The Review: Foucault and Politics; an Interview With Mark Dery

A Conversation With Mark Dery

Recently, Mark Dery wrote a fascinating, and disturbing, profile of Mark Crispin Miller, an NYU scholar of media studies who has, in recent years, embraced a host of outlandish conspiracy theories. I spoke with Dery about his article and about conspiracy theorizing more broadly. Here’s some of that conversation.

Would you hazard a rough diagnosis of the sociological situation here? What gives rise to this?  

The thing about Miller that could be generalizable is touched on in a book I’ve just been reading, Rob Brotherton’s Suspicious Minds: Why We believe Conspiracy Theories (2015). He does a kind of a Dick Hebdigian subcultural scholarship take on conspiracy theorists.

The old knock on conspiracy theory is that it is religion for a secular age. That presumption haunts the canonical work on conspiracy theory, which is Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Hofstadter suggests that conspiracy theory presents a kind of paranoid cosmology for a secularized landscape. It renders a complicated world simple.

Brotherton suggests that, in fact, we now have some decent sociological data on conspiracy theorists, which we didn’t have in the age of Hofstadter. Hofstadter presumed that people who embraced conspiracy theories aren’t terribly intelligent; they’re uncomfortable with nuance; they crave a simplistic explanation.

It turns out the opposite is true. Many highly intelligent people succumb to conspiracy theories. One aspect of the conspiratorial mind-set is in fact an urge toward complexification, a desire to read between the lines, to be hermeneutic, to be Talmudic.

In The Consequences of Modernity, the sociologist Anthony Giddens points out that all of us in the modern world are taking enormous quantities of information on faith — we have no technical knowledge of the expert systems that govern our lives. Even if we ourselves are technicians in one or another of those systems, like say an airline pilot, our areas of illumination are quite limited. But we have rough and ready heuristics for figuring out what’s plausible and what’s not. For somebody like Miller, those heuristics break down — he loses any capacity to weigh relevant probabilities. So the most preposterous theories will seem appealing to him. To what extent is the question one of psychopathology?

My inclination would be to say that it’s an ideological tropism, that the strange flowers of conspiracy theorists have a tropism toward this sensibility — they tilt toward the black sun of conspiracy theorizing, not for reasons of psychopathology or individual neurosis. I think it’s a curious hybrid: an ideological pathology.

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