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Article Excerpt
Conspiracy is as natural as breathing. And since the struggles for advantage nearly always have a rhetorical strain, we believe that the systematic contemplation of them forces itself on the student of rhetoric.
--Kenneth Burke
As I was walking up the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish he'd go away --Author unknown
It is not the content of arguments predicated on conspiracy that makes them so unsettling but their form. There is nothing particularly horrific about a "man who wasn't there;" he is an absence, a blank space. What is disturbing in this bit of doggerel is its way of confounding the rules of everyday epistemology. How is it possible to meet someone who wasn't there? The question suggests either insanity or the supernatural; it is the moment identified by Tzvetan Todorov as the essence of the fantastic--the hesitation between belief and rejection, a moment suspended between the marvelous (the extraordinary but ultimately credible) and the uncanny (the bizarre and ultimately untrue) (passim). Contemporary thinking on conspiracy theory inclines toward the notion that Richard Hofstadter's mid-century, totalizing, stable, declarative, reassuringly complete, omnipotent conspiracies have been superceded by postmodern, fragmented, unstable, interrogatives, that provide more doubt, uncertainty, anxiety, even ironic detachment, than direction for resistance. In Kathleen Stewart's poetic description, contemporary conspiracy theory:
lives in a world where the line between inside and outside, fantasy and reality, animal and human and machine does not hold. This is a world full of gaps and the urge to find the missing link. It hums with the possibility that the uncanny is real and it hunkers down in fearful but excited expectation. We're waiting for something to happen--a drama, an endpoint, something to break the enclosure of untouchable systems and the drone of an endlessly repeating present (16).
We live in a world, on the one hand, where every phenomenon is available for perusal as a "text," and on the other hand, a world in which, as Nietzsche warned it could, "the text finally disappeared under the interpretation" (49, emphasis in original).
There are, of course, pedestrian, mundane versions of the appearance/reality tension as reflected in such ready cliches as "There's more here than meets the eye" or "This isn't what it looks like," yet while these suspicions lie within the realm of the normal, there is an unmistakable defensiveness even in such mild protestations. Under normal circumstances, appearance demands presumption. One who claims that things are not as they appear to be assumes the burden of proof; a strong prima facie case is required before appearances need be seriously interrogated. Conspiracy argument exploits and reverses this normative presumption, making lack of evidence into evidence transmogrifying surfaces from their pedestrian status as the most visible outward manifestation of reality into veils and masks. The only thing separating conspiracy argument from prevailing explanation, according to Jamer Hunt, is the "ratio of visibility to plausibility" (25). Conspiracy argument reveals the significance of what seeks to pass beneath notice as insignificant. Brian Keeley suggests that "conspiracy theories are the only theories for which evidence against them is actually construed as evidence in favor of them" (120). Conspiracy arguments rely on, to appropriate James Baldwin's magical phrase, "evidence of things not seen." When the absence of evidence becomes evidence, narrative possibilities expand--what is seen is finite; what is unseen is infinite--limited only at those moments when confronted with the presence of intractable contrary evidence.
The exchange of evidence for non-evidence reverses figure-ground relationships and constitutes the critical moment in the creation of the maddeningly tautological logic of conspiracy argument. Another bit of childhood humor illustrates the point: How does an elephant hide in a strawberry patch? It paints its toenails pink. Have you ever seen an elephant in a strawberry patch? It works doesn't it? The argument is diabolically simple and apparently unanswerable. As Keeley notes, "there is nothing straight-forwardly analytic that allows us to distinguish between good and bad conspiracy theories" (126). In Skip Willman's more extended formulation: "the effort to debunk conspiracy theory and restore rationality to the public sphere, as opposed to the irrationality an/or pathology (political social, or psychological) of conspiracy theory, often relies on an equally ideological vision of historical causality" (21).
Certainly in light of recent events--the collapse of Enron and revelations of the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to "connect the dots," that is, to reveal the plot, prior to the attacks on the United States on September 11 to name but two of the most prominent--conspiracy argument cannot in itself serve to dismiss claims as paranoid or pathological. The lack of an analytic test may not be critical when talking about elephants in strawberry patches, but it becomes a serious deficit when we are asked to consider the fish hiding in our tomatoes through the miracle of genetic engineering, the chemical agents hiding in the bodies of veterans of the Persian Gulf War, the mercury hiding in our rain and the arsenic in our soil, the potential cancer risks associated with cellular transmission towers, the origins and effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the likely efficacy of a "Star Wars" missile defense system, the relative merits of evolution as a theory versus creationism as a theory, just to name a small sampling of the technical and scientific public policy issues facing us today, debates in which scientists divide into opposing camps over the presence and effects of agents that are, to the eye unaided by technology and training, largely invisible.
Increasingly, public disagreements among scientists over scientific problems with broad public significance--problems that often postulate invisible agents, requiring the public to accept explanations that are non-obvious, even counter--intuitive increasingly such disagreements make arguments based on science and technology particularly susceptible to conspiratorial interpretation. And as scientific and technological arguments continue to eclipse the personal and public spheres (Dewey, Goodnight, Knight, "Introduction," 12), as paranoia, or at least a "hermeneutic of suspicion," achieves omnipresence in the world, it becomes ever more important to find a test, strictly analytic or not, by which opposing scientific arguments can be judged, preferably in the public sphere. "We need to have nonscientist participation in decision making about science's priorities;" writes Andrew Ross, "the concept of `science for the people' is more relevant and more remote than ever" (13). As part of the effort to restore public science, this essay looks to contemporary thinking on narrative as argument and considers, specifically, the possibilities in viewing scientific arguments as conspiracy narratives.
Science as a "Breathing Together"
The same bit of legerdemain whereby elephants hide themselves in strawberry patches, whereby the unseen demands our credulity while the obvious and visible is dismissed as, at best, insignificant, at worst, mendacious, has made the scientist a perennial figure of our suspicious scrutiny. According to Oscar Handlin:
[A] deep underlying distrust of science runs through the accepted attitudes of people in the most advanced nations. Paradoxically, the bubbling retorts, the sparkling wires and the mysterious dials are often regarded as the source of a grave threat. Their white-coated manipulators, in the popular image have ominously seized a power which they may use to injure mankind. (185)
Whom does Handlin evoke here if not Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Morbius, Dr. Moreau, Dr. Phibes, Dr. Frankenfurter, the mad scientist as conspiratorial party in league with nefarious forces, a caricature played out in countless science fiction and spy-thriller vehicles?
Beneath what we may view as the camp presentation of the mad scientist, the apprehension is real, and the regular arrangement of elements, the emergence of an archetypal character, suggests something about conspiracy arguments in a scientific age. Kenneth Burke writes of "the conditions of secrecy imposed on many experimental scientists" (Rhetoric of Motives, 35), and we witness a recent example of the violation of those conditions in the controversy over Wen Ho Lee and information he was alleged to have copied illegally in his Los Alamos laboratory. Even more recently, again at Los Alamos, there was the national concern over missing and then recovered computer hard drives and the nuclear secrets they contained. But imposed secrecy, for purposes of national security, the protection of trade secrets, or any other advantage, is mere appurtenance, a result of the conditions under which science may be done, not an intrinsic characteristic of science.
There is another kind of secrecy in science, however, that appears to be integral. Handlin notes that, from the earliest days of modern science, scientists "possessed and exercised a magic, the character and purposes of which were unknown to the uninitiated" (189). The term "magic" captures both the secrecy and the power dimensions of conspiracy and suggests the potential for reading science as conspiracy. Edmund Leach, thirty-five years ago, argued that scientists "are becoming a cohesive elite whose only common characteristic is the possession of secret knowledge and an unwillingness to communicate with others" (37). It would be difficult to argue that the subsequent years have proved him wrong. Andrew Ross, writing three decades after Leach, recognizes that "each of the stable sciences, and each of their specialty subfields, has its own domain of technical consensus, a closed circle of opinion that makes sense only in relation to the particular instruments and genres of data analysis enveloped for that field" (4). Though Leach goes on to deny that we must "go on from here to think of science as a kind of Frankenstein monster which must necessarily dominate all our lives" (37), the denial itself acknowledges the ripeness of conditions for a conspiratorial motive. In an atmosphere of suspicion, Diana Crane's "invisible colleges" assume an ominous aspect. What are they hiding anyway?
In the aftermath World War II, we got a glimpse of what was being hidden. The ominous purposes to which science had been put were revealed not only in the ghastly experiments...
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