The Politics of Conspiracy Theories: American Histories and Global Narratives

1 The Politics of Conspiracy Theories: American Histories and Global Narratives Alexander Dunst (Potsdam) 1. Introduction In 2002 the administration of George Walker Bush launched a diplomatic and media campaign to manufacture consent for the invasion of Iraq.1 Saddam Hussein’s regime and the terror network of al-Qa’ida were conspiring, Bush and his minions declared, to threaten the United States and its allies with weapons of mass destruction that could reach London, as an intelligence report famously claimed, “in 45 minutes”.2 A suspicious national and international citizenry, long schooled in the public relations of imperialist aggression, met the sabre-rattling with a mixture of disbelief, angry protest, and resignation. Once American troops and their international support had occupied Iraq, it did not take long for critics to expose such war rhetoric as cynical ploys. Among the widespread condemnation of the media build-up to the invasion, one avenue of critique was conspicuously absent despite its ubiquity in U.S. and, arguably, global culture. Its classic formula, otherwise a frequent reference point for commentators, is to be found in the writing of historian Richard Hofstadter on “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. As he notes, “the central preconception of the paranoid style [is] […] the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character”.3 Elements of Hofstadter’s diagnosis formed the basis of the story 1 Parts of an earlier version of this essay appeared in Slovene and English as: “Navadna paranoja: ponoven premislek o studiju (ameriske) zarote” / “Ordinary Paranoia: Rethinking (American) Conspiracy Studies”, in: Paranoia: Spellbound Spaces of Culture and Politics, Spec. issue of Dialogi: Revija za Kulturo in Družbo, 11/2011, 3/4, pp. 120–135. 2 Cf. “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union”, Jan. 28, 2003, http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=2003_presidential_documents&docid=pd03fe03_txt-6 (accessed Oct. 7, 2011); ‘A Policy of Evasion and Deception’, The Washington Post, Feb. 3, 2003, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/transcripts/powelltext_020503.html (Oct. 7, 2011); and Glenn Frankel and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “45 Minutes: Behind the Blair Claim”, in: The Washington Post with Foreign Policy World, Feb. 29, 2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15697-2004Feb28 (accessed Oct. 7, 2011). 3 Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, in: The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, New York 1965, pp. 3–41, p. 14. 2 told by the Bush administration: from the construction of an absolute enemy to its deployment at political turning points.4 My point here is not to launch another attack on the Bush administration, this time by way of a pathologizing diagnosis of its political paranoia. Nor do I intend to construct a genealogy of American conservatism that would see him and his associates as the true heirs to Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, the right-wing paragons Hofstadter reserved his ire for. An understanding of McCarthy, Goldwater, and now Bush, Jr., as the exceptions to an otherwise sound political system is best left to its liberal apologists. Besides, nothing would be easier than to show that conspiratorial rhetoric in America was never exceptional, never a fringe phenomenon, but has been part of mainstream politics from its beginnings. As Bernhard Bailyn argued in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, both proponents and opponents of independence from the British crown presented themselves as victims of a conspiracy, a belief Bailyn identified as a dominant intellectual pattern of the revolution.5 To point to more recent examples: what should we make of Ronald Reagan’s claims that the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada and its co-operation with Cuba posed an imminent threat to U.S. security – a contention deployed for its military invasion? Or Hillary Clinton’s famous claim, made on live television, that her husband and then president Bill was the target of a “vast right-wing conspiracy”?6 What interests me here is not necessarily the truth content of Reagan’s or Clinton’s claims but the question why paranoid narratives such as these are so rarely understood as conspiratorial when they issue from the centres of power. In his recent and excellent study of Conspiracy Theories in the Arab World, which spends considerable time reviewing Americanist research on the topic, Matthew Gray repeatedly states that the U.S. government does not engage in conspiracy narratives even whilst discussing the Bush administration’s claims about links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa’ida.7 This is all the more remarkable given that Gray’s study systematically broadens our view of who engages in conspiratorial rhetoric. He includes an uncommonly broad set of actors: “the state, political elites, political leaderships, social forces, and marginalized or disenfranchized individuals and groups, among 4 Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, p. 3. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Enlarged Ed., Cambridge 1992. 6 Cf. Stephen Zunes, “The US Invasion of Grenada”, Global Policy Forum, Oct. 2003, http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/155/25966.html (accessed Oct. 7, 2011); David Maraniss, “First Lady Launches Counterattack”, in: The Washington Post, Jan. 28, 1998, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/hillary012898.htm (accessed Oct. 7, 2011). 7 Matthew Gray, Conspiracy Theories in the Arab World: Sources and Politics, London 2010, pp. 78, 118, 168– 169. 5 3 others”.8 Gray is writing about the Middle East but his list and my earlier examples of conspiracy theories narrated by the political leadership in America force us, I believe, to ask how state and mainstream social actors have been systematically exempted from such diagnoses in a U.S. context. I will attempt to give a very brief and necessarily incomplete answer to this question in the first section of this essay. There it forms part of a wider critique of what I will call, absent a more satisfying name, ‘conspiracy studies’, the interdisciplinary field of research that takes America’s culture of conspiracy as its subject. We have already noted the seminal contribution to this field of Richard Hofstadter and will hear more about the intellectual and political context of his writings on the paranoid style later. Since the late 1990s, research on conspiracy theories has not only blossomed – a trend that owes as much to millenarian fears as to the attacks on New York’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 – but undergone considerable revision. Distancing itself from the calculatedly ambiguous yet vehement pathologization of dissent as paranoid initiated by Hofstadter, this revisionist conspiracy studies eschews overt pathologization and insists, by varying degrees, on thinking conspiracy theories at a remove from psychopathology. Seen as distinct from paranoia, in principle, conspiracy theories are now understood as worthy of serious academic investigation, but are still viewed with a heavy dose of ambivalence as to their political and epistemological value.9 Like any dialectical negation, this reaction shares much with its preceding term. In what follows, I will argue that this revisionist conspiracy studies is defined by the logic of the ideological binary. Here, the positive re-evaluation of conspiracy theories depends on the continued abnegation of paranoia and gives rise to a ceaseless production and policing of the borders between sanity and madness that conceals an ultimate identity. As a consequence, a revisionist conspiracy studies perseveres with a research programme that locates paranoid narratives at the margins, privileges texts which seemingly distance themselves from paranoia, and remains blind to a systematic pathologization employed to stifle political opposition. Revisionist conspiracy studies thus adheres to an intellectual tradition it routinely rejects, and reject what does not adhere to it. Such complex ideological operations are not overcome by grand gestures. While quite understandable as a reaction to its long-standing demonisation, the countercultural investment of paranoia with progressive potential remains caught in the binary it strives to rebuff. Rather 8 Gray, Conspiracy Theories in the Arab World, p. 6. Among the most influential full-length studies within such a revisionist approach are Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, Minneapolis 2008; Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From the Kennedy Assassination to ‘The X-Files’, London 2000; and Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America, Ithaca 2000. 9 4 than repeat efforts to dissociate the two terms, or drop discussion of paranoia altogether, I will think about their distinctiveness as part of their inseparability. That is to say, what is commonly referred to as conspiracy theories will be understood as paranoid narratives, a form of story-telling partly determined by what I regard with Jacques Lacan as the epistemological mechanism of paranoia. Such a conception allows us to go beyond the static antitheses of conspiracy theorizing seen as either flawed and meaningless or illuminating and subversive and move towards an understanding of its structure and logic, its strengths and failures. Ultimately, I claim, rethinking conspiracy studies necessitates re-writing paranoia not as a madness outside reason but the madness of reason: to conceive it not solely as a paranoia about the state, but also as part of state reason.10 Throughout, my comments will be guided by Lacanian psychoanalysis and especially the radical revision of Lacan’s thought in the mid-1970s. His writings on paranoia are arguably a privileged discourse for an attempt at rethinking America’s culture of conspiracy. They equally resist the pathologization and naïve idealization inherent in so many approaches to the topic and combine clinical insight with theoretical acumen. Arguing against the routine dismissal of their claims, Lacan asserted that the sometimes abstruse conclusions of conspiracy theories in no way negate a central element of truth. As he writes, “to misrecognize presupposes recognition”.11 Let me insert a final comment, on method and its implications, before I turn to the main part of this essay. As I realized whilst writing this article, my approach to conspiracy theories might be understood, somewhat reductively, as a return to Hofstadter, minus pathologization. Freud is replaced with Lacan, but in both cases the relevance of psychoanalysis for the study of political and literary communication is asserted. The differences, however, are perhaps as revealing and, I hope, also productive for the further study of conspiracy theories. At first sight, the integration of paranoia into reason (in other words, its de-pathologization) would seem to deprive us of the possibility of political or ethical evaluation. The reverse is true, I think. Moral judgments have never been a good guide to scholarly analysis, and the classification as irrational only ever removes from sight what it pretends to scrutinize. Thus, any critique of conspiracy theories should not be based on the moral condemnation of their supposed irrationality. Only a fair-minded account of their 10 For a recent article that emphasizes paranoia’s function as a dispositif of state power but persists in attempting to separate its reasonable and unreasonable, necessary and pathological, manifestations, cf. Jonathan Bach, “Power, Secrecy, Paranoia: Technologies of Governance and the Structure of Rule”, in: Cultural Politics, 6/2010, 3, pp. 287–302. 11 Jacques Lacan, “Presentation on Psychical Causality”, in: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, Trans. Bruce Fink, New York 2006, pp. 123–158, p. 135. 5 analysis of societal power relations can establish a truly political or ethical evaluation of conspiracy theories. Despite an occasional return to pathologizing terminology, this is arguably what underpins most recent studies on the topic – but only at the cost of rejecting any connection to paranoia. Scholars like Gray, Mark Fenster, or Peter Knight do this because they find paranoia’s ideological baggage of pathology unpalatable, and rightly so.12 Yet if we remove this weight, we might be able to draw, once again, from the insights a psychoanalytic perspective has to offer. 2. A Critique of Conspiracy Studies In a little-noticed aside in his introduction to the Paranoid Style, Hofstadter refers to the political scientist Harold Lasswell as “one of the first in the country to be dissatisfied with the rationalistic assumptions” of his profession and to have turned “to the study of the emotional and symbolic side of political life”.13 Although he has faded into obscurity today, to the student of modern American conspiracy theories Lasswell plays a role only rivalled by Hofstadter himself. After all, it was Lasswell’s application of psychoanalytic terminology to political science in the 1930s that conceptualised political beliefs and actions as stemming from unconscious, and thus in the eyes of Lasswell and his followers, irrational sources.14 At one stroke, Lasswell thus opened up a whole new field of study that would blossom from the 1940s to the early 1960s and examined politics as the projection, in his words, of “private motives upon public objects in the name of collective values”.15 Reversing this movement, scholars could now psychoanalyse political rhetoric they found dangerous or simply displeasing as the emanation of pathological minds. Such a negative view of politics was already inherently biased in favour of a status quo no longer in need of protest and reform. Yet Lasswell also detected the source of political engagement in an irrational hatred of existing authority and portrayed community organizers as paranoid agitators. During and after World War II Lasswell’s former students at the University of Chicago adopted this methodological framework to studies of the national character of America’s ideological and military opponents, from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union. 12 I offer a critique of their writings below. Richard Hofstadter, “Introduction”, in: The Paranoid Style in American Politics, pp. vii–xiv, p. ix. 14 Cf., for instance, Harold Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics, Introd. Fred I. Greenstein, Chicago 1986; Harold D. Lasswell/Dorothy Blumenstock, World Revolutionary Propaganda: A Chicago Study, Freeport 1970. 15 Lasswell/Blumenstock, World Revolutionary Propaganda, p. 296. 13 6 Perhaps the most influential of these, Nathan Leites’ The Operational Code of the Politburo, formed the central reference point for U.S. negotiators during the armistice talks at Panmunjon at the end of the Korean War. A product of the containment doctrine of the early Cold War, it portrayed the enemy as divorced from reality and incapable of rational decisionmaking.16 “What accounts for the great strength of the Bolshevik belief that there are enemies with annihilatory designs?”, asked Leites, an influential member of the Air Force think tank RAND, in 1955, only to give an unequivocal answer: “[A] major factor behind this central Bolshevik attitude [is] […] the classical paranoid defense against latent homosexuality”.17 Such psychoanalytic studies of national character constituted the larger intellectual background for Hofstadter’s later reliance on the famous study of American anti-semitism, The Authoritarian Personality. It was this volume, co-written by Theodor Adorno at Columbia University shortly before Hofstadter joined its faculty, and its authors’ detection of the “paranoid style” that would form the basis of his work on the topic. Limiting themselves to interviews rather than in-depth analysis, Adorno and his collaborators blurred the boundaries between neurosis and psychosis, between psychological mechanisms and symptoms. They detected surface traces of underlying psychological structures – ideas, traits, and ‘touches’ of paranoia. As a social type, the authoritarian character exhibited symptoms of psychosis that manifested themselves in what the authors called – in the case of one 26-yearold interviewee – “authentic paranoid style”.18 It was here, then, that the “paranoid style” was born. In contrast to studies on National Socialism or the Soviet Union which had detected mental disease in elite as much as in mass psychology, The Authoritarian Personality now concentrated on prejudice as a popular phenomenon only. The reasons for this focus lay in the interest of its authors and the American Jewish Committee, which financed the project, in the mass psychology of fascism. It coincided with a conviction, increasingly shared by American and European scholars if not by the Frankfurt School, that communism and fascism shared a “totalitarian” character radically different from liberal democracies – a distinction that 16 On Leites in particular and the establishment of a military-academic complex after World War II in general, cf. Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Industrial Complex, Princeton 2001. Much of the fascinating nexus of psychoanalysis and the development of early Cold War doctrines, in which Lasswell and then Leites played important roles, remains understudied. 17 Nathan Leites, “Panic and Defenses against Panic in the Bolshevik View of Politics”, in: Werner Muensterberger (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences, vol. IV, New York 1955, p. 138. 18 T. W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, New York 1969, p. 615. Of course, given the very different intellectual and political background of Adorno and the Frankfurt School, The Authoritarian Personality also differed in important regards from U.S. studies of national character, and Hofstadter’s reading was extremely selective. I have written at greater length about the impact of The Authoritarian Personality on Hofstadter in my PhD thesis: Alexander Dunst, Politics of Madness: Crisis as Psychosis in the United States, 1950-2010, Nottingham 2010. 7 extended to the psychological makeup of its elites.19 Unlike the professional agitators and organizers characteristic of totalitarian regimes, whose hunger for power, according to Lasswell and other social scientists, revealed their mental pathology, America’s democratic checks and balances were believed to favour politicians with more diverse interests and balanced minds.20 The Authoritarian Personality’s exclusion of political and social elites from analysis may have made it easier for Hofstadter to follow similar lines of inquiry in his essays on the paranoid style, but he shared his peers’ suspicion of the common man. Part of a late modernist intelligentsia that increasingly isolated itself from ordinary citizens, Hofstadter decried the “irrationality of the public” at the same time that he lauded the “well-rationalized systems of political beliefs” of educated elites.21 In their inherent bias against popular movements and the common man’s intellect, Hofstadter’s writings on political paranoia were part of his much more ambitious re-writing of American history. In his Pulitzer-Prize winning The Age of Reform he denounced the Populist and Progressive reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a provincial, quasi-delusional, and often anti-semitic mass revolt against modern government. In the mantle of a historical argument, Hofstadter struck out against both left and right: against a preceding generation of historians who saw America’s past as determined by class struggle and argued for wider participation in the country’s politics, as much as against the right’s “cranky pseudo-conservatism of our time”, in which he recognized a successor to the earlier reform movements.22 The “paranoid style” Hofstadter attributed to the pseudo-conservatives was characterized by an excessive coherence that ignored contradictory evidence and the construction of a totalizing narrative which imagined history as conspiracy. Its adherents struck him as “absolutist”, marked by “feeling[s] of persecution”, and “paranoid leap[s] into fantasy”.23 By definition, for Hofstadter, such conspiratorial fantasies were limited to those standing outside the increasingly narrow frame of mainstream politics. Despite the fact that his main examples of the paranoid style were United States senators, thus leading representatives of the country’s two mainstream parties, Hofstadter construed conspiracy theories as a popular sentiment only ever accommodated by the establishment or carried into the mainstream by populist 19 For the seminal contribution to this post-war consensus cf. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed., Cleveland 1958. 20 Harold D. Lasswell, “The Selective Effect of Personality on Political Participation”, in: Richard Christie/Marie Jahoda (eds.), Studies in the Scope and Method of ‘The Authoritarian Personality’, Glencoe 1954, pp. 197–225, p. 221. 21 Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R., London 1962, p. 18. 22 Hofstadter, Age of Reform, p. 19. Pseudo-conservatism was another term Hofstadter had borrowed from The Authoritarian Personality. 23 Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, pp. 17, 4, 11. 8 demagogues who themselves lacked the rationality and sophistication distinctive of the true politician. The paranoid style, he wrote in a letter to a friend, only afflicted those out-ofpower, and thus by definition exempted the moderate liberals of the 1950s and early ‘60s.24 Of course, this act of exclusion was aided by the clinical associations of the terminology Hofstadter used to describe conspiracy theories. Its political motivation was as clear: having cut themselves off from their popular and radical roots, liberals were increasingly coming under attack from conservatives, on the one hand, and a new participatory politics headed by the Civil Rights and students movements, on the other. Declaring them both irrational, even paranoid, and discrediting their historical record as much as their mass base, left the political arena to those who already inhabited centre stage. Hofstadter’s identification of conspiracy theories with a dangerous insanity was rarely challenged until the late 1990s, when literary scholars began to analyze a wave of popular conspiracy narratives that had attracted large audiences and garnered positive reviews from critics. In many of these more recent monographs, the authors reject Hofstadter’s more overt pathologizations. As Fenster argues, Hofstadter’s “understanding of it [conspiracy theory] as paranoid was confused and confusing in his own work, and has only become more simplistic and useless as it has been taken up by others”.25 Peter Knight in turn holds that “[i]n recent decades […] the images and rhetoric of conspiracy are no longer the exclusive house-style of the terminally paranoid”.26 Such differentiation between these terms opens up two paths for conspiracy studies. Both, however, take the form of an ideological binary in which the recognition accorded to conspiracy theories mirrors a continued pathologization of paranoia. In the more traditional approach, closer to Cold War liberalism, conspiracy theories essentially still correspond in form to Hofstadter’s understanding. Fenster thus writes that they “frequently lack substantive proof, rely on dizzying leaps of logic, and oversimplify the political, economic, and social structures of power”. At the same time, conspiracy theories are now acknowledged as an important if ultimately unsound element of U.S. culture and seen as a “longstanding populist strain in American political culture […] that is neither independent from nor necessarily threatening to the country’s political institutions or political culture”. All along, however, a distance is maintained between conspiracy theories and the “madness of paranoia”.27 24 David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, Chicago 2006, pp. 159–160. Fenster, Conspiracy Theories, p. 36. 26 Knight, Conspiracy Culture, p. 3. 27 Fenster, Conspiracy Theories, pp. 9, 11, 194. 25 9 Here, Hofstadter’s politically charged diagnoses of cultural and political texts – a cultural pathology wielded as an intellectual weapon in a struggle for political influence – have sedimented into supposedly factual characteristics of such narratives. A paranoid political tradition comprising both state and oppositional actors continues to be written as “a populist strain”. Meanwhile Hofstadter’s twin diagnoses of rigidity and totalization have become the smallest common denominator of conspiracy theories. They are “wonderfully unified accounts of all the data at hand”, characterized by “symmetrical totalities”, and “rigid convictions”.28 The habitual rejection of Hofstadter’s more unpalatable denigrations of paranoia thus retains the pathologizing logic inherent in his understanding of conspiracy theory. Overt criticism goes hand in hand with an implicit continuation of what Michael Paul Rogin has called the “countersubversive tradition”.29 Aided as much by an isolated reading of Hofstadter’s essay on the “paranoid style”, which disregards an intellectual tradition in the social sciences that sought to discredit political opponents by associating them with insanity, as well as an absence of interest in contemporary re-considerations of paranoia, such scholarship reinforces rationality’s long-standing power over madness. The second, more strongly revisionist, approach may equally lack any consideration of this tradition, but its close textual analysis has considerably altered the way we look at conspiracy theories. Knight, for instance, has argued that they are frequently complex and self-reflexive, eschewing the rigidity and totalizing intent of which they are still so often accused. However, such arguments are undermined once again by the logic of the ideological binary. Like more traditional approaches, these studies balance their partial re-evaluation of contemporary conspiracy theories by the continued pathologization of paranoia. In Knight’s case this takes the form of a historical argument that pits today’s “more insecure version of conspiracy-infused anxiety” against an older “paradoxically secure form of paranoia” described flippantly as “the exclusive house-style of the terminally paranoid”.30 Jodi Dean, for her part, endorses alien abduction narratives as a legitimate part of U.S. politics, only to accuse their critics of “irresponsible paranoia”.31 The binary opposition of the two terms enables the privileging of certain narratives as essentially sane and insists on the insanity of those it continues to label paranoid. In other words, as the philosopher Brian Keeley admits 28 Brian Keeley, “Of Conspiracy Theories”, in: Journal of Philosophy 96/1999, 3, pp. 109–126, p. 119; Ray Pratt, Projecting Paranoia: Conspiratorial Visions in American Film, Lawrence 2001, p. 17; Knight, Conspiracy Culture, p. 3. 29 Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology, Berkeley 1987, p. xiii. 30 Knight, Conspiracy Culture, pp. 4, 3. 31 Jodi Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace, Ithaca 1998, p. 136. 10 with admirable frankness, it allows “us clearly to distinguish between our ‘good’ and their ‘bad’ ones”.32 What unites both versions is the continuous reassertion of the boundaries between reason and unreason. This presents a recurrent problem for any study of conspiracy theories, for, as I will argue from a Lacanian perspective, the lesson of any ideological binary, namely the ultimate inseparability of privileged and repressed terms, also holds true for this particular case. As Keeley establishes in his article, “[t]here is no criterion or set of criteria that provide a priori grounds for distinguishing warranted conspiracy theories from UCTs [unwarranted conspiracy theories].” In the end, the only argument to distinguish reason from unreason, or warranted from unwarranted conspiracy theories, is the subversion of the distinction itself: the threat conspiracy theories pose to a narrowly-defined rationality, and thus sanity’s power over madness. “It is this pervasive scepticism of people and public institutions entailed by some conspiracy theories”, writes Keeley, “which ultimately provides us with the grounds with which to identify them as unwarranted”.33 Most decisively, the implication of these recent studies of conspiracy theories in an earlier pathologization of dissent extends to their research programme. Continuing Hofstadter’s identification of conspiracy theories as a product of society’s margins, conspiracy studies often takes as its subject narratives issuing from such sub-cultures as Alien abductees, right-wing extremism, and other forms of millenarianism. Even when the analysed texts are clearly a part of mainstream culture, such as the TV-series The X-Files, the dominant impulse is nonetheless to read them as a popular opposition to establishment politics. Such an interpretive thrust may be justified in some cases, but it blindly repeats post-war liberalism’s original deflection from the use and instigation of paranoia as part of U.S. establishment politics. What is overlooked is the prominent use of paranoia as the circumscription rather than the expression of dissent. It is the participation of paranoid narratives in state reason, such as the Bush administration’s claims about links between Iraq and al-Qa’ida, that usually goes unexamined, whether in the form of official government policy, political rhetoric, or popular culture. As a consequence, Hofstadter and his brand of elitist Cold War liberalism are handed a lasting ideological victory. Attempts to overcome the binary logic of such accounts and redirect its central assumptions are rare. In general, they have remained at a stage of tentative suggestion, such as Martin Parker and Claire Birchall’s proposition that the humanities and conspiracy theories 32 33 Keeley, “Of Conspiracy Theories”, p. 126. Keeley, “Of Conspiracy Theories”, p. 123. 11 share a common discursive structure.34 Lacanian approaches to the nexus of conspiracy and paranoia remain surprisingly scarce. Most of these engagements have come from critics who apply them to the concrete analysis of narratives rather than a rethinking of conspiracy theories. 3. Re-thinking Paranoia with Lacan From early on in his work, Lacan fundamentally questions traditional assumptions about knowledge and the distinction between reason and unreason. At the centre of his thought at this time lies the famous conception of the imaginary relation, man’s identification of himself with an other, initiated by the “mirror stage”.35 This misrecognition of ourselves as our own image simultaneously creates the self or ego and the understanding of an opposite object. As an estranging construction of self as image or object “the imaginary dimension, with which man is always involved, […] is constitutive of human reality”.36 The imaginary takes us beyond the immediacy of being characteristic of most animal life, and alienates us from its self-presence in a logic in which understanding of one element derives solely from its opposite term. The knowledge of self and object as autonomous or self-same is based, for Lacan, on a fundamental error: imaginary knowledge, or connaissance in the original French, is necessarily a méconnaissance, a misunderstanding. The decisive twist for our present purposes is Lacan’s definition of this imaginary relation as constitutively paranoid, as it involves a process in which any object is defined solely by virtue of its reflection in the ego and vice versa. As a consequence, Lacan can not only speak of the “paranoiac structure of the ego”, but identify paranoia as “the most general structure of human knowledge”.37 Paranoia thus becomes neither a logic radically distinct from sanity nor its excess; not a lack of insight but the very mechanism of the initial production of knowledge. Rather than constituting an entity that can be neatly distinguished from scientific understandings of the object world, 34 Martin Parker, “Human Science as Conspiracy Theory”, in: Jane Parish/Martin Parker (eds.), The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy Theory and the Human Sciences, Oxford 2001, pp. 191–207; Clare Birchall, “The Commodification of Conspiracy Theory”, in: Parish/Parker, The Age of Anxiety, pp. 233–253, p. 249. 35 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”, in: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, Trans. Bruce Fink, New York 2006, pp. 75–81. 36 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III: The Psychoses 1955-1956, Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), Trans. Russell Grigg, New York 1997, p. 120. 37 Jacques Lacan, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis”, in: Écrits, pp. 82–101. 12 paranoia is “constitutive of human reality”.38 That is to say, human reality presupposes an initial withdrawal from the self-sameness of animal being and the “dizzying leaps of logic”, to quote Fenster once more, that constitute not a paranoia separate from knowledge, but knowledge as paranoia.39 The many revisions and reversals of his work notwithstanding, Lacan’s conception of a necessarily delusional construction of imaginary reality already contains the central thesis of his late work on madness. For much of the 1950s and 1960s, however, an imaginary paranoia could, if not bypassed, at least be controlled by man’s integration into the symbolic, the world of inter-subjective speech and internalized authority. Correcting the strictly dyadic logic of the imaginary, the differential play of the signifier establishes a symbolic knowledge, or savoir, that could dispel the objectifications of imaginary connaissance. Such dialectization is complicated by the definition of savoir as unconscious, and the resistance of modern reason to an understanding of knowledge that denies absolute mastery over it. In line with this emphasis on the symbolic, Lacan’s classic writings on psychosis define paranoia not exclusively as a logic common to all humanity. Paranoia here applies to the general structure of knowledge and its special case paranoid psychosis – seen from the privileged perspective of a hegemonic neurosis as an inability to advance beyond it. Due to a failure to internalize social authority, a submission to its norms and conventions that, in turn, allows for a certain amount of freedom within these rules, the paranoid psychotic is shackled all the more tightly to authority’s unmediated power – to which delusion provides a personalized imaginary response. As Lacan writes, “what is refused in the symbolic order […] reappears in the real”.40 Having established Lacan’s mature understanding of the term, we are in a position to clarify the central preconceptions about paranoia in conspiracy studies. As we have seen, conspiracy theories are routinely accused of over-coherence, “rigid convictions”, and totalization: arguments that can be traced to post-war liberalism’s praise of irony and doubt and its pathologization of the political commitment of left and right.41 With Lacan we can argue that such a description of paranoia conflates two elements. On the one hand, paranoia’s dyadic logic leads to absolute certainty. But this certainty only concerns the existence of the object in question. Its meaning remains highly volatile as the imaginary connaissance of paranoia is not stabilized by the differential knowledge of the symbolic. As Lacan writes, 38 Lacan, The Psychoses, p. 120. Fenster, Conspiracy Theories, p. 9. 40 Lacan, The Psychoses, p. 13. 41 Knight, Conspiracy Culture, p. 3. 39 13 “any purely imaginary equilibrium with the other always bears the mark of a fundamental instability”.42 As a consequence, the paranoid narrative “varies, whether it has been disturbed or not”, and the paranoiac “seeks, over the course of his delusion’s evolution, to incorporate these elements [external stimuli or changes] into the composition of the delusion”.43 Common descriptions of paranoid narratives as ‘rigid’ thus conflate the certainty of the existence of an object, frequently represented by the conspirator or persecutor in narrative, with a certainty of meaning. A similar argument can be made in the case of so-called ‘totalization’, part of the ideological arsenal traditionally levelled against the left. Two elements come together in this accusation: first, what we have discussed in terms of rigidity or over-coherence, the rejection of contradictory data in favour of establishing a unified narrative; secondly, and as a consequence of the first, the imposition of this narrative on others, and the political or economic imperatives said to follow from it. Two remarks seem pertinent here. As Freud already noted in his study of Schreber, paranoia is a partial rather than a total delusion. Visitors were often surprised to find that the German judge talked affably about politics and literature but did not mention his paranoid cosmology in conversation with them.44 While the exclusive presence of two terms, the opposition of self and other, means that the paranoid narrative is highly personalized, in the sense that its object relates directly to the self, such a truth is therefore also radically subjective, not the assumption of an objective reality to be imposed on others. This is not to argue that some conspiracy theories do not espouse comprehensive worldviews but that their total quality is not to be taken as a characteristic of paranoia, nor their paranoia as ‘totalizing’. As Lacan writes, the paranoid psychotic: doesn’t believe in the reality of his hallucination […] nothing is easier to obtain from the subject than the admission that what he can hear nobody else has heard. He says – Yes, all right, so I was the only one who heard it, then. […] Reality isn’t at issue, certainty is.45 These arguments should not be regarded as theoretical hair-splitting. Rather, I believe that they describe conspiracy theories more accurately than much conspiracy studies has done to date. A more internally consistent understanding of paranoia as an epistemological structure, at once broader and more precise than previous conceptions, not only encourages us 42 Lacan, The Psychoses, p. 93. Lacan, The Psychoses, p. 18. 44 Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-Analytical Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)”, in: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12., Trans. and ed. J. Strachey, London, pp. 9–82, pp. 15–16. 45 Lacan, The Psychoses, p. 75. 43 14 to question what we all too often take to be the undisputed qualities of conspiracy theories, but also to re-examine a cultural and political history that has been written according to these supposedly objective criteria. Two brief examples must suffice here. Does not the imaginary instability of meaning in paranoia we established earlier provide us with a precise explanation for why, as Fenster observes, “the classical conspiracy narrative […] [is] vulnerable to continual unravelling”? That is to say, why do conspiracy theories tend towards narrative and logical incoherence, a quality of such texts that Fenster attempts to reconcile with their supposed over-coherence?46 And should not the same instability warn us of arguments that consign conspiracy theories of the past to an outdated “paradoxically secure form of paranoia” that rejects ambiguity and complexity?47 Turning now to Lacan’s late writings on psychosis, it needs to be said that they move beyond a conception of madness as imaginary without invalidating the earlier understanding. The reversals of the later work on psychosis are summarized in Lacan’s proposition that ‘the Other does not exist’.48 The Other as the subject’s particular relation to the symbolic world is in itself lacking, that is to say, is without the fullness that the subject seeks in it. The subject’s acquiescence to existing reality is thus dependent on an element of choice, and the fantasy of a full Other can be traversed for the subject’s alternative construction of reality that seeks enjoyment not in the Other but in him- or herself. In Lacan’s writings of the 1950s, the symbolic order in its consistency, assured by the imposition of authority, the so-called ‘Name-of-the-Father’, provided an anchor for symbolic knowledge and joined it to the imaginary and the real. Once Lacan’s increasing distance from structuralism leads to the insight into the inconsistency of the Other, the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ becomes a fourth term that knots three radically distinct orders – a no longer privileged symbolic, the imaginary, and the real – into reality. As the product of such a fourth term, the social conventions of neurotic normality are similar in structure to the delusions of the psychotic and become only one of many impositions of contingent meaning on a baffling world. What distinguishes neurosis and psychosis is not their inherently rational or irrational nature. Psychosis is “not an irredeemable deficiency but rather another form of subjective organization”.49 Both are delusions in the strict sense of the word, but neurosis is a shared delusion in that it institutes a socially-accepted limit to meaning and behaviour and structurally displaces the object of desire from the subject. In contrast, psychotics must 46 Fenster, Conspiracy Theories, p. 150. Knight, Conspiracy Culture, p. 4. 48 Lacan, “The Mirror Stage”, p. 688. 49 Véronique Voruz/B. Wolf, “Preface”, in: Voruz/Wolf (eds.), The Later Lacan: An Introduction, Albany 2007, pp. viii–xviii. 47 15 construct this limit one by one.50 Accordingly, both neurosis and psychosis have to be understood as contingent attempts at interpretation, bridging a gap between a meaningless real and a meaningful structure whose passage is guaranteed by nothing but its practice. Lacan here exposes the supposed epistemological privilege of sanity as a form of shared belief: precisely the subject’s conviction in an inherent structural or logical difference of a supposedly sane organisation of reality, its internal consistency. It is thus that Miller can write that “[e]veryone is crazy. It is only then that it becomes interesting to make distinctions”.51 Such a conception of psychosis leads not, as one might assume from the identification of all reality as delusional, to a conceptual conflation. Sanity is not denied existence as a category but defined precisely as a sub-category of madness distinguished by its hegemonic status – madness which is supported by the acceptance of its norms and laws as rational. What has changed from early and mid-Lacan to the final phase of his teaching is that he no longer identifies psychosis solely with the imaginary, or a failure to control it. As the symbolic loses the status of a cure, a privilege extended to it under the presupposition of its fullness, the delusional act of reality-production now includes symbolic knowledge or savoir. The emphasis on sanity as hegemonic madness also introduces, more strongly than before, the potential for historical change and the possibility of making new distinctions. Lacan’s late writings also entail a re-definition of paranoia. With reference to Schreber, the paranoiac is now said to imagine that “the Other enjoys [him] in his passivized being”, that is to say, an imagination of a personalized Other, frequently someone standing in for the abstract sphere of social laws, who enjoys in place of a subject that thereby feels robbed of its pleasure.52 This refinement of Lacan’s analysis adds an important aspect to our understanding. While earlier we noted the characteristic imaginary personalization inherent in paranoia, this final definition emphasises the centrality of jouissance and its attribution to figures or structures of authority in situations in which the subject is unable to become an active, enjoying participant in society. Therefore, we can say that what lies at the centre of paranoia is the imagination of a consistent authority, frequently portrayed as all-powerful, and the attribution to this authority of jouissance, of which the subject feels itself robbed.53 50 I am grateful to Véronique Voruz for clarifying these structural distinctions between neurosis and psychosis. Jacques-Alain Miller, “A Contribution of the Schizophrenic to the Psychoanalytic Clinic”, Trans. and ed. Ellie Ragland/A. Pulis, in: The Symptom 2/2002, http://www.lacan.com/contributionf.htm (accessed Nov. 29, 2010). 52 Jacques Lacan, “Présentation des Mémoires d’un névropathe”, in: Autres Écrits, Paris 2001, p. 214. 53 In case this description sounds too much like the psychopathology of old, we might want to emphasise that for Lacan, capitalism indeed functions on the basis of what he calls, in his reading of Marx’s notion of surplus value, the exploitation of “surplus-jouissance”. And do not our fantasies, habitually fuelled by a consumerist culture, constantly revolve around other people’s enjoyment, which we might feel surpasses or even compromises our own enjoyment? Cf. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), Trans. Russell Grigg, New York 2007, pp. 19–20. 51 16 Herein also lies the essential truth of paranoia, without which it is difficult to imagine why conspiracy theories should exert such fascination on the general population and academics alike. Its detection of a structure of authority or oppression speaks the truth of society – its structural responsibility, or the unbroken interrelation and movement between all constituents of the symbolic universe – and transforms it into the existence of conspiracy. In the meaning instituted by their portrayal of power, however, conspiracy theories also strengthen the belief in an authority whose potential disintegration is exposed by the need for such paranoid certainty in the first place. The paradox of conspiracy narratives thus lies in their exposure of the antagonisms they may want to repress and the reinforcement of a status quo they may wish to subvert. 4. Conclusion: Global Narratives As mentioned above, Lacan understands paranoia not as a psychiatric pathology but as a human epistemology. Thus, his psychoanalysis can be seen as complementing existing macroscopic methodologies in the study of political conspiracy theories, or as laying the theoretical groundwork for the study of paranoid narratives in the humanities. Where the former emphasize the precise role and characteristics of existing conspiracy theories in a given context, a Lacanian framework can offer insights into their general function and logic. Such a theoretical basis would seem to be of particular interest for comparative approaches to conspiracy theories. Even at this early stage it seems clear that approaches focussing on the political culture of a given nation or region are constitutively unable to account for the truly global appeal of conspiracy theories exposed by transnational perspectives. Ultimately, interpretations of national or regional conspiracy cultures – no matter how convincing in themselves – thus always rely on universalizing psychological assumptions. In the absence of convincing alternatives, they have tended to fall back on Hofstadter’s Cold War adaptation of post-Freudian thought, the extent of whose ideological bias and intellectual shortcomings should have become evident. Yet it is only when we reject Hofstadter’s definitions of conspiracy theories as a populist and irrational opposition to power that we can begin to ask questions long hidden by their habitual pathologization. Why and how have government and state actors deployed conspiracy theories in the U.S. and beyond, and to what effect? What role did conspiratorial rhetoric play in the popular justification and narration of the Cold War, or in the war against 17 so-called global terrorism, still with us today? Very little work that goes beyond impressionistic and partisan denunciation has been done on conspiratorial theorizing as a tool of political persuasion and hegemony in the U.S. Perhaps, such work would help us to better understand the complex relationship between popular and establishment in its circulation. As I hope these brief reflections indicate, the understanding of paranoia as an epistemological structure does not result in a totalizing disregard for historically and culturally evolved differences. Difference remains meaningless without identity. To return to my initial example: to point to the conspiratorial narratives of government actors in the U.S. is not to equate them with their use in the Middle East, or elsewhere. Rather, the acknowledgement of such partial identity in mechanisms of political persuasion and control would seem to constitute the necessary foundation for a comparative analysis that goes beyond flawed Cold War distinctions between “authoritarian” and “liberal democratic” systems. Thus, we might begin to acknowledge that both Western and non-Western states make conspiracy theories a rational and potentially effective part of their political culture. We might then investigate where their use follows similar patterns and where it diverges. To phrase this in a somewhat different terminology, owed to Michel Foucault, we might ask: can the roles played by conspiracy theories in different national or regional contexts be traced to the constantly evolving and geographically uneven practices of bio-political governmentality? Finally, what constitutes the transnational appeal of conspiratorial narratives spread via international media or the World Wide Web? Here as elsewhere, a Lacanian approach is no hindrance to specific case studies and political analysis, perhaps even the opposite. Lacanian psychoanalysis has long offered an account of the historical evolution of subjective structures that seems particularly well-placed for the analysis of a global culture of conspiracy. Observing the fragmentation of public discourse and the increasing pluralization of norms and communities, Lacanians have posited a general weakening of existing structures of authority. Could the sometimes global currency of conspiracy theories today be understood as a reaction to such a crisis of authority – not of single governments and regimes – but of internalised forms of consent to existing power arrangements? Of course, such hypotheses must be tested and, if need be, adapted or rejected. Constructing a broad theoretical framework for such questions, however, allows us to compare and evaluate observations drawn from different actors, national cultures, and transnational networks that might otherwise remain isolated. Perhaps it is worth returning to Richard Hofstadter one more time in closing. Surveying his essays on the historical evolution of the paranoid style, Hofstadter commented 18 that they all dealt “with public responses to a critical situation or an enduring dilemma”.54 He also noted the international appeal of conspiracy theories and somewhat apologetically explained his exclusive focus on American culture by his chosen profession as a historian of the United States. The crisis of democracy confronted by Hofstadter and his peers in the late 1950s and 1960s ultimately took him in a very different direction. If we insist on his initial observations on the global currency of conspiracy theories and their mediation of political crisis we might today come up with very different answers to these very same questions. 54 Richard Hofstadter, “Introduction”, p. viii.