A conspiracy of science
| Autor: | James Darsey |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2002 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Western Journal of Communication. 66:469-491 |
| ISSN: | 1745-1027 1057-0314 |
| DOI: | 10.1080/10570310209374750 |
| Popis: | Conspiracy is as natural as breathing. And since the struggles for advantage nearly always have a rhetorical strain, we believe that the systematic contemplation of them forces itself on the student of rhetoric. --Kenneth Burke As I was walking up the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish he'd go away --Author unknown It is not the content of arguments predicated on conspiracy that makes them so unsettling but their form. There is nothing particularly horrific about a "man who wasn't there;" he is an absence, a blank space. What is disturbing in this bit of doggerel is its way of confounding the rules of everyday epistemology. How is it possible to meet someone who wasn't there? The question suggests either insanity or the supernatural; it is the moment identified by Tzvetan Todorov as the essence of the fantastic--the hesitation between belief and rejection, a moment suspended between the marvelous (the extraordinary but ultimately credible) and the uncanny (the bizarre and ultimately untrue) (passim). Contemporary thinking on conspiracy theory inclines toward the notion that Richard Hofstadter's mid-century, totalizing, stable, declarative, reassuringly complete, omnipotent conspiracies have been superceded by postmodern, fragmented, unstable, interrogatives, that provide more doubt, uncertainty, anxiety, even ironic detachment, than direction for resistance. In Kathleen Stewart's poetic description, contemporary conspiracy theory: lives in a world where the line between inside and outside, fantasy and reality, animal and human and machine does not hold. This is a world full of gaps and the urge to find the missing link. It hums with the possibility that the uncanny is real and it hunkers down in fearful but excited expectation. We're waiting for something to happen--a drama, an endpoint, something to break the enclosure of untouchable systems and the drone of an endlessly repeating present (16). We live in a world, on the one hand, where every phenomenon is available for perusal as a "text," and on the other hand, a world in which, as Nietzsche warned it could, "the text finally disappeared under the interpretation" (49, emphasis in original). There are, of course, pedestrian, mundane versions of the appearance/reality tension as reflected in such ready cliches as "There's more here than meets the eye" or "This isn't what it looks like," yet while these suspicions lie within the realm of the normal, there is an unmistakable defensiveness even in such mild protestations. Under normal circumstances, appearance demands presumption. One who claims that things are not as they appear to be assumes the burden of proof; a strong prima facie case is required before appearances need be seriously interrogated. Conspiracy argument exploits and reverses this normative presumption, making lack of evidence into evidence transmogrifying surfaces from their pedestrian status as the most visible outward manifestation of reality into veils and masks. The only thing separating conspiracy argument from prevailing explanation, according to Jamer Hunt, is the "ratio of visibility to plausibility" (25). Conspiracy argument reveals the significance of what seeks to pass beneath notice as insignificant. Brian Keeley suggests that "conspiracy theories are the only theories for which evidence against them is actually construed as evidence in favor of them" (120). Conspiracy arguments rely on, to appropriate James Baldwin's magical phrase, "evidence of things not seen." When the absence of evidence becomes evidence, narrative possibilities expand--what is seen is finite; what is unseen is infinite--limited only at those moments when confronted with the presence of intractable contrary evidence. The exchange of evidence for non-evidence reverses figure-ground relationships and constitutes the critical moment in the creation of the maddeningly tautological logic of conspiracy argument. … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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