Insecure vs. secure paranoia

Peter Knight concludes his seminal Conspiracy Culture with a meditation on the post-Cold-War paradoxes which circulate around the idea that "everything is connected." Hardly an affirmation of the latter, Knight's account lists the multiple, seemingly hidden ways in which the globe really does seem to be interconnected--risk theory, ecology, systems theory, globalization--only to acknowledge that such interconnectedness exists only at a "deeper" level which cannot be narrated by Cold-War-era accounts of secret cabals, but towards which such accounts nevertheless point. While embedded in a range of 90s popular and theoretical cultures, Knight's argument nevertheless points to a compelling feature of contemporary conspiracy theories: that these express current amalgams of power in only allegorical or partial ways. I really like the way Knight frames cabal-type conspiracies as products of the Cold War; this fuels, certainly, my argument that the small room of conspiracy functions nostalgically. He characterizes the age as one of "insecure," or posthumanist paranoia, but points to the powerful pull that "secure" paranoia has in the present.

Secure paranoias, insecure paranoias, space of places, space of flows. Surely it's not much of stretch to say that the cabals of the Cold War are tightly bound to the civic institutions that Castells figures as failed in the Network Society. The unsettling distances that Knight finds at work in DeLillo's Underworld are also characteristic of the distances between elites and people which lie at the core of Castells' account of the social organization of the Network Society: elites are cosmopolitan, people are local.

Still, though, something about gender and identity cuts through all this. On the one hand, the conspiracy theorist's nostalgia is akin to the militia and fundamentalist nostalgia that Castells figures in The Power of Identity; on the other, the gender imaginaries circulate more widely than the local.