-Caveat Lector-
http://rigint.blogspot.com/
>>Much of corporate media, including "alternative" corporate media,
became co-conspirators after the fact simply by habit, because they
inhabit and thrive within that outer circle. To acknowledge the
possibility of a high crime of the magnitude of Kennedy's
assassination or 9/11 would be an invitation, not to gentle reform,
but to revolution. And institutional power sends out such invitations
only when it sees how it can come out on top again.<<
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Signs of the Times
Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A
sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting
for something else...thus semiotics is in principle the discipline
studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something
cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell
the truth: it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all. - Umberto Eco,
Theory of Semiotics
I think the only people entitled to be shocked by the commuting of
Scooter Libby's sentence are those who were shocked that Libby was
sentenced in the first place. Or rather, that it was a second-tier
player like Libby and not Rove or Cheney who appeared trussed and
basted as the suckling pig of Democrats' scandalously disappointing
Fitzmas. It's those constantly incredulous types who deserve the
saucepan eyes at Libby's predictable catch and release.
Even so, the Internet reaction is as rich as it is predictable, and
ineffectual. Instead of America's streets, America's chatrooms are
filled, because its citizens have been given them for the appearance
of a commons, and clatter with indignant typing. But 10 million
people posting We're not gonna take it anymore! isn't a revolution.
It isn't even a Twisted Sister song.
That's the bad news. The good news is it's a Leonard Cohen song.
What hath Bush wrought? If nothing else, he's made semiotics
everybody's business, whether everybody realizes it or not. Under the
Bush years, the signs by which Americans and much of the Western
world have lived have become so evidently estranged from what they
allegedly signify that they now suggest little more than the lies
told by Power to maintain itself. "Freedom," "democracy," "justice":
Everybody knows. Among other things, Bush is the Deconstruction
President.
In The Trickster and the Paranormal, George Hansen has this to say:
It is commonly assumed that there is a simple, objective
correspondence between the signifier and the signified even thought
they are separate entities. It is assumed that language is only a set
of names for things, events, and concepts. These assumptions are
incorrect, but few recognize the extent of the implications. This
lies at the heart of deconstructionism, and magic.
There is power in the act of naming, because it imbues meaning to a
thing - or to an event or a concept - that has no necessary
correspondence to the thing itself. This was evident even on the
morning of September 11, when the event of the attacks receded behind
their purported meaning even as they were still under way. And then
soon after, the breathless reporting of Bush's confirmation that this
means war, albeit against an abstract noun which would nevertheless
cost at least hundreds of thousands of actual lives.
[Carrying On, Tues PM:]
From the start there was an institutional incuriousness about the
attacks, as there so often is when the institutions themselves
benefit by them ("Blair rejects 7/7 inquiry calls"; "Putin rejects
public Beslan inquiry"). Naturally any circle of high conspirators
would be reluctant to have any light shed on the criminal events they
enabled, but there's a far broader circle of reluctance, that
partakes of the Power that is enabled by the meaning of the crime.
That is, those who stood to benefit by 9/11 were not limited to the
relatively small number of perpetrators within the institutions of
public life, because the perpetrators themselves partook of the
larger circle of institutional power. Much of corporate media,
including "alternative" corporate media, became co-conspirators after
the fact simply by habit, because they inhabit and thrive within that
outer circle. To acknowledge the possibility of a high crime of the
magnitude of Kennedy's assassination or 9/11 would be an invitation,
not to gentle reform, but to revolution. And institutional power
sends out such invitations only when it sees how it can come out on
top again.
Event and meaning is also an issue for the 9/11 Movement, which
unfortunately has come to mirror some of the White House's most
dumbed-down Manichaeism. For the leaders and proponents of the "New
Truth" movement, as with the evangelists of the "Official Story,"
meaning has almost entirely effaced event. For some, the actual
crimes of hijacked aircraft striking buildings have vanished all
together, and in their place has been substituted "controlled
demolition" and something, anything other than Flight 77 striking the
Pentagon. Why? Because the actual event is perceived as of
insufficient significance to support the sign of "Inside Job."
But that's a failure of political language which doesn't know the
nuance of parapolitics, and it is one which allows those inside, to
one degree or another, to define our terms for us. What does "Inside
Job" mean? It doesn't mean Executive Branch; it doesn't mean, as with
other empty jargon, "Bush knew." I've written before that many who
push 9/11 as an Inside Job want to push Osama right out of the
picture, but bin Laden is himself inside the security-narcotics-
terror nexus, composed of factions that interpenetrate one another,
which sometimes compete and sometimes strike strategic alliances
depending upon what advantages they believe they can gain. Peter Dale
Scott recently quoted a Russian general, who said that "9/11 changed
the direction of the world in the direction desired by transnational
oligarchs and and an international mafia." Scott also said, and I
agree, that "I find it very hard to believe that the Bush
administration either let or made it happen. It's clear that people
within government were involved, but we should avoid condemning an
entire administration."
I'd ask any who take exception to my position or to Scott's remark to
ponder the course of 9/11 justice after the Bush administration
leaves office, while the statecraft of clandestine power which
preceded it, remains.
And since its sixtieth anniversary has arrived, complete with the
posthumously-unsealed affidavit of Walter Haut, let's consider the
sign of Roswell and its significant overshadowing of modern UFOlogy.
What is the meaning of the Roswell story? As told through back
channels like Haut (Roswell's former Public Information Officer), the
likewise-deceased Lieutenant Colonel Philip Corso and Stephen Greer's
"Disclosure Project," the meaning is not so much that aliens are
here; it's that the aliens are here and we have them. The US
military, according to its own covert stream of UFO disinformation,
can shoot down alien craft, keep their dead occupants on ice,
negotiate with their comrades and reverse-engineer their technology.
The meaning of Roswell is not Fear them; it's Fear us.
The latest addition to the Roswell mythos may be the "dragonfly
drones," about which Whitley Strieber recently gushed "I can only
surmise that the appearance of the drones, and now the release of
materials by Isaac, is a new step in the ongoing experiment that we
call contact." (See also Linda Mouton Howe's "Earthfiles.") I was not
impressed by the original photographs, and the subsequent materials
strike me as a hoax in the tradition of UMMO and MJ-12. Whether the
"drones" have official sanction or not, the hoaxers adopt and
elaborate upon the sanctioned mythologies of Roswell and reverse
engineering.
With respect to UFOs and matters of High Weirdness, my inclination is
to give particular attention to the cases that frustrate analysis and
appear to be absolute nonsense, because a phenomenon that is truly
alien is unlikely to mimic human intelligence. In other words, I
suppose, if there's to be weirdness, then bring on the weird. I'm
less impressed by Roswell, however many deathbed confessions the
military may produce, or "Isaac" and his scan of an alleged 1986
report from Palo Alto's supposed "CARET" ("Commercial Applications
Research for Extraterrestrial Technology"), than I am by accounts
from, say, a shaken Mexican policeman who claims he was chased by a
flying humanoid; or by John Tasco who was approached one evening in
1957 by a pasty, bug-eyed dwarf in a green suit and a tam-o'-shanter
cap who told him "We are peaceful people, we only want your dog."
Such events are incursions of the truly alien upon our experience,
and defy our attempts to infer meaning.
That's not to say hoaxes and disinformation can't be instructive. For
instance, the Issac documents describing the alien tech. On the RI
discussion board, "Attack Ships on Fire" points out how, "by drawing
certain symbols on the CARET technology it somehow instills the means
for the material to perform what the drawer wants." This is sigil
magic, which returns us to the power of signs and of reading and
meaning, and George Hansen's comparison of deconstructionism to
occult science.
So, if the drones are a sanctioned hoax, the meaning it advances is
Fear us; we too are sorcerers. And if it isn't, they may be anyway.
But so may we, at least in the mundane sense of not adopting their
meanings, which empower them, as our own, which disempower us.
posted by Jeff at 7/03/2007 07:09:00 AM 47 comments
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