"What we are giving you are the facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
-- U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell addressing the U.N. Security Council, Feb. 5, 2003
The title, Phantom Truck, plays on the paradox contained in the etymology of the word 'phantom,' which comes from the ancient Greek for
both 'to make present to the eye' and 'mere appearance'. The second meaning was taken up in the Latin phantasma, meaning 'illusion,'
and from there evolved into the contemporary English usage of 'phantom,' for anything dubious, including the 'ghost' or 'apparition,' which in
turn brings us back to the idea of making visible.
Powell's slide presentation to the U.N. and subsequent revelations re-trace this etymological and epistemological circle, in which we move
from visualization through illusion to the lie revealed.
This paradox, that the same word indicates both that which is visible and that which is untrue or deceptive, grows organically from the
Platonic metaphysics of Ideas or Forms as the pure, transcendent sources of being and all that participates in said Forms as 'mere
appearances.' In this philosophy, to put it somewhat simplistically, all that we can see is, by default, less than true. In Plato's model, the
movement is unilateral: the Idea always precedes, provides the ground for and, in this sense, legitimates the appearance. Yet, it's worth
noting that in Plato's myth of the cave, it is the very light of the Ideas that casts these 'shadows on the wall', so that, in a sense, the Ideas
participate in the fraud of these apparitions.
The ontological cycle traced by Colin Powell's presentation reverses or inverts the proper metaphysical circuit. In the place of the
unchanging Idea, it substitutes the Phantasm. Here, Plato's simple progression is diverted through a series of mis-directions: an idea is
fabricated about a truck, which then becomes 'intelligence', which in turn becomes a virtual representation (i.e. a PowerPoint presentation),
only later 'discovered' in the desert and retroactively identified as the actual object (literally a re-presentation that precedes its
presentation), which is then revealed to be, in fact, a mis-representation and, finally, only as art, is it given actual form. That is to say, the
'fabrication' is now itself fabricated. No longer evidence of a supposed 'truth', the phantom honestly presents itself as a mere
representation --that is to say, The Lie.
And this is just exactly what Plato warned us about art.