We, the Sheeple: Making Sense of Conspiracy Theory in the Context of Neoliberalism

I have long taken for granted Fredric Jameson's dictum that conspiracy theory constitutes the "poor person's cognitive mapping in the postmodern age," a "degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter's system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content" (Jameson 1988, 356). This thesis is in keeping with his equally famous exhortation to "always historicize" (Jameson 1981, ix); it also "opens up," for Peter Knight in Conspiracy Culture, "the possibility of a materialist analysis of why people turn to conspiratorial explanations…in the era of globalization" (Knight 2000, 20). Yet, Knight cautions, the account threatens to become "too powerful" in its attribution of an entire "culture of paranoia" to a collective inability to "map" the transnational hyperspace of late capital: "[Jameson's] faith in a monolithic and ultimately determined totality itself has strong conspiratorial overtones," he observes (20).

It may be out of a desire to avoid such totalizing paradigms that Michael Butter, in The Nature of Conspiracy Theories, shies away from advancing a systemic explanation for the apparent pervasiveness of conspiracy theories in contemporary Western culture. But the parallels between conspiracist discourses—which remain by and large "delegitimized," as Butter argues they have been since the mid-twentieth century—and scholarly ones, which seek more nuanced, yet often still totalizing, explanations for the otherwise bewildering array of political and cultural phenomena that constitutes the condition of postmodernity, continues to haunt the text. And if there is such a thing as being too deterministic—as is arguably the case with Jameson's attribution of conspiracy theory, in the proverbial "last instance," to a "repressed understanding of economics" (Knight 2000, 20), then it is equally possible to be not deterministic enough, and the implication in Butter's very title that conspiracy theories have a "nature" verges on surrendering to the idea that unorthodox accounts of historical phenomena are simply a fact of social life. Further, without a systemic account of their provenance and persistence, it becomes that much more challenging to identify sustainable solutions. But this in itself may raise—as Butter's book does, whether or not by design—broader questions about the function and purpose of humanistic scholarship than either this essay, or the book, can ultimately answer.

To be clear, Butter does not go so far as to suggest that conspiracy theories are universal and inevitable: though he does raise evidence of conspiracist thought as far back as antiquity (Butter 2020, 94), he also insists that certain historical conditions have been more conducive to conspiracism than others, among them specific assumptions about subjectivity, agency, causality and temporality; the existence of a "public sphere" in which conspiracist thinking could circulate in some form; and a related media infrastructure or set of "media conditions" that enables the latter (92). The book is also a corrective to Jameson's thesis insofar as it demonstrates that conspiracy theories are by no means unique to the era of "late capitalism" or postmodernism. To the contrary, Butter shows, conspiracist thinking not only predates "late capitalism" by a number of centuries, but until the postwar era, it was "regarded… as a perfectly legitimate form of knowledge," and it is thus above all the "status of conspiracy theories in public discourse that has changed most radically over time" (7; emphasis added). Claiming, perhaps debatably, that conspiracy theories are now "simultaneously legitimate and illegitimate knowledge" (8)—following their stigmatization in the wake of WWII and Richard Hofstadter's diagnosis of the "paranoid style" in American politics (5)—Butter identifies a "glaring disparity between the heat with which the topic is currently discussed and the knowledge informing the vast majority of such discussions" (4) and sets out to "provide a more accurate account of conspiracy theories" that explores their "underlying principles, functions, effects and history" as well as the "changing public spheres in which they circulate" (6). Presenting his work as "the end of the beginning of the study of conspiracy theories" (8) that erupted at the turn of the century—with...