Good stuff here, really helping me conceptualize some pressing, present-day problems I want to get better at articulating.
If you were to suggest one book I could read to explain the role of this high-control form of mutated capitalism (neoliberalism) in the rise of conspiratorial thinking in periods of peak mass social distress, what would it be? Preferably something with a lay person's vocabulary. I am thinking of writing a rebuttal to a centrist liberal sycophant masquerading as an "I know better than you, peasants" style popular mainstream journalist.
Hey JD! Sorry for the delayed reply here. I’ve been thinking about this question and poking around in some sources and doing a few searches. I’m not aware of a text that really hits this quite directly as a point of focus that I could recommend (there might be one out there though!)
A couple of recent texts I like about Neoliberalism that are well researched and accessibly written are “Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age” and “The Border that Crossed us: The case for opening the US-Mexico Border.” Those will give nice overviews of a Marxist critique of neoliberalism, but I don’t think they’ll help much with getting directly at the question of conspiracy theory.
Fredric Jameson is a key reference point on the topic of late capitalism, though his pieces are generally on the more academic side, and I’m not sure how much he has devoted to the topic of conspiracy theory directly. There’s a passage I’ll quote below where he makes a connection.
Honestly, the case you already found agreeable in Shammas’ essay (which draws on a philosopher who is writing about Jameson lol: https://www.e-flux.com/notes/633672/always-jamesonize) is probably more useful for directly countering that sycophant from the Salon article, but this might be worth poking into:
“I have spoken elsewhere of the turn toward a thematics of mechanical reproduction, of the way in which the autoreferentiality of much of postmodernist art takes the form of a play with reproductive technologies as film, tapes, video, computers, and the like which is, to my mind, a degraded figure of the great multinational space that remains to be cognitively mapped. Fully as striking on another level is the omnipresence of the theme of paranoia as it expresses itself in a seemingly inexhaustible production of conspiracy plots of the most elaborate kinds. Conspiracy, one is tempted to say, is the poor person's cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter's system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content.” https://www.rainer-rilling.de/gs-villa07-Dateien/JamesonF86a_CognitiveMapping.pdf [For some reason the text there is kind of messed up in a few places, like it was transcribed in a weird way and not corrected.]
Let me know your thoughts. I’m happy to discuss further—I love that you’re pushing back against that writer and thinking about writing a formal rebuttal.
I think you probably already have what you need to make a strong case against her, and I'm afraid of making too much of a rabbit hole here when you've already hit the nail on the head: she doesn't contextualize, she doesn't provide context for WHY people would be more susceptible to accepting conspiracy theories in this moment, and we can imagine pretty good explanations when you consider things like decades of displacement within the workplace (manufacturing leaving to other countries, increased automation), diminished working class power with attacks on unions, stagnant wages/standard of living alongside increased productivity, and then a series of crisis from the Great Recession to the pandemic... in a society/culture that does not provide coherent explanations for these (fundamentally socio-economic) problems they face, and for their lack of agency, etc.
As Jameson famously remarks, "always historicize" (which is what that blog linked above titled "always Jamesonize" is a play on. :)
Thank you so much for taking the time to pull all this together for me. I really appreciate it. Looks like some great resources for me to dive into as I have time!
Good stuff here, really helping me conceptualize some pressing, present-day problems I want to get better at articulating.
If you were to suggest one book I could read to explain the role of this high-control form of mutated capitalism (neoliberalism) in the rise of conspiratorial thinking in periods of peak mass social distress, what would it be? Preferably something with a lay person's vocabulary. I am thinking of writing a rebuttal to a centrist liberal sycophant masquerading as an "I know better than you, peasants" style popular mainstream journalist.
Hey JD! Sorry for the delayed reply here. I’ve been thinking about this question and poking around in some sources and doing a few searches. I’m not aware of a text that really hits this quite directly as a point of focus that I could recommend (there might be one out there though!)
A couple of recent texts I like about Neoliberalism that are well researched and accessibly written are “Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age” and “The Border that Crossed us: The case for opening the US-Mexico Border.” Those will give nice overviews of a Marxist critique of neoliberalism, but I don’t think they’ll help much with getting directly at the question of conspiracy theory.
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1653-revolutionary-rehearsals-in-the-neoliberal-age
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1655-the-border-crossed-us
Fredric Jameson is a key reference point on the topic of late capitalism, though his pieces are generally on the more academic side, and I’m not sure how much he has devoted to the topic of conspiracy theory directly. There’s a passage I’ll quote below where he makes a connection.
Honestly, the case you already found agreeable in Shammas’ essay (which draws on a philosopher who is writing about Jameson lol: https://www.e-flux.com/notes/633672/always-jamesonize) is probably more useful for directly countering that sycophant from the Salon article, but this might be worth poking into:
“I have spoken elsewhere of the turn toward a thematics of mechanical reproduction, of the way in which the autoreferentiality of much of postmodernist art takes the form of a play with reproductive technologies as film, tapes, video, computers, and the like which is, to my mind, a degraded figure of the great multinational space that remains to be cognitively mapped. Fully as striking on another level is the omnipresence of the theme of paranoia as it expresses itself in a seemingly inexhaustible production of conspiracy plots of the most elaborate kinds. Conspiracy, one is tempted to say, is the poor person's cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter's system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content.” https://www.rainer-rilling.de/gs-villa07-Dateien/JamesonF86a_CognitiveMapping.pdf [For some reason the text there is kind of messed up in a few places, like it was transcribed in a weird way and not corrected.]
Let me know your thoughts. I’m happy to discuss further—I love that you’re pushing back against that writer and thinking about writing a formal rebuttal.
I think you probably already have what you need to make a strong case against her, and I'm afraid of making too much of a rabbit hole here when you've already hit the nail on the head: she doesn't contextualize, she doesn't provide context for WHY people would be more susceptible to accepting conspiracy theories in this moment, and we can imagine pretty good explanations when you consider things like decades of displacement within the workplace (manufacturing leaving to other countries, increased automation), diminished working class power with attacks on unions, stagnant wages/standard of living alongside increased productivity, and then a series of crisis from the Great Recession to the pandemic... in a society/culture that does not provide coherent explanations for these (fundamentally socio-economic) problems they face, and for their lack of agency, etc.
As Jameson famously remarks, "always historicize" (which is what that blog linked above titled "always Jamesonize" is a play on. :)
All the best,
Kevin
Thank you so much for taking the time to pull all this together for me. I really appreciate it. Looks like some great resources for me to dive into as I have time!