Conspiracy theory and the logic of the sovereign

In Michel Foucault's series of lectures published in Society Must Be Defended, he spends a long time articulating a split in seventeenth century thought which still haunts the present day: the obfuscation of what he terms the "race war" memory of the Norman Conquest by the sovereignty theory of Hobbes. At core, Foucault argues, Hobbes's Leviathan is a justification of State power, whether such power is granted by contract, acquisition, or natural rights. While political philosophers might critique the sovereign, they would rather, in Foucault's words, "give the State too much power than not enough power" (98) in order to "[ward] off a certain insidious and barbarous enemy" (99). Hobbes formed his idea of Leviathan, Foucault continues, to ward off the discourse of race war, "[the] discourse of struggle and permanent civil war" in which ultimately, it becomes clear that "we are not talking about sovereignty; we are talking about domination, about an infinitely dense and multiple domination that never comes to an end" (111). This, Foucault maintains, is the knowledge that operated amongst political struggles in the seventeenth century, visible in the writings of such groups as the Diggers and Levelers: you have conquered us by force, and all your laws, and by extension all our laws that justify your laws, are rooted in this domination, and no amount of rationalizing such conquering force in terms of sovereignty will make this reality disappear. Here is the end-logic of the Nietzschean and Foucauldian ideas that have exerted wide influence on recent accounts of colonialism, racism, gender, queerness, and the like: domination is rooted in the whole of the social, and it is no good looking for utopias in the next revolution. By extension, power is a complex, multivalent beast that operates in a host of tricky, ultimately capillary ways. Shoot the king and you get nothing, for the king's institutions persist.

So, where does conspiracy theory, as a general, popular, analysis of history with multiple strands but some general shared characteristics, stand in relation to Foucault's formulation? Well, many commentators, Mark Fenster and Peter Knight among them, seem to hold that conspiracy theory serves to unveil the continual war that writhes beneath the veneer of the social, that while conspiracy theory appears to be a fringe phenomenon with faulty analytic tools, it in fact operates as a populist instrument for detecting the widespread operation of power, for demonstrating, that is, that "the social order is a war [...] War is both the web and the secret of institutions and systems of power" (110). In identifying a war raging beneath the surface of the social order, conspiracy theory, seen through this light, functions as what Foucault calls "political historicism."

But what if it's the opposite? What if conspiracy theory, while not a fringe phenomenon, actually accrues to the logic of the sovereign, in part because it operates on one of society's fundamental binaries, that of gender. The discourse of conspiracy theory, I argue, is the discourse of the sovereign, because it focuses not on a hidden continuous war, but on the ruthless efficiency of a political order, however hidden. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow chides his aunt for believing in womanish makebelieve world of virtuous imperialism; but in dismissing the feminized version of imperialism, a move he'll continue in his denunciation of the feminized "pilgrims" floundering through the Congo, he affirms the existence of right, efficient action--what he calls "hard work." Something like the same thing occurs with the conspiracy theorist. In affirming the supernatural efficiency of conspirators' action, the conspiracy theorist denies, or at least obscures, the kind of mutable, continuous struggle that Foucault discusses, a struggle where even Marlow's aunt, by attributing to him an agenda foreign to Marlow, seeks to impose, and may succeed in imposing, her own will on Marlow. The discourse of efficiency is not simultaneous with the Hobbesian discourse of contract; and yet it would seem to form part of justifying the ways of power to men that is the target of Foucault's entire enterprise.

Not panopticism, but the plotting cell.