\documentclass[oneside,english,12pt]{amsart}
\usepackage{pslatex}
\usepackage{charter}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{url}
\usepackage
[pdftitle={Conspiracy Theories},
pdfkeywords={conspiracy, paranoia, political theology},
pdfauthor={Florian Cramer},
backref=true,
pagebackref=true,
hyperindex=true,
bookmarks=true,
bookmarksopen=false]
{hyperref}
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{0}
\setlength\parskip{\medskipamount}
\setlength\parindent{0pt}

\sloppy


\begin{document}


\title{Notes on the Nature of Conspiracy}

\author{Florian Cramer}

\date{12/2007}

\maketitle

``For there either was some Tristero beyond
the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if
there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue,
and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed,
assumed full circle into some paranoia.'' Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of
Lot 49


\section{Political Theology}

Conspiracy theories are an old phenomenon, but a modern term, coined in
Karl Popper's book ``Open Society and Its Enemies'' from 1945. What
nowadays is called a conspiracy theory chiefly applies, since the
publication of the Rosicrucian manifesto ``Fama Fraternitatis'' in the
early 17th century, to secret societies like the Rosicrucians,
Freemasons and Illuminati, since the 19th century in to whole parts of
the population like Jews, nowadays also to Muslims or, reciprocally in
political Islam, to Christians. Religion is a conspiracy in the most
literal sense of the word, a gathering and fabrication of spirits, or
ghosts.  Conspiracy theories thus target the gray areas between religion
and politics, belief and power.  

Their ground assumption is the existence of esoteric as opposed to
exoteric politics just as in esoteric versus exoteric religion; in other
words, that there is a hidden politics underneath or opposed to publicly
visible politics, or -- particularly in antisemitic conspiracy theories
-- that there is esoteric politics in exoteric and esoteric religion.
Conspiracy theories are thus prime examples of political theology as
defined by Popper's adversary Carl Schmitt. They are are
reverse-engineered political theology that do not merely describe, but
practically apply the concepts of the esoteric and the exoteric much
like American neo-conservatism applies Leo Strauss' assumption of an
esoteric truth in political philosophy. 

If religion is a conspiracy, then theology is conspiracy theory and vice
versa, conspiracy theories are theologies that have shifted from
cultural explanations of nature to cultural explanations of culture;
human explanations of how mankind works, as opposed to human (but
disguised as divine) explanation of how divine power works. Modern
conspiracy theories, in other words, are the oxymoron of secular belief
systems.

\section{Semiotics}

These theologies are, above all, interpretations of signs: In
Western religions, interpretations of nature as symbolic, as a divine
sign that emanated from the divine word. In modern conspiracy theories,
it is the attribution of signs -- words, images, sound bites as recorded
primarily by mass media -- to one  coherence and all-comprehensive
meaning, connecting signs of diverse origins against a common sense that
considers them unrelated. As abundant webs of interrelated signs, where
everything corresponds to everything, and every detail has a higher
meaning, conspiracy theories are hyper-semioses and what Umberto Eco
calls ``overinterpretation''; in his novel ``The Pendulum of Foucault'',
he writes, aside from its pulp fiction, precisely such a semiotics of
conspiracy theories as hybrids of interpretation and political theology.

Conversely, Christian and Jewish theology have a strong element of
semiotic paranoia since they trace every material phenomenon to the
creation through the word of god.  Pop cultural conspiracy theories like
in Robert Anton Wilson's ``Illuminatus'' could  be called semiotic plays
with political theology which ultimately reverted to proper political
theology once they were taken, for example by 1980s German computer
hacker Karl Koch, for face value and a Straussian esoteric revelation of
the true machinations of world power. -- In hacker culture, paranoia of
political world conspiracies steered by Illuminati or Freemasons still
continues to exist.

\section{Paranoia}

``Siehst Du den lichten Streif da über das Gras hin, wo die Schwämme so
nachwachsen? Da rollt abends der Kopf. Es hob ihn einmal einer auf, er
meint', es wär ein Igel: drei Tag und drei Nächt, er lag auf den
Hobelspänen. - Leise: Andres, das waren die Freimaurer! Ich hab's, die
Freimaurer!'' (Georg Büchner, Woyzeck, 1837)


To make sense of anything and everything is a narcissistic proposition
insofar it traces all signs back to one entity, and one conspiracy; this
is why conspiracy theories are either monotheistic in their structure,
or at least based on systematic theology. In psychoanalytic terms, they
are paranoid semiotics, with paranoia being a form of irrationality that
is perfectly if not overly rational:  irrationality relying on rational
methods of drawing seemingly logical, coherent and persuasive
conclusions from observations and facts, or rationalization that becomes
irrational because it doesn't accept irrationality, and contingency.On
the level of rhetoric, this often entails inclusions of seemingly unrelated
observations while filtering and keeping only those that fit a
preconceived theory. 


\section{Sublime}

Far from being merely a clinical psychosis, paranoia is the open modus
operandi of whole industries: ``Only the Paranoid Survive'', for
example, is the title of the autobiography by the co-founder and
long-term CEO of the Intel corporation, Andrew Grove. Likewise, IBM and
Microsoft are famous for their paranoid marketing strategy of spreading
``FUD'', or ``fear, uncertainty and doubt'' about competing products and
companies,  the emotions and sentiments that conversely complement
semiotic over-rationalization of conspiracy plots.  They describe the
aesthetic dimension of conspiracy theories, in the literal meaning of
aisthesis as perception, sentiments and subjective judgement. 

Since the Latin rhetoric of Pseudo-Longinus and the 18th century
aesthetic theory of Edmund Burke, the sublime is the aesthetic register
of fear, uncertainty and doubt. Longinus, Burke, later Immanuel Kant and
romanticist artists like Caspar David Friedrich and William Turner
identify the sublime with forces of nature: storms, lightning, mountain
ranges and canyons, dark woods.  In the 19th century, gothic novels turn
the horrors of nature into human-made horrors of culture, a tradition
continued up to The Name of the Rose and The Da Vinci Code with their
combinations of the gothic tale with murder plots and political
conspiracy.  It might not seem coincidental that the first large-scale
conspiracy theories, such as the antisemitic ``Protocols of the Elders
of Zion'', have appeared since the 19th century, too, using the sublime
as the trope of an aesthetic politics: infinite, branching out,
threatening, overwhelming. 

In his book ``The Postmodern Condition'' from 1979, Jean-François
Lyotard identifies a ``postmodern sublime'' based on subjective
experiences, and a human condition, of contingency. The conspiracy
theory novels of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Anton Wilson, Umberto Eco and
Dan Brown do not only exemplify a ``postmodern'' permeability of popular
and high culture, but also -- especially in  Wilson's hacker cultural
perception -- the thin line of paranoia, between reflecting and
submitting to contingency. 


\section{Underground politics}

From Latin rhetoric to dark romanticism and abstract expressionist
painting, the sublime has been generally identified as
anti-beautiful, anti-classicist and therefore anti-mainstream.  Gothic
still exists as a subculture today.  Conspiracy theories, with their
paranoid sublime, likewise are a counter-cultural phenomenon,
underground wherever they contradict official history and construct
alternative realities.  Disrupting common-sense truth, they show how
things can be interpreted radically differently, amounting in the best
cases to practical epistemological critique. For these reasons,
conspiracy theories have been tactically employed in subcultures, both
analytically, as readings, and synthetically, as fabrications, such as
the collective identity and media phantom Luther Blissett. At the same
time, it exemplifies a translation of Pynchon's, Wilson's, Eco's and
(perhaps) Brown's conspiracy fictions into a social practice, and as a
critical reversal of the escalation of fiction into belief: dubbing
itself a ``conspiracy'' first, it ended up with the publication of the
historical novel ``Q'', thus ultimately containing itself as fiction and
putting the lid on any paranoid political theology that otherwise might
have grown out of the project.


\section{Overground Politics}

The affinity of conspiracy theories and postmodern condition does not
exhaust itself in the sublime: while a single conspiracy theories claims
an alternative truth, conspiracy theories in their whole state that
there is not one, but an infinite number of truths whose rule depends on
power and, especially in the case of counter-truths, persuasiveness.
Just as Nietzsche stated in his 1873 fragment on ``Truth and Lie in an
Extra-Moral Sense'', truth is rhetorical:

\begin{quotation}
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and
anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations which have been
enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and
which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people:
truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what
they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins
which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer
as coins.
\end{quotation}

While Nietzsche claims to offer an ``extra-moral'' perspective on truth,
it nevertheless contains a morality: That truth, as a rhetorical
fabrication, cannot be trusted. Although Nietzsche's respective claim
marks a blind spot in the logic of this statement -- similar to the
paradox of the Neoist slogan ``belief is the enemy'' --, it also points
out where conspiracy theories become problematic: At the very point
where they are trusted, and believed.  

Thomas Pynchon's novel ``The Crying of Lot 49'' from 1966 tells 
of an underground, conspiratorial postal system of which, until the end,
it is not clear whether it exists in reality or just in the imagination
of its main protagonist. The system communicates the message of an
alternate reality by its mere existence and mythological history.  Its
counter-cultural network includes a Neo-Nazi Mike Fallopian and the white
supremacist Peter Pinguid Society. At this point, the conspiracy plot is
no longer romantic, but reflects gray zones between underground and
overground politics; the underground, and what later was romanticized by
Deleuze, Guattari and electronic art as a ``rhizome'', is no value in
itself.


\section{Networks}

If conspiracy theories create webs of meanings by considering anything
related to anything, they construct networks. The network as such is a
structurally paranoid figure of thought, or at least one that invites
conspiracy theories.  The Internet as the electronic network of networks
thus is the perfect embodiment of conspiracy theories, including the
popular urban legend that it was designed by the U.S. military to
withstand a nuclear strike.

\section{Media Theory}

No other discipline has spun this urban legend more often than media
theory.  Media theory itself has paranoid tendencies first of all by its
inflation of the term ``medium'' to the degree that virtually everything
ends up being a medium, including senders and receivers, light bulbs and
guns, angels and altar bread. If everything is a medium, it is easy to conclude that we
are surrounded and permeated by media. And since McLuhan's assumption
that the medium is the message, media theorists believe that the medium
is the creator rather than the purveyor of a message, a tool with its
own agenda. 

Therefore, media theory tends to describe technology not as something
cultural and constructed, but as an autonomous agent that has taken over
and programs culture, not unlike the science fictions of Blade Runner,
Robocop and Terminator. Critical theory thus turns into a belief system
that puts technology where gods and demons once used to be. It becomes
all the more questionable once it transforms from a heretic provocation
against goodie-two-shoes humanities into an institutional doctrine.

One could, admittedly, criticize this critique as paranoid itself.  But
thinking of ``media'' as a whole as one big conspiracy might put
conspiracy theories to productive critical use.

\end{document}
