Abstract

In this paper I trouble some key analytical moves in the burgeoning field of conspiracy studies, and explore alternative approaches which link it to two strands of current social theorizing—governmentality and the politics of affect.  First, I go ‘meta’ (Husting and Orr 2007) to ask how the production of knowledge about knowledge itself becomes a form of politics.  Here I follow Bratich’s work on conspiracy theories as part of neoliberal governmentality, understanding public anxiety over conspiracy theories to be one instance of a set of “series of prevention strategies for dissent” (p. 12) in neoliberal political economies.  Second, I show how a fuller analysis of conspiracy theory discourse requires developing the cultural politics of contempt, or the notion of affective governmentality  (Ahmed 2004b; Illouz 2007; Ferguson 2010). I argue that current struggles over the use of the phrase conspiracy theory work in and through a politics of contempt.  I use Arendt’s theorization of political action to argue that the emotionality of U.S. conspiracy panic discourse effectively polices the boundaries of what is sayable, knowable, thinkable, and perhaps ‘feelable,’ from the unsayable/unknowable/unthinkable; from the patently ridiculous, pathological, and emotionally suspect.  Such abject kinds of knowing place the knower out of bounds of reasonable politics, and for Arendt, violate the conditions on which political action must rest.   The argument will have three parts; first an overview of current studies of conspiracy theories; second, an exploration of conspiracy panics as a form of emotionalized governmentality; and third, an exploration of the functions and effects of contempt in conspiracy panic discourse.