In “The Paranoid Style of American Politics” (1964), Richard Hofstadter argued that American political culture has been characterized by persistent conspiracy thinking, from anti-Masonic movements in the 1820s to the rise of the John Birch Society in the 1960s. Fredric Jameson reframed Hofstadter’s argument in his classic 1983 talk on cognitive mapping—ultimately collected in The Geopolitical Aesthetic in 1994—suggesting that conspiracy offered a “poor person’s cognitive mapping” of the totalizing networks of late capitalism. More than forty years later, conspiracism has mutated and spread. The simultaneous fragmentation and individualization of media consumption, and increased concentration/consolidation of media industry ownership, make fertile ground for the elaboration of paranoid cultural styles. Phenomena like Q*Anon, anti-vax activism, flat earth YouTubers, dead internet theory, or worries about the “great replacement,” suggest that paranoia and conspiracy have become ordinary and ubiquitous. Contemporary conspiracism is often reactionary, with fears ranging from feminists, immigrants, and queer and trans people, to public schooling and government agencies. Yet its generalization partakes of a broader anger and wariness directed at institutions of contemporary political and economic life–institutions whose failures weigh upon people looking for ways of understanding the immiserated conditions of their lives, and finding in conspiracism a ready (already pervasive) conceptual armature. 

This seminar invites participants working on the history and contemporaneity of conspiracist thought. Papers will theorize conspiracism, paranoia, and suspicion as historically-situated and evolving epistemological forms that are culturally resonant and politically flexible. 

Topics might include: 

• the relation between conspiracy, rumors, gossip, and paranoia
• the anxiety of “agency”
• the “shadow” state / the deep state 
• conspiratorial reading / interpretive practices 
• genres of conspiracy (fantasy, dystopia, political thriller, etc)
• conspiracy as a narrative structure 
• theories of techno-feudalism (and/as conspiracy)
• anti-feminism
• conspiracy and whiteness 
• limitations of liberal anti-conspiracism
• pathological accounts of conspiracy 
• conspiracy and abstraction 

Organizers: Sarah Brouillette, Lee Konstantinou, Madeline Lane-McKinley