Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics

In yet a further twist, challenges to scholars' credibility arise from within the ranks of those working on 9 I u truth. In late November 2oo6, Jones and others split from Scholars for 9 I 11 Truth. The following month, they formed a new group, Scholars for 9 / 11 Truth and Justice. Some lamented the infighting among the Scholars, recognizing the link between this fighting and the larger struggle for credibility even as they displaced the fundamental problem. In the. words of "Livdlarry": "I've been somewhat 'torn' o.n this infighting issue for quite some time and can see some truth in at least two positions with regard to what information is 'credible: It comes as no surprise that disinformation agents .are busy sowing confusion anywhere that they can when such a horrible reality is at stake:'26 Aware of the problem of credibility, Lividlarry subsumes it under conviction and suspicion. A horrible reality is at stake, a certain horror and a certain reality. Confusion is thus a matter not of this reality but of disinformation, of those who want to cast doubt on what he and others already know for certain. In fact, Lividlarry is particularly skeptical regarding eforts to establish credibility. He continues, '\1lhen those interested in accumulating whatever information and/ or insights are out there fall into the trap of determining 'credibility' based on their interpretation of plausibility there is a danger that a piece of the puzzle might go unnoticed:' What happened on September 11 was incredible, implausible. Limiting oneself to plausibility avoids encountering what is already certain.

Factions among the Scholars ofer diferent explanations for the split. Fetzer claims Jones was blocking people from posting on the Scholars' website and trying to take over the group.27 He also charges Jones with attempting to keep controversial theories about 9 I 11 out of the public eye. The theories in question were proposed by Judy Wood, a former assistant professor at Clemson University with a Ph.D. in materials engineering science, and Morgan Reynolds, emeritus professor of economics at Texas A & M. Reynolds and Wood had posted a number of critiques of Jones's work on the Internet.28 Challenging Jones's claim that "nano-enhanced thermite or thermate" was used to bring down the WT c in a controlled demolition, they point out that Jones does not establish that therrnite or therrnate has ever been used to bring down large buildings much less pulverize them. They note as well that Jones doesn't account for how much thermite or thermate would need to have been used, where it would need to have been placed, and how it would have been ignited.29

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Additionaly, Reynolds and Wood accuse Jones of failing to credit the work of others on 9 /1 truth, ignoring the fact that "no Boeing 757 went into the Pentagon was proven years ago;' and upholding too many components of the oficial government conspiracy theory. 30 Wood suggests that space-based laser beams perhaps in connection with very large mirrors brought down the WTC .³¹ Jones both rejects the "no planes hit the Towers" theory and charges Wood and Reynolds with engaging in ad hominem attacks, in part because they mention his previous work on cold fusion. In a broadcast .in January 2007 of Fetzer's radio show The Dynamic Duo, on which Reynolds and Wood appeared as guests, Fetzer, in what he claims is not an ad hominem, mentions a paper written by Jones wherein Jones uses archaeological evidence to prove the Mormon claim that Jesus �sited the ·Arn.ericas.32 For much of the remaining portion of the show, Fetzer, Jones, and Wood discuss problems in Jones's claims to follow the scientific method and suggest that his work has more in common with pseudoscience.

In yet a more fundamental critique, Gerard Holmgren criticizes the entire community of Scholars for 9 I 11 Truth (including Fetzer and Jones by name) for plagiarizing the earli.er work of Internet researchers. In Holmgren's words: "The scholars make their presence in the media felt not through original research (they haven't done any), nor through quali.ty of presentation (they make frequent factual errors-if indeed they are 'errors'). They make their presence felt purely by swagger in parading that Jones and a number of his associates are professors . . . . Not only do the scholars plagiarize their cresearch' articles, but their press statements are calculated to reinforce the false notion that their work is original, that the revelations are new, and also to play the hero card by claiming personal risk in unveiling these shocking new revelations:'33 On his website, Holmgren explains that the so-called 9 I 11 truth movement is actually controlled by the very people who perpetrated the crimes of September 11. Their control relies on carefully placed disinformation and on the careerism and opportunism of those who want to profit from the 9 I 11 truth industry. 34 Disinformation keeps the myth that planes actually crashed into the Pentagon and World Trade Center alive. Holmgren knows that these are fabrications. American Airlines flights 77 and 11 (the ones alegedly hitting the Pentagon and the North Tower) never existed. The well-known fo�tage of the plane striking the South Tower is an animated cartoon. Holmgren is convinced that the events of 9 I 11 are like a giant snuf film consisting of real explosions and fake planes and hijackers.

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Skepticism and Certainty

Zizek's account of the decline of symbolic ef.icienC)lj Santner's discussion of the crisis of investiture, and Lacan's teaching on psychosis can help sort through these layers of credibilityj incredibility, and certainty. Together, these ideas help us understand the problem posed by 9 I n truth not as one of credibility but of its absence, that is to say, the �bsence of conditions of possibilty for something like belief or credibility.

As chapter 2 detailsJ the decline of symbolic eficiency. refers to a breakdown in signification. Identities, arguments, or signs that are clear and compelling in some settings car little weight in others. One might imagine Nicole Richie and Jirgen Habermas in an airport waiting area� Neither w uld recognize the other's symbolic weight or be able to assess the other's cultural capital.

That identities, arguments, and signs are limited in their power and range, that they fail to be thoroughly compelling in a variety of contexts, has repercussions for contemporary subjects. We are often skeptical about what we hear. To approach this from the other side, Zizek frequently describes symbolic eficiency with the question, ''"What do you believe, your eyes or my words?" In a functioning symbolic order, we believe the words, no matter what our eyes tell us. We recognize that the judge is not just the man we see but the ofice he holds. We recognize the doctor is m.ore than the woman before us. She is also the trained, experienced expert on whom we depend. In the m.ediated networks of communicative capitalism, though, we don't believe their words. ·we believe our eyes. Present subjects accept very little on face value. We don't believe what we hear. If a doctor gives us bad news, we get a second or third opinion and then reject Western medicine in favor of more authentic folk remedies. If the judge makes a ruling we reject, we suspect he was paid of, corrupt, or invested in an opposing ideology. And even when we concede that another is likely using her best judgment in as fair a way as possible, we find ourselves emphasizing the plurality of possible views: everyone has her own opinion. Experts disagree.

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So we are skeptical. But often our skepticism is combined with a kind of certainty or conviction. We don't challenge or reject everything all the time. To keep going, we have to keep some aspects of our lives stable and secure. We need base points from which to navigate. Skepticism toward the mainstream. news, then, is combined with an increased division between who watches what and who trusts whom. Some sources can be trusted. Republicans in the United States are m.ore likely to watch Fox News and report that they trust what they hear on Fox. Vice President Dick Cheney has said he only watches Fox. The idea of the decline of symbolic eficiency clicks on this fragmentation, on the inability of elements that flourish in one discursive habitat to take root and thrive in another.

As ^Zizek points out, Donald Davidson designates the background assumption that everything another says is not completely wrong the "principle of charity:' It's a presumption of underlying agreement on which disagreement rests. Davidson argues that "charity is not an option . . . charity is forced on us; whether we like it or not, if we want to understand others, we must count them right in most matters:'35 The decline of symbolic eficiency points to the withering away of this principle of charityless and less are people today forced to presume charity. There are strong material-technological explanations for this withering away. Not only are communication technologies charitable in our stead, making connections with other machines, but the interconnecting of ever more people lets us find enough of those who share our convictions that we don't have to believe. In a previous age, we may have been isolated in our views, village idiots roaming the streets, madwomen in the attics, or psychotic judges driven to document our illness and our discoveries. Now we're part of a discourse, community, or movement.

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Santner's discussion of the memoirs of Judge Daniel Paul Schreber provides a second element useful for thinking about contemporary problems around credibility and certainty.36 Vhereas Freud's reading of Schreber was central to his understanding of paranoia (particularly with regard to its presumed link with homosexuality), Santner underscores the similarity between the crises leading to Schreber's ·psychotic breakdown and those facing modernity more generally. He understands these crises as crises of symbolic investiture.

Symbolic investiture refers to the way a person becomes endowed with a new social status that informs her identity in the community (xii) . Examples include the ordination of a priest, a marriage ceremony, graduation and the conferral of a degree, or wing a prestigious prize. In modernity, Santner argues, symbolic identities become ever more fragile, less able to "seize" the subject at the core of her self-understanding. Modern subjects, then, understand themselves as never fully occupying their identities. I am not just a mommy; professor, woman, Caucasian, American. There is always more to the modeJ;n subject than her role ot position. And this means that the roles themselves are less than they had been. They carry less meaning and weight. They are less impressive, less eficacious. Fully aware of the distance between tl).e person and her role, we are inclined to see the role as a sham, a ruse, a cover for corruption or abuse. We sense the tautological character of symbolic roles and social institutions. The judge is a judge because we treat him as a judge. People become married in a marriage ceremony because that's what a marriage ceremony does.

The crisis of symbolic investiture reveals the violence and compulsion, the "vicim.is circularity;' underlying social order (a point Santner explores with reference to Walter Benjamin's "Critique ofViolence;' 43) . Typically, subjects forget or repress their knowledge of violence. This forgetting and repressing is necessary for the continued function of the social :field and the credibility of symbolic identities. At points of crisis, however, knowledge of the dependence of the social function on coercion and repetition becomes difcult to repress ( 139 ) . At these points, Santner tels us, "we are at the threshold of a psychotic universe where the subject has become unable to forget, unable (primordially) to repress the drive dimension of the symbolic function, which expands into a general state of rottenness and decay" ( 43) . The force underlying knowledge fails to authorize facts but instead infuses them with the pervasive, irrational violence of coexistence.

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Santner' s crisis of symbolic investiture deepens and extends Zizek' s account of the decline of symbolic eficiency by connecting the crisis of symbolic investiture to paranoid psychosis. A central lesson of the Schreber case is that a generalized loss of symbolic power can generate feelings of overproximity, in Santner's words, "loss of distance to so.me obscene and malevolent presence that appears to have a direct hold on one's inner parts" (xi) . Confronted with the excessive proximity of authority, the subject can't continue to play the game of everyday life, a game that requires it to deny the "impasses and dilemmas of symbolic power and authority" ( 144) . The traumatic loss of symbolic authority thus impacts the subject such that he feels this now-missing authority to be all the closer, more powerful, and intrusive. He confronts the irrationality and violence underpinning authority per se-the tautological way we obey law because it is law and accept the judgments of a judge because she is the judge. Santner's psychotic, then, is not delusional because he accepts as certain what is necessarily false but because he denies the falsity, the fiction, the lie necessary for the functioning of the symbolic order. The psychotic doesn't fall for the performative magic of utterances backed by symbolic authority. He focuses instead on the "rottenness and decay" that underlies them.

Vhat are the implications of the decline of symbolic eficiency and the crisis of symbolic investiture for thinking through the problems posed by the 9/11 truth movement? The decline of symbolic eficiency tags the movement's setting in profound skepticism. Contemporary subjects don't have to believe. They can find out. This skepticism is coupled with a sense of certainty or confidence. Not everything is called into question at the same time, and some sources are more reliable than others. So contemporary Americans might claim media cannot be trusted and support that claim with evidence taken from media they trust. Their trust, however, doesn't travel from one setting to another. Vhat they find to be authoritative, to count as expert knowledge, is similarly limited. The crisis of symbolic investiture highlights the loss of a powerful authority or authorizing power. Subjects respond to this loss by positing an all the more intrusive, invasive, and proximate power, by failing to believe the fiction of the symbolic order and suppress the sense in which it covers over arbitrary power.

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Those who view September u in terms of the U. S. government's failure to secure its citizens and its territory might respond to this loss by positing another power and by tracing the workings of this other power throughout the sociopolitical terrain. For them, the lost sense of American invincibility is accompanied by the loss of a signifying authority, one capable of providing meaning, of authorizing an explanation for the events of 9 I 11. They don't accept the authority of the administration's signification of the event. Instead, they focus on the "rottenness and decay" underlying political and state power.

Lacan's teachings on psychosis help specify this site of crisis and loss. In Seminar III, he distinguishes between the psychotic and the normal subject: "What characterizes a normal subject is precisely that he never takes seriously certain realities that he recognizes exist. You are surrounded by al sorts of realities about which you are in doubt, some of which are particularly threatening, but you don't take them fully seriously, for you think . . . that the worst is not always certain, and maintain yourselves in an average, ba�ic-in the sense of relation to the base-state of blissful uncertainty, which makes possible for you a suficiently relaxed existence. Surely, certainty is the rarest of things for the normaJ subject:'37 The normal person has a lot of doubt, but he doesn't let these doubts get in the way of his everyday functioning. There are many things he doesn't know for sure, but this doesn't bother him. He doesn't worry about it. In fact, his happy persistence requires him not to ask questions or look too closely at things. The normal subject carries on in an uncertain world where many things are unknown and lies are p ervasive. Indeed, Lacan says, "the normal subject spontaneously rejects certainty"; he may deny the truth that is right before his eyes just so he can keep on going ( 76).

In contrast, for the psychotic, Lacan explains, "reality is not the issue;' certainty is ( 75) . What he is certain of may wel be ambiguous, unclear, opaque. But the psychotic is certain, nonetheless. And this certainty does not correspond directly with reality. Reality isn't at stake. After al, normal subjects persist in a terrain of reality filled with uncertainty and falsity. The psychotic rejects this ambiguityj the ambiguity of the everydaY, of language, replacing it with certainty. Lacan notes that the psychotic's certainty is often expressed through writing. The paranoid write, they produce "sheets of paper covered with writing." Schreber, for example, published his writings on his psychosis, which raises the question for La can of what the need for recognition might mean ( 78). Perhaps it might be a need for acknowledgment or community as a way of lessening the unbearable and direct confrontation with power alone. Perhaps Schreber's desire for recognition is a desire for conversation and camaraderie, for others with whom he might discuss and compare his findings such that he might escape the isolation of his certainty. Networked communication technologies provide ways of meeting this need.

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Lacan defines psychosis in terms of the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father and the hole this creates in the chain of significations. As he puts it, "Something primordial regarding the subject's being does not enter into symbolization and is not repressed, but rejected" ( 81). Because the Nameof-the-Father or master signifier stabilizes and makes possible language and signification as such, in its absence there is chaos. The psychotic responds to this hole, this chaos, in various ways. He may afirm, emphatically, another other. Most of us are familiar with paranoia as positing an other behind the scenes, pulling the strings. Often, this other remains mysterious, enigmatic ( 194). This comes as no surprise given the absence of a way to hold the signifyg chain together. The lack of such an anchoring point perpetually stimulates the efort to find meaning.

To compensate for the hole in the symbolic, the psychotic turns to the imaginary. La can refers to a "captivating image" ( 204). The psychotic f� tens on this image, positioning himself in relation to it. Insofar as this relation remains at the level of the imaginary, it is not a symbolic relation capable of anchoring meaning or ofering a clear degree of separation between the subject and the other. On the contrary, precisely because the relation is on the imaginary plane, it is characterized by fear, rivalryj and aggression (2os) . The psychotic enters into a rivalrous game with the imaginary other, a game of deception and deceit that turns his world into a kind of phantasmagoria, an uncertain terrain where nothing is as it seems and everything is permeated by meaning and significance ( 69). The psychotic may try to mimic the conformist behaviors of those around him as he grapples with the intensity of his fears and of this rivalry. He may seek to avoid confronting his awareness of the power and aggression, but as his psychosis ·becomes more acute, he wil be less able to deny the obscene intrusions of power that surround him.

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Thus far I've emphasized several aspects of the Lacanian account of psychosis: that psychosis is a reaction to a hole or absence, that this reaction takes place on the level of the imaginary, and that it involves certainty, feru; distrust, and a sense of permeating meaning that may be expressed through writing and publication. One additional aspect of Lacan's discussion, an aspect that returns us to the setting of psychosis, is necessary for thinking about 9 I 11 truth as the psychotic clone of university discourse. Lacan writes: "To be more or less captivated, captured, by a meaning is not the same thing as to express that meaning in a discourse designed to communicate it and reconcile it with other variously received mean).ngs. In this term received lies the driving force of what makes discourse a common discourse, a comonly admitted discourse" ( 63) . The hole to which the psychotic responds, the hole constitutive of psychosis, is a gap or absence in the "commonly admited discourse:' Normal subjects don't perceive the hole. For them, the symbolic order is intact and they ignoJ.7e, as best they can, the ruptures of the Real. The psychotic perceives the hole and reacts to it, but he reacts in a way that he can't fully communicate. The image that covers over or takes the place of the hole doesn't function in t4e same way for him as it does for normal subjects because for them its place is already occupied. Thus, they can't reconcile the psychotic's image, no matter how certain it may be, with the other meanings constitutive of reality. It is simply not part of a common discourse.

But what if discourse is not common? 'What if our conditions are characterized by the decline of symbolic eficiency and the presence of a variety of diferentiated discursive habitats? 'What, in other words, if the words of the government are already greeted with skepticism and doubt? Under the intensely. mediated conditions of communicative capitalism, texts that might once have remained solitary; like Schreber's, can become part of a group, a scene, a genre, a movement, a community. One can discover that one is not alone, that others feel the same way, have the same doubts and suspicions. Schreber's psychotic writings don't establish a social link. Even as he narrates his experience, his writings remain an object within psychoanalytic discourse. Networked information and communication technologies end this isolation, allowing for the emergence of a discourse of the psychotic, a discourse that reacts to a hole with certainty, fear, distrust, and a permeating sense of meaning.

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Because it is built around a hole, an absence, this discourse has trouble communicating its findings, its discoveries, to other discourses, to discourses that have already integrated a signifier in the place of the hole. So even as the psychotic discourse may adopt the patterns of other discourses, the hole which generates its investigations remains unrecognized, disallowed. Vhat it finds meaningful cannot be reconciled in their terms.

As it tries to find acceptance, to be recognized, confirmed, as it tries to transmit its findings, the psychotic discourse tends to hold itself together by mimicking other discourses. It forms itself in their image, as their clone, attempting thereby to attract to itself their already established credibility. Particularly compelling in this psychotic attempt i� its reliance on fundamental aspects of language and sociality. Psychotic discourse accentuates the truth that, as Lacan says, "language entirely operates within ambigui� and most of the time you know absolutely nothing about what you are saying" ( 115-16). The psychotic confronts us with the lack in language, with indeterminancies we normally overlook. More fundamentally, he reminds us of the violence and irrationality underlying the symbolic order, the way law "is sustained not by reason alone but also by the force / violence of a tautological enunciation, 'The law is the law; " as Santner explains.38 The psychotic discourse tries to prevent us from repressing what we already know, undermining thereby the conditions of possibility for credibilty.

The Truth of 9 I n

Accounts of the events of September 11 confront the specific horror of the disintegration of the social link, of the symbolic pact holding society together.39 The oficial story emphasizes the incompetence of the U.S. government, its failure to deliver on its trilon dollar defense budget and actualy defend. In the face of this overwhelming display of the broken promise of security, Bush repeated, almost daily, his promise to protect the American people, to secure freedom and the American way of life. This repetition reminds us of the loss that compels it.

Part of what gives the administration's account of 9 I 11 its force is the way it hammers home a fact of which we are all secretly aware, namely, that of our underlying passivity; how we are "helplessly thrown around by forces out of our control:'40 Rooted in this passivity, the logic of the incompetence theory is a drive for more power, more security, more surveilance. As it reiterates the meme of loss, the Bush administration seems almost to enjoy its own passivity, its own failure, finding therein a way to ask for, and get, more power.

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