Conspiring (Sympnea and Dyspnea)

Abstract

Conspiracy has probably become one of the key notions—or fantasies—of our times. Conspiracy, in the modern acceptation of the word, as in “conspiracy theory,” has not only filled the mediasphere in which we live and breathe but it has also overshadowed—maybe we should say repressed—its ancient meaning. Surprisingly, this forgotten sense was revived on a poster lithographed by Andy Warhol in 1969 for a group exhibition in a Chicago gallery. The poster was meant to benefit the legal defense fund for the Chicago Seven (who were charged by the federal government with conspiracy for organizing anti-Vietnam War protests). Warhol used the image of an electric chair (as he did in a series of paintings titled Little Electric Chairs in 1964-5) and he printed the following words over it: “conspiracy means to breathe together.” The remarks that follow are a first attempt to attune our ears to what this largely buried meaning bears as a future-in-the-past. Unearthing the forgotten resonances of conspiracy as co-inspiring could certainly be described as an archaeological gesture. But since my excavation aims at finding something hidden in what we think of (reductively) as the most immaterial (or subtle) of media, i.e., air or the atmosphere, it could also be characterized as anarchaeological, as a sort of reversed or upside-down archaeology, directed upwards, towards the unground of the aerial. The very possibility of breathing, and breathing together, has maybe never seemed as fragile as now, after a coronavirus pandemic (with face masks and ventilator shortages), after the culmination of decades of racist chokeholds by law-enforcement in the United States and elsewhere, after more than a century of airpocalyptic smog episodes worldwide (the word “smog” was coined in 1904 by the Treasurer of the Coal Smoke Abatement Society to designate the “London particular” which “consists much more of smoke than of true fog,” while “airpocalypse” appeared in 2013 to refer to record atmospheric pollution in Beijing).1 How do we still breathe and share breath, when and if we do?