Conspiracy Theories

384 Pages·2008·2.333 MB·English

by  Mark Fenster

Conspiracy Theories
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Conspiracy Theories
Secrecy and Power in
American Culture
Mark Fenster
Revised and Updated Edition
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
Copyright 2008 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
First edition published in 1999 by the University of Minnesota Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fenster, Mark.
Conspiracy theories : Secrecy and power in American culture /
Mark Fenster. — Rev. and updated ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-5494-9 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Conspiracies — United States. I. Title.
HV6275.F45 2008
973 — dc22 2008009097
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Introduction
We’re All Conspiracy Theorists Now . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
I. Conspiracy as Politics
1. Theorizing Conspiracy Politics
The Problem of the “Paranoid Style” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.When the Senator Met the Commander
From Pathology to Populism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
II. Conspiracy as Cultural Practice
3. Finding the Plot
Conspiracy Theory as Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
4. Uncovering the Plot
Conspiracy Theory as Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
5. Plotting the Rush
Conspiracy, Community, and Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
III. Conspiracy Communities
6. The Prophetic Plot
Millennialism and Christian Conspiracy Theory . . . . . . . . . . 197
7. A Failure of Imagination
Competing Narratives of 9/11 Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
Afterword
Conspiracy Theory, Cultural Studies,
and the Trouble with Populism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361
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Preface
My fi rst signifi cant political memory: Richard Nixon’s resignation
when I was eleven years old. It was a family moment, the clos-
est thing to a major public trauma that I had experienced during my
conscious life (I was too young to be fully cognizant of or to remember
the Kennedy and King assassinations), and my savvy older sister put
her portable audiocassette recorder up to the television’s little speaker,
preserving the event for posterity. By the time of his resignation, Nixon
seemed like a bad man, although I had secretly rooted for him against
McGovern just to be contrary to all of the older kids at my liberal
Quaker school. Along with many others on the latter end of the baby
boom who were too young to experience the political assassinations and
Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, I had in me the peculiarly American
antipathy to politics and politicians that was instilled by Nixon’s ulti-
mate ignominy. Nixon led me to conclude that you can’t really trust
powerful people, and he led me to suspect that events and machinations
kept secret are probably more important than what is actually revealed.
Perhaps that suspicion, like my tendency to contrarianism, was
always meant to be. The fi rst book I remember reading and enjoy-
ing was a children’s picture book, The Secret Three.1 Ostensibly the
story of Mark, Billy, and Tom, three boys who form a secret club, the
book’s banal description of the boys’ adventures was (for me, anyway)
vii
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viii PREFACE
o vershadowed by the intriguing way the boys meet. Mark and Billy learn
of Tom’s arrival on the island where they all live by fi nding an encrypted
message that Tom had placed inside a bottle and tossed out to sea. Once
they decode the message and meet Tom, they continue to develop new
secrets and codes. Wherever you turn, the book implied, you might
fi nd a possible sign of some secret, a decipherable existence that would
potentially fulfi ll a deep, perhaps unrecognized desire. The book itself
was advertised as part of publisher Harper & Row’s I Can Read series;
while clearly an allusion to its simple language, large typeface, and vivid
illustrations, the series name took on added meaning in a story about
the proliferation of secret signs scattered throughout the world. The
Secret Three taught me that learning to read was a process not only of
understanding the plain meaning of writing but also of fi nding and cor-
rectly interpreting hidden codes and messages.
The most important secret of Mark, Billy, and Tom’s club was not its
mere existence. Rather, its true secret, its infantile but resonant source of
power, its “position of exception” in Georg Simmel’s phrase,2 lay in the
exclusivity of its membership and language. Thanks to the club, envy,
concern, and longing haunted the otherwise banal boyhood utopia that
the book offered me as a fantasy. I wanted at once to join the group, to
replicate it in my own lonely childhood, and to expose and dismantle it.
My contradictory response to The Secret Three, as well as Nixon and
Watergate’s effect on me, is analogous to the conception of power pres-
ent in a particular strain of contemporary American populist discourse:
conspiracy theory. Imagine the experience of “fi nding” evidence of a
“conspiracy”—not especially diffi cult, given the circulation of novels,
fi lms, and nonfi ction narratives that represent such an event. For those
who look for such evidence or who experience this moment of discov-
ery and the gravitational pull into a world of suspicion of doubt, it is
a cathectic moment, an instant in which the spine tingles, the pulse
quickens, the mind focuses. A secret group, wielding unknown but
awesome power, exists. The evidence proving its existence and power
becomes a source of endless further consideration, interpretation,
and investigation, and a reason to fi nd and uncover the plot that both
exemplifi es and causes one’s own powerlessness. This book seeks to
interrogate the social, cultural, and psychic relationship between con-
spiracy and theorist, between individual and group interpretation and
narrative strategies, between populist notions of “the people” and “the
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PREFACE ix
powerful.” Ultimately, I propose that conspiracy theory operates broadly
as a political and cultural practice that longs for a perfectly transparent,
accessible democracy—an end that, even if it were possible, conspiracy
theory can hardly imagine and cannot attain.
Although it retains the basic argument and a signifi cant portion of
the content from the original edition, this revised and updated edition
of Conspiracy Theories tries to clarify the earlier book’s insights, make
them more accessible to a wider readership, and update the research to
include developments in the social and textual case studies of the fi rst
edition and in the academic literature on conspiracy theory and popu-
lism. Most signifi cantly, I have included an entirely new chapter on the
attacks of September 11, 2001. My interest in returning to this project is,
admittedly, partly an effort to keep the book relevant, as it makes little
sense to promote a book about conspiracy theory that fails to cover an
event that has generated more conspiracy theories and theorists since
the assassination era of the 1960s. But I also intend this republication
to meet an important need: a broadly understandable, interdisciplinary
account of a crucial and pervasive political and cultural phenomenon,
as signifi cant today as ever before. Too frequently, commentators glibly
dismiss conspiracy theory as marginal and pathological, a dismissal that
fl attens its complexity and misunderstands its role in contemporary
politics and culture. Also too frequently, academics either share this dis-
regard or, if they attempt to depart from this approach, fail to address
an audience outside of their (our) own small world. I regret that the
original edition of Conspiracy Theories occasionally fell into the latter
trap, either through leaden prose or jargon. I have tried to move the
thickest and least necessary of that jargon into the notes, while retaining
the insights provided by technical social theory and social science into
the practices and signifi cance of conspiracy theory.
As with the previous edition, I would like to acknowledge the enor-
mous infl uence of a number of teachers, friends, and colleagues over the
years, including Joli Jensen, Janet Staiger, Horace Newcomb, Tom Schatz,
Larry Grossberg, Jim Carey, Chris Anderson, Jeff Sconce, Jim Wehmeyer,
Charles Acland, Michael Curtin, Matt Wray, Eric Hayot, Ed White, Bill
Page, and John Henry Schlegel. Thanks to Wesley Beal and Jennifer Kent
for able research assistance on this updated edition. I thank the editors
at the University of Minnesota Press with whom I worked, including, on
the fi rst edition, Janaki Bakhle, Lisa Freeman, Micah Kleit, and Jennifer