Conspiracy Culture

From Kennedy to The X Files

Dr Peter Knight, Peter Knight

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135117313
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Conspiracy theories are everywhere in post-war American culture. From postmodern novels to The X-Files and from gangsta rap to feminist polemic, there is a widespread suspicion that sinister forces are conspiring to take control of our national destiny, our minds, and even our bodies. Conspiracy explanations can no longer be dismissed as the paranoid delusions of far-right crackpots. Indeed, they have become a necessary response to a risky and increasingly globalized world, in which everything is connected but nothing adds up.
Peter Knight provides an engaging and cogent analysis of the development of conspiracy culture, from 1960s' countercultural suspicions about the authorities to the 1990s, where a paranoid attitude is both routine and ironic. Conspiracy Culture analyses conspiracy narratives about familiar topics like the Kennedy assassination, alien abduction, body horror, AIDS, crack cocaine, the New World Order, as well as more unusual ones like the conspiracies of patriarchy and white supremacy.
Conspiracy Culture shows how Americans have come to distrust not only the narratives of the authorities, but even the authority of narrative itself to explain What Is Really Going On. From the complexities of Thomas Pynchon's novels to the endless mysteries of The X-Files, Knight argues that contemporary conspiracy culture is marked by an infinite regress of suspicion. Trust no one, because we have met the enemy and it is us.

1
Conspiracy/culture

Everything is some kind of plot, man.

(Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow)

AGENT SCULLY: What makes you think that this a conspiracy? That the government's involved?

KURT CRAWFORD: What makes you think it isn't?

(The X-Files)

The paranoid is the person in possession of all the facts.

(William Burroughs)

At first sight there is a remarkable continuity in the discourse of American conspiracy over the centuries. The obsessions that Richard Hofstadter documented in his snapshot portrait of the "paranoid style" can still be found at the turn of the millennium. Conspiracy theories about the malign influence of Jewish bankers, the Illuminati and the Masons persist today, from the pages of the Liberty Lobby's Spotlight magazine, to Pat Robertson's best-selling The New World Order (1991). Indeed, Daniel Pipes argues that a frighteningly resilient anti-Semitism continues to be at the heart of most conspiracy theorizing.¹ Yet alongside these familiar demonologies there have emerged significant new forms of conspiracy culture, which operate in very different ways to more traditional modes of the paranoid style. Moreover, even those traditional forms of right-wing extremist conspiracy thinking take on new meanings and serve new purposes. This chapter will outline and explain the major changes in the scope and function of conspiracy culture since the 1960s. The first part summarizes each element in this shift, and the second part examines as a case study the career of Thomas Pynchon, and his novel Vineland (1990) in particular. As Chapter 2 makes clear, however, plotting the trajectory of popular paranoia over the last few decades is far from straightforward. The basic story is of a loss of innocence, which is often seen as a direct consequence of the Kennedy assassination in November 1963. Yet that tale of a widespread fall into conspiracy-minded suspicion and self-perpetuating doubt is itself usually a product of a later need to backdate the causal origin of present woes to the early 1960s. The causally coherent narrative about a growing skepticism towards the authority of experts and the government is undermined by a more general distrust in the authority of narrative to tell such a causally coherent story.

Despite these in-built difficulties, it is nevertheless possible to sketch out in broad terms changes in the shape and function of conspiracy culture over the last few decades. The traditional portrait of the conspiracy theorist is as a marginal, paranoid crackpot, usually located on the far right of the political spectrum, and, in the American context, in a decided minority. Hofstadter, as we have seen, identifies the paranoid style as an "old and recurrent mode of expression in our public life," but one which is the "preferred style only of minority movements."² The following sections show how this model is in need of revision, since conspiracy theories are no longer necessarily the mark of—in order—a delusional, right-wing, marginal, political, dogmatic mindset.

I. The Changing Style of Paranoia

(Un)deniable Plausibility

As the Introduction argued, conspiracy talk cannot be understood any more as straightforward evidence of a delusional, quasi-paranoid mentality. A growing self-consciousness in the rhetoric of paranoia ensures that conspiracy theories are rarely the naive and unmediated symptoms of a deranged mind. Many conspiratorial pronouncements are now prefaced with a self-aware disclaimer along the lines of, "I may sound paranoid, but ..." It has also become harder to dismiss conspiracy theories as proof of a collective propensity to paranoia quite simply because in many people's eyes they have become far more plausible. Since the 1960s more and more Americans have taken the idea of conspiracy, if not for granted, then certainly as a possibility always to be considered. The catalog of prominent conspiratorial events and revelations has produced a climate in which further rumors are more likely to be entertained than immediately dismissed.

If the operating principle in the clandestine world of the intelligence agencies is "plausible deniability," a policy which ensures that those higher up the chain of command are never connected to the dirty work of agents in the field, then for many in the normal world there is an air of what might be termed undeniable plausibility about rumors of government conspiracy. With hotly contended issues like Gulf War syndrome, the assumption for many Americans is that the government is not only responsible for whatever caused the illnesses originally, but is also covering up its culpability. In the light of the revelations about episodes such as the Tuskegee Institute syphilis studies, and the testing of nuclear radiation, LSD and Agent Orange on unsuspecting army personnel and civilians, it would come as no surprise, the argument goes, that the government would have conducted similarly callous experiments on servicemen and women during the Gulf War. Even if a particular conspiracy theory turns out to be wildly unfounded, for many people it is nevertheless a reasonable assumption that a conspiracy theory is an initially viable explanation for strange events and coincidences.

The rhetoric of conspiracy is thus no longer the hate -filled lingua franca of extremists, but has become part of the American vernacular. Since the 1960s conspiracy culture has produced an accumulative litany of acronyms, code names and trebled names, less a credo of fixed belief than a shorthand of routinized suspicion. The evocative roll call includes: JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, Marilyn Monroe, MK-ULTRA, Operation Paperclip, Phoenix, Mongoose, Majestic-12, COINTELPRO, Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, Arthur Herman Bremer, Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley Jr, LSD, MIA, CIA, FBI, NSA, Secret Service, Octopus, Gemstone, Roswell, Area 51, Tuskegee, Jonestown, Chappaquiddick, Waco, Oklahoma, Watergate, Iraqgate, Iran-Contra, October Surprise, Savings & Loan, Whitewater, Lockerbie, TWA flight 800, O. J., Ebola, AIDS, crack cocaine, military—industrial complex, black helicopters, gray aliens, grassy knoll, magic bullet, lone nut. This mantra of popular paranoia ranges from the undeniably plausible to the wildly speculative. But the logic is that the few cases of actually proven conspiratorial misdealings (e.g. COINTELPRO, the FBI's much abused program of domestic spying on and infiltration of black activist groups, amongst others) warrant at least an initial skepticism about official denials in all subsequent cases.

What is more significant, however, is that it is becoming increasingly hard to be certain of the difference between the plausible and the paranoid. With both a restricted access to real information (despite the Freedom of Information Act) and an overload of data (particularly on the Internet) it is proving more difficult to distinguish between false rumors and actual revelations. As far as the conspiracy theorist is concerned (and to some extent we are all conspiracy theorists now), the possibility of deliberately planted false clues—"disinformation"—means that we can never rest in our interpretative endeavors. Take the example of the now notorious rumor about the crash landing of an alien UFO at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.³ On 8 July 1947 the Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release announcing that the wreckage of a "flying disk" had been found, a story quickly picked up by the local and then the national media, which began to link the crash to recent talk and sightings of "flying saucers." The story was then denied by the Army Air Force, who announced that the sighting of an unidentified flying object and its metallic debris was merely a weather balloon falling to earth. In the halfcentury since the crash (and most intensely since the rediscovery in the late 1970s of the case), many people have revisited those early rumors, insisting that the weather balloon story was a cover-up for a far more disturbing truth, the most popular of which is that aliens had landed, and (in more elaborate versions), that the government and the military knew this, and became involved with the aliens in one way or another, and have been covering both elements up ever since.⁴ According to many conspiracy theorists, President Eisenhower created Majestic-12 (MJ-12), a top secret committee of military, intelligence and academic personnel to orchestrate the concealment of the truth behind the crash, namely that four "extraterrestrial biological entities" (EBEs) had been found near the crash site.

Although the much reprinted MJ-12 documents are undoubtedly a hoax, the military and the intelligence agencies have indeed returned to investigate the case (and other sightings) several times. The Air Force's long-running Project Blue Book investigation into UFO phenomena concluded that all the sightings could be explained away in terms of natural phenomena. The Robertson Panel, a classified committee of scientists convened by the CIA in 1953, likewise came to the conclusion that there was no good evidence that UFOs were of alien origin. But a 1997 article in the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence admitted that the weather balloon story was a coverup, and even that the National Security Council had been instructed (on the advice of the Robertson panel, who were apparently worried about the public succumbing to mass hysteria) to debunk UFO rumors, through such means as Project Blue Book.⁵ According to this article, the truth that had to be kept quiet was the existence of high-altitude spy planes and other experimental craft. In the wake of a string of sensational books on Roswell, New Mexico Representative Steven Schiff urged the General Accounting Office to hunt for any documents on the case. The Air Force was prompted by this move to begin a six-month investigation of its own, which reported in July 1994 that the crash was not of a weather balloon but a balloon that was part of Project Mogul, a top secret mission to track Soviet nuclear tests. In response to criticism by ufologists about the first (and supposedly definitive) report's silence on the question of alien bodies reputedly found at the site, the Air Force launched a further inquiry. This explained that in the 1950s the USAF had used crash-test dummies in experiments on high-altitude parachutes, and therefore local eyewitnesses may have retrospectively combined the two elements to form the Roswell myth of recovered alien bodies.⁶

Here at last was supposedly the ultimate answer to what the UFO community dubs a "cosmic Watergate," given in a spirit of post-Cold War glasnost. Yet the repeated pattern of denial, concealment and false revelation casts a shadow of suspicion on any official pronouncement in this—and many other—cases. It is not so much that everyone believes that the government is inevitably lying (though many Americans take that as read). Rather, even if the story of covert weapons research is true, there is no certain way of knowing for sure that it is true. For many, a lingering suspicion always remains; nothing is ever quite what it seems; no "final report" ever ensures that the case is truly closed. According to a Time/ Yankelovich poll, 80 percent of Americans believe the US government knows more about extraterrestrials than it chooses to let on.⁷

In addition to never quite being able to fully believe in official pronouncements by experts and authorities, there is the mounting difficulty of not knowing which experts to trust. The trial of O. J. Simpson, in which the defense alleged that there had a been a police conspiracy to frame the former football star, heard from a phenomenal number of expert scientific witnesses, not just on the evidence but on the nature of DNA testing itself, adding a level of complexity most people were content to ignore.⁸ For most amateur inquirers, when the various experts are in disagreement, there is no obvious and agreed-upon criteria for working out which expert to believe, other than to call in a further expert, and so on, potentially for ever. Obviously conspiracy theorists do come to conclusions, but the specter of uncertainty always haunts their seemingly solid convictions.

In the eyes of many Americans, the only safe bet is that there might well be a conspiracy, for all the public at large know are likely to ever know. The burden of proof is now reversed, such that the authorities must strenuously provide conclusive evidence that there has been no initial conspiracy or subsequent cover-up. Of course, with the default mode of reception set to battle-weary paranoia, any denial of a conspiracy is itself often taken as evidence of a desire to cover something up. Contemporary conspiracy culture is therefore always poised on the edge of an infinite abyss of suspicion. The prime-time conspiracy show, The X-Files, stylishly captures the possibility that we have entered what David Martin's book on the CIA and the Cold War termed a "wilderness of mirrors."⁹ Looking back over his five years of investigating the paranormal and unexplained events chronicled in the FBI's X-Files, a disillusioned Special Agent Mulder confesses sadly at a UFO conference that his all-too-gullible belief in alien life has been exploited by the conspiracy he has begun to uncover. He announces that his ready belief in a government plot to hide the existence of extraterrestrial life was cynically used by the higher ranks of power in order to mask their sinister medical experiments on unwitting victims, who in turn were fed abduction stories to lead them off the trail. "The conspiracy is not to hide the existence of extraterrestrials," he explains, "it's to make people believe in it so completely that they question nothing."¹⁰ By the next series, however, Mulder has once again found what he thinks is conclusive evidence of alien visitations, and now believes that the official denial was a carefully coordinated lie to conceal the fact that the government has all along been involved with alien—human hybrid DNA experiments. With its endless reversal and re-evaluation of all certainties, The X-Files (as Chapter 6 discusses in more detail) dramatizes in a condensed and stylized form the perpetual motion of suspicion that marks out recent conspiracy thinking. Far from offering a paradoxically comforting and fixed paranoid interpretation of the last half-century of American history, it revels in an infinite hermeneutic of suspicion which undermines every stable conclusion the Special Agents reach. Rather than dwelling on any particular fixed product of conspiracy theorizing, The X-Files concentrates, in line with other examples, on the process of repeatedly discovering that everything you thought you knew is wrong.

Invisible Government

The rise of a cultural fascination with conspiracy as an undeniably plausible working assumption in the last few decades cannot be separated from the emergence of what might be termed a culture of conspiracy. It is not just that conspiracy thinking has become more legitimate as a popular mode of historical explanation because a few conspiracies have been unmasked in a very public fashion. An internalized fantasy of conspiracy and counterconspiracy also seems to captivate those on the inside of the power game. During the twentieth century, and since the foundation of the CIA in 1947 in particular, American politics has increasingly relied on clandestine means to pursue its goals, and a bureaucratic culture of secrecy has come to be taken for granted. A year after the Kennedy assassination, David Wise and Thomas Ross argued in their ground-breaking study that there is an "invisible government" at work in the United States, forming "an interlocking, hidden machinery" that gathers intelligence and carries out its own policies. An informed citizen, they suggest, "might come to suspect that the foreign policy of the United States often works publicly in one direction and secretly through the Invisible Government in just the opposite direction."¹¹ This doppelganger government dates primarily from the National Security Act of 1947 and the development of the Cold War, and is comprised in the main by the sprawling intelligence community, which includes the CIA, the National Security Council, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, Army Intelligence, Navy Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Atomic Energy Commission and the FBI.

The investigations into political assassinations during the 1970s (particularly the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee of 1975), in addition to the Watergate and the Iran-Contra hearings, exposed the extent of so-called ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Introduction: Conspiracy/Theory
• 1 Conspiracy/Culture
• 2 Plotting the Kennedy Assassination
• 3 The Problem with No Name: Feminism and the Figuration of Conspiracy
• 4 Fear of a Black Planet: "Black Paranoia" and the Aesthetics of Conspiracy
• 5 Body Panic
• 6 Everything is Connected
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index