To Breathe Together: Conspiracy Theory as Art, Spirituality, and American Folklore

Abstract

My senior project is titled To Breathe Together, after the etymological origin of conspiracy, conspirarate. Con for together, spirare for breath. Beyond its poeticism, the phrase is fitting because it describes with some accuracy what conspiracy has come to represent in our culture -- a collective kind of stupor, a dream made of all of the constituent mores, desires, nightmares, and crises real and imagined in American history. My interest and my argument will be that this breathing motion of a culture of conspiracy, with all its paranoid and totalizing tendencies, exists as a kind of strategy and aesthetic for dealing with culture today, and the weight of inherited history, a highly accelerated and confused mythopoetics, folklore, or tall tale. I believe this has come about via two crucial and interlocking mechanisms. Firstly, what Max Weber termed the "disenchantment of the world," or the sense that systems of belief and ways of life that once gave many grounding have been fundamentally altered and displaced by the secularization and industrialization of society. A literal retreat of magic and myth from the role of social life sees new forms of culture emerge, especially where technology and media come into play as the new interlocutors of experience. Secondly, the rise of the internet as a new mediating force, as something which could at the very least facilitate enchantment. Because of the internet's connection to a space in-between the material and the immaterial, it has come to displace religiosity in secular life, if not complement modernized expressions of religion in American life. Conspiracy theory is a contemporary form of Anthropological mythopoetics, where myth and narrative are used to create ideas and concepts that might not strictly be true, but which give social language to otherwise unintelligible forces.