the bison to the edge of the cliff...." Then, hopefully, we weigh and sift those possibilities into likelihoods that shape what little actions we can take in the face of futurity. Even in the relatively static universe of tribal life, scenario-casting plays a role, but it really comes to the fore in modernity, and even more so today, when the speed and depth of change turns us all into multi-tasking crystal gazers.
Both the wired futurism of the 1990s and the grim scenarios of today's headlines express this spirit of hyperactive speculation. During the boom economy, these speculative possibilities were technological and economic, and, with the exception of Y2K, largely positive. They stirred desire, even, on occasion, utopian desire. The economy itself came to resemble a vast possibility machine, and the visible game was to bet on an upbeat future potential lying in the convergent etherspace defined by new software, new hardware, and the fruitful properties that emerge, as if by magic, from ever more complex and intensified networks of money, algorithms and cultural signs.
If the 1990s were the attention economy, a hustle for eyeballs in a clamorous space of digital speculation, we now live in a fear economy. Nasty possibilities are articulated by authorities and amplified by an alarmist media, generating and channeling massive waves of fear and concern. But this new economy does not reflect a fundamental change in our speculative mode, and it depends on an altogether familiar unwillingness or inability to question and critique the dominant phantasm. In the wake of 9-11, we simply redirected the imaginal engines of possibility from utopia to Dis. This was particularly noticeable following the attack. In the last months of 2001, every pundit, authority and institutional body imaginable publicly enumerated, in juicy technical detail, the vast array of horrors that potential terrorists could, conceivably, unleash. And while this explosion of techno-thriller SciFi can certainly be explained by a national desire to "Be Prepared", it was almost too quickly shaped by other agendas, particularly the media's new-fangled yellow journalism and the Bush administration's Republican putsch. In addition, it seemed willfully unconscious about the subtler laws of information exchange and media feedback brought into play. It was a rational response taken up by an irrational system.
Today the fear of possibility has become an instrument of statecraft, now pervasive in the domestic sphere. However likely or not the possibilities are, this instrument does not target reason; it targets the imagination. The pre-emptive logic that has come to dominate the Bush administration's bid for global dominance is a logic of imaginal fear. This is what I mean by magic: the strong rhetorical manipulation of the imagination and the direction and quality of the energy, such as fear or desire, that infuses the psyche. This is one of McLuhan's most crucial insights, perhaps the most important: that the electronic media space that we now inhabit almost as intimately as the atmosphere follows a logic of magical thinking rather than the rational and linear modes intensified during the phase of high European culture that carries at its heart the Enlightenment revolution.
That revolution does not stop, but it hardly holds the field these days. That's one of the things 9-11 told us: powerful global forces do not play by Enlightenment rules, even in the degraded forms deployed by the current globalist corporate enterprise of unleashed technoscience. In response to Islamic fundamentalism -- an ideology and cultural imagination that is, from a scientific-rational perspective anyway, basically delusional -- we are undergoing a veritable orgy of secular celebration, that resuscitation of western ideals I call the Revenge of the Enlightenment. Rational tolerance for the irrational and intolerant has always been the bugaboo of the liberal project, and now the lines are being redrawn. But the Revenge of the Enlightenment does not, cannot acknowledge how much of Western reality already takes place in domains that follow other rules. The central domain in question is of course the media. The logic of Hollywood film, of sports and the premodern narrative structures a la Star Wars or Lord of the Rings -- these are hardly peripheral forces, to say nothing of the increasingly immersive and non-narrative immanence of music- and image-based media cultures. The movie-poster spoof for Gulf Wars Episode II: Clone of the Attack is deeper satire than it knows. Every Bush administration lie, every naked bid to stir up the rude beasts of fear and patriotism, further erodes the zone of public consensus that keeps the dark spirits of the imaginal world at bay.
One of the gifts of insomnia is that, during those restless and solitary slices of spacetime, the consensus net dissolves, the portals open, and there you are: dancing with shadows. As I hope to have shown, this gives you the ability to move into the political unconscious, to limn the shapes that motivate the collective minds we all, by necessity, move in. But the other part of the gift is something more personal, perhaps even spiritual. Following the classic American dictum to make lemonade out of life's lemons, I have embraced the mad and horrible scenarios that sometimes seem to press in from all sides as opportunities to watch my own mind and heart freak out, to prepare myself, as it were, for whatever greater and weirder terrors await -- and surely they await, at death's door if not the next installment of our dumb, utterly ignoble end-times review. The aim is not to get caught up in the content of particular fears, because these narratives, these political dreamtexts, inevitably shape the subject and its choices. Instead, I am interested in getting at the raw forces that enliven the scenes. This is one of the most valuable things I have learned from Buddhist practice: the ability, still fitful, to plug directly into the physiological and emotional energies that sustain the stories we tell ourselves.
Ultimately, this means becoming intimate with anxiety and dread without the relative comfort of a story that explains why such feelings are assaulting me in the first place.
This practice of paranoia goes beyond psychology. In the Tibetan rite of chod, one offers one's body and mind to the demons and hungry ghosts. If you can, you effect this supreme detachment in a charnel ground, just to intensify the spookiness of the affair. I have not practiced chod formally, but I've wandered close enough to eldritch astral cemeteries in meditation trances to know that the practice is no joke. One can see in it the internalized residue of the classic shamanic death rehearsal rag, wherein the medicine man, jacked up on sacred brews or not, submits to the dismemberment and posthuman reconstitution of her psychic, cultural, and possibly even physical system.
I don't know how to characterize the forces that one submits oneself to, although my gut tells me it's a shame to psychologize them as fear, or even madness. Kali's necklace rattles in the moonlight; her fangs glitter and the moon is full. Certainly such a cosmic power does not fit in the comfortable parameters of hope or faith, let alone sanity. But there is still a subtle trust involved: trust that the mind can meet the mind, that the demons too are just puppets, and that, in the words of Dale Pendell, "One who has learned to face the gods directly has no fear of facing a king."
Erik Davis is a San-Francisco based writer and the author of Techgnosis. Currently he is researching a book on the history of California spirituality. More of his work can be accessed at his website.