Our rendezvous point was the Prince Regent stop on the Docklands Light Railway line. While we were standing around and waiting for something to happen, Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) had begun circulating among the crowd, saying hello and trying to make casual friendly conversation with the assembled activists. As two approached us, however, the protestor I was talking to warned me not to speak to them: ‘you know these Smurfs are forward intelligence officers, don’t you?’ Mockingly known as Smurfs for their baby-blue vests, these outwardly affable PCSOs were immediately treated with suspicion for fear that they might be harbouring hidden intentions. ‘They’ were not on ‘our’ side.
We were there to occupy the world’s largest arms fair – the DSEI (Defence and Security Equipment International) – which boasted a guest list which included countries on the UK government’s own human rights watchlist (e.g. Colombia, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia) as well as the world’s largest arms companies, including manufacturers of illegal tear gas, and suppliers to the Saudi and Israeli militaries. A press release on the Campaigns Against Arms Trade website (CAAT 2017) explained the motivation behind the protest:
The weapons companies and militaries responsible for the civilians killed on the streets of Bahrain and Egypt, for those killed in drone attacks, and even for arming Assad, will be in London. We’re taking action to stand in their way, to bring down the government support for the arms fair and to take on those who profit from conflict and repression.
Suddenly, there was a shout for everyone to follow and we moved quickly around the corner to the entrance of the ExCeL centre. The plan had been agreed in advance but kept to a small group so that the police couldn’t anticipate the activists’ movements. Green pop-up tents adorned with anti-war slogans sprang up on the roundabout leading to the entrance, although there was no sign of other resources needed for a long-term occupation (e.g. sleeping bags) which suggested these were a symbolic gesture. The drums started up. One protestor, who had created a fantastic costume of the grim reaper, was dancing on stilts just as the ‘bike bloc’ arrived and everyone cheered as they did a lap of the roundabout. Other activists lay down in front of the trucks as they arrived and chained themselves together in front of the entrance gates. In a clever example of artistic détournement, they had even printed out the admission policy for the arms fair, underlining the pertinent sentences:
DSEI Admission Policy
Any person in possession of non-permitted items will be refused entry to or ejected from the venue and site. Prohibited items include knives, fireworks, explosives, smoke canisters, aerosols, airhorns, noisemakers, flares, weapons, dangerous or hazardous items, illegal substances, laser devices, bottles, glass vessels, cans, poles, or any article that may compromise public safety or which may pose a hazard or nuisance to any other person, or any article to be used for a commercial or a charitable purpose.
I spotted Shaun who, clearly remembering our conversation about undercover police earlier that week, came straight over to me and without saying hello, pointed out someone he thought was a plain-clothes officer. He commented on the way this individual was moving around the protest and the suspicious manner in which he seemed to be walking between the police and the protestors. But most of all, Shaun told me, the biggest giveaway were the black boots.
Labelling someone a ‘conspiracy theorist’ is usually taken as an insult. It suggests that they have no capacity for reason or rational thinking, it questions their sanity, and insinuates that their grievances should not be considered ‘sensible’. The more elaborate the theory the more distance people try to put between themselves and it, with some speculations (for instance, that movements have been infiltrated by undercover police) deemed more ‘reasonable’ than others (say, pan-historical and international networks of power operating beyond our imagination). To speak of the Illuminati, for example, as an underground network in pursuit of a New World Order and responsible for major historical events (from the French Revolution, to 9/11 and the financial crisis) is to risk inviting mocking laughter and raised eyebrows. To mention the Rothschilds and Freemasons who are thought to control global finance, the mainstream media, and governments, is to risk dismissal as ‘non-sense’. And yet we also live in an era in which many so-called conspiracy theories have actually proved to be true. Take, for instance, the invasive state surveillance of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) through communications software and mobile phones (as revealed by Edward Snowden); the mountain of secretive state actions revealed by Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks; and right down to the elite education and social clubs of British politicians and corporate executives (fast-tracked from Eton to degrees in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford and thence to Downing Street via Bullingdon Club swine-based initiation rituals).
Whether something counts as a conspiracy theory, in other words, should not be simply a judgement on its truthfulness. Whether the theory is that the Queen of England is a shape-shifting reptilian overlord (following David Icke) or that there are undercover police officers at an anti-arms rally, I argue that what we should focus less on determining the accuracy of such theories, and more on how such theories construct self-understandings of power and resistance. This allows us to understand the possible foreclosures that such narratives create for resistance, rather than speculating on the policing of movements by secret forces. By definition, arguing whether a conspiracy theory is true or false is unwinnable, as they speculate on the known unknowns of power – things we ‘know’ that we ‘don’t know’ – and therefore cannot be proven. Even in cases of revelation, the conspiracy itself retreats anew (‘you think that was the truth? That’s what they want you to think’). But how such narratives frame power and resistance is clear. Power becomes constructed as something which is secret, controlling, top-down, centralised, hidden, and operating behind appearances, meaning that a conspiracy theory could include any ‘narrative that has been constructed in an attempt to explain an event or series of events to be the result of a group of people working in secret to a nefarious end’ (Birchall 2006: 34). Thus, conspiracy theory could be said to apply to a wide range of ideas about power: from the often-mocked explanation of global networks like the Illuminati, to more widely accepted ideas of shady collusions between state and market (the 1%) and operations carried out by undercover police in surveillance and espionage.
Taking this broad definition, I will demonstrate in this chapter how conspiracy theories and cynicism were central to the way in which Occupy (in) London framed its resistance in relation to the power the activists understood themselves to be up against. We will begin with an outline of the prevalence of conspiracy theory within the movement, as well as activist defences of such narratives as useful for organisation, disruptive of normative discourses of knowledge, and simply ‘accurate’ in capturing the ‘nature’ of power (if not the truth itself). Such arguments find their parallels in social theory, but it will be my contention that, while these defences are not necessarily wrong, the political potential granted to conspiracy theories actually overlooks many limitations. First, against arguments that such narratives might be useful for organisation, Occupy (in) London demonstrated that the idea that fellow activists might be undercover officers and representing a powerful conspiracy actually fractured and undermined solidarity. The distrust that such narratives caused, it will be suggested, actually did more damage to the movement than any potential information that infiltrators may or may not have gathered. The second idea, that conspiracy theories might disrupt the normative order of knowledge, is limited insofar as this creates further libertarian cynicism towards collective organisation and authority. The post-crash UK Parliament, which was suspected of colluding against the democratic interest, was not in any way challenged by snide and cynical criticisms, with such cynicism precluding the possibility of intervening into a central and crucial site of influence.
This model also plays into the third and final limitation. Far from providing an ‘accurate’ intuition about the nature of power, framing it as centralised, top-down, cynical, and hidden overlooks structural critiques in favour of a more revelatory mode of resistance. When the truth of power is always considered to be behind appearances, then the aim becomes to ‘reveal’ that truth and show it for what it really is (hence ideas of ‘waking up the people’ or the well-worn Anonymous phrase ‘what if I told you …’). Yet not only does this play into a certain modernist conception of truth and a postmodernist cynicism in which all appearances cannot be trusted, but it also automatically pre-positions the protestors as the weak and powerless and ‘them’ as the all-powerful and insurmountable. Furthermore, whenever this self-definition of powerlessness intersects with ideas of authenticity, movements risk playing into a ‘cunning of impotence’ (Nietzsche 2008) and a ‘siege mentality’ (Brown 2001) in which that weakness and marginality is celebrated as a virtue. It will be concluded, therefore, that movements should avoid accepting (and championing) their designation as marginal, weak, inconsequential, and without authority, and instead assert positions of collective democratic authority and political responsibility.
Because designating someone a conspiracy theorist can be used as a way for the police order to designate grievances with power as ‘non-sense’ – as well as draw a normative line between the rational and the irrational, the sane and the insane – I have tried to be careful about the way in which I portray conspiracy theory within the Occupy movement in London. This does of course depend on how we identify conspiracy theory (and I have taken a particularly broad definition, which I argue will be useful in highlighting the limitations such narratives present movements in a problematic framing of power and resistance). Yet I do not want to overstate the prevalence of what we might call the ‘popular understanding’ of conspiracy theories, which might add to policing labels of the movement as naïve, unreasonable, and irrational. The majority of Occupy activists in London were not conspiracy theorists in the popular sense of the term. Ideas about ‘the 1%’ varied in sophistication and depth, from outright pathological dismissals of individuals to more complex narratives of systematic and ideological collusions between state and market, and while ideas about undercover agents were widespread, they were based on a precedent of previous cases when undercover police have been outed (see Evans and Lewis 2013).
Having said that, popular conspiracy theories were nevertheless sufficiently prevalent within the movement to be part of everyday conversations:
I worked at the info-tent at Occupy London [LSX] for a long time and I’d have people coming to me (thinking I was some kind of authority because I was standing behind a desk) saying: ‘I’ve got some YouTube videos for you’ – Great, what are they about? – ‘Well, did you know that 9/11 didn’t actually happen?!’ You got it all the time. And I can’t just say that that’s down to ignorance, this idea of Rothschilds, Illuminati, the ‘all-seeing eye’… just because there was an icon somewhere near the camp in Occupy London, everyone being like: ‘yeah, we’ve been infiltrated’.
(2014, int. 8)
Although this is the experience of just one activist, this interaction suggests that such narratives of all-encompassing hidden power networks were quite common occurrences and were considered by many to be a common-sense understanding of the way in which power operates. It demonstrates that there were certainly some occupiers in London who promoted and spread what are commonly understood as conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, the Rothschilds, or 9/11 being an inside job, and that the activist who had shown me a picture of ‘the all-seeing eye’ at Trafalgar Square (see Chapter 3) was not a one-off.
Some activists expressed despair at the popularity of such theories, arguing that those who believed in such rubbish were exhausting, mad, or just ignorant; on the other hand, others (while ensuring that they were still distancing themselves from such narratives) mounted reflexive defences of conspiracy theories. For instance, some argued that such narratives might actually be considered useful for organising resistance, putting it to me that such discourses of power could be mobilised as part of Occupy’s consolidation of collective protest:
There’s a collective narrative that goes on as well … about how we take shit for so long and then we rise up against the dictator or the evil king or stuff like this … To that extent, this can be part of what Occupy is doing. It’s, y’know, for it to go around the world so quickly, there must be something like a collective meme or something … I mean, what does ‘conspiracy’ mean anyway? If two people get together to agree a plan on something, that’s a conspiracy!
(Greg)
Questioning the status quo, looking for alternatives, looking for one that’s more positive so the outcomes effect the general public (as far as they’re not the 1% you know?) Being really critical of the way that … it seems that governments are lobbied and these think tanks exist by corporations and there’s things like that influence government … well, government seems to be influenced by corporations.
(Harry)
While Greg and Harry don’t necessarily ‘believe’ in such narratives they argue that they might form the basis of a movement if used as a pragmatic organisational tool and a method for encouraging the wider public to be critical and look for alternatives to the status quo. Such a defence of conspiracy theory as useful for spurring collective organisation and critical consciousness finds its counterpart in political theory. As Dean has argued, for instance, conspiracy theories might be considered as bestowing a certain symbolic efficiency on ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’, drawing the lines in the sand through ‘the fantasy of a “we” [which] is held open through the suspicion that there are secrets’ (2002: 97). For Dean, conspiracy theories can also help to draw connections between different powerful groups as part of a critical approach to society and politics, because ‘insofar as practitioners can link together varieties of disparate phenomena to find patterns of denials, occlusion, and manipulation’, then ‘conspiracy theory, far from a label dismissively attached to the lunatic fringe, may well be a vehicle for political contestation’ (ibid. 1998: 8). Such narratives, in other words, could become the basis of a collective self-recognition and collective critical identity, defining ‘us’ in comparison to ‘them’ (who are the cause of our grievances) and providing cohesion in a context of symbolic inefficiency, or as Dean puts it ‘the so-called distributions and imaginative leaps of conspiracy theory may be helpful tools for coding politics in the virtual relations of the techno-global information age’ (ibid.: 144).
While this organisational and critical potential of conspiracy theories might seem convincing in theory, I argue that the experience of Occupy (in) London suggests that such narratives – insofar as they are based on the perpetuation of a fundamental distrust and cynicism – actually have the opposite potential to undermine solidarity and collective organisation. As I will demonstrate below, the conspiracy theory that there were undercover police and agents infiltrating the movement proved to be a fracturing and divisive narrative that, far from creating a helpful tool for coding politics and becoming a vehicle for political contestation, actually helped to dissolve and break the movement apart.
And yet, as Birchall has argued, conspiracy theories might instead be thought of as useful for challenging the normative distribution of the police order. By pushing the limits of what counts as ‘reasonable’ knowledge and subsequently demonstrating the contingency of those limits, she argues that conspiracy theories can advance marginalised and dismissed ‘folk knowledges’ while at the same time illustrating how ‘all knowledge is only ever “theory”, that the relationship between the sign and its referent is necessarily inflected by imaginary processes, and that any transcendental truth claims rely on contingent strategies of information’ (Birchall 2006: 73). Conspiracy theories, in other words, might be defended on the grounds that they highlight normative orders of knowledge and hierarchies of authority, and these police that which may or may not be considered ‘sensible’. Or, in Felicity’s words:
[Conspiracy theory] is that feeling that something’s wrong and that you don’t like the current system. Yet because you are in the current system, you’re so engulfed in it, it’s very hard to find a way to resist it or to you know … ’cause in a way it’s not really enough to resist: you have to start tearing its logic apart.
By illustrating that there is a police logic at play, the argument is that conspiracy theories break through foreclosures of resistance and instead ‘start tearing the logic apart’. By demonstrating where the distribution is being drawn between the sensible and non-sensible, conspiracy theories allow activists not only to discern that line but to see it as contingent and un-fixed (i.e. challengeable).
And yet the evidence from Occupy (in) London, once again, suggests that this doesn’t seem to work in practice. Rather than pushing activists to challenge police order logic and distribution, instead such conspiracy narratives add to the libertarian cynicism of power and collective authority, seeing all authority as something to be avoided. Theories of the state colluding with the market (‘the 1%’), for instance, foreclosed alternative possibilities of what government or political parties could be, instead framing them as necessarily corrupted and corrupting of authentic resistance and change. Faced only with cynical and snide ridicule, politicians and experts felt emboldened by neoliberal normativity, and able to simply dismiss the idea of alternatives as ‘non-sense’. Not only did this dismiss the state in advance as a crucial arena of post-crash struggle, but it also defined politicians and experts as those in possession of legitimate ‘authority’, while the protestors, in comparison, were the ones without authority.
Crossing over with this cynical approach to the state is our third and final defence of conspiracy theory, which argues that – while such narratives of power might not necessarily be ‘true’ – they nevertheless capture something about the nature of power, oppression, and democratic deficit:
If you can easily suspect a government of doing that sort of thing, then it’s bad enough. If you can imagine them doing it, then it’s bad already because it means they have the capability of doing it.
(2014, int. 6)
The other thing I think about this conspiracy thing is that, it’s contemporary myth, if you like, it’s always rooted in something. I looked into this a while back. I looked into rumour and the sociological functions of rumour and urban legends always point to something … some kind of instinctive truth. For example, there is an urban legend of crocodiles in the [New York] subways, and sociologists look at it and say: ‘there is a clear mythical perspective that there are great powerful forces under the surface that are dangerous and moving around’. And I really think that’s got some weight to it, the kind of narrative we come up with – the reptilian overlords, the bloodsucking aristocrats – I mean, that’s very symbolic.
(Shaun)
The argument here is that if people can imagine elites acting in such a way against the public interest and with unaccountable impunity, then the situation has already got ‘bad enough’. There is a ‘grain of truth’ to all theories, there is no smoke without fire, even if the theory itself might seem a little unbelievable or far-fetched. For these defenders, therefore, conspiracy theory not only tells us something about the truth that power is unequally distributed in an (allegedly) democratic society, but also that power is something dangerous, that is operating ‘beneath the surface’, and which more people should wake up to and become aware of.
To reiterate, it is not the intention of this chapter to take a stance on the accuracy of conspiracy theories of power, but to critically elaborate on how such narratives develop problematic constructions, framings, and understandings of the relationship between power and resistance. The problem with this final defence, therefore, is not that all conspiracy theories are simply false understandings of power, but that they encourage the construction of power as something which is, by its nature, top-down, nefarious, and operating behind appearances. This model not only extends modern narratives of truth and postmodern narratives of cynicism, but also pre-positions activists as the ‘powerless’ and the ‘marginal’ when faced with all-encompassing and secret powers which can never be reached or challenged. When this intersects with ideas of authenticity, the problem is then further amplified through a cultural tendency to then celebrate this powerlessness and marginality as a virtue and sign of authenticity.
Conspiracy theories may well have some political potential in certain contexts – such as facilitating critical organisation, challenging normative distributions, and capturing part-truths of power – but it is my contention that they perhaps do more harm than good, by spreading distrust, libertarian cynicism and foreclosure, as well as pre-positioning activists as ‘the weak’. Conspiracy theories are a direct result of a disenchanted and cynical political climate, characterised by profound disillusionment, disconnectedness, and alienation felt towards collective institutions, as well as a sense of powerlessness, helplessness, and anxiety brought on by a decline in symbolic efficiency. As has been argued elsewhere, in this climate, conspiracy theories might well be considered a predictable part of any movement, which ‘symbolically takes to task the political leaders of the most powerful nation-states’ as ‘this can go hand-in-hand – visually, rhetorically and analytically – with the depiction of world leaders and their associates as secretive, undemocratic conspirators trying to take control of economic processes’ (Schlembach 2014: 18). But I argue that effective resistance is not, in fact, something prevented by secret and nefarious powerful interests which are opposing activists from behind the scenes; but by a normative structure and foreclosure that was actually maintained through such cynical models of power and resistance.
One of the more sinister explanations given for the eventual fracturing and dissolving of the Occupy movement in London was that a number of activists were in fact undercover agents who had infiltrated the movement in order to corrupt and sabotage its resistance from within. Such a suspicion that their fellow protestors could be part of a conspiracy against the movement in some capacity – be that the police, the security services, or the Illuminati – was widely shared within the movement, as indicated by a number of high-profile cases which demonstrated how police in the UK do not consider it beyond their legitimate capabilities to infiltrate even peaceful movements (with perhaps the most famous example being ‘Mark Stone (Kennedy)’ who went undercover in environmental movements for seven years (see Evans and Lewis 2013). For some, while such infiltrations were clearly an abuse of power, they were also evidence that their protest was morally right and presented a real political challenge to the establishment. After asking outright if I was undercover police, for example, James explained:
They’re all over us! They’re studying hard what we’re doing. They’re studying Occupy and they’re infiltrating the squats and they’re spending multi-million pounds to get inside our heads, our motivations, and find out what it is we want to do, how we plan to do it, and the dangers of how that could spread (because if it does spread, they’re in real shit!) And they know this because they know how much they’re going to cut and they know how desperate people will become, they’re going to increasingly pump money into security and politicking and military and surveillance to quell further unrest.
Who exactly ‘they’ were was not always made completely clear, but ‘they’ were understood to be worried about the potential impact of the Occupy movement, or at least concerned enough that they were attempting to directly police and oppress the protest using surveillance and intelligence, pre-empting direct action in order to organise against them, and disciplining the protest from spreading further. For James, it was clear that what the movement was doing was important, otherwise why would ‘they’ be trying to stop it?
The overall effect of this particular conspiracy theory within the movement, however, was not one of self-designated pride for having created something important, effective, and worthwhile. Instead, speculation and rumour hung in the air, with accusations beginning to circulate about who the ‘agents’ were. This soon developed into clear organisational problems of who should (or should not) be trusted:
Well, I mean there’s probably infiltrators on the site – obviously we can’t know who it is – but I have more respect for people … the infiltrators who actually have to sleep in tents and stuff and live on hardly any food. It was funny at St Paul’s, you know, people with no money somehow got fuller of face … seemed to be getting wider.
(Greg)
I think there is a possibility that capitalism may try to infiltrate this to cause problems and things like that, but if that happens, I am absolutely certain that we’ll seek them out and send them on their way.
(2012, int. 8)
But Occupy was certainly infiltrated by this. I wouldn’t have much problem naming who they were, but there might have been one that I missed. And they’re always good fun doing the work, we feed rubbish information to take back [laughs]. No, I mean, there’s always been undercover police in every left-wing organisation. Even the right-wing organisations (even though they’d be more sympathetic to the right-wing organisations).
(2014, int. 11)
You know there was infiltrators at various levels. You’ve got MI6 around the corner you know, because of the Anonymous being there as well, there was CIA (and it was actually mentioned in court, CIA involvement).
(2013, int. 13)
It was taken as read that there were definitely infiltrators within the movement, with ‘clues’ including something as innocent as activists ‘getting fuller of face’ despite a lack of food, and ‘slips’ being as innocuous as those who turned up at the camps with expensive, brand-new tents and sleeping bags (or even those who simply arrived in pairs, including two men who had apparently arrived wearing matching socks and black boots). Despite a lack of clear and direct evidence, however, the activists were certain that there were spies and saboteurs among them, as if the very fact that it was difficult to know who they were was itself an indication that there was a conspiracy afoot to try and bring down the movement.
Given this atmosphere in the background, James wasn’t the only interviewee who was somewhat suspicious of whether I – with a voice recorder, notepad, and official consent form – was trying to infiltrate and gather intelligence on the movement for the police. But I was by no means alone in being treated with suspicion and distrust simply for being a newcomer. As Harry explained:
I mean, even the same way you got in contact with me, I thought: ‘ok, maybe they’ve [Occupy] sent this guy to me to find out if I’m kosher?!’ because it does make you start to think like that … When I went to the actual meeting, these people who were facilitating the meeting I found very cold. I felt there was a real wariness towards me. I voiced my concern saying: ‘look, I think some of these people might think I’m some sort of undercover agent, they might think I’m press, you know? I’ve come from nowhere, I’ve turned up, I’ve said can I get involved … yeah, maybe they think I’m police or press or … you know?’ And he said … I can’t actually remember what he said, I can’t remember whether he said ‘maybe’ or ‘not sure’.
Distrust towards newcomers brought on by the fear of infiltration created clear preclusions and hierarchies within the movement, making it less easy to welcome people to the movement and to qualitatively extend to others. This wariness created a debilitating doubt within the organisation, and some activists expressed dismay at the growing paranoia within the movement:
I think there’s a lot that goes on that we have no knowledge about … I think that undercover policing thing … people are bound to get paranoid about that because there have been so many revelations and a lot of … I mean people’s trust has been destroyed.
(2014, int. 1)
Sometimes when you get too well known, then people start accusing you of being a police officer and that is damaging as it can land you in trouble sometimes. If they bad-mouth you to other people, then you’re going to be suspected.
(Dan)
Accusations of people being saboteurs became more and more common as the movement began to fracture and break apart, with cliques even formed by those who shared reservations about certain individuals, in order to keep them out of decision-making. Newcomers who wanted to join in or learn more about Occupy (and therefore asked ‘too many questions’) were treated with immediate suspicion, while long-involved personalities who had become ‘too well known’ within the movement were accused of being agents trying to take over, co-opt, and steer Occupy in an ineffective direction. This meant that those who were simply trying to join the movement of ‘the 99%’, or just to speak up and offer an alternative point of view at the assemblies, started to be viewed sceptically:
For me, there’s a very strong discomfort in being distrustful. We want to be a movement of the 99% and include people who look a bit different and don’t really turn up to these kinds of things. But if we immediately treat them as coppers, then they’re not going to feel welcome, etc. … It’s the threat of those things more than the reality that does the damage. I mean, if anyone could be a copper, then as soon as you see anything that anyone is doing as ‘counter-productive’ to the movement (as per your vision of it) – ‘hang on a minute, you’re a cop! That’s why you’re doing this because you want to fuck everything up!’
(2014, int. 3)
By creating a ‘zero-level’ argument in open debates, theories of infiltration allowed people to hang onto their individualised views of the movement and dismiss the views of others merely as ‘sabotage’. Thus, through such ‘simplifications of power to be found in paranoid rhetoric’, a minority of activists were able to simply ‘produce knee-jerk reactions to anything that threatened their belief system’ (Birchall 2006: 89). Unfalsifiable arguments that people were only disagreeing because they were trying to create division and break the movement apart were utilised by individuals in order to maintain their previously held positions and beliefs, never having had to be prepared to compromise or to be reflexive in the direction of collective solidarity, and even using such accusations as a last resort in order to supply stubbornness. Subsequently, raising alternative ideas which went against wider consensus became treated less as evidence of democratic vibrancy and more as an attempt to manipulate and destroy the movement.
It could be argued, therefore, that there did not actually need to be undercover agents within the movement for the damage to be done. This is not to say that there weren’t infiltrators, but it seems that the theory itself was enough to spread just enough insecurity and distrust among the activists to cause them to eventually split and divide. Once again, Jenny provided a valuable insight into how the theory of conspiracies can, by itself, dissolve movement solidarity, making further comparisons with her experience at Greenham Common. She recalled that at the peace camp ‘there was certainly an inordinate amount of conversation about undercover agents and such … some people were obsessed with it and many people were accused of being one’. One theory in particular – which was initially brought to the group by an activist returning from arrest – was that the Russians (in collaboration with the British) had developed a weapon that could make the activists in the camp suddenly fall ill:
The nickname for this microwave bombardment was ‘zapping’ and she [the informant] said ‘zapping’ was going on at Greenham. Within short order, numbers of women started leaving the camp and becoming ill … and I used to say: ‘well, I haven’t been zapped!’ It was supposed to happen … you’d be sitting around the fire and somebody would say: ‘I’ve been zapped’. And I’d think, really?
For Jenny, the rumour that the camp was under attack was enough to begin tearing it apart. It therefore didn’t matter whether ‘zapping’ was real or not because, after the conspiracy had been spread by this ‘double agent’, it was able to act as a meta-conspiracy or a rumour started by the police in order to disrupt their protest. Continuing with her story, Jenny then told me that she was invited to take part in a Channel 4 documentary on the Greenham Common protest in the early 1990s, which was also going to include a former intelligence officer. However, the programme was cancelled at the last moment:
to a huge amount of disturbance on behalf of TV critics who said it was going to be a great programme and why was it being taken off the air? And certainly, in my own mind, it’s because this guy was going to say it’s an exercise in psychological warfare. And I think that’s quite interesting in terms of conspiracy theories … because it’s a double-bluff, isn’t it?
Whether or not ‘zapping’, or the sudden cancellation of the programme, is evidence of conspiracy is beside the point. What this story demonstrates is the power of conspiracy theory in creating distrust and division within the movement, a narrative that is perhaps more effective than any infiltration in destroying collective organisation. Conspiracies of infiltration have the potential, it seems, to cause more damage as myths and rumour, than they might as surveillance, espionage, or sabotage. Such paranoia creates situations of fracturing and division, breaking apart efforts to organise collectively as well as democratically negotiate the movement’s collective identity, appearance, and actions.
Frustration, stress, sleep deprivation, extreme weather, paranoia-inducing drugs, as well as the inability to care properly for those suffering from mental illness, surely did nothing to alleviate the distrust which developed between members of the Occupy movement in London. As things began to fragment, and people became ever more exhausted, accusations of who was responsible for compromising the movement (and all the effort the activists had invested into it) became rife. Disagreements were no longer seen as the hallmark of democratic negotiation, but instead as evidence of a conspiratorial plan to undermine and sabotage their resistance, leading to the development of exclusive cliques and hierarchical circles of trust. In other words, the problem of conspiracy theory here is that it foreclosed the possibility of collective organisation and solidarity, instead lending itself to further preclusions and unaccountable hierarchies.
As the group which was imagined to be directly opposed to ‘the 99%’, ‘the 1%’ became an empty container for many post-crash grievances and summed up Occupy’s anger and indignation at neoliberal collusions between ostensibly ‘democratic’ governments and plutocratic demands to socialise the crisis through bailouts, quantitative easing, austerity, tax relief, and tax avoidance. What is particularly at stake in the idea of ‘the 1%’, is that corporations are seen to be operating against the democratic will of the electorate with a disproportionate sway over the policy and decisions that representatives make. The implication being that there was a consistent ‘elite’ conspiracy across state and economy, with the power to make far-reaching decisions of global significance despite merely being ‘the 1%’. This powerful, anti-democratic ruling class was, in the aftermath of the crisis, considered simply to be maintaining inequality, injustice, and democratic deficit for its own mutual benefit:
Let us be under no illusions that the ruling class and their executives in government have got an armoury that they will use against us: we’ve seen that in various countries around the world.
(2012, int. 8)
I think Occupy is against exclusivity, yeah? Occupy’s promoting inclusivity … but I think that’s where we left with the 1% … I think we can be pretty sure that the 1% who are in power are not going to give up, not in the short term. I think it’s a lot of things going on at the moment that they won’t give up lightly, and as far as I’m concerned, they can fuck off to the Cayman Islands and suck it.
(2012, int. 9)
Clearly the very powerful do conspire in their mutual interests – and that’s why they are the 1% – but it’s because they conspire very effectively and they get together in Davos to work out some specific elements of that.
(2014, int. 3)
The stock exchange hosts and supports all these disgusting corporations that are harming us in so many different way and are basically controlling our lives. We have so little say in stuff that affects us and international trade is something that affects us all … the whole global capitalist system is something that affects us all.
(2013, int. 6)
Considering themselves to be ‘under no illusions’, these activists had seen the ‘truth’ behind ‘the 1%’ as an international ruling class supported by powerful national governments and their armoury, ready to conspire and act towards their mutual protection of power, status, and wealth during the crisis. The notion of ‘the 1%’, therefore, expressed a suspicion of powerful and wealthy individuals acting in cahoots, purposefully exploiting democratic loopholes and corrupt parliaments in order to get their own way. Collective formal politics (such as political parties), as well as democratic governments, were simply fronts for much more closet operations and interests:
Because that’s the arrogance of politicians, they think they can do whatever. They call it ‘democracy’ … how is it a democracy when two million people go on the streets and say: ‘we’re totally against sending troops to Afghanistan/Iraq’. They go on the streets … and they totally ignore them. And this is called a democracy. I think democracy is a name for tricking people right?
(2012, int. 8)
[Austerity] is a deliberately designed programme to slaughter your public services, to sell them off to people-in-power’s mates who run the utility company and the private services or whatever, and you know, funnel money out of people … and keep them so fucking hard at it, working, paying rent, being able to afford the bus, the food, everything else, dealing with all the other shit that’s going on.
(2013, int. 9)
Elected politicians, as part of ‘the 1%’, were a cynical and deceptive group, guided by selfish and instrumental principles of serving their own careers, as well as others in their class. Members of Parliament were understood to be abusing the trust placed in them by their electorate in order to simply further their own interests (rather than social justice or democracy) and subsequently – rather than seeing the ‘1%’ as a group which had been legitimised by the continuation of neoliberal normativity – instead such narratives made a pathology out of individual actions. Whenever a politician broke a promise or defended corporate interests over democratic interests, this was simply an inevitable part of what is, in essence, a shady, immoral, and untrustworthy state.
This framing of power, therefore, extended a profound libertarian disillusionment towards the state (as a central and influential arena of struggle) and, by extension, any formal collective organisation or project (such as a party). Central government was seen as inherently flawed and beyond repair, a corrupted and corrupting system that will always be systematically exploited and abused by ‘the 1%’:
And then, you know, in the news we see: ‘oh yeah, politicians, MPs, we’re going to give ourselves possibly ten grand [pay rise] because we think we’re worth it!’ And you think: ‘You cunts! You fucking wankers!’ There’s all this … all this kind of poverty going on (and we all know the Cabinet is supposed to be full of millionaires anyway). It’s just greed looking after itself.
(Harry)
And the stuff in Westminster, that’s not politics. That’s not politics. And I’m bored of saying ‘politicians lie’ I mean we know that. I mean, in a sense, why are we still surprised by that?
(2013, int. 4)
Look what’s happened with the Tories and the Liberals and stuff. They’ll change these things and hope we kind of forget by the next time around. And even if an MP loses … the lobbyists aren’t going to care, are they? They’ll hedge their bets and they’ll bribe and lobby the next person who comes in, and the system itself can’t really change that.
(Greg)
It was reasoned that even seemingly idealistic and trustworthy politicians, as soon as they were elected, were susceptible to lying, spin, and becoming part of ‘the 1%’. They were bound to collude with corporate interests eventually, and it was an easily predictable outcome of this system that MPs would, at some point, break promises to the electorate and let them down. They would sooner give themselves a pay rise or abuse the expenses system (even when so many came from already privileged and wealthy backgrounds) while the rest of the country were told to put up with austerity, than actually challenge corporate interests on behalf of the democratic post-crash grievances of the people. And nothing was going to change that.
Central to this cynical framing of ‘the 1%’, therefore, were debates about whether Occupy (in) London should or should not engage with the parliamentary system, either by forming its own party or by advocating support for existing organisations that resembled its views (such as the Green Party). The debate grew in the last days of the campsites when they were facing eviction, but became an extremely hot topic when counterpart movements in Greece (Syriza) and Spain (Podemos) appeared to be having limited early success in working alongside political parties. For many, however, entering the dark halls of power would necessarily lead to co-optation and therefore corruption of their authentic resistance, making them complicit to a system that only worked for ‘the 1%’:
I think Occupy as a whole didn’t want us to be a political party. I think the point was that the political system is part of the problem and I think that’s right.
(2014, int. 1)
In terms of anything that veers towards reformism or complicity with the status quo of the state organising … these aren’t models that solve the problems that Occupy was initially trying to address (or trying to address from my point of view). So, I don’t think these reformist notions are productive, no.
(2014, int. 4)
Why would we choose to work within the frameworks that are fundamentally, by their own structure, inherently causing these problems? Why would we choose to engage on that platform?
(Lucy)
The brand is big enough that Occupy is perhaps the only name that could challenge UKIP or challenge the major parties and say there is a different way to do this. But then again, if we went into electoral politics, it would lose an amount of innocence and the innocence as seen by the public, the simplicity of the 99% and the 1%.
(2014, int. 11)
When ‘government’ and the formal organisation of politics is seen as the problem, then any hint of reformism or developing a radical model of the state – or even simply viewing the state as a central and crucial arena of struggle and the distribution of possibility – is dismissed in advance as inauthentic complicity. Occupy (in) London’s extra-parliamentary status was taken as evidence of its authenticity. Anything to do with the state or formal parties subsequently became the object of libertarian suspicion and rejection, thereby denying the protestors the possibility of using the state as an influential platform of resistance. This isn’t to say that Occupy should have in any way limited itself to only engaging with the state, nor that it should even have necessarily become a political party, but that to not see the state as one major site of resistance among many others was a profound foreclosure of their ability to make their appearances seen and their voices heard.
In contrast, there were others within the movement who saw forming a political party or supporting an electoral alternative as crucial to changing the system from within and affecting wider societal change. Thus, many regretted the fact that Occupy (in) London never developed into something along these lines:
But I think at heart it needs to be a political party that people can have faith in. And parties without spin doctors. A party where you have just got people to be brave enough just to be honest about shit.
(Harry)
The more level-headed and mature people … I mean, ok, you have rebellious people and a few good people can actually make changes, but unfortunately for that rebellion to succeed, you really need to actually have the majority of people. Suffragettes and the civil rights movement didn’t do it by themselves, they ended up with politicians and unions and everybody else got involved. So, you can say: ‘oh yeah, we’re here, we’re radical, we’re special … you can’t join’. It’s like no, that’s ridiculous.
(Jenny)
Well, when Occupy was happening, I was dead against it. When it was a camp, it seemed really poisonous to go down that track. But now we’re trying to do things differently … well not differently … we’re trying to promote ideas rather than just be against other ideas. It seems immature to discard the state. But having said that, I’m not sure I’d want to engage with the state via political parties … I don’t know if there is another way because this is actually a huge hole in my activism … it’s a big hole and I’d like to address it. I kind of think the Green Party has some very positive things it wants to do.
(2014, int. 10)
Adopting a much less cynical position on organised politics and the state as an arena of resistance, these activists argued instead that it might be possible to create a ‘different sort’ of party, one which was more transparent and without the tendency towards spin, double-bluffs, secrecy, or conspiracy. For these advocates, while cautious, it might be possible to change the system from within and use the state as one platform from which to make an alternative appear.
And yet the lack of movement in this direction meant that Occupy (in) London only ever saw formal organisation and the state as limited to its current form:
We say ‘fuck you, government, what you are doing is wrong’. We try to do here altogether, the people together (because you’re so fucking useless, government). We try to do it here in a way that’s a little more sensitive or sensible.
(2013, int. 8)
This [Occupy] is the disenfranchised of this country. And the whole campaign for ‘none of the above’ would work by saying that a vote for anything else is a vote for the 1% … which of course, in truth, is what it is.
(Jenny)
That the activists had allowed themselves to be positioned and defined in relation to this (neoliberal) normative insistence of the state’s incapacity for direct democracy and radical justice, the police order which justified post-crash intervention of the state into the market, as well as ‘unavoidable’ and ‘regrettable’ austerity measures, was simply accepted. The state ‘couldn’t’ (or ‘shouldn’t’) do anything but rescue the wealthy, manage the budget through austerity, and provide national security against terrorism.
What’s more, by positioning themselves in opposition to all things to do with the government, when the politician and economist pronounced their authority on the matter – that this was the only thing they could do – this was mirrored only by an implicit activist acceptance of their own lack of authority in comparison. Cynical, snide criticisms and insults aimed at politicians did nothing to fundamentally challenge this dynamic, and only foreclosed the possibility of a democratic authority and intervention in this distribution of the sensible. The decision not to engage with the state and stick to a cynical mocking of ‘the 1%’, in other words, only had the effect of reducing and restricting the possibility of their resistance to, in effect, ‘asking for the political leadership of the country and the corporate financial system to change, to clean up their act and be less beastly to the global poor’ (Winlow and Hall 2012: 10). Or as one activist put it:
We’re basically rationalistic, dualistic, and reactive. We’re all inheritors of this kind of distorted culture. And I think … ‘we’re not hierarchical, so we’re horizontal’… as if just being anti-hierarchy and trying to enforce horizontality just gives us solutions automatically. And as if organising things in participatory groups (as opposed to engaging with the centralised political system) … I think that’s our biggest problem. The system is very happy that movements appear radical – like Occupy – [but] don’t have any means or political levers. I think that fits capitalism quite well!
(2014, int. 3).
Although ‘the 1%’ may form a group with a collective interest that acts to its mutual benefit, they can easily ignore criticisms that accuse them of ‘not really being democratic’ or that they are ‘only in it for themselves’. This does nothing to undermine their normative authority on the situation, nor assert the authority of democratic alternatives, and instead problematically accepts ‘common-sense’ limits on what the post-crash state and collective politics could achieve. By addressing grievances ‘upwards’, Occupy (in) London was ‘reinforcing rather than subverting the master’s authority’ (Dean 2009: 84), positioning itself in relation to ‘the 1%’ and therefore accepting its own designation as ‘the one without authority’ (i.e. ‘non-sense’). Or as Butler puts it, through ‘the effort to identify the enemy as singular in form’, activists risk ‘a reverse discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms’ (2006: 18). Through such a construction of power, the state was seen as something which belonged to ‘them’ and that ‘we’ cannot ever hope to change, resembling the type of cynical paranoia found in popular culture where ‘the enemy is ‘the system’, the hidden ‘organisation’, the anti-democratic ‘conspiracy’ (Žižek 2011b: 170). In comparison to what is perceived to be a corrupted and corrupting system, resistance is rendered futile as the desire not to become ‘one of them’ by being ‘co-opted’ into the state apparatus encourages further cynicism, rather than an organised intervention into the normative structures of the police order. Or in Birchall’s words: ‘if I choose to read an event through the discourse of conspiracy theory, this will determine my agenda … I will find sinister rather than structural reasons for unanswered questions’ (2006: 49).
At another level again from undercover police and ‘the 1%’, are theories of international pan-historical conspiracy networks. These are the narratives which are commonly understood to be conspiracy theories and, for their proponents, they captured the nefarious and secret organisation behind all appearances which was deemed to be in control of everything – from politics, to the economy, to the mainstream media. As the example of conspiracy theory par excellence, speculation about ‘the powers that be’ demonstrates a common theme running across all conspiracy theories: the cynical distrust of appearances. Whether a theory of undercover agents, state and corporate collusion, or international networks: they all rely on a model and understanding of power as being hidden, nefarious, and acting in secret behind appearances. Thus, they share a certain position of aiming at unaccountable and coercive agencies which are deemed to be ‘out there’, preventing or limiting change and operating against our will.
Following Sloterdijk, we could argue that such cynical narratives are themselves a product of a wider postmodern cynicism, in which the modern pursuit of ‘un-concealing the truth’ has created a situation in which ‘a twilight arises, a deep ambivalence’ (1987: 22). If the European Enlightenment project was a search for objective reason and truth via rational thinking, it is Sloterdijk’s contention that, in practice, it produced the opposite, by rendering all appearances as potential screens to truth. Subsequently, because truth is understood as something hidden and concealed (rather than something normatively constructed), ‘a new form of realism bursts forth, a form that is driven by the fear of being deceived or overpowered … everything that appears to us could be the deceptive manoeuvre of an overpowering evil enemy’ (ibid.: 330). Rather than bringing about ‘consciousness’ or ‘illumination’, modernity brings about an ‘enlightened false consciousness’ that creates a disabling sphere of confusion, suspicion, distrust, cynicism, and symbolic inefficiency. Once power has been constructed in this mode, then the aim of resistance becomes to try and reveal the ultimate truth of power, to ‘sort of peel back the curtain or try and peel back the Monopoly board and seeing if there was … if there is anything underneath’ (Harry). Denying the structural operations of power, instead cynical activists set about findings clues for the ‘real’ power behind appearances, creating a debilitating situation in which the ‘truth’ of power can actually ‘hide out in the open’. Through an ‘emperor’s new clothes’-style double bluff, Žižek has criticised the way in which such cynical resistance, with ‘all its ironic detachment … leaves untouched the fundamental of ideological fantasy, the level on which ideology structured the social reality itself’ (2008d: 27).
In other words, the distribution of the sensible, as a police order which needs to be challenged at a structural level, is unaffected and uninterrupted by efforts to try and find some power beneath it. No one believes the truth in front of their eyes. The objective structural violence of the status quo – extreme socio-economic disparity, war, violence, the international and historical exploitation of labour, the democratic deficit of market-driven policy – is not considered to be the true source of the problem – the truth of power must be deeper. This is why, for Foucault, ‘the political question … is not error, illusion, alienated consciousness or ideology; it is truth itself’ (1980: 97) because ‘the mask is not simply hiding the real state of things, the ideological distortion is written into its very essence … that is why we must avoid the simply metaphors of de-masking, of throwing away the veils which are supposed to hide the naked reality’ (Žižek 2008d: 25). For the postmodern subject that no longer trusts their eyes, the normal distribution of power (the emperor is naked) is overlooked in favour of going after some deeper conspiratorial truth and aiming for that final moment of revelation when all the workings of power will finally be exposed.
This construction of power is particularly debilitating, because such pan-historical and international networks, like the Illuminati, the Rothschilds and the Freemasons, were by definition broad, deep, and secret powers that could never actually be fully known or challenged. Conspiracy theories could never be fully revealed and instead would have to be pieced together through snippets of revelation and traces of evidence. Some, for example, found clues for these all-powerful agencies in popular culture:
[The public is] being subliminally programmed through this stuff already, so when the ‘change’ happens, the thoughts are there. Films like Avatar are out there and whatever, that’s put there by the Illuminati obviously and the truth is in it. Like that’s their way of telling us … like … well putting the truth in front of our eyes (like The Matrix) and there’s loads of other films like that that are like, you know, it’s blatantly put in front of your face, but most people see it as sort of like, you know, it’s just a film or whatever. Behind ‘V’ [for Vendetta] there’s a good message and the people who have made those films which are controlled by the Masonry or whatever … they put that out there for a reason.
(2012, int. 6)
Despite being the theories most at risk of being dismissed as ‘non-sense’, for this activist, the existence of such vast powerful networks was blatantly obvious and he chided the public for falling for it. For him, the truth of power was there to be uncovered if people only opened their eyes to the flagrant clues and how we have been subliminally programmed to accept ‘their’ domination. While most people would not notice such clues, this activist has seen through such appearances to the power hidden beneath.
Describing international conspiracy networks in such a mundane and ‘obvious’ manner, however, was not the most common way in which they were invoked. For others, there was a clear attempt to be a little more cautious in describing the secret workings of power. Wanting to avoid being designated as ‘non-sense’, instead this group downplayed the ‘obviousness’ of the theories, by adding appeals to common sense and evidence in order to bolster their credibility:
And you start to think … ok, you thought it was a ‘conspiracy theory’, but then you find out ‘actually …’ And you only find these things when people start talking and a number of things like Bilderberg, and the 147 corporations that control the economy of the world (and actually it’s been proven each time). And unfortunately, some of our guys go for the ‘conspiracy side’ – like the Bilderberg or the Rothschilds and everything else – you find out that the conspiracy side of Morgan Chase, Warburtons, Rothschilds … they’re not listed in the Forbes magazine. The 147 corporations have been proven by New Scientist in an article back in 2011. So, you start to think: ‘ok, there’s actually a bunch of people that are hidden out there, maybe?’ I don’t know but at least we know something.
(Jenny)
Jenny’s biographical appeal to knowledge is designed to show how she became convinced that there was ‘something’ going on behind appearances in an appropriately rational manner and through careful consideration and investigation. By referring to authoritative empirical sources and research (e.g. that something was in the New Scientist but missing from Forbes) she also attempts to appeal to ‘reliable sources’ of empirical evidence to make her point.
Such use of journalistic sources, however, was inconsistent with other arguments that the mainstream media were simply not to be trusted. Large media corporations and mainstream journalism were taken to be secretly on the side of the conspiracy, and were therefore covering up or spreading misinformation on behalf of the powers that be:
Right, obviously the public’s ideas are shared by what’s in the newspapers or on the radio, on television and everything like that. So, there’s always a campaign against, you know, dissent, alright? I don’t know who leads these campaigns, but crooks, thieves, and liars (and I think Rupert Murdoch is one of the biggest of those).
(2012, int. 8)
Not that there is any ‘one brain’ of capitalism, but the powers that are out there to protect themselves were able to use that [media] as a means of defence. To show them in a bad light – occupy – to show them in a bad light.
(Harry)
I think one of the geniuses of the modern information deluge system is that the real conspiring that goes on and is operative in the world is diluted in a sea of so many stories of conspiracy that the actual conspiracy is very difficult to distinguish.
(2014, int. 3)
Pre-empting the recent epistemological panic surrounding post-truth, alternative facts, and fake news, these activists were already struggling with the symbolic inefficiency and confusion caused by the information deluge in 2012–14. The problem is that it becomes impossible to say which information might be trusted and acted upon, which information is the ‘truth’, and which contains a bias or secret agenda. Yet once power is assumed to be something that is hidden behind appearances, then any appearances will simply become part of the cover-up and all sources of information rendered suspect. Cynicism becomes the automatic reaction.
Brian, in particular, demonstrated the sheer difficulty of navigating this field. Pointing out evidence of conspiracy at the Bilderberg conferences, he began (like Jenny) by attempting to add to the credibility of his theories by using empirical sources, as well as appeals to the authority of common sense:
We’re being fed a lot of lies. If you know that a lot of the plans for wars we’ve seen over the last decade were laid in the previous decade, then there is a plan … things don’t just happen. Are you familiar with Bilderberg? The annual meetings? Well, two years ago, if people mentioned to me ‘Bilderberg’ I’d say you don’t need to talk about Bilderberg or the Illuminati or whatever, you just need to look at the system, because if you mention the word ‘Bilderberg’ people regard you as a conspiracy theorist. I would actually say this is changing. And this year, for the first year, the mainstream media actually did serious reporting from outside Bilderberg.
He then continued by describing Bilderberg as a coalition of interests – financial, political, industrial, as well as the military and mainstream media – who were colluding in order to make decisions of global significance in their own interest. In order to provide further evidence of this, he cited the attendance list of the 2012 conference:
But if you look at the sequence of events, the people who are involved, last year, who was at Bilderberg in Chantilly? Kodmani, Bassma Kodmani, who was part of the Free Syrian Liberation Movement. So, clearly, what was being organised in Syria, she was being brought in to talk about that. So, these things are orchestrated. People imagine they just happen, that the Arab Spring just happens or whatever it may be, but these are carefully marshalled.
That the attendees included a member of the Syrian National Council was enough for Brian to conclude that events in that country were being centrally controlled, with the implication being that his understanding of power was more than speculation: he had reached the hidden truth of Bilderberg through the smallest details, clues, slips, and pieces of evidence:
The world of misinformation is very complex. Alex Jones rants on about Bilderberg and a few other things, as does David Icke, both those people also say a lot of other things which may or may not have credibility to them. So, does that undermine the whole rationale of what they say about Bilderberg? No, it doesn’t. But you know, we live in a very high-impact information age, so trying to separate out messages which are cloaked within stuff that may not be true is quite difficult. Just because Fox News says one thing doesn’t make it untrue, but a lot of other things they’re saying may be untrue.
Given that he (like many conspiracy-driven activists) saw mainstream journalism as part of the same conspiracy, Brian’s appeal to such sources of evidence directly contradicts his theory of power, with the reference to ‘serious reporting’ seeming to be an attempt to pre-empt criticism of his theory by referring to an ‘authoritative source’ of information. The way in which evidence for such conspiracy theories is utilised is directly relevant to the framing and foreclosure of resistance which follows. For many, the mainstream media could not be trusted to report on hidden interests and, even in cases of apparent revelation – such as when Jones, Icke, or Fox News did actually portray the truth – these were taken as further proof of an even deeper and wider conspiracy. There was a consistent and perpetual retreat of the ‘truth’ of power, which in turn made the activists’ self-appointed task to uncover it never-ending.
By relying on a never-ending search for empirical evidence and clues to corroborate claims, as well as reiterating the modernist idea that truth is something that needs to be ‘un-concealed’, conspiracy theories overlook reflexive and normative critiques and instead sustain the police order of what ‘counts’ as an authoritative source of knowledge. Or, as Dean argued in her research on UFO theorists, believers ‘tended to reinforce official assumptions about who or what can be credible because ufology wants to convince political and scientific authorities of the claims’ (2002: 42). In the drive to avoid being designated as ‘non-sense’, activists inadvertently support the very co-ordinates that distribute them in the first place as marginal and without authority. Such appeals to narratives of endless and untouchable secret power networks, in other words, extend a police order that marginalises activists in the first place, by accepting what counts as legitimate or sensible knowledge.
Constructions of resistance as faced with an all-powerful, insurmountable and hidden agency, become evacuated of all democratic authority, and some occupiers subsequently criticised such an approach, describing this as an ‘easy philosophy of opposition’:
So, I get the feeling that they aren’t really sure about what they believe in and will gravitate towards an easy philosophy of opposition. You know: ‘I’m unhappy, it’s just gone wrong, where’s the problem, who is it, oh it must be Thatcher, oh it must be this, it must be that’, you know?
(Sean)
We should stop talking about ourselves as ‘the resistance’. You’re already giving a position of inequality in which the other part is much stronger and is sort of oppressing you, and you’re just sort of trying to resist that, rather than trying to create a situation where you are equals.
(2013:10)
I think this is the thing, not allowing yourself to become a victim. If we’re talking about resistance, it’s never seeing yourself as a victim, that is when you’re being controlled. If you think you’re resisting against a higher power, then they’ve already controlled you. So that’s why I’m not so keen on this ‘resistance’ … it’s like, connect with your own power.
(2013:13)
The other side of the paranoia is it kind of romanticises protest, it kind of romanticises organisation somehow, because you feel like you’re operating outside of the status quo somehow. And: ‘oh, look at me, I’m going to do something illegal here, and I’m doing it in secret and in solidarity with a small clique behind me’. There’s lots of social capital that can be born from that.
(Julia)
In conspiracy theory, power and resistance are constructed as binary opposites. ‘The powers that be’ are understood to be something hidden that is acting with bad intentions, but also as something all-reaching, all-influencing, all-knowing, and ultimately, untouchable, unaccountable, and unchallengeable. In contrast, resistance is structured in relation to this power, as something marginal, powerless, ineffectual, ‘outside’ of influence, and without authority. At the point where this self-marginalisation intersects with authenticity, we also get ‘an easy philosophy of opposition’, or a narrative which argues that ‘we may be marginal, but at least we are righteous’; ‘we may be ineffectual, but at least we are authentic’; ‘we may be powerless, but at least we have the moral high ground’. Powerlessness subsequently becomes a sign of authenticity, celebrated as ‘an election and a distinction’ (Nietzsche 2008: 31), with accusations of a ‘cover-up’ [acting] as a homogenising agent to present the image of a corrupted “them” and a “romanticised and radical us”, as well as a lived socio-political reality’ (Birchall 2006: 46). With conspiracy theory, power is not understood as something normative and structural, but as something totalising, insurmountable, and unchallengeable, while resistance is fetishised in comparison as authentically marginal and righteously impotent.
Rather than dismissing conspiracy theories outright and playing into wider designations of the movement as ‘non-sense’, I have sought to recognise such narratives as a direct outcome of the kinds of issues that Occupy were attempting to address: grievances with the unaccountability and distances of government; disillusionment; the democratic deficit of post-crash neoliberalism; the unaccountable social and environmental impacts of global corporations; historically entrenched distributions of structural inequality; and the inauthenticity of capitalist culture. What’s more – while in some contexts conspiracy theory well may act as an organisational tool (Dean) which can present folk knowledges and challenge distributions of knowledge (Birchall) as well as capture ‘something’ about the nature of power – it has been my contention that a rise in distrust, a lack of authority, a foreclosure of alternative models of government and collective organisation, as well as a binary understanding of ‘secret power’ versus ‘impotent-but-authentic-resistance’ within Occupy (in) London did more harm than good.
Regardless of their empirical accuracy, I have argued that conspiracy theories are problematic as constructions of power and resistance. In the first place, they break apart solidarity and limit the possibly of a democratic and negotiated collective organisation by creating distrust and uneven distributions of power. When any fellow activist could be an undercover agent, suspicion and scepticism reign, fracturing and dissolving any chance of solidarity, democratic negotiation, or a qualitative extension to newcomers. Second, such theories play back into a libertarian logic that extends neoliberal cynicism towards the state, foreclosing the presentation of an alternative of what democratic governance or collective politics could be, as well as pre-denying themselves the state as one crucial arena of appearance and voice among others. When ‘the 1%’ are met with snide and cynical criticism, then the state is not only rashly dismissed as a crucial and influential site of struggle, but protesters also accept the police order limitations of what the state could possibly achieve within the post-crash context beyond austerity and socialising the crisis. Finally, ideas of conspiracy play into distributions of what counts as ‘truth’ (something to be unconcealed and revealed) which extends the confusion, uncertainty, and contradictions of symbolic inefficiency. When the truth of power is considered to be something hidden behind appearances, then this extends modernist conceptions of truth as well as postmodern cynicism, lending itself to a situation in which power can ‘hide out in the open’ without being challenged (the ‘truth’ must be deeper!). It is for this reason that Žižek has argued ‘the enemy today is not the fundamentalist but the cynic’ (2008d: xxiii).
In comparison to the hidden and nefarious conspiracy, the cynical activist overlooks structural criticisms in favour of searching for clues, slips, evidence, and the final moment in which the truth of power will be revealed. Intersecting with ideas of authenticity, this then can give rise to a certain enjoyment in marginality and exclusion, seeing their powerlessness as demonstrating their righteousness, moral superiority, and the underdog authenticity of their actions. Adopting a ‘siege mentality’, in other words, resistance becomes characterised by ‘a stubborn clinging to a certain equation of truth with powerlessness, or as acting out of an injured will’ which is ‘susceptible to growing rigidly defensive and brittle out of a sense of their imperilled existence … [tending] to preclude their addressing deep sources of injustice’ (Brown 2001: 23). Clinging to powerlessness and injury, the cynical activist celebrates their ‘imperilled existence’ and grows ‘rigidly defensive’, instead of addressing deep structures of injustice. This is a bizarre situation, in other words, in which ‘suffering lives as an identity rather than as general injustice or domination’ (ibid.: 39). Pursuing authenticity in powerlessness, a self-understanding of resistance develops in which ‘resentment prompts actions that [are] codified as just, and in which righteousness and inferiority act to ramify each other’ (Littler 2009: 9).
Movements, therefore, must therefore avoid such a ‘cunning of impotence’ in which:
the oppressed and downtrodden and violated tell themselves: ‘let us be different from evil, that is, good!’ [But] when listened to coldly and without prejudice, this actually means nothing more than ‘we weak are, after all, weak: it would be good if we refrained from doing anything for which we lack sufficient strength’.
(Nietzsche 2008: 30)
This construction of resistance is one that accepts (and champions) the police order designation of activists and alternatives as the marginal, weak, inconsequential, and powerless without authority. Instead, activists must take political responsibility by asserting their collective democratic authority, even if they are being distributed as ‘non-sense’. Through an aesthetic and reflexive intervention into normative structures of power, one which avoids the pitfalls of pursuing authenticity and the cunning of impotence while being backed by a collective, symbolically efficient organisation, it become possible to make ‘non-sense’ appear against its dismissal as such and directly challenge wider foreclosures of possibility.