worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren’t actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants whom it sees as enemies; that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes. Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things—what would we know then that we don’t already know?51
At this time, when Reagan could be seen to be entrenching Nixon’s cultural agendas—the war on drugs, glorification of a masculinist militarism and misogynistic heteronormativity, white supremacy at home and abroad—Patton had no need to unearth the secrets of a new conspiracy to establish that there was support inside and outside government for actions that harmed the preponderance of the victims of AIDS. She did not need to read between the lines. Reading the lines of American history, and the overt public rhetoric and policies of the Nixon and Reagan administrations, was more than enough to prove it.
Patton’s reasoning illuminates a definitive aspect of conspiracy theories, one that challenges neat equations of reason or logic with power and privilege: Conspiracy theories are unnecessary explanations. They do not begin from an unsolved problem, a difficulty or a gap in knowledge, then seek evidence and arrive at conclusions through inquiry and sound reasoning. Instead, they begin from the assumed, from that which is experienced as known, applying what one already believes to explain what one does not understand. In doing so, conspiracy theories tend to reinforce initiating assumptions, and strain the credulity of those who do not share these assumptions. Their complexity arises not as a consequence of encounters with the overdetermined richness of an interdependent field of causes and conditions, but as a corollary of the need to explain how the presumed and easily comprehensible agenda of the conspirators is hidden from the uninitiated. Of course, sometimes this complexity of concealment is also borne out by reasoned inquiry into conspiracies, as in the reporting on the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, or the investigations into Russian influence operations. The demonstrable existence of conspiracies, Patton’s answer implies, means that it is not incredible to accuse the US government of deliberately spreading disease: There are historical precedents for this, from the spread of small pox among Native Americans52 to the deliberate infection of African Americans with syphilis.53 However, these plots do not provide sufficient reason to default to government conspiracy as explanation for any epidemic among members of an oppressed population, especially given that what Sedgwick calls “systemic oppressions” are usually sufficient to cause harm without any additional conspiratorial plot. And inquiries into historical conspiracies have not described flawlessly executed plots by farsighted masterminds, as even intelligent, competent and experienced political actors like Presidents Johnson and Nixon were drawn deeper into secrecy and illegality by unforeseen circumstances and unintended consequences.
In short, the fantasy of conspiracy as explanation is also a fantasy of the whole agency of historical actors, an agency unimpeded by any objectifying determinations or conditions. Patton’s answer bypasses this fantasy to indicate pragmatic attempts to respond to apparent problems, rather than suspiciously leaping to a more “real” cause of the problem beneath or beyond its appearance as a situated set of conditions. Sedgwick frames this difference in terms of the relation between view and practice, or knowledge and action:
Patton’s comment suggests that for someone to have an unmystified, angry view of large and genuinely systemic oppressions does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin that person to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences. To know that the origin or spread of HIV realistically might have resulted from a state-assisted conspiracy—such knowledge is, it turns out, separable from the question of whether the energies of a given AIDS activist intellectual or group might best be used in the tracing and exposure of such a possible plot.54
One’s answer to that question “represents a strategic and local decision.” In efforts to mitigate or terminate harms, exposing a plot is only necessary to the extent that the conspirators are taken to be the cause of those harms, or else continue to be a condition pertinent to the production of those harms. Patton’s activist efforts may or may not call for a “paranoid project of exposure,” because the harms they address may or may not be consequent upon state conspiracy: This is the matter to be determined by inquiry, rather than imposed according to a formalism that predetermines the inquiry.
Thus Sedgwick demonstrates the wisdom of reflecting on the historical and positional conditioning of the most reliably familiar abductions, which one has been led to expect by life experience or the bounds of one’s knowledge. Her willingness to contemplate Patton’s different view allows her to relativize the default premises determined by historical conditions in which she was constructed as a subject—conditions that include the Cold War era of opaque and far-reaching government conspiracies. One such documented conspiracy is COINTELPRO, under the auspices of which the FBI undertook vast operations to discredit, attack and assassinate leaders of left movements.55 Beginning with communists and socialists, the program soon expanded to target activism by feminists and people of color. As in the cases of the Pentagon Papers or Watergate, it made sense to investigate and expose these secret and illegal activities of US government officials in order to prosecute or end their crimes, or to ameliorate the reputational damage done. But as a result of the publicity around these conspiracies, an informed and engaged US person who lived through the seventies might be expected to perceive any harm directed at or limited to left activists or marginalized communities as the likely product of a government plot. Given the political history of the United States since Eisenhower, that conclusion is reasonable—in the literal sense that there are valid reasons to conclude thusly. But in spite of the Reagan administration’s deceit, plots and cover-ups, including most notably Iran-Contra, those of us who came of age during or after his administration might presume conspiracy theory instead to be the province of right-wing extremists—as it seemed often to be under Clinton, Bush and Obama. It might even seem unlikely to us that a government plot could be effective or long remain secret, an assumption informed by the Bush-era bungling that Best and Marcus highlight. If Sedgwick manages to innovatively work through these conditioning forces, this is because she remains curious about methodological approaches outside those supported by her own conditioning, and attends to those like Patton who dispute or question her assumptions, as well as those like her students whose experience and frame of reference differ from her own.
By relativizing her premises, and by opposing the theoretical monoculture in which the paranoid position is identified in an exclusionary way with theory as such, Sedgwick exemplifies the utility of theoretical reflection defined as examination of one’s own presumptions and premises. As she demonstrates in describing her students’ anachronistic emulation of Miller’s emulation of Foucault, methodologies are tied to thematics and problematics, and all of those are conditioned by one’s life experience. While the Eisenhower–Kennedy–Johnson–Nixon America that conditioned Sedgwick’s premises might lead her to think first about state intervention as a cause of the HIV epidemic, the Reagan–Bush–Clinton–Bush America that was just emerging as she conversed with Patton would lead us to think first about the likelihood that state neglect would enable and exacerbate the epidemic. For those shaped by whatever era is now still emerging, the first thoughts will no doubt be different again.
But this relativity is not total: We can establish logically that defaulting to conspiracy is at odds with what Sedgwick calls “an unmystified, angry view of large and genuinely systemic oppressions,” because it substitutes personal, agential cause for social, systemic conditions. That oppressions are systemic entails that the normal functioning of the system itself is an elaborate conspiracy against the populations it oppresses—though not one that is comprehended, much less directed or caused, by a single individual, agency or institution. A systemically oppressed or exploited population is subject to so many vectors of state neglect and state attack that it is unnecessary, in principle, for those in power to introduce additional, elaborate conspiratorial plots to cause them harm. Of course, such plots are sometimes undertaken, as in COINTELPRO, but exposing or explaining those plots is neither necessary nor sufficient to comprehend systemic oppressions.
I
