I'm a phony, all right, but I'm a real phony

Pierre Mourier has written about the fetishizing of evidence in one of the chapters in "Blind/Sited", which calls into question the rational excesses of internet evidence and suggests that they produce a kind of stain, which he memorably terms tainted evidence. He also interrogates -- in this particular chapter and in the book as a whole -- the extreme scopophilia of some of the internet's evidentiary fora and sites (lots of really mind-blowing wordplay with site and sight, and even cite, obviously). Anyway, I think it's in the chapter on Holocaust denial ("Holocaust Denial is a River in Egypt") where he talks about the paradox by which the excess of evidentiary spectacle (photos of corpses, gas chambers, etc.) creates a blind spot (or "blind site") into which Holocaust denial can be inserted. Fascinating stuff -- really makes you think about even "evidence" being implicated in the techniques of power.

[I actually posted this comment somewhere in the blogosphere and received an e-mail query from a student doing research on fascist aesthetics. Crazy world.]