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‘How do the American people know…?’: embodying post-9/11 conspiracy discourse

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Abstract

Conspiratorial thought has been highly visible in post-September 11th America, manifest through the continued growth of a public ‘9/11 Truth Movement’ as well as at the state-level, through the Bush administration’s conspiracy rhetoric of Islamic terrorists intent on infiltrating the US homeland. In this paper, I demonstrate how conspiracy can be understood as a ‘knowledge-producing discourse’; dialectically engaged across multiple subject positions and through which geopolitical narratives are performatively produced and contested at interconnected scales of bodies, homes, city streets and national ‘homelands’. Through drawing on, and challenging, the conceptual and methodological approaches of a burgeoning feminist geopolitics, I ground my analysis in the embodied performances of ‘patriotic dissent’ by members of the 9/11 Truth Movement in New York City, as well as through my own situated and ethical engagement with positions of political difference.

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Notes

  1. Brzezinski acted as an unofficial foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama during his successful 2008 presidential campaign against Republican nominee John McCain.

  2. I use the real names of individuals only when these are already in the public domain through print or Internet media outlets, or else with stated permission.

  3. Luke recorded this incident on video camera and posted the footage onto video-sharing website YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q4jrQ6T9ZA. Accessed September 20 2008.

  4. More extensive coverage of the story came from independent media outlets, being discussed for example on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on the PBS network and in UK socialist daily Morning Star under the headline “Cold War warrior raps Bush 'hubris'” (February 2 2007).

  5. Whilst not all conspiracy theories are necessarily political in nature, or restricted to Western societies, many well-known examples from American popular culture and society have promoted a certain understanding of global politics, whether involving the perceived influence of Masons, Jews or Communists (Berlet and Lyons 2000), or the prospect of a ‘New World Order’ of global integration that threatens national sovereignty (Spark 2001).

  6. The majority of ‘alternative’ narratives of 9/11 would appear to fit the standard dictionary definition of a conspiracy theory as, “A belief that some covert but influential agency (typically political in motivation and oppressive in intent) is responsible for an unexplained event”. From the Oxford English Dictionary online, available at: http://dictionary.oed.com/. Accessed June 8 2008.

  7. The term ‘false-flag’ refers to an attack made to appear to be the work of another country, party or group other than that to which the attackers themselves belong. An often cited example is Operation Northwoods, a plan allegedly devised under the Kennedy administration to supply justification for US military intervention in Cuba.

  8. See the Wikipedia entry on ‘9/11 Conspiracy theories’ for a comprehensive overview. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories. Accessed June 8 2008.

  9. Individualistic explanations of conspiracy as ‘personal paranoia’ (Hofstadter 1966; Showalter 1998) have been challenged in a post-Watergate American society where scepticism and distrust regarding ‘official accounts’ presented by the Government and/or security services is now a widely held and accepted public attitude. This attitude has been theorised as representative of a post-modern ‘conspiracy culture’ in some recent academic accounts (e.g. Parish and Parker 2001; Knight 2000, 2002), where conspiracy is seen as suggestive of wider social, political or cultural trends (see also Jameson 1988, 1992).

  10. Attempts to move Critical Geopolitics beyond a perceived representational focus have led to recent engagements with non-representational theory and through it a consideration of affective expressions of geopower e.g. Ó Tuathail 2003; Carter and McCormack 2006.

  11. Ó Tuathail and Dalby (1998) define these categories as, “the practical geopolitics of state leaders and the foreign policy bureaucracy…the formal geopolitics of the strategic community, within a state and across a group of states, and the popular geopolitics that is found within the artefacts of transnational popular culture” (p. 4).

  12. Though see Ó Tuathail 1996, Routledge 1996, and Megoran 2004; 2006; for critical geopolitics studies employing ethnographic and embodied methodologies.

  13. Individuals involved in the 9/11 Truth Movement have utilised Internet media technologies such as video-sharing software to disseminate their claims to a potentially global audience. The success of this strategy was evidenced by the film Loose Change which was independently made using a laptop and registered an estimated 10 million viewings within one year of being made freely accessible on Google Video (Sales 2006).

  14. I was based in Manhattan for 6 weeks during December 2006 and January 2007, during which time I attended public meetings and film screening events organised by New York 9/11 Truth. I also observed/participated in the groups protest activities staged at public locations throughout Manhattan including Ground Zero, Columbus Circle and Union Square Park, during which members of New York 9/11 Truth were aware of my position as a researcher but the public were not.

  15. This is despite the efforts by some fire-fighters to stress how they, too, were victims of the attacks. This was supported by the public release in 2002 of transcripts of hundreds of interviews conducted with fire-fighters following the WTC attacks and which presented a more complicated story of valour and heroism clouded also by fear and uncertainty in the midst of unreliable communications (New York Times, February 2 2002).

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Acknowledgements

My thanks to Deborah Dixon, Mike Woods, Dan Sage, Maria Jones and two anonymous referees for their helpful ideas and feedback throughout the development of this paper; the research for which was gratefully undertaken with funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Thanks also to the individuals involved in the 9/11 Truth campaign who shared their time and experiences with me.

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  1. Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, Ceredigion, SY23 3DB, UK

    Laura Jones

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Jones, L. ‘How do the American people know…?’: embodying post-9/11 conspiracy discourse. GeoJournal 75, 359–371 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-008-9252-7

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