We appreciate the authors’ efforts to engage with our work. Unfortunately, the review is misleading and misrepresents what the book is about. The audience we geared this book to is avowedly interdisciplinary, with contributors from anthropology, history, political philosophy, and cultural studies, among other diverse fields. Conspiracy/Theory showcases insights that are primarily historical and ethnographic, reaching beyond the relatively narrow literature in political science the authors lament our missing. Among political scientists, we do hope the book will appeal to scholars of political theory, as well as to others, mainstream or not, who are open to thinking outside their comfort zones.
We explicitly tackle the well-known article by Hofstadter in order to understand the evident overreliance on it in contemporary scholarly and journalistic works—and to move past it. We make the point that conspiracies do exist, while noting that a lot of powerful players have found the accusation of conspiracy theory useful as a means of crushing critique. Our focus, however, can hardly be reduced to an analysis of elites or systems. In fact, when a phrase like “the system” appears in our book, it is as a form of ethnographic speech, that is, a local idiom to be explored as discourse. More generally, the review overlooks our attention in many chapters to how conspiratorial reason operates variously in diverse communities and through everyday language. Conspiracy/Theory’s added value lies in its exploration of the core logics of conspiracy, proposing a major reset on how conspiratorial reason functions, the work it does in the world, and the implications and ramifications it has for our current political life.
Another of the reviewers’ misleading suggestions is that we depend too much on critical theory as a method, missing the point that the aim of our project is not to celebrate critical theory but to investigate the complex terrain between the plausible and the implausible, the believable and the flagrantly fictitious, between knowing and not knowing. Our objective, in other words, is to ask about the boundaries between different kinds of epistemological frames, some of which are coded as conspiratorial and others as critical. We do not say, as the authors assert, that conspiracy theory is a maladaptive cousin to critical theory. The authors do not engage our careful categorizations, including the various meanings of conspiracy, theory, conspiracy theory, and critical theory we offer. They ignore our analyses of social media and technological innovations as powerful infospheres, failing to address our account of the countervailing roles social media plays in both building new experiences of community and generating confusions that impede political judgment.
It is the reviewers’ view that we neglected to grapple with the literature (singular) in political science and would know more if we had. But they do not acknowledge the huge bibliography from other fields on conspiratorial reason, in addition to the works written by political scientists, that we do engage. From their point of view, there is only one disciplinary approach that counts—political science—and only one way of doing political science that really generates knowledge. With profound respect for political science, we nevertheless find such judgments to be deeply anti-intellectual.
Conspiracy/Theory is the product of the concerted efforts of seventeen experts to identify the epistemological lines between things marked as conspiratorial and those labeled critical, without overlooking suggestive and generative discursive similarities. The volume covers examples from South Africa to Syria to the United States to Cyprus. It examines the variegated cognitive and affective experiences that interpellate subjects into a world filled with unavoidable uncertainty—a world of ongoing crises, destructive populist politics, nation-state overreach, dissimulation, and new digital technologies that are transforming authority, influence, and surveillance as we speak.
The slash in our title is important, indexing three somewhat distinct aspects of our reconsideration of conspiratorial reason. First, we underscore the evident affinities between conspiracy theory and critical theory, including the enjoyment to be found in exposing obscure or hidden connections—and the ways in which both styles of reasoning generate solidarities with the aim of producing a political “otherwiseness” to status quo conventionalities. A difference remains, of course, in the scholarly rigor with which critical theory operates in conspiratorial mode and many more popular forms of conspiratorial thought. We acknowledge these differences to move beyond them, inviting readers and ourselves to interrogate our own habits of thought, as well as to recognize, in particular, the force of narrative in collective worldmaking.
The second and third aspects must be dealt with quickly for lack of space. Along with exploring affinities, the volume stems from a scholarly curiosity in stories, even the cockamamie ones, that animate communities of argument. How are we to understand the semiotic, sociological, and political-economic universes in which outlandish stories appear true even to large groups of people? And third, the book exposes hidden and not-so-hidden conspiracies that are not only real but operate to organize our lives. Conspiracies inhere in the logics of capital accumulation, including its commodity form fetishisms, emerging structures of financialization, racialized and gendered hierarchies, exploitative labor practices, and militarisms; they can be found in the blurry boundaries between nation-state and academic knowledge production—and increasingly, in the overwhelming power of ultra-wealthy donors to influence the intellectual agendas of academic institutions.
The task of critical analysis in our perilous moment is to cultivate modes of discernment, drawing attention, for example, to things we may already know but haven’t been able to recognize or acknowledge or think about collectively. By reassessing the tradition of critical theory in light of conspiracy theory, and vice versa, our approach draws attention to new factual truths and new ways of thinking or seeing that have eluded scrutiny. And as in all cases of political divination, Conspiracy/Theory is about the satisfactions to be found in connecting the dots.
