The cultural critic and controlled demolition

I don't think I've read anything quite like Michael Truscello's "The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism in American Popular Culture," recently published in Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies. In it, Truscello, by all accounts a prolific, serious cultural critic with an awe-inspiring publication record for an assistant professor, takes the remarkable step of validating not just skepticism of the 9/11 Commission Report, which, as Truscello well demonstrates, was flawed and limited from its inception, but of the controlled demolition theory, a lynchpin of the much-derided 9/11 Truth movement whereby the three World Trade Center buildings felled on 9/11 were all demolished with previously set explosives. Academics have long played the conspiracy theory game, from philosophy professor Josiah Thompson to Berkeley's Peter Dale Scott to retired Claremont theologian David Ray Griffin. But somehow, Truscello's account, in part because it engages the cultural criticism of conspiracy theory, comes across as more serious and engaged. As a result, it's all the more jarring when Truscello figures the dizzying controlled demolition as a desired site of Left analysis.

Much of Truscello's argument regarding the 9/11 Commission Report is entirely compelling. He makes an excellent case for the report's mischaracterization of Al Quaeda as a hierarchical, established organization as opposed to the (now more accepted) view of the group as decentered and rhizomatic. Indeed, even Truscello's critique of the Bush administration pinning fault on Bin Laden comes across as thought-provoking, as does his general description of the Commission as undercut by conflicts of interest, limited access to key witnesses, and the requirement that all members have high-level security clearance, a fact that, as Truscello compellingly argues, would inevitably bias the Commission towards the answers desired by a security state. Finally, the general thrust of his article--that 9/11 should be further scrutinized as a site where radical security state changes were produced--is both sensible and laudable.

As Truscello notes, and as Bratich and Fenster have both argued, the label "conspiracy theory" frequently has the effect of limiting what truths will be recognized by a larger public. Conspiracy theory frequently denotes the point where serious analysis ends and what Ginna Huston and Martin Orr call "the ‘freak show’ of American culture in the postmodern moment" begins (quoted in Truscello 33). Truscello is basically arguing that, in regards to 9/11 conspiracy theory, this line has been drawn too aggressively, and forms of analysis which should be legible--most compellingly, around the security state--have been obscured.

But this line exists, and while it may be drawn for ideological reasons, it can and should also be drawn for logical reasons. Certainly, if the World Trade Center towers were felled by explosives, such an act would be subject to the same drive to obscure that occurred around Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo; there is no doubt that the security state works to cover its mistakes, and, as Peter Knight argues, the postwar culture of national secrecy has encouraged the proliferation of conspiracy theories. But the scope of such a coverup--and the very luridness of rogue agents destroying prominent American buildings--makes the idea difficult, if not impossible, to imagine in the real world.

Such a coverup can, of course, happen in the world of V for Vendetta, and here lies the interesting core of Truscello's article: in pointing out that 9/11 skepticism has circulated in popular culture, but resisted by serious Left critics, he muddies the boundary between the forms of critique which emerge in popular culture and the forms of critique which function as effective critical analysis. Part of the appeal of V for Vendetta is the thrill of imagining the government being so transparently manipulative as to stage disasters. But such transparency, thrilling in fiction, breaks down when confronted by the messy, uneven way in which history proceeds--not as a plan, but as a cascading series of accidents, of which political players may certainly take advantage.

So I'm not sure what Truscello is doing by including controlled demolitions in his catalog of 9/11 skepticism. Part of me suspects that this is performative; that in the same way V for Vendetta gets people out on the streets protesting, his serious treatment of controlled demolition functions as a lever which can be used to pry open the cathected security state. He may be playing a complicated game with rich implications for the use of conspiracy theory, calling attention to the problematic limiting around extreme but popular skepticism, while simultaneously acknowledging, through mimicry, the powerful allure of such extreme skepticism. Its often been observed that the contemporary media environment has little patience for sustained analysis or historicizing; it does, though, readily engage lurid, straightforward accounts of history, and it may be that Truscello, like the members of Anonymous who don V for Vendetta masks, recognizes that complex historicizing simply doesn't cut it in the post-9/11, Web 2.0 atmosphere. Renting a billboard with the words "Where's the Birth Certificate," however, does, and if the Tea Party has demonstrated anything in the past two years, it's that seemingly wild accounts of government can exert effective, policy-altering influence. Truscello's analysis exists in the wildly fun territory of violent video games and 4chan: unignorable, likely to be marginalized, but perhaps indicative of an immanent, poorly-understood future.

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.