Mysteries, Conspiracies, and Inquiries: Reflections on the Power of Superstition, Suspicion, and Scrutiny

From Firenze University Press Journal: SocietàMutamentoPolitica

Simon Susen

In the modern world, the ‘thematics of mystery, conspiracy, and inquiry’ can hardly be ignored. At least since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these subjects have occupied a central place in ‘the representation of reality’ and, thus, in ‘the political metaphysics’ of modern societies. More specifically, they have profoundly shaped the ways in which reality has been described, analysed, interpreted, explained, and assessed — not only by laypersons navigating social life and researchers studying particular aspects of human existence, but also by fiction authors, notably those producing crime novels and spy novels, two of the most popular literary genres of the modern age.

One of the most important differences between, on the one hand, academic researchers and, on the other hand, laypersons and fiction writers concerns the quest for different kinds of validity. Indeed, it is the pursuit of ‘scientific’ validity through which the former seek to distinguish themselves from the latter, including from the many other (pseudo- or non-scientific) modes of inquiry that, over the past centuries, have emerged in the societies they examine. In this context, one may differentiate between three principal epistemic forms:

a. ordinary epistemic forms, which are produced, reproduced, and transformed by everyday actors, seeking to cope with the various demands thrown at them in the course of their everyday lives;

b. fictional epistemic forms, which are constructed, reconstructed, and deconstructed by writers, aiming to tell stories based — in most cases — on a combination of imaginary worlds and real worlds, with the former being directly or indirectly inspired by the latter; and

c. scientific epistemic forms, which are generated and employed by researchers and experts, allowing for an analytic, logical, methodical, rational, explanatory, evidence-based, and/or evaluative immersion in, engagement with, and understanding of the world and/or the universe or multiverse.

Interestingly, in each of them, different types of inquiry may play a more or less significant role in the symbolically mediated and discursively filtered representation of reality. There are not only (a) ordinary and common-sense-based types of inquiry, (b) fictional and literary types of inquiry, and ( c ) scientific and research-based types of inquiry, but also numerous other variants of inquiry — such as political, cultural, economic, judicial, criminal, technological, military, demographic, and environmental ones. In terms of both form and sub-stance, these types of inquiry may overlap, implying that their respective classification is not always unambiguous.

A key feature that, to a greater or lesser degree, all types of inquiry share is the ambition to uncover the constitution of an underlying reality, which tends to be concealed beneath the veil of everyday modes of perception, appreciation, interpretation, and action.Undoubtedly, both the natural sciences and the social sciences are, to a considerable extent, motivated by the goal to penetrate into core, if not noumenal, levels of reality, thereby challenging the assumptions derived from people’s everyday engagement with the realm of appearances. Three fields of investigation are crucial to Boltanski ’s project: (a) psychiatry, notably its nosological construction of paranoia, reflected in the explosion of count-less inquiries, in many cases protracted to the point of delirium; (b) political science, notably its attempt to shift issues around ‘paranoia’ from the psychic to the social level, thereby moving from the scientifically inspired terrain of ‘mystery’ to the ideologically driven terrain of ‘conspiracy’, including ‘conspiracy theories’8; ( c ) sociology, notably its determination to shed light on subjacent causal mechanisms, structures, and forces, whose existence largely escapes common-sense modes of existing in, engaging with, and attributing meaning to the world.At the heart of Boltanski’s approach lies the thesis that the task of ‘the representation of reality’ is inextricably linked to the challenge of grasping the ‘changes that affected the way reality itself was instituted during the period in question’.

Particularly important in this respect is the relationship between reality and the nation-state, including both their material and their symbolic (re-)construction. Mysteries, conspiracies, and inquiries have been — and will continue to be — essential ingredients of this deep intertwinement between reality and the state. Drawing on both the natural sciences and the social sciences, including educational sciences and population studies (especially their use of large data sets and statistics), key variants of the nation-state project began to impose themselves on the course of modern history, ‘eliminating the gap between lived reality and instituted reality, between subjectivities and the objective arrangements that served as their framework’, between the world as it appears to, and is experienced by, ordinary actors and the world as it is empirically structured and factually organized by solidified, and partly formalized, modes of action and interaction. Arguably, the removal of this chasm is inherent both in the idea and in the realization of the nation-state.

Put in Habermasian terms, the nation-state embodies a curious synthesis of lifeworld and system. Put in Foucauldian terms, the nation-state constitutes ‘an agency of self-awareness, control, and governance’, capable of guaranteeing ‘the organization, stability, security, and consciousness of that [seemingly] natural order’, within which a given population is placed and by which it is defined. Through this ‘utopian synthesis between state and nation’, reality was at once lived by everyday actors and instituted by sets of organizational structures, ‘treated as already in existence and as requiring a supplementary effort to bring it into being’, as always-already-there and as always-still-to-be-constructed. Irrespective of whether or not one conceives of this constellation in terms of ‘biopolitics’, culminating in the establishment of the welfare state, it is hard to overlook the convergence and alliance ‘between state projects and scientific projects’ in large-scale attempts at controlling, classifying, and disciplining territorially bound populations.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/smp-12996

Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/smp/article/view/12996