Conspiracy, Complicity, Critique

Abstract

Conspiracy, Complicity, Critique Peter Knight (bio) The coronavirus pandemic and the storming of the Capitol have created a perfect storm of conspiracism, especially visible on social media. Many commentators have returned to Richard Hofstadter's analysis of the "paranoid style in American politics" to make sense of the surge of conspiracy-minded populism and the spread of disinformation. Conspiracism is usually framed as beyond the pale of rational discourse, a symptom and a cause of the delegitimization not only of the media, scientific expertise, and democratic institutions, but also of the very idea of objective truth (see Rosenblum and Muirhead 2019 on the nihilistic tendencies of the "new conspiracism" of post-truth politics). But does Hofstadter's diagnosis of the paranoid style still make sense today, when, for example, President Trump himself was one of the most significant "superspreaders" of misinformation about the coronavirus and the 2020 election (Evanega et al. 2020)? Although Hofstadter acknowledges that the paranoid style is a persistent trait in American politics, he nevertheless insists that it is "the preferred style only of minority movements" (1996, 7). Hofstadter, like other consensus historians and sociologists in the 1950s and 1960s, wanted to explain but also to stigmatize what they regarded as mass political delusions (see Butter 2014; Thalmann 2019). In effect, they wanted to diagnose but also quarantine conspiracism as a dangerous tendency, to put clear water between conspiracy thinking and more respectable ways of making sense of historical causality. Either you believe that nothing happens by accident, that nothing is as it seems, and that everything is connected (Barkun 2013), or you think that way of understanding historical causation and collective agency is a delusional fantasy. In contrast, this essay will explore the territory between conspiracy and not-conspiracy, focusing on notions such as collusion, complicity, and critique, which are neither the same as conspiracy, nor simply its opposites. The question is whether it is possible, under conditions of neoliberalism that make it harder than ever to trace lines of corporate and governmental accountability, to talk about problems of collective action and occluded power without lapsing into a conspiracy theory. Only by recognizing the affinities and disavowals between the rational mainstream and its marginalized, irrational counterparts can we begin to understand the seductive appeal and expressive functions of conspiracy theory as an act of communal political [End Page 197] identification, rather than merely a "crippled epistemology" (Sunstein and Vermeule 2009, 211) whose mistaken propositions can be combatted through fact-checking corrections. To do so, I'll first sketch out cock-up, complexity, and contingency theories, before going on to consider how conspiracy theories constitute both a distorted critique of neoliberalism, while at the same time also distracting and diverting their believers from more concerted forms of political opposition. The Conspiracy Theory of Society What is the opposite of a conspiracy theory? One common answer is what might be termed contingency theory, the assumption that there is no underlying plan or meaning to history. Another—closely aligned—possibility is the cock-up theory (as it is termed in the British colloquialism; see McKenzie-McHarg and Fredheim 2017), the notion that things rarely go to plan, often as a result of incompetence rather than intention. A third, related option is complexity theory, the idea that order emerges spontaneously out of a complex system without there being anyone behind the scenes secretly in command. All three answers assume that there is a clear divide between conspiracy theory and its opposites, with conspiracy theory viewed as an unsophisticated, inaccurate, and harmful mode of thought. Although the expression "conspiracy theory" had been used from time to time in the late nineteenth century, Karl Popper provided the first explicit definition of the phenomenon and its opposites (Thalmann 2019; McKenzie-McHarg 2020). He began to formulate what he called "the conspiracy theory of society" (2002, 94; his italics) in two lectures delivered in the late 1940s, before working this argument into the American edition of the second volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1950. It is "the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence...