the power of the art of deceit

If you’ve found yourself thinking the world has gone a bit surreal lately, you’re more right than you might realize. It’s not just the vernacular use of the word; that is, it’s not just that things are weird. We happen to live in a paranoid, increasingly authoritarian culture in which the real, the presumed, and the purported are indistinguishable strands of a dense hallucinatory web of mediated spectacles. In short, these times are right smack dab in the middle of actual surrealism’s wheelhouse. Indeed our national-security-addled consumer-spectator society practically demands a surrealist analytical angle, albeit one that makes a distinction between the historical surrealist movement and what I will call a surrealist mode of inquiry. Let’s break it down. Consider first of all that things have gotten conspicuously unpleasant out there, since well before a certain pandemic took over the headlines. Western society would seem to be witnessing the rise of, if not textbook fascism, then something uncomfortably akin to it. What else are we to make of nominally liberal democracies characterized by total surveillance, executive kill lists, indefinite detention, authoritarian populists, militarized police, propaganda posing as journalism, shrinking civil liberties, and anti-terrorism laws being used to suppress dissent? If any of the assertions in that list strike you as unwarranted, read on; plenty of specific examples will be cited in the pages ahead.

jarring juxtaposition, often by way of black humor, is to the technique of surrealism what anti-fascism is to its ethos.

As we enter the world of dreams, desires, and selective perceptions, we go even deeper into surrealist territory.

Consider what we accept without forcing an exchange of the consensual cultural self-image. Permanent war has long since been normalized. Total surveillance barely merits a shrug of indifferent shoulders, if we’re not too busy actively equipping our own mobile phones with ways to track our movements, desires, and social contacts. Indefinite detention and torture now also make their bids for that state of ubiquitous invisibility. Against a backdrop of grotesque wealth inequalities, an increasingly precarious working class, militarized law enforcement, systemic racial injustice, and a certain armed segment of the US population that occasionally likes to invoke the prospect of civil war (Giglio 2020), it is difficult to imagine more perilous societal conditions.

postmodern colonization of the cultural dreamscape,

Fisher has noted that over several decades, especially in the United States, “capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business”

the kind of absurd irony that practically begs to be treated with surrealist black humor. The national security ontology is the stick to the business ontology’s putative carrot.

To kick the legs out from under capitalist–or national security–realism in this way would be a Wizard of Oz moment in which we suddenly notice the small vulnerable man behind the curtain working the machinery of illusion.

Ultimately, of course, the label is not as important as what’s in the can.

The nexus of dreams, hyperreality, paranoia, totalitarianism, terror, art, myth, and culture is where realpolitik becomes surrealpolitik.

Black humor is distinguished from other sorts of humor by its not necessarily being funny, or rather by the discomfort that arises from the juxtaposition of absurdity and horror.

what we generally take to be the facts of perceived reality are actually, to some uncertain and variable degree, fictions. They include elements that are variously constructed, edited, imposed, presumed, and incomplete. Reality is, in short, a kind of narrative spun by numerous psychological, social, and biological factors that are often, like so many narrators in fiction, unreliable. At least some of what we take to be the manifest givens of reality might therefore reflect anything from mild bias to radical illusion. As one neuroscientist (Lotto 2018) put it elegantly enough: “You never, ever see reality!”

what we do see in lieu of reality is a deeply personalized yet culturally conditioned neuronal representation of what our history has taught us to expect. Our senses provide us with limited, undependable, and, above all, meaningless information; our brains provide the meaning, based on experience and belief.

It is difficult usefully to separate internal processes from external data since they form an interdependent system of reality creation; this is true of both ordinary socialization and delusion,

My innovative undergraduate institution, Hampshire College, had a motto–Non satis scire (“ to know is not enough”)–that guided its own mode of inquiry. It’s a good reminder that actions, not thoughts, feelings, or intentions, are what ultimately define us. A good motto for a surrealist mode of inquiry might be the détournement Nimium scire: to know is too much. Too-certain knowledge puts limits on new learning and imagination; contrarily, destroying assumptions frees that imagination and creates opportunities both to learn and to expand the so-called Overton Window, or the range of ideas that are conceivable within a given society.

we are privy only to the tiny sliver of the universe that we’ve evolved to perceive, a proportion that is not only minuscule compared to what actually exists, but that is paltry even compared to the sense-data registered by a below-average dog.

we have perhaps not much more than a base-level awareness that our perception of reality is, to some degree, a construction of our own biases and assumptions, and that we might exercise our imaginations to conjure a larger set of possibilities–a new reality.

He described propaganda as “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses” by “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country” (p. 37).

surrealism represents in many ways the very conceptual opposite of propaganda, with a goal of un-regimenting the public mind (making the eventual cooptation of surrealist art as propaganda in advertising a bit of a cruel irony). Surrealism also dealt with minds one at a time, whereas propaganda deals in masses of them. Generally speaking, it might be said that, from a common interest in the unconscious, propaganda seeks to create order from chaos; surrealism seeks something like the reverse.

What is striking is how much strangeness reality can accommodate, or how determined people are to pretend that things are normal. This is dreamwork.

For a surrealist mode of inquiry, the blurriest margins of these territories–between real and unreal, conscious and unconscious, sane and insane–are where things are most interesting, where the stakes are highest, and where we can most fruitfully query the reliability of our most trusted assumptions.

Today, surveying the political landscape at home, are we seeing a few excesses within an otherwise sound system, or is there something more to worry about?

an authoritarian surveillance state mentality has already done a great deal of violence to civil liberties in the United States. The issues themselves are no secret. They are not so much hidden as obscured by a combination of factors that allow them to remain unrecognized, plausibly denied, or sufficiently excused by the persistence of national security realism. As individual issues, even in the form of a steady drip, they lose much of their power to alarm. Indeed, we become inured to them. They become normalized, albeit in tension with our collective self-image. Assembled together, however, and presented as a cultural tapestry, the effect is somewhat more jarring: we have a literal permanent state of emergency (Paye 2006) featuring a global war on terror, i.e., a war of dubious legality against a poorly defined abstract concept with no geographical constraints and no prospect of victory, defeat, or conclusion (Murray 2011; Sanders 2011; Spinney 2011; Bacevich 2013; Stanford 2015); total surveillance, in which all communications are monitored and our own devices used to watch and listen to us (Simons and Spafford 2003; Miller 2014; Sylvain 2014; Ganguly 2015; David 2017); militarized domestic police forces with broad powers over our lives, liberties, and property, using SWAT team tactics with impunity even against those suspected only of nonviolent crimes (Schaefer 2002; Wolf 2007; Whitehead 2013; Alexander and Myers-Montgomery 2016; Bolduc 2016; Sack 2017); centralized corporate media that (for a variety of reasons) fail to contest government narratives (Chomsky and Herman 2002 [1988]; Borjesson 2004 [2002]; Davies 2009); protest and dissent being treated under legal provisions for terrorism (Fang 2015; Levin 2017; ACLU undated-a); and a loss of civil liberties to the extent that US citizens, like everyone else, can now be declared enemy combatants by arbitrary executive decree and be indefinitely detained or killed without recourse to due process (Friedersdorf 2012; Sarah 2013; Georgeanne A 2014; Diab 2015; Gee 2015; Powell 2016).

Anti-terrorism authority has been wielded far more often against non-terrorists than against terrorists. Sometimes other illegal activity is caught–Patriot Act provisions have led to charges for money laundering, fraud, drug possession, and immigration offenses (ACLU undated-c)–and sometimes the authority is used against legal, peaceful dissent. The FBI has opened “domestic terrorism” surveillance operations on civil rights groups advocating for racial justice and immigrants’ rights (Levin 2019); police have gone undercover to infiltrate and spy on anti-fracking activists (Fang and Horn 2016); the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force tracked Black Lives Matters activists (Fang 2015), indigenous protesters and environmentalists at Standing Rock (Levin 2017), quite a few other “peaceful advocacy groups” (ACLU undated-b), and, apparently unsuccessfully, tried to infiltrate at least one vegan pot luck dinner (Snyders 2008).

Of particular interest to a surrealist mode of inquiry is the state of tension maintained in the nexus of misinformation, disinformation, dissent, debate, and censorship. The symbolic order or big Other didn’t come from nowhere and it is not maintained magically. Narratives require storytellers. Those with privileged narrative-driving power–authorities and their proxies, corporate media, key influencers–must deal not only with telling stories but with hecklers. They must deal with dissent, and in ways the pre-internet institutions did not have to worry about.

A surrealist mode of inquiry actively seeks locations of tension in which information is maligned not because it is harmful to the public interest, but because it is harmful to the symbolic order. When dissent is “debunked” as misinformation or disinformation, who fact-checks the fact-checkers?

What has been created is a vortex of concentric forces, reducing reality to a small cluster of reports, flowing through a handful of monopoly providers who, in turn, channel each other’s stories into their own streams. Frequently unchecked, commonly created by PR, this consensus account of the world is inherently inadequate in its selection of stories, inherently unreliable in its reporting, daily generating the mass production of ignorance. (Davies 2009, p. 108)

it’s not entirely bad advice to be careful about which rabbit holes you choose to go down–investigation is time-consuming and otherwise challenging–but obviously the inevitable result of trusting the received consensus as a general strategy will always be to reinforce rather than to challenge official narratives.

The social media giants did not initially seem eager to become the arbiters of truth, since their primary business interest is ostensibly in maximizing usage of their services, with little incentive to assume the liability or the costs of policing

Social media are not merely neutral platforms within which disinterested executives are just trying to make sure everyone gets their facts straight. They are the battlegrounds in the “war of narratives” that has explicitly been declared. Free and open discussion is not on the agenda.

Note that whether the inspectors were correct in their conclusions or not isn’t the point. The point is that the normal processes of science were utterly disregarded in favor of an allout, demonstrably dishonest narrative-control effort, in which mainstream journalism was an uncritical, witting participant.

Foreign policy in general may not be a taboo subject for criticism, but when it comes to certain military and intelligence matters, there are clearly areas that seem not only to repel inquiry, but to nullify the thought of it, to rob it of legitimacy and respectability–to put the questioning outside of “normal” discourse or polite society.

When transparent evidence is dismissed as so-called evidence while we’re expected to accept hidden evidence as just plain evidence, something strange is going on. The normalization of this kind of behavior is better understood as a weirdification of reality. It signals that we ought to tread very carefully around claims of disinformation and other convenient shorthand methods of dismissing arguments without engaging them.

It evidently bears repeating that a democracy is, by design, an adversarial system that not only permits but requires–both in order to function and for its fundamental legitimacy–a thriving “marketplace of ideas.” Open debate, free speech, a press that exercises its nominal freedom to challenge power, these are the sorts of things that pop up in any internet search for “lifeblood of democracy.” The handful of examples of suppressed speech given here don’t even scratch the surface of this unfortunate and apparently accelerating trend.

We have a society whose symbolic order is constructed from notions of freedom, democracy, equality, and law, but whose actual characteristics include total surveillance, torture, indefinite detention, and arbitrary executive assassinations; the aggressive suppression of unwanted scientific information; the inappropriate use of anti-terror authority against dissenters and protesters; and concerted government-corporate efforts to silence, marginalize, discredit, or taboo certain kinds of political speech. Most of these features, if they are justified at all, are justified on national security grounds. Most of them, upon close scrutiny, see their justifications disintegrate and become potential ruptures in the symbolic order.

What is important is that a surrealist mode of inquiry is alert to repressive tendencies, and privileges the poking and prodding of these ruptures in order to stress test the dreamworld of the virtuous free democracy. It asks: Is this a society that welcomes dissent? Or is this a society that has marshaled its most powerful public and private resources to control it?

What a surrealist mode of inquiry brings to the task of contesting Ur-Fascism is a raising of the profile of the ways in which the machinery of repression is also a machinery of mystification,

in an age dominated by total surveillance, terrorism, counterterrorism, fake news, and conspiracy theories, the paranoid element of surrealism has never been more relevant.

In a reified reality narrative, subjects become objects–passive, fixed, fated–and objects become subjects–active determinants of an inevitable order. Social and economic relationships, for example, become a “natural” function of “the way things are” rather than the result of choices and power relationships. Radical change becomes unimaginable. Everything is too orderly, too organized, too real to be re-imagined. “It is what it is.”

The extent to which the big Other represents a fundamental deception is an open question. Certainly Fisher’s argument is predicated on the expectation that the deception is fundamental, far-reaching, and insufficiently questioned. This possibility suggests the notion that society–particularly perhaps American society–might be suffering from what one might call “cultural gaslighting.” Gaslighting became a psychological term of art in therapy in the 1980s and is now regularly used (and abused) colloquially (Abramson 2014). Deriving from the 1944 film Gaslight (and/ or the play and earlier film that preceded it), the term denotes the imposition of a false reality, “a form of emotional manipulation in which the gaslighter tries (consciously or not) to induce in someone the sense that her reactions, perceptions, memories and/ or beliefs are not just mistaken, but utterly without grounds—paradigmatically, so unfounded as to qualify as crazy” (Abramson 2014, p. 2). Extending this concept of gaslighting to a cultural level goes beyond the usual jaded recognition of corruption, e.g., the expectation of a certain amount of lying and greed among our politicians. Cultural gaslighting implies a more total hoodwinking at the level of capitalist realism or a national security ontology, an imposition of a whole set of ersatz socio-political assumptions.

The question becomes: Are these events merely anomalies within a generally trustworthy narrative, or are they ruptures that reveal a hidden, fundamentally different reality? Or are such questions “utterly without grounds”–is it crazy to ask?

The feedback loop that is constituted by learned beliefs and confirmation bias is, at the same time, the fundamental mechanism of both delusion and ordinary socialization. To question the symbolic order is to question your own mind.

As psychologist David Rosenhan put it in his study of whether medical professionals could tell the sane from the insane in a clinical setting, “Whenever the ratio of what is known to what needs to be known approaches zero, we tend to invent ‘knowledge’ and assume that we understand more than we actually do”

The misdiagnosis of justified true beliefs as crazy is a well-recognized phenomenon. It even has a name: the Martha Mitchell Effect, after the wife of John Mitchell, the US Attorney General in the early 1970s (Colman 2009). Martha made accusations of illegal activities going on in the White House that were deemed so off the wall that they were dismissed as the delusions of a mentally ill woman.

In Greek mythology Cassandra was given the power of prophecy by Apollo, but when she rejected his advances he also gave her the curse that nobody would believe her warnings.

Once it is appreciated that the symbolic order is maintained, at times and in part, by liars, gaslighters, and propagandists, it can become very easy to believe anything as long as it is not an officially sanctioned narrative. “Don’t believe anything until it’s been officially denied” is a useful enough rule of thumb–until officials deny something that’s actually false.

the territory between sober skepticism and spurious fantasy is creative ground that is ripe for surrealist provocation.

Paranoia and plots are so thoroughly the water in which we swim that we do not always recognize them by those names.

unwelcome evidence being ignored or dismissed, as in several cases in Syria (Carden 2017)–the suggestion, for example, that a given justification for war might be a mere pretext is still normally treated with that special derision reserved for the most unhinged of drooling moon-howlers.

the paranoid style “has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated than with the truth or falsity of their content.” What is interesting then about Hofstadter’s perfectly accurate observation is that, true or not, crazy or not, evidence in a paranoid style comes with implicit scare quotes, and the more evidence that is presented, the worse it gets.

what is immediately obvious to the person on the receiving end is something that has nothing to do with assassinations or controlled demolitions: that the proselytizer has spent an unconventional quantity of time on the subject, is in the fever grip of an obsession, has crossed the bridge out of normal town. In short, the very profusion of evidence makes the person seem crazed. It is a question, as Hofstadter notes, of style.

None of the foregoing should be taken to imply that there is a sharp, clear division between paranoia and normal town. That bridge sees a lot of traffic, and many of those who don’t cross it spend time on it gazing at the river flowing beneath.

A tension arises from our efforts variously to conform to and distinguish ourselves from that symbolic order, e.g., to be socially acceptable while protecting our more idiosyncratic personal views. It is that space between the official narratives and the thoughts we entertain in private or on the margins that provides such fertile soil for a surrealist mode of inquiry.

behind the decorum of our implicit agreements regarding a consensual normal lies a tension between rational and irrational, paranoia and practicality, fact and fiction.

We know enough to wonder more about why we think we know what we think we know.

If not for the fear of terrorism, the various indignities now associated with going through an airport, to say nothing of the loss of so many civil liberties, would not be tolerated.

“that sorcery-bundle of mythical representations on which Western culture is based”

As we have seen, nowhere is the problematic intermingling of fiction and fact more evident than in the thoroughly mediated and intelligence-agency-dependent world of terrorism narrative.

What we have here are consummate examples of Taussig’s “epistemic murk.” When Jean Baudrillard describes a world that “can no longer dream” because images have become indistinguishable from the real “as though things had swallowed their own mirrors” (2008, p. 4), or when Louis Aragon states that “[ t] he only way to look at Man is as the victim of his mirrors” (2010 [1924]), they weren’t speaking about the mystifying interplay of intelligence and terrorism, but they might as well have been.

For a surrealist mode of inquiry, these are not only cautionary tales against certainty, but invitations to query why so much taboo is associated with questioning a state of affairs that is so patently questionable.

In short, without humor, surrealism is insufferable.

Whether used in political art or activism or just as a form of permission we can give ourselves, alone or as a means of social bonding, to break tension with laughter, black humor is about as fine a communications tool as there is, and it provides a crucial psychological defense against the madness of the times. Its employment within a surrealist mode of inquiry makes potentially esoteric critical concerns more accessible, bypasses intellectual defense mechanisms that make us resistant to seeing things in a new way, and does the performative surrealist work of stimulating the connections between our conscious and unconscious minds.

This book’s central ideas all have to do with words that are notoriously hard to define: surrealism; reality; fascism; terrorism; insanity. With each additional layer of elusive abstraction, the fuzziness of the whole panoply multiplies. Ambiguities and flexibilities abound, and boundaries exist only to be tested.

a surrealist mode of inquiry begins with a great refusal: a refusal to accept in a facile way the realism of realpolitik. A surrealist mode of inquiry sees the fictions, lives the dream, and wants to know: where are all these elaborations of the national security state taking us?

Distant cultures and distant times are whole forests, substantially disinvested of our own identities; the present moment is thick with individual trees growing out of the soil of who we are now.