A recurring joke in the movies Indiana Jonesespecially in its third part, The last crusadeis that no matter how much “Professor Jones” insists that the X does not mark the placein his adventures he never stops finding signs that tell him where he has to go to find the Ark of the Covenant, the stones of Ankara, Nurashi, or directly the Holy Grail (among many other things). In the third part of the doctor’s adventures, the “clue” is directly a huge X on the floor of a library in Venice.
They said Deleuze and Guattari that “There is no treasure map, the map is the treasure” and if there is a moment in which this phrase makes complete sense, it is precisely today, with the coordinates changing, with the rise of the extreme right throughout the planet.
Having a map, knowing where the North Star points (that is, not losing your way) is more important than ever. Let’s not forget that, to function, the most important element of a compass is a magnet. Without that magnetic weight that attracts and orients, there is no possible orientation vector. So it is possible that we do need some X Let them mark some maps and point out some treasures.
Only it is possible that the letter we are looking for is not X, but Q.
Q is the title of a novel written by collective identity Luther Blissett in 1999 as the culmination of the Luther Blissett Projectan initiative around the production of myths, guerrilla communication and cultural sabotage. Q It is a novel about peasant revolts, Thomas Muntzerthe Anabaptists and, due to certain rhymes of the time that perhaps are a little lost today, it also seemed to be a reflection of the anti-globalization movement that emerged at the same time as its publication.
Its writers later formed another collective identity called Wu Mingbut at some point during the first (ay) term of donald trump An alleged official from the “Whashington sewer” began posting messages on conspiracy forums signing himself as Q. Was this a new cultural joke by Luther Blissett? Was Qanon’s Q a cultural sabotage device that had gotten out of hand? At all.
On September 20, 2018, Wu Ming 1 gave a lecture on this matter that you can find on Wu Ming’s YouTube channel explaining the event and what he defined as “the paranoid style.” A fabulous and incisive x-ray of how the conspiracy was working on a global level. The paranoid style has well-defined characteristics that separate it from the realm of conspiracy (which is measurable, analysable and has a beginning and an end) and brings it closer to that of perpetual fantasy (whose contours are never clear, in which the emotional replaces the measurable and the conspiracy never seems to end, but has more and more layers and more depth)
The paranoid style is one of the elements that define contemporaneity today. A form of reaction to the complexity of the world in an essentialist and retrograde key, which supposedly seeks point out the dull contours of evilto which he always responds with an ideal image that seeks to recompose a lost order.
I thought about it a week ago when the PSOE approved in its last congress to remove Q from LGTBIQ+ from its ideology and I read one of the promoters of the initiative saying that they were righting something that had been broken. Straightening is certainly an important choice when you are talking about lesbians, gays and transsexuals..
Here the Q, however, is not that of QAnon, but that of Queer. The Q of queer defines another way of being in the present. A form of open identities, inclusive and, therefore, non-paranoid and zero essentialist.
The Q of Queer is the Q opposite to the Q of QAnon, it is the Q of queers, trans people, dykes, intersex people, bisexuals… But also the Q that can house all heterosexual CIS uncles and auntswhich do not fit into the narrow norm with which patriarchy indicates function and form. The norm that dictates who we should be every day.
One of the characteristics that have allowed the PSOE to be the great hegemonic party of Spanish society for a good number of years is that, above all things, it was contemporary. The present cannot be disputed from a place other than that of contemporaneity. Therefore, with this decision, what he does is not deny Q. What he does is completely surrender to the only other contemporary Q, that of the paranoid style. The one that marks the north in the place where they already are Trump, Abascal and Milei.
And for this reason, also, any other north on any other map must pass through the Q that represents freedom, disobedience and diversity. The Q that makes the world wider.
That’s what the present story is about. That’s the X. That’s where the compass points.
#marks #place
