Notes on the Nature of Conspiracy
Florian Cramer
12/2007
"For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance
of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was
just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and
manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed,
assumed full circle into some paranoia." Thomas Pynchon, The
Crying of Lot 49
Political Theology
Conspiracy theories are an old phenomenon, but a modern term,
coined in Karl Popper's book "Open Society and Its
Enemies" from 1945. What nowadays is called a conspiracy theory
chiefly applies, since the publication of the Rosicrucian manifesto
"Fama Fraternitatis" in the early 17th century, to secret
societies like the Rosicrucians, Freemasons and Illuminati, since the
19th century in to whole parts of the population like Jews, nowadays
also to Muslims or, reciprocally in political Islam, to Christians.
Religion is a conspiracy in the most literal sense of the word, a
gathering and fabrication of spirits, or ghosts. Conspiracy theories
thus target the gray areas between religion and politics, belief and
power.
Their ground assumption is the existence of esoteric as opposed
to exoteric politics just as in esoteric versus exoteric religion; in
other words, that there is a hidden politics underneath or opposed to
publicly visible politics, or - particularly in antisemitic
conspiracy theories - that there is esoteric politics in exoteric and
esoteric religion. Conspiracy theories are thus prime examples of
political theology as defined by Popper's adversary Carl Schmitt.
They are are reverse-engineered political theology that do not merely
describe, but practically apply the concepts of the esoteric and the
exoteric much like American neo-conservatism applies Leo Strauss'
assumption of an esoteric truth in political philosophy.
If religion is a conspiracy, then theology is conspiracy theory
and vice versa, conspiracy theories are theologies that have shifted
from cultural explanations of nature to cultural explanations of
culture; human explanations of how mankind works, as opposed to human
(but disguised as divine) explanation of how divine power works.
Modern conspiracy theories, in other words, are the oxymoron of
secular belief systems.
Semiotics
These theologies are, above all, interpretations of signs: In
Western religions, interpretations of nature as symbolic, as a divine
sign that emanated from the divine word. In modern conspiracy
theories, it is the attribution of signs - words, images, sound bites
as recorded primarily by mass media - to one coherence and
all-comprehensive meaning, connecting signs of diverse origins
against a common sense that considers them unrelated. As abundant
webs of interrelated signs, where everything corresponds to
everything, and every detail has a higher meaning, conspiracy
theories are hyper-semioses and what Umberto Eco calls
"overinterpretation"; in his novel "The Pendulum of
Foucault", he writes, aside from its pulp fiction, precisely
such a semiotics of conspiracy theories as hybrids of interpretation
and political theology.
Conversely, Christian and Jewish theology have a strong element
of semiotic paranoia since they trace every material phenomenon to
the creation through the word of god. Pop cultural conspiracy
theories like in Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus"
could be called semiotic plays with political theology which
ultimately reverted to proper political theology once they were
taken, for example by 1980s German computer hacker Karl Koch, for
face value and a Straussian esoteric revelation of the true
machinations of world power. - In hacker culture, paranoia of
political world conspiracies steered by Illuminati or Freemasons
still continues to exist.
Paranoia
"Siehst Du den lichten Streif da über das Gras hin,
wo die Schwämme so nachwachsen? Da rollt abends der Kopf. Es hob
ihn einmal einer auf, er meint', es wär ein Igel: drei Tag
und drei Nächt, er lag auf den Hobelspänen. - Leise:
Andres, das waren die Freimaurer! Ich hab's, die
Freimaurer!" (Georg Büchner, Woyzeck, 1837)
To make sense of anything and everything is a narcissistic
proposition insofar it traces all signs back to one entity, and one
conspiracy; this is why conspiracy theories are either monotheistic
in their structure, or at least based on systematic theology. In
psychoanalytic terms, they are paranoid semiotics, with paranoia
being a form of irrationality that is perfectly if not overly
rational: irrationality relying on rational methods of drawing
seemingly logical, coherent and persuasive conclusions from
observations and facts, or rationalization that becomes irrational
because it doesn't accept irrationality, and contingency.On the
level of rhetoric, this often entails inclusions of seemingly
unrelated observations while filtering and keeping only those that
fit a preconceived theory.
Sublime
Far from being merely a clinical psychosis, paranoia is the
open modus operandi of whole industries: "Only the Paranoid
Survive", for example, is the title of the autobiography by the
co-founder and long-term CEO of the Intel corporation, Andrew Grove.
Likewise, IBM and Microsoft are famous for their paranoid marketing
strategy of spreading "FUD", or "fear, uncertainty and
doubt" about competing products and companies, the emotions and
sentiments that conversely complement semiotic over-rationalization
of conspiracy plots. They describe the aesthetic dimension of
conspiracy theories, in the literal meaning of aisthesis as
perception, sentiments and subjective judgement.
Since the Latin rhetoric of Pseudo-Longinus and the 18th
century aesthetic theory of Edmund Burke, the sublime is the
aesthetic register of fear, uncertainty and doubt. Longinus, Burke,
later Immanuel Kant and romanticist artists like Caspar David
Friedrich and William Turner identify the sublime with forces of
nature: storms, lightning, mountain ranges and canyons, dark woods.
In the 19th century, gothic novels turn the horrors of nature into
human-made horrors of culture, a tradition continued up to The Name
of the Rose and The Da Vinci Code with their combinations of the
gothic tale with murder plots and political conspiracy. It might not
seem coincidental that the first large-scale conspiracy theories,
such as the antisemitic "Protocols of the Elders of Zion",
have appeared since the 19th century, too, using the sublime as the
trope of an aesthetic politics: infinite, branching out, threatening,
overwhelming.
In his book "The Postmodern Condition" from 1979,
Jean-François Lyotard identifies a "postmodern
sublime" based on subjective experiences, and a human condition,
of contingency. The conspiracy theory novels of Thomas Pynchon,
Robert Anton Wilson, Umberto Eco and Dan Brown do not only exemplify
a "postmodern" permeability of popular and high culture,
but also - especially in Wilson's hacker cultural perception -
the thin line of paranoia, between reflecting and submitting to
contingency.
Underground politics
From Latin rhetoric to dark romanticism and abstract
expressionist painting, the sublime has been generally identified as
anti-beautiful, anti-classicist and therefore anti-mainstream. Gothic
still exists as a subculture today. Conspiracy theories, with their
paranoid sublime, likewise are a counter-cultural phenomenon,
underground wherever they contradict official history and construct
alternative realities. Disrupting common-sense truth, they show how
things can be interpreted radically differently, amounting in the
best cases to practical epistemological critique. For these reasons,
conspiracy theories have been tactically employed in subcultures,
both analytically, as readings, and synthetically, as fabrications,
such as the collective identity and media phantom Luther Blissett. At
the same time, it exemplifies a translation of Pynchon's,
Wilson's, Eco's and (perhaps) Brown's conspiracy fictions
into a social practice, and as a critical reversal of the escalation
of fiction into belief: dubbing itself a "conspiracy"
first, it ended up with the publication of the historical novel
"Q", thus ultimately containing itself as fiction and
putting the lid on any paranoid political theology that otherwise
might have grown out of the project.
Overground Politics
The affinity of conspiracy theories and postmodern condition
does not exhaust itself in the sublime: while a single conspiracy
theories claims an alternative truth, conspiracy theories in their
whole state that there is not one, but an infinite number of truths
whose rule depends on power and, especially in the case of
counter-truths, persuasiveness. Just as Nietzsche stated in his 1873
fragment on "Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense", truth
is rhetorical:
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and
anthropomorphisms - in short, a sum of human relations which have
been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and
rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and
obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has
forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out
and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures
and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
While Nietzsche claims to offer an "extra-moral"
perspective on truth, it nevertheless contains a morality: That
truth, as a rhetorical fabrication, cannot be trusted. Although
Nietzsche's respective claim marks a blind spot in the logic of
this statement - similar to the paradox of the Neoist slogan
"belief is the enemy" -, it also points out where
conspiracy theories become problematic: At the very point where they
are trusted, and believed.
Thomas Pynchon's novel "The Crying of Lot 49"
from 1966 tells of an underground, conspiratorial postal system of
which, until the end, it is not clear whether it exists in reality or
just in the imagination of its main protagonist. The system
communicates the message of an alternate reality by its mere
existence and mythological history. Its counter-cultural network
includes a Neo-Nazi Mike Fallopian and the white supremacist Peter
Pinguid Society. At this point, the conspiracy plot is no longer
romantic, but reflects gray zones between underground and overground
politics; the underground, and what later was romanticized by
Deleuze, Guattari and electronic art as a "rhizome", is no
value in itself.
Networks
If conspiracy theories create webs of meanings by considering
anything related to anything, they construct networks. The network as
such is a structurally paranoid figure of thought, or at least one
that invites conspiracy theories. The Internet as the electronic
network of networks thus is the perfect embodiment of conspiracy
theories, including the popular urban legend that it was designed by
the U.S. military to withstand a nuclear strike.
Media Theory
No other discipline has spun this urban legend more often than
media theory. Media theory itself has paranoid tendencies first of
all by its inflation of the term "medium" to the degree
that virtually everything ends up being a medium, including senders
and receivers, light bulbs and guns, angels and altar bread. If
everything is a medium, it is easy to conclude that we are surrounded
and permeated by media. And since McLuhan's assumption that the
medium is the message, media theorists believe that the medium is the
creator rather than the purveyor of a message, a tool with its own
agenda.
Therefore, media theory tends to describe technology not as
something cultural and constructed, but as an autonomous agent that
has taken over and programs culture, not unlike the science fictions
of Blade Runner, Robocop and Terminator. Critical theory thus turns
into a belief system that puts technology where gods and demons once
used to be. It becomes all the more questionable once it transforms
from a heretic provocation against goodie-two-shoes humanities into
an institutional doctrine.
One could, admittedly, criticize this critique as paranoid
itself. But thinking of "media" as a whole as one big
conspiracy might put conspiracy theories to productive critical use.