A conspiracy of science

Abstract

Conspiracy is as natural as breathing. And since struggles for advantage nearly always have a rhetorical strain, we believe that systematic contemplation of forces itself on student of rhetoric. --Kenneth Burke As I was walking up stair, I met a who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish he'd go away --Author unknown It is not content of arguments predicated on that makes 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 rules of everyday epistemology. How is it possible to meet someone who wasn't there? The question suggests either insanity or supernatural; it is moment identified by Tzvetan Todorov as essence of fantastic--the hesitation between belief and rejection, a moment suspended between marvelous (the extraordinary but ultimately credible) and uncanny (the bizarre and ultimately untrue) (passim). Contemporary thinking on theory inclines toward 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Hofstadter's mid-century, totalizing, stable, declarative, reassuringly complete, omnipotent conspiracies have been superceded by postmodern, fragmented, unstable, interrogatives, that provide more doubt, uncertainty, anxiety, even ironic detachment, than direction for resistance.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 theory: lives in a world where line between inside and outside, fantasy and reality, animal and human and machine does not hold. is a world full of gaps and urge to find missing link. It hums with possibility that 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 enclosure of untouchable systems and drone of an endlessly repeating present (16). We live in a world, on one hand, where every phenomenon is available for perusal as a text, and on other hand, a world in which, as Nietzsche warned it could, the text finally disappeared under interpretation (49, emphasis in original). There are, of course, pedestrian, mundane versions of appearance/reality tension as reflected in such ready cliches as There's more here than meets eye or This isn't what it looks like, yet while these suspicions lie within realm of 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 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 into transmogrifying surfaces from their pedestrian status as most visible outward manifestation of reality into veils and masks. The only thing separating argument from prevailing explanation, according to Jamer Hunt, is ratio of visibility to plausibility (25). Conspiracy argument reveals significance of what seeks to pass beneath notice as insignificant. Brian Keeley suggests that conspiracy theories are only theories for which against is actually construed as in favor of them (120). Conspiracy arguments rely on, to appropriate James Baldwin's magical phrase, evidence of things not seen. When absence of becomes evidence, narrative possibilities expand--what is seen is finite; what is unseen is infinite--limited only at those moments when confronted with presence of intractable contrary evidence. The exchange of for non-evidence reverses figure-ground relationships and constitutes critical moment in creation of maddeningly tautological logic of argument. …

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