Conspiracy culture: American paranoia from the Kennedy assassination to The X-files

301 Pages·2001·68.458 MB·English

by  Knight, Peter

CONSPIRACY CULTURE
Conspiracy theories are everywhere in postwar American culture. From
postmodern novels to The X-Files, and from gangsta rap to feminist
polemic, there is a widespread suspicion that sinister forces are conspiring
to take control of our national destiny, our minds, and even our bodies.
Conspiracy explanations can no longer be dismissed as the paranoid delu
sions of far-right crackpots. Indeed, they have become a necessary
response to a risky and increasingly globalized world, in which everything
is connected but nothing adds up.
Through an engaging and cogent analysis of books such as Betty Frie
dan's The Feminine Mystique, Don DeLillo's Underworld, movies such as
Oliver Stone's JFK, the internet, and other forms of popular culture,
Peter Knight explores how conspiracy culture has developed, from the
1960's countercultural suspicions about the authorities to the 1990s, where
a paranoid attitude is both routine and ironic. Conspirary Culture analyses
conspiracy narratives about familiar topics like the Kennedy assassination,
alien abduction, body horror, AIDS, crack cocaine, the New World
Order, as well as more unusual ones like the conspiracies of patriachy and
white supremacy.
Conspirary Culture shows how Americans have come to distrust not only
the narratives of the authorities, but even the authority of narrative itself
to explain What Is Really Going On. From the complexities of Thomas
Pynchon's novels to the endless mysteries of The X-Files, Knight argues
that contempory conspiracy culture is marked by an infinite regress of sus
picion. Trust no one, because we have met the enemy and it is us.
Peter Knight is Lecturer in American Studies at the University of
Manchester.

CONSPIRACY CULTURE
From the K. . ennedy Assassination to The X-Files
Peter Knight
London and New York
First published 2000
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, axon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the T '!)Ilor & Francis Group
Transferred to Digital Printing 2007
© 2000 Peter Knight
Typeset in Garamond by Steven Gardiner Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-415-18977-2 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-18978-0 (pbk)
Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this
reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original
may be apparent
CONTENTS
List of figures vii
Preface ix
Introduction: ConspiracyI Theory 1
1 Conspiracy IC ulture 23
2 Plotting the Kennedy Assassination 76
3 The Problem with No Name: Feminism and the Figuration
of Conspiracy 117
4 Fear of a Black Planet: "Black Paranoia" and the Aesthetics
of Conspiracy 143
5 Body Panic 168
6 Everything is Connected 204
Afterword 242
Notes 245
Index 283
v

FIGURES
1.1 Gateway to the "dark side": www.disinfo.com 56
2.1 The many different images of Lee Harvey Oswald 92
3.1 "I'll just die if I don't get that recipe." Still from 126
The Stepford Wives
5.1 Still from The X-Files 172
5.2 Still from Outbreak 192
vii

PREFACE
Branch sits in his glove-leather chair looking at the paper hills
around him. Paper is beginning to slide out of the room and
across the doorway to the house proper. The floor is covered
with books and papers. The closet is stuffed with material he
has yet to read. He has to wedge new books into the shelves,
force them in, insert them sideways, squeeze everything,
keep everything. There is nothing in the room he can
discard as irrelevant or out of date. It all matters on one level
or another. This is the room of lonely facts. The stuff keeps
coming.
(Don DeLillo, Libra)
Like the culture of conspiracy theory this book discusses, it has seemed at
times that my investigations had entered an infinite regress of speculation
and explanation, note-taking and revision. There is alwt!Ys one more clue
to chase, one more theory to pursue, one more connection to make--not
least when dealing with contemporary research materials. I first began
thinking about conspiracy before The X-Files had aired. At first the tele
vision show seemed to have been deliberately planted for me as a clue that
I had tapped into something significant (not, of course, that I would enter
tain such a paranoid suspicion). At times, however, trying to keep track of
the endlessly proliferating plot lines of The X-Files and other recent
cultural texts has produced a sense of vertigo, as I entered what (in connec
tion with the operations of the CIA) has been described as a wilderness of
mirrors. In the end I had to imagine a coherent totality behind the unfin
ished culture that was (and still is) unfolding as I was writing. There was
always one more X-Files episode to watch; likewise, Thomas Pynchon and
Don DeLillo both published enormous new novels after I thought I had
finished with those sections. That sensation of vertigo, of both fearing
and desiring a sense of coherence beneath the incomplete fragments, is not
so far from the conspiracy culture this book describes.
IX