Conspiracy theory as a label

Conspiracy theory is a label with a set of coordinates, a denotation with stigmatized and stigmatizing presence. It’s something one does something with as much as believes. In current media parlance, it’s taken as axiomatic to touch conspiracy theory only in a hazmat suit, lest one be accused of being “one of them”, the subaltern class waiting outside the “public forum” run by the liberal elites. I want to consider a few different definitions of conspiracy theory that will illuminate these denotative edges.

First, that given by Hoon Song in his Pigeon Trouble, an ethnography of the annual pigeon sacrifice carnival in the depths of Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal country. Conspiracy theory is:

relationally situated engagement actualized by projective identification and mimesis born of a communicative ideal” (p. 121).

This definition is loaded and instructive. First, it does away with the normative conceptualization of conspiracy theory as an ‘epistemological claim without affect’ by identifying it with a practice of speech provocation–its utterance initiates a duel.

Yet I stumble on the use of “projective identification,” a term first uttered by the child psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein, and widely discussed by her followers. It remains a commonly used (and misused) term in contemporary psychoanalytic parlance. It’s worth gazing at the clinical context whence this term emerges since so much of Song’s work hinges on the capacity of the conspiracy theorist to identify with what it hates or loves or suspects.

Klein argues that the child develops a hatred of parts of itself, but this hate is directed against the mother. This affect is an identification because the child’s hate has been projected onto an object (mother). Klein refers to this “projective identification” as a “prototype of an aggressive object-relation”.¹ The psychoanalyst T.H. Ogden refers to the concept as “the ridding of the self of unwanted aspects of the self; the depositing of those unwanted parts into another person; and finally with the recovery of a modified version of what was extruded”²

It’s perhaps uncharitable to bring in the clinical context so strictly, yet it is worth asking, who or what is the recipient of the projection of unwanted parts? Within the therapeutic alliance, there is an interaction between the projector and the recipient. If we’re talking about how a satanic cabal of liberal elites drinks the blood of kidnapped children, for example, then are all the “bad parts” therein coming from all who believe in the conspiracy theory? This signals one of the faults of so freely adapting clinical terms to the study of discursive formations.

And if we pursued a rather mechanical use of the concept of projective identification that uses Song’s definition alongside Ogden’s, then we wind up with something like: conspiracy theorist projects the unwanted “bad” parts onto a vision of what evil looks like out there in the world. Projective identification is a fantasy of removal, a re-channelling of self-hatred into an object relation. Let’s say that works as an attribution of an original conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theorist zero imputes to the satanic-cabal-illuminati-etc not just god-like powers of control and access but also the most devilish vices. Fine. But does the projective identification apply to those who also believe? Are the fantasies of unwanted parts of themselves now aligned in some kind of super-unconscious? Bonkers.

Song describes an encounter with a conspiracy theorist who identifies with him. Song resents the academic “mimicry” of the amateur theorist:

It is guilt-inspiring to step into a persona whose status authority your interlocutor simultaneously courts, covets, despises, and dismisses. In the face of such a miming, you feel yourself splitting from yourself, becoming an Other to yourself, shall we say, feeling not only supplemented but also supplanted (p. 120).

And yet, this resentment of the wild, subaltern idea-spelunker whom the academic meets at a conference is the type of scenario of encounter that haunts the notion of “conspiracy theory” itself. Indeed, there is a fear here, as in numerous academic encounters with conspiracy theory believers that they’re dealing with a particularly noxious and dangerous form of thinking.

I do think this bit is marvelous:

[T]he paranoid critique can never take a linguistic sign at its face value, a mere messenger. Every sign is presumed to be an instrument of deception. Even a truthful statement […] is taken to be a double deception that has already taken into account the hearer’s suspicion.”
Song, Pigeon Trouble, p. 121.

So we return to the heart of the matter, the status of the paranoiac, with their apophenia, their confusion of cause and effect, the heavy pressure of historical determinism, an odium fati, or perhaps the projective bad parts onto the screen of the external global elites. And yet it is not “critique” since its excessive semiosis spills over any boundary conditions–life is untrammeled by this-wild-thing-being-nevertheless-true. We are in the realm of myth and therefore untethered by “critique” and its values of function and efficiency.

Indeed, what we are speaking about when we speak about “conspiracy theory” is something proximal to the etymology of “theory” (from Greek theōria “contemplation, speculation; a looking at, viewing; a sight, show, spectacle, things looked at”³. The conspiracy theorist postulates a spectacle, a show, a sight to behold. It’s a carnival. We are the ones who want this to be more than a knee-jerk affect to a culture of defeat, or a big and loud “fuck you” to the establishment epistemology.

To know is to be stigmatized for knowing what has already been stigmatized. This conspiracy discourse is a pollution, a poison, a word virus, it bucks and punches under the charge of liberal communicative transparency, and even the very notion of “dialogue”.

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