A chance encounter on the train a few weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center. A Tunisian woman who has been living in Austria for decades praises the advantages of the laical orientation of the Tunisian state, gets worked up about rampant conspiracy theories and the lack of rationality in current political debates, then begins, without a break, to talk about »the« present media scandal. According to her, everyone already knew; only the Western media apparently did not – or even worse, were not saying they did: 4,000 Jews did not turn up for work in the Twin Towers on September 11. Only the – naturally, mostly Jewish – reporters were at the spot minutes after the attack – as if they had been informed by the organization behind the attack: the Israeli secret service, Mossad.

According to an article in the »Spiegel,« this construct was put into medial orbit on September 17 by the Lebanese television station Al Manar, which admits on its home page to waging »psychological war against the Zionist enemy.« Later, it was to be found in the US Net newspaper »Information Times,« and was propagated in countless e-mail versions. Finally, on October 18, the US magazine »Newsweek« cited a survey carried out by Gallup International in Pakistan: 48% of Pakistanis believed Israel to be behind the attacks on the World Trade Center, 25% believed in a conspiracy within America, 12% thought that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the attacks.

Thus can mass skepticism turn into mass faith. This newly confirmed faith is paradoxically based on a mistrust that has become general – on »suspicion,« as the art theoretician and philosopher Boris Groys calls our motivation for calling the semiotic production of the media into question. It is not only the »X-Files« and Descartes that say »Don't trust anybody!« This fundamental suspicion goes far beyond the now usual doubts about the reflective function of medial images. It is not so much directed at manipulative or propagandistic techniques, at questions about simulation or the truth of images and their potential for use as political instruments. Rather, it concerns that which can never be conveyed by these imagic narrations: the hidden motives and backgrounds of their production. Why are we exposed to a particular picture, or, more generally, a particular sign, at a particular point in time?

The attacks of September 11 offer a paradigmatic field for projecting the conspiracy theory, »the only theory that describes our real relationship to the medial world« (Boris Groys). Why? Several criteria would seem to be relevant here: the surprise effect (the abnormality that has to be normalized), the dimensions of the horror (the more shocking the deed, the more believable the paranoid view of the state of emergency seems), the mediality necessarily inherent in terror (without the media it would be no more than a normal crime).

First of all, it has to be remembered that the world at large was completely unprepared for the attacks. Today, now that the machinery of interpretation has been in action and the shocking nature of the event appears to have been digested, this effect of being overwhelmed has long since lost its power. No one seriously says any more that everything has changed after September 11. But precisely the initially incomprehensible nature of the terror act probably made the torrent of retrospective rationalizations and interpretations based on conspiracy theories inevitable. Moreover, the pictures of the burning skyscrapers are media events par excellence, in which the media presentation coincides with the much-quoted »penetration of the real.« The peculiar tension brought about by the shocking monstrosity of the deed, the seemingly direct evidence of the images, and the rash accusation of the 19 people involved in carrying out the attack was fertile ground for interpretations that at least purport to be able to cope with the collectively felt complexity of the world and the skepticism towards the media that has become part of mainstream thought since the Gulf War at the latest. Here, the paranoid view is the only one that seems critical and unmanipulated. It does not trust the official language of power, which always lies, but looks systematically for where it slips up. The way the parascientific conspiracy theory works thus recalls both the detective's and the psychoanalyst's search for clues, both professions that insist on autonomy and incorruptibility.

The various conspiracy theories that are now proliferating have at least one thing in common: they tend to see unique events not so much as ruptures, but rather as continuities, continuations of a perpetual conspiracy using other means. That is why, after a few weeks, the fairy story about the 4,000 Jews who did not turn up to work arrived back in the ideological space that produced it. That is why many others fall back into the same eternal dogmatism that seals off perception from reality: the father figure CIA/Pentagon/Mossad/USA/Israel was responsible, because it always has been; only the victims change. This mantra of self-victimization is – as is suggested by the forms in which the paranoid legends about September 11 spread – not only reinforced by institutionalized, hierachic media, but above all by the decentralized chain-letter democracy of the internet. In a way, the internet is even the main medium of the conspiracy theory, being as it is of a referential nature: there is always another link to be found. The truth is always out there – in the Net.

And the Net shows something else as well: the popularization of paranoia does not necessarily have to be caused by a form of blinding ordained from above that degrades the adepts to victims of their own media incompetence, as is sometimes argued with reference to the illiteracy, poor education or underdeveloped press freedom in, say, Pakistan. It can also be the result of a cynical awareness. It is possible to say, with Zizek: They know what they are doing, and they do it anyway.

However, the matter is complicated by the fact that there really are conspiracies at work all over the place. The suspected El-Qaeda attackers were very probably part of one. And the CIA is very certainly working on another one at this moment. »The question is not whether you are paranoid, but whether you are paranoid enough,« says Thomas Pynchon. His thousand-page virtuosic exposition of hermeneutics as paranoid art also points out the basically unending nature of any world perception founded on a subversively oriented conspiracy theory. These days, many people think they are in a sort of ideology-free state of suspense in which »political preferences and decisions are actually meaningless and practically impossible,« as the political scientist and paranoia researcher Jodi Dean puts it – admittedly referring mainly to the USA. As a result, there seems to be a higher susceptibility to generally accepted paranoid constructions than ever before. These can probably only give rise to productive forms of knowledge if the act of liberation from ideological indoctrination they supposedly express retains a habitually nomadic character and is on its guard against obligations to new (old) certainties, as, for example, in Pynchon's fictions.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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