Andrew Strombeck

Department of English
University of California, Davis
amstrombeck@ucdavis.edu

 

Review of: Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X-Files.New York: Routledge, 2000.

 

In the post-9/11 world, cultural paranoia and its number-one star, conspiracy theory, have reemerged with a vigor unseen since their heyday in the fifties. The Bush Administration’s anti-terrorism rhetoric could be characterized as a form of conspiracy theory, epitomized by Bush’s use of “Axis of Evil” to conflate the undeniably different Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. On the left, a relentless stream of conspiracy-minded notions (some, of course, with a basis in truth) have been associated with the Administration, from a secret plan to cancel the 2004 elections to the idea of an “October Surprise” featuring the reappearance of an always-already captured Osama Bin Laden to the now infamous “Bush bulge.” Such an atmosphere heightens the need for a critical evaluation of conspiracy theory like Peter Knight’s Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X-Files. (A note on terminology: in this essay, “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy culture” refer to thinking about actual conspiracies; “conspiracy theory criticism” refers to second-level thinking about conspiracy theory.) Knight, a lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester, makes a compelling case for the emergence of a widespread “conspiracy culture” in the post-Kennedy era, using evidence from literature, popular culture, and conspiracy subcultures. This conspiracy culture is indeed pervasive. Its components include an American government increasingly obsessed with secrecy, a popular politics of suspicion developed in response to this secrecy, and a host of cultural productions that simultaneously parody and spread these conspiracies. Knight argues that conspiracy theory indexes a larger alienation characteristic of late capitalist life, that conspiracy theory “express[es] a not entirely unfounded suspicion that the normal order of things itself amounts to a conspiracy,” a claim validated by the tone of post-9/11 politics. Yet while Knight is astute in reading recent conspiracy culture as more pervasive than assumed by earlier critics like Richard Hofstadter, Knight seems too ready to sever the connection between conspiracy theories associated particularly with “right-wing white men” and a wider conspiracy culture. Even while recognizing that conspiracy theory is differently experienced by different subjects, Knight resists asking why conspiracy theory has by and large remained the property of white men.

 

This book is part of a recent cabal of conspiracy theory criticism, which includes Mark Fenster’s Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Life, Timothy Melley’s Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America, Patrick O’Donnell’s Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative and Jodi Dean’s Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Knight himself is something of a conspiracy-theory industry, having in the past four years edited both a collection of essays (Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America) and a multi-volume conspiracy encyclopedia (Conspiracy Theories in American History). The publication of this conspiracy criticism has been propelled, perhaps, by the reemergence of conspiracy culture in the 1990s, represented on the one hand by the sustained popularity of The X-Files, which highlighted the playful aspects of conspiracy subculture, and on the other by Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which unveiled to the public an active and conspiracy-minded militia subculture. Like Knight’s work, all of this criticism seeks to debunk the idea, generally associated with Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1963), that conspiracy theory is the exclusive domain of an extremist right. Part of the project at work here is the establishment of conspiracy theory as a legitimate object of study, a move that, while less than perfectly necessary after two decades of cultural criticism, works against a dominant ideology that posits conspiracy theory as extremist fringe defined as pathological against a “healthy politics” associated with a pluralist middle. Knight begins by carefully differentiating his sense of a wide conspiracy culture from the narrow vision of conspiracy theory offered by its debunkers, who would include–in addition to Hofstadter–professor of Middle Eastern studies Daniel Pipes and feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter. These critics, instead of trying to understand the cultural causes of conspiracy theory, hold it up to a “gold standard of rationality” and maintain that it represents instances of personal pathology–paranoia–projected onto an outside world (11). Cultural studies, of course, has its own pitfalls, and Knight warns against these in describing what he sees as Fenster’s “bending over backwards to find the glimmerings of utopian political desires buried in the products of conspiracy theory” (20). Instead, Knight sets out to determine just what it is that makes conspiracy theorists tick.

 

Knight differentiates this newer conspiracy culture from Hofstadter’s extremist vision in several ways: Knight argues that in the postwar era, the U.S. government has become more secretive, a shift best represented by the classifying of thousands of Kennedy assassination documents. During the postwar era, the U.S. intelligence community has ballooned (the CIA was founded in 1947), and revelations of this community’s wrongdoings have tumbled out in a steady stream (the Church hearings in the seventies, the Iran-Contra hearings in the eighties, etc.). This results in what Knight, following Michael Rogin, describes as a “spectacle” of secrecy in American politics (29). In response to this increased governmental intrigue (or at least the perception of such), Americans have embraced conspiracy as an explanation. This sense of conspiracy is based not on the idea of a unilateral conspiracy accomplished by a single secretive group, but on the idea that large institutions–corporations and governments–control everyday life. Contemporary conspiracy culture also differs from its extremist form in its intensity of belief; in conspiracy culture, conspiracy is “less an item of inflexible faith than an often uncoordinated expression of doubt and distrust” (44). Finally, our conspiracy culture differs from its predecessors in its playfulness. Knight cites a variety of sources, most prominently The X-Files but also conspiracy-themed publications like Disinformation.com and The Steamshovel Press, that treat conspiracy with a mixture of irony and sincerity.

 

Knight sees conspiracy culture as, to an extent, coterminous with postmodern culture; his reading of the simultaneous emergence of both comes across most clearly in his (mandatory for conspiracy criticism) chapter on the Kennedy assassination. Echoing pronouncements by Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson, Knight calls the assassination a “primal scene of postmodernism” because it heralds a sense of “unmanageable reality” (116). The assassination produces an endless proliferation of conspiracy narratives, none of which provides any closure (115). While new evidence continually surfaces–the 1992 Assassination Records Review Board identifies an astonishing 4.5 million documents and items related to the assassination–this evidence offers little access to any “deep” meaning about the assassination. Knight gives a good sense of the desire circulating around the assassination, a desire he shows at work both in thousands of amateur assassination researchers and in postmodern writers (DeLillo, Ellroy, Mailer) who take up the assassination.

 

In his next two chapters on feminist and African-American uses of conspiracy theory, Knight demonstrates how conspiracy theory shares yet another facet with postmodernism, its rejection of universalist “metanarratives” in favor of local stories about particular subjects. These chapters offer fresh ways to consider the uses of conspiracy theory for disempowered subjects while demonstrating the critical limits that are hardwired into conspiracy narratives. Knight argues that for some feminist and African-American writers, conspiracy theories become a way to narrate the real historical forces that are in fact aligned against them: patriarchy and racism. Since both patriarchy and racism operate in a variety of spheres–domestic, economic, political, social–conspiracy theory provides a way to imagine these forces as totalities. Moreover, conspiracy theory provides the leverage necessary to pry open a dominant ideology that posits both patriarchy and racism as already-solved problems. Even so, conspiracy theory presents certain formal limits that stunt its tactical usefulness. Using Betty Friedan, The Stepford Wives, radical feminist manifestos, Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, and Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, Knight shows that the language of conspiracy pervades some feminist texts in the form of male supremacist cabals, the “brainwashing” of women, etc. Conspiracy theories, Knight argues, provide a way to name a “faceless problem” (135). The difficulty, Knight points out, is that conspiracy theory not only figures but also creates hierarchies; both Friedan and Wolf, in order to write, have to locate the conspiracy as acting on women other than themselves. Knight, drawing on Patricia Turner’s I Heard It Through the Grapevine, finds similar uses of conspiracy theory at work in African-American communities; the essential point here is that “unconscious thoughts and behavior of whites amount to a conspiracy to keep African Americans oppressed . . . life in the ghetto is the same as if there had been a deliberate conspiracy” (146). For African Americans and other minorities, conspiracy theory functions differently than it does for whites; because of the historical forces aligned against them, Knight argues, conspiracy “comes naturally” to minorities. While this idea has its potential pitfalls, particularly the implicit suggestion that African-American conspiracy theory is an inevitable kind of pathology, it does point to an important concept: that conspiracy theory is experienced differently by different subjects. Knight’s analysis implicitly revisits the quandary of postmodern agency: how to articulate “the death of the subject” at the very moment when nonwhite, non-male subjects have been granted agency. With its obsession with invisible cabals and institutional intrigue, conspiracy culture rehearses anxiety over the death of the subject. But Knight’s reading of African-American and feminist conspiracy theory reveals subjects that are very much intact, with conspiracy theory serving to reinforce identities rather than threaten them.

 

Knight concludes that contemporary conspiracy culture at its best offers a vertiginous sense that “everything is connected.” This idea, which echoes Fredric Jameson’s argument in the first half of The Geopolitical Aesthetic, is that conspiracy narratives both reflect and distort the lived conditions of late capitalist globalization. It is an idea both compelling and reductive. On the one hand, it readily explains the prevalence of conspiracy theories under late capitalism, but on the other, it reinforces the notion that there is a singular subject (implicitly white and male) who experiences late capitalism through a universal lens. While Knight seems thus accurately to diagnose the impossibility of late capitalist political knowledge, so establishing the exigency of conspiracy theory, he implicitly celebrates a postmodern third person, without attending, as he does elsewhere in the book, to the uneven ways in which conspiracy theories are deployed across different political subjects and the ways in which they may function differently, to take just one of his examples, for African Americans.

 

If most earlier conspiracy theories worked to demonize some Americans (African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants) for the benefit of others (white males), is a postmodern irony enough to allow contemporary conspiratorial explanations to evade this demonization? A more nuanced account of contemporary conspiracy theory might foreground the disciplinary mechanisms latent within conspiracy discourse, asking, for example, whether some forms of conspiracy theory favor some subjects over others; this is an analysis Knight points toward but does not complete in his chapters on African-American and feminist conspiracy theories. Such an account might go further toward explaining why, though it has at times been useful to other subjects, conspiracy theory remains, in its production and consumption and in its highest literary forms (DeLillo and Pynchon), largely the province of white men. This qualification seems especially important when the major critics of conspiracy theory–with some exceptions, notably Patricia Turner and Jodi Dean–are themselves white men. The field threatens to become a refuge for white masculinity within cultural criticism instead of an opportunity for a self-conscious consideration of the limitations white masculinity places on discourse.

 

This particular lapse points to other blind spots. The largest of these–one that exists with other works of conspiracy criticism–lies with Knight’s too-rigid differentiation between earlier conspiracies–he refers to these as conspiracies of the Us-vs.-Them variety–and contemporary conspiracy culture. In part, this separation mischaracterizes early conspiracy theories. As David Bennet demonstrates in The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History, conspiratorial explanations have long been important within American history; president Andrew Jackson, for example, gained political capital by crusading both against the “many-headed hydra” of the National Bank and, in a subtler fashion, against the “pernicious” influence of immigrant-linked Catholicism. Thus, to locate pre-Kennedy conspiracy theory as solely the domain of “extremists” is misleading and belies the deep genealogical connection between “extremist” conspiracy theory and contemporary conspiracy culture.

 

Conspiracy Culture gives readers a sense of conspiracy theory as a complex cultural phenomenon, one capable both of binding together popular fears, extremist beliefs, and politics proper and of “keep[ing] aloft several different explanatory possibilities at the same time, refusing to let any one element of the paranormal, the paranoid, and the conspiratorial claim the final ground of stability” (191). Conspiracy theory self-consciously engages with a host of theoretical issues, including disciplinary power, feminism, anti-racism, and political theory, in the process emerging as critical theory’s alternate universe, a universe in which all the issues are the same and all the conclusions different. This “parallelism” is thus the source of conspiracy theory’s potential and its shortcomings; it is also an important warning for the cultural critic, who only at his or her peril fails to look hard into conspiracy theory’s cracked mirror.

 

If the conspiracy culture Knight describes is a multiplicity along the lines that Deleuze and Guattari describe in Anti-Oedipus, it is not a multiplicity without limits; in conspiracy theory, anti-Oedipus needs its Oedipus. With conspiracy theory reemerging as a powerful political force in America, questions like these become crucial in understanding and engaging in politics. Conspiracy theories may be energizing, but for whom? Knight does good work toward analyzing the ideological function of conspiracy theory, demonstrating how conspiracy theory’s forms are both used and interpreted differently by different gender and minority subcultures. His overall analysis is accurate, with this qualification: the feeling that “everything is connected” remains a state of affairs enjoyed most thoroughly by the white men best positioned to take advantage of it.

 

Work Cited

 

• Bennett, David H. The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1988.