A-Z: C is for Conspiracy Theory

C is for Conspiracy Theory

Clare Birchall, Professor of Contemporary Culture, King’s College London

“Conspiracy Theory” is the term we use to denote a hypothesis that an event or phenomenon, or a series of events, occurred as a result of a plot orchestrated by a self-serving cabal. However, it is important to remember that “conspiracy theory” is a pejorative, subjective term used to denigrate certain ideas and ways of knowing. It marks certain interpretations as illegitimate and unscholarly. There were uses of the phrase from the 1870s: American newspapers, when reporting on criminal acts would, for example, discuss the “conspiracy theory” alongside the “blackmail theory” or the “abduction theory” (McKenzie-McHarg 2020). And there has, of course, always been alarmist fearmongering about conspiring groups. However, it was Karl Popper’s denigration of the “conspiracy theory of society” that enlisted the term into processes of boundary maintenance (Popper 2002). For Popper, talk of collectives such as social classes behind the scenes pulling the levers of history is an intellectual error that does not recognise the role of unintended consequences in how events unfold. Believing in these “magical forces” is little better than a superstitious faith in Greek gods and they are a sign of a closed rather than an “open society.” “Conspiracy theory”, for Popper, designated a seductive but misguided form of neo-providentialism. This pejorative characterisation was reinforced by a spate of scholarship epitomised by Richard Hofstadter’s classic study of the “paranoid style” (Hofstadter 1964). With this in mind, we must consider the whole epistemic constellation within which this “stigmatised knowledge” (Barkun 2003) operates. We must, that is, take into account conspiracy theory’s others (and its others’ others!).

Cultural studies has offered a more measured view of conspiracy theories (Fenster 2008; Knight 2002; Melley 1999). Some scholars have gone so far as to dismiss the term “conspiracy theory” as a moral panic about political legitimacy (Bratich 2008). But such arguments might leave us open to extreme versions of relativism that prove particularly problematic in so-called post-truth times. Still, Bratich’s reading makes sense when we consider the influence that Fredric Jameson’s description had: he posited conspiracy as “the poor man’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age” (Jameson 1988). The implication is that the people are not performing political analysis correctly (even while Jameson ultimately lays the blame at the door of late capitalism and its dominant aesthetic).

If conspiracy theory is a distinct form of discourse, it is essential to situate it historically and geographically. In the US context (which is not more prone to conspiracy theorising despite certain exceptionalist arguments), accusations of shady plots have always existed (Butter 2014). However, if we are seeking the emergence of a phenomenon that we would recognise as conspiracy theory today, we need to look to the 1970s and 80s, a time when America grappled with various revelations of government overreach – COINTELPRO, MK-ULTRA, Watergate, Iran-Contra. The US’ involvement in black and psychological operations encouraged further speculations in a post-countercultural, government-sceptic milieu. At this time, conspiracy theories – communicated predominantly through zines, radio, BBS, Usenet, or books published by specialist presses – aimed to hold the powerful to account. Because of political and technological shifts in the 1990s, these theories were joined by other strands that also used conspiracist logic: evangelical end-times apocalyptic conspiracism, far-right ethnonationalist antisemitic and anti-black conspiracism, and UFOlogy and Fortean content increasingly accessible via the graphic interface of the world wide web. This is an early example of conspiracist convergence that accelerated during Trump’s presidency, and the Covid-19 pandemic, and is assisted today by social media affordances as well as the physical adjacencies offered by “real life” protest.

Rather than content, we can think about conspiracism in terms of its guiding logic. Matthew Barkun helpfully describes three guiding principles of conspiracy theorisation: everything is connected, nothing is what it seems, and nothing happens by accident (Barkun 2003). Together they forge a particular relation between totalising cognitive mapping, a reliance on suspicion and the privileging of conspiracy over contingency, or human agency rather than macro-structural processes. What distinguishes conspiracy theory from rumour, therefore, is not just that an extra narrative layer must be present (an event is attributed to a self-serving conspiring cabal), but that it is an immersive discourse propped up by ways of understanding the world. This is why conspiracy theories are often tied to identity formation and belonging, making them much harder to refute than discrete forms of disinformation, fake news or rumour. They can often be world-building, immersive and participatory. While conspiracy theories are frequently analysed for the negative affects and effects they engender, it is also true that they provide pleasure and forms of play for many.

Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead suggest that we are now witnessing “conspiracy without the theory”: conspiracy hashtags or social media fragments rather than detailed narratives (Rosenblum and Muirhead 2019). There is obviously something to this – and social media has certainly changed the way conspiracy theories are communicated and constructed. However, it is not the whole story. “Conspiracy without the theory” is a good way of capturing the conspiracist gesturing of Trump on social media, for example, or how conspiracism on TikTok works –  #conspiracytok – but it does not capture the laborious “baking” of theories performed by followers of QAnon, for example.[1] Perhaps a more important shift in the Anglo-American context, is the way that accusations of conspiracy no longer seem to primarily emerge from the margins as a way of challenging monopolies of power and force (as was the case from the 1970s), but are increasingly employed by those in power as a way of sowing discord and intensifying culture wars discourse.

It is crucial to recognise that the place and practice of conspiracy theory is not universal but rooted in time and space. The framing and status of conspiracy theory in any society changes over time: Michael Butter and Katarina Thalmann have argued that conspiracy theories were a perfectly legitimate way of talking about history in the US prior to the Twentieth Century (Butter 2014; Thalmann 2019). Equally, the shape it takes in each culture will be different. That much research on conspiracy theories arises out of the American (and latterly, European) context is problematic if such definitions and theories are transported wholesale to make sense of what is happening across the globe (even though it is certainly the case that home-grown US narratives travel and adapt to other contexts). New scholarship is confronting these issues (see Butter and Knight 2023). Whether it makes sense to use one term to describe all of these different iterations is an ongoing issue.

References

Barkun, Michael. 2003. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Birchall, Clare. 2006. Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip. Oxford: Berg.

Birchall, Clare, and Peter Knight. 2022. Conspiracy Theories in the Time of Covid-19. London: Routledge.

Bratich, Jack Z. 2008. Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Butter, Michael. 2014. Plots, Designs, and Schemes: American Conspiracy Theories from the Puritans to the Present. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Butter, Michael, and Peter Knight, eds. 2023. Covid Conspiracy Theories in Global Perspective. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Fenster, Mark. 2008. Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hofstadter, Richard. 1964. The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Jameson, Fredric. 1988. ‘Cognitive Mapping’. In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Knight, Peter, ed. 2002. Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America. New York: NYU Press.

McKenzie-McHarg, Andrew. 2020. ‘Conceptual History and Conspiracy Theory’. In Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories, edited by Michael Butter and Peter Knight, 16–27. London: Routledge.

Melley, Timothy. 1999. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Popper, Karl. 2002. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. 2nd edition. London: Routledge.

Rosenblum, Nancy L., and Russell Muirhead. 2019. A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Thalmann, Katharina. 2019. The Stigmatization of Conspiracy Theory since the 1950s: ‘A Plot to Make Us Look Foolish’. London: Routledge.

Footnotes

[1] Jack Wilson eloquently made this point at a recent workshop on Reactionary Digital Politics and Conspiracy Theories, 15 March 2024.