Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory

Would you sacrifice yourself to change the future?

The X-Files

You and I Robert have observed history. Time has been our glass. We are in history now, living in it, making it. Implicated? I am on a grail quest!

The Da Vinci Code

I take as my starting point in this paper the fact that the present moment has witnessed a resurgence of the production of the privileged socio-political genre of paranoia, the conspiracy narrative. From recent high profile films such as the remake of the Cold War classic, The Manchurian Candidate (2004), The Constant Gardener (2005), Syriana (2005), State of Play (2009), Watchmen (2009), and the adaptation of one of the most widely read popular conspiracy narratives of all time, The Da Vinci Code (2006) (a film about which I'll have a few things to say in the final section of this paper), to the collective project of organizations such as Scholars for 9/11 Truth and David Horowitz's Students for Academic Freedom, the conspiracy narrative has become once again a prominent aspect of contemporary American culture.

There are a number of factors that could account for this rise in conspiracy visions—the violences of corporate globalization; the events of September 11, 2001; the emergence of the new security state; the documented activities of the Bush administration; and the general climate of fear, suspicion, and paranoia accompanying the global War on Terror, first envisioned and brought into being by prominent members [End Page 149] of the Project for the New American Century.¹ While these factors all, of course, contribute significantly to a situation propitious to conspiracy narratives, I want to explore how this efflorescence also sheds light on current debates about the future of work in the university in general, and the humanities and American Studies in particular. The protagonist in any conspiracy narrative is what Fredric Jameson calls "the social detective," a figure who "will either be an intellectual in the formal sense from the outset, or will gradually find himself/herself occupying the intellectual's structural position by virtue of the premium placed on knowledge or the cognitive by the form itself (perhaps the last contemporary narrative type in which the lone intellectual can still win heroic dimensions)" (Geopolitical 38-39). Thus, all conspiracy narratives, focused as they are on the flow and use of information, are about intellectuals, and the form has some surprisingly interesting things to teach about the current role of intellectuals in the university.

I begin by looking at two earlier classic American conspiracy narratives—Philip K. Dick's late 1960s masterpiece, Ubik (1969), and an episode from the sixth season of the hit television show, The X-File s (1993-2002)—both of which offer useful insights into the narrative form. Conspiracy narratives, as Ed White suggests in his reading of eighteenth century versions of the practice, engage in a project of "mapping the relations of force and trying to make sense of a social formation. . . . The conspiratorial project maps structures in order to determine the flow and texture of culture" (17, 22). In this regard, contemporary conspiracy narratives represent an undissolved remainder, or what Jacques Derrida calls a "specter," of a modernism haunting postmodern culture wherein such deeply narrative forms of critical engagement become increasingly difficult. And as Jameson notes, the "insistence on narrative analysis in a situation in which the narratives themselves henceforth seem impossible is [a] declaration of intent to remain political and contestatory" (Foreword xx). Contemporary conspiracy narratives thus offer among other things a popular form of an oppositional politics akin to the modernist, or more precisely post-postmodern, 1990 s critical projects of Derrida's "hauntology" or Jameson's "cognitive mapping." And yet, in what I show to be their formal contradictions, these two paradigmatic conspiracy narratives unveil the limitations of this form—limitations that then point toward an even deeper kinship with the cultural formation Jameson elsewhere names a post-World War [End Page 150] II "late modernism." Finally, the film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code makes evident, against the grain of such...