Conspiracy and Democracy

Module title: Conspiracy and Democracy 

Module Leader: Dr Demetra Kasimis

Overview:

The goal of this seminar is to examine the role of conspiracy and conspiratorial thinking in the theory and practice of democracy. Rather than assume that conspiracies and conspiracy theories are pathological elements that can and should be eliminated from political life or that the 21st century is an era of unprecedented epistemic crisis, we will assume that they are permanent features of collective life, with specific histories, and that they help index shifting understandings and dynamics of power in particular contexts. We begin by considering the conventional literature on conspiratorial thinking and distinguish carefully between a conspiracy and a conspiratorial way of seeing politics. Some of the overarching questions include when is discourse of conspiracy more or less illuminating of relations of power; which relations of power do conspiratorial figurations (or accusations) tend to attend; and why does conspiracy often get linked to questions of sexual control and patriarchy. Our focus is less on conspiracies that bring down regimes, although we will touch on these, and more on how and to what effects writing about democracy uses the problem of conspiracy to make claims about how power works.

To approach these questions in a new and creative way, we will move from contemporary formulations of the problems to the politics and thought of ancient democracy and back again. We will consider how Athenian critics across genres used the theme of conspiracy to make speculative, critical arguments about the shadowy, silenced, and seemingly extra-political workings of democratic power that both sustain and threaten it from the inside. Why and when would theorists writing under democracy turn to conspiratorial modes of narration and argumentation? As we will see, Athenian critics tend to use conspiratorial figurations to explore the workings of the oikos, that capacious and often misunderstood Greek term that refers ambiguously to (1) a private (house and work) space and (2) hierarchical yet fragile relations of production, consumption, and reproduction. From banking, sex, and patriarchy to price fixing, slavery, and philosophy, the activities, ideologies, and relations of the oikos find expression in conspiratorial terms. We will ask why this is the case and what this pattern of argumentation might tell us about the political position and power of the “private” and economic dynamics of democratic life today. How do Athenian law and convention construct private power and encase it from democratic rearrangement? Do they do so in ways similar or dissimilar from contemporary democracies? When seen from the shadows and margins, does democracy create the conditions of conspiracy and its own undoing? When does democratic power get imagined as conspiratorial?

Students will learn to engage in contemporary critique by way of past texts and concepts and acquire a deep understanding of the meaning and practice of democracy and its immanent critique in classical Athens as well as today. They will practice close and historically situated readings of ancient and contemporary texts and develop a set of analytic tools for approaching enduring questions of illicit or hidden power.