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I have long taken for granted Fredric Jameson's dictum that conspiracy theory constitutes the "poor person's cognitive mapping in the postmodern age," a "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" (Jameson 1988, 356). This thesis is in keeping with his equally famous exhortation to "always historicize" (Jameson 1981, ix); it also "opens up," for Peter Knight in Conspiracy Culture, "the possibility of a materialist analysis of why people turn to conspiratorial explanations...in the era of globalization" (Knight 2000, 20). Yet, Knight cautions, the account threatens to become "too powerful" in its attribution of an entire "culture of paranoia" to a collective inability to "map" the transnational hyperspace of late capital: "[Jameson's] faith in a monolithic and ultimately determined totality itself has strong conspiratorial overtones," he observes (20).
It may be out of a desire to avoid such totalizing paradigms that Michael Butter, in The Nature of Conspiracy Theories, shies away from advancing a systemic explanation for the apparent pervasiveness of conspiracy theories in contemporary Western culture. But the parallels between conspiracist discourses-which remain by and large "delegitimized," as Butter argues they have been since the mid-twentieth century-and scholarly ones, which seek more nuanced, yet often still totalizing, explanations for the otherwise bewildering array of political and cultural phenomena that constitutes the condition of postmodernity, continues to haunt the text. And if there is such a thing as being too deterministic-as is arguably the case with Jameson's attribution of conspiracy theory, in the proverbial "last instance," to a "repressed understanding of economics" (Knight 2000, 20), then it is equally possible to be not deterministic enough, and the implication in Butter's very title that conspiracy theories have a "nature" verges on surrendering to the idea that unorthodox accounts of historical phenomena are simply a fact of social life. Further, without a systemic account of their provenance and persistence, it becomes that much more challenging to identify sustainable solutions. But this in itself may raise-as Butter's book does, whether or not by design- broader questions about the function and purpose of humanistic scholarship than either this essay, or the book, can ultimately answer.
To be clear,...