Things have been very quiet on the Idle Toil front over the past month or so. There are reasons for this; I've been engaged in a lot of personal and job-related matters, and I'm re-modelling my bedroom, which has cut off my access to books, art materials and my main desktop computer. All this has left me in something of a creative rut.
I have though, finally, decided on the topic and title of my next major artist's book. Finally, without the artificial deadline of a submission date, I hope to be able to really get every detail of this work absolutely perfect; I suspect it may end up taking a year or more to complete to my satisfaction. It's title (for the moment) is: CONSPIRACY PROTOCOLS.
This will be a book about conspiracism, a topic of deep and perennial fascination to me. It will explore conspiracism not just as a political, social or historical phenomenon, but also as a body of literature, as a belief system, and as an aesthetic. Particularly, it will explore the emergence, in the internet age, of a culture of conspiracy that transcends certain traditional political boundaries. It will explore the fascinating connections between conspiracism and western esotericism, and the concept of conspiracism as a branch of occultism.
It has become apparent in recent years that previous attempts at understanding conspiracism are becoming inadequate in the 21st century. It now seems inadequate to view conspiracism as a 'paranoid style' applied to other political movements; increasingly conspiracism is becoming an end unto itself; a total ideology with common features that unite adherents on the far left and the far right, creating a world of political slippage where Noam Chomsky and Francis Yockey can be quoted side by side. A shadowy world of con-artists, entryists, manipulators, demagogues, visionaries, cultists, rogue academics, double-crossers and esotericists more murky and fascinating than the shadowy conspiracies that obsess its adherents. Central to it all is an occult belief system that combines elements of new age philosophies, psychoanalysis, gnosticism and apocalyptic christianity: a system of secret powers, secret symbols, rituals, mind-control and technological magic. It shall be an interesting ride.
