Conspiracy Culture: from Kennedy to the X Files
Peter Knight Routledge, 304pp, £12.99
ISBN 0415189780
Rumour has it that you no longer have to be paranoid to believe that there exists a conspiracy to spread conspiracy theories about everything. Early in Conspiracy Culture, Peter Knight runs through an "evocative roll-call" of the "acronyms, code names and trebled names" that have infiltrated the American mind since the 1960s.
The list includes JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, Marilyn Monroe, Cointelpro, Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, Mark David Chapman, John Hinkley Jr, LSD, MIA, CIA, FBI, NSA, Octopus, Gemstone, Roswell, Area 51, Jonestown, Chappaquiddick, Waco, Oklahoma, Watergate, Iraqgate, Iran-Contra, Savings and Loan, Whitewater, Lockerbie, TWA Flight 800, OJ, ebola, Aids, crack cocaine, military-industrial complex, black helicopters, grey aliens, grassy knoll, magic bullet, lone nut - and many more.
Since the Kennedy assassination, conspiracy culture has moved from the fringes to the centre of American cultural life, from "an obsession with a fixed enemy to a generalised suspicion about conspiring forces". Where conspiracy theorists once saw the US threatened by an external minority such as the Communist Party, now the assumption is more "that the American way of life is itself a threat to those marginalised by it", and that the conspiracy is within the corridors of power. Arguing that "the logic of conspiracy" has helped to shape the outlook not just of right-wing militia, but of the new left, feminists, black radicals, Aids activists and academics, Knight concludes that "in a nation increasingly fragmented into minorities, each of which feels itself to be besieged, paranoia becomes the default political style".
Too often, Knight himself writes as if he is part of a conspiracy of scholars, using code to keep its secrets. Talking about his favourite subject, The X-Files, for instance, he describes how the show "revels in an infinite hermeneutic of suspicion". Perhaps they should have put that on the T-shirts instead of "Trust no one".
Still, there are insights among the conspiratorial whispers. Most striking is the contrast between conspiracy culture today and the classic American conspiracy theory of, say, the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the early 1950s. Then, the conspiracists saw a deliberate plot by communists with clear subversive aims. Even when the communists were culturally represented as aliens, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the conspiracy theory concerned wilful human action in pursuit of predetermined goals. By contrast, all sides in the current debate about conspiracy culture share the assumption that people are incapable of pursuing anything much. The strength of conspiracy culture rests on the loss of belief in the history-making potential of humanity.
Knight describes, for example, how the evolving conspiracy culture has elided with ecological and globalisation theories of "connectedness". The result is a depressing "posthumanist" world-view, in which people are at the mercy not so much of secret conspirators, but rather of out-of-control economic and environmental forces. The posthumanists scoff at more conventional conspiracy theorists for imagining that anybody could control events. Yet, in fact, these conspiracists have also abandoned the humanist world-view. As Knight puts it, in his snappy way, conspiracy theories now represent "an ironic stance towards knowledge and the possibility of truth, operating within the rhetorical terrain of the double negative".
He suggests that conspiracy thinking can be a "creative" response to bewildering change, "an everyday epistemological quick-fix to often intractably complex problems". But that only demonstrates the problem: whatever form they take, conspiracy theories are not theories of society at all. They offer nothing in the way of understanding, far less resolving, those complex problems. In the end, they can only reconcile people to the hopelessness of the human condition. Conspiracy thinking is, in essence, an intellectual endorsement of ignorance, fear and powerlessness.
The subtitle of Knight's book is a classic of the cultural studies department, a virtual world where the literal and metaphorical merge so that the assassination of a president can be put on a par with a sci-fi series on TV. Karl Marx may have attacked philosophers for only interpreting the world when "the point is to change it", but at least it was the world that they sought to interpret. Now, it seems, the only thing philosophers are interpreting in various ways is The X-Files. The point is to change channels.
Footnote on connectedness: as a student, 20 years ago, I argued with many American studies lecturers at Manchester University. Today, Peter Knight lectures in American studies at Manchester University. This is a coincidence. Trust me.
Mick Hume, a former editor of LM, is now editor of the new online publication spiked
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