Smear-ghouls¶
It’s only one tweet, but I’m going to treat it as massively
indicative, because:
(1) It’s Friday night
(2) It’s more entertaining that way, and
(3) It actually might be massively indicative
Plunging straight into madness’ maw, therefore, we have this:
And now all the right wing, neoreactionary SuperPAC money will be shifted to other close US Senate races, like… http://t.co/13BvajioYm
— Les AuCoin (@lesaucoin) July 24, 2014
Some immediate take-away? ‘Neoreactionary’ (the word) has crossed a currency threshold, and its destiny is now vastly senseless. It’s retrospectively obvious that if anything was going to happen to it in the wider culture, it was going to be this. Roughly, it’s becoming what ‘neoconservative’ and ‘neoliberal’ were, and are: a political term that circulates socially because it designates something vague and scary to its enemies, who then use it as a smear-ghoul to tar things they don’t understand, and don’t like. This probably sounds bad, but if we think so, it’s a sign of how unrealistic we’ve been about the dominant semiotic processes in degenerating democracies. It wasn’t ever going to be any other way.
Running isn’t going to work. There’s an argument to be made for fleeing territory, but to flee signs is utterly pointless. There’s no superior semiotic position to be escaped to. The way this is happening is the way it happens. It has to be understood, worked through, played with. As the Wittgenstein-tendency of NRx would surely be the first to concur, private languages are intrinsically delusive. When your antagonist is a titanic cultural control apparatus, your words are going to get messed with in ways that seem simply insane. That’s the way it is.
It’s not — by any means — an altogether disastrous situation, at least, not any more than the situation in general is disastrous. Even if the dominant public sense of a co-opted word is allusive, polemical, and strategically abusive, there is still a subtle undercurrent of awkwardness.
“Oh man, those Tea-Party morons are like total tools of the
neoreactionaries!”
“Yeah, too right! *snork* *snork* *snork*” (What the hell is a neoreactionary? Gotta Google that
m***********.)
And really, it doesn’t matter what they think — except right out on the margin, where things slip. It’s obviously going to be the targets of the smear-ghouling, in a few peculiar cases, who ask: If this ‘neoreaction’ business is creating so much fear and loathing among our enemies, there might be something to it that I’d like.
SoBL has a quite brilliant tweet on the topic:
Same methods. Hunt Bros + archconservatives in '79 = Koch Bros + TeaParty '10 = Thiel+ Neoreactionaries '14. http://t.co/01dN9znMfc
— SOBL1 (@SOBL1) July 25, 2014
Conspiracy construction is an essential part of the process. It’s a way the Left-establishment digests threats without having to think about them, keeping the problem purely strategic, rather than ideological. One consequence — eventually it brings a conspiracy into being. If war has been declared, you might as well fight back. In this sense, the swelling wave of Silicon Valley conspiracy mongering on the Left strikes me as wholly positive, its absurdity notwithstanding. Tech billionaires who find themselves in the cross-hairs of this stuff are pretty much forced to acknowledge that appeasement isn’t working. Some of them are going to get the idea that the Cathedral wants to destroy them. At that point, they start looking for options.
You can have the CIA angle thrown in for free:
over/under that several Dark Enlightenment leader-figures are being fed scripts by the CIA, who prefer supporting fascists over socialists?
— ◇◇ (@chipstian) July 25, 2014
How long before some elements within the intelligence services start to wonder whether they have some unexplored options, too?