[Reader-list] Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America

[Rana Dasgupta]

book review by a friend of mine at USC.  touches on important themes of knowledge, belief and crisis.

R


Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America
Peter Knight (ed)
New York and London: New York University Press, 2002


A Review by Christopher H. Smith, University of Southern California, USA. 


Considering the unfolding post-September 11th era of surveillance, paranoia, and covert paramilitary engagement, Peter Knight’s Conspiracy Nation anthology appears fortuitous. Conspiracy, after all, seems an appropriate interpretive mode for an unsettling structure of feeling constituted by “Jihad,” “regime change,” “weapons of mass destruction,” “undisclosed locations,” and “total information awareness,” not to mention “hanging chads,” “document shredding,” and “whistle-blowing.” In one of the theoretical critiques contributed to the collection, Fran Mason suggests that we all occupy conspiratorial subject positions amid a disquieting social milieu; we wage an interminable struggle to map the truth of our increasingly fragmented, yet perilously connected, world. Indeed, the uncanny restlessness of everyday life has been exacerbated post-9/11 by the abiding suspicion that significant disclosures on mechanisms of national security and economic prosperity are being withheld, p
erhaps “for our own good,” or perhaps because these revelations would reveal malfeasance by those “in the know.” The most apt metaphor for our age is thus that of “the smoking gun.” 

Tellingly, in the lead essay Skip Willman rephrases this metaphor as a definitive conundrum: “Do we inhabit a conspiratorial universe in which mysterious forces manipulate history, or one driven by contingency in the forms of chance, accident, randomness, and chaos?” (25)   While this potentially debilitating information gap threatens to obscure democratic process, American citizenry has been reassured that the discerning oversight of a vigilant executive branch will prevail over uncertainty. For many otherwise trusting and loyal citizens of the country, this benevolent claim has not made for a particularly good night’s sleep. 

Conceived at an academic conference in 1998, Conspiracy Nation does not delve directly into the labyrinth of post-9/11 speculative discourses, and therefore in certain respects the book’s cumulative insights seem muted. The momentous historical cleavage of 9/11 aside, the eleven essays collected in this volume do succeed in offering a compelling assessment on the crises of knowledge endemic to globalization, multiculturalism, and postmodernity-- crises that many people in the United States increasingly identify and explain via conspiracy theories of often cosmic proportions. Ranging in scope from alien abduction sagas and the paranoid fiction of Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo, to the cult television sensation The X-Files and the mass-market paradigm of motivational research, the authors in this collection diagnose conspiratorial symptoms throughout the American social body. The primary ambition via this scholarly triage is to redeem conspiracy and paranoia from the pathologi
zed margins of social relations, and for the most part this “normalization” objective is attained with acuity. 

Eithne Quinn’s essay on Tupac Shakur exemplifies the quality of the writing in much of the collection and it offers an especially well-phrased analysis of the rapper’s racially over-determined celebrity status, and his concomitant lyrical shift from black activist poetics to cryptic conspiratorial rhetoric. Quinn argues that Tupac’s “paranoid style” comprised performative gestures that “laid bare the fractures produced by the combination of an inordinate sense of agency conferred by media spotlight and a genuine sense of responsibility he bore as [racial] representative, coupled with his debilitating lack of autonomy in the face of wider industrial, discursive, and political forces” (192). Unfortunately, the “keeping it real” modernist code of the gangsta rap genre precluded Tupac from maintaining his spectacularly scattered subjectivity for very long. 

While Conspiracy Nation amply introduces some of the formative texts of conspiracy scholarship, there is a sense of redundancy in its overall theoretical approach. References to Frederic Jameson’s definitive text Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism seem to pop up on every other page, and passages from Slavoj Žižek and Jean-François Lyotard appear frequently as well. This somewhat narrow theoretical framework leads to some glaring blind-spots, the most telling of which is an inattention to the apocalyptic and millennial sensibilities that have defined significant aspects of the American mindset in the postwar era -- neither “religion” nor “Christianity” are to be found in the book’s index. In his well-crafted essay on “Agency Panic and the Culture of Conspiracy,” Timothy Melly flirts with the apocalyptic nature of many American conspiracy cultures when he says that “most conspiracy theories are virtually impossible to confirm”, and “require a form of quasi
-religious conviction, a sense that the conspiracy in question is an entity with almost supernatural powers” (59). While this description certainly sounds like it could include prophetic belief, the anthology as a whole fails to notice the connection. 

Perhaps the notion of religion is too difficult an area for this redemption project to take on. Ironically, the vexed relationship between certain conspiracy narratives and progressive political agendas is precisely the subject of Jack Bratich’s essay, “Injections and Truth Serums,” wherein he investigates the obstacle posed against Left-wing constituencies by AIDS conspiracy theorists. Rather than close the Left off from the forms of subjugated knowledge that challenge its monopoly on radical politics, Bratich calls for a “politics of articulation, one that brings into question the very desire to avoid conspiracy theories and the aspiration to identify with a regime of truth” (147-48). Whether a willful omission or merely an oversight, this theoretical interpolation goes unheeded in Conspiracy Nation with respect to religion, and thus a prime opportunity to historicize postwar America’s paranoid “cognitive map” in theological terms is lost.