Impossible Knowledge

Conspiracy Theories, Power, and Truth

Todor Hristov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367670290
• eBook ISBN: 9780429749377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Conspiracy theorists claim impossible knowledge, such as knowledge of the doings of a secret world government. Yet they accept this impossible knowledge as truth. In effect, conspiracy theories detach truth from knowledge.

Knowledge without power is powerless. And the impossible knowledge claimed by conspiracy theorists is rigorously excluded from the regimes of truth and power – that is not even wrong. Yet conspiratorial knowledge is potent enough to be studied by researchers and recognized as a risk by experts and authorities.

Therefore, in order to understand conspiracy theories, we need to think of truth beyond knowledge and power. That is impossible for any scientific discipline because it takes for granted that truth comes from knowledge and that truth is powerful enough to destroy the legitimacy of any authority that would dare to conceal or manipulate it. Since science is unable to make sense of conspiracy theories, it treats conspiracy theorists as individuals who fail to make sense, and it explains their persistent nonsense by some cognitive, behavioral, or social dysfunction.

Fortunately, critical theory has developed tools able to conceive of truth beyond knowledge and power, and hence to make sense of conspiracy theories. This book organizes them into a toolbox which will enable students and researchers to analyze conspiracy theories as practices of the self geared at self-empowerment, a sort of political self-help.

1 Suffering

This chapter argues that conspiracy theorists make impossible knowledge claims because they suffer.

But if conspiracy theorists were suffering from a broken mind or body, they would simply be ill. Their impossible knowledge claims should have deeper roots in the in-between space, in which individual bodies and minds converge or diverge, conflict or synchronize. In a word, their suffering should have social roots.

Of course, some diseases affect populations rather than isolated individuals, and conspiracy theories were once indeed considered a sort of epidemic that spread through the contact of dangerous minds like the far-right extremists or the communists. But the conspiratorial narratives gained such wide currency in late modern popular culture that their conceptualization as an epidemic or even as a pathology no longer seems adequate.

The ground of order

Conspiracy theories have been explained by the suffering caused by the flawed social order of late capitalism.

Since the concept of order is often used as an empty abstraction, let me illustrate its concrete stakes by means of an example discussed by Michel Foucault in the introduction to The Order of Things (2002, xix–xx).

After World War I, Kurt Goldstein and Adhémar Gelb invented a test for abstract thinking (Gelb and Goldstein, 1920; Finger et al. 2009, 248–9): the subject was asked to sort a large number of woolen skeins of varying color and texture. If the subject was suffering from color anomia, she would endlessly arrange and rearrange the skeins; for example, she would group them according to hue, but then she would scatter them again in order to group them according to brightness, only to start shifting them about from one place to another in a fraught attempt to take into account their texture, until she would heap them up again in the center of the table.

Neurologists explain color anomia by a lesion of the brain. But Foucault used the color sorting test as an illustration that any order rests on a ground, without which words and things fall apart. So, from a Foucauldian perspective, what is wounded in the case of color anomia is not just the brain but the ground of order. If the anomic subjects cannot stop ordering and reordering the skeins, it is because any order they manage to produce seems to be ungrounded, a thin foil of orderliness covering an unfathomable disorder.

Foucault’s example also demonstrates that the ground of order is not a given; it is a product of labor. To order a heap of woolen skeins means to put them in their places, but to do that one needs to divide the multiplicity into elements, to decompose the common space of the table into different places, to differentiate the time of ordering into moments like ‘first,’ ‘second,’ ‘next,’ ‘after that,’ etc., to assign a proper place and moment to each element, to decide which elements belong or do not belong together, to decide which elements are similar or dissimilar, and – since they are linked not by binary relationships of equivalence or opposition, but rather by an intricate web of resemblances and differences – to define the threshold between relevant and irrelevant resemblances and differences, to decide on the threshold beyond which the differences between two elements become too much to put them together or the resemblances between them are enough not to pull them apart, to organize the differences between the elements of a group into an open series of variations of the same, to take into account the distance and proximity between the different groups of elements, to set up residual and hybrid groups like ‘the rest,’ ‘unsorted,’ ‘to be taken care of later,’ without which any order is impossible or at least impractical, and so on.¹

In a nutshell, the ground of any order is the work of ordering. Although in the case of the color sorting test, ordering is a relatively uncomplicated work for one, it can be much a more extensive, sustained, sophisticated, collective effort which involves a multiplicity of agents and intricately organized and stratified apparatuses of power, production, signification, and subjectivity (Foucault 1988, 17; Agamben 2009, 2–15).

Anomia

Many critical theorists have interpreted conspiratorialism as a symptom of a flaw in the late capitalist social order identified with its incomprehensible totality, complexity, social contradictions, powerlessness, and injustice.²

But if we take into account that conspiracy theories make social totality even more incomprehensible, that the critics who explain them as symptoms of the social situation do not take into account their heterogeneous functions in popular culture and often sound conspiratorial themselves, then such diagnoses would justifiably seem nothing but theories of conspiracy theories which are too powerful for their object, which reduce power to repression, and which are themselves inscribed in the grand plot of class struggle (Knight 2000, 20, 74, 225, 2003, 23).

I argue that it is more productive to read such theories as arguments that late capitalism affected the very ground of social order, the work of ordering.

Even if we admit that the social order is a given, it will not be incomprehensible if we cannot grasp it. And to grasp it means to order it for ourselves, from our perspective. Of course, that does not mean to draw an accurate or detailed map of the social order, just like we do not need a map to understand indexical expressions like ‘here,’ ‘now,’ or ‘we.’

For an ordinary actor, to comprehend the social order means to find one’s place in it. But in order to do this, one needs to sort out a multiplicity of elements that are quite more complicated than a heap of woolen skeins, at least because of the following reasons:

• 1 They are cumulative quantities that cannot be decomposed into individual units, just like a traffic jam cannot be decomposed into individual cars.
• 2 They are variable, quite like the number of cars needed to jam the traffic at a particular point.
• 3 The elements of the social order are differential, i.e. they are defined by differences or thresholds, as the traffic jam is characterized by its difference from stopping at a red light, or by the threshold below which the cars just move slowly.
• 4 The elements of social order depend on a series of other variables which are open, unpredictable, interdependent, and often unknown (a traffic jam depends not only on the place and the time of the day, but also on the road network and its condition, on the public transportation network, on the share of car ownership by household, on the weather conditions, on the current events – perhaps a football game, a renovation, a police blockade, etc.; Foucault 2009, 35–7; Garfinkel 2002, 92).

Comprehending the social order is a sophisticated practical accomplishment, even if it depends on fuzzy categories like ‘us’ and ‘them,’ on questionable figures like ‘the aliens,’ or on heterotopia like ‘the Balkans.’ Late capitalism has made this accomplishment increasingly difficult, for at least the following reasons:

• 1 The ground of modern order was shaped by disciplinary apparatuses (Foucault 1979; Jameson 1988, 349). If we simplify, to order a multiplicity of elements means to put them in a closed space, to impose on it a grid that allocates an individual place to any element, to organize the elements according to their function or value, to measure their deviation from a norm, and to organize them into spatial or temporal series, so as to maximize efficiency (Foucault 2009, 67–9). If you find that description abstract, then any modern classroom or cubicle office can provide an ample illustration. Now, in late capitalism the grid of disciplinary order has been eroded by flows that are deterritorialized in the sense that they cannot be closed up in a delimited space, like capital, information, or migrant flows, and in consequence ordering has come to mean putting in their places elements that circulate beyond borders at an increasing velocity (Jameson 1988, 350–1).
• 2 Late capitalism is driven by the imperative of growth. But to achieve exponential growth, one needs to intensify production at increasing rates. Since the products have to be put in circulation, the demand for them should be virtually insatiable. So, the crucial products of late capitalism are not the tangible goods of the modern industry, like machines or clothing, but rather goods that make a difference, like novelties or brands. In order to survive, late-capitalist industries need to produce differences with increasing intensity (Jameson 1991, 4). In effect, to comprehend the social order one has to sort out series of cumulative differential elements that develop at an increasingly higher speed. Imagine a Gelb-Goldstein color sorting test in which the psychologist keeps putting new wool skeins on the table faster and faster, the color of the skeins depends on their difference in hue from others, so they increasingly change their colors, and perhaps the table is shaking.

Of course, social order is still comprehensible, if not to the ordinary actor, then at least to a critic like Frederic Jameson or to his critics. But such critics have at their disposal the powerful discursive apparatuses of social science and critical theory. The poor³ do not have access to such sophisticated and expensive apparatuses of knowledge production, and if they do not develop faster than late capitalism, they are unable to put their social world in order and they become socially anomic.⁴ However, that does not mean that they give up and live in disorder, but rather that just like the color anomics, they are consumed with an incessant, desperate, increasingly productive work of ordering which is never arrested in a finished product, an endless reordering disentangled from any order, an act without knowledge (Foucault 1988, xii).⁵

To be socially anomic means to be unable to find your place among the others. But this does not mean to be excluded, to lack a place and in that sense to be free. It means that your position is constantly sliding, that your place is always becoming something else, that you are always elsewhere. And although that can be invigorating, since you can always hope to end up in a different place (Jameson 2009, 595), it can be also frustrating because you will always be displaced and misplaced (Dean 1998, 11).

Demanding the impossible

How do impossible claims of knowledge articulate social anomia?

Almost two months after the start of the occupation of Zuccotti Park in 2011, Occupy Wall Street made no demands. The mainstream media reproached the protesters that if they demanded nothing, the authorities could not offer them a thing, so they could achieve nothing and they would be responsible for their unavoidable failure.

A special working group discussed relentlessly the list of demands of the movement. A few days before Thanksgiving, at a decisive but not very well attended meeting, the group reviewed the final version of the list, which was now reduced to creating jobs. In the course of the discussion reemerged other demands, like nationalization, reduction of student debt, and establishment of a party. Then a new member of the group known as Elk said:

Of course, we’d love to get rid of debts, and have jobs. But people in this country with money and power are deciding policy outside of government, in a way to support people with money.

(Demands 2011a)

Was this a conspiracy theory? Or just a general dissent? Was it different in kind from the demand to nationalize the banking system proposed by a communist a few minutes before? Itzak, an older member of the working group, asked Elk what people he had in mind and how he came to know about their secret dealings. So Elk explained:

This is through my own research… . My understanding is that [they are] members with a lot of money, and they tend to be members of the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations, members of these groups are often members of other groups, and they are the people coming together and committing treason, because they are creating policy and not allowing the two party system to work.

(Demands 2011a)

Now, this was obviously a claim about a small group of powerful people conspiring together to advance their interests by means of secret manipulation of public institutions (Knight 2003, 15). Conspiracy theory, commented Itzak later on, and in response Elk made an even more impossible claim:

The problem with conspiracy theories is that they are not just theories. These things are true. They are conspiracy facts. That is something that the general public doesn’t know much more about. There needs to be education. I think this movement is about everyone taking personal responsibility for choices that we have made. Therefore we all need to educate ourselves. So we understand that these aren’t conspiracy theories. When you look at Building 7 and see what architects and engineers say, there’s no question that the government had something to do with 9/11.

(Demands 2011a)

Elk’s claim was impossible not simply because of its contents. Its subject was constituted by impossibly idiosyncratic knowledge. It was addressed to the potential ‘we’ that would emerge out of the transformation of his idiosyncratic knowledge into social norm. The actual listeners, the members of the working group, were reduced to ears that should hear his address to this actually nonexistent ‘we.’ And Elk was demanding the impossible, in a language that made the others doubt his seriousness or sincerity, in violation of the accepted procedure, as he did not wait for the proper item in the agenda and spoke too long. But is not this the formal structure of any revolutionary discourse?

Nevertheless, the claim was made by a subject unable to speak properly, to a subject that could not hear, through the channel of tens of ears that did not want to hear. And because of this triple impossibility, the truth of the claim or the right to make such a claim was not even questionable. The claim was not even wrong (Bratich 2008, 3), and the only question was how could one wrong the truth so much, how could one violate the right to speak this much?

And since the claim seemed a wrongdoing, the question was not what Elk wanted to say, but what made him talk like that. Suffering, perhaps.

The conspiratorial sublime

Conspiracy theories can be explained as an attempt to repair the anomic situation brought about by late capitalism.

In general, such theories postulate an order hidden beneath the social order. But the hidden order should belong to the social order, because otherwise it would be irrelevant. At the same time, it should not be included in the social order, because otherwise it would be carried away by the incessant displacement of social positions.

Conspiracy theorists solve or dissolve the paradox of belonging without inclusion by representing the hidden order as a totality (Jameson 2009, 603, 1992, 3, 1991, 38). Indeed, the totality of a multiplicity of elements belongs to the multiplicity without being included in it, just like the totality of a city belongs to the city without being a part of it (Jameson 1988, 353).⁶

But if totality is hidden, if it is lacking from the present social order, it ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Suffering
• 2 Desire
• 3 Power and truth
• Conclusion: against debunking
• Index