The Metastases of Alterity: Cacognosis in 12.21

Fig 1. How to criticize with an automatic

When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.

Baudrillard, Simulations 

(Taken from Helguera, "Polyvalent Spaces: The Postmodern Wunderkammer and the Return of Ambiguity")

But at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing. Results, I am certain, are so thorough that no public harm save a shock of repulsion could ever accrue from a hinting of what was found by those horrified men... Besides, what was found might possibly have more than one explanation. I do not know just how much of the whole tale has been told even to me, and I have many reasons for not wishing to probe deeper. For my contact with this affair has been closer than that of any other layman, and I have carried away impressions which are yet to drive me to drastic measures.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth 

I

One might summarize many previous contributions to this forum, and the unpublished work on which they have been based, by defining the symbological novel as a narrative machine for colonizing alterity with normality which is a late emanation of the European encounter with the New World.  Correspondingly, one might gloss many previous analyses of the positions available to the Symbologist by saying that mythognosis corresponds to awareness of alterity, orthognosis to denial of alterity, and cacognosis to engagement with alterity.  The plot of every symbological novel charts the progression of the Symbologist from mythognosis through cacognosis to redemption by orthognosis, which is to say from incurious awareness of alterity to engagement with its substantive particulars, followed by redemption through a formal repudiation of its Otherness.  (As Twinglebrook-Hastings recently pointed out, this is why they have them in airports.)

I will flesh out this concise schema a little, for the sake of the new readers who, no doubt, flock daily to this blog; I hope the old hands will forgive me.  This is how it works: 

The Symbologist initially regards the Object to which the Code refers as existing, but being of mere academic curiosity (e.g. Langdon's initial attitude to the Illuminati in DVC).  The action of the novel begins when events force the Symbologist to regard the Code and its Object (both of which should be understood to stand for the “Other” in the postcolonial sense) as being of practical importance.  Crucially, these events are always caused by cacognosis, and are typically the personal doing of actually cacognostic characters.  It is engagement with alterity, which is to say flirtation with cacognosis, which drives the mythognostic Symbologist from his accustomed indifférance.  For example, in TLS (as Bremselhacker has noted,) all of  the arch-cacognostic Mal’Akh’s activities constitute a performance whose only conceivable audience is the Symbologist, and whose sole object is to convince the Symbologist of its own relevance.  Langdon's intrigue actually generates each subsequent performances, exacerbating the eruption of cacognosis.  

In all symbological novels, the unraveling of the Code prompted by the supervention of alterity (i.e., cacognosis,) leads to one of two possible conclusions

1. The Object is a source of dangerous alterity.  In this case, it is invariably destroyed.  This is common in the Reillyan vein of symbologic fiction, and has also been observed by Twinglebrook-Hastings in Brown’s pre-symbological work Deception Point.
2. The Object turns out not to be a source of dangerous alterity, but to have been misinterpreted as such by the cacognostic (typically because he “took it literally”).  Instead, it turns out to be a metaphorical representation of some commonplace feature of the Symbologist’s ideological landscape.  This is the usual conclusion of classical symbologic novels (e.g. PYR, DVC, TLS, TGK).

Strategy #2 is, as Simon Schaffer has brilliantly demonstrated in his Tarner Lecture "An Antique Land," has its origins in the colonial literature of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, which persistently sought to characterize colonization as a form of return by locating the precursors of the colonists’ greatest achievements (e.g. meridian astronomy) in the immemorial past of the colonized people.  It is also widely observable in other contemporary cultural products such as von Daniken/Tsoukalos’ History Channel series Ancient Aliens and neurosymbological works like James Cameron’s Avatar. 

Fig 2. Cacognosis

The progression of the Symbologist through a series of relations to alterity is the backbone of the symbological novel, and is analogous in its strict formality and propaedeutic intent to the Medieval morality play.  It is on this basis that symbological fiction generally has been characterized as a reaction to postmodernity, broadly understood to include all manifestations of postcolonialism and poststructuralism, those Hellmouths which endlessly unleash coruscating swarms of alterities.  Within Symbologist's renunciation of the postmodern condition, cacognosis plays the role of the Devil in the Temptation of Christ (Matt 4:1-10): it is the force which tempts the Symbologist from the path of righteousness, and its rejection constitutes his redemption.

This functional characterization of cacognosis does not exhaust the subject, but is essential to a close reading of 12.21; the novel lacks a cacognostic character in the usual sense, but cacognosis plays its usual role nothetheless.  

Thomason has only one important cacognostic character, Chel’s mentor and surrogate father Victor Cranning.  Unlike Mal’Akh, Teabing, Bezumov, Senator Kurtz, or any of the other cacognostics familiar from the classics of the genre, Cranning is very nearly irrelevant to the plot; he does not set its events in motion personally, nor does he have have the usual cat-and-mouse relation to the Symbologist.  It is not his activity which motivates the transition from awareness to engagement for Chel or Stanton.  However, as St. Basil tells us, "by this silence, history wishes to train the activity or our intelligence, giving it a weak point for starting, to impel it to the discovery of the truth" (Hexaemeron 1:3).  Cranning is a tiny piece of flotsam whose course allows us to deduce the direction of the great whorl of cacognosis.

2

Cranning trains the activity of our intelligence in two important respects, one direct; the other indirect.

First, he directly confirms that cacognosis tout court is to be identified with postmodernity.  We initially encounter him in what Pablo Helguera calls a "postmodern Wunderkammer:" the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which is described (by Thomason) as follows:

The Museum intentionally obscured the lines between fact and fiction.  Part of the fun was trying to figure out which exhibits were real.  Still, Chel was philosophically ambivalent about a place that inspired concusion and defied logic.  Not to mention how uncomfortable she was with the exhibit her old mentor was putting up there. (123).

The exhibit turns out to be a representation of the four races of man allegedly described in Mayan cosmology.  Its fixation with indexical, immediate relations of signification (each piece is a sculpture of the human form in the medium allocated by Mayan cosmology to the respective race of man, e.g. corn, chicken bones, etc.) is instantly reminiscent of the logic of spirit animal assignation Thomas imputes to contemporary Guatemalan peasants:

A man’s wayob was a symbol of who he was: the brave man, like a king, was a jaguar; the funny man, a howler monkey; the slow man, a turtle. (72)

Cranning's work is, to filch a Hesperidean apple from the garden of Brown himself, "symbologically perfect": it refuses all forms of signification other than the indexical, and its referents belong to autochthonous myth.  However, the point is clearly that despite it’s symologic orthodoxy, Cranning’s exhibit qua engagement with the Other is cacognosis and therefore belongs in a sanctum of postmodernity which “intentionally obscured the lines between fact and fiction."  It is precisely because Cranning seeks to understand (which in symbological fiction means also “to emulate”) the Other that he counts as postmodern, and cacognostic.

Fig 3. Alleged physician; total douchebag.

The second, sense in which Cranning trains our intelligence is indirect, for the primary manifestation of cacognosis in 12.21 is not Cranning personally, but rather the the plague itself, Thomason’s stupid, fictitious prion disease “VFI.”  VFI is, in fact, so stupid in its particulars, that its invention by someone who claims at some point to have attended a medical school somewhere must signal a deliberate allegory in which the signifier is writing checks the referent cannot honor.  And indeed, if we attend to the morphology and functionality of VFI, we discover some salient facts supporting this deduction: 

First, VFI is acquired by contact with the Code (in this case, the codex); crucially, it is only acquired by cacognostic contact with the code.  Chel’s orthognostic uncle found the hidden city, but was spared because his only motivation was nationalist pride and respect for is ancestors.  On the other hand, Volcy, who “let the white man’s obsession with the Long Count compel him to sacrifice the honor of his ancestors” (76, read: “let the white man’s engagement with his alterity compel him to tempt them with it) is afflicted.  According to the strict constraints of the symbological novel, the Symbologist is the only subject; all other characters are allegorical representations, so the only possibility for an orthognostic, like Volcy, who flirts with cacognosis is annihilation.  (This is, incidentally, why in novels with a cacognostic character the copout always results in the cacognostic's death, and why that death is nearly always an act of nature rather than of any other character.  For the cacognostic to survive the copout, he would have to change his relation to alterity, which is only possible for the Symbologist.)

Fig. 4. The workings of ideology made visible.

Second, the plague, like cacognosis, is transmitted by the organs of vision and causes fatal insomnia.  One need hardly point out that this is a precise reversal of John Carpenter’s acerbic critique of ideology in the film They Live, which imagines a universe where magical sunglasses make ideology visible and stop subjects from functioning "all by themselves." Thomason instead enjoins us to don "eye covers" when faced with the Other, and prove our sanity by our ability to sleep.  

Third, the equation of VFI with cacognosis is confirmed by the means of its control.  Early on, Thomason says that "LAPD had been called in to stop the metastasizing press."  This seems a bizarre metaphor, particularly for an alleged doctor, until juxtaposed with the only other reference to metastasis in 12.21: 

It's like a cancer.  Even if it's metastasized, you remove the tumor at its original site so it doesn't spread further.  We need to know what it is and how it started to have any chance of fighting it. (121)

This is, of course, true neither of cancer nor of prion disease, but it is true of cacognosis, as is roundly demonstrated by every other symbological novel; the redemption of the Symbologist always consists in locating the source of cacognosis (which is typically seated in an individual like Mal'Akh, Teabing, or Bezumov,) and extirpating it by one of the two means described above.

Fig 5. Cacognosis.

The answers to Stanton's two questions, i.e. "what it is" and "how it started" provide the final proof of the equation of cacognosis with alterity.  As I think I've demonstrated, what VFI is is cacognosis.  Where it started is a little more complex: its proximal cause is cannibalism (that perennial symbol of cultural alterity, ascribed at various times to basically everyone encountered by Europeans leaving Europe over the last five hundred years); but its ultimate cause, as Volcy explicitly tells us, is the cacognosis of people like Victor Cranning. 

3

This line of enquiry leads to the final question I will attempt to answer in this post, which concerns the role of what we have been calling "vulgar economic determinism" in 12.21.  In the (now lamentably remote) last post on this blog, Bremselhacker gave a compelling account of the complementary means by which classical ("strong") symbology and para-symbological discourses such as David Brooks saccharine and obnoxious neurosymbology ("weak symbology") serve to re-contain the Symbologist (and the reader) as subjects constituted strictly by the pedestrian ideology of modern techno-capitalism.  

The entire essay rewards re-reading, but the element I wish to build on here is his claim that in strong symbology, the suspension of VED as the sole conceivable basis for human behavior renders the mythognostic Symbologist opaque to himself because it ostends the possibility of a transcendent subjectivity.  Once Langdon begins to believe in the possibility that the Grail exists, it "changes everything," and causes him to ask whether "you realize the implications this could have?!"  This moment is exactly coincident with the appearance of cacognosis, which is to say, alterity.  That is because they are the same narrative gesture.   

(As an aside, this ontologic failure of self-transparency is impossible in weak symbology, because the economy of truth is different in that "science" is never called into question; the subject of weak symbology is not self-transparent, but his recovery consists in discovering that science has accounted or his non-transparency by proving the phenomenologic monotony of VED).

What Thomason's awful book allows us to see, then, is the true nature of cacognosis.  In strong symbology, the mythognostic Symbologist is tempted by the possibility of a transcendant subjectivity (i.e., one which transcends VED) but redeemed by the revelation that the signs of the Other were only metaphors for the himself (i.e., VED).  The cacognostic, on the other hand, is an actually transcendent subject, who actually refuses VED.  (This is why cacognosis is always Orientalized.)  Examples abound, from Silas' asceticism to Mal'akh's tattoos, but the purest example I can call to mind is Victor Cranning, whose animating goal is to obtain the priceless commodity, remove it from the circuits of capital, and remove himself from society in order to enact a radical alternative to the present order.

And what, exactly, is the transcendent possibility represented by cacognosis?  This is precisely the point: you, the reader, and he, the Symbologist, can never know, because to tell you would subvert the entire function of symbological narrative.  The cacognostic cannot speak.   This is why Martin's Ahmed Aziz, and, for that matter, Chel and Stanton, cannot even parrot existing orthodoxy in their disciplines.  To do so would contravene the necessity of preserving, as Twinglebrook-Hastings has put it, "the existing order of things that the symbological narrative functions to maintain while absorbing anything subversive."  Even actually existing academic consensus represents a tentacle of the alterity, the suppression of which is the primary histologic commitment of the symbological novel.  

So, in the end, Thomason leaves one feeling a bit like Odin.  Reading his second and, (pray God) final offering may be phenomenologically indistinguishable from having one's eye gouged out; but the prize of knowledge demands sacrifice.