A critical conceptualization of conspiracy theory
2023; Wiley; Volume: 31; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1467-8675.12683
ISSN1467-8675
Autores Tópico(s)Social Media and Politics
ResumoConspiracy theory has lately come under greater scrutiny in countries around the world, with several conspiracy theories having gained infamy for encouraging dangerous behaviors and attitudes among their followers: QAnon in the United States (see Coaston, 2020); claims that COVID-19 was brought to China by Americans (see Chunshan, 2020); and the broader international anti-vaccination movement (see DiRusso & Stansberry, 2022; Sturm & Albrecht, 2021), to name just a few of the most prominent. These and other conspiracy theories have contributed to undermining trust in political institutions and have even played a role in motivating political violence, as exemplified by events such as Donald Trump's claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election and the subsequent Capitol Building riot of January 6, 2021 (see Argentino, 2021; Bessner & Frost, 2021); the arrest in late 2022 of members of the Reichsbürger movement, a monarchist group associated with Holocaust revisionism and anti-Semitic conspiracism more broadly, for their involvement in a plan to overthrow the Federal Republic in Germany (see Burchett, 2022; Hill, 2022); and the storming of the Brazilian Congress by supporters of the former president Jair Bolsonaro, on the pretext that his 2022 election defeat was also fraudulent (see Nicas, 2023). Despite the plainly political aspects of such conspiracy theories—both in terms of the content of their claims and their implications—when conspiracy theory is conceptualized or defined, politics has too often been overlooked. Conspiracy theory has often been conceptualized primarily through the lens of epistemology, seen as a particular sort of truth claim, though precise definitions and assessments of this type of claim vary (e.g., see Buenting & Taylor, 2010; Cassam, 2019; Clarke, 2002; Coady, 2007; Dentith, 2018; Keeley, 1999; Pigden, 2007; Sunstein & Vermeule, 2009). This epistemological framing is not constrained to philosophical discussions on conspiracy theory, being also present in research by political scientists on conspiracy theory. For example, in their study of how governments could respond to conspiracy theories, Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule (2009) argue that belief in harmful and false conspiracy theories is the product of what they term as a "crippled epistemology." Similarly, while their broader argument is that conspiracy theories are more likely to be endorsed by political losers, Uscinski and Parent (2014, Chapter 2) also conceptualize conspiracy theory chiefly through the lens of epistemology; the political aspects of conspiracy theory are largely omitted from their conceptualization, and instead they focus on the standards that could be used to judge the likely truth or falsity of a conspiracy theory, such as Occam's Razor and falsifiability. The question of truth is certainly a very important aspect of conspiracy theorizing, as any conspiracy theory will try to persuade us that things are one way and not another. However, the role of persuasion here has been largely overlooked. A conspiracy theory will indeed make truth claims, but those claims are not made in a vacuum; they are articulated in a particular context and are influenced by factors such as the identity of the conspiracy theorist's audience, the medium through which they are communicating, and the political moment in which they are expressed. In this way, rhetoric and politics are of key importance, and yet have been largely excluded from definitions and conceptualizations of conspiracy theory. My primary argument in this article is that we should adjust how we think about the very idea of conspiracy theory. Rather than just taking the term as referring to a particular type of truth claim—one that posits the existence of a conspiracy—we should also see politics and rhetoric as necessary parts of the concept of conspiracy theory. Therefore, instead of viewing only conspiracy theories through the lens of truth and falsity, or rationality and irrationality, we should also ask about what a conspiracy theory is doing in a political sense; what are the political ideas and assumptions it is expressing? What are the identities it is constructing? To whom is it being addressed, and in what context? By focusing more on such rhetorical and political questions, the conceptualization I outline here encourages us to take conspiracy theories themselves as our objects of study, and to examine the political content of their claims, how they are articulated, and how they seek to persuade. The conceptualization I develop in this article draws on a combination of Adorno's (2007, 2008) negative dialectics as well Billig (1991) and Finlayson's (2004, 2007, 2012) writing on rhetoric and political thinking. I refer to this as a "critical conceptualization," as, in the spirit of critical theory, it seeks to think "against the flow of the (reified) world" by neither taking the concept for granted nor treating it as natural, instead examining its social constitution and place in social life (Best et al., 2018). This critical conceptualization builds on invaluable research by historians and cultural studies researchers, which has helped to trace the development of conspiracy theory from a legitimate to an illegitimate form of knowledge (e.g., see Bratich, 2008; Butter, 2014, 2020, 2021; Fenster, 2008; McKenzie-McHarg, 2020; Thalmann, 2019). In approaching the task of conceptualization, I am also interested in how the concept of conspiracy theory influences the practice of conspiracy theorizing. As many scholars have already noted, the term conspiracy theory as we encounter it today comes with a set of pejorative connotations (e.g., see Bratich, 2008; Thalmann, 2019; Uscinski & Parent, 2014). Besides referring to particular entities and activities (conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorizing), then, the concept itself has developed a social significance of its own. As Uscinki and Parent note, "To label a theory as a conspiracy theory or someone a conspiracy theorist may place him or her on uneven terrain" (2014). Via an overview of its changing meaning and significance, I argue that conspiracy theory as a concept contains a tension—if not an exact contradiction—between two ways in which it has been used: On the one hand, conspiracy theory has been used to denote a particular type of explanation that posits a conspiracy as the cause of something; on the other hand, it is used to mark out this type of explanation as illegitimate, assuming it to be unwarranted, irrational, or false. While the former aspect is neutral and descriptive and does not judge the truth or falsity of specific claims made in a conspiracy theory, the latter aspect is pejorative and assumes such claims should be treated with suspicion. The tension between the descriptive and pejorative meanings of conspiracy theory produces a dilemma of a rhetorical kind. For the person whose utterance is at risk of being labeled as a conspiracy theory, the question is how best to respond to the likely marginalization as a speaker. For the speaker, then, the question is how best to persuade an audience and improve the chances of a conspiracy theory being treated as the exception to the general rule of suspicion and stigmatization. While this dilemma affects conspiracy theories generally, a speaker or author's response to it will vary from one case to the next. As Finlayson explains, attempts at being persuasive "can be grasped only as strategic and contextual rather than as abstract and generalizable" (2004). How a conspiracy theory is articulated, and what is said and left unsaid, will vary depending on the specific context. In some cases, a speaker may refrain from expressing their claim for fear of stigmatization and delegitimization. In other cases, a strategy of preemption may be used, whereby the speaker anticipates the dismissal of their claim and tries to head it off early on, as we see in phrases such as "I am not a conspiracy theorist, but…" (McKenzie-McHarg & Fredheim, 2017). Alternatively, a speaker may even turn the stigma to their advantage, using their delegitimization as proof that they must be on to something, as the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been able to do (Thalmann, 2019). Therefore, our analyses of conspiracy theories must be grounded in the particular context of each one. As such, the critical conceptualization I develop here does not offer a one-size-fits-all approach to studying conspiracism, but instead encourages us to pay greater attention to the specific context and content of a conspiracy theory, without losing sight of the general concept.1 Now for some preemption of my own, and a brief word on what I am not trying to achieve. To avoid confusion, I should stress that my argument is not assessing the epistemic or conceptual value of conspiracy theory. I am not arguing that any particular conspiracy theory should be rescued from the stigma, nor that the broader category is undeserving of its pejorative status. Moreover, this is not an argument about how to determine whether any conspiracy theory might be true. Rather, my focus here is on developing a stronger basis for analyzing conspiracy theories from a political theoretical perspective. I am not the first to push for greater attention to be paid to the political content of conspiracy theories. In his influential book, Conspiracy Theories, Fenster (2008) emphasizes the political aspects of conspiracy theory, arguing that "conspiracy theory has always been a significant element of American political rhetoric," and sees it as closely linked to populism. For him, both populism and conspiracy theory posit an opposition between "the people" and a shadowy elite (Fenster, 2008). In an article on conspiracy theories during the Algerian Civil War, Silverstein (2002) argues that conspiracy theorizing contributed to the construction of a common political culture for Algerians, amid a climate of censorship and strict control of the national media. Similarly, Iqtidar (2016) argues that we should pay greater attention to the content of specific conspiracy theories, their historical context, and their role in political change. Focusing on conspiracy theories from Pakistan about the Blackwater private military firm, she takes these to be political imaginaries that hold potential for collective change, serving as possible strategies for calling for greater accountability of such companies in the areas where they operate. The argument I outline in this article seeks to complement these earlier pieces on the politics of conspiracism, rather than contradicting them. As with these earlier authors, the critical conceptualization of conspiracy theory encourages us to focus on what conspiracy theories are saying about politics, and how they are saying it. This will involve studying the discursive construction of political identities and narratives, as exemplified in the populism Fenster detects in conspiracy theory. However, it will not presume all conspiracy theories to be articulating a uniformly populist political vision—while there is a clear structural affinity between conspiracy theory and populism, we should avoid with conflating populism and other related beliefs, such as authoritarianism and ethnonationalism (Bonikowski, 2017). The argument I will make here also encourages us to pay far greater attention to conspiracy theory's conceptuality, recognizing that the concept itself occupies the same reality as the phenomenon it describes and influences the articulation of conspiracy theories. This article begins by outlining my approach to conceptualization, starting by describing the solely epistemological conceptualizations to which I am opposed. In this section, I also highlight the relevance to my approach of Adorno's negative dialectics as well as Billig and Finlayson's work on rhetoric and political thinking. The next section examines the history of conspiracy theory as a concept, drawing on previous research showing its development from a neutral term in the 19th century to a pejorative term in the mid-20th century. I show that this change in meaning brings about a tension within the concept between its neutral descriptive aspect and its pejorative aspect. While this tension can be overcome from a philosophical perspective, in the final section I argue that it causes a dilemma that the conspiracy theorist can only overcome through rhetoric; the conspiracy theorist faces the challenge of persuading an audience while starting from a position of marginalization and stigmatization. As stated above, my aim is to outline a new conceptualization of conspiracy theory that emphasizes its political and rhetorical aspects. The conceptualization I develop here contrasts with previous attempts that view the concept of conspiracy theory solely in terms of epistemology, while also overlooking the context in which the concept has been situated. The form of conceptualization I have in mind is about more than briefly defining the term "conspiracy theory," and involves thinking not just about conspiracy theories themselves, but also about how the concept is used in discourse. Before outlining my own position, it is worth saying more about the sorts of approaches to conceptualization that I see as inadequate. These are approaches that see conspiracy theory chiefly in terms of epistemology—as ways of gaining knowledge, detached from social context. For example, an early study by the political psychologist Goertzel (1994) on conspiracy theory belief omits even a basic definition of conspiracy theory, assuming that the term's meaning and the irrationality of conspiracy theorizing are already self-evident to the reader. It becomes clear that, whatever he understands by the term, he takes conspiracy theory belief to be problematic when they are part of a monological belief system, which are impervious to evidence and "speak only to themselves, ignoring their context in all but the shallowest respects" (Goertzel, 1994). While he takes these conspiracy theories as symptomatic of deeper social problems such as alienation and disaffection, they are seen as being problematic in themselves for epistemological reasons: "The key issue [with monological conspiratorial beliefs] is not the belief in a specific conspiracy, but the logical processes which led to that belief" (Goertzel, 1994). These conspiracy theories are therefore a problem because they are an inadequate way of knowing the truth. In some domains, people suffer from a "crippled epistemology," in the sense that they know very few things, and what they know is wrong. Many extremists fall in this category; their extremism stems not from irrationality, but from the fact that they have little (relevant) information, and their extremist views are supported by what little they know. As with Goertzel's study, conspiracy theory is taken to be an epistemological concept, with problematic conspiracy theories being specifically those that involve faulty ways of gaining knowledge; those which stop us from understanding the truth of a situation or event. The problem I see with this way of conceptualizing conspiracy theory is not that epistemology has no role to play here—clearly it does, as conspiracy theories always involve the expression of truth claims (a conspiracy theory must at least be claiming something). Rather, the problem I find is that in framing the concept of conspiracy theory only through the lens of epistemology, we strip the concept of key contextual factors, and overlook the centrality of politics in conspiracy theorizing. Some conspiracy theories are sensible and some are silly, but if they are silly this is not because they are conspiracy theories but because they suffer from some specific defect—for instance, that the conspiracies they postulate are impossible or far-fetched. A similar argument has been advanced by Coady (2018) who has argued that we should avoid using the term conspiracy theory as its pejorative connotations dissuade us from investigating the occurrence of real conspiracy theories. For the purposes of this article, the merits or faults in Pigden or Coady's arguments are not relevant; I am not making an argument about whether some conspiracy theories are worth considering as potentially true. Rather, my focus is on developing a conceptualization that can ground the analysis of actual cases of conspiracy theories as we encounter them in society. From my perspective, then, the key flaw in their arguments is the erasure of the pejorative connotations of the concept of conspiracy theory, as it strips the concept of a key contextual factor—what we could describe as the social significance of the concept. Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with Pigden and Coady's arguments, we should recognize that the pejorative connotations of the concept should not be written out of the picture when our concern is with analyzing conspiracy theories as part of society and politics. The articulation of conspiracy theories, including what their creators choose to say, and how they say it, will not occur in isolation from social context; it thus seems to me that something vitally important is left out by adopting the neutral conceptualizations advocated for by Pigden and Coady. In their accounts of what conspiracy theories are, society is largely absent, and conspiracy theories are treated chiefly as only a philosophical puzzle that needs solving. Cassam (2019) adopts the reverse position to the likes of Pigden and Coady, arguing that conspiracy theories generally should be rejected as they are "unlikely to be true" and "implausible by design" as they offer only speculative explanations without solid evidence. He adjusts for the existence of actual conspiracies with the assertion that if a conspiracy claim is proven true then it is actually a "conspiracy fact" (Cassam, 2019). Once again, conspiracy theory is understood as referring to something epistemological, though on this occasion it refers to an epistemological fault. Cassam's view goes a step in the right direction by correctly recognizing that conspiracy theories are "a form of political propaganda and that the response to them also needs to be political" (2019). However, his argument against conspiracy theories is at its root chiefly concerned with the reasons against believing in them, and so treats conspiracy theory as a mainly epistemological matter, while an analysis of how different conspiracy theorists propagandize and seek to persuade is not given. In this way, a conspiracy theory is not seen as a piece of communication between a speaker or an author and audience, nor as articulated in a particular context, but rather as a truth claim that simply appears fully formed to the audience. Ultimately, then, Cassam's account of conspiracy theory is also of little use to us in analyzing particular conspiracy theories, as the most it can tell us about a case is that it is unlikely to be true and so should not be believed. Something important about conspiracy theory is missing from the conceptualizations I have been describing so far, namely the social context in which conspiracy theorizing occurs and its political aspect. The truth claims made in a conspiracy theory are neither formulated nor communicated in a vacuum—they do not present themselves in such a neat and tidy way. A more productive starting point for conceptualization would be to follow Billig's observation that by expressing a belief, an individual does not only convey something personal to themselves, but also positions themselves in relation to other beliefs within a broader public argument: "Our beliefs and our attitudes do not merely occur in our heads, but they too belong to wider social contexts of controversy" (Billig, 1991). For example, consider the conspiracy theories that appeared in the wake of the 2010 Smolensk air disaster, in which a plane carrying Polish president Lech Kaczyński crashed due to human error and poor visibility, killing Kaczyński and 95 others (see The Guardian, 2011). When a person expresses a belief in a conspiratorial version of this event, such as claiming that the crash was the result of a plot by Vladimir Putin and Donald Tusk, they position themselves in opposition to the nonconspiratorial accounts of the crash and distrust the state's ability to accurately report on the matter. Moreover, this opposition has broader political consequences, with conspiracy theories about the disaster having contributed to a broader polarization of Polish society (Bilewicz et al., 2019). As Tworzecki suggests, the Law and Justice party, led by Kaczyński's twin brother, Jarosław, has adopted the conspiracy theory as "dogma" and has sought to "sow mistrust by normalizing conspiracy theories" (2019). In this way, there is far more going on here than just the positing of a conspiracy's existence. The conspiracy theory is part of particular argumentative and political contexts, and has taken on a political function, being used for the maintenance of power and the articulation of political divisions. Without recognizing the importance of politics to conspiracy theorizing, we risk stymieing our analysis of particulars cases, narrowly interpreting them as attempts at reaching the truth at a remove from social context, overlooking their efforts at constructing political narrative and identities, as well as articulating political beliefs and assumptions. Therefore, the approach to conceptualization I use in this article is about more than briefly defining the term "conspiracy theory" as a certain (faulty) way of gaining knowledge. What I mean by conceptualization involves thinking not just about conspiracy theories and their features, but also about broader contextual factors affecting the concept, including the historical development of the concept and place it occupies in a particular social context—specifically, recognizing how the practice conspiracy theorizing has been impacted by the pejorative connotations Pigden and Coady sought to do away with. This is a difficult and perhaps convoluted task, but one that I believe to be necessary. To start with, approaching conceptualization in this way means that we gain a better understanding of what our object of study is—of what we are intending to analyze, in this case conspiracy theories. Put simply, if we want to learn more about conspiracy theories, it would help to know what one is. Of course, there are shades of grey and areas of crossover with other similar kinds of discourse, such as with forms of millennialism and spirituality (Asprem & Dyrendal, 2015; Barkun, 2013; Ward & Voas, 2011), but despite these opaque boundaries we are still referring to something when we talk about conspiracy theories. Conceptuality has to do with the recognition of reality—not with the analysis of concepts. Concepts are required to render reality intelligible, to grasp and comprehend the reified relations and to understand the power of compulsion that issues from them. Conceptualization goes beyond the immediate perception of reality in order to comprehend what is hidden in its immediacy or immediate appearance. What is appearance an appearance of, and what appears in appearance? Therefore, if our concern is with studying conspiracy theory as a social phenomenon, as a practice or type of utterance that has impacts on politics and society, then we need to consider its concept within its particular social and historical contexts, and determine what appears in the concept. Rather than taking the concept as static and unchanging, we need to examine how it came about and developed over time. The challenge is not to subsume such performances [of political thinking] within the philosophy of which we think they are expressions but to disclose or make visible the philosophy they bring forth and dramatise. It is not enough to categorize the expression of political ideas, saying which philosophy they belong to. This assumes the identity of the concept and its nonconceptual referent, failing to see the dialectical relationship between the two (Adorno, 2007). No concept will be able to exhaust its referent, and not every aspect of a conspiracy theory can be captured in a single definition. Our conceptualization should therefore seek to understand this dialectical relationship over time, and so recognize that the concept of conspiracy theory could change again in the future and that its meaning may vary between different societies. Having argued against treating the concept of conspiracy along line solely epistemological lines and detached from context, and having proposed an approach based on Adorno's negative dialectics and Finlayson's account of political ideas, I now begin to construct my own conceptualization, starting with the historical and social context in which the concept of conspiracy theory has developed. Drawing in particular on invaluable research by McKenzie-McHarg (2018 ,2020 ), Thalmann (2019), and Wood (1982), I describe how conspiracy theory as a concept has developed and changed over time, paying particular attention to its stigmatization since the mid-20th century. Conspiracies have long been a feature of human history, but as we will see, the way we think about them has changed over time. As McKenzie-McHarg has shown, the term "conspiracy theory" has its origins in the print journalism of the 1860s and 1870s, where it was used to explain particular crimes rather than broad, all-encompassing plots, and did not carry the pejorative connotations it does today, which only came about in the mid-20th century (McKenzie-McHarg,2018 , 2020 ). McKenzie-McHarg emphasizes that the term came about in the context of "scientization," a process by which scientific principles and methods were brought into nonscientific parts of society. For example, as the authority of science grew at the expense of religion, the field of journalism increasingly aspired to the principle of objectivity by introducing scientific standards and vocabulary into reporting. As McKenzie-McHarg himself notes, "by the 1880s readers of a newspaper found themselves often encountering notions of evidence, proof, refutation, fact, and–most significantly for present purposes—theory" (2018, emphasis in original). He observes that "theory" has an ambiguous quality to it, as it sometimes appears to be the goal of an investigation to build an accurate theory of an event, while at other times "theory" suggests a speculative account whose truth is yet to be determined (McKenzie-McHarg, 2018). Journalists aspiring to objectivity may not necessarily have engaged in speculation themselves, but they did report on the speculative theories and opinions of other people. McKenzie-McHarg gives the example of a newspaper article on the discovery of a set of bones, which reports that someone had devised a "murder theory," speculating that they had belonged to a murdered human—they were ultimately found to be animal bones (McKenzie-McHarg, 2018). In this case, "theory" lends an air of scientific rigor to what may have been mere speculation by a bystander. Besides "murder theory," terms such as "suicide theory," "blackmail theory," "abduction theory," and "conspiracy theory" also began to appear in newspapers during the latter half of the 19th century (McKenzie-McHarg, 2018). "Conspiracy theory" thus appears as just one of many ways of explaining a crime. At this time the term was not a generic concept and had to be "generated each time anew by the specific needs of each specific case" (McKenzie-McHarg, 2020). Put differently, there was no talk of conspiracy theories in an abstract or general sense, nor did the term denote a class of speculative explanations. Instead, "conspiracy theory" was always tied to a particular incident and lacked the pejorative connotations we find in it today. This should not be construed as meaning that no conspiracy theories existed prior to the creation of the term; as Thalmann (2019) shows, the creation of this label has certainly impacted on the beliefs and texts it refers to, but did not create them out of nothing. Popper is often cited as the first scholar to have offered a critique of conspiracy theorizing (see deHaven-Smith, 2013; McKenzie-McHarg, 2020; Pigden, 1995; Thalmann, 2019). In his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, originally published in 1945, Popper describes what he terms the "conspiracy theory of society" as part of his critique of historicism (Popper, 1963). This is the view that social phenomena can be explained by identifying the people who have caused them to happen, or who have an interest in their occurrence. According to this view, everything happens according to someone's design, whether they be "the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists" (Popper, 1963). Popper dismisses this as an irrational way of understanding society, seeing it as a hangover from a time when religious superstition held sway. The sheer number of individuals acting to achieve their own ends (often in contradiction to those of others around them) means that society cannot be explained by uncovering conspiracies—things are just far too complicated to warrant such an explanation. No matter how much we may plan to achieve certain goals, things rarely run so smoothly in the real world, and human interaction will result in unintended consequences that cannot be foreseen. Popper's notion of the conspiracy theory of society indicates a move toward a general concept of conspiracy theory. "Conspiracy theory" is still tied to an object requiring explanation, but that object is no longer a crime like those in the newspapers of the 19th century. Nor does it refer to one particular explanation but is used to classify a category of explanations. Thus, Popper contributes to a shift toward a new use for "conspiracy theory," classifying
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