Conspiracy Culture

Hidden Agendas, Endless Investigations, and the Dynamics of Complexity: The Conspiratorial Mode of Storytelling in Contemporary American Television Series

by Felix Brinker

published in: Aspeers 5 (2012), 87-109.

In this paper, I explore a particular kind of narrative construction pervasive in contemporary American television... more In this paper, I explore a particular kind of narrative construction pervasive in contemporary American television series. Popular shows such as Lost, Battlestar Galactica, 24, Alias, or Fringe all similarly construct long-running narratives around their protagonists’ attempts to solve central underlying mysteries. By doing so, these series amass ever more complex backstories and perpetually complicate their individual webs of intersecting subplots and long-term story arcs. Drawing on narratology, concepts developed in television studies, and Mark Fenster’s work on Conspiracy Theories, I argue that the series’ success is indebted to a particular way of telling their stories—which I call the ‘conspiratorial mode’—that makes them ideally suited to operate within the competitive environment of post-network television. This article sketches the narrative structure of these conspiratorial shows, situates them in the context of contemporary television, and considers their curious dynamics of narrative progression and deferral. Finally, its goals are to suggest reasons for the recent resurgence of conspiracy narratives in television beyond and apart from a paranoia that is supposedly widespread in contemporary American culture.

Dead and alive: Beliefs in contradictory conspiracy theories

by Karen Douglas

Wood, M., Douglas, K.M., & Sutton, R.M. (in press).  Dead and alive: Beliefs in contradictory conspiracy theories.  Social Psychological and Personality Science. 

Conspiracy theories can form a monological belief system: a self-sustaining worldview comprised of a network of... more Conspiracy theories can form a monological belief system: a self-sustaining worldview comprised of a network of mutually supportive beliefs.  The present research shows that even endorsement of mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively correlated.  In Study 1 (n = 137), the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered.  In Study 2 (n = 102), the more participants believed that Osama Bin Laden was already dead when U.S. special forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive.  Hierarchical regression models showed that mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively associated because both are associated with the view that the authorities are engaged in a cover-up (Study 2).  The monological nature of conspiracy belief appears to be driven not by conspiracy theories directly supporting one another, but by broader beliefs supporting conspiracy theories in general.

Rhizomatic Horror: Eclipsed Narrative and Experimental Weird Fiction in Steve Beard’s Digital Leatherette

by Andrew Wenaus

Extrapolation 53.1

Bruce Sterling recently criticized the fiction of Steve Beard as “being based in quote, Theory, unquote” and that this... more Bruce Sterling recently criticized the fiction of Steve Beard as “being based in quote, Theory, unquote” and that this academicism is ineffective for slipstream fiction. This article suggests that Beard’s novel, Digital Leatherette (1999), is not slipstream fiction but rather an intervention in New Weird fiction. Beard employs the conceptual structure, the rhizome, formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as the diegetic framework for his novel. The result is an assemblage of fictions that refer to a constitutive narrative; yet, this unified diegesis remains eclipsed and unnamable. Digital Leatherette confronts H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror in an age where the “inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents” is more of a formal axiom than aphorism.

The Hidden Impact of Conspiracy Theories: Perceived and Actual Influence of Theories Surrounding the Death of Princess Diana.

by Robbie Sutton

Douglas, K.M. and Sutton, R.M. (2008) The hidden impact of conspiracy theories: Perceived and actual impact of theories surrounding the death of Princess Diana. Journal of Social Psychology, 148, 210-221.

The authors examined the perceived and actual impact of exposure to conspiracy theories surrounding the death of... more The authors examined the perceived and actual impact of exposure to conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. One group of undergraduate students rated their agreement and their classmates' perceived agreement with several statements about Diana's death. A second group of students from the same undergraduate population read material containing popular conspiracy theories about Diana's death before rating their own and others' agreement with the same statements and perceived retrospective attitudes (i.e., what they thought their own and others' attitudes were before reading the material). Results revealed that whereas participants in the second group accurately estimated others' attitude changes, they underestimated the extent to which their own attitudes were influenced.

Dead and alive: Beliefs in contradictory conspiracy theories.

by Robbie Sutton

Wood, M., Douglas, K. M., & Sutton, R. M. (in press). Dead and alive: Beliefs in contradictory conspiracy theories. Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Conspiracy theories can form a monological belief system: a self-sustaining worldview comprised of a network of... more Conspiracy theories can form a monological belief system: a self-sustaining worldview comprised of a network of mutually supportive beliefs. The present research shows that even endorsement of mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively correlated. In Study 1 (n = 137), the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered. In Study 2 (n = 102), the more participants believed that Osama Bin Laden was already dead when U.S. special forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive. Hierarchical regression models showed that mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively associated because both are associated with the view that the authorities are engaged in a cover-up (Study 2). The monological nature of conspiracy belief appears to be driven not by conspiracy theories directly supporting one another, but by broader beliefs supporting conspiracy theories in general.

Baracknophobia and the Paranoid Style: Visions of Obama as the Antichrist on the World Wide Web

by Amarnath Amarasingam

In Robert Glenn Howard, ed. Network Apocalypse: Visions of the End in an Age of Internet Media (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011): 96-123.

This chapter explores the belief among certain subsets of the US population that Obama is the Antichrist depicted as... more This chapter explores the belief among certain subsets of the US population that Obama is the Antichrist depicted as setting the stage for the end of the world. First, I examine the apocalyptic fears and conspiracies surrounding the presidency of Barack Obama, placing it in historical and religious perspective. Second, I investigate how expressions of apocalypticism and conspiracism surrounding Obama manifest themselves on the Internet.

The Dan Brown Phenomenon: Conspiracism in Post-9/11 Popular Fiction

by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson

Published in Radical History Review, No. 111, Fall 2011

Despite the immense and lasting success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code as both a novel and a broader cultural... more Despite the immense and lasting success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code as both a novel and a broader cultural phenomenon, few scholars have attempted to explain its very popularity. Using a cultural-historical lens, this essay argues that the success of Brown's narrative should be understood as a reflection of some of the major political themes in the post-9/11 United States: the secrecy and deceptions of the George W. Bush administration and the resulting distrust of government and flowering of conspiracy theories.

Making Politics Reasonable: Conspiracism, subjectification, and governing through styles of thought

by Jack Bratich

In Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality
Editors: Jack Z. Bratich, Jeremy Packer, and Cameron McCarthy.
(SUNY Press, 2003, pp. 67-100).

Democratic Dreams, Nightmares of Conspiracy

by Ted Remington

Draft only

A meditation on the role narrative rhetoric plays in giving voice to the marginalized in a democratic society, looking... more A meditation on the role narrative rhetoric plays in giving voice to the marginalized in a democratic society, looking at conspiracy theories as a case study.

Conspiracy Theorizing Surveillance: considering modalities of paranoia and conspiracy in surveillance studies

by Nicholas Holm

published in Surveillance and Society 7.1 (2009)

In this paper I argue that the notion of paranoia can inform a post-panoptic theory of surveillance, without simply... more In this paper I argue that the notion of paranoia can inform a post-panoptic theory of surveillance, without simply functioning as a pre-emptive dismissal of a critical engagement with technologies and regimes of surveillance as just paranoid. Rather, I seek to address how paranoia can be rearticulated to serve a productive, non-pathological function in an analysis of logics of surveillance. To this end, I consider the manner in which paranoia is characterised in popular cultural narratives and how the advent of cultural paranoia can be understood in the context of the expansion of state and corporate surveillance, especially in the UK and post-9/11 North America. Drawing on this notion of cultural paranoia, I then argue for three modalities of paranoia-as-surveillance theory. The first modality, the paranoia of the subject of surveillance, addresses the divergent panoptic subject who rejects the disciplinary logic of the panopticon; the second modality considers how the paranoid as the suspicious subject could be used to characterise the expansion of surveillance regimes through an ever-present need to observe; and the third modality of conspiracy theory proposes that a paranoid logic, akin to that of the conspiracy theory, sutures over epistemic gaps in the interpretation of information in instances of analytic deficit.

Community, Media, and Black Intellectual Paranoia-as-Politics

by Anthony C. Cooke

Journal of Black Studies 42.4 (May 2011)

A Review of Michael Barkun. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions In Contemporary America.

by Dereck Daschke

Terrorism and Political Violence 18:1 (2006).