The conspiracy of literary criticism

As I continue to crawl through prep for the intro to theory course, I keep finding specters of conspiracy haunting [literary] theory. Latest: in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), Stephen Greenblatt writes of the fiction of the totalizing society, what he describes as "posit[ing] an occult network linking all human, natural, and cosmic powers and that claims on behalf of its ruling elite a privileged place in this network. Such a society generates vivid dreams of access to the linked powers and vests control of this access in a religious and state bureaucracy at whose pinnacle is the symbolic figure of the monarch" (Lodge 558). Thewriter here, in the conventional view of Great Literature, has privileged access to the "occult network" by virtue of representing the dreams and wishes of the ruling elite, and by extension granting access to the mysteriously inaccessible figure of the monarch. The desire of literature, then, is desire for access to a sense of totality, a sense of wholeness that one can associate, without too much critical wrangling, with the figure of the big Other, who guarantees order and meaning for the subject. This is a wildly wonderful way to account for the desire of conspiracy theory and its accompanying narratives.

Greenblatt continues: "The great attraction of [the author or text as authority] is that it appears to bind and fix the energies we prize, to identify a stable and permanent source of literary power, to offer an escape from shared contingency" (Lodge 559). Replace "text" with "conspiracy theory" and "literary power" with "political power" and we've got a nicely encapsulated description of CT.

Or, the play is a conspiracy:

"[O]ne of the ideological fictions of the theater was precisely to create in its audience the sense that what seemed spontaneous or accidental was in fact fully plotted ahead of time by a playwright carefully calculating his effects, taht behind experienced uncertainty there was design, whether the design of the human patriarchs--the fathers and rulers who unceasingly watched over the errant courses of their subjects--or the overarching design of the divine patriarch. the theater when would confirm the structure of human experiences as proclaimed by those on top and would urge us to reconfirm this structure in our pleasure" (Lodge 568).

Play, like conspiracy theory, confirms that all is (patriarchically) ordered with the world.