Conspiracy Theories, the Passion for the Real, and Revolutionary Subjectivity

 

In November of 2016, a month that lives in infamy, a North Carolina man in his twenties grabbed his guns and drove to Washington DC to “self-investigate” the Comet Ping Pong Pizza Restaurant on Connecticut Avenue. Given that he is by all accounts not an insane person, one can only assume that at some level he actually expected to find a secret chamber under the restaurant where children were imprisoned as part of a global child sex-trafficking ring involving Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, the Obamas and who knows who else. The fake news story that became an outlandish and extravagant conspiracy theory known as “pizzagate” was only months old at this time. It began when Wikileaks published thousands of emails from John Podesta’s hacked account. The massive and indiscriminate dump of Podesta’s emails percolated down to the darkest recesses of the internet and what came gurgling back up was a conspiracy theory linking the Clintons to a worldwide Satanic cabal involving not just pedophilia but also, of course, the end-all-be-all of imagined moral atrocities, the eating of babies.

The number of Youtube videos devoted to pizzagate is surely in the tens of thousands, and I presume these are among the primary vehicles for the propagation of such conspiracy theories. They are excruciating, and horrifying--hours upon hours of shifting screen-grabs overdubbed with the monotonous dronings-on of basement-dwellers about codewords and coverups. “Pizza” means boy. “Map” means girl... Or does it? You can find numerous feature-length exegeses of a two-line email from Podesta to a real estate agent about a handkerchief left on a kitchen island. Podesta said, “don’t worry about it.” What does it mean??! Pixilated images of smiling young children are exhaustively scrutinized for non-existent signs of some concealed torment or imminent threat.“We are getting close to something here,” one Youtuber says, “I don’t know what it is, but it is something Big...”

Explaining conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theories are not new. Those involving the Illuminati, for example, date back to the 1700s. Some scholars trace the western tradition of the conspriacy theory back to the Crucades, and no doubt one could draw out yet more ancient genealogies. However, conspiracism seems to have a special affinity with late modernity. After all, what good is a conspiracy theory, really, in the Gilded Age? Everyone knew who the conspirators were. The Rockefellers. 

It is true, nonetheless, that there were conspiracy theories of wide reach in the 19th century. But conspiracism in the U.S. seems to have crossed a threshold in the 20th century when people began to believe that our own government was involved in the conspiracies at the highest levels. Today the “paranoid style in American Politics” has crossed yet another threshold: our government has been actually infiltrated, not by the long theorized conspirators themselves, but by a coterie of full-blown conspiracy theorists led by Donald Trump. I do not intend hyperbole. Michael Flynn’s own son was stoking the pizzagate fires via Twitter from Trump Tower, and the relatively comforting thought that he was doing this cynically is nothing but wishful thinking. If conspiracy theories have not grown in prevalence, the phenomenon seems at least to have become a more formidable force politically over the past several decades.

Several sociological explanations of the general phenomenon of conspiracy theories have been offered. Perhaps the most compelling general one is that people tend to think in terms of intentional causality, especially when bad things happen. Perhaps in a secular age it is natural for conspiracies of unseen bad actors to take the place of wrathful deities. However, such general explanations do not address the more vexing and more interesting question of why conspiracism seems to have gained salience and influence in late modernity.

The explanation may lie in the very successes of liberal capitalism. We have succeeded in creating a civilization without a single centralized authority. Power is distributed--however unequally, and however one-dimensionally--between a multitude of multitudes: consumers, publics of many sorts, political parties, corporations, clandestine organizations, stockholders, oligarchs, aristocrats, technocrats, autocrats, and of course actual conspirators. Not to mention various “material agents” of significant power recently receiving attention from social theorists: petroleum, infrastructures, glaciers and ocean currents, shipping containers, the internet, psychoactive drugs, and cityscapes. A certain kind of pluralism, not to say democracy or justice, has been achieved. And yet we still feel the boot of power on our necks, perhaps more vividly than ever. So we invent these phantoms of authority and specters of sovereignty. It isn’t oppression that is our true horror, it seems, but having no one to blame for our oppression, just as Nietzsche said.

Although it should be the height of irony, the growing salience and efficacy of elaborately delusional conspiracy theories may be nothing other than the direct result of the information age. The marvelous development of the internet, which reduced the marginal cost of information production to near zero, should have made the world utterly transparent to itself. But instead it has manifested a now fairly well-understood capacity for amplifying error by forging confederacies of far-flung dunces who would otherwise remain isolated in their ignorance. Working with raw cultural materials of more antique provenance, such as apocalyptic religious beliefs and plain old xenophobia, the World Wide Web forged together disparate delusions into what Michael Barkun calls “superconspiracies” linking, for example, UFOs, the Mafia, the Gestapo, and the Wobblies.

Or, perhaps it is the more iconic twentieth century media that are to blame. Conspiracies make a great story, and so late-modern consumers of film and television are steeped in tales of all types of them. But before we blame the Adornian “culture industry” for fostering conspiracism, we should take note of Bruno Latour’s suspicion that critical theory itself shares in the blame. Here is what he wrote in 2004:

Let me be mean for a second. What’s the real difference between conspiracists and a popularized, that is a teachable version of social critique inspired by a too quick reading of, let’s say, a sociologist as eminent as Pierre Bourdieu (to be polite I will stick with the French field commanders)? In both cases, you have to learn to become suspicious of everything people say because of course we all know that they live in the thralls of a complete illusion of their real motives. Then, after disbelief has struck and an explanation is requested for what is really going on, in both cases again it is the same appeal to powerful agents hidden in the dark acting always consistently, continuously, relentlessly. Of course, we in the academy like to use more elevated causes—society, discourse, knowledge-slash-power, fields of forces, empires, capitalism—while conspiracists like to portray a miserable bunch of greedy people with dark intents, but I find something troublingly similar in the structure of the explanation, in the first movement of disbelief and, then, in the wheeling of causal explanations coming out of the deep dark below. What if explanations resorting automatically to power, society, discourse had outlived their usefulness and deteriorated to the point of now feeding the most gullible sort of critique? Maybe I am taking conspiracy theories too seriously, but it worries me to detect, in those mad mixtures of knee-jerk disbelief, punctilious demands for proofs, and free use of powerful explanation from the social neverland many of the weapons of social critique. Of course conspiracy theories are an absurd deformation of our own arguments, but, like weapons smuggled through a fuzzy border to the wrong party, these are our weapons nonetheless. In spite of all the deformations, it is easy to recognize, still burnt in the steel, our trademark: Made in Criticalland.

I think we must take Latour seriously here, perhaps more seriously than he takes himself. There is in any case something of the flavor of the ‘60s counterculture in the conspiracist’s mind--an antipathy to authority, tinged with mysticism. My first hypothesis is that there is a yet deeper connection between the old “New Left” and the growing culture of conpsiracism of our brave new century--a connection which lies in a peculiarly modern “passion for the real.” I am appropriating this concept from Alain Badiou, and it is with only a selective fidelity to his own expositions of it that I aim here to enroll this concept in an exploration of the contemporary politics of truth and falsity.

Passion for the Real 

If conspiracism has a special relationship to the twentieth century, perhaps we should ask about the Zeitgeist of the 20th century itself. Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” depicted the great, violent, aspirational political projects of the 20th century as driven by an ideological commitment to a specific conception of freedom. Without dismissing the importance of this analysis, I read Badiou’s The Century in contrast to Berlin. Where Berlin saw struggles over the meaning of liberty, Badiou sees struggles defined by the “passion du reel.” These revolutionary projects of the twentieth, according to Badiou, aimed at creating a “new man” precisely by means of stripping away the false, the fake, and the superfluous--unmasking the inauthentic, and exposing the real--which is to say, ultimately, exposing the “real world” and revealing the “true man.” 

On its face, Badiou’s characterization of the last century may be questioned on several counts. Wasn’t the politics of the twentieth century really about utopian ideological aspirations--capitalist, communist, nationalist, etc.--rather than realist ones? Wasn’t twentieth century philosophy centered on subjectivity rather than the objectively real? Hasn’t the century closed on a note of religious extremism, nationalism, and conspiracism? Didn’t the post-modernism that characterized the end of the century imply the death of the reality and of truth itself? 

Jean Baudrillard, writing 25 years before the publication of The Century, announced not the love of the real but the “murder of the Real” as the definitive event of at least of the latter decades of the twentieth century. However, Baudrillard can be read as supporting Badiou’s thesis. In the first place, for Badiou the passion for the real actually proceeds in part by way of an obsession with non-reality. He offers the example of the subconscious, our “real self,” which we encounter only through endless exploration of dreams and fantasies, surely the least real of all things. In this way, it is in the moment of catching simulacra in the act of simulation that the real is glimpsed. Perhaps the murder of the real, then, was a crime of passion. Only an age obsessed with “the real” could have eclipsed it so completely, and only with its total eclipse could the obsession with the real reach its frenzied glory.

Baudrillard began Simulation and Simulacra with Borges’ fable of the imperial map-maker whose abstraction was coextensive with the territory itself--a mad, ill-fated project that ends, as the story goes, with only tattered shreds of the great map persisting in the deserts of the former Empire. The point for Baudrillard, though, is to invert the imagery.

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself. 

Baudrillard does not intend to mourn the passing of the Real as something we should try to recover. This was the simplistic misreading that made him greet the Matrix film trilogy, so obviously inspired by his work, with horrified embarrassment. Baudrillard provided a summary of his objections to The Matrix in an interview shortly after its release.

The [characters in The Matrix] are [either] in the matrix, that is, in the digitized system of things; or, they are radically outside it, such as in Zion, the city of resistors. But what would be interesting is to show what happens when these two worlds collide. The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment. This is a serious flaw. The radical illusion of the world is a problem faced by all great cultures, which they have solved through art and symbolization. What we have invented, in order to support this suffering, is a simulated real, which henceforth supplants the real and is its final solution, a virtual universe from which everything dangerous and negative has been expelled. And The Matrix is undeniably part of that. Everything belonging to the order of dream, utopia and phantasm is given expression, “realized.” We are in the uncut transparency. The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce. 

The Matrix gets it exactly wrong, then; the desert of the real is not the harsh, perilous, unvarnished “true” world outside all socially produced simulacra. The desert of the real is the desertion, the total absence of the real, artificially accomplished. The point is not to escape simulacra. Every good post-modernist knows that. The point, for Baudrillard, is rather to recover something, for example, of true symbolic art in place of hyperrealistic cinema, to recover something of true mythology in place of our photographic and digitized version of history, and to recover the symbolic social somehow before or beyond the hyperreal second nature of the market society. And yet, within Baudrillard’s sophisticated analysis there is also an affective undercurrent that itself partakes of a passion for the real. In one sense the hyperreal is a critical concept that takes aim at passionate realism. And yet, in the structure of Baudrillard’s critique the concept leads a double life, denoting also the ultimate deception--the ultimate “liberal bubble” outside of which the radically different, radically real world awaits. And ultimately isn’t it the case that the real is given its seductive outlines mostly by its opposite, by illusion, simulation, and deception? And if the hyper-real is more real than real, it is also thereby a hyper-deception--a greater deception than deception. The desert of the real in Baudrillard’s sense is not the outside of artifice, but it is a place of non-life, a place of the non-lived. Here “people no longer look at each other,” he writes, “but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other but there is contactotherapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc.” Can we truly avoid the idea that the real of the authentically “lived” lies somewhere beneath or beyond this hyper-real, awaiting rediscovery?

Perhaps there is something ungenerous and even shameful about the way Baudrillard disowned The Matrix--like Rousseau sending his children off to the orphanage. But his reading of The Matrix as a production of hyperreality rings true. The cheapest thrill of the film is our emergence with Neo from the everyday--where we pay our rent on time, take out the elderly neighbor’s garbage...--into the dystopian “desert of the real,” as Morpheus calls it. This is the “desert of the real” that we love. Or do we? Perhaps what we really love is the moment of emergence into the real. Or better yet, isn’t the real thrill, in fact, being in the matrix while subverting it? What we really want is to be chasing the real, on the trail of the real, glimpsing the matrix as the matrix, catching the non-real in the act of dissimulation (as Badiou suggests), along with our comrades-in-arms perhaps. There exists a desire to be in that socially produced, revolutionary subject position. Baudrillard prefers The Minority Report, The Truman Show, and Mullholland Drive because these films avoid simplistic Platonism, meditating instead on the entanglements of a reality suffused with abstraction all the way down. But The Matrix tells us something about the passionate appeal of the Real that the others don’t. 

Baudrillard may shed light on the passion for the real whether or not there is a subterranean passionate realism operating in his work. For Baudrillard, the eclipse of the real by simulation is primarily chalked up to ubiquitous commodification, the rise of mechanical reproduction, electronic media, etc. In this way Baudrillard’s critique can be read as an update of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. With Debord a passion for the real is even closer to the surface. Debord’s “spectacle” is the commodification of the life-world itself; with its real use value--it’s “lived” reality--lying beneath the mere appearance of exchange value. “The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous moving of the non-living.”

As a critical concept, “spectacle” bespeaks the falsity of appearance, and registers a certain distrust of vision in particular. Although in everyday speech vision often stands in for perception in general--”I see what you mean,” etc.--there is also a long tradition of distrusting vision as the most suspect of the senses, the least immediate, and most easily deceived. After all, even the light which strikes the eye is a trickster--willfully deceiving us as both wave and particle. Debord writes, “Since the spectacle’s job is to use various specialised mediations in order to show us a world that can no longer be directly grasped, it naturally elevates the sense of sight to the special pre-eminence once occupied by touch: the most abstract and easily deceived sense is the most readily adaptable to the generalised abstraction of present day society.” 

It is no coincidence that Debord’s critical project insisted on action over speech, the creation of “situations” over doctrine, and the performance of detournement over the production of traditional visual art. The performative techniques of detournement and especially the Situationist derive, a purposely disoriented and distracted way of occupying the cityscape, are about recovering the real. But the real in a particular sense, which I propose to call the “phenomenal real.” And here is the connection with authenticity, and again with the passion for the real as a desire for a certain kind of subject position. The tactile and the haptic are privileged--embodied action is at once the surest form of communion with the real and the surest way to authentic revolutionary subjectivity. No pure psycho-thriller like Mullholland Drive could have the success of The Matrix franchise, or Avatar, or Fight Club; these were action films.

The Phenomenal Real

Let us suppose the passion for the real is part of the era of simulation, or the result of the explosion of electronic media, or of mechanized commodification run amok. If so, it seems to be overdetermined, because this modern passion for the real also has a philosophical genealogy. Particularly through the phenomenological tradition beginning with Edmund Husserl. What is momentous about Husserl’s philosophy is that he breaks with the philosophical tradition of seeking the real through propositional truth or universal grand theory. Husserl’s real is rather immanent to perception. Thus the Husserlian project is not to seek religious conversion or engineer a logical system ‘behind’ perception, nor to ‘use’ perception for an empirical project of building an edifice of accurate observations. Rather the point is to perfect the moment of perception itself. Here is the significance, in my reading, of the epoche; it marks the beginning of the phenomenal real. 

This Husserlian project quickly became a cultural and genealogical one with Martin Heidegger, for whom perception is perfected not only through a kind of psycho-philosophical “inner work” but also crucially through material praxis--particularly for Heidegger, agrarian praxis. In Heidegger’s Being in Time as well as his later work, the theme of authenticity, which is only nascent in Husserl, is fully formed and is connected with the ideal of truth through the vicissitudes of perception. Thus, in Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger could pose the following question, which is by no means peripheral to his grand philosophical project: “...a distant mountain range under a vast sky--such a thing ‘is.’ What does its Being consist in? When and to whom does it reveal itself? To the hiker who enjoys the landscape, or to the peasant who makes his daily living from it and in it, or to the meteorologist who has to give a weather report?” It is a question of finding the modality of praxis that paves the way to the phenomenal real.

In this way, Heidegger prefigures a kind of philosophical pastoralism that became prominent in critical environmental thought in the latter half of the twentieth century. Consider the following passages from the work of the influential agrarian nature writer Wendell Berry, for whom embodiment and performance are deeply implicated in projects of recovering the real by modulating perception.

Wilderness is the element in which we live encased in civilization, as a mollusk lives in his shell in the sea. ... And so [by walking in the woods] what I have done is strip away the human facade that usually stands between me and the universe, and I see more clearly where I am... I am afoot in the woods. I am alive in the world, this moment, without the help or the interference of any machine. I can move without reference to anything except the lay of the land and the capabilities of my own body. The necessities of foot travel in this steep country have stripped away all superfluities. ...I am aware that I move in the landscape as one of its details.

Common to both Heidegger’s philosophy and many environmental critiques is an ideal--or perhaps we should even call it a fantasy or dream--of being more truly in and of the world. It takes its force in part from the complementary notion that otherwise our existence is somehow false, unreal, inauthentic, or not “lived”--that we are not truly alive, aware, or awake to the world. It is a dream that is expressed largely through a continual conjuring--performing and narrating--of the moment of awakening, a kind of conversion to the phenomenal real. Hannah Arendt, speaking about the experience of attending Heidegger’s early lectures, said it was as if he were opening the door to a hidden world, his beautiful secret philosopher’s kingdom. 

Baudrillardian critique becomes at least somewhat compelling when we reflect on this concern at a certain critical distance. It can seem very peculiar, and it seems to be particularly associated with modernity, perhaps with Western modernity. Were it only a philosophical conceit, we might blame Renè DesCartes and be done. But the manifestations of this passion for the real, and its obverse which we might call a malaise of the non-real, seem broader than would be explained merely by the development of philosophical ideas.

The connection to critique is clear. Those who advance this ideal of the phenomenal real have a kinship with other critical figures such as Cynics, revolutionaries, and prophets, as well as the Platonic philosopher who has privileged access to truth--who dispels illusions and awakens the people from their dogmatic slumber. But the crucial difference between the classical figure of the Platonic philosopher or the Prophet of God and this modern existential concern is that with the former the touchstone of truth is transcendent--God or eternal forms or the laws of Nature. With the latter, the touchstone of truth or the real is immanent--it is the “lived environment” (which curiously implies there can be another kind of environment). The task of the critic or revolutionary here, then, is to live the environment--to perform the environment as lived. Which means to take up a critical subject-position bodily. 

Realpolitik, violence, and the phenomenal real

One way of performing the real is through violence. Indeed this may be the surest way. There is always a kernel of violence within performances of the phenomenal real. There is a mortal concern grounding all “work” in Heidegger. “Being towards death” is in the slow plodding steps of Heidegger’s peasant woman in her old shoes, in the labors of the carpenter shingling a steep roof against the German snows. There is a kind of violence in the Situationists’ derive and detournement, in the sense that the codes of conduct written into the capitalist built environment are violated. There is violence even in Wendell Berry’s nature walks: the necessities of foot travel, and the stripping away of the body’s protective barriers.

The connection between violence and the Real is a predominant theme in Slavoj Zizek’s readings of Jacques Lacan. With Zizek, “the Real” approaches the romantic notion of the sublime. It is that which confounds and transcends categories, language, and perhaps thought itself. This reading is compelling in the context of certain brands of Realpolitik or political “realism.” Realism’s defining feature (as a theory of international politics) is the inside/outside divide. Inside the state is the national community; outside is anarchy, the state of nature, the world of war. Foreign policy realists like Dick Cheney are every bit as passionate about anarchy as the guys dressed in black throwing man-hole covers through Starbucks’ windows. 

Anarchy here is the real, the “great outside” to use Maillasoux’s term. It is the realm of action. The inside-outside divide is an affectively charged conceptual frame that has an important spatial instantiation today at the national border. But it also transects the polity and the psyche in various ways. It divides those who are wise to the conspiracy from the dupes. It divides open carry and concealed carry enthusiasts from the pathetically naive, unarmed masses living in their liberal bubbles. There is a “color code” that is familiar to advocates of gun rights in the U.S.--a version of what is called the “Cooper code.” Living “in the yellow” means being on alert, being prepared. You switch to the orange when danger appears, red when it strikes. But you should live in the yellow. You can’t live in the orange all of the time. That would be pathological paranoia. But far more contemptible than paranoia is living in the white zone, where most people live, unprepared, unarmed, and un-vigilant. Only those who live in the yellow are living in the real world. How can you be sure you are really living? Get a gun, and carry it. Bearing arms is not only about power, sovereignty, and masculinity, it is also about the Real. 

Donald Trump’s rhetoric on torture, which forms part of his “realist,” or perhaps hyperrealist stance on foreign policy and national security, serves a similar purpose. Trump has all but celebrated torture and its ‘obvious’ efficacy as a tool of national security. But the point of his taking this position is not to get results, in terms of extracting actionable intelligence from detainees. Trump himself seems to have little use for intelligence anyway. But casually condoning torture marks Donald Trump, or others of like disposition such as Dick Cheney, as dwellers in the real world, outside the bubble of the polity. Realpolitik, I am suggesting, is less an ideology than a subject position. And the performance of this subject position, I would further suggest, is a significant part of contemporary conspiracism. 

The gender dynamics of this species of realism are hard to miss. What is perhaps most important, though, is the way this chauvanism is marshaled to a disparagement of democracy. Domestic democratic politics is feminized here before a misogynist gaze, and politics itself as the stuff of the inside of the polis is held in contempt. The realm of action is outside, beneath, or behind the surface or spectacle of politics. The contemporary resonance of this view is indicated in unmistakable fashion by the commercial success of the latest and greatest digitized hyperreal drama, House of Cards. The blood leaking from beneath Frank Underwood’s hands in the cover shot tells us we are in for something real.

Conclusion

With these explorations my aim is to investigate a possible link, at the level where ideology and affect meet, between the contemporary infiltration of conspiracism into the highest office of the land and a certain brand of Realpolitik meant largely for domestic consumption. By way of a modest conclusion, let us place this constellation of ideas and affects in the context of classical republican thought, particularly as understood in the work of Hannah Arendt. No one will accuse classical republicanism as an historical political tradition of excessive pacifism. And yet the militarist, realist posturing in today’s politics bring an ethos of violence to politics in a way that is alien to the republican tradition. Ancient Greek culture was as thoroughly masculinist as any Iron Age warrior society, and the inside-outside distinction was of paramount importance for the Greek polis. However, in Arendt’s interpretation at least, the distinction between inside and outside supports a very different relationship to politics. The Greek polis was first and foremost a realm of action. It was, more specifically, a space to safeguard the “speaking of great words and the doing of great deeds.” It is interesting to note here that Athenian executions used bloodless techniques, hemlock or strangulation primarily. It seems this was intended precisely to distinguish politics from war and the inside of the polis from outside--a distinction, however, which marks a respect rather than contempt for politics, understood here in Arendt’s Aristotelian sense of “judicious exchange of opinion about public life and the common world.” Perhaps we could chalk the difference up to the fact that Athenians had more direct experience with war and anarchy than Trump and Cheney.

In a similar way to Badiou, perhaps, I am wary of dismissing the passion for the real even if it proves to be a time-bound phenomenon. I too am passionate about the real. But here is another way Arendt may be instructive. Arendt had her own form of political realism, which is closely connected to her concept of “world alienation.” The mood of Arendt’s critiques shares much with Debord and other twentieth century social theorists. She lamented the mindless automaticity of “mass society” in which the private sphere of production and consumption--work life and home life--eclipsed the public sphere of meaningful action and real, fully formed, public life. But with Arendt there is a crucial difference. Here, the eclipse of the real, which she depicts as alienation from the world, is the eclipse of politics. The real, for Arendt, is revealed, enacted, or achieved intersubjectively, which is to say politically, through the public exchange of ethical, political, and aesthetic judgements on consequential matters.

It may be that it is this loss of a realm of meaningful agency in the world that fires the engines of both the conspiracism and the hyper-Realpolitik posturings of Trumpism. As David Fincher, the director of Fight Club, said, “the [compromise] of real life as modern man knows it [is]: You’re not really necessary to a lot of what’s going on. It’s built, it just needs to run now. Thank you very much, here’s your Internet access.”

Jake Greear, 2017