our publication has struggled with a central question: do we call ourselves a magazine or a journal? We seem like we are teetering on a tightrope, balancing the line between what Mikhail Bakhtin calls “the official life” and the “carnival square.” In the former capacity, we produce traditional articles—“serious” content—that engage directly with the philosophical tradition, bearing all the marks and conventions befitting an academic publication that (dubiously) claims John Dewey as its founder. In the latter, we pull down the mask and encourage out-of-box thinking and dramaturgical reflections on contemporary society. Since first joining the club as freshmen, we have prided ourselves in maintaining a capacious understanding of what it means to do philosophy, tenuously negotiating our genuine reverence for the philosophical tradition with our eagerness to innovate and remain accessible. This issue is our attempt to honor this polyvalence.
Perhaps a testament to the residual unseriousness that touches everything that our esteemed publication does is the way that we literally stumbled upon our theme of this issue: circus. After one of the editor-in-chiefs discovered the term beclown (v. “to reflexively clown”) through their favorite angry populist political podcast, and unsuccessfully pitched it as a theme several times, we finally caved this semester and decided to investigate how the “spectacle” permeates our experience in philosophy. While everyone comes to the Gadfly to learn, to get at the truth, there is an undeniable pleasure in verbally jousting with your peers, and the acrobatics of a student defending their crude, half-baked, deeply controversial position in an article can be as alluring as watching a contortionist. Nevertheless, we take our beclowning seriously; every clown dons their red nose with pride and conviction. Struggling to come up with mature philosophical ideas
the Editors
is challenging, and often engenders public ridicule. We know that our attempts as students to engage with fraught, difficult concepts can seem amateurish and silly. But no mime, no jester, would impugn their craft because spectators taunt and tease! So, at the Gadfly, we’ve learned that we can be a serious intellectual community while having some fun. We can do traditional philosophy worthy of a journal and play around with the genre with experimental pieces that you might conventionally find in a magazine. Furthermore, our community, in its breadth and ambition, finds resonance in the circus’s menagerie. We feel at home at the intersection of the profane and the holy, the individual and the group, the real and the impossible. Circus is more than a stable ontological identity; it is non-negotiably dynamic, somatosensory, and relational. It is, in essence, the movement that underlies and continues to animate the Gadfly, the tiny but broad cosmopolis of thinkers.
Oscar Luckett, our very own interviews editor, opens this carnivalesque issue with the
deossification of philosophies of laughter. Trapezing on the ropes of literature and philosophy, Luckett swings us into the opening act by examining one of our most instinctual reactions: laughter. With “heterodoxic” and “counterdoxic” laughter, political order is upended and everyday life gains a sense of reverie.
To wake up from such a dream can seem almost cruel, but Rachel Aumiller surprises us by pulling the rabbit of hope out of the hat of despair. As she examines failures of contemporary political movements through the lens of Hegelian history and posits paradoxically that such defeats are dialectically “battle cries,” we are reminded that part of the beauty of the political circus is how it allows for ambulating arrangements between individuals and groups, audiences and performers, and tragedies and comedies. Aumiller does not want us to simply feel shame or shrink from the political schadenfreude; rather, she encourages us to laugh and continue to fight.
Speaking for a city that can no longer speak for itself, Matthew Vitello performs perhaps one of the most introspective acts of ventriloquism you have ever seen. In his architectural survey of Cedar Point, Vitello reveals its loss of history as a result of the forces of commercialization and inauthenticity that compress time and space and abstract from all historical contingencies. More than mere physical maneuver, architecture and urban development are revealed as material-discursive practices laden with ideological implications and actual consequences.
Zooming in on the little boy who witnessed his first magic trick at the hyperrealistic, postmodern theme park reveals a different experience of loss: one of mystery. Aharon Dardik turns his nostalgia inside out and constructs a phenomenological account of mystery with much help from Socratic ignorance and Sartrean nothingness. This positivistic enumeration of mystery is perhaps one of the best ways to summarize the goal of an undergraduate publication: to affirm what we do not (yet) know.
As much as it is rewarding, mystery can be equally as
entrapping. Aya Labanieh asks the important question: why do we turn conspiratorial in the face of the magician and his tricks? In its entrancement, the spectacle simultaneously dispossesses us of epistemic agency. As a survival response, we contort our minds and wrap it around a false totality of vision of the world systems. Yet, to become a true contortionist rather than a clueless puppet requires conscious and absolute control over one’s body—something that conspiracy theories cannot grant.
Eden Milligan exhibits this spectacular bodily awareness in her defense of excess. Milligan opens the act with a fantastical pin of a counterfactual, she throws philosophers into the ring of the circus. The audience becomes the performer (or the performance?). She holds the mic to our faces and asks: what is philosophy’s relation to excess? There is no time or space for breathing—except maybe that of fire—as we are pounded over the head with a sense of the present, the instant, and the now. Rationalism be damned, Milligan rushes us, it is time to enter into the tent for the Grand Entry.
With entry comes the
uncomfortable but inevitable necessity of the exit. As two seniors whose departure from this university and this publication are imminent, we cannot help but lament just a little. It has been a tremendously rewarding and transformative four years of lives, and Gadfly has always been a haven with its transparent and open wings. Both of us have taken on a myriad of roles within the Gadfly and seen how the little insect has sometimes flown into walls or astray from its directed course. Nevertheless, we cannot be more honored to announce ourselves as “former Gadfriends/flidians”. As Michelangelo Antonioni so beautifully showed us, this letter need not end on a gloomy blow-off—-it can always end with two mimes playing tennis.
spectacular bodily awareness in her defense of excess. Opens the act with a fantastical pin of a counterfactual, she throws philosophers into the ring of the circus. The audience becomes the performer (or the performance). She holds the mic to our faces and asks: what is philosophy’s relation to excess? There is no time or space for breathing—except maybe that of fire—as we are pounded over the head with a sense of the present, the instant, and the now. Rationalism be
Soham Mehta
Skylar Wu Best,
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In 2019, Josh Thompson was called into a meeting with the boss of his copywriting agency. The email summoning Thompson requested that he bring a “support person,” an individual required by New Zealand law to be present and provide comfort to employees facing dismissal. Knowing he would likely be let go, Thompson hired a clown to accompany his firing. The clown made several balloon animals throughout the meeting, honked a red nose, and mimed tears when Thompson was officially dismissed.
It is impossible to eulogize, let alone soften the blow, of the myriad tragedies of the present moment, precisely because we are still immersed in them. Deft polemics, pleas to elected officials, self-immolation have not yet wrought a ceasefire, a halt to the corrosion of international civil liberties, or brought us any nearer to the modest goal of three degrees of annual warming. The fabrication of distance between immediate personal impact and the site of the tragedy does not diminish its complete saturation in the world.
It is abundantly clear that “ours is essentially a tragic age,” as D.H. Lawrence wrote in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. How we may “refuse to take it tragically” leaves a more challenging question. A traditional school of thought offers laughter as a means of averting desolation, a way to “go round, or scramble over the obstacles.”1 Its simple appeal lies in its boundlessness—no matter how daunting the gallows, we are told, there will always be a form of laughter to match and overcome its horrors.
The most common argumentative thread among dominant philosophies of laughter is its negating force. Hippocrates mused on the physiological benefit of laughter, epitomized in the character of Democritus whose laughter overcomes vain fear of death through enlightened virility—this brings us the therapeutic image of “laughter as the best medicine,” or laughter negating illness.
Kant considered laughter to be an expression of intellect overcoming ignorance. In Critique of Judgement, he expounds that laughter occurs at the surprising point of
1 D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
encounter between expectation, a product of rationality, and reality, which lies beyond the rational. Particularly when the clash between the two does not result in serious pain, the bounds of rationality are delineated and overcome—the laugh becomes a victory cry, which negates and vanquishes ignorance.
Bergson reapplies Kant’s incongruity framework to instead position laughter as a social or moralizing force arising from the clash between stagnancy and vitality. In Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Bergson suggests that laughter is a form of social critique that exposes the limitations of rigid convention and mechanical behavior. Like Kant’s intellectual laugh, Bergson’s moral laugh identifies the absurd and arbitrary limits of human behavior, then, spontaneously, negates their importance.
While Kant and Bergson praised laughter’s overcoming power, Bakhtin historicized and analyzed laughter in a more ambitious, palingenetic form. Rabelais and His World offers a genealogy of ancient and pre-medieval laughter convalescing in the laughter
of the carnival, as epitomized in the writing of Rabelais. Carnival serves as a celebration of excess and renewal before the paring back of Lent, as unrestrained laughter is coupled with unrestrained feast, drink, and sexual indulgence. Bakhtin notes that while Carnival has clear roots in the Greek Dionysian and Roman Saturnalia, the tradition of early winter gorging likely has roots in proto-agrarian society in which remnant food stock had to be consumed before spoiling. As the carnival evolved, it developed a unique vernacular of laughter that negates as much as it renews.
The carnival was marked by a series of supreme inversions
that renewed and reinvested in a vision of how laughter, and non-carnival society, might operate. Carnival’s first inversion was in the content of its laughter: its “atmospheric laughter” held no subject too sovereign or too sacred to be brought into its pull. As a creation of the church, the carnival’s desecration of the sacral is by design—in fact, the carnival was birthed from the church, first illicitly in the pamphlets passed between monks’ quarters, a profane and expressive response to the church’s repression. As the pamphlets changed hands and became more popular, the church slowly authorized more and more bawdiness, until the carnival as we know it was created, operating discretely from, but in tandem with, the sacred feast days that preceded periods of self-restraint. The pope and the king found their corollary in the king of misrule and the lord of unreason. The sacral rites of baptism and the parade of idols were matched and repurposed in baptisms of urine and parades of ribaldry.
The carnival was not just heterodoxic, but counterdoxic— the main subject of Carnival laughter, the grotesque, disrupted a stultifying sacralization of the body and
charted a vision for utopic autonomy and redemption. Bakhtin marks that the very subject of grotesquerie, the body’s lower stratum (bowels and genitals) and its operations, carries with it a distinctly positive force, both in its functional and recreational purposes—feces and intercourse are not just helpful for fertilizing crops or producing offspring. Just as the carnival asserted seasonal renewal, the interplay between the darkening days and eventual crop yield, it comfortably celebrated the grotesque at the extremes of the body and bawdy:
“The essence of the grotesque is precisely to present a contradictory and double-faced fullness of life. Negation and destruction (death of the old) are
included as an essential phase, inseparable from affirmation, from the birth of something new and better.” (Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 62)
Atmospheric laughter, by any historical standards, inverted the form that laughter took. It did not just bring the high to the low but created the social conditions that democratized how and by whom jokes could be made. By unsealing the authority to crack a joke, the carnival also demands in return that all be subject to its laughter—there were “no footlights” to separate the carnival’s actors from the audience—creating a distinct and novel form of communication, according to Bakhtin. “The satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it.… The people’s ambivalent laughter, on the other hand, expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it.” (Bakhtin, Rabelais, 12) In the world of Carnival laughter, there is no partial immersion, with little difference between the carnival and the carnival’s laughter.
What distinguishes the laughter of the carnival from everyday life is atmospheric and
philosophically rich humor. Its philosophical depth does not mean that the jokes are more cerebral—with the carnival ensues more “degeneration” into grotesquerie—but that with this degeneration comes a reversal of ecclesiastical and political order. The carnivalesque inverts all existing hierarchy, and for the days of its feast both prophecies and actualizes renewal.
Who dares condemn laughter? Even if we may acknowledge laughter’s oversaturation— our eagerness to interpret everything as grist to the laughter mill—we scorn those who critique the sacral right to laugh at anything. We might picture the carnival’s detractors to be like Shylock, a character who serves as an essential counterforce to the festivity and laughter of the carnival in The Merchant of Venice. Against the carnival’s debt jubilee, he persecutes his debtors, (albeit in a fleshly and carnivalesque way). He disengages from Venetian moral mandates and relies on the legal system to uphold his debts. Most clearly, he enforces austerity during Bassanio’s carnival feast of wild extravagance, calling to his daughter, “Let not the sound of shallow foppery enter / My sober house.” (William
Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, II.5.36-37)
Yet the regenerative potential of the carnival did not die at the hands of anti-revelry temperance forces in the flat and antisemitic make of Shylock but at laughter’s deluge. Daniel Gamper, lecturer in moral philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, writes on borderless laughter taken to its extremes,
“It could be that this reduction to the absurd (an absurdity that, as such, makes us laugh) is the result of the fact that for many people life in society is gray, unpleasant, confusing, insecure, precarious, or aggressive, and what better way to tolerate it than with the lightness of laughter.” (Daniel Gamper, De
qué ríes: Beneficios y estragos de la broma, 47, [translations my own]).
Embedded in the right to laugh at anything is the mandate to laugh at everything. Laughter is not only seen as a moral good but a necessary respite. Like the hearty feasts of the carnival, “a people can be fed on laughter.” (Gamper, De qué ríes, 143) Politicians and newscasters, those who perhaps once were considered the arbiters of seriousness, know that success requires turning the serious into a joke. The carnival’s atmospheric humor becomes constant, making moments of seriousness impermanent, and reorienting the attention economy’s hierarchy of successful personalities. Indeed,
“the king knows that it’s better to pretend to be the Lord of Misrule himself, the better to keep the peasants in line.” (Ed Simon, “Who Still Needs the Carnivalesque?” The Baffler)
That politicos and media heads may trade in entertainment ahead of action speaks to the cloaking success of humor and the artificially generated appetite for laughter endemic to an era of mass communication. Adorno and Horkheimer writing in Dialectic of Enlightenment document how modern laughter asserts its primacy over all else, including beauty, cognition, and morality. This occurs partly under the cloak of the carnival’s erasure of social inhibition, which allows demagogues to operate fluidly between the worlds of sincerity and humor, and in doing so reap the benefits of both worlds (direct communication to those in the know, and the comedian’s denial “only joking!” to those who are not). Adorno and Horkheimer writing on the uninhibited frenzy of the political rally may as well be describing the rites of the carnival:
“The anti-Semites gather to celebrate the moment when authority lifts the ban; that moment alone makes them a collective, constituting the community of kindred spirits. Their ranting is organized laughter. The more dreadful the accusations and threats, the greater the fury, the more withering is the scorn. Rage, mockery, and poisoned imitation are fundamentally the same thing.”
This laughter—always pointed, derisive laughter “at something”—protects the interest of the powerful who materially profit from the degraded logic of the masses, reinforces itself, and degrades beauty even further. To Adorno and Horkheimer, “There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh at.” The empty howls of the masses, fed sop by the entertainment industry, fill the chasm left by the precariousness of everyday life under consumer capitalism. Stretched thin, laughter falters—to them, laughter only occurs in the wake of, as an escape from “either physical danger or from the grip of logic.” The pervasiveness of hollow laughter, its constant prescription,2 and as a result,
2 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 112 “Fun is a medicinal bath which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe.”
its addictive properties,3 indicate an ability to face the world directly and negate what Adorno calls “the promise of Happiness.” Unending reproach to laugh more and without restraint does not indicate a robust coping strategy to meet the tragedy of the gallows. Rather, it is an exhausted laughter for an exhausted public, the shadow of tragedy yet to come.
When laughter ceases to have any bearing on the comedic or tragic content of its subject, what does it become? What is laughter at the bounds of legibility? Samuel Beckett’s 1943 Watt, a novel concerned with thought and language in the wake of metaphysics’ collapse, contemplates these questions. Delivered into a world devoid of higher truth, the eponymous Watt employs the tools of scholasticism against scholasticism and its thesis: that there may be an essential kernel of truth at the heart of rationality and empiricism. Like the novel, a rehearsal itself (Beckett’s first novel written in French and one he considered merely a writing exercise), Beckett externalizes Watt’s thought without
destination into patterns of language. Thought and language as manifested in Watt are a series of permutations that lead nowhere, loop in on themselves, and exhaust every possible route. In a particularly laborious palaver, Watt analyzes a simple painting at length:
And he wondered what the artist had intended to represent (Watt knew nothing about painting), a circle and its centre in search of each other, or a circle and its centre in search of a centre and a circle respectively, or a circle and its centre in search of its centre and a circle respectively, or a circle and its centre in search of a centre and its circle respectively, or a circle and a centre not its centre in search of its centre and its circle respectively, or a circle and a centre not its centre in search of a centre and a circle respectively, or a circle and a centre not its centre in search of its centre and a circle respectively, or a circle and a centre not its centre in search of a centre and its circle respectively, in boundless space, in endless time (Watt knew nothing about physics), and at the thought that it was perhaps this, a circle and a centre not its centre in search of a centre and its circle respectively, in boundless space, in endless time, then Watt’s eyes filled with tears that he could not stem, and they flowed down his fluted
3 Gamper, De qué ríes, 145, “That the expectation of newspaper readers, of those who stroll through the global information village, or of those who wander in the mental Zapping Zone is to laugh, is a success of a caricaturing of thought….”
cheeks unchecked, in a steady flow, refreshing him greatly.
(Samuel Beckett, Watt, 154-154)
Beckett recognized in laughter a hollowness akin to language mangled almost beyond comprehension. With the hope of higher understanding demolished, laughter, like thought and language sublimates “from the lower to the higher, from the outer to the inner, from the gross to the fine, from the matter to the form.” (Beckett, Watt, 65). Beckett charts this progression in a succession of three laughs:
Of all the laughs that strictly speaking are not laughs, but modes of ululation, only three I think need detain us… The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not
true! Well well. But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout — Haw! – so. It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs –silence please — at that which is unhappy. (Beckett, Watt, 65-6)
The mirthless laugh, the risus purus, is not a triumph of the ethical (as in Bergson) or the intellectual (as in Kant), but is an exhausted laugh, orbiting only itself. It is a laugh familiar to many—one that follows the same joke, repeated ad nauseam until the words lose their meaning. Picture the transition from a chortle to a strong nose exhale. Adorno, writing on Beckett, considers Beckett’s recursive laughter of detachment.
Humor is salvaged in Beckett’s plays because they infect the spectator with laughter about the absurdity of laughter and laughter about despair. This process is linked with that of artistic reduction, a path leading to a survival minimum as the minimum of existence remaining. This minimum discounts the historical catastrophe, perhaps in order to survive it. (Theodore Adorno, Notes on Literature, 502)
Adorno and Beckett both argue that “the laugh that laughs at the laugh” emanates
from the minimal subject, one unable to account for the horrors and injustices of the world and therefore retreats from it. It is laughter in crisis that acknowledges the failures of tragedy and comedy, and turning inward, “resounds with the echo of the escape from power.” (112) Adorno names this event “reconciled laughter,” the antithesis of “wrong laughter,” which merely “echoes the inescapability of power” (112). Both events follow survival, a cathartic reflex at snatching safety from the jaws of death, as Adorno writes, “fear averted from the self bursts out in hearty laughter” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 88). However, reconciled laughter does not reify the totalitarianism of the state or entertainment industry, rather it is “critical selfawareness—a circular insight into the subject’s claustrophobic entrapment within a damaged world.” (Michelle Rada, “The Illusionless: Adorno and the Afterlife of Laughter in How It Is”, Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 38, No. 2, 152). The laugh that laughs at the laugh that Adorno identifies in Beckett does not anesthetize or overcome misery, but cries out despite it—it is infinitely exhaustible, yet infinitely impotent.
Beckett’s most famous refrain, taken from the Olympian monologues of Malloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable concludes movingly, “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Laughter may be a vacuous social reaction – it may not (and as far as we can tell, does not) do anything, say anything, or bring about any change. Yet somehow, miraculously, in full knowledge of this, we laugh all the same.
Returning to Thompson’s clown exposes a boundary of contemporary laughter. The clown produced the remorseful laughter expected of him and satisfied all parties—Thompson for safely
subverting office etiquette, and his employers for adhering to the New Zealand legal code. In its benign defiance of normative social and cultural conventions, the clown both ruptured and reasserted their bounds. A squeaky balloon animal and rainbow wig jammed the agency’s firing procedure but did not disrupt it. It was not just New Zealand administrative law that required the clown to be in attendance. To the agency, the clown was a necessary parody of itself, mimicking the autocratic mechanisms of bourgeoisie employment showing fauxremorse, fumbling with papers, bargaining with hard-skill (balloon poodles), but still holding no bearing on the ultimate result of the workplace mill. The clown ostensibly proves both Thompson and his
former agency’s ability to have a good laugh, supposedly at no one’s expense.
Perhaps it is time for a new laughter—what I may coin messianic laughter. Only hinted at briefly in Benjamin’s Illuminations and Derrida’s Acts of Religion, the messianic laugh does not deny the cage walls, “the entrapment within a damaged world.” Nor does it attempt, like the carnival’s laughter, to temporarily prefigure counter-life. Rather, it is laughter that attentive to the simultaneous crises of the world points towards the chasm. It is laughter that is spontaneous, in the company of friends, and is aware of its own failure. At its core, the messianic laugh would be deossifying, anticipatory and sacralize nothing, even the sacred power of laughter.
Rachel Aumiller is a philosopher writing on the ontological, ethical, and political dimensions of emotions, sensations, and desire. During the academic year, she is a Lecturer in Discipline at Columbia’s English and Comparative Literature department and is affiliated faculty of The Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender; in the summers, she’s based in Berlin and Hamburg. Alongside her investment in articulating a queer, feminist ethics of intimacy, Aumiller is just one piece of a band called Rachel Aumiller and her Illegits
In anticipation of her forthcoming book The Laughing Matter of Spirit, this interview was conducted by Lily Kwak and was edited for brevity and clarity by Yunah Kwon.
Gadfly: You repeat this mantra throughout your book, of how ‘nothing changes, but nothing really does change.’ Could you begin by explaining this idea?
Rachel Aumiller: My book begins from a place of pessimism, looking at different kinds of protest movements. For example, when I was in graduate school, I was a part of the Occupy Wall Street protests and movements like #MeToo. A lot of people judge those to be failures because the institutions didn’t really change, we see the same political leaders in place, and people aren’t held accountable for their actions. Countercultural protests from the 60s were seen as failures because they didn’t stop a war or a genocide. On some levels, it feels like there’s a repetition of these movements that don’t really result in any serious change.
The tragic landscape still goes on, and it’s tempting out of a place of exhaustion to just think, it doesn’t matter, nothing changes anyway, so why do it?
But I am looking for a different kind of change that happens: the ripple effect of those movements that change our consciousness, which changes our relationship to ourselves in a way that can produce real material change. So when I say nothing changes, that negativity itself undergoes a change. You have the nothingness of the political subject who has been reduced or born into a position of negativity in their society, who counts as nothing before the law, whose suffering counts as nothing before the world. That same negativity that’s been determined by the world and by societal structures
becomes a source of agency, a source of creation, and a source of creative destruction. The negativity that’s been given and determined by a world that people are born into becomes a self-relationship that can result in a kind of agency, especially when it’s seized on a communal level. So nothing becomes the object that’s undergoing change. And then the third sense of ‘nothing changes’ is that nothing itself is the agent of this change. Nothing is being transformed by different kinds of negativity. So I’m thinking about layers of negativity.
You frame this political pessimism through the lens of Hegel. What drew you to Hegel’s philosophy of history, specifically revolving around his theatrical and historical categories of tragedy and comedy?
I focus on Hegel’s philosophy of aesthetics and The Phenomenology of Spirit, which is one of his major works. In a section called “The ArtReligion,” he analyzes the role of art and how it shaped Greek life, evolved over time, and changed the Greeks’ conception of the relationship between the divine and the human. For example, singing hymns together is a practice of
art where the divine is present in that artistic activity. This is different from looking at a sculpture, where the art is the object and the human observer is the subject. Hegel’s thinking about different kinds of artistic practices and how they change our conception of ourselves in relationship to some authority or divine other.
Hegel ends this section with an analysis of tragedy and comedy as artistic genres, but also as practices that reshaped how the Greeks saw themselves. Tragedies are always named after an individual like Antigone or Electra. In tragedy, an individual is sacrificed for a contradiction that belongs to the whole community, represented by the chorus
and drama. Problems in a community are placed onto a single person in an attempt to absolve the larger society. By sacrificing one person, they believe they’ve overcome the problem. But of course, that’s why it repeats in every generation; the real contradiction, which is in the law, isn’t overcome. In comedy, the gods who represent political law and authority are brought out on stage to be mocked. In doing this, the Greeks show a willingness to laugh at their own conventions and destroy or reconsider them. So for Hegel, comedy represents the collapse of a whole way of existence and the possibility for something new to emerge.
Your work uses Hegel’s analysis to reflect on the idea of ‘failed’ contemporary
political movements, particularly the failures of left-wing political resistance. Yet you posit the seemingly paradoxical claim that defeat becomes a battle cry for political resistance. Could you elaborate on that?
I think about the ‘tragic’ political stage as a stage of history where we’re trying to defend our identities or values constructed by a system that alienates us against ourselves and others. In a ‘comic’ stage of existence in history, the individual or community realizes that the very fundamental categories we’ve been given to grasp ourselves (i.e. gender, or the role of ‘daughter’) are in contradiction with our own existence. To seize ourselves as a political subject, we first
have to destroy these categories that alienate us from ourselves through self-destruction. But this self-destruction allows for the recreation of a subject or community. Marx has this wonderful quote where he says that the proletariat first has to realize that they play the role of a political negativity in order to demand that there’s something more: “I am nothing, but I ought to be everything.” There’s this moment of coming in touch with your own political negation that’s necessary, which is almost a form of agency in itself.
I think the sensation of nihilism is necessary to oppose the conventions that have reduced certain individuals to a political negation within society. Since we’re already working within German philosophy a lot, we can look to a thinker like Nietzche who’s often thought of as a nihilist, particularly a positive nihilist. In realizing that your existence is meaningless, you can create meaning. I follow this line of thought through Marx, who argues that it’s our social structures that reduce subjects to negativity. Consequently, it’s only by allowing ourselves to fully feel devastation that we can oppose the conventions that produce and alienate us.
Some of my work focuses on Walter Benjamin, who responds to a horrific historical stage with laughter. It’s very bizarre that, as a Jewish individual, he thinks of responding to the rise of fascism and Nazism as a kind of dark comedy. But it’s a comedy when he confesses that he’s been reduced to nothing from the beginning. That he was born into a losing battle. When you recognize that you were nothing to begin with, you also have nothing to lose. That’s what makes this ‘nothing’ dangerous for the structures that reduce it.
Social movements often seem to be oriented around a vision of hope. Do you agree with this characterization? Why is it that non-nihilistic political action seems to have been more successful?
When I was growing up or perhaps in college, there were these ‘it gets better’ campaigns targeted to queer youth that sent off a message that ‘it automatically gets better,’ or that things are progressively getting better because that’s the way history unfolds. Like history is just naturally progressing to a higher ethical stage. Of course, this comes out of teleological understandings of history. These narratives
pacify people who are suffering from structural inequality. I think hope has to be grounded in nihilism that recognizes the world as it is. To some populations or individuals, there is no hope. Nihilism motivates radical reconstruction of a new way of being.
You mentioned earlier the proletarian cry: “I’m nothing but I must be everything.” As people existing within late capitalism, how can we understand these inherent contradictions on a personal level?
There can be agency in seizing yourself by the very place where society won’t allow you to appear and finding freedom or creativity in that. I grew up queer in an evangelical background. During the nineties and early aughts, there was so much purity culture that always focused on heterosexual relationships. You couldn’t even look at a boy or someone of the opposite sex without being thought of as lusting. There was so much attention and anxiety around heterosexual relationships that there was really no discussion of queer sexuality. In these frameworks, queer sexuality didn’t even exist, or wasn’t even on the radar. There was something
about being nothing, or not being visible, that allowed for naive queer friendships or homosexual relationships without even realizing what they were. There’s freedom in that, rather than demanding representation in a sphere that’s never going to accept you for who you are. I talk a lot about touching yourself in the nothing, which is a feminine metaphor of masturbation. The pleasure of seizing yourself by the nothing.
How can this embrace of negativity change our relationships with ourselves?
Art as a form of political protest has a unique ability to transfer experiences from the individual to the society. When something you’re experiencing as an individual suddenly becomes visible to the whole community, it’s like a self-exposure. It’s exposing yourself in your most vulnerable place of pain. I have a weird example that comes to mind. There’s a Russian artist, Petr Pavlensky, who, as a way to protest the Russian government, went into a public square and nailed his balls to the stone pavement in front of a historic plaza in Moscow. I imagine it was a tragic comedy for him. It’s a horrible image. He was saying, ‘this is the pain
that we’re going through.’ And to make a spectacle out of his own pain by causing harm to his own body was so shocking. It seems to be a relationship of communication or a relationship of one person to other people, but it’s a transformation of the self, of allowing one’s frustration and excess of emotions of anger and pain to just overflow to the surface. It’s a release. This recalls Marx’s quote again, where the proletariat cries out, “I have nothing, but I ought to be everything.” It’s that moment of externalizing one’s negativity through artistic performance or protests that allows one to have agency and create political disruption. A negative self-relationship that’s been externalized.
Another theme in my book is this idea of comic doubles—Laurel and Hardy, for example—and how the opposites end up mirroring each other. The external comic double grasps a division that’s in ourselves—the double actually represents one subject. One of the doubles that I follow is the figure of the phantom self or the shadow. Sometimes, we’re so focused on discovering who we are in positive terms, becoming something, becoming our vision of ourselves in terms of certain careers or relationships, that the thing that’s following us around is a negativity that wants space and causes disruption. And sometimes it’s not the old self, in the sense of my old self that played the piano that no longer plays the piano, but it’s something that wasn’t something, something that’s nothing— maybe it’s an aspect of yourself that’s undetermined that wants to be present not as something, but as something that’s undetermined.
At the end of Hegel’s “The Art-Religion,” there’s this image that I maybe exaggerate a little bit in my work. At the end of Aristophanes’ play The Clouds, the protagonist sets fire to the stage and burns it down to ash, and the curtain
closes on a stage of history. In that darkness, something is stirring; it’s a kind of negativity stirring in the nothing that, for Hegel, is the ‘self.’ This is a moment that I’m intrigued by. I like to meditate and heighten that image. Maybe that’s an image of a shared experience of nihilism that actually gives birth to something. Not by trying to insist on hope where there is no hope, but by accepting a hopeless condition. Or not accepting it, but fully acknowledging it, allowing yourself to look upon events that are devastating and to be shattered by that. And to
find movement precisely in that hopelessness rather than resisting it or looking away. My comedy is very intense. It’s funny because I started writing about tragedy and comedy, but then the book really became about comedy and horror, and the relationship between those two things.
Sometimes we think of philosophy and art as practices that should be coherent and noncontradictory. That it’s about having a unified, strong perspective. But there’s also a way to create, whether it’s philosophically or artistically,
that allows the cracks to come to the surface. All of us are full of contradictions, and a lot of those contradictions are a reflection of society as a whole and how they manifest within our individual bodies and lives. Pouring that out on the paper or in your art allows that aspect of yourself to be heightened. We might think of representing our different identities in our art, whatever they may be, and we want to give these things visibility. But I think there’s also a way of trying to represent exactly what can’t be represented, the negativity of our different contradictions; the way our identities don’t match up and can’t match up. These paradoxes constitute us on an embodied social level. I guess there’s a question of how to give a voice to the contradiction between those different kinds of negativity without covering them. I think that’s where a strong perspective and a strong voice come from, in allowing yourself to be in contradiction with yourself and trying to augment rather than overcome.
Reading about your work, I was reminded of Isabel Wilkerson and her ideas about how marginalized people are like actors on a stage condemned to perform certain social roles. What do
you think it means for us to fully play out these negative roles?
Returning to the idea that on the tragic stage, one person is sacrificed for a sin that belongs to all, if the conflict is on a global political level, it belongs to everyone. It’s easy for some people from a position of privilege to feel like they’re out of the conflict. I mean, if we think of something like the climate catastrophe, some people are touched by the catastrophe first and feel it more deeply. It’s often people who are impoverished, people of color, and people who are in a more vulnerable position. It feels like it’s their crisis, and it can be put on them as if it’s their problem, even though the crisis belongs to all. But I think there’s a way of playing out that tragic role that’s been assigned to certain marginalized groups that transfers the vulnerability to everybody. There are different tactics that the individual who’s meant to play out this tragic role can use to turn it into a comedy by exposing it for what it is.
I think of student protests, for example. A lot of people try to ignore things that are happening on a political or
global level because we have to get on with our lives. A protest deliberately creates an annoyance or disturbance so that people can’t ignore an issue or guilt that belongs to all of us equally, transferring a burden that some people feel all the time. We don’t feel the same because of privilege, but there’s something comic about this insistence on being annoying. If we think of slapstick comedy, it’s like a persistent sneeze, or an itch, or tripping, and it’s a tiny little disturbance within everyday life that threatens to unravel the narrative. It’s like a recurring tiny little splinter that, with its repetition, both structures the whole narrative while also unnerving it. I think of the protests that we see going on for ceasefire and
Palestinian rights. I don’t think of these as a comedy or as lighthearted, but actually quite the contrary, they expose corruption as a farce. They laugh in the face of reverence or seriousness towards institutions with values we don’t respect. A protest allows you to experience the transformation from seriousness and reverence to suddenly not being able to look at authority figures with seriousness anymore. There’s an eruption of emotions, maybe it’s laughter, maybe it’s anger, that comes up to the surface. And if you’re beginning to feel that as an individual, it’s because those tensions are so great that multiple individuals are beginning to feel the same thing. There’s a comedy in that collective realization.
You’ve discussed the role of duality in art and this classic idea of art holding a mirror up to society. How do you see art’s role in political mobilization?
I think art allows us to have a different relationship with ourselves through mediation. What’s interesting about Hegel’s analysis of Greek art and religion is that after participating in these comic festivals, the community was able to see itself differently. Sometimes when we’re looking directly at ourselves in an introspective mode, it’s hard to get that perspective. It’s by engaging with other people, or especially a struggle with other people or mediums, that we
are reshaping our relationship to ourselves. I have protests on my mind because that’s our environment right now, but these protests have a theatrical quality to them. For example, the way the protesters on our campus have taken Columbia gear and splattered blood on it is very dramatic, sometimes with a serious, a playful, or a celebratory tone. It’s weird to think of a celebratory tone, but the solidarity in protests can be thought of as a celebration of the values that a community stands by. I think the performance of that is a way to grasp ourselves through communal activity. Selftransformation happens when you’re participating in activism or an artistic work that has a political or social character to it.
In an unlikely location in Northern Ohio, in a small city called Sandusky, there lies an amusement park which, to rollercoaster fans, is like nowhere else in the world. Despite its isolated location in a small Ohio city, this park is often referred to as “coaster Mecca” by members of the roller coaster enthusiast community, and it attracted 3,327,000 visitors in 2021 alone according to the Themed Entertainment Association’s Global Attraction Attendance Report that year. This park is Cedar Point. Cedar Point has an unusually rich history for such a popular amusement park; its history dates back to
the American Civil War. Cedar Point had already existed for decades when it acquired its first roller coaster in 1892, a mere seven years after Coney Island famously opened the same “switchback railway” model, widely considered the first true roller coaster. Cedar Point has consistently been visited for over 150 years by vacationers, today spanning nearly the entirety of an eponymous peninsula that juts out into Lake Erie. It includes 16 roller coasters, more than all but 3 other amusement parks worldwide. When visiting the park today, however, something stands out as peculiar.
Right at the gates, the commanding presence of spectacle in Cedar Point makes itself apparent. The very entrance is situated below the track of Gatekeeper, a coaster whose track threads the needle through two narrow holes in pillars that shoot up directly above the entrance. The imposing, smooth blue track is the first introduction before emerging into the carnivalesque cacophony. This is the main midway, lined with shops, restaurants, fair games, and rides. Everything is designed to look like a main street of a city during a carnival, but the disparate shapes, colors, and the peaks of roller coasters pointing out at all angles betray its lack of real inhabitants.
On the right lies Planet Snoopy, a Peanuts-themed zone designed for young children, and directly north of that lies the most brown and boring of the structures in the park: Cedar Fair’s own corporate headquarters. A railroad traverses the path further along, and the fullyfunctioning small steam train the peninsula uses as a ride crawls across the park. In an area to the North lies Frontier Town, part of which is themed to a spaghetti-western concept of the American West, and the rest a sort of frontier homestead
town with wooden cabinshaped buildings offering glass blowing demonstrations and Auntie Anne’s pretzels. The space feels sugary, artificial, clean, and shiningly new, not to mention deeply inauthentic. Yet, it is really, deeply historical. The history of the land known as Cedar Point after western settlement in the area began with its usage as a Civil War prison, according to Chris Edwards in his article on the park for the Walkerville Times, where it held Confederate soldiers. It became a place for vacationing in 1870, when a bathhouse opened on the peninsula. It is even the case that some of the architectural pieces of its history, notably the 1960s roller coaster Blue Streak, remain standing. Despite all of this, why does it not feel historical?
Cedar Point is above all else a place; an amusement park in a small Ohio city. Cedar Point and Sandusky are intrinsically linked: Cedar Fair alone provides almost 8% of the city’s annual tax revenue and is by far the largest contributor to the city’s economy, according to the City of Sandusky’s 2021 audit, driving millions of visitors to stay, eat, fill up their gas, and generally spend money in the city every year.
Cedar Point injects millions of dollars into the city’s economy and as such is deeply ingrained in the story of its surrounding city. Sandusky has had a surprisingly prolific history over the years: Lucy Elliot Keeler recounts in her article “Old Fort Sandoski of 1745 and the ‘Sandusky Country’” that the area that would become Sandusky was first occupied in the middle of the 18th century by a trading post. Time passed and Sandusky developed from a trading post to a proper town, later playing host to Charles Dickens in 1842, as the famous writer recounts in his American Notes for General Circulation, and Pictures from Italy. When not playing host to vacationers, Sandusky draws its revenue from auto parts manufacturing and a regional power company. Sandusky is indeed very old by American standards, and may have once been a veritable “frontier town,” but now the tops of shiny new coasters’ lift hills in Cedar Point stand taller and more imposing than ever, calling into question the impression of, and validity of, historical meaning in its host city.
Cedar Point’s connection to and positionality in history bears an important similarity to the amusement parks discussed
in Canadian landscape designer Alexander Wilson’s book, The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to Exxon Valdez. In this work Wilson discusses Dollywood and Knott’s Berry Farm, two other theme parks which illuminate more about the state of Cedar Point. Dollywood, Wilson argues, is littered with “things,” which contribute to an inauthentic commodification of history within Dollywood in a painful reminder of the inaccessibility of the past as such. Knotts’ Berry Farm succumbs to a similar sort of inauthenticity, as well as drawing on “social anxiety about the future of human settlement on Earth’’ in its being a historical theme park deeply reliant on commodifying itself: moving from being a place where food was actually grown to a place which almost parodies its farm history to sell “things’’ based on a warped conception of its role as such. Dollywood is to the nearby town of Gatlinburg what Sandusky is to Cedar Point, each reflecting and redoubling the increased commodification of the other, as seen by the city’s reliance on the park for growth coupled with the park’s dependance on the city and its inhabitants and structures to be a functioning
business. Distance increases from the necessity of food production and connection to the land, as Wilson notes, moving to luxuries that lack any form of necessity and often warp to the point of parodying the history of the park itself. These warped commodities are sold back to park goers in their search for entertainment. As capitalism progresses, city and park become more commodity and less history in tandem.
Why is this fate befalling Cedar Point? Philosopher and theorist Frederic Jameson provides insight in his analysis of architectural postmodernism in his book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Jameson describes a “populist” fusion of low and high art appearing in architecture on page 3, directly reflective of the makeup of Cedar Point, noting: “the effacement in them of the older (essentially highmodernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture.” Cedar Point fuses surprisingly beautiful structures with solely commercial purpose, with beautiful facades often appearing only at one side of the building and the rest left bare and concrete. Roller coasters, too, exist in part for the basest of purposes–to elicit terror and release adrenaline in the brain– despite accomplishing this end via
extremely complex feats of engineering prowess. Each roller coaster is meticulously and artistically designed to elicit the most base of chemical reactions in the cleverest and deceptively-safest way possible. Another piece of the postmodern aesthetics that Cedar Point latches onto is pastiche. A coaster themed to a drag race track is situated very close to one themed to medieval folklore, Planet Snoopy incorporates colorful, playful rides, but right across the walking path are two colonial buildings with columns at their entrances. Frontier Town cannot decide whether its theme is an early colonial American settlement in the East or a romanticized “Wild West.”
Cedar Point’s eclectic collection of architectural styles, themes, and themed areas aligns with what Jameson calls “pastiche,” in which the expression of a
place itself becomes a sort of self-parody in its incorporation of disparate elements in its makeup. Cedar Point’s structure indeed parodies itself and its own existing historical value clashes with its displayed celebration of commodity, eschewing artistic cohesion and drawing from numerous traditions in an irreverent way. This contributes in part to this loss of historical feeling, of historical presence. The notion of pastiche is heavily associated with commercialization and commodification under a capitalistic system, as is Wilson’s unsatisfactory experience of Dollywood and as are many of the structures in present-day Cedar Point, deeping the impression of Cedar Point as a postmodernist space. It is easy to see, too, how the sense of history in certain very old artifacts like the Blue Streak coaster might begin to be drained when they are situated
within this sort of pastiche.
There are yet other factors at play: Cedar Point’s being a postmodernist space alone would not be enough to remove a sense of history from this place that genuinely has such history. Cedar Point’s nature as a commercialized, postmodern space cannot be the sole reason for the feeling of inauthenticity that occurs along with the lack of historical presence. As used here, the word “inauthentic” assigns a particular secondary quality to the feeling of a lack of history in this historical place. Certainly this is the term that appears natural, too, when considering Knott’s and Dollywood and their own facades of history. To define inauthenticity, attention must first be paid to what authenticity is.
“Authenticity” is an incredibly contentious term among philosophers. Both Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche discuss the concept of authenticity at length, but mostly as it applies to personal behavior. Kierkegaard attributes authenticity to finding a religious faith and professing one’s own beliefs as they hold them in Practice in Christianity, and Nietzsche takes a similar course in discussing authenticity, a
concept appearing throughout his Beyond Good and Evil. He, however, detaches it from Kierkegaard’s concept of God, rather making it about a person sticking to their own moral interpretation of the world and acting upon it. In each case we have authenticity as practice reflecting an intangible internal state of belief. This intangible internal quality is often described as authentic in humans when externalized and made tangible, and the property similarly applies to places like Cedar Point. In this case, an intangible, internal aspect of Cedar Point (its historical context) requires an outward expression (such as a physical structure or building or remnant actually from each era of its history). Indeed, Cedar Point has one noticeable location where the past is accessible and easily felt in an example of one of such outward expressions of historical context (which I will refer to henceforth as “authentic objects”): the Blue Streak roller coaster.
Built in the 1960s, the Blue Streak provides a counter to the earlier idea that places in theme parks serve as a reminder of the inaccessibility of the past as posited by Wilson, as here the past is felt clearly: it is displayed authentically with
a genuine artifact from the period, one of the oldest rides at the park. The intangible qualities internal to the land of Cedar Point are given external expression in keeping with the concept of authenticity. This only reaches back a brief period compared to Cedar Point’s long operation history, and this unmasks the fact that two aspects are at work here. The first, that which Jameson and Wilson discussed, is a more general loss of feelings of history in Cedar Point as a result of commercialization and capitalism’s proliferation. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard point to a more specific instance of lack of history: Cedar Point simply contains no real artifacts from its past before its oldest rides. These sorts of artifacts resemble those which essayist and philosopher Roland Barthes, in his essay “The Eiffel Tower,” describes as “mythic objects,” which are physical objects/monuments into which has been instantiated the story of a place. Just as atop the Eiffel Tower one feels as though one can reach back in time and perceive the history of Paris, so the crest of Blue Streak’s hill acts for Cedar Point, but sadly only for a fraction of the Park’s history to the point of Blue Streak’s construction. It does not live up to the
timelessness of the Eiffel Tower, and the mythos for Cedar Point is seldom remembered, leading to a lack of any true narrative to instantiate into Blue Streak beyond that which it bore witness to since its construction. Blue Streak does not quite become a mythic object for this reason, as the mythos of Cedar Point was killed (beyond where specific, pointed authenticity lies in physical expression) and thus there can be only certain individual authentic objects. The fact that the park at large is lacking a mythic object, on top of the general commercialized conditions arising from the postmodernist architecture, and the few authentic objets, creates a general air of a lack of authenticity associated closely with the commercialized development of the park and demolition of its very old and often historic structures.
A lack of authenticity in the park is clear in its lacking history’s physical expression and in the general commercialization of the history displayed in the park, but it is not yet apparent why there is a sense that the park’s appeal to history is inauthentic. This more active word suggests a sort of deception is occurring, and that is in fact the case with
Cedar Point. Cedar Point’s Frontier Town area is a prime example of this deception taking place. Sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard originated a concept which perfectly describes the trajectory of Cedar Point: towards hyperreality, what he calls on the first page of Simulacra and Simulation “the desert of the real itself.” He describes the condition of hyperreality as the world as a kind of simulation, made up of simulacra. Simulacra are signs without signifiers, replicas without originals. Baudrillard states that they are expressions which purport to symbolize or reflect an aspect of reality which does not actually exist. He conveniently uses the example of Disneyland, on page 8, as a “perfect model”
for hyperreality: Disneyland is full of castles and locales which never existed and reflect no hint of reality whatsoever. Cedar Point, with its themed Midway and Frontier Town area, displays many of the same characteristics as Disneyland. Cedar Point puppets reality with its log-cabin-like buildings and old west saloons concealing a Panda Express or expensive fair food. There was never a Western town like Frontier Town in all of America, and yet Frontier Town seems to present itself as a copy of something from the past, an encapsulation of some archetypal town on the frontier that never existed and resembles no town that did. It imitates the nonexistent; it is a zone of simulacra, each area similarly building Cedar Point
up as a hyperreality. Frontier Town is supported by Cedar Point’s overuse of Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts gang in its two separate children’s sections, and all its various themed coasters (Magnum Xl-200 to space travel and Top Thrill Dragster to drag racing). Nothing that ever existed here, on the grounds of the park, is being imitated and all that exists is the sign (here a structure). There never was a Western town known as Frontier Town, so it represents a void of meaning rather than meaning. And how can such a place hold history?
Cedar Point’s conundrum is further illuminated when postmodernist perspectives on pastiche blend with
hyperreality in the work of Alan Bryman, a professor and researcher concerned with massive conglomerates in our current postmodern society, who explains why time’s destruction occurs succinctly in the case of Disney’s theme parks in the book Disney and his Worlds. He calls the concept “time-space compression,” on page 162, noting that it arises out of a combination of postmodern features including pastiche and presence of simulacra. Bryman notes that this timespace compression causes a sense of bombardment with symbols of times and locales, far removed from any context, that destroys the feeling of the place as situated in its own historical circumstances or
even those of its very location. Cedar Point and Sandusky both have a rich history tied to their location, but Cedar Point feels tied to neither its own history nor indeed its location in Sandusky, except in certain authentic objects of old rides like Blue Streak. This explains further the feeling of unease when presented with gleaming new coasters aside sterile mock log cabins, of the Wild West aside unthemed locations with profuse Ohio-native foliage and birds. Not only do the aforementioned concepts of postmodern, commercialized space and a precession of simulacra destroy a sense of time, therefore, but also a sense of place.
The connection heretofore established between theme park and city, then, appears to be deeply reliant on both the inauthentic and commercializing forces at play. This kind of strange connection has been forged in other cities that house theme parks, too. In a piece in the journal Annals of the Association of American Geographers entitled “Postmodern Urbanism,” researchers Michael Dear and Steven Flusty examine the role of several cities in Southern California. One section titled “City as Theme
Park” succinctly describes its argument as such:
California in general, and Los Angeles in particular, have often been promoted as places where the American (suburban) Dream is most easily realized. Its oftnoted qualities of optimism and tolerance coupled with a balmy climate have given rise to an architecture and society fostered by a spirit of experimentation, risk taking, and hope. Architectural dreamscapes are readily convertible into marketable commodities, i.e., saleable prepackaged landscapes engineered to satisfy fantasies of suburban living.
In this conception of Los Angeles, the pursuit of the “American Dream” itself is what has contributed to a feeling of commodification and inauthenticity. Inauthenticity is tied to a lack of physical representation of history, which can come about due to a failure to preserve certain mythic objects. L.A.’s overall socioeconomic state seems to have stripped the efficacy of even authentic places imbued with history, and further, as Baudrillard notes how the state of Disneyland is reflected broadly in Los Angeles, it is a city inundated with theme parks that act as “power stations,” in the words of Dear and Flusty on page 9, to an illusory simulation of reality.
Sandusky too is inundated with entertainment centers, water parks, and hotel resorts in a manner which serves to only further break down the illusion of Sandusky as a city in and of itself. Ohio is not a destination state, and as such Sandusky is only a destination for the sake of its park. The relationship between Sandusky and Cedar Point is far more intimate than occurs in the more popular Californian parks, and as such the degradation of the history in even smaller American cities that seem to hold more of their history is still drained by these “power stations.”
Cedar Point is a contributor to the destruction of the illusion of history in its growth, paralleling the achievement
of the “American Dream” and Jameson’s titular “Late Capitalism” and capturing people with disposable income enough to take a vacation on the peninsula, compressing itself in space and time by using a pastiche of nonspecific signs signifying nothing but the postmodern, illusory state of the world around it, while eschewing authentic objects it could use to preserve at least some of its history more often than preserving them.
One does not feel history in Cedar Point because despite the existence of the site’s vast history, aspects of a growing postmodernism within the park (through its pastichelike blending of places and
times in its various sections) render attempts at capturing the historic a self-parody. As a result of its commercialized structure, it utilizes a paltry few authentic objects and no mythic objects which bring into reality the underlying historical components of the park. Its accumulation of structures and areas which—while purporting to be representations— represent nothing can nearly be said to classify Cedar Point as within the realm of hyperreality. It is tied to a city which is itself tainted by the same underlying postmodern conditions that the park itself is, as L.A. is linked to Disneyland, and thus acts as a fuel for the destruction of the sense of not only time but also space in itself. Once this spatiality is gone, then there is nowhere for the historical sense of the place to really stand, as the place itself has been corrupted. All of this stems from the economic state of America at large and its fruitless pursuit of the achievement of the American Dream at large, contributing to a spiraling state of “Late Capitalism” which has destroyed the sense of time and place in not only Cedar Point, and not only Sandusky, but ex-places and ex-cities the country over. Cedar Point’s state as a pilgrimage site for
coaster enthusiasts means it attracts a specific type of customer that the more welldocumented examples of this phenomenon do not in Los Angeles and Florida, and its situation in a uniquely small city with a single park dominating the majority of its industry leaves it a clear case of how capitalistic forces can encroach on the specific history of even smaller, tightknit communities. Sandusky is far less capable of preserving bits of its history in becoming ahistorical and far less able to defend its sense of place-ness against the powerhouse that both comprises most of its economy and yet also works to drive an increasing hyperreality and degradation of history.
Moving forward, though, Cedar Point’s status among coaster fans and efforts of organizations like the American Coaster Enthusiasts to preserve pieces of its history when Cedar Point expands and demolishes the old to build new, more exciting rides puts it in a unique position to actually reverse this trend over time. Cedar Point is deeply impacted by increasing commercialization in wider American society due to the remnants of the “American Dream” and consumerism,
and these forces conspire to destroy its authentic physical expressions of history, which can still allow it to cling to historical contexts even where it otherwise seems hyperreal. However, the status of pushes for preservation of authentic objects that anchor bits of its history might provide a unique counterpoint to the narrative that capitalism will solely drive history further out of historical places, because the history of the commercial itself is uniquely coming to be preserved in Cedar Point, and it powers a similar process in the city that houses it.
Barthes, Roland. “The Eiffel Tower .” A Barthes Reader, edited by Susan Sontag, Hill and Wang, New York, 1985, pp. 237–250.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Glaser, The University of Michigan Press, 1994. Bryman, Alan. Disney and His Worlds. Routledge, 1995.
Dear, Michael, and Steven Flusty. “Postmodern Urbanism.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 88, no. 1, 1998, pp. 50–72.
Dickens, Charles, and Marcus Stone. American Notes for General Circulation, and Pictures from Italy. Chapman & Hall, 1913.
Edwards, Chris. “Cedar Point: The Queen of Great Lakes Resorts.” The Walkerville Times, Walkerville Publishing, http:// www.walkervilletimes.com/36/cedar-point.html.
Fabar, Keith. City of Sandusky, 2022, City of Sandusky, Erie County, Single Audit For the Year Ended December 31, 2021
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1992.
Keeler, Lucy Elliot. “Old Fort Sandoski of 1745 and the ‘Sandusky Country.’” Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, vol. 17, 1908, pp. 357–430.
Kierkegaard, Søren, et al. Practice in Christianity. Princeton University Press, 1991.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Edited by Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman. Translated by Judith Norman, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Palicki, Martin, editor. : Themed Entertainment Association (TEA), 2021, Theme Index/Museum Index 2021: Global Attractions Attendance Report.
Wilson, Alexander. The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez. Between the Lines, 1991.
Buildingthe Phenomenolo ofMystery AharonDardik
As a kid, I loved watching magic shows. I’d stare dumbfounded as the magician would pull a dove out of thin air, release it to the crowd, and squeal with delight as a ball would disappear and reappear from underneath a set of cups. The whole time, in the back of my mind, I wanted nothing more than to know how the trick worked. I’d imagine all sorts of complex contraptions, advanced feats of engineering that underlie all the magic: some secret. Compartments in the table that transferred the ball from one cup to another, a camera that the magician had planted behind me that gave away the details of my card that was randomly drawn. However, the absurd nature of my imagined solutions made me absolutely confident that I was wrong, and there was some other, cleverer way the tricks were done. When I was old enough to get my own magic set and books that explained everything, the spell was broken. Sleight of hand is not a technological triumph, but a performance predicated on the informational imbalance between the magician and the audience. Now that I finally know how so many classic tricks worked, this success was more of a disappointment than an
achievement. I used to possess ignorance, I was aware of the ignorance, and now I yearn for it again.
What is the nature of this experience of the magic show? The entire time I was in the state of ignorance, I was trying to gain the knowledge, but in truth, what I wanted was to remain in the act of trying to discover the truth. This is exceedingly strange. However, without the terminology to describe it philosophically, I had no framework to consider this experience in depth. This lack of vocabulary makes the analysis required for meaningful insights far more difficult. To use my childhood experience of magic shows as a source of philosophy, one needs to describe it using phenomenology, a philosophical approach concerned with the investigation of human experience and consciousness as it is lived and perceived rather than as data for abstraction. Phenomenology sees the human experience as having a certain level of reality in and of itself, not just an accumulation of sense data focusing on uncovering the structures of human experience and the ways in which we make sense of the world. Therefore,
phenomenologists have largely shied away from studying ignorance, defined here as the state of not knowing a particular true statement. If phenomenology is about our fundamental experience, there’s something inherently difficult in employing its methodology to ignorance, as whatever we are ignorant of is definitionally outside of our experience. Despite this aversion, there is no actual contradiction in phenomenologically engaging with our experiences of the unknown, the absent, and ignorance. While we may not have much currently existing phenomenology on the experience of ignorance, all the constituent parts of this particular phenomenon are
explored in various branches of philosophy. Ultimately, I think the phenomenological account points us further than just magic shows, but to a fundamental component of philosophical inquiry and the human condition.
The first aspect of this experience was articulated by the “Father of Western Philosophy” himself, Socrates. For all of his deep contributions to philosophy, Socrates begins many of his inquiries focused on merely unveiling one’s awareness of their own ignorance on the topic at hand. In the Socratic dialogues, a consistent pattern emerges. Socrates meets with his interlocutors who are confident
in their understanding of a given concept, and then reveals to them the illusory nature of that knowledge and their actual underlying ignorance. In Euthyphro, he meets Euthyphro whose original confidence in his own understanding of piety drives him to believe that he is justified in putting his father to death. Through a dialectical exchange, Socrates deconstructs and exposes the inconsistencies in Euthyphro’s conception of piety. He ends the conversation, however, without ever providing a positive
definition of piety for substitute and thus leaves his listeners and interlocutors arguably in a state of knowing-less than they started.
In Euthyphro, Socrates uncovers the problematic (and seemingly unsolvable) circularity in the divine command theory of piety that Euthyphro originally held as absolutely valid: Are pious things pious because god(s) command them to be so, or are they commanded by god(s) because they are pious? When Euthyphro
turns the question back to Socrates, Socrates replies that he, too, does not know the answer. Socrates doesn’t bring his interlocutors more knowledge of the subject, but rather the knowledge of their shared ignorance. This style of argumentation is so irritating that Socrates humorously calls himself a gadfly — a stinging, bothersome insect — when he forcefully opens the eyes of his interlocutors to their own ignorance. One should not be surprised, therefore, that he was executed shortly after this comment.
While Socrates could be killed, Socratic ignorance — the knowledge and awareness of one’s own ignorance — perseveres as an important factor in later developments of philosophy. Socratic ignorance is particularly important for epistemology, the philosophical branch about how we relate to knowledge. In epistemology, Socratic ignorance is not only a valued tool that helps to delineate the boundaries of our knowledge but a foundational guide that helps to frame our inquiries. If you think you know what piety is when you, in fact, do not, all your intellectual pursuits and decisions related to piety are thus in danger. Clarity in
what information you have, relative to what you do not, is crucial for nearly everything, especially philosophy.
However, statements of ignorance are not identical to other factual statements in terms of their metaphysical nature. Usually, propositions are framed positively. Yet, in statements of ignorance, the propositions are framed negatively. Rather than saying “I do know how the rabbitin-the-hat trick works,” the proposition is “I don’t know how the rabbit-inthe-hat trick works.” When distinguishing between these two propositions, philosophers often refer to them as positive facts and negative facts. The statement that I am a human is a positive fact; the fact that you are not an elephant is a negative fact.
Whether negative facts exist independently of other facts is a controversial subject in linguistics and metaphysics. Bertrand Russell, for example, believed that negative facts existed autonomously. In order to say something like “It is true that I do not have the knowledge of the magician’s tricks,” the lack of knowledge referred to must be real. Most of Russell’s contemporaries,
however, disagreed. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in contrast, believed that positivity and negativity did not apply to facts but only to sentences. The meaning of a sentence is not inherent in the words themselves, but rather in how those words relate to each other and to the context in which they are used. Individual facts do not have independent positive or negative existences: that information is only provided through the rest of the sentence and its context. “... [H]ave knowledge of the trick” is a sentence fragment that is given its positive or negative value by being preceded with “I do...” or “I don’t...” respectively. One may already notice the reductive stance that metaphysics takes toward ignorance: facts have a binary quality and are not differentiated individually. They either exist or they don’t.
Phenomenologically, however, different absences in our knowledge are experienced differently and distinguishable from others. Phenomenology largely disregards the metaphysical questions of existence or lack thereof, reorienting our focus to our lived experience of the world. In Being and Nothingness, JeanPaul Sartre brings our attention
to the phenomenology of negative facts when he relayed the story of looking for his friend Pierre in a café. As Sartre searches the café, he doesn’t just experience the other people and space around him as a unified and undifferentiated whole; rather, he experiences each one of them as not Pierre. This relationship is possible only when preceded by the condition that there is already a relationship he is expecting to have with the café — as the place he is meeting Pierre. Therefore, the equally true statement that “the Archbishop of Canterbury is not in this café” is not experienced in the same way as the absence of Pierre because it is not contained or related to Sartre’s outing. Sartre calls this specifically conditioned experience of focusing on one’s awareness of absence nothingness: the experience of negative facts in a way that carries significance for the life of the subject.
Applying Sartre’s conception of nothingness to knowledge, a new understanding of Socratic ignorance emerges — we are capable of experiencing the knowledge of the absence of knowledge. Socratic ignorance is not just the negation of knowledge, but also a type of
knowledge and an epistemic phenomenon that we can explore and contemplate on its own terms. There are distinct experiences, thoughts and feelings that arise from the knowledge that I do not know something: a trick is being performed, and I don’t know how it works. In fact, we can desire ignorance, such as when you try to avoid spoilers before reading a book. It can also be undesirable and unpleasant, like walking into a room and realizing that you forgot why you wanted to go there; or staring at a question on your exam you should know the answer to but do not. The knowledge of ignorance is a quotidian experience. It is the phenomenon of being aware of the negative space in one’s knowledge — a sense of epistemic nothingness. When I learned how the magic tricks worked, I didn’t just gain knowledge, I lost something real: ignorance.
When we describe our relationship to a piece of knowledge through the phenomenological nothingness rather than the metaphysical conception of negative facts, we gain a positive account of Socratic ignorance. In doing so, we arrive at a meaningful description of my childhood
experience of the magic show: a phenomenological account of the epistemology of ignorance. This verbose philosophical phrase counterintuitively describes a common, rudimentary experience — that of mystery.
The phenomenology of mystery is the lived experience of Socratic ignorance, the experience of nothingness caused by the known absence of knowledge. In the history of philosophy, mystery is generally thought of as a universal quality ascribed to objects external to our individual experiences. An object or concept is itself shrouded in mystery and partakes in the quality of mysteriousness without
consideration of the individual identity of the observer. Notably, the theologian Rudolph Otto describes the experience of God as mysterium tremendum et fascinans — the terrifying and fascinating mystery. For Otto, God is mysterious because Their nature is fundamentally hidden and acts as a universal access point to the acute feeling of mystery. While I would agree that cases of universal ignorance do exist and are important, I believe a SocraticSartrean understanding of mystery allows us to create a more accurate phenomenology of mystery dependent on the epistemic conditions of the subject, not the qualities of the object. If the experience of
mystery relies on a positive sense of awareness of ignorance, then mystery does not act merely as a negative fact but can be positively experienced as an epistemic phenomenon of nothingness. Otto’s God does not objectively possess the quality of mystery; rather, God evokes in the believer an experience of ignorance as to God’s nature. The believer searches for and anticipates God’s presence within their experience, and yet will never be able to fully never comprehend God, experiencing nothingness instead.
Mystery, however, does not have to always contain a sense of divinity and constancy. It is often contained within the
ordinary. Whenever you are keenly focused and aware of your lack of knowledge, you are experiencing mystery. This can be as brief and inconsequential as wondering what time it is without an immediately available timetelling device. It can be as grandiose as being enraptured by a magic performance,
trying intently to discern the trick behind the trick. The answerability of these questions has no bearing on the nature of the experience of mystery. After all, we cannot know beforehand which mysteries are solvable, and which are not; our ignorance of which mysteries are solvable is itself, a (perhaps temporary) mystery.
Tilting the A Conversation Control, and Aya
Gabriella
Flat Earth: on ConspiracyCulture withLabanieh
Aya Labanieh is a writer, academic, translator, and comic. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English and Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University and also works as a Research Associate for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. Her scholarship focuses on conspiracy theories and conspiracy culture, specifically within the lens of postcolonial Middle Eastern literature and media. Our discussion centers around the creation and proliferation of conspiracies and the all consuming chase to unveil them.
This interview was conducted by Gabriella Calabia and edited for brevity and clarity by Yoav Rafalin.
Gadfly: What is a conspiracy theory, particularly in the context of your scholarship?
Aya Labanieh: At its core, a conspiracy theory is a story about dispossession and lack of agency. It’s typically a political story wrapped up in questions of power: Who has it? Who doesn’t? Why is the distribution so? Who is to blame for your lack of power within a system? Frederic Jameson has a really great quote on this: “a conspiracy theory is a degraded attempt to think the impossible totality of the world system.” So it’s a vision of the world in which everything is connected, everything is designed a certain way that is harmful for the individual—everything is designed to manage, exploit, or oppress their body. And it’s a genre of counter discourse as a result, right? It’s a popular
critique against those in power that allows for the average person to take up the past and mobilize it in a political way. Conspiracy theories typically describe a group of elites working together in secret to achieve a certain political goal that is (often) to the detriment of the ordinary man. The term conspiracy derives from the Latin word conspirare, “to breathe together,” which I find to be very beautiful as an image—you could almost imagine people huddled up, plotting something in a dark room to achieve their desires, and they’re sharing the same air and whispering in undertone. That’s the image that it brings forth. And the conspiracy theory is really preoccupied with that image.
What is it that gets something deemed a conspiracy theory?
Is the distribution of power critical for the categorization of certain theories as conspiracy versus not?
It is that focus on power and dispossession, and often a certain totalizing vision of that power that has control over you and over the world. The term conspiracy theory is usually thrown around as the ultimate insult, right? “This is not critical thought, this is a conspiracy theory! It’s irrational.” And what that often belies is that a lot of conspiracy theories contain seeds of truth. They’re not complete falsehoods. Rather, what’s dangerous about the conspiracy theory is
it mobilizes truths in oblique ways or for forms of political action that are dangerous and misleading, that often target the wrong people, or are marshaled against the weakest members of society—minorities like Jews or homosexuals, for example. Conspiracy theories mobilize that affective and rational sense of critique against the wrong targets, instead of those with the most power and capital.
In your essay, “Global Conspiracy Without a Globe,” you mention the common enemy, the stereotypical Big Brother for instance. Do conspiracies have to have an enemy? Are they all
inherently harmful?
Do they all have a certain enemy? Yes, because their target is the conspiracy, the group that is gathering together to dispossess you. Often that group’s power is seen as hyper-individualized, rather than part of a system or structure. There’s a certain bridge that is important to point to between the conspiracy theory and critical theory, i.e. academic critiques of power. This overlap doesn’t mean they’re identical, but they’re deeply invested in questions of power, of exposing power, and of liberating us from power. They’re invested in elites who control systems that manage us and in connecting the dots of history to tell the story about those elites and about those systems. Conspiracy theories are essentially popular, affective versions of the critical theory, assessing how we’ve been oppressed and managed by global capital, or by colonialism.
Often, when you think of conspiracy theories, you’re thinking of January 6, or antivaxxers. However, conspiracy theories are far more ubiquitous than that, and cut across lines of class, race, ethnic background, and religion. So
you get a lot of conspiracy theories among marginalized groups. For example, I come from a Muslim background, and there are a lot of conspiracy theories around 9/11, around the FBI. If you’re in the Middle East, there are many theories around CIA intervention, around being controlled and puppeteered by external global powers. And that postcolonial perspective is not wrong. There are so many cases in which these conspiracies are real, which animates paranoia; these cases are rational to fear. Being disenchanted with the systems that we’re under is something that we, as critics and philosophers concerned with leftist politics, share with conspiracy theorists. We share
the feeling that the world is in fact a far darker place than one used to think, that certain ideologies or fantasies are just that—fantasies, that the American dream is a lie, or that meritocracy in various forms is a lie. There are so many overlaps. But what becomes dangerous is that the conspiracy theory is more easily manipulated by those in power, often to the detriment of leftist political organizing to hold elites or systems accountable. Instead, your fear and hatred is deflected through the conspiracy theory from its true target. I think there’s a kind of thrill to the constant unmasking of the ever deeper conspiracy, beyond the bare facts of capitalism’s exploitation and governments being in bed with capital. These almost seem too boring, too banal to explain why the world is so screwed up. The banality of evil is very difficult to grasp.
Instead, there is a thrill in constantly exposing, going down the rabbit hole of deeper, uglier realities—more evil things than you can imagine: think blood libel or pedophilic sex rings. The conspiracy theory promises you agency via the act of exposure. Although the message is that everything in the world is run by powers
beyond your control, you can regain something by exposing those powers. But in a conspiracy theory there’s always a more evil, deeper layer. You’ll never reach the answer, which ends up deflecting from who’s actually responsible. The so-called “Epstein List” is a really good example of this. It was released early this year, culled from hundreds of court filings of nearly 200 friends, associates, and victims of Jeffrey Epstein. The conspiracy theories surrounding him are so focused on various elites in New York City or in politics, or the “Deep State” rounding up kids for pedophilic exploitation. This list then prompted a strange witch hunt online for anybody remotely connected to Epstein. However, this list is a map of power relations between financiers, politicians, literal royalty, lobbyists, and the heads of various corporations. Setting aside the question of sex or pedophilia, these people are always in the same rooms together, carrying out a variety of deals in secret with absolutely no democratic control, hidden from accountability, and exploiting the public. But, instead what happened is the list gets torpedoed and read through the lens of partisan polarization,
bypassing class consciousness and systemic analysis. The right wing says that Epstein is a representation of New York, while the left wing says, look here are pictures of Epstein with Trump. This back and forth is so distracting. And that’s where the danger comes in. It becomes so easy to hijack what seems like raw evidence of corporate collusion with the government to talk about some “deeper” conspiracy. This is the double-edged sword: the conspiracy theory prompts you to be critical and reject the given narrative—and you should be suspicious of a lot of the ideologies you’ve been fed—but it then ultimately leads you to a place that is antithetical to holding these elites accountable in any way.
Is there a relationship between the irrational skepticism that leads to a conspiracy theory, and the rational skepticism we see in philosophical discourse?
I tend to resist hierarchizing forms of critique, because I do think the impulse is the same. This skepticism is a healthy skepticism; it’s a reaction based in broken trust. It’s skepticism of what you’re being fed constantly through whichever media machine, through your
algorithm, etc. This is exactly what we’re telling people: be as skeptical as possible to have some type of media literacy.
I think philosophical inquiry is also never ending. We’re always interpreting and reinterpreting, arguing and trying to get to the bottom of something we all know is impossible to do. But with conspiracy theories, as you’re engaging in skepticism, you have no political foothold in anything you can believe. This skepticism goes all the way to the bone. That is a result of our systems of government and knowledge becoming systems that you cannot trust in the same way you used to. If you get to the level where you believe the Earth is flat, you live in a deeply impoverished world, because you believe everything is lying to you all the time, even the weather forecast. You are entirely alienated from the social world, everyone is lying to you. And yet, even then, there will be occasional, perfectly rational and rightfully skeptical posts on a Facebook group like the official Flat Earther page, such as an article by The Guardian about how it’s very difficult to trust many scientific studies because they are non-replicable and often funded by corporations, and therefore their findings are not
to be consumed uncritically. This analysis by The Guardian is the kind of critique that we see as legitimate, and a kind of healthy skepticism. This skepticism tells us that our institutions of knowledge are not as trustworthy as we would like. The people in flat Earth groups reflect the extreme form of that exact mistrust—the extreme reaction that takes place when you are inundated with disinformation nonstop. Many people have ended up there—and they will sample both official sources of knowledge, like that Guardian article, and non-official sources like “scientific” studies carried out by somebody wearing a lab coat in a YouTube video, supposedly proving the Earth is flat. They will consume these
in the same breath, in equal measure, because it’s very difficult to ground yourself in what can and can’t be trusted.
The media tends to present “conspiracy theorists” as lone, isolated individuals on the fringe. But instead we seem to find a kind of community dedicated to conspiracy theories, fostered primarily by social media platforms. Conspiracies may have been around for thousands of years, but what impact has this new form of community had? Where is this going?
It’s worth noting that the ancient belief that the Earth is flat is one thing, the belief that there’s an active conspiracy to hide from you that the Earth
is flat is another. Although conspiracy theories have been around for a long time, I think there are moments in our history that result in an explosion of conspiracy theories—something Peter Knight has argued in his book Conspiracy Culture. These moments are characterized by the proliferation of real conspiracies that completely erode the average person’s ability to accept the narratives of history being told to them, and accept what institutions are doing to be in the service of the greater good. There was an explosion of conspiracism in the US after the founding of the CIA, right after World War II and during the Cold War, that is a direct result of the proliferation of conspiracies abroad and domestically. All manner of conspiracies—
undercover operations, the toppling of regimes, the silencing of activists worldwide, corporations gaining a lot of leverage over governments in the Global South through the US military’s involvement—actually took place. And that’s not counting COINTELPRO and various things domestically that were happening to surveil and crack down on activists.
Much of these conspiracies took place under an informal system of “plausible deniability”— when the government tries to maintain as much distance as possible from the agents of conspiracy that it is, in fact, funding and controlling. So if the agents get exposed, the government has the failsafe to plausibly deny that they were involved in or aware of what was happening. What that creates, on the ground, is a pervading attitude that Knight calls “undeniable plausibility”: everything becomes plausible; everything can be a conspiracy; everything is impossible to trust. So these moments in history are explosive in the amount of epistemic injury that they do to people on the ground, destroying their ability to trust their own institutions. That did not only happen in the US, but all around the world
where the US and other global powers were involved.
And in a way, something similar is taking place right now, as a result of social media and the digital world that we inhabit: we are in another one of those very explosive moments in which we don’t share a common hold on reality with everybody around us. This groundlessness is incredibly dangerous. Sound political judgment depends on people being able to act together and converse and reach certain conclusions by sharing a common world and a common set of facts. So it becomes very difficult to form solidarities or to organize politically because you’re not even speaking the same language, or worse, you’re speaking the same language, but the words mean totally different things. Our political terms themselves are being co-opted. A lot of leftist terms that have been used to critique fascism, or to critique capitalism are themselves being taken up by the disinformation machine, and churned back out with totally different meanings. That not only neutralizes the effectiveness of the terms, but leads to another schism in what the terms actually mean. Here’s an example: When you look at anti-Vax protests,
they repurpose our feminist terminology around consent or abortion—“My body, my choice.” Or even conspiratorial terms like “the Great Reset,” which is about how elites allegedly manufactured the global COVID-19 pandemic to subjugate the world’s population using lock-downs, masks, and harmful vaccination technologies. But corporations did capitalize on the pandemic to rake in profits, not totally dissimilar to what conspiracies predicted! It’s just that “the Great Reset” doesn’t place the target on corporate greed at all. Another example is how Donald Trump constantly throws around the term “the Deep State” to describe his electoral win being “stolen”— this in fact elides that there is an undemocratic, shadowy Deep State—one made up of donors and lobbyists. These things exist. But now that the terms we use to describe them are hijacked, we don’t share that same reality around what they mean, what facts they refer to. And that is an incredibly dangerous thing.
Is there any way to move forward? Can people escape the conspiratorial mindset if the thrill of conspiratorial exploration is a positive feedback loop?
This is a very difficult question. I’m often in the business of studying things as they are, as opposed to prescribing policy or prescriptive changes. I’ll admit that that’s the harder thing to do, because it’s a lot easier to lose trust than to rebuild and regain it. Our world and the regimes that we are living under are not designed to rebuild trust and transparency. We’ve worked so hard to make COVID-19 vaccines free and accessible, which should be one small step in the larger project of welfare for accessible health care for all, but this small step has instead become demonized and feared, because we are all (rightfully) so suspicious of the government. So when the government does one thing, that is actually, “good,” we can’t really trust that.
This mistrust runs so deep that it’s very difficult to imagine how you would rebuild it. Engaging in philosophical inquiry and applying it to the world around us, like what you’re doing at The Gadfly, is absolutely crucial. Building solidarities based on these actual systemic struggles, is so important too—although unfortunately solidarities are not always net positive. There are presently plenty of attempts
by the right wing to hijack people that are critical of Big Pharma within this anti-vax wave, to take advantage of their legitimate fears and mobilize them against immigrants and poor people, or against forms of socialized medicine, health care, and safety nets. I call these mobilizations “nefarious solidarities.” Nefarious solidarities can be quite successful in folding very different groups together into a repressive or even fascist mission. Another great example is Jordan Peterson, who is arguably the most famous right wing influencer on the internet today, releasing a video titled “Message to Muslims” in 2022. Talking about how Muslims in North America and in the East need to recognize that they are in fact on the same side as the alt-right, in North America and “the West”, because the true enemy that binds these groups together are the “gender ideologues,” i.e. the LGBTQ+ and the feminists. This rhetoric is creating a certain alliance, a certain solidarity between totally different groups that have different interests that are inimical to each other—against the weakest member of both societies, instead of being against capital and those with concentrations of power. This is the dark side of what can be
achieved through conspiracy theories. There are groupings of people that become politically mobilized to achieve incredibly harmful, if not fascist, visions of the world.
Thank you so much for this discussion, I found it really interesting. Do you have any thoughts we haven’t touched upon that you’d like to share?
I think one aspect around this dance of agency that I mentioned earlier is how games are the aesthetics of agency. You have power within a predefined set of rules, and I do often feel like conspiracy theories are
engaged with the aesthetics of knowing, promising agency and empowerment. Conspiracy theorists care deeply about aesthetics, specifically about people who have “knowledge.” Jordan Peterson dresses like a caricature of what an intellectual is, the fantasy of what an intellectual is. Aesthetics are critical. In these flat Earth conferences, people wear lab coats, which feels like a sense of authority. The aesthetics of knowledge become the trappings of knowledge. But ultimately, conspiracy is a contradiction: promising the empowerment you will get from the revelation, but
ultimately withholding it. Because the content of what is known, the content of what you will expose, will always already entirely dispossess you, it will always be what Eve Sedgwick said is a “paranoid reading” of the world. You already know the bad news—that you’re disempowered—but you’re gonna go on the endless hunt because of a false promise of power. And if anything, there is endless exposure all the time. Journalists and researchers exposing more and more horrors. The exposure alone actually does nothing. A corrupt corporation will likely get away without any kind of consequence. So now exposure
is hollow. But the conspiracy theory has a promise around exposure, that exposure will bring about a resolution or an end to your lack of agency and disempowerment. But it must always defer the exposure because that end doesn’t happen.
I also have one last thought on solidarity. I have a lot more sympathy for people who have fallen down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, because my entire family, community, and world has dabbled in conspiracy theories throughout my life for very good reasons. We lived as an Arab Muslim community in post 9/11
America. The FBI was actively raiding our mosques and our homes, posing as undercover converts at prayer, recording people surreptitiously and wire-tapping their phones. Conspiracies were everywhere. This hermeneutics of suspicion was so rampant that I do have a lot of empathy for it and understanding of its origin, while knowing the dangers it can lead us to. Empathy is required to be able to have a conversation with people who have been so deeply epistemically damaged. But empathy is not enough. I think about Thomas Nagel’s “Moral Luck” a lot in this context. Moral Luck says that a very significant aspect of what a person does depends on factors totally outside of their control: upbringing, genetics, epigenetics, etc. But we still treat them as objects of moral judgment, which feels very confounding, because their moral goodness or badness is significantly shaped by luck and not choice. This blew my mind as an undergrad studying philosophy. How can I ever hold anyone accountable, if everything that has gone into making them who they are as moral subjects is completely arbitrary?
And I think there’s a connection here to be drawn. With the conspiracy theorist, there’s a certain amount of epistemic luck, certain epistemic privileges or lack thereof, in terms of what knowledge we have access to, what knowledge we’re primed to receive or reject based on our historical experiences. And those things are entirely beyond our control. What types of systemic critiques are you able to voice based on the knowledge that you have or don’t have? What rational argument and evidence is even legible to you as such? How can you articulate your grievances? It’s all so based on how much epistemic injury that you have been dealt in your life. I think about how conspiracy theories can function as these popular modes of rational thinking for people whose access to knowledge has been ruptured or destabilized in so many ways. And any of us could find ourselves in that position, as the marginalized Other of critical thinking (the conspiracy theorist), based on factors totally outside of us. This gives me pause. But I cannot emphasize enough how dangerous this epistemic genre can be—how destructive it can be towards our attempts to build a better future—a world we can trust.
Defense of Excess: Philosopher’s to the Eden
Overcoming the Aversion Circus
Milligan
Part 1: Grand Entry
The philosopher hates the circus.
If Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero were peeled off the Butler banner, outfitted in tophats, and sent to the 1925 Barnum and Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth, they might perish in their star-stenciled seats as “Entry of the Gladiators” began to play.
The circus always begins with the “Grand Entry,” a scene in which all the acts parade in a loop and greet the crowd. There are clowns, elephants, zebras, acrobats—more bizarre variations than The Daniels could concoct—and each element to the greatest degree of excess. For a sense of the spectacle, enjoy this 1930 New York Times description:
“Indeed, what makes the circus irresistible is the lavishness of the conception—not merely in the grandiloquence of its trade jargon, which results in linguistic apoplexy when something unusual comes along, but in the bountifulness of its showmanship. Not one ring, but three rings amplified by two stages… Not four or five elements, but four or five complete herds of ponderous pachyderms–enough to fill
the arena, an elephantine, nay, a chriselephantine display. Enough horses to put the United States cavalry to rout, enough zebras to populate a jungle, an enormous special congress of 100 clowns, gathered from every country on Earth.”
It goes on, but that might have been enough to kaleidoscopize1 your mental representation, which will be necessary. If we were working with forms— and we may as well, in the company of Plato—we might say that the form of the circus includes the greatest possible number of every possible attraction. The Grand Entry exists for this numerosity. Its principle is excess. The Grand Entry tramples on moderation in stampedes. It is made to appeal to the masses, and it assumes that the masses all want “more.”
We should remember that the circus is not just a visual display. While the trombones and the trumpets toot and honk and the horses kick up dust clouds, the Candy Butcher will yell out “Peanuts! Get Your Peanuts!” and the whole place will smell like salt and cotton candy. This is all by design, and this design is advertised (as in the New York Times article).
1 Kaleidoscopize: to make kaleidoscopic. In the circus spirit, I’m jargonizing.
Then, to seek the circus is to seek out excess.
The circus viewer, insofar as they are acting by being an engaged audience member in a passionate appreciation of excess, necessarily commits vice.
Aristotle thought that the mean in relation to choice was different for every person. Yet the circus only leaves one option open: enjoy it all.
Now it is a mean between two vices; Our golden mean golden boy might feel compelled to
find the exit. Checking this impulse, Aristotle would remain in his seat but withdraw inwardly. For on his way out, Aristotle might reflect with just a bit of clouding elitism on the differences between the circus and the feasts he regularly enjoyed.
Virtue is developed by practice. Since “virtue is a state of character concerned with choice,” and virtuous action is moderate action, the choice of moderation must be present. At a feast with the other Athenian elites, the choice of moderation—taking a few
grapes instead of dropping an entire bunch down your throat—exists. At a circus, on the other hand, the only conceivable way to enjoy the show is to choose to delight in the excess of it.
The circus does not provide a chance for cultivating anything like moderation. The circus is not like a grand feast, where one could employ their virtue in only taking the food they need. Though other scenes of excess might still make way for temperance, a discerning abstinence that takes reality as a test of self-restraint, such a relation is not possible at the circus. There is no way to
appreciate the scene except by fully plunging into the muchness; by taking excess as at least fascinating, if not good.
Looking around at the cheering audience, Plato would be depressed by his company as he realized he was wasting his hours with the masses who, as if dreaming, not only failed to consider beauty’s true form, but delighted in some degree of grotesqueness that did not even attempt to be beautiful.2 He might look from the contortionist on the horses back to the claps and smiles of the audience members beside him and drop his head in his hands. Cicero would sympathize with him, probably quoting Caecilius Statius again as the elated roar of the audience subsided: “I think the height of exultation the height of error.”
Add to the Ancients the other names from LitHum and CC syllabi, and you’ll get a ferocity against the circus that would rival the lions it enslaved. Augustine would painfully remember his younger years: “For as I became a youth, I longed to be satisfied with worldly things, and I dared to
2 In Republic 476b-d, Plato asks inquires about “the man who believes in beautiful objects… but does not believe in beauty itself”: “Is his life a dream, do you think, or is he awake?” The response is that this man, a spectator of life, lives as if dreaming, while the philosopher uniquely is awake.
grow wild in a succession of various and shadowy loves. My form wasted away, and I became corrupt in thy eyes” (City of God Book 2 Chapter 1). Hearing this, Nietzsche would shoot his glance back toward Plato, in recognition of a similar wasting away in the excited crowds who are engaged emotionally but not intellectually.
The clowns—even if there were a hundred of them—would have a hard time cheering this crowd. Would they do any better with us? As much as we might disagree with these philosopher’s arguments, their impact is unavoidable. Because of them, we’re all supposed to hate the circus. In “Paper Moon,” the Barnum and Bailey circus stands in as the absolute symbol of what is false and soulless about reality:
“It’s a Barnum and Bailey world Just as phony as it can be But it wouldn’t be make believe If you believed in me”
“Paper Moon” 1933
Ella Fitzgerald & The Delta Rhythm Boys
Written by Harold Arlen
We are made to fear the circus and to be disgusted by it. As the ultimate spectacle, it epitomizes the “pure entertainment” that is so easy to be skeptical of. The circus brings an ecstatic,
dazzling, glittery joy; this joy is false and evil.
However much we might wish to be like the lucky bastards who got to just be entertained by the circus in 1925, we have read too much. So I hope you don’t mind that I will put you among the unhappy troupe in the good circus seats who the clowns and elephant-tamers puzzle over. You’re allowed feelings of your own, but The Philosophers will keep chattering and sighing in the background. They make it hard for you to settle into your collapsible seat, and try as you might to harmonize the elephant trumpets and monkey symbol clashes into something pleasant, Augustine’s quiet sobbing is one sound too many. You’re not really in it yet.
Part 2: Tiger Fighter
After the grand entry has finished and the fire-breathing jugglers, sword swallowers, and snake charmers have done their things, the worldrenowned tiger fighter, Ms. Mabel Starks, appears. The undoubtable animal rights violation kind of obscures my point here, so I’ll hold onto your ethical consciousness for now; let’s imagine your distaste for the act is, like your company, entirely from
the logistikon. 3 I realize you can’t really give up your morality, and this is a genuine distinction between you and the philosophers (like Cicero, who gathered panthers for the Colosseum) who lacked these sentiments. However, I only ask to borrow your ethics for now, and I promise I will give them back and let them resettle the situation soon.
The reasoning mind does not know what to do with itself during this performance. Millennia of men have distinguished what is from what seems, and wherever the line is drawn, the tiger act is firmly on the seeming-side. What can you grasp of life from a woman play-fighting with a predator? You’re trying hard to figure it out, but the philosophers are chatting again. Nietzsche might be inspired or jealous of the ferocity of the lion fighter, who is at least more than mediocre, but being a woman, her inherently unpeaceful nature takes away any respect he might have had. He complains that the fight is faked. Ms. Starks only appears to be in control, but really, it’s all gimmicks. Augustine reflects on the pitiful condition of the audience who fear for
the woman in her pretended performance instead of fearing for their own souls. They each refuse to be moved. What seems has no force on the soul of a philosopher, and this act is only a projection of seeming.
It is precisely because the act is excessive that it seems pretended. There is no way to make sense of a tiger fighting with a human when the tiger’s strength is clearly superior. It is easy to believe there is a hidden factor which eliminates the problem.
Yet, there is no reducing out the amazingness of Ms. Stark’s act. A commentator on a 1949 tiger fighting act performed by Clyde Beatty of the Clyde Beatty–Cole Bros. Circus put it well:
“No trainer can ever be safe from sudden attack, especially when in a cage full of killers that are never broken of their natural instincts. It is no theatrical trick that creates suspense when audiences watch him [Beatty with the tigers]. Something can happen at every performance” (clyde beatty tiger training)
Indeed, something can happen at every performance. Realizing that Ms. Starks risks her life in every performance and so her fight is genuine on some
3 logistikon, from Plato’s Republic: the “highest” part of the soul whose goal is reason.
level, you begin to sympathize with the amused crowd. Each snarl draws you in further to the performance, and you eventually notice the scars on Ms. Stark’s arms: proof of real struggle. Meanwhile, the philosophers lean back in their seats with crossed arms, retreating into their doubts. They do not see the scars, nor do they want to.
Part 3: Trapeze Act
Gradually, you start to experience the circus with everyone else while the philosophers keep murmuring their discontents. Plato is still muttering “asleep! They’re all asleep!” and Augustine is still crying—but you’ve nearly attuned yourself to the show. After the woman bows and leaves the stage with her lion, the arena quiets and the bright lights fade.
The main act is about to begin. Two spotlights swoop in to focus on a pair of trapeze artists standing on either side of the scaffolding at the center of the circle. You hold your breath. They lift off their platforms, spinning on their bars. Then, she goes for a flip: she lets go. He catches her hands, and as they swing back to the perimeter the crowd has
reached a roaring cheer. The faces of children and adults around you mirror your sheer incredulity.
The trapeze act continues, but you’re stuck repeating the movement of the flip, the catch, the silence, the howl, and the bloodless awe-struck looks that emptied and filled the circus. You lose sight of what’s going on in front of you. You’re reminding yourself that the trapeze artist is not a god. You remember that they trained to do that—first on cushioned floor mats, then over a wide safety net—yet an unbridgeable question remains. You wonder, how could they possibly trust themselves to make that perfect movement when there’s so
much going on? To spin the right amount and catch the hand at the right time is one thing, but to do this in the simmering cacophony, with the fresh memory of the lion escaping its cage and nearly killing the trainer, the horrible deaths of acrobats in years past… How could they have possibly cleared all of it out of their awareness to achieve this perfection?4
This is the wrong question. The essential elegance of the trapeze artists did not exist despite the excess of the surrounding scene; it was born from it. They achieve the impossible as a circus performer, and you understand the impossible at the circus. Had you watched only the trapeze act under an open sky, the feeling would not have been the same. At the zenith of the black hole which sucked your mind fully into
4 Such things did happen at the circus. In 1930, an acrobat fell from a 40 foot pole and was pronounced dead in his dressing room as the show continued. In 1924, while the Circus was paraded down the streets of Harlem, four horses spooked by a rat crashed into a lion’s cage. The lion escaped and thankfully did not kill any of the hundreds of people on the streets. A trip through circus archives will tell you that the show almost never was predictable.
the performance, the gaudy stripes on the circus wall were still visible in the spotlight. To arrive at this moment, you had to accept what came before it: that it doesn’t make sense.
You quit your pursuit of unanswerable questions, and your bewilderment fizzes away. You feel as though the world has been turned upside down and the circus tent has become a funnel through which your particular joy, over the bodies and seats and elephants and rings, drops. The slight resistance you had to the pretending of the circus (which carried resistance to the excess) has left, and what remains is dewy awe. A deeply personal impression that the act was performed just for you rises electric. In this renewed state of mind, a resonance searches for words.
The acrobats do not speak. They do not need to, as their movements can be approximately translated. On a smaller scale, their performance parallels a carnival act Ray Bradbury witnessed when he was eleven. In 2012, he told Wired about an act with Mr. Electrico, a magic man who used a switch to electrocute himself on stage: “He sat in the chair with his sword, they
pulled the switch, and his hair stood up. He reached out with his sword and touched everyone in the front row, boys and girls, men and women, with the electricity that sizzled from the sword. When he came to me, he touched me on the brow, and on the nose, and on the chin, and he said to me, in a whisper, “Live forever.”
The Greatest Show on Earth did better than Mr. Electrico by leaving the words unexpressed. The effect was the same, but distributed simultaneously to every peanut muncher in the crowd who was there to observe it. It turns out the circus, like any argument, had a point to prove. Maybe it was excess for the sake of excess. Yet, it achieved the impression of that simple good that all the philosophers long for.
Yet, do we feel falsely? Is “live forever” a lie, or more importantly, is it useful?
It is useful. For Bradbury, the message shaped his life. The above quote continues: “And I decided to”; his decision took the form of devotion to a lifetime of writing. After going to the circus, you can go anywhere. Because the awe you feel is deeply personal, you’re likely to go wherever you can
replicate the trapeze act in your own way.
One trip to the circus probably will not forever set the trajectory of your life. But the circus is known for traveling. You can always find it somewhere else and enter again.
Part 4: Barnum and Bailey World
Ella Fitzgerald—or Harold Arlen, technically—was right: We do live in a Barnum and Bailey world. That much is easy to see in New York City, where sardine-packed subway rides and the sensory assault of busy downtown streets are unavoidable. It’s also clear to the scientist who know that there are millions of cells in a peanut. The mathematician, trying to quantify the noneuclidean shape of the acrobat’s arched body swinging through the air, does not exactly have a simple way to do so. The more technologies we acquire, the more sub-structures we become aware of, and the more things we give name to, the more excessive it is. Then, to be educated is to seek to acknowledge a greater excess. Walking in Butler Library might be quite like walking in a circus tent. Enter for more.
But when we read, do we ever half close our eyes to mute the overwhelming excess of the grand entry? There are views in the texts we read that we cannot accept, that make us want to get up from our seats or retreat from the awful spectacle before us. Plato’s theory of the “natural slave” is obviously, painfully, viscerally wrong.
Now you see moral consciousness is back in the picture. You may as well direct it back to the circus: you think of the elephants, the distress you felt for them before, and furrow your brow somewhat forcefully. It is difficult to consider the elephants. You’re left with a deep dull pain from the understanding that something so awful exists within the show. The show in its entirety was an essential experience. Upsettingly, this makes the horror and sorrow of it essential. Of course, we can imagine a circus that accomplishes the same feats of parading excess, glorious pretending, and impossible essentiality without harming any humans or animals. However, the 1925 circus was not this way. Our world is not this way.
In this world, there are many things that are hard to swallow.
The many things around us everywhere are connected to suffering at least as bad as the tigers,’ and it does no good to ignore this. It is not easy to take it all in. To really observe the Grand Entry is to observe in it the bad and the ugly along with the great. Still, I need not even refer to the promise at the other end. It should be enough to acknowledge that the overwhelming, grotesque, unethical excess already exists everywhere. Circus speciation is a framework to keep your attention aimed at the world by relating to the excess as
pure entertainment. As the show of things in the world progresses, the trapeze miracle is produced, not all the time but everywhere.
The most attentive circus spectator takes it in: the spectacle, the excess, the pretending, their own sorrow and horror and fascination, and the awe. They find that the Greatest Show on Earth is the one before them.
There is no “live forever” without “live here and now.” Enter the tent.
Art Contributors
Cover
Embyr Williams
Letter from the Editors
Still from Blow-Up (1966)
A Barrel of Tears, A Vale of Laughs
Creative Commons, Alex da Corte, Barbara Kasten, Judy Pfaff, Iari Pittman, Tabaimo
Nothing Changes: Political Negativity and Hegel’s Ancient Comedy
