Plots: Literary Form and Conspiracy Culture

Ben Carver, Dana Craciun, Todor Hristov, Ben Carver, Dana Craciun, Todor Hristov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367500702
• eBook ISBN: 9781000475616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited collection contributes to the study of conspiracy culture by analysing the relationship of literary forms to the formation, reception, and transformation of conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theories are narratives, and their narrative form provides the structure within which their 'readers' situate themselves when interpreting the world and its history. At the same time, conspiracist interpretations of the world may then be transmediated into works of literature and import popular discourse into narrative structures. The suppression and disappearance of books themselves may generate conspiracy theories and become co-opted into political dissent. Additionally, literary criticism itself is shown to adopt conspiracist modes of interpretation. By examining conspiracy plots as literary plots, with narrative, rhetorical, and symbolic characteristics, this volume is the first systematic study of how conspiracy culture in American and European history is the consequence of its interactions with literature.

This book will be of great interest to researchers of conspiracy theories, literature, and literary criticism.

Section 1Conspiracy theories about books and authors

3Erich Auerbach’s conspiracy theory

John W. Roberts

10.4324/9781003048657-5

Reflecting on Oliver Stone’s J.F.K. (1991), historian Hayden White explains that two concepts – the historical event and the story – have undergone what White terms a radical transformation ‘as a result of both that revolution in representational practices known as cultural “modernism” and the technologies of representation made possible by the electronics revolution’ (White 1996b, 22–3). On White’s account, the twentieth-century’s unique combination of both audiovisual mass media and the emergence of what he terms ‘holocaustal events’ of traumatically sublime scale and scope have had the effect of rendering historical events incomprehensible, since it is no longer possible to establish a finite context to delimit historical events (20, 22). While White identifies the Holocaust as the paradigmatic example of such an event, he also explains how the Kennedy assassination functions as a so-called ‘modernist event’ insofar as it is evidently not possible to definitively say what the limits of the event are, what information is or is not relevant, and what the limits of the context for approaching the event might be.¹ This is why for White, Oliver Stone’s maximalist aesthetic strategy of blurring the boundaries between historical fact and fiction is not only effective, but in White’s words harbours ‘the only prospect for adequate representations’ of such holocaustal, modernist events (32). Hence for White, the controversial aesthetics of docu-drama become, through their very inability or refusal to conventionally narrativize and thereby domesticate modernist events, the only hope for representing the traumatic historical rupture those events produce. Moreover, if J.F.K. is a film that has been taken to task by commentators for indulging in conspiracy theory (White 1996b, 19; Stone and Sklar 1992), it is precisely in this adoption of conspiracist elements that the film’s problematic authenticity would appear to reside.

This epistemological and aesthetic problem regarding the adequation between form and content extends well beyond the paradigmatic case of J.F.K., encompassing representational forms of conspiracy theory more broadly, which likewise tend to muddy the distinction between realism and self-reflexive artifice. As Peter Knight observes, post-Kennedy American conspiracy culture ‘oscillates between the hoax and the accurate revelation, between the serious and the ironic, factual and the fictional, and between the literal and the metaphorical’ (Knight 2000, 48). Not only do the textual artefacts of conspiracy culture blur the boundaries between truth values, between appearance and reality, and between the indicative and the subjunctive moods, but these ambiguities are intimately tied to the aesthetic form of such artefacts. If J.F.K. presents a somewhat didactic example given Stone’s overpowering stylistic emphasis on the discontinuity and fragmentation of the visible as such, the claim can also be extended to post-Kennedy conspiracism in a more general sense, which I follow Knight in understanding broadly as marked by ‘a default skepticism that it is always plausible that there is a hidden agenda to public events’ (48).

Conspiracy theory’s blurring of the boundaries between truth and illusion, what White refers to as ‘the placing in abeyance of the distinction between the real and the imaginary’ (White 1996b, 19), also tracks closely with the development of postmodernism, both as an aesthetic movement expressing scepticism about the existence of metalanguage, and as an historical periodization designating the era of increasingly globalized capitalism from the 1960s onward. Indeed, as Knight provocatively argues, the Kennedy assassination itself, with its seemingly bottomless capacity to accommodate alternative explanations of what actually happened, may be understood as postmodernism’s ‘primal scene’ insofar as it is retroactively posited as postmodernism’s cause, but is only comprehensible in those terms as an effect of the postmodern turn (Knight 2000, 116). In this sense the recognition of the Kennedy assassination as an epochal event is dependent on its articulation to a later event or series of events – the full-blown development of postmodernism in its historical and aesthetic aspects – which the Kennedy assassination qua modernist event appears as both the cause and the effect of, while the development of postmodernism appears both as an effect and the cause of the Kennedy assassination as a transformative historical event. In short, as both White and Knight suggest, the relationship between causes and effects with respect to ‘modernist’ historical events within postmodernity is no longer tenable in the sort of unproblematically linear-chronological terms that may have held previously.

This essay aims to extend and complicate the representational quandaries of the modernist event by arguing that Erich Auerbach’s theory of representational realism, as articulated both in Mimesis and especially in Auerbach’s 1938 essay ‘Figura’, can help explicate the stylistic and epistemic features of the conspiracist hermeneutic stance provoked by such events. Auerbach’s central concept in both works is the figura, a rhetorical and hermeneutic structure in which one historical and textual event prefigures a later event that both redeems the earlier event while simultaneously gesturing beyond both to the horizon of a transcendental unity. As a mode of historical interpretation figural prophecy posits, like Knight’s oedipal interpretation of the Kennedy assassination as the primal scene of postmodernism, a non-linear mode of historical causality that relies on retroactive causal agency. In Mimesis Auerbach famously argues that the figural operates through the formal practice of paratactic fragmentation, and that such parataxis is the singular and definitive expressive form of realism spanning the arc of Western literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf. In the analysis below I argue that this mode of representation is also central to the aesthetic and rhetorical functioning of conspiracy theory, focusing primarily on the post-Kennedy era and the recent contemporary example of QAnon. In doing so, the essay seeks to leverage the multifaceted status of realism as a conceptual mediator to illuminate the epistemic and representational commitments of contemporary conspiracy theory.

It also seeks to tease out two related implications of White’s concept of the modernist event in relation to the representational logic of conspiracy theory. The first issue has to do with the plasticity of form itself. For White, what distinguishes modernist events from earlier, conventionally narratable ones is a certain malleability or indeterminability of the scope of the event itself, which is characterized by the inability to say for sure whether any individual piece of potential evidence is or is not relevant to the event. This is certainly the case with J.F.K.’s sprawling network of potential clues, and with White’s even more challenging example of the contentiousness of the video footage of Rodney King’s 1991 beating, the evidentiary status of which was significantly undermined by the LAPD’s defence attorneys during the court proceedings (White 1996b, 23). If the veracity of the video recording showing King being struck over fifty times can be effectively undermined as evidence that any significant event happened at all, then no lesser evidentiary document stands even a chance. Importantly, it was by strategically employing the tools of close textual analysis and encouraging the jurors to ‘interpret’ the evidence that the LAPD’s attorneys were able to cast aspersions on both the tape and King’s testimony (Tomasulo 1996, 78, 80–1). Hence, what is at stake in the concept of the modernist event is not only an epistemological question about how to adequately represent historical trauma, but a related and quite literally aesthetic question about the capacity to engage with and comprehend the phenomenal form of such events, that is to say their shape and figure. As White comments, ‘I would suggest that J.F.K. is neither factual nor fictional but rather “figurative” and should be assessed as a “figure” first and foremost’ (White 1996b, 36fn2). Auerbach’s theory of the figura helps to illuminate more precisely what White means in positing the figurative as an alternative to both the factual and the fictional, how conspiracy culture operates figurative, or figural discourses, as well as the role of the aesthetic in figural discourse.

Secondly, there is a crucial and strategic slippage in White’s essay between the representational categories of realism, modernism, and postmodernism. For White, the representational conventions underpinning nineteenth-century realism and historiography, and in particular the reliance on ‘the event’ as a coherent narrative category, are plainly inadequate to the representation of modernist events. It is to aesthetic modernism that White turns – to Woolf, Sartre, and Stein – in order to explicate the paradoxical authenticity of modernism’s refusal of the realist paradigm of the coherent event. Yet as White’s essay implies, the aesthetics of high modernism also carry forward into and ground the aesthetics of postmodernism, of which J.F.K. is paradigmatic. In claiming the aesthetic refusal of the coherent event for the adequate representation of modernist events, White claims a kind of paradoxical realism for modernism, which in turn furnishes the formal and conceptual ground of aesthetic postmodernism (White 1996b, 18). White resolves the apparent contradiction produced by claiming on the one hand that modernist and postmodernist dissolution of the narrative event generates a form of realism, while on the other that more conventional narrative realism’s failure to adequately index the real resembles the ungrounded signification characteristic of postmodernism, by positing the triad of realism, modernism, and postmodernism not as more or less discrete historical periods in a linear sequence, but rather as interrelated and mutually reinforcing categories. In this respect he follows Fredric Jameson, who explains realism’s paradoxical capacity to represent reality by noting that

where the epistemological claim [of realism] succeeds, it fails; and if realism validates its claim to being a correct or true representation of the world, it thereby ceases to be an aesthetic mode of representation and falls out of art altogether.

(Jameson 1992a, 158)

For Jameson as well as for White, the concept of realism itself is a necessarily fraught notion insofar as it dialectically unites the oppositional terms of representation and reality. Importantly, however, the concept of realism nevertheless remains critically productive insofar as it illuminates the unarticulated epistemic and ontological commitments of those who deploy the concept in order to mediate that opposition. Hence, if the question of realism in relation to conspiracy theory is, as Knight and White observe, perhaps not particularly useful as a means of distinguishing truth from fiction, it maintains symptomatic value as a tool for critical analysis. Using the recent QAnon conspiracy theory as a representative example, I argue in the conclusion that while the theory’s figural mode of historical narration fails to furnish a factually accurate account, its appeal to the logic figural prophecy is itself revelatory of how individuals seek to cognitively map complex networks of political power.

Figural Mimesis

German émigré philologist Erich Auerbach makes for an admittedly unlikely theorist of contemporary conspiracism, given both his disciplinary and historical distance from cultural postmodernity and his characteristically placid and serene mode of humanistic inquiry even in the face of exile in Turkey during World War II. It would also seem that Auerbach makes an odd fit as an intellectual herald of conspiracy theory given the sharp contrast between Auerbach’s penchant for Viconian humanism and conspiracy theory’s tendency to construct totalizing apparatuses of social domination, in which the more totalizing the conspiracy is, the weaker the individual’s substantive capacity to withstand the deterministic power of the conspiratorial whole becomes (Fenster 2008, 141). Yet, even at the outset of Auerbach’s intellectual career, he was keenly interested in the kinds of epistemological and aesthetic problems raised by the concept of conspiracy, even as early as his 1913 legal dissertation on the topic of criminal coperpetration. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht notes that Auerbach’s earliest work anticipates his later concern with the tragic dimension of mundane, everyday life, writing that ‘[c]ombining a component of guilt with a component of innocence, the role of the coperpetrator contains in its very structure a potential for tragedy’ (Gumbrecht 1996, 28). This synthesis of guilt and innocence is characteristic of criminal conspiracy within the frameworks of legal statutes but it also indicates, at a very early stage in Auerbach’s thinking, the significance of a discontinuous mode of causation in which the actions of one individual ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Opening considerations
• Section 1 Conspiracy theories about books and authors
• Section 2 Plotting: narrative forms of conspiracy
• Section 3 Fictional disclosures: conspiracy and the politics of truth
• Index