Conspiracy Theories

This still doesn't explain if or why conspiracy theories are a predominately American art form. 

From Todd McGowan:

Confronting the inconsistency of social authority is not an easy task 

for the subject. Many try to sustain a belief in its consistency through an 

imaginary construction that represses contradictory ideas. The problem 

with this solution is that these ideas become more powerful through their 

repression, and the result is some form o f neurosis. Another possibility 

is the paranoid reaction. Rather than trying to wrestle with the problem 

of the gap in authority, the paranoid subject eliminates it by positing an 

other existing in this gap, an other behind the scenes pulling the strings. 

As Slavoj Zizek explains it, “Paranoia is at its most elementary a belief into 

an ‘Other of the Other,’ into an Other who, hidden behind the Other of 

the explicit social texture, programs what appears to us as the unforeseen 

effects of social life and thus guarantees its consistency: beneath the chaos 

of market, the degradation of morals, and so on, there is the purposeful 

strategy of the Jewish plot.”36 The comfort that paranoia provides for the 

subject derives solely from this guarantee. For the paranoid subject, the 

surface inconsistency of social authority hides an underlying consistency 

authorized by a real authority whom most subjects never notice. Paranoia 

simultaneously allows the subject to sense its own superiority in recogniz­

ing the conspiracy and to avoid confronting the horror of an inconsistent 

social authority.

...

But Stone is not the only leftist to turn to paranoia. Many do so in order 

to confront forces that they otherwise couldn’t identify. Among those who 

suffer from political oppression, paranoia and conspiracy theory serve as 

vehicles for thinking through systems of control and even mobilizing action 

against those systems. As Peter Knight points out, “Conspiracy thinking has 

played an important role in constituting various forms of African American 

political and cultural activism.”38 When it directly produces activism, the 

political valence of paranoia seems to tilt more clearly to the left than it 

does in the case of Stone’s film.39

Marxist Fredric Jameson focuses on a related aspect analyzes the paranoid film in The Geopolitical Aesthetic. In this work, Jam e­son aligns conspiracy theory with what he calls cognitive mapping — the attempt to think the global capitalist system in its totality. The diffuseness of global capitalism prevents the kind of cognitive mapping that was possible in earlier epochs. Today, in order to think the totality at all, subjects must resort to the idea of a conspiracy. As Jameson points out in his analysis of 

All the President’s Men, “The map of conspiracy itse lf... suggests the pos­

sibility of cognitive mapping as a whole and stands as its substitute and 

yet its allegory all at once.”40 Jameson’s statement reflects his ambivalence 

about conspiracy theory and paranoia — even though it allegorizes cognitive 

mapping, it also substitutes for it — but he nonetheless sees its usefulness as a strategy for the Left, especially when facing the global capitalist leviathan.

The problem is that even when it works to mobilize subjects to fight 

against an oppressive system, paranoia has the effect of depriving subjects 

o f their agency. By eliminating the gap in social authority and filling in this 

gap with a real authority who effectively runs the show, paranoia deprives 

subjects of the space in which they exist as subjects. The subject occupies 

the position of the gap in social authority; it emerges through and because 

of internal inconsistency in the social field of meaning. The extent to which 

paranoia allows the subject to experience social authority as a consistent field  is the extent to which it works against the subject itself. Even if it manages 

tangible political victories, emancipatory politics that relies on paranoia 

undermines itself by increasing the power of authority in the thinking of 

subjects and decreasing their freedom. W hat’s more, it doesn’t actually 

work.