OTL: Letter to Joe Lancaster: Conspiracy

Being a response to the publication of Joe Lancaster's Freemasonry and Anarchism (Sheffield: JLB, 2011; distributed Rare and Racy Books)

Well, if you want to get at least one reader, I suppose one way is to fabricate an endorsement and blazon it on the back of the book: "Ben Watson - ‘Interesting and brave polemic JLB - I like it.’". The cheek of it, Joe! Putting words in my mouth, you should be ashamed. I never once logged onto the forum where you posted all this material (the 'Pierre J. Proudhon Memorial Computer' strand on 'Criticisms of Anarchism'). In fact, come to think of it, I've never read anything you've written, on screen or on paper. [this was actually untrue; Joe had sent me one post — a diatribe against feminism — and I did email back those words; but this was seven years before, and I'd forgotten …] But now it seems I have to …

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So now, having actually read Freemasonry and Anarchism, wading through nearly two hundred pages of that discomfiting psychosis called conspiracy theory, here's a real quote for the back of your book: "I can't endorse more than 10% of the opinions in your book, Joe, and the continual grinding of teeth about loose sexual habits is distinctly off-putting, suggesting morbid idée fixes on your part rather than anything objectively true. Nevertheless, for those interested in the psychopolitics of moral alienation and social collapse, your text provides a crash course in its atrocious pile-up."

Freemasonry & Anarchism, Joe Lancaster

The closest I ever got to praising your ideas was the radio show I broadcast after I visited you in Sheffield all those years ago, when we drank cans of beer and listened to Frank Zappa on mini-disc in your mother's living room. Our conversation was continually interrupted by you nipping out the house to smoke some substance (what was it? crack? you called it "chasing the dragon" or something … back then it wasn't the Freemasons, it was the "drug economy" and how, by ignoring this part of capitalism, left analysis failed to explain your world). Why didn't you cite something from my show - a script you accurately transcribe on pages 80-81 - instead of making something up? Such a cavalier attitude towards veracity does not bode well for a book which noisily claims to be revealing "facts" everyone else ignores. Or is the whole caboodle actually just a plea for attention, as scurrilous and cynical as the porn and pop stars you rage against? If so, I'm afraid I have to confess it worked.

Before I respond to the contents of Freemasonry and Anarchism, let's clarify matters by recalling what I said about you seven years ago (7 April 2004) on my radio show ("Late Lunch With Out To Lunch", 2pm Wednesdays, ResonanceFM):

Last weekend I went to visit Joe Lancaster, the film-maker, in his native habitat, which is Hillsborough in Sheffield. He took me to task about the International Conference of Esemplastic Zappology last January, which he'd filmed in its entirety. Joe complained that no-one's paper had addressed Zappa's virulent critique of American womanhood, and so what had emerged at the conference was a sanitized Zappa safe for politically-correct consumption. Lancaster believes that Zappa's no-holds-barred critique of women is not so much sexist, as a criticism of the sentimentality which thinks that blinding one's perception to inadequacy makes something adequate. In fact, Joe argues, capitalist exploitation is frequently mediated through women, since it's fear that non-conformity and lack of conventional success will lead to lack of sexual opportunities which keeps men with their noses to the grindstone. Although I don't think that's the entire story, and there are elements of the traditional poète maudit in Joe's stance, I think Lancaster's point raises issues which have been absent from left thinking since the heyday of Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man. As Franklin Rosemont has argued in an essay recently made available in pamphlet form at Housman's Bookshop on Caledonian Road - titled Karl Marx & the Iroquois - poetry and revolution are intimately related, and their separation is always a sign of Stalinism. [Today this jump from female mediation of capitalist oppression to "poetry and revolution" seems rather sudden and inexplicable … I think my line of thought was that inventive and creative men (poets, artists, Frank Zappa before signing to Verve Records, Joe) can find it hard to get laid because they refuse to conform to conventional stereotypes of success and attractiveness. BW 10-vi-2011] In Britain, capitulation to bourgeois feminism by the Left in the 70s has led to unrealistic and moralistic concepts of sexuality and self-expression. Besides, the idea that all women are right all of the time is actually a distortion of feminism, which was originally a revolutionary criticism of how most women behave under capitalism. Pro-women ideology can become a politically-correct shibboleth which doesn't allow anyone to say anything real. In terms of trying to convince working-class people that what socialists say is realistic, the left's position on sexuality can tie its own hands behind its back, though with none of the pleasures incumbent upon the practice of consensual bondage: as William Burroughs and Zappa point out, it's hypocrisy about sex which allows the whole system of spectacular lies to proliferate.

In your book, you append the following: "Watson paraphrases me several times, and at others spins my ideas off into leftish idiocy. What he does at least appear to acknowledge is that a blanket acceptance of pro woman ideology, refusing to accept as, I stated earlier 'women's equally lamentable contribution to the current state of the human psyche' is folly of the first order." (p. 81)

I'm puzzled by your reference to "leftish idiocy". Idiocy is idiocy, regardless of political colouring. "Leftish idiocy" implies that, as a whole, leftwingers are idiots whereas rightwingers are not. Is this really your position? Your book's thesis is that Freemasonry is a ruling class ideology which allows them to enslave and butcher populations. I don't imagine that resisting this could be the task of the right, whatever the febrile imaginings of survivalists and white supremacists. Flinging around insults like that is likely to lose all your left readers. Not this one, though, but that's because I'm forensically interested in sociopathology.

You then go on to defend "moralistic conceptions of sexuality" - my description of the sorry legacy of feminism - because these might "resemble something approaching normality" (p. 81). Yeah, about as much as spanking children prevents sadomasochism! You use Robert Ardrey's observations about caged baboons to diagnose urban perversions. This is the same shtik as Desmond Morris's The Human Zoo, and it has the same dubious relationship to titillation as rape reports in News of the World. What is 'condemned' is in fact being circulated as porn! As Freud demonstrated, behind the stern moralist, there's always the frenzied wanker. Better to ’fess up, get psychoanalysed, bring your drives to consciousnes, write some porn yourself (see my Shitkicks and Doughballs). Know thyself, young man, then it follows as the night the day that thou canst not be false to any man (as Jacques Pierre had it). For you, the major atrocities of the modern world are not starvation produced by treating food as a commodity nor wars sponsored by first-world arms manufacturers, but pornography, paedophilia and sodomy. This obsessional neurosis requires an explanation, and of course it's your own libidinal investment in imagining such practices. Your individualistic positivism - the Christian core of your thought - cannot admit instinctual drives, so they're projected onto someone else: the Freemasons. No amount of historical research can free you from this delusion, since if it's not there, there's always a reason ("they cover it up!"). And if it is there, "it's plain to see".

The high comic point of your denunciation of everyone and everything comes when you 'reveal' that Marx, Lenin and Trotsky were Freemasons because in various photographs they've stuck their right hands between their coat buttons (it's "the sign of the master of the second veil", according to figure 34 of the Freemasonry manual you're using - what are the other at-least-33 signs? Might they not perhaps exhaust all the positions anyone could take before a lens?). Has it not occurred to you that these three might've thrust their hands inside their coats simply to look imposing, imitating Napoleon's famous full-length portrait? All the work and words and actions of three great socialists reduced to zilch by aligning three photographs! This is 'proof' on the level of Von Danniken's Chariots of the Gods. It was enough for The Sun, which devoted a centre-page spread to Von Danniken when his book came out in paperback - someone in an Aztex codex had a ring round his head ergo he was a spacemen - but it's not enough for me.

But it's undoubtedly funny, what you're doing. Picture thinking! Impatience with the word, wielding something graphic and explicit. But your use of pictures is highly selective and impure - rigged. Asger Jorn undertook a great anthropological project, which was to collect images of people sticking out their tongues, from pre-history all the way up to today. His archive provides an alternative history to that of the written word: you can make your mind up about the relationship of biological human nature to cultural traditions and habits simply by examining the pictures. However, your deployment of images prevents thought, rather than stimulating it - ah, they were all Freemasons, bin them! But Marx and Lenin and Trotsky only matter in the first place because of the connections they made between thought and political action, connections made by words, words and more words. To someone trying to think in pictures - Captain Beefheart, for example - they're irrelevant, so it wouldn't matter whether they were Freemasons or not. Aligning those photos is a coup like doing a conjuring trick at a political meeting. Funny, but stupid.

And throughout your postings, the same egregious mismatch of aesthetics and politics. Your crazy ventures in verbal interpretation and numerology are the work of a frustrated poet, not a persuasive political analyst. I love them. I'd swap a page of yours for the entire works of Nina Power. That's because brokering consent is tedious and passive, a mere rearrangement the hidebound concepts which rule us. Real thinking indeed brings to consciousness the specificities of verbal form, which is why Hegel thought puns profound. However, you've got to assess your readers and weigh up their reactions. You're arguing with political anarchists, so your poetics simply come over as the ravings of a loon. The motifs you unpack from words ("cannabis - abyss of Cain") are brilliant at giving us a picture of your mind, but that doesn't mean we immediately share your vision.

You haven't made a book, Joe, you've bound some Internet postings in paperback. Ferocity and insult are the lingua franca of the net - all those dweebs pounding their keyboards seeking to gain authority and status they can't get anywhere else - but they're distinctly unappetising in a book. A book is something you buy and peruse at your leisure, at your own pace and for your own pleasure. Who wants all this bile and agony? Not me. We may unite in appreciation of Frank Zappa, but what I admire is not simply his assault on the feelgood fraud of liberal political correctness, it's the aptness and logic and precision of his issued oeuvre. You wave him around like you do Alan Watt - a blogger to agree with. Zappa's not! He's someone to DISAGREE with. The blogosphere is soaked in identifications, everyman can download their own customised newsletter. People have their retarded opinions flattered day-by-day, there's no genuine dialogue or dialectic, all genuine philosophical thought expunged, it's disgusting (much more disgusting than, what's that texting acronym you rage against, "LOL"?, at least that reminds me of Lol Coxhill). As Paul Sutton put it, twisting a further meaning from a phrase in Jonathan Jones: "Zappa creates not so much a ‘paranoid listener’ as an annoyed listener." Annoyed, because what you want is always spliced in with what you don't want … yet. Zappa changes you. The fans who banner the boring old "music is the best" quote miss the point, which is that Frank made records work: records you change your mind about each time they're played. Now, there's good value for you. Likewise a book needs to nurture the reader, give them an arena to play in. Your book, on the other hand, is just angry assertion. Again and again. It's horrible, and the reason is you.

Have you actually sat down and read through your own book, or is it simply a dump of your postings in print? You might have noticed some glaring omissions. You use Zappa throughout, but don't talk about the moment when he dealt with the Freemasons: 'The Grand Wazoo' on The Lost Episodes. Far from projecting them to the skies as the ultimate evil manipulators, Zappa's text - recited by Captain Beefheart in1969, backed by Synclavier in 1991 - pokes fun at them: "You may think my hat is funny but I don't, I am the Grand Wazoo, keeper of the mystic scroll and roll of parchment from the Lodge. And I'm a veteran. Everyday on coffee break at the hardware store I tell Fred what to expect because we play pranks during the initiation." Frank Zappa once summarised his philosophy as: "the emperor is naked". Sure, this revelation doesn't suddenly rid the world of capitalism, starvation and war, but it sure enough gives me a programme for my own contribution to the cause. Laugh at the ruling classes, and give us some confidence! We're right to oppose their plans. Right to strike against the cuts. Their 'art' and 'ethics' and 'morality' is a front on greed and exploitation! Don't give me the usual gloom and doom and panic. I can get that from The Independent. Daily.

Another figure missing from your book is George Clinton. You vilify hip hop, but what are you gonna replace it with? Logging onto conspiracy theory websites? De Quincey? I got halfway through Confessions but gave up, bored. In his book on De Quincey, Ed Baxter (manager of Resonance FM) used Derrida to argue that De Quincey's meandering unreadability is an avantgarde stratagem. Hmmm. James Brown and George Clinton are the funk bedrock of hip hop, and the mobsters and rackateers can't accept their class politics. Like Reggae, hip hop has its own structural integrity and standards it must adhere to. Your accusation that it's all a farrago of pimps and whores and hustlers is just what they said about blues, R&B and funk. You sound like the uptight greenhorn who went to the wrong part of town, got distracted by a pretty face and some long legs, had his wallet stolen and now thinks they should bulldoze the redlight district. Like Plato in the Republic, you solve the problem of 'semblance' (just the problem of life as a signifying monkey, man) by exiling the poets. It's you and Plato - the fucked-up - who require a period of exile, not the poets.

Actually, the last time I had to put myself through the gruesome mill of conspiracy theory was because of George Clinton. In 1995, he talked to me for hours about William Cooper's Behold a Pale Horse, I had to go to Compendium and buy the thing. It's all the same gubbins you're circulating, Joe. Like you, Cooper baulks at fullblown Nazism, but it's the identical conspiracy psychosis. He actually reprints The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious forgery by the Tsars' secret police which gave a green light to anti-Jewish pogroms in nineteenth-century Russia. Professedly 'non-racist' (he's got a Chinese wife), he alters 'Zion' to 'Sion', 'Jews' to 'Illuminati' and 'goyim' to 'cattle' throughout. But the core psychosis remains: imagining that the ills of the modern world are the result of a conscious conspiracy. Certainly, far right ideology draws upon the feudal mindset, for which the mass of people are a kind of productive domestic herd. But, just as there's a difference between a Hollywood film and reality, there a difference between ideology and what's possible or feasible. The Stalinist system actually wound down the slave labour camps because slavery is not as profitable as wage labour. The extreme exploitation dreamed about by eugenicists and fascists (and Joe Lancaster) would only be possible after wholescale demolition of all democratic institutions and trade unions. Of course, the right are forever planning such attacks, but the idea that there is no fight and will be no fight is insane.

But … I've got a 'but', see. In writing up my interview with George Clinton, I decided that he was using William Cooper to imagine the horrors of capitalism, so the aesthetic component of conspiracy theory was useful. It might not work as politics but it sure enough works as music and poetry. As Iain Sinclair put it in Downriver about a row of derelicts at a bus stop: "People driven mad by seeing things as they are." To believe that the ruling class actually want the suffering they inflict doesn't tally with the evidence and falls at the hurdle of everyday scepticism, but imagining - for a moment - that they do certainly highlights the enormities their profit system wreaks on the globe. But using a notorious anti-semitic forgery to get there is the cheapest shot, Joe. Moral outrage and horror frisson prevent any investigation of the social object: i.e. sober analysis of capitalist plans, of relations between capital and states, the unpredictable outcome of military action, and the contradictions of the capitalist proces itself (the tendency, as technology replaces labour, of the rate of profit to fall).

When I attended meetings at Conway Hall in 2006 on unreported facts about 9/11 (like many in the German left, I find the idea that the event was staged by the US State fairly plausible), several speakers waxed indignant about the term "conspiracy theory", pointing out that it's simply the way mainstream media denigrate criticism of established interests. True enough. On the other hand, I think your work, Joe, does deserve the term. The organisation of materials is not scrupulous, scholarly, investigative or factual - it's psychotic. Nothing is weighed up in its own terms or subjected to immanent critqiue, everything is pulverised to draw the same sinister logo on the blackboard. In unconnected archival dust. So everything tends towards the identical explanation ("It's the Freemasons!"), even though this conspiracy exists only in fiction. We're back with Eugene Sue (go read The Holy Family by Marx). You cite masonic symbols in Hollywood films (Halloween, p. 111) as though they prove your case, when in fact they're just evidence that Hollywood scriptwriters dip into the same pool of 'scary' stuff as you. Without either academic rigour or serious in-person political debate, everything becomes a solitary pursuit of the 'buzz'. Drugs, porn, conspiracy theory, they're all baubles of consumerism for the immature and lonely, people who can't see they're being strung along.

As Garreth Harris, expert on the BNP and EDL put it to me, "Conspiracy theory is the politics of weakness". It's also plain silly: the ruling class do not need an 'evil theory' to do what they do, for them bombing Yugoslavia or Libya is an 'ethical' act. Certainly, conspiracy theory carries an emotional charge out of all proportion to political understanding or factual evidence. This is because it voices the paranoia induced by social alienation, something happy-clappy 'rational' socialism refuses to do. The Situationists understood this when they invented the concept of the Spectacle, which also articulates feelings of alienation. But it's better than 'the Freemasons', because it doesn't purport to describe the workings of a mysterious group of people which your micro-world 'exposure' can rout: it describes a cultural relation, that of pure consumption. It can link the alienated vision to genuine Marxist analysis. What's confusing about conspiracy theory is that the projection of political weaknes itself becomes a buzz, a commodity. Hence all that action on the Internet. A mum at my daughter's school has fallen for it too. Perhaps I should introduce you! If you found a partner all this crap you spout about there being no monogamy or love left in the world would surely vanish (being a good, hardworking dad with a partner, I live in a world of love and monogamy). Freemasonry and Anarchism is an exciting prospect for a certain kind of a consumer. In this it resembles art, which is why it needs aesthetic appreciation rather than political rebuttal.

Because of course, Joe Lancaster and his postings and Freemasonry and Anarchism would make a great movie. It should be made by the guys who made Memento: the Sheffield maths teacher haunted by skull-and-cross-bone motifs on his pupils' jackets, by Masonic symbols glimpsed on passing vehicles, by Frank Zappa's "baphomet hand signal"; the lone face of rugged individualism and integrity tempted by 13-year-old nymphets with smeared scarlet lipstick and skimpy Halloween rags … It would be entirely comprehensible to Hollywood because the book's governing tensions are crassly Christian (to sin or not to sin), with none of the enlightenment about self and society contributed by Marx and Freud. Shall we work it into a film treatment, Joe? It's much better than that dull Edgar Allen Poe story you sent me.

In War and Peace, with Napoleon's army advancing on Moscow, Pierre's world is falling apart. He goes to his study and writes down the letters 'Napoleon' and 'Bonaparte'. He does a 'numerological' analysis on them and finds - of course - 666, the number of the beast. Tolstoy was portraying social crisis, the regression of a mind at the end of its tether to mystical explanation. You're going through the same thing, Joe. Your refusal (inability?) to enter the strange purple world of middleclass 'educated' bullshit (aka 'postmodernism') has left you high and dry among the underclass losers you get your drugs from, a lone literate individual clutching at ideological straws. But, the Freemasons! If it weren't so sad, it'd be funny. Look, everyone, what deindustrialisation and Internet media have done to the Sheffield working-class, once one of the stoutest bulwarks of socialism! Joe, you are touched. Joe, you are great. Joe, you are mad.

Ben Watson
10-vi-2011