Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America (review)

Abstract

If asked to reduce Peter Knight's edited collection to an implied coherence, one might say that it boils down to a conversation with Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and, by extension, Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984). Organized into four sections—"Theories of Conspiracy Theory" (chapters 1 through 3), which challenges some popular academic theories of conspiracy, "Alien Nation" (chapters 4 and 5), which analyzes alien abduction narratives, "The Enemy Within" (chapters 6 through 8), which focuses on internal conspiracies and elements of popular culture, and "The Ends of Conspiracy" (chapters 9 through 11), which examines the positive potentials of conspiracy as a theoretical and narrative idiom—almost every author attempts to articulate the relationship between the conspiratorial imagination and postmodernity. Understood as either a gradual globalism and post-Fordist stage of trans/multinational capitalism on the one hand, or as a radical break from modernity in terms of an "incredulity toward metanarratives" on the other (Lyotard, xxiv), almost every chapter situates the postmodern condition as a bewildering experience that is best captured by the concept of paranoia.