Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics

Zizek explains that, unlike in desire, where the object emerges at the moment of its loss, in drive loss itself is an object.6 September 11 names such a loss. The very term designates not just a day but a trauma. September u has become a meme for loss, repeated endlessly in oficial accounts and reiterated in unoficial ones. In al these accounts, moreover, 9 In marks the loss resulting from excessive, impersonal, obscene power, power with litde regard for life, power permeated with the jouissance of its conviction. Explanations for what happened on September u, oficial and unoficial alike, circle around this knot of obscenity and loss, albeit in diferent circuits. Zizek further links drive to constituent anxiety, to pure confrontation with the void (objet petit a). 7 Theories of the events of 9 I n rely on and reinforce this constituent anxiety as they confront the specifc horror . of the disintegration of the social link, the destruction of the symbolic pact promising security and holding society together.

In much of the production of the 9 I 11 truth mpvement, this confrontation with a hole in the symbolic order is accompanied by jouissancerepetition, intensity, afect. The jouissance connecting each fact to another produces certainty as an efect-it feels true (we can feel it in our gut). Indeed, jouissance arises through connectivity, through the specificity and· systematicity of the facts circling the hole of loss. Connections are excessive, nearly impossibly interlinked. Every specific fact-exact times and temperat�res, flight schedules and passenger manifests, miltary exercises and oficial communiques-is linked. Everything is meaningful by virtue of pointing to something else. Enjoyment is produced by the very drive to link, connect, and document, by the intensity of detail and specificity. Because the most central component of the explanation remains unknown -who did it?-the evidence accumulates in extreme and specific detail, establishing connections without ever reaching its goal.

The 9 I 11 truth movement combines its intense certainty with an overwhelming skepticism. Explanations are doubted: why does the administration's story change over several years? Why are there diferences in the oficial times of the planes crashing and the towers folowing? Why is a close associate of Condoleezza Rice, Philip Zelikow, appointed to head the commission investigating 9 I 11? A volatile mix of certainty and skepticism occupies the place of the lack of belief in the oficial story.

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This combination of certainty and skepticism takes the form of the discourse of the university. We saw in chapter 3 that in university discourse the facts speak for themselves. Experts claim objectivity even as they attempt to overlook the institutional power that supports their claims to expertise. Scientific socialism, the press, and economics are al instances of university discourse. Each emphasizes facts. Facts are supposed to determine outcomes independent of power. Purporting to let the facts speak for themselves, the 9 I 11 truth movem.ent is structured in accordance with university discourse. Yet it lacks its authorizing support (the institutional power we saw Gutmann and Thompson assuming yet ignoring). Accordinglyj I view the movement for 9 I 1 truth as a clone of university discourse, a psychotic done. 8

Vhy psychotic? Because of Lacanian psychoanalysis's account of psychosis as a missing signifier, an absence and a foreclosure. The loss of authority on September 11 produced a hole in the already fragile, declining U.S. symbolic order. The Bush administration attempted to fil in that hole by explaining the events of the day in terms of terrorism. The 9 I u truth m.ovement rejects this explanation and builds a discourse around the hole that is left, a response that is psychotic in its formal structure. To hold its speculations together, this psychotic discourse models itself on other, more conventional discourses such as university discourse (hardly a surprise given both the present ubiquity of university discourse and the role of actual university professors in the movement) .

While the 9 I 11 truth movement is exemplary of the psychotic cloning of university discourse, the fragile discursive habitats of communicative capitalism increase the likely proliferation of such psychotic clones. Characterized by the circuit of drive, by an intensity, certainty, and skepticism that circles around a fundamental loss, psychotic discourse perpetuates anxiety. It renders all that comes into contact with it suspect, uncertain, permeated with possible meaning. The gap between the oficial story of 9 I 1 and the 9 I 11 truth movement (and reappearing within the movement itself) thus suggests less an engaged political struggle than it does a more debilitating political deadlock that displaces action onto impossible subjects, futures, and terrains. "What sort of politics is possible when there is knowledge without belie£ when certainty and skepticism persist in tandem, each supporting but imune to the other? And what does any answer to this question entail for aspirations to collective approaches to equity and justice?

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Conspiracy Theory

Conspiracy theory is typically considered a vernacular discourse, one that speaks and thinks outside the oficial institutions of power about power's excess, about the crimes and obscenities hidden from and by power's public face. Critics fault conspiracy theorists for their amateurishness, considering them dabblers in a realm of expert knowledge who try to know what they cannot know, what they should accept on faith. They dismiss conspiracy theorists as autodidacts unschooled in rules of evidence and rational argumentation. They deride conspiracy theorists for their extra-institutional position, their lack of conventional expertise. These critics emphasize as wel the absence of the credentials necessary to speak in what is upheld as the public sphere. A language of infection tends to folow as the critic worries about the health of the public, the vitality of public reason. For critics, the overal unauthorize� character of conspiracy theory signifies the illegitimacy of the theories produced by those who look for and find evidence of conspiracies. They treat co.nspitacy theorists in al their questions and suspicions, accumulations of facts and amassings of evidence, as extremists, deluded denizens of the lunatic fringe so alienated from general society that they are compeled to resort to the most outlandish explanations to make sense of the world and their lives in this world.

Some critics find conspiracy theorists to be so outside the mainstream that they mar or insult true political memory. Accusing those involved in the 9 I 11 truth movement of insulting the police oficers and firefighters who raced into the burning towers of the World Trade Center (a strange, displaced insult that fails to grasp how the alternative explanations of September 11 hardly insult these workers but instead the government who allegedly caused their deaths and now covers its crimes in their heroism),

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Senator John McCain finds 9 I n conspiracy theories "a distraction from the proper lessons of ${ \mathfrak { g } } / { \mathfrak { 1 1 } } ,$ from what is truly important to this countrY:'9 McCain reiterates the accepted critique of conspiracy theories: "They ignore the methods of science, the protocols of investigation, and the dictates of logic. The conspiracy theorists chase any bit of information, no matter how flimsy, and use it to fit their preordained conclusions. They ascribe to the government, or to some secretive group, powers wholly out of proportion to what the evidence suggests. And they ignore the facts that are present in plain sight:'10

The stigma attached to the "outsider-y-ness" of the conspiracy theorist enables the very term conspiracy theorist to be wielded so as to exclude a view in advance. For example, the New York Times columnist David Brooks dismissed Kevin Philips1S book American Theocracy as crude conspiracy mongering.11 The book is a critical account of the conservative coalition in American politics, a coalition that Phillips, as a young Republican strategist, helped build. Similarly, Senator James Inhofe sought to discredit attributions of global warming to human factors as "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people:'12 In each case, the critic attempts to render a book or an issue as so outrageous that no sensible person could possibly find it worth any serious attention.

The stigmatizing efect of labeling someone a conspiracy theorist is so great that allegations of conspiracy brought by governmental oficials seem somehow not themselves to be conspiracy theories. Theorizing a conspiracy, then, is not what makes a conspiracy theorist; thinkng or positing something that mainstream common sense (what Lacan calls "�he big Other") deems paranoid nonsense is. Thus, we find ourselves in the weird situation where some conspiracy theories have a presumed legitimacy in part because they cannot be called conspi.i-acy theories. Around the time the Bush administration was asserting that a conspiring group of Islamic fundamentalists armed with box cutters hijacked four planes, brought down the World Trade Center, smashed through the west wall of the Pentagon, and crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, U.S. government oficials and the mainstream media publicized the proliferation of conspiracy theories in the Arab world, conspiracy theories that blamed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on the Massad or the U.S. government itself. In a speech to the United Nations General Assem.­ bly on November 10, 2001, George W. Bush declared, "We must speak the truth about terror. Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the uthj malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty:' 13

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As part of this efort not to tolerate conspiracy theories, the State Department posted several articles "debunking" the top September n conspiracy theories on its website.14 Part of the problem with its debunking, however, is that it cites evidence many in the 9 I u truth movement find suspect, evidence like the video of a plane ·crashing into the Pentagon (many viewers, I among them, don't see a plane in this allegedly definitive proof) or tapes of Osama bin Laden taking responsibility for the attacks (some conspiracy theorists argue that the translation is wrong or that the tapes are fakes) . The State Department site also refers to a book put out by Popular Mechanics, Debunking 9 I 11 Myths: "Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up To The Facts, as wel as the 9 I 11 Commission Report, texts which the 9 In truth movement has already heavily criticized. And with respect to the 9 I 1 Commission Report, the truth movement is not alone: immersed in controversy from the beginning-the Bush administration attempted to block the formation of a commission and, after it conceded, persistently failed to fund the commission's work or supply it with the requested information-the commission's report was widely viewed as bland and disappointing at best. In the words of a H·arper's Magazine essay by Benjamin DeMott, the report is "a cheat anq a fraud. It stands as a series of evasive maneuvers that i.nf'antilze the audience, transform candor into iniquity, and conceal realities that demand immediate inspection and confrontation:'15

Some self-proclaimed conspiracy theorists celebrate their outsider status, finding that it establishes the authenticity of their work. Precisely because they have refused to be bought by the system, refused the privileges of the mainstream, they can be trusted. Their views are in no way compromised by the conflicts of interest typical of those working in the interstices of government, big corporations, the military, and the universities.16 To establish their credibility, then, conspiracy theorists often describe the danger, exclusion, and hardship they've undergone for the sake of the truth.

Many conspiracy theorists prize their ability to cut through the government's and mainstream media's conceits and dissimulation. They often manifest their rejection of the mainstream aesthetically. Conspiracyoriented websites tend to be visually complicated and messy, crowded with links, facts, evidence, and information. The sites are confusing, hard to navigate. One is never quite sure where one is. And not surprisingly, they heavily interconnect, mutually citing and reinforcing each other even as they may disagree, furiously, over whether the World Trade Center was taken down by planted explosives made of thermite or remote-controlled drones. Among conspiracy researchers, the complexity of images and multiple fonts, the visual enactment of confusion and connection, afirms their position as outsiders. Their books, their sites, aren't slick, with slick denoting a mindset and aesthetic overattuned to the deceptions of the mainstream.

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9 l11 Truth

Two factors contributing to the production and circulation of alternative claims for what happened in the United States on September 11 distinguish the 9 I 11 truth movement from other assemblages associated with conspiracy theories: one, the way the ideas circulate on the Internet as videos and, two, the participation of a variety of highly regarded academics. These same factors also make 9 I 11 truth a central site for examining contemporary problems around credibility and certainty.

^" L O O S .E C HA N G E "

Most people who doubt the oficial story of th e events of 9 I 11 get their information from the Internet. Particularly interesting in this regard is the way 9 I 11 conspiracy theories circul�te !lOt simply through websites and blogs but as full-length videos. I can compare this with alien abductionin the nineties, as accounts of alien abduction became more visible in American popular culture, those involved in the abduction community relied in part on email and websites.17 Nevertheless, the circulation of knowledge of abduction took place primarily through books, conventions, and made-for-television investigative reports. The television specialswhile exploiting the trash value of abduction-included heavy doses of skepticismj they gave a lot of air time to debunkers. The 9 / 11 truth movement difers in that people make and distribute their own videos.

The most prominent video associated with 9 I u truth is Loose Change, an eighty-minute documentary made by Dylan Avery, a twenty-two-yearold from Oneonta, New York. It first appeared on the Web in the summer of 2005. Since then it has had at least ten million viewings. The magazine Vanity Fair calls Loose Change "the first Internet blockbuster:' ¹⁸

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A striking aspect of the video is its production of certainty through repetition, intensity, and afect, in other words, the way it performs the shift from the questioning of the hysteric toward a certainty more characteristic of psychosis. Here is its version of "find out for yourself" in the film's final voice-over:

I'll say it again: why are they hiding from us? "'What are they hiding from us? And what's it going to take until people in this country give a damn and do something about it? Now that the evidence has been presented, what will you do about it? Wil you find comfort in the oficial version of events? Or wil you go out and investigate for yourselves? Wil you share this information or wil you ignore it? Wil you be at ground zero on September uth? America has been hijacked. Is it more likely by Osarna bin Laden and his ragtag group of Arabs with box cutters or by a group of tyrants within our own government, ready and willing to do whatever it takes to keep their stranglehold on this country? It's up to you. Ask questions. Demand answers.

To whom is. this demand raised? To the tyrants, the al-powerful obscene tyrants supposed/ produced through the operati ri of the theory. So the same tyrants who alegedly commited the crime are here demanded to expose themselves, to admit to it, to come clean. There is a strangeness to this demand, an incompatibility between it and the crime and criminals it is raised to expose.

More interesting is the attitude of certainty: the viewer is enjoined to investigate. Yet the film presents itself as already knowing what the subject wil find out. It's certain and it manifests this certainty straightforwardly in the evidence presented, the information shared, the America hijacked. Even if "it's up to you;' the film already knows what you wil discover, as long, that is, as you are brave enough to leave the comfort of the oficial version of events. Overlaying the final credits is an austere hip-hop piece with a �trong base line. The vocals begin: "We all know where you're gain; we know that you're out there:

The efective and afective success of Loose Change sterns from its use of music, from the way music provides the connections b etween diferent images, screens, and facts. A compelling drumbeat, strong base line, and repetitive samples bypass the mediation of argument to establish a feeling of certainty. The first eight minutes of the film, for example, feature images and a voice-over enumeration of various sorts of items: contradictory quotes from Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Ari Fleischer, and Richard Clarke; a description of Operation Northwoods, a 1962 plan involving a faked hijacking submitted by the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staf to the Secretary of Defense; the $1 9 8 4$ test of a remote-controlled Boeing aircraft; and, so on up through news reports in early September 2001. The reports mention the significant increase in put options placed on United Airlines, Boeing, and American Airlines; Larry Silverstein's purchase of the World Trade Center and the accompanying 3.5 billion-dollar insurance policy; and Attorney General John Ashcroft's shift to traveling by private rather than comm.ercial aircraft. The items are presented chronologically; events on a timeline leading up to September 11. Because the underlying music establishes continuity among the images, particularly through its repetitions and driving base line, the viewer gets the sense that events are already connected to one another in the Real. Taking the connections between the events for granted, surendering to the hypnotic rhythm, is easier than disrupting one's enjoyment in the music.

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The remainder of the film folows the pattern of voice-over, segment from news media and interviews, and repetition of ambient/ chill/ lounge/ techno samples. Most often, the samples reemerge at those moments when the voice-over is mentioning particularly telling facts, facts that need to be linked to other facts, facts the conection together of which produces the knowledge of a conspiracy within the U.S. government. A segment on Rani Hanjour, the alleged pilot of American Airlines flight $^ { 7 7 }$ the one presumed to have crashed into the Pentagon, features an interview with a staf member from Hanjour's training school. The hypnotic beat and repetitive sampling come in just after the staf member finishes describing how inept Hanjour was as a pilot and the voice-over mentions that air-trafic controllers at Dules presumed the plane was flown by a military pilot.

The satisfying repetitions of the ambient/ chill/lounge /techno tracks reinforce the pleasures of conspiracy theory. They provide the film with an edginess, a trangressive allure that reiterates the transgressions the film purports to reveal. It's a soundtrack of revelation and disconcealment inviting viewers and hearers to share in the secret, the secret knowledge of political violence and obscenity. As mainstream a magazine as Time gets it. In a page-one article from the September n, 2oo6, issue, the columnist Lev Grossman writes: 'Watching Loose Change, you feel as if you are participating in the great American tradition of self-reliance and nonconformist, antiauthoritarian dissent. You're fighting the power. You're think: ing diferent:'19 We don't need to believe the Bush administration's lies when we can see the evidence and know what really happened.

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One of the final clips featured in the film ·provides a bridge to the academics credentialing the larger 9 I 11 truth movement. The clip is from Hannity and Colmes, a nightly program on the Fox News Channel. Hannity and Calmes are interviewing Kevin Barrett, an adjunct professor teaching an introductory course on Islam at the University ofWisconsin-Madison. Asking about Barrett's "opinion" and whether he "believes" 9 /11 was an inside job, Hannity attempts to browbeat and stigmatize Barrett as a crazed conspiracy theorist. Barrett responds that he knows, he doesn't "believe" i he knows. He has studied the evidence for two and a half years and he knows.

S C H O L.L\RS F O R 9 l 1 1 T RU T H

As an academic, Barrett is a key point of overlap between Loose Change and the second aspect of the 9 I 11 truth movem�nt that distinguishes it from other conspiracy theories, the emergence of the group Scholars for 9 l11 Truth. The group was founded on December 15, 2005, by James H. Fetzer, Distinguished McKnight Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and Steven E. Jones, professor of physics at Brigham Young University.20 Afated with the group is the peer-reviewed Journal of 9 I 11 Studies. Fetzer is the author and editor of a number of books on the assassination ofPresidentJohn F. K.ennedy, including Murder in Dealey Plaza: TNhat We !(now Now That We Didn't l<now Then, The Great Zapruder Film Hoax: Deceit and Deception in the Death of JFI� and Assassination Science: Experts Speak Out on the Death of JFI(.

In November 2005, Jones posted a paper on the Web in which he argued that the World Trade Center towers fell as a result of a controled demolition.21 As John Gravois notes in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "His paper-written by an actual professor who works at an actual research university-has made him a celebrity in the conspiracy universe:'22 ABC News picked up an AP wire feature on Scholars for 9 I n Truth citing a Canadian chemist critical of Jones's account of the collapse of the Twin Towers. According to the chemist, members of the conspiracy community "practically worship the ground [Jones] walks on because he's seen as a scientist who's preaching to their side:' So even as the ABC feature notes that few mainstream scientists will engage the work of Scholars for 9 I 11 Truth so as not to lend it "unwarranted credibility;' it recognizes that the academic credentials of the group "could do that anyway:'23 More importantly, the feature alludes to a fundamental · characteristic of the group: they already know that the oficial story of 9 I 11 is wrongj their efort is expended so as to prove it.

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The 9 I 1 truth movement gained in momentum because of the involvement of credentialed academics. For those in the movement, these scholars provide the expert knowledge, the credibility, they need to fight their battle for truth in the . public sphere. Among the most important and influential is David Ray Grifin, a well-established theology professor. Not only did Grifin synthesize in a dear, systematic study many of the criticisms of the oficial account circulating on the Internet and published in European presses but his book The New Pearl Harbor was endorsed by the renowned history professor Howard Zinn and provided with a forward by Richard Falk, an emeritus professor of international law at Princeton.

The combination of Scholars for 9 I 11 Truth and the popularity of videos like Loose Change make the 9 I 1 truth movement an interesting site for thinking about problems of credibility. For some in the movement, the slickness of Loose Change is propagandistic, making the film into an instrument of disinformation instead of scientific inquiry. Writing for the 9 I 11 Research website, Victoria AshleYi in an article praising the contribution of Steven Jones, criticizes Loose Change: "Propaganda techniques, such as repeating an emotionally charged scene over and over, or approaching the unanswered questions of 9 I n in the manner of a ghost story telling, keep viewers transfixed by the presentation without any involvement of a rational evaluation of evidence:'24 The very aspects of the film that make it powerful and popular seem to some to undermine the movement's eforts toward chalenging the Bush administration's version of events.

The scholars whose work rejects the oficial story have had to defend their academic freedom and scholarly credentials. In October 2oo6, Brigham Young University announced Jones's retirement. This announcement followed a month after Jones had been relieved of his teaching responsibilities and placed on leave. Lawmakers have chalenged the academic integrity, not to mention the intelectual honesty and overall sanity, of scholars working in the area of 9 / 11 truth. During the sumer of 2006, Wisconsin legislators pressured the University of Wisconsin-Madison to fire Kevin Barrett for his view that September 11 was an inside job. The provost, Patrick Farrell, defended Barrett, although he warned Barrett that should he continue to "illustrate an inability to control" his interest in garnering publicity for his ideals, he would have less confidence in Barrett's ability to teach the course.25 The same academic credentials providing credibility to the 9 I n truth movement are being called into question and, to some extent, revoked.

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