Conspiracy Theories: Symptoms, Practices, Theories

It is common knowledge that we live in a time of conspiracy theories. They thrive all over the place and their audiences steadily grow. To contain the spreading of conspiracy theories surrounding the Coronavirus Pandemic the European Commission even published a manual – a checklist – on how to identify them. Already in the 1990s – well before the widespread use of social media – Fredric Jameson had pointed out that the proliferation of conspiracy theories should be seen in relation to the demise of critiques of the social totality. He defined them as “the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age.” Today conspiracy theories have been recognized as dangerous challenge to the existing democratic order and are often discussed in the context of the so-called post-truth condition. However, the reason behind their increasing proliferation is an overall epistemic precarity as one of the main cognitive, cultural, and political features of our age. It is the hard fact that we cannot trust our political elites, the democratically elected officials of our states who are known to lie; that we cannot trust our scientists whom one can buy and sell; that we cannot trust our main-stream media that all too often disseminate propaganda instead of information.  

The class will discuss the problem of conspiracy theories using the following texts:

Matthew D’Ancona, Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back.

European Commission, “Identifying Conspiracy Theories”. https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/coronavirus-response/fighting-disinformation/identifying-conspiracy-theories_en

Ivan Illich, „The Cultivation of Conspiracy“, 1998.

https://pudel.samerski.de/pdf/Illich98Conspiracy.pdf

Joseph Masco and Lisa Wedeen (Ed.), Conspiracy/Theory, Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2024.

Consists in active participation and contribution (discursive, textual, and performative).

The module grading is based on the mentioned contribution, active in-class participation and

• - submission of written assignments (word minimum of 800 total)

 “Students from other departments or universities will be given a place on the course subject to room capacities.”