In a Shared Breath: Conspiracy as a Political Tactic

• In Event: Exploring Democratic Mobilizations Against Right-Wing Populism: Tapping, Historical, Contemporary and Global Reservoirs of Opposition Mini-Conference: Co-Opting Right-Wing Populism as a Tactic for the Left?

Abstract

How is conspiracy a political tactic? The most recent iterations of conspiracy – from claims of “rigged elections” to “illegitimate authority” – highlight a strategy that seems to delegitimize political institutions. This has proved an especial useful tactic for the political right, serving as a strong foundation for various iterations of new populisms. In response to such “conservative” conspiracies, some on the left have begun to decry the immorality of conspiracy – that such plots pose a false reality, and engender an undercurrent of violence that works to motivate a destabilizing partisanship. But this response leaves conspiracy itself as a rejected tactic, and ignores the history of leftist conspiracies and their emancipatory potentials. This paper inquires whether and how there may still be a possibility of the left coopting conspiracy as a political tactic. How would a contemporary left conspiracism manifest itself in this new global politics, and what might be risked and gained in the practice? Building on James Martell’s recent reflections on conspiracy, and contrasting this with Nancy Rosenblum’s critique of new conspiracist thinking on the right, I hope to make sense of the political potentialities of conspiracy. I frame this investigation through an exploration of Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the conspiracy of the rebellious subject in a control society. Using the recent case of the Berkeley Police Department’s conflicts with Antifa protestors, this paper aims to illustrate how the state itself deploys conspiracy, but so too how conspiracy can serve as a tactic for resistance (for both the left and the right).

Author

• Andrew Poe, Amherst College