A conspiracy of science

Conspiracy is as natural as breathing. And since the struggles for advantage nearly always have a rhetorical strain, we believe that the systematic contemplation of them forces itself on the student of rhetoric.

-Kenneth Burke

As I was walking up the stair,

I met a man who wasn't

He wasn't there again today.

I wish, I wish he'd go away

-Author unknown

It is not the content of arguments predicated on conspiracy that makes them so unsettling but their form. There is nothing particularly horrific about a "man who wasn't there;" he is an absence, a blank space. What is disturbing in this bit of doggerel is its way of confounding the rules of everyday epistemology. How is it possible to meet someone who wasn't there? The question suggests either insanity or the supernatural; it is the moment identified by Tzvetan Todorov as the essence of the fantastic-the hesitation between belief and rejection, a moment suspended between the marvelous (the extraordinary but ultimately credible) and the uncanny (the bizarre and ultimately untrue) (passim). Contemporary thinking on conspiracy theory inclines toward the notion that Richard Hofstadter's mid-century, totalizing, stable, declarative, reassuringly complete, omnipotent conspiracies have been superceded by postmodern, fragmented, unstable, interrogatives, that provide more doubt, uncertainty, anxiety, even ironic detachment, than direction for resistance. In Kathleen Stewart's poetic description, contemporary conspiracy theory: