• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
Download
 
Conspiracy Thinking and Conspiracy Studying
By Alasdair Spark http://www2.winchester.ac.uk/ccc/resources/essays/thinkstudy.htmIn July 1997 the supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary included the term'conspiracy theory' for the first time. This was a recognition that in recent yearsconspiracy has become increasingly popular as an explanation for unfolding events, mostovertly in the United States. Whether it be widely held beliefs about the KennedyAssassination, a government cover-up of extra-terrestial contact, claims made by Patriotmilitia groups about a 'New World Order' and an imminent United Nations takeover,African-American suspicions of a deliberate programme to flood the ghetto with drugs,the popularity of The X-Files or the speculations found in the National Enquirer or on theInternet, all point to conspiracy as a discourse which is now fully part of the public realm,and a popular cultural manifestation which is symptomatic of contemporary concerns.For those of us engaged in study, such populist conspiracy surely needs to be understoodin terms beyond the two poles usually charged with meaning: as the collective 'paranoia'of Right Wing extremists (the psychological model originated by Richard Hofstadter'sstudy of the 1950s), or as the irrationality and gullibility of an under-educated public (asCarl Sagan recently asserted in The Demon Haunted World (1996)). Instead, tounderstand the extensive popularity of conspiracy and what it means for thecontemporary United States, we need to understand the methodology, appeal, andmetaphor which mark this attempt to narrativise the confusions and complexities of thelate Twentieth century. An awareness of this, in effect of the internalised logics of conspiracy theory - 'conspiracism' - ought to make scholars consider why conspiracy has become so prevalent - and in effect so liberated - since the late 1980s?Issues of knowledge, secrecy and power do have to be admitted, in which the possibilitiesand appeal of conspiracy thinking as a genuine uncovering of secrets and a revelation of authority are apparent. But on its own, this approach would serve only to legitimatecertain conspiracy thinking as rational and therefore as worthwhile; what also demandsour collective consideration are the utmost tendencies of conspiracy to enquire andimagine. Therefore, to take the other extreme, while it is clear that there is a 'camp'quality to some of the more baroque theories put forward (eg, that the British Royalfamily are drug-runners), this should only indicate more strongly the need for anappreciation of the aesthetics of conspiracy-mongering, and for a scholarly enquiry aboutthe meaning of the pleasures, entertainments, and satisfactions which conspiracy appearsto provide to such large numbers of Americans today. To that end, it is evident thatconspiracy thinking today is no longer confined to Right wing organisations or to rightwing positions. Conspiracy evidently can no longer can be identified with marginal, and psychologically disturbed (status-deprived/paranoid) groups; and that the collectivedimension of this 'paranoia', increasingly evident since the Sixties from Left and Rightalike, suggests that employing clinical terms to collective populations is mistaken -conspiracy may be a symptom, but not of an illness. Therefore, the development of 
 
conspiracy thinking in the Sixties and the advent of Leftist (eg gay, feminist, anti-Vietnam War) perspectives, many with good reason, and the deployment of conspiracy inliterature by authors such as Pynchon and Delillo ought to cause us to discuss issues of national security and the secrecy culture which Tom Engelhart calls the "invisiblegovernment" - for instance in the context of such as COINTELPRO and Watergate. Theculture of secrecy has bred a culture of conspiracy, one which post-Sixties events such asIran-Contra, or the revelations of radiation testing have only served to confirm.Furthermore, as Michael Lind in The Next American Nation has argued, multi-culturalism also has promoted notions of conspiracy - the Right believes that the nationhas been subverted by a sinister new class of liberal intellectuals and bureaucrats, and theLeft that opposition to multi-culturalism is covert, whispered project of the whitemajority - for instance the Texaco tapes. Therefore, conspiracy poses some difficult problems for the accepted multi-cultural model in which cultural relativism is allowed, but racial and ethnic divisions are policed. The acrimonious debates about Afro-centrism,Egypt, 'sun and ice people' and perhaps most significatly the OJ Simpson trials suggestnothing less.The recent critique of conspiracy offered by skeptical critics such as Carl Sagan in TheDemon Haunted World (1996) is that conspiracy indicates the gullibility of the American population at large. Following the lead of Andrew Ross in his discussion of the New Age(Strange Weather, 1992), conspiracy thinking in its treatment of knowledge, evidence, personal testimony and authority, presents a paradigm of the world worth examining.Discussion must also engage with Elaine Showalter's thesis in Hystories (1997) thatAmerica is currently subject to a "plague of paranoias" in which a nation of "wannabe"victims are displacing responsibility for their various ills upon imagined agencies. The prevalence of conspiracy requires an explanation which steps beyond discrimination between the validity of personal belief. In the contemporary situation, the significant baseline for a study of conspiracy thinking is the uncertainty and dissonance of the post-Cold War world, and the new order of post-Fordist globalisation of economy, polity, andinformation which has rapidly accelerated in its wake. Already, before the events of thelate 1980s, it was a trope of post modern theory (from whichever base one chooses) tocharacterise late capitalist culture as defined by fragmentation, incoherence, and aresistance to meta-narratives; this study will contend that in the conspiratorialimagination's willingness to plot connections and to connect plots, the opposite can beseen, and that conspiracy constitutes a postmodern (a hyperreal) mode of communicationand therefore a popular attempt to re-cohere and re-determine meaning by transforming'secret' information into common folk knowledge. Furthermore, the saturation of information in an advanced contemporary society such as the United States makes thisattempt to map meaning necessary, and the use of conspiracy as metaphor for disempowerment comprehensive.Critical terminology is vague here (for instance, between Conspiracy theory and Theoryabout conspiracy) and so we would like to promote the use of a new term – dietrologia.Taken from the Italian phrase for conspiracy theory and translating as ‘behindology’, wehope the use of this term can be useful in attempting to map and understand the re-coherences which conspiracy imagines and so extensively deploys. That these re-
 
coherences produce difficulties (the irrational, the racist, the paranoid, the bizarre, thetrivial) is not disputed, but this problem is particularly true for an academy which despiteits engagement with the popular continues (as Andrew Ross has argued about 'low'culture) to find difficulty with the apparently un-malleable politics of some elements of  popular culture. It is too easy for critics to dismiss conspiracy as too crazy to study, or the politically regressive mystifications Fredric Jameson implies in dismissing conspiracy as"debased", and a "poor person's mapping of the postmodern age" - inevitably suggestinga monopolistic view of what the rich person's mapping might be. Therefore, the aim of our studies must be to resist the characterisation of conspiracy as (literally) incredible, butalso to challenge the presumption of it as innately recidivist. In setting conspiracy within postmodern theory, we engage particularly with the contention made by Jameson thatsuch thinking represents an over-determined response to the fragmentation induced bylate capitalism - that in trying to see everything, it sees nothing. In fact, its desire to plotconnections and to connect plots indicates precisely the utility of conspiracy in providinga zone for the imagination in which alternative totalities can be constructed and revisedout of the mass of information. These totalities, their constitution, operation, and theidentities they provide for participants are the important items for study, and it is only inrecognition of this that their progressive or anti-progressive meanings can be debated. Tothis end, an appreciation of conspiracy as commodified in the knowledge marketplace,the producer-consumer relationship it embodies, and the pleasures it provides indecipherment, invention, and (for some) action, are also essential to any serious study.Led by work done by Gordon Wood on conspiracy in the Eighteenth century, examiningconspiracy provides a valuable and overlooked means of understanding popular  perceptions of the contemporary situation, and the paradigms which the conspiratorialimagination provides pose serious questions about causation, authority and knowledge inthe postmodern, globalising era.To this end, the importance of the Kennedy assassination as a primal scenario incontemporary conspiracy thinking is evident. The assassination provides the 'mother-lode'for conspiracies (the event at which almost all conspiracies eventually touch base), andtherefore November 22 1963 serves as one of the fractures from which the modernconspiracy era has been dated, and - as important - is back-dated to by the contemporary'reverse mapping' of recent American history as conspiracy led - that the plot-line for history is conspiracy. In doing so it has served as a primer or evolving text for contemporary conspiracy thinking, providing, refining, and elaborating mechanisms of argument, use of evidence, plotting of narrative, and the establishment of interconnections which have established a working methodology for conspiracy'sdiscussion of events which we consider rests upon "undeniable plausibility" (it makessense, it must be so) which satisfies the conspiracy consumer. In doing so, it also hasestablished a marketplace for conspiracy, and therefore a producer-consumer relationshipevident in commodification of conspiracy, in the mass of materials for sale, the touristicopportunities developed, and the endless elaboration of the central mystery and deferralof solutions for the consumer.The second major fracture which has fed conspiracy thinking in the past decade is provided by unidentified flying objects. At first sight, this does not provide such an
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...