Prior to this work, the little I knew about QAnon was against my will, and I was fine to keep it that way. However, it feels like an essential belief system to look at if I’m going to try and make an analysis of constructions of reality right now, and particularly of ones that effectively employ the affective qualities of transmedia storytelling to manipulate belief.
When I ask people what they know about QAnon, it’s usually a similar amount of information to what I’d had, acquired non-consensually through the media during Trump’s presidency. Something about “Pizzagate”, a cannibalistic cabal, and middle aged white women going down rabbit holes with YouTube’s predatory algorithm playing the White Rabbit. What isn’t given to these believers, at least in the majority of conversations I’ve had, is any semblance of agency. Clearly, they must be stupid.
It’s not untrue that the United States has a critical thinking problem, our structures of capitalism and white supremacy are dependent on that; and our public school systems perpetuate it by only working to ensure that young people become good workers and unquestioning consumers. But what makes this narrative so easy to step into that (per one study) nearly one in five Americans still believed in QAnon in 2022, despite multiple sources, including forensics linguistics teams, having identified “Q” as a couple administrators of 8chan (rather than a mysterious, high-clearance, rogue government agent)?
In Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie, specifically the chapter “Approaching the Eerie”, Fisher defines the eerie as, “constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence” —using a crow’s “eerie” cry, signifying some form of unseen intent beyond what one would associate with a bird, as an example of the failure of absence; and Stonehenge as an example of the failure of presence, because the context required to read the object and understand the questions of why/how it exists have fallen away, despite the object’s physical presence.
What this builds toward is Fisher’s assertion that, “Since the eerie turns crucially on the problem of agency, it is about the forces that govern our lives and the world. It should be especially clear to those of us in a globally tele-connected capitalist world that those forces are not fully available to our sensory apprehension. A force like capital does not exist in any substantial sense, yet it is capable of producing practically any kind of effect”.
What this recognizes is the affective structural and cultural undercurrents that inform how we feel in our bodies, but may unsettle if they are not able to be seen or understood. Clearly, something is wrong.
Fisher notes that, “...the eerie necessarily involves forms of speculation and suspense … once the questions and enigmas are resolved, the eerie immediately dissipates”. What happens then, when the antidote to the unease is knowledge, but we lack an agreed-upon understanding of what is real or what is at play in the construction of our realities within that “knowledge” resides? What if, instead of an understanding of the underlying systems of our society, the eerie is eroded by a misdirecting narrative, like QAnon?
What’s even more dangerous about QAnon, I think, is that it offers just enough vague information (or sometimes just the suggestion of knowledge, or a map for easily produced patterns), that an element of the eerie is resolved, but enough of it remains that the brain latches on, seeking more scraps, which QAnon continuously promises, even in “Q’s” periods of silence.