The Paranoid and Psychotic Pedagogies of Conspiracy Theory: Locating the Political in the Sinthome of Conspiratorial Logics

Abstract

Agreeing with the spirit of these authors' aims, I wish to use the space of this chapter to both trace historical lines of inquiry into conspiracy theory and to introduce Lacan's conceptualizations of psychosis and the symptom as means of rethinking conspiracy as a psycho-cultural, rather than pathological, phenomenon. Constructing conspiratorial logics as a response to the loss of symbolic efficacy in the neoliberal moment, I create a vantage point from which to discuss how paranoia produces paradoxically hyperbolic and inert enactments of political agency and action, a symptomatic machination of perpetuity that internalizes conspiratorial readings of the social and in turn works to generate a vast paranoiac cartography. Extending my earlier writing on conspiracy, I read these lenses alongside of a conspiratorial text-one that was handed to me over 20 years ago in the form of a resume-as a means of theorizing the conspiratorial logics mobilized by both leftist (the classic panoply of JFK assassination theories, 9/11 truth movements, suspicions that responses to Hurricane Katrina were racially biased) and rightist (the birther movement (Obama birth certificate), suspicions of foul play in the death of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and now-President Trump's claims that Mexican officials intentionally traffic 'rapists' into the United States) ideologies, as well as instances of the conspiratorial within popular culture. My desire herein is to illustrate the conspiratorial mode as a transideological pedagogical process, one that simultaneously locates power as enmeshed in complex metaphysical webbing and consistently reduces that power to simplistic, Manichean dualities. Using this body of literature, I contend that the conspiratorial performance of political (in)action is itself a curriculum that has emerged within the paranoid-psychotic character of modern life, a way of simultaneously producing a system of meanings that reinstates the symbolic order/Law and (dis)engaging with any responsibility within this order by locating power as a fixed and distant entity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)