Reconstruction 7.4 (2007)
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The Utopian Limits of Conspiracy Theory Journalism / Gary Walton
<1> One of the most intriguing avatars of the "conspiracy theory narrative" is when the narrative eschews the designation of fiction altogether and adopts the trope of journalism. In fact, we can imagine any individual conspiracy theory narrative as adhering to a continuum which stretches from those narratives that are self-consciously packaged as fictions, such as The Da Vinci Code (2003), Foucault's Pendulum (1988), or The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) on one end of the continuum, for example, and those narratives that project themselves as putatively "journalistic investigations" on the other. On this end of the continuum, one could place Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (2004), by Michael Ruppert, Barry and 'the Boys': The CIA, The Mob and America's Secret History (2001) by Daniel Hopsicker, and American Assassination: The Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone (2004) by Jim Fetzer among many, many others. These latter narratives are recent additions to a long, if not always honorable (or honored), tradition of conspiracy theory narratives that would include such notable examples as On the Trail of the Assassins (1988) by Jim Garrison (the New Orleans District Attorney who was the only man to bring an accused conspirator in the JFK assassination to trial), Rush to Judgment (1966) and Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK? (1991) by Mark Lane, and Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy (1989) by Jim Marrs. In the case of these works, the conspiracy theory narrative takes on the trope of the journalistic investigation and challenges the "official" narrative by offering an alternative to the dominant or accepted interpretation of "the facts" of the case. Moreover, these texts occupy a kind of cultural gray area between what Clare Birchall in her book Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip (2006) designates as "legitimate" and "illegitimate" knowledge (3). These narratives are both bounded by and resist "official" codes and venues that exist in the public arena for the production of public "truth." These narratives occupy a public space that Birchall has called "popular knowledge" [1]: i.e. a type of unofficial knowledge that helps individuals to "rewrite or re-cognize events, and perhaps more importantly, to reconfigure context (by bringing apparently peripheral narrative threads to bear [on the subject at hand]) and the boundaries of contextualization (when the knowledge employed to interpret and cognize a story becomes an integral part of that story)" (44). Indeed, such alternative narratives help readers negotiate the aporias extant in official narratives, whose evidence sometimes seems too full of coincidence, or the "available evidence is 'too present'" or when it is "implausibly convenient" (56). Thus, not only do these narratives offer a kind of limited resistance to the regimes of truth that dominate our culture, they offer traditionally disenfranchised individual information consumers opportunities to participate in the creation of public knowledge(s). Indeed, it is because conspiracy theory narratives have become so popular that we need to take them seriously as narratives. This is especially true when conspiracy theory narrative dons the trope of journalism and attempts to broach the divide separating "illegitimate" knowledge from "legitimate" knowledge. The purpose of this essay, then, is to examine the three conspiracy theory narratives by Jim Fetzer, Daniel Hopsicker and Michael Ruppert as narrative structures and discuss several important elements contained in them that not only make them unique but compelling to many readers. Moreover, by examining the trope of conspiracy theory narrative, and especially conspiracy theory narrative as journalistic trope, we can better understand its function as a counter balance to the power of the "legitimizing" force of the mass media in contemporary society and perhaps, more importantly, confront those narrative elements that bifurcate "legitimate" knowledge from "illegitimate" knowledge.
<2> As Michael Foucault has made clear, there is an inherent power struggle between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" knowledges. Birchall, in her study, stresses that Foucault formulated a "power/knowledge" paradigm through his analysis of "epistemic structures" and how these structures relate to power. He makes clear that knowledge, popular or otherwise, cannot be thought of outside of this paradigm. However, power must not be thought of as a top down hierarchy only - power relations can be seen as "chains"(formal and/or informal) that can influence culture from the bottom up or horizontally, also. Official knowledge (or narratives) tend to fall within the Enlightenment/rationalist and humanist traditions and gains its power from the acceptance of these traditions by information consumers. Popular knowledges (such as conspiracy theory narratives) on the other hand exist on the periphery of these traditions and thus are marginalized by the gate keepers of official knowledge as being either not serious or seriously flawed in their epistemic structures. Common criticisms of conspiracy theory include arguments that it is a) a form of "latent insurrection"; b) lacks seriousness; or c) it is laden with "irrational" and "illegitimate" excesses (66). Birchall suggests, however, that we consider that particular conspiracy theory narratives may be considered as examples of Jean-Francois Lyotard's concept of the differend - that is, a "differend would be a case of conflict between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments" (72). In other words, we should not expect conspiracy theories to "prove" themselves using legitimizing rules that by definition exclude them. Moreover, Birchall argues, the very ambivalence and self-conscious undecidability that conspiracy theories evoke might force readers into considering that there is "something dubious" about the legitimizing process of "all knowledge." This defamiliarization of information structures becomes increasingly necessary in a world in which we are flooded with "information flows" that seem to be taken over by the hyperreal and simulacra. Indeed, Birchall argues that popular knowledges like conspiracy theory provide "paralogic moves" which can help create "dissensus" (as opposed to "consensus") which in the end will force "athetic" processes (a term Derrida used to suggest a process of moving "beyond" the current theory or position) to occur in society. Thus, when a reader is forced to make deliberate decisions about the knowledge she encounters, she is involved in an "athetic" process that in the end can result in a positive move forward - a process that can be described as a kind of "politics" (150). In the end, then, "popular knowledge [including conspiracy theory]...[is] a discursive formation (although not a discipline) that is characterized by contexts that give rise to ideological formations" (11). So, even if these discursive formations foment "latent insurrection" through "dissensus," they are positive because they defamiliarize entrenched "epistemic" power structures and move society forward toward justice and freedom through "athetic" processes.
<3> One way to approach conspiracy theory is through its constituent narrative structures. Indeed, the formal structures of conspiracy theory narratives can be successfully compared to more traditional narrative structures. Mark Fenster in his paradigm work Conspiracy Theories (1999) expends considerable space comparing the structure of many conspiracy theories to classic mystery stories. Many readers are drawn into conspiracy theory narratives by the same elements that intrigue the readers of detective fiction, especially the presentation of enigma and the suspense created by the process of trying to "solve" the intrinsic mystery of the conspiracy. However, where fictional conspiracy theory narratives (or traditional murder mysteries or detective fictions) will foreground Roland Barthes' "proairetic code" [2] - those aspects of the narrative concerned with plot (or in some cases give equal weight to both the proairetic code and the hermeneutic code - those aspects of the narrative that are concerned with the unraveling of mystery), the "journalistic" trope subordinates the proairetic to the hermeneutic. Thus, the sense of plot sequence in the process of the narrative is not nearly as important as the sense of uncovering or solving the enigma or mystery. (Of course, one might argue that this is true of the journalism trope in general.) In some cases, as with Barry and 'the Boys,' the "semic" code (those aspects of the discourse that are concerned with the creation of character) will be foregrounded - this book can be seen as an enormous character sketch of the covert operative/drug runner Barry Seal, as well as an exposé on the government's secret operations in Mena, Arkansas during the Iran/Contra scandal. More importantly, the "journalistic" conspiracy theory narrative employs what Roland Barthes calls the "reality effect" [3] (Fenster 109); the journalist/narrator vies for credibility by using the weight of putative empirical evidence to assemble an alternative signified - an alternative vision of reality.
<4> Since controlling "the reality effect" or the legitimacy of "knowledge" in the public realm is at the heart of power/knowledge paradigm, it is not surprising that whenever any narrative challenges the consensus it is dismissed, sometimes virulently, especially by those who Gore Vidal has called "Court Historians" [4], apologists for the status quo. Yet, attacks on conspiracy theory come from many quarters. Birchall, for example, examines the arguments against popular knowledges, especially conspiracy theory, as coming from such notable figures as Jürgan Habermas, Umberto Eco, Elaine Showalter and Fredric Jameson. Although their criticisms differ in the particulars, all of these critics condemn conspiracy theory for not promoting consensus. Eco and Habermas fear that the flouting of Enlightenment rationalism invites the radical right (such as the National Socialists in Germany) to use irrational and emotional incitements in their bid for power. Showalter argues that conspiracy theory is a kind of hysteria that "should be dealt with in private as individual psychological ailment rather than in public as social narrative 'reality'"(Birchall 70). Marxists such a Fredric Jameson fear that at best conspiracy theory is a diluted form of "cognitive mapping," an identity defining process that is replacing Marxian concepts of class consciousness and real political praxis [5]. (More on this in a moment.) In fact, all these critics, including Mark Fenster to some degree, seem to demonize conspiracy theories as offering an overly simplified and irrational view of political and economic structures.
<5> Given these criticisms, any conspiracy theory narrative that is couched in the trope of journalism is obliged to establish its bona fide early. The authors of American Assassination do bring a certain amount of credibility to their work from the outset because of their academic credentials. Professor Jim Fetzer is McKnight Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and Don Trent Jacobs holds a Ph.D. The authors need as much credibility as they can muster since their book attempts to argue that Senator Paul Wellstone's death in a plane crash in 2002 was not an accident, that indeed his death was an assassination. Further, they argue that the evidence of their investigation point to the perpetrators as being from the highest levels of the US government. Since the public ramifications for such an argument are profound (not the least of which is that assassination undermines the public's faith in democratic processes), Fetzer and Jacobs set out early in their narrative to try to blunt criticism of their argument by creating a convincing bona fide [6]. Moreover, since the authors acknowledge the phrase "conspiracy theory" itself has become a signifier for any argument that should be approached with much skepticism, if not dismissed out of hand as being "wacky" or "nutty," [7] they are adamant that their work to be seen in the context of Enlightenment rationalism and rigid journalistic standards. Thus, Fetzer and Jacobs frame their argument by stressing their mode d'emploi as an objective one:
As university professors who have undertaken investigations into this case...both the authors of this book understand the necessity for careful consideration of alternative hypotheses and thorough consideration of available evidence. Indeed, among the most fundamental conditions of objectivity that govern scientific inquiries is that they must be based upon all the available relevant evidence. Evidence is relevant when its presence or absence (or truth or falsity) make a difference to the truth or falsity of the hypotheses, accident or assassination, especially by making them more or less likely, given that evidence. Violating this condition, which is known as the requirement of total evidence, leads to the commission of another fallacy, "special pleading," [8] where evidence is intentionally selected to create a biased result. (xvii)
The above statement is meant to reinforce the "reality effect." More importantly, however, the authors want to give the impression that they are "operating within the 'dominant' or 'preferred' code" (Hall, Stuart "Encoding/Decoding" qtd. in Birchall 50). Thus, the authors hope to transcend the gulf in the reader's mind between "illegitimate" narrative and "legitimate" narrative. The question of legitimacy is central to the credibility of their narrative project.
<6> Of course, one could argue that any consideration of narrative as journalism (or ultimately as history) is dependent on "legitimacy" and the concomitant "reality effect." The fact that the reader believes that the narrative is being constructed from empirical evidence is vital to its effect on the reader as a conduit for truth. To that end, one strategic mode d'emploi that is seen in virtually all journalistic conspiracy theory narratives is the "recurring trope" of "unanswered questions" to be found in the "'official' reportage of the event" (Birchall 46). The purpose of this strategy is to confront the inherent contradictions found in the official account and thus come to more satisfactory conclusions (based in large part on the same, available evidence as the "official" narrative). The implication is that the initial investigation either did not delve deeply enough into the available evidence or that the investigators had ulterior agendas other than the one of purely seeking the truth. Consider the following statement taken from the introduction to American Assassination:
[W]e have taken an independent and objective analysis of the available evidence in this case, using the pattern of scientific reasoning knows as "inference to the best explanation". We do not simply believe as an article of faith (based on intuition or mere speculation) that Senator Paul Wellstone's death was an assassination rather than an accident. In these pages we have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the official account presented by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) cannot be logically sustained. Its "findings" are even contradicted by its own evidence. We have also proven that the likelihood of an assassination - which is an hypothesis the NTSB did not consider - is greater than the likelihood of an accident. The assassination hypothesis provides a better explanation than the alternative. [emphasis mine.] (Fetzer x)
Here Fetzer suggests that NTSB's conclusions would inevitably be flawed since they eliminated assassination as one of the possible causes of the deaths at the outset of the investigation. Such a consideration would be outside of what Stuart Hall has called the "preferred code" of the "legitimate" narrative. Thus, according to the authors, the truth can only be approached by using the "illegitimate" method of the conspiracy theory narrative. Ironically, here the claim is made that it is the conspiracy theory narrative that will remain faithful to the ideal of Enlightenment rationalism by considering the evidence objectively and fairly, which the official narrative does not do.
<7> Moreover, since the conspiracy theory narrative as a journalistic trope is engaged in the Foucaultian power /knowledge struggle with the authoritative narrative (the received text of the public "myth" [9] as Roland Barthes would term it) for the credulity of the reader, an acceptance by the reader of the bona fide is a vital initial condition of the textual dynamic between reader and text. In this regard, it is probably worth remembering Hayden White's distinction between "historical theory" and "metahistory" here: "[I]n historical theory, explanation is conceived to stand over against interpretation as clearly discernible elements of every 'proper' historical representation"; whereas, "In metahistory...the explanation and the interpretive aspects of the narrative tend to run together and be confused in such a way as to dissolve its authority as either a representation of 'what happened' in the past or a valid explanation of why it happened as it did" (White 52). In this instance, Fetzer and Jacobs are trying to convince the reader that what they are constructing is "history" not "metahistory" - that is, their text is not just another interpretive blurring of the facts, but is indeed a scientific inquiry moving toward "the truth" of historical fact. (Ironically, as White makes clear, in the postmodern world all history is "metahistory" - we cannot divorce "the facts" from the interpretation, the bona fide notwithstanding.)
<8> Yet, the faith in journalism itself as a purveyor of "history" is increasingly coming into question by the public. There are several reasons for this. One is the long line of scandals that have shaken the faith of the public in their official institutions. Indeed, there are several pivotal events, what Hollywood movie makers would call, "plot points" [10] (moments of crisis in a narrative that push the narrative along) in the post- World War Two era that seem to make the totalizing narratives of "conspiracy" seem reasonable. When looked at through the lens of conspiracy theory, recent history takes on the patina of "metahistory," the "metahistory" of the conspiracy narrative in which a nebulous "them" seems to be manipulating public events. The first "plot point" that many commentators point to is President Eisenhower's admonition, "We must guard against... the military-industrial complex" given in his farewell address from office. (Here the amorphous "them" is given a name, although other groups including the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Bilderberger group et. al. have been associated with this amorphous signifier "the military-industrial complex".) However, the " Ur" event in the post-World War Two conspiracy metanarrative is the assassination of President Kennedy. Perhaps the reason for this is that many "baby boomers" point to that event as when they lost their innocence toward the public mythos. Then in quick succession the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assured the need for suspicion toward the authoritative narrative of history and invited the creation of the alternative conspiracy theory narrative. Moreover, with the advent of the Watergate scandal in the Nixon administration, the Iran/Contra scandal in the Reagan administration, the Savings and Loan scandal in the George Bush Sr. years, the White Water imbroglio under Bill Clinton and finally the controversy over the 2000 election and the "bad intelligence" and the lack of WMDs in the run up to the war in Iraq under George Bush II, it is not surprising that many "myth consumers" do not trust the official explanations to public events. In fact, Mark Lawson has written that because of the above series of scandals, as well as the increased commodification of "news," there has been a "collapse in editorial authority" [11] (Birchall 52). Moreover, since the Bush administration seems obsessed with secrecy, and is increasingly caught in contradictions, if not outright lies [12] , as Jonathan Rabin has said "Conspiracy theorizing is fast becoming a legitimate means of reporting on [such] a government" (59). He goes on to say that, "because the political climate [is] characterized by secrecy and security alerts...conspiracy seems more 'reasonable' and less 'fringe'." In addition, many information consumers see the corporate media, because of the consolidation of ownership [13] as well as their inherent profit-oriented, capitalist, and/or elitist world view, as homogenizing the "news." The advantage that some readers see to books like Fetzer's is that they can employ what Don Delillo has called dietrologia ("the science of what is behind something" [46]) to get behind the comfortable rationalization of events by the major media to the hard dirty facts beneath or behind those events. The corporate media does not want to delve into the many "unanswered questions" because the answers might be inconvenient or un-politic - worse they could create public anxiety about public events which is bad for business (if not public safety). According to Birchall, dietrologia not only circumvents the official media's complacency, but it pierces the veil of secrecy and cover-up which seems to surround many public events, as well as provides a kind of populist solidarity by dividing the world into "them" who are trying to keep us in the dark, and "us" who are trying to find the truth (46).
<9> One of the most intriguing conspiracy theory narratives of the past few years that uses dietrologia as a mode d'emploi is Daniel Hopsicker's Barry and 'the boys': The CIA, The Mob and America's Secret History. Hopsicker, who was a producer of news stories for NBC and is now an independent investigative reporter, has created a narrative that spans the years from the Kennedy Assassination to the Presidency of George Bush Sr. Indeed, Hopsicker's study argues a nefarious connection between Governor Bill Clinton and Arkansas that has nothing to do with White Water or the failed land deal that so concerned the nation during most of Clinton's presidency. Like Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, Hopsicker has taken several conspiracy theories and woven them into one arch-narrative - but, where Dan Brown's "conspiracy theory narrative" is marketed as fiction (even though he claims it is based on historical fact), Hopsicker markets his narrative as an investigative report, i.e. "history." Hopsicker's narrative is indeed the type of "metahistory" that Hayden White describes because it is impossible to separate the interpretation from the assemblage of "facts."
<10> Like many "journalistic" conspiracy theory narratives, Barry and 'the boys' reads like a suspense novel, yet, as I mentioned earlier, when taken as a whole it really is a giant character sketch. The Barry of the title is Barry Seal, who the dust jacket tells us was "the biggest drug smuggler in American history, who died in a hail of bullets with George Bush's private phone number in his wallet." What we discover in the course of the book is that Barry Seal was a deep cover CIA agent whose association with operatives in covert activities spanned from the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Kennedy assassination to Watergate, Iran/Contra, and finally to a huge drug smuggling operation centered in Mena, Arkansas with connections to both George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton. The very sweep of the tale expands from bildungsroman to epic saga. The fact that the appendix gives fifty pages of documentary evidence adds weight to its "reality effect," however, providing an intensive bona fide. As described by Hopsicker, Seal was a man of his appetites. As one DEA agent is quoted as saying, "Hey, I got a guy, he's a pilot, he's from Baton Rouge, and they call him El Gordo...the Fat One" (329-330). We can see this statement as an example of Barthes' "semic" code - that is, those iterated aspects of the narrative that are concerned with creating "character." Tracing the semic code is important to this work because Seal's character is at the very heart of the narrative's structure. He is a likeable rogue, who in an eighteenth century romance we might call a "picaro." Like the picaro, "El Gordo" is socially mobile, moving among the country's power elite while at the same time mixing with its outcasts; he has relations both with government officials and with drug dealers and hit men - thus, he can take us behind the façade of the "news" to the sordid world of covert intrigue. Seal is not unlike the antihero characters created by Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane. We enjoy learning about him because his life is exciting and he is invariably breaking social taboos - inevitably to his own detriment. By the end of the narrative, Seal is assassinated by hit men, at whose behest we are never quite sure. The assassins could have been sent by drug lords, tired of his interference and competition, or more intriguingly, his assassins could have been sent by elites in the US government. At one point, we read that Seal telephoned George Bush Sr. and barks into the telephone, "If you don't get these IRS assholes off my back [he owed '$30 million for the money [he] made in drug dealing'] , I'm going to blow the whistle on the [ Iran-] Contra scheme" (442). In the end, the narrative has the shape of a morality tale, albeit a postmodern one. After all, unlike the hero of a romance novel who, after confronting the villain, as D'artagan confronts Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers, succeeds in protecting honor and "the right"; here the hero dies and the villain continues his sordid enterprises, unexposed and unpunished. Moreover, in this morality play, the rogue not only fails to expose the plot against "the people," he pays with his life for his criminal activity. It is only through the telling of the tale (through the process of dietrologia) that we get to glimpse the "truth," the corruption that lies behind the headlines. In this case the conspiracy theory narrative can be seen as a social corrective, exposing the dark underbelly of American's secret culture. In that sense, it has a positive "athetic" quality that motivates us to first speculate on the given narrative and hypothesis, and then to move forward in both our thinking about and our involvement in political realities.
<11> Yet, for those interested in the conspiracy theory narrative as a genre, this narrative has much to offer in the way that it weaves disparate conspiracy theories together into one compelling whole - literally an "arch-" narrative or totalizing vision or "metahistory." Take for example one of the pictures in the appendix. The photo shows the reader the image of a young man in a military uniform climbing into the door of a military cargo plane. (See photo below.)
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Fig. 1. (Hopsicker 454)
The caption reads: "Sixteen year-old Baton Rouge Civil Air Patrol cadet Barry Seal boards a US Air Force plane on July 23, 1955 to fly to a two week training camp at Barksdale AFB in Shreveport, Louisiana where he will meet fellow cadet Lee Harvey Oswald [emphasis mine] from New Orleans and both will fall under the sway of CIA agent and pedophile Capt. David Ferrie" (454).
Click image for larger version
(Fig. 2 .Here is a photo of David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald taken when both were members of the Civil Air Patrol. www.russianbooks.org/oswald/pix/feroswA1N.jpg )
The name Lee Harvey Oswald is one of the most notorious names in American history, ranking in infamy with those of John Wilkes Booth and Benedict Arnold. The connection no matter how tangential between Seals and Oswald is a tantalizing "kernal" [14] of narrative information for any reader interested in American history. Moreover, Hopsicker will argue that Seal and Oswald were friends and served in the Civil Air Patrol together. The fact that a contemporary, self-admitted CIA agent and drug smuggler had deep connections to one of the most despised villains in history is heady information indeed. However, for those readers who are familiar with the facts and characters surrounding the Kennedy Assassination (whether those codified by the authoritative narrative The Warren Report or the many counter narratives that have come out since), the name David Ferrie will be very familiar. David Ferrie was a pilot who played a central role in the trial that District Attorney Jim Garrison succeeded in prosecuting against Clay Shaw, the owner of the Trade Mart in New Orleans and reputed deep cover CIA agent. Hopsicker argues that Ferrie was "well-acquainted with all of the most notorious names linked to the assassination: Lee Oswald, Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, Jack Ruby, and Carlos Marcello" (51). Moreover, the author states that "by the time the Select Committee [on Assassinations] had wrapped its investigation half a dozen former cadets could be found who were in the Civil Air Patrol in 1955 and could link David Ferrie to Lee Oswald" (38). He quotes John Odom, a former member of the Patrol in 1955 as saying, "We boys from Baton Rouge weren't nearly as sophisticated as the New Orleans unit, so Barry [Seal] was much enamored of David Ferrie....They met at least three times a week...and Lee Harvey Oswald was a member of Ferrie's elite 'little boys' club" (37). Ferrie, according to Hopsicker, claimed to be a CIA agent in 1955 and further bragged about his involvement in flying missions over Cuba during the Bay of Pigs operation. The importance of this information is that it connects the CIA to Ferrie and Ferrie to Lee Harvey Oswald (who many conspiracy theories describe as a dupe of the CIA). At the very least, Seal's link to Oswald gives weight to Hopsicker's narrative, as well as credibility to Seal's own connections to the secret world of government spies. Here we can see an example of conspiracy theory exchanging one totalizing narrative for another - that is, the vision of TheWarren Report that Oswald was a lone gunman etc. (as well as the myriad of "official" reports of subsequent investigations that tend to reassure the public, including those surrounding Iran/Contra that did not connect the CIA, et. al. to Arkansas and the Mena airport much less Barry Seal to high government officials) - for one that sees the US intelligence agencies' involvement in drugs and gun running at the very heart of recent public scandals and whose nefarious operations can be traced back decades.
<12> The intricacies of Hopsicker's narrative are too numerous to recount in this discussion, but suffice it to say for our purposes that Hopsicker's narrative shows that "the conspiracy theory narrative" is open-ended; it can never have complete closure because the narrative deals with disclosing secrets and uncovering clues to a mystery that can never be solved definitively. As Birchall has pointed out " The point of such work is to keep the question of knowledge, and therefore of politics - of what it is, of what it can do, and all of its associated questions about power, authority, legitimacy, responsibility, and representation - open" (28). It is truly a "counter myth" to the received authoritative myth created by the Warren Commission et. al. and the media. Ironically, the very journalistic trope used by this type of conspiracy theory narrative makes it into a postmodern fabulation. The "writerly" aspects of the narrative come into play in a variety of ways, not the least of which is the decision made by the reader to believe or not believe the "facts" as presented. One approach a reader might take is to simply grant a kind of provisional belief - take the attitude "what if this were true?" - a version of Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief." One certainly can derive a sense of plaisir [15] from reveling in the contours of the narrative's construction. For example, one has to admit a certain admiration for the symmetry that the connection between El Gordo, Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie provides. This type of narrative, whose important "plot points" are driven by coincidence (as opposed to causation), one is accustomed to finding in fiction, especially mystery or romance novels, not in the "reality-based" world of reportage. On the other hand, attractive symmetry in "reality-based" reportage is problematic. As Hayden White points out, "there is a reluctance to consider historical based narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature [e.g. fiction] than they have with those in the sciences" (82). Therefore, the pleasing shape of coincidence is looked on askance - as it would be in realistic fiction, as a flaw in construction, as deus ex machina. Too much artistic shape argues against the believability of the journalistic trope. So, the very fact that Hopsicker can connect Barry Seal to Lee Harvey Oswald, to the mob, to Oliver North, and ultimately to George Bush, Sr. is an advantage to its readability and its attractiveness as a fabulation, but a hindrance to its acceptability as "history." In the end, it strains the reader's sense of credulity, but heightens his/her sense of plaisir. Perhaps, more importantly, the anxiety caused in the reader by the challenge such a text brings to the official narrative through the recognition of the aporia of legitimacy that occurs when the reader realizes the gulf between the "official narrative" and the "conspiracy theory narrative" can result in a "paralogic move" and "dissensus," all of which can result in an "athetic" move forward for the reader.
<13> As I mentioned earlier, one important aspect of some conspiracy theory narratives is what Mark Fenster calls the "totalizing impulse" - that is the narration's attempt to create a totalizing vision of history, or a historical period, to "represent and enable a recognition of the totality of history, and specifically of the linkages between public and private and between the relations of productivity and political and social order denied in classical liberal thought" (Fenster 116). This phenomenon of attempting a totalizing vision can be thought of as what Fredric Jameson calls "cognitive mapping" or "something we might have called in pre-postmodern times as 'class consciousness'" (Homer 186). Fenster defines "cognitive mapping" as "an ideological practice in which the individual subject attempts to 'span or coordinate, to map, by means of conscious and unconscious representations,' the 'gap' between the individual's local subject position and the totality of class structure" (Fenster 116). Even though Jameson himself is critical of conspiracy theory's style of cognitive mapping, we can still see the need for such a map (or bridge, might be another way of thinking about the concept) which comes from the individual's feelings of isolation and disconnectedness in a postmodern society that is defined by the "simulacra" to which the individual is exposed through the mass media. Fredric Jameson has described this individual "consumer" (or "myth consumer" to use Roland Barthes' term) of prepackaged reality as "schizophrenic." Here the term is used not so much as a clinical psychological term, but as a descriptive cultural term. Jameson borrows the use of the word from Lacan who describes "schizophrenia" as "a break in the chain of signification. For Lacan the schizophrenic's failure to fully grasp language articulation will affect his or her experience of temporality, or, more accurately, he or she will experience a lack of temporal continuity. The schizophrenic, therefore, is condemned to a perpetual present, an 'experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence'["Postmodernism and Consumer Society" 119]" (Homer 183). In postmodern society, the individual feels isolated from the means of production and thus cannot understand the forces that are acting upon him/her both in terms of production of material goods (petroleum, for example) or world politics (the Kennedy assassination or, more recently, the events of 9/11, for example). Many individuals' sense of reality is finely tuned to the twenty-four hour news cycle, which creates a perpetual "schizophrenic" present. The totalizing vision of the conspiracy theory narrative, then, attempts to bridge the felt gulf between the individual and the blur of disparate signifiers to which he/she is exposed - to fuse those signifiers into a meaningful whole and to give a depth and a felt sense of historical continuity.
<14> Daniel Hopsicker has attempted to "map" the reality of the machinations of the secret government from The Bay of Pigs operation to the Iran/Contra debacle using the unifying "picaro" character of Barry Seal as his focus. Michael Ruppert's more recent book Crossing the Rubicon attempts to map events from 9/11, 2001 through the period he calls "Peak Oil" (or the age when world oil production begins to decline). Ruppert, a former Los Angeles police detective, sets up his narrative as a journalistic trope, beginning with his own bona fide, his statement of objectivity and adherence to "fact." The structure of the book is created as a kind of summation to a jury, the jury of public opinion presumably, during which the author will lay out his argument, his interpretation of the facts (his "metahistory") and the jury (the reader) can make up his or her own mind as to whether he or she agrees with his totalized vision, his "cognitive map." Ruppert's basic argument is that the events of 9/11, the Iraq War, and the putative "war on terror" are all related, but not as the "authoritative narrative" would explain it. Instead, Ruppert's argument rests on the proposition that 9/11 and the Iraq War, etc. were a consequence of the stark realization by the global elites that world oil production is in a state of decline and therefore a political "end game" scenario needed to be put into place to protect the power of the status quo.
<15> There is not space here to trace Ruppert's argument, fascinating though it is. Instead, I would like to discuss what Ruppert's book does not do. While Ruppert's narrative does offer an alternative explanation to the events of 9/11 to those expounded by the media or by the 9/11 Commission, he does not center his argument on an alternative interpretation of the video evidence extant vis à vis 9/11 [16] . Many other conspiracy theory narratives do, such as Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11 th Attack (2002) by Eric Hufschmid and Pentagate (2002) by Thierry Meyssan or the DVDs, 911 In Plane Site (2004) and 9-11 Ripple Effect (2007) by Dave VonKleist and Loose Change (2005) by Dylan Avery. The problem inherent with arguments that center on the video evidence is our natural tendency to believe what we are seeing is real. After all, the saying goes, "seeing is believing." This is a phenomenon defined by Jameson as "reification." The Random House Dictionary defines "reify" as "to convert into a concrete thing." Jameson has suggested that the relationship of an image to its referent has devolved from the age of realism where "the image is still tied to its referent," to modernism "when the image becomes severed from its referent" to postmodernism "where reification penetrates the image itself and rends signifier and signified asunder" (Homer 186). We are in the age where "simulacra" describe a "hyperreality" that has little or no referent in the "real world." We live in a world where tv shows are more "real" to us than our own lives, where ideas don't exist if they are not repeated in media or are forgotten when they cease to be repeated in the media. As Sean Homer has put it, "Postmodernity was seen to spark a further expansion of an essentially Lukácsean conception of reification whereby the commodity form had now penetrated the last enclaves of resistance to capital, that is, the aesthetic, the Third World, and the Psyche" (186).
<16> The problem with the images associated with 9/11 is the same problem we had with those associated with Kennedy assassination, especially the Zapruder film [17]. Because we observe the video or the film, we think we are observing the "real," the truth. We tend to forget that the film is indeed a text that must be interpreted and, second, that when it is broadcast or, as in the case of the Zapruder film, printed in Life magazine, it becomes a commodity. The use of the pictures in the specific commercial context argues an ideology defined by the commercial imperative. This is especially true if the context is a "news" program, whose raison d'etre is to make money for the corporation that produced it. Watching video of events is an interesting interpretive phenomenon because we tend to naturalize the signifier as the signified - or "reify" the signifier, to use Jameson's terminology. This is the foundation of Roland Barthes' "Reality Effect" - we think we are seeing the thing itself, the ding an sich, but in fact we are not; we are seeing a representation of the thing itself, "what we take as 'concrete detail' is constituted by the direct collusion of a referent and signifier" (The Rustle of Language 147). The emulsion on the Zupruder film or the digitized image on the video tape is not the thing itself. The image can be manipulated, edited, altered, or the context in which it is viewed can change its meaning. One aspect of the conspiracy theory narrative that empowers the individual is that it can provide the myth consumer enough ideational distance from the "news" video to allow the viewer to "defamiliarize" the event and read the video as a semiological text that does not have one "univocal" meaning. It frees the myth consumer from the "reality effect."
<17> In this regard, it might be useful to consider the fictional conspiracy narrative contained in the film Wag the Dog (1997) directed by Barry Levinson [18]. In this film, the President of the United States is caught in a sex scandal less than two weeks before election day. To divert attention from his very real peccadillo, he hires Conrad Brean who is the master of "spin" to fix the problem. Using a top Hollywood producer, Stanley Motss, Brean creates a "simulacra" of a war to distract public attention. Motss hires actors and set designers to create "news" footage that is broadcast as the real thing. They create personal interest stories out of whole cloth, that are as fictional as any Hollywood film but are sold to the public as reality. The producers even write a song, record it as if it were written and recorded decades before and stash the recording in the Library of Congress so it can be "discovered" by an unwitting journalist. The effect of the film is to show how the "simulacra" of news events can be created by the producers of mass media information systems. We see that the "reality effect" is indeed just an "effect" that is generated by the dynamics of the media involved. Moreover, while a film such as Wag the Dog is fictional satire, we must keep in mind that the administrations of both Clinton and Bush have been creating "news" stories, using their own production teams and offering them to cash strapped local stations who then run them as "news" stories [19] for many years now. Thus, the entire veneer of "objectivity," of the concept of "the fourth estate" as watchdog of the public interest, is obviated - with impunity. Moreover, there occurs in the public mind what Baudrilliard terms an "implosion" of meaning - the lines between fact and fiction have been so blurred as to be irretrievable.
<18> But even if we were to observe the events themselves - if we were in Dallas on November 22, 1963 or in New York on September 11, 2001 and had observed the events that would be eventually be codified as "history" - could we make sense out of them on our own? Would we inevitably need some kind of narrative structure to interpret those events? Compare the difference in experience of touring a strange city on one's own, observing the buildings, people, historical places and artifacts without a guidebook or guide with that same experience with the unifying narrative provided by a guide or guide book. This difference in experience is what Roland Barthes calls "the real" vs. "the intelligible" (The Rustle of Language 140). The experience of the former is "real" but may not make much, if any, sense. The experience provided by the latter narrative may not be "real" in an existential sense but it is understandable. The "myth" that is created by the received texts of the media, whether they be written, aural, or especially visual is seductive because we believe we are encountering "the real," when in fact, we are experiencing sophisticated interpretive texts grounded in a semiological system. We tend to confuse the "intelligible," an interpretation, for the "real," the ding an sich. However just because a received text, say, the news video of the crash of some kind of aircraft into the Pentagon, is "intelligible," that does not necessarily mean the interpretation we naturalize is true. This is what Baudrillard is referring to when he suggests that "meaning has 'imploded' because of our intensive exposure to the mass media" (Wood 195). In his concept of "the ecstasy of communication," he suggests that media consumers have been overloaded with images to the point where meaning has become aesthetic rather than reasoned. A good example of this phenomenon was discussed by Mike Deaver, the Deputy White House Chief of Staff under Ronald Reagan, with Bill Moyers on The Public Mind [20] (1989). Deaver pointed out that it was his job to engineer press events so the White House set the networks' agenda for that day's news cycle. But as he also admitted, the subversive aspect of his job was to create aesthetically pleasing video images that at times belied the news content that was being discussed. He gives as his example a staged news event in which Ronald Reagan is seen having beers with union men in a bar in Boston on the very day that Reagan declared the PATCO (the air traffic control union) strike illegal and had the FAA hire scab workers to break the back of the union. For the consumer of the "news" the only defense is to reject the "commodified images that invade our consciousnesses" (Wood 195). However, such rejection is not easy. In fact, the very resistance that some readers or observers have to an alternative interpretation of, say, the video of the crash at the Pentagon on 9/11, from the authoritative narrative is caused by the deep felt need to believe in the "reality effect" of the image. This need is so powerful that it might be felt even though the consumer might realize that the image is indeed being used as a commodity, a commodity that implies by its very context a covert ideology, that of the status quo. Here again, one motive of the conspiracy theory narrative is to "defamiliarize" the text of the authoritative narrative, whether it is written or visual, thus allowing the "myth consumer" some critical distance to reassess the information.
<19> In this sense, using a very broad definition, conspiracy theory narrative, whether cast as a fiction trope or as a journalistic trope, can be seen to have affinities to what Mikhail Bakhtin in his book Rabelais and His World (1984) has dubbed the "carnivalesque." This narrative is the voice of the "other," the subaltern in the power struggle between the "myth consumer" and the "authorized" narrative. Bakhtin describes the context of such a narrative in the following manner:
As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed. (10)
Admittedly, Bakhtin is talking specifically about parody and humor here. But the impulse of the "other" to voice its opinion, to create its own text, to write its own narrative is central to the construction of the conspiracy theory narrative as I conceive it, and is very similar to what Bakhtin is describing here. The conspiracy theory narrative is a liberation from the "prevailing truth" and "the established order" of the received text. In short, like parody and humor, the conspiracy theory narrative is subversive to the dominant power structure. It creates "dissensus."
(Fig. 3. A good example of a pictorial text that is "writerly" and an exemplar of the spirit of the "carnivaleseque" that also defamiliarizes the authoritative "received" myth is the photo included in a piece by Mike Adams called "Pentagon hit by flying grilled cheese sandwich, video frames show" which can be found on the 911Truth website <www911truth.org>. This photo [21] satirizes the official explanation that a Boeing 757 crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 by substituting two slices of sandwich bread for the blurred image of what the media reported to be an aircraft about to crash into the pentagon. The reconstructed image is so absurd as to give the viewer ideational space that resists the reification that normally accompanies viewing such a photo.)
<20> In sum, we must remember that a fundamental allure of conspiracy theory is that it is associated with the taboo. On the other hand, the attraction of journalism as a trope is that readers feel that it expresses "the facts" about the world. When these two narrative tropes are combined, the attraction for some readers is almost irresistible. However, as many critics have pointed out, conspiracy theory can be dangerous (as when it promotes racist or sexist ideologies) but uncritical trust in the journalistic trope (especially when it is presented as the "official" or "authoritative" narrative) can be dangerous also. (One need only consider Judith Miller's series of erroneous reports on Saddam Hussein and the WMDs in Iraq published in the New York Times [22] that gave credence to the Bush administration's inflated justifications for war to see how dangerous naïve acceptance of main stream journalism can be.) Moreover, since the very raison d'etre of conspiracy narrative is "stigmatized" knowledge (to use Barkun's term), we especially must be careful not to be too sanguine about accepting it uncritically, either.
<21> Still, because of its popularity and tenacity as a "popular knowledge," conspiracy theory narrative is worth study as narrative in and of itself (just as fairy tales, myths, or noir detective novels are worth study as constructed narratives). But conspiracy theory narratives that couch themselves as journalism offer themselves as a tantalizing type of narrative in that they present themselves to us as illicit knowledge that strains to be credible. We know that real conspiracies exist. History is replete with examples. Thus, it is the very "undecidability" of any given conspiracy narrative that is at the heart of its structural tension. This "undecidablity" combines with the trope of journalism to force the critical reader to "defamiliarize" not only the conspiracy theory as a narrative structure but as a mechanism for understanding the world as well. Indeed, the reader must confront the very "stigmatized" knowledge contained in it. In addition, by forcing the reader to distance herself from the narrative and to analyze the text as a narrative, the result is to "defamiliarize" the trope of journalism itself. The inherent lesson is that the reader should never naively "naturalize" (to use Roland Barthes' term) any received text.
<22> In an age of mass media, and especially with control of that media in fewer and fewer hands, it behooves us to see journalism (that is "the news") as a constructed narrative that can be manipulated like any other narrative. Conspiracy theory, because it deals in "marginalized" "unofficial" and/or "stigmatized" "knowledge," forces the reader to "defamiliarize" the narrative each and every time he or she encounters it - as Birchall has said "if we recognized [these texts] as undecidability, it forces us to decide what is and what is not knowledge at every step of the way. And this decision making about the knowledge we encounter is one possible description of politics. It is part of the work of an ethical and responsible analysis of culture" (150). This process of ideational distancing can be a desirable strategy when trying to negotiate the various received narratives to which an individual is subject in the postmodern world. It is true that such a strategy can create "dissensus," but "dissensus" is necessary if the individual is not going to be at the mercy of the "official" and at times "univocal" commodified public narrative. Many readers see the conspiracy theory narrative as a means to "change the discourse" and "appeal to a higher truth, " social functions that Christopher Norris has suggested is vital to counter the hegemony of the mass media (Wood 196) and thus as a mechanism for an "athetic" move toward justice and freedom as Birchall has suggested. At the very least, the conspiracy theory narrative can point to the aporias in the official narrative.
<23> Yet, even if we cannot generate any of these lofty motives for reading conspiracy theory narratives, the fact remains that reading them is just plain fun - like reading murder mysteries or pot boilers. In the end, the conspiracy theory narrative is at base narrative after all, and well constructed ones inherently evoke plaisir in the reader. The more the narrative strains to become journalism, the more tantalizing it becomes and the more pleasurable its contemplation becomes for the reader - and at the end of the day, that is worth something.
Works Cited
Baer, Robert. Blow the House Down. New York: Crown, 2006.
_____. See No Evil. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002.
Barkun, Michael. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2003.
Barrett, Kevin. Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie. Joshua Tree, Calif.: Progressive Press, 2007.
King, Geoff. Ed. The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to "Reality" TV and Beyond . Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2005.
Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: U of California P., 1989.
Birchall, Clare. Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip. New York: Berg, 2006.
Eisenhower, Dwight D. "Farewell Radio and Television Address to the American People." January 17, 1961. <www.eisenhower.archives.gov/farewell.htm>
Fenster, Mark. Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. U of Minnesota P, 1999.
Fetzer, Jim and Don Trent Jacobs. American Assassination: The Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone. Brooklyn: Vox Pop, 2004.
Griffin, David Ray. Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11.Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006.
_____. Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory. Northampton: Olive Branch Press, 2007.
_____. The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11. Northampton: Olive Branch Press, 2004.
Hicks, Sander. The Big Wedding: 9/11, the Whistle-blowers, and the Cover-up. Brooklyn: Vox Pop, 2005.
Homer, Sean. "Fredric Jameson" in Modernism: the Key Figures. Ed. Hans Bertens and Joseph Natoli. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2002, 180-188.
Hopsicker, Daniel. Barry and 'the boys': The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History. Noti, OR.: Madcow Press, 2001.
Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. "The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge" in From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Ed. Lawrence Cahoone. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. 481-513.
Moyers, Bill. The Public Mind. PBS Video, 1989.
Pratt, Ray. Projecting Paranoia: Conspiratorial Visions in American Film. Lawerence, Kansas: UP of Kansas, 2001.
Rich, Frank. The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006.
Ryan, Michael and Douglas Kellner. Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.
Ruppert, Michael C. Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. Gabriola Island, BC Canada, 2004.
Wag the Dog. (Video Tape) Dir. Barry Levinson. New Line Home Video, 1997.
White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins U P, 1978.
Wood, Tim. Beginning Postmodernism. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester UP, 1999.
Notes
[1] Birchall states that "popular knowledges are discursive forms of popular culture...that systematize and contextualize ideas about the world and specific events. They often require no specialist training, although the participants become versed in discursive 'rules'. They retain an ambivalent relationship to more legitimated ways of knowing; and display both general and singular properties" (22). [^]
[2] In his work, S/Z Roland Barthes forensically deconstructs Balzac's short story "Sarrasine" and isolates five discursive codes which he argues is part of the "already written" aspect of the narrative. These codes include: "the proairetic," which governs the formation of plot; "the hermaneutic," which involves question and answer, enigma and solution, suspense and peripetia; "the semic," which involves character formation; "the referential," which involves allusions to cultural background; and "the symbolic," which guide the reader to thematic interpretations. Evoking an enigma and then describing the steps to solve it are central operations of mystery and detective novels as well as a large part of their allure. The attraction of readers to conspiracy theory can be argued to come from the same kind of structural elements. [^]
[3] Mark Fenster quotes Roland Barthes as defining the "reality effect" as occurring where "'an unformulated signified, sheltered behind the apparent omnipotence of the referent' and sheltered as well behind the social prestige of the historical speech act that declares, 'this happened'" (Fenster 110). [^]
[4] In his essay " Burr: The Historical Novel ," Gore Vidal differentiates himself from academic historians by saying:
Unlike the academic historian who gets his doctorate in, say, "God as Metaphor in the Federalist Papers," and keeps all his notes and lectures until they - or he - fall apart, I have accumulated seven theses in the course of writing what I call "narratives of empire." That is, seven novels from Burr to The Golden Age; from 1776 to 2000. But once I am done with a period, I move on to the next. During one of those rare intervals that I am on amiable terms with our chief court historian [emphasis mine], Arthur Schlesinger, I asked him about a detail in one of his books on Franklin Roosevelt. He drew a blank: said something to the effect that he marveled at how much he had once known, put in a book, and then forgot. We agreed that any well-researched book is itself the ultimate sole repository for all the facts so painstakingly assembled, because if memory was required to hold all the beads that a writer has strung over time in time about time, the brain would burst. [from Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other) (Simon and Schuster 2001) by Mark Carnes] <http://www.powells.com/biblio?show=0648576508page=excerpt>
In practice however, Vidal uses the term "court historian" in a derogatory manner, suggesting that most academic historians are lap dogs of the power elite. [^]
[5] It has been argued that the Communist narrative of history as a dialectic between classes is itself a kind of conspiracy theory since they see elites in control of the means of the production and the proletariat at the mercy of the vicissitudes of capital. Yet, it is probably worth noting that some critics, especially Lyotard, distrust all totalizing narratives, whether they come from the right or the left. He states in "The Postmodern Condition: A Report of Knowledge" that:
Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of the progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it..... [T]he society of the future falls less within the province of Newtonian anthropology (such as a structuralism of systems theory) than a pragmatics of language particles. There are many different language games - heterogeneity of elements. They only give rise to institutions in patches - local determinism. (Lyotard 482)
One of the aporias extant in conspiracy theory narratives involves the apparent paradox between the attempt to suggest a totalizing narrative and the rejection of overarching narratives as being exclusive and at odds with the heterogeneity of the language games from which they are constructed. [^]
[6] Michael Barkun in his book A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (2003) offers a typical criticism of writers such as Fetzer and Jacobs who attempt to create convincing bona fides when talking about "unofficial" knowledge or who take iconoclastic positions toward "official" narratives. Barkun asserts that such writers are dealing in what he terms "stigmatized knowledge" - that is, information found outside the imprimatur of "universities, communities of scientific researchers, and the like" (26). The implication is that such communities offer objective and authoritative critical boundaries that can be trusted. The fallacy inherent in Barkun's categorization is the assumption that universities, think tanks, and other institutions do not have their own agendas, biases, and politics that tend to mold their thinking (or at times subvert their objectivity). Moreover, Barkun criticizes those authors who traffic in "stigmatized knowledge" as using a kind of corrupted scientific method that gives the appearance of objectivity and a façade of "allegedly empirical" information (28). Part of the problem, he opines is that such writers give this appearance of objectivity by "appropriating the apparatus of scholarship in the form of elaborate citations and bibliographies" in which "authors obligingly cite one another." Putting aside the fact that it is a common practice for members of all academic disciplines who read papers at professional conferences, for example, invariably to "cite one another" in papers and that the papers themselves are full of "elaborate citations and bibliographies," it seems to me that Barkun is begging the question here. First, when considering "popular knowledges" such as conspiracy theory, the very "undecidability" is part of its narrative construction and thus must be considered as part of the forensics of its examination. The very fact that such narratives occupy that gray area between "legitimacy" and "illegitimacy" should remain a major consideration when we analyze them. This forced skepticism is useful when we consider any received information regardless of the source, whether "official" or "unofficial." Indeed, any claim to a bona fide needs to be taken on its own merits and should be considered part of the protocol for judging any argument. As anyone who has worked at a university knows, just because someone has an advanced degree and/or has an academic job - that fact alone does not mean the individual knows what he or she is talking about on any given issue. More to the point here, however, is that the demonization of any argument by declaring it a "conspiracy theory" so that it can be dismissed out of hand is far too facile and convenient a strategy in an age in which all received knowledge is becoming more and more suspect. (It is useful to recall Michael Foucault's warning that all knowledge is part of a "power/knowledge" paradigm.) It is a sad truth that the reliance on the integrity and good faith of the Enlightenment/rationalist tradition of the academy is not enough for many "consumers" of information today. Too many times in recent history public institutions, whether they be part of the government, the press or the academic community, have failed in the eyes of the public to live up to their responsibilities - two obvious examples are the Warren Report and The 9/11 Commission Report.
Yet, it might be worth noting here, however, that Barkun does give a very useful overview of what he terms "right wing" conspiracy theories - especially those that treat racial or religious groups as scapegoats for various societal ills. The proponents of these theories are the very ones Jürgan Habermas, Umberto Eco and others find so troubling. These proponents include the religious right (as exemplified by Pat Robertson in his book The New World Order [1991]), white supremacist groups (who see a racial paradigm in Victor Marsden's version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), militia movements (who, again, see a model to emulate in The Turner Diaries), etc. In his study, Barkun traces many of the more popular ideas that have tended to influence these groups. The central one he calls "millennialism" - a belief in an end time in which "history reach[es] its climax in a collective, this-worldly redemption" (16). In addition, he traces the influence of belief in "The Illuminati," "The New World Order," "The Free Masons," "The Knights Templar" and other staples of traditional "stigmatized knowledge." He also spends a great deal of time discussing the various theories surrounding UFOs. In the end, A Culture of Conspiracy is a kind of cautionary tale about the popularity and influence that some conspiracy theories can engender. The effect of the book is to emphasize the need to take conspiracy theories seriously, even if (or perhaps especially if) we do not agree with them, since they influence great numbers of people. Yet, although there is much that is useful in Barkum's study for readers interested in the genealogy of many popular "conspiracy theories," the study itself suffers from the disdain and condescension the author obviously feels toward his subject.[^]
[7] The authors remind the reader in the introduction that "conspiracies are as American as apple pie....When two guys knock off a 7/11 store, they are committing a conspiracy" (xviii). Indeed, as many conspiracy theorists (including Webster Tarpley, Barry Zwicker, David Ray Griffin, Jim Marrs, et. al.) have repeatedly and stridently pointed out, "the official explanation of September 11 [2001 is a] 'conspiracy theory' itself (Birchall 55-56) involving nineteen Arab terrorists. This conspiracy theory was used as the justification for the invasion of Afghanistan. [^]
[8] This use of "special pleading "is sometimes called "cherry picking" the evidence - something that the Bush administration was accused of doing to fabricate a case for going to war against Iraq in 2003. "Cherry picking" is defined as "the careful selection of information to buttress a particular predetermined perspective while ignoring other information that does not. In other words, take the best and leave the rest. An obvious example of the cherry pick is the allegation that the Bush Administration emphasized those pieces of intelligence that supported its desire to invade Iraq. But if you look around, you'll see it everywhere, embraced across ideological perspectives" (Roger Pielke, Jr., Ogmius No. 8, 2004) <http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/ogmius/archives/issue_8/intro.html> [^]
[9] Roland Barthes makes two points about what he calls the "already written" in society. First, he states that our public narrative is basically an ideology-laden mythology:
The whole of France [and by extrapolation the West] is steeped in this anonymous ideology: our press, our films, our theatre, our pulp literature, our rituals, our Justice, or diplomacy, our conversations, our remarks about the weather, a murder trial, a touching wedding, the cooking we dream of, the garments we wear, everything, in everyday life, is dependent on the representation which the bourgeoisie has and makes us have of the relations between man and the world. These 'normalized' forms attract little attention, by the very fact of their extension in which their origin is easily lost. (Mythologies 140)
Second, we naturalize this mythology without even realizing it:
In fact, what allows the reader to consume myth innocently is that he does not see it as a semiological system but as an inductive one. Where there is only an equivalence, he sees a kind of causal process: the signifier and the signified have, in his eyes, a natural relationship. This confusion can be expressed otherwise: any semiological system is a system of values; now the myth-consumer takes the signification for a system of facts: myth is read as a factual system, whereas it is but a semiological system. (Mythologies, 131) [^]
[10] According to Syd Field in Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (1994), "A plot point is any incident, episode, or event that 'hooks' into the action and spins it around into another direction" (13). [^]
[11] Claire Birchall quotes Mark Lawson as saying:
Increased commercial competition has brought pressure for rapid printing or transmission and the resultant spreading of information - half-fact, no fact, innuendo, gossip - which has nothing to commend it as journalism other than the fact that no other news outlet has got it. (Lawson qtd. in Birchall 52) [^]
[12] TheGreatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina by Frank Rich is rife with examples of the Bush administration's manipulation of not only the news but of economic and scientific data, etc. Rich states at one point, "There was no way to quantify the fictionalizing in every corner of the administration....At NASA and NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), political appointees rewrote or censored public documents and agency speeches if they conveyed scientific findings about pollution and global warming that contradicted administration environmental policies" (170). The administration created their own fake journalists (such as Jeff Gannon of the fake Talon News) and their own fake news stories (such as those created by Patricia Harrison, the assistant secretary of state - who did such a good job at creating fake news she was installed as president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting). See Rich's chapter entitled "When We Act, We Create Our Own Realty" (153-176) for an overview of the Bush administration's propaganda machine. [^]
[13] According to Mafruza Khan's 2003 article "Media Diversity at Risk: The FCC's Plan to Weaken Ownership Rules":
Five companies - Viacom (owner of CBS), Disney (ABC), News Corporation (Fox), General Electric (NBC) and AOL Time Warner - control about 75 percent share of production of prime-time viewing. Research conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that larger companies and network owned TV stations produce lower quality news shows than do smaller media companies. These five corporations are now on the verge of controlling the same number of television households as the big three broadcast networks did forty years ago. In the past, when three or four broadcast networks controlled so many households, the Commission [FCC] protected the public's interest in competition and diversity of viewpoints by requiring independent production of programming. <http://www.corp-research.org/archives/may03.htm> [^]
[14] In Roland Barthes' theory of textuality, the plot of a narrative is made up of "kernals" of information that link up to form a narrative sequence. "Whoever reads the text collects bits of information under the generic names of actions (Walk, Assassination, Rendezvous), and it is this name which creates the sequence" (S/Z 19). [^]
[15] Jonathan Culler in his book Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (1975) has pointed out that there has been much discussion over Roland Barthes' concepts of the texte de plaisir and the texte de jouissance. Culler points out that the difference between the former and the latter "is only a matter of degree: the latter is only a later and freer state of the former" (191). But Barthes makes clear in The Pleasure of the Text (1975) that the more "writerly" a text becomes, that is, the more the reader must put himself/herself into the text, filling the gaps of meaning, engaging in the production of meaning, the more jouissance (ecstasy) one feels. The more one is involved in the text, then, the more one moves from plaisir to jouissance. [^]
[16] Questioning the "official" version of the events of 9/11 has become a kind of cottage industry of its own. The same commentators who have become so intimately associated with the study of the Kennedy assassination, such as James Fetzer and Jim Marrs have also taken on the study of the attacks on 9/11 (James Fetzer in The 9/11 Conspiracy of America [2007] and Jim Marrs in The Terror Conspiracy: Deception 9/11 and the Loss of Liberty [2006]). A recent attempt by various poststructuralist scholars to deal with various aspects of 9/11 - especially the role of media and the concomitant "spectacle" of the events as they played out on television - is presented in a series of essays in the book The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to "Reality" TV and Beyond (2005) edited by Geoff King. One of the most interesting arguments in the book is presented by Douglas Kellner, (the author of several books on media theory and Philosophy of Education Chair at the University of California) in which he invokes the theories of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. In Kellner's essay, Debord describes "a media and consumer society, organized around the production and consumption of images, commodities, and staged events" (24). Spectacle for Debord is "a tool of pacification and depoliticization; it is a 'permanent opium war'" which "stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life - recovering the full range of their human powers through creative practice" (25). Basically, Kellner argues that 9/11 has been treated by the media as just another television show, a commodity that at best reinforces the status quo and at worst stupefies the public into a state of paralyzed fear. In fact, all of the essays in the anthology examine the events on 9/11 as media spectacle and simulacra that lie in stark contrast to the existential reality of the lives of the viewers.
Another anthology entitled The Hidden History of 9-11-2001 (2006) edited by Paul Zarembka is part of a series entitled "Research in Political Economy" and features many authors who have become associated with the study of alternative versions of the 9/11 narrative including Don Jacobs, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed as well as David Ray Griffin (see below). Most of the authors in this anthology are academics who teach at major universities throughout the world. Each of the essays deals with a separate unanswered question that surrounds the events of 9/11.
In still another example, Kevin Barrett, the instructor at the University of Wisconsin who created a fire storm of controversy when he announced on a radio program that he believed the US government was behind the attacks on 9/11, has written a book about his journey into field of conspiracy theory called Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie (2007). The book serves as an entertaining, if informal, introduction into the current popularization of 9/11 as a nexus of conspiracy theories. Another overview is Conspiracies, Conspiracy Theories and the Secrets of 9/11 (2006) by Mathias Broeckers, as is The Big Wedding: 9/11, the Whistle-blowers and the Cover-up (2005) by Sander Hicks. These books are not as scholarly as the anthology edited by Geoff King, but they do evidence how the field has become democratized as a "popular knowledge."
Of course, the most loved (and the most vilified) of the 9/11 commentators is David Ray Griffin. Griffin is professor of philosophy of religion and theology, emeritus, at the Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. His books on 9/11 include: The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (2004), The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (2005), 9/11 and American Empire (2006), Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11 (2006) and Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory (2007). David Ray Griffin is a consistent critic of the "official" narrative of 9/11. His various books pick apart the story as told by the major media: (especially the infamous article entitled "9/11: Debunking the Myths" [2005] published in Popular Mechanics magazine), the Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers (2005) issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and The 9/11 Commission Report (2004). Not only does Griffin find misstatements, failures in logic, and errors in the various narratives and reports, but he discusses obvious fabrications and lies. Griffin enumerates and sometimes illuminates the many "aporia" that are woven into the fabric of the "official" 9/11 narrative. Griffin's work is so dense it deserves its own study. Suffice it to say, however, that his conclusions return again and again to the need for an independent investigation of the events of 9/11. His overarching point is that all of the studies and explanations we have so far are fatally flawed and politically motivated. Moreover, to say that he has been demonized by establishment critics for his impertinence would be an understatement. He has been laughed off of cable talk shows such as Hannity and Colmes and has been called a "kook" in various print publications. The latest comes from Alexander Cockburn in his article "Fidel, You Got the Wrong Conspiracy" published in the Oct. 8, 2007 edition of The Nation. In this commentary, Cockburn lumps Griffin in with another media devil, Fidel Castro, by saying "It turns out Castro's joined at the hip with David Ray Griffin. Castro says the Pentagon was hit by a rocket, not a plane, because no traces were found of its passengers..."(8). Beyond the fact that Cockburn deliberately mischaracterizes Griffin's position vis à vis the attack of the Pentagon, the effect of mentioning his name in the same sentence as Fidel Castro implies that Griffin is no better and has no more credibility than that crazy communist dictator Fidel. (In such attacks, critics rarely deal with the salient evidence at issue and tend to rely on ad hominem smears.) Indeed, Griffin is an interesting case in that he is highly respected for his scholarship in the areas of theology and religion, but because he dares to cross over the line into "stigmatized knowledge," he is stripped of his scholarly credibility. This is a phenomenon that can be seen again and again in the studies of "popular knowledges" and especially conspiracy theory. [^]
[17] Books that challenge the authoritative interpretation of the Zapruder film and other images from the Kennedy assassination include Murder in Dealey Plaza: What We Know Now that We Didn't Know Then about the Death of JFK (2000) ed. James H. Frazer and The Killing of A President: The Complete Photographic Record of the JFK Assassination, The Conspiracy, and the Cover-Up (1993) by Robert J. Groden. The number of films on the subject are legion. [^]
[18] Wag the Dog is just one example in a long line of films that have used conspiracy theory narratives either as the plot of the film or as a subtext for its story. There are several valuable studies of conspiracy theory narrative as it evidences itself in film. Early studies include Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (1990) by Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner and The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992) by Fredric Jameson. One of the most recent is Projecting Paranoia: Conspiratorial Visions in American Film (2001) by Ray Pratt. While Camera Politica and The Geopolitical Aesthetic offer a solid grounding in the aesthetic theory that any student of conspiracy theory narrative would find useful, Projecting Paranoia offers a valuable historical overview of what Pratt calls "the age of paranoia" (8) in film. He argues that paranoia is part of the post-World War Two (ergo postmodern) zeitgeist and then traces how that paranoia evidences itself in American cinema. Indeed, while all three books are valuable overviews of aesthetic theory and film history, they are limited because their examples by necessity end with their publication dates. Recent examples of conspiracy theory in film that come readily to mind and deserve study include Syriana (2006), Munich (2005), Casino Royale (2006) and Shooter (2007). Syriana's plot is based on the book See No Evil (2002) by Robert Baer (a former CIA agent) that focuses on the various conspiracies by governments and corporations to control Mideast oil. Munich is the story of a secret Israeli hit team sent on a mission to revenge the assassination of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic games in Munich by terrorists. Casino Royale is the latest remake of Ian Fleming's famous novel that features the spy James Bond or 007. While the plot centers on arms dealing and 007's attempts to stop it, part of the subtext involves the targeted buying of stock market put options by a terrorist organization on a company they attend to attack to make sure the company's stock plummets - thus making the terrorists a tidy profit. What makes this plot point so intriguing to those who have been following the various "theories" about the events of 9/11 is that many news organizations reported that in the days and weeks before September 11, 2001 someone bought millions of dollars in put options on the airlines who would eventually be involved in the 9/11 attacks. The implication is that someone or some organization in a position to know placed those options with fore-knowledge of the events. Robert Baer, in his novel Blow the House Down (2006), suggests that the perpetrators were former, disgruntled CIA agents. Yet, the question remains: how would they know? Were they somehow involved in the attacks? Shooter (2007), on the other hand, is a film about a former Marine scout sniper who is tricked by a super secret organization to participate in stopping what he thinks is an assassination attempt on the President. He is double-crossed and made the scapegoat for a real assassination. The implication is that such scapegoating is a craft secret of these super secret, paramilitary organizations and such a dupe had been chosen to take the blame for an assassination before - such as Oswald in the Kennedy assassination. The conspiracy involves corrupt senators and paramilitary contractors as well as big oil companies. One of the most intriguing lines in the film is when the corrupt senator admits that the invasion of Iraq was indeed all about oil. With so many films coming out now about 9/11, its aftermath, and the Iraq war, a new full-length study of these films is inevitable. [^]
[19] According to the New York Times:
Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.
... the administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations...
Some reports were produced to support the administration's most cherished policy objectives, like regime change in Iraq or Medicare reform. Others focused on less prominent matters... They often feature "interviews" with senior administration officials in which questions are scripted and answers rehearsed. Critics, though, are excluded, as are any hints of mismanagement, waste or controversy.
Some of the segments were broadcast in some of nation's largest television markets... prepackaged segments [include] "suggested" lead-ins written by public relations experts. It is a world where government-produced reports disappear into a maze of [news programming, feeds, web sites, etc.] only to emerge cleansed on the other side as "independent" journalism.
David Barstow and Robin Stein, "Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged TV News," New York Times, March 13, 2005 [Emphasis Added] <http://www.globalissues.org/HumanRights/Media/Manipulation.asp> [^]
[20] In an essay entitled "Television and the Presidency: How the News Affects Our Perceptions" (March 24, 1992) that describes the effect of images over content on the evening news, the author describes the effect of how images distort the news content:
The Reagan administration used to entice television with carefully orchestrated moments knowing that the power of the images would override the accompanying narration no matter how negative. Lesley Stahl did a piece for the "CBS Evening News" that tried to point out the contradiction between the messages implied in the photo opportunities and the actual policies of the president. Pictures of the president at the Handicapped Olympics and the opening of an old age home were matched with Stahl's voice over of budget cuts for the disabled and elderly. As she found out later the report was a failure.
We just didn't get the enormity of the visual impact over the verbal. [We] would run these pieces and say, 'While the president went fishing today back in the White House things were falling apart,' but no one would hear us.... I did a piece where I was quite negative... about Reagan and yet the pictures were terrific... I thought they'd be mad at me, but they weren't. They loved it.... [An official] said to me, 'They didn't hear you. They only saw [the] pictures' (Moyers [The Public Mind]).
Mike Deaver also agreed.
[She had] unwittingly accomplished the purpose of the White House in trying to be critical of [it]. In the competition between the ear and the eye, the eye always wins (Moyers [The Public Mind]).
<http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/president.shtml> [^]
[21] The caption that accompanied the photo adds to its "carnivalesque" quality: "The Pentagon wasn't hit by a Boeing 757 jetliner. It was hit by a flying grilled cheese sandwich. How do I know? I clearly saw it in the video frames released by the FBI, there on the right. Not everybody sees the grilled cheese sandwich, I admit. Some people see a Boeing 757 jet out of the same blur that I'm pretty sure is a grilled cheese sandwich." (Mike Adams, Counterthink.org, May 18, 2006) [^]
[22] Frank Rich in his book The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina (2006) details how New York Times reporter Judith Miller was part of "an assembly line for providing and publicizing much of this erroneous evidence [connecting Saddam Hussein and WMDs in Iraq]...." Rich reports that the Bush administration was helped along by a press corps that was either culpable or incredibly gullible. Rich states at one point that "the intelligence that the administration chose to overstate, leak to willing journalists, and repeatedly broadcast to the public...proved to be dead wrong" (187). Miller was forced to resign from the Times several years after the damage had been done (190). "'WMD - I got it totally wrong,' said Miller." The war, however, that was facilitated by her erroneous reporting, continues unabated. [^]
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