rather that these are the workings of power, and thus one need not look beyond, behind or beneath the apparent abuses of power that characterize our systemic oppressions to find a “true” or “real” cause of the cause. This is even the case in actual conspiracies: Why would we not believe Black Panthers who claimed that the FBI was attacking them? Why would we not believe that Reagan sold weapons to Iran to fund anticommunist death squads in South America and lied to cover it up, or that Bush lied to get us into the Iraq War, or that Clinton lied to cover for his affairs, or that Trump obstructed justice to prevent explanation of his campaign’s collusion with Putin? A responsible inquiry need not fear beginning from an abduction about what appears to be the case, because responsible inquiry subjects that starting point to examination, research, revision and tests of logic and evidence before a conclusion is reached. In the same way, we need not fear to acknowledge that history or politics condition our own views, preferences and expectations—we need only commit ourselves to examining our own sources and premises, and attending to those who differ from us.
So an “unmystified” view is compatible with an “angry” one, in Sedgwick’s terms, because an inquirer need not pretend to be disinterested from the start: Indeed, without anger or passion to fuel the process, what would be the motor of all the work necessary to change one’s mind? This means that conspiracy theories, which confirm rather than change one’s assumptions, are at best a useless supplement to the kind of social analysis that incentivizes transformative activism, and at worst a disempowering replacement for such analysis. The paranoia of conspiracy theorizing tends to overvalue the power of those who occupy the hegemonic position, representing them as masterminds manipulating the oppressed like objects, able to shape the world while hiding their involvement completely. Paranoia and conspiracy therefore construct a view of the world that flatters the powerful and demeans the oppressed.
Because it identifies powerful enemies, the paranoid reading can appear radical, only to later reveal its complicity with the narcissism of the oppressor. Kanye West provides us with a contemporary example, in the form of his unexpected recent displays of affection for President Trump. The affinity was unexpected, in part, because West famously responded to the mismanagement of Katrina relief by announcing that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” at a charity concert in 2005. In the same year, West drew an analogy between the AIDS and crack epidemics, scourges of the queer community and the black community in the eighties, calling AIDS a “man-made disease […] placed in Africa just like crack was placed in the black community to break up the Black Panthers.”56 On his album of that year, Late Registration, the song “Heard ‘Em Say” announces “I know the government administered AIDS,” and “Crack Music” names the culprit behind West’s conspiratorial view of that epidemic: “How we stop the Black Panthers? Ronald Reagan cooked up an answer.”57 As we have noted, investigations revealed that it was an institutionally white supremacist and stridently anti-communist system of law enforcement that “cooked up an answer.” And that answer was much less inventive, involving the harassment, murder and imprisonment of civil rights workers and leaders, including the Panthers’ Fred Hampton, throughout the sixties and seventies.
The mechanics of exposing this truth did not require sophisticated hermeneutics, in the sense adduced by Best and Marcus, but dogged research and pattern recognition, of the sort done by journalists and Congressional staff in the sixties and seventies to uncover COINTELPRO—or in a simpler form by Chris Wallace interviewing Mick Mulvaney. And for all their complexity, the systemic explanations for crack, AIDS or the Panthers’ decline are still the parsimonious option: Given the historical commitment, or at least indifference, of US authorities to the destruction of black lives, why would Reagan need to resort to inventing a new method of ingesting cocaine in order to undermine a community organizing movement? Would it not be infinitely simpler to continue along the course of neoliberalism and culture war, relying on those policies to accomplish the destruction of black community mobilization? Union-busting, deregulation and free trade policies would undermine employment opportunities, spending cuts would limit the social safety net, Nixon’s drug war would continue to demonize people of color and a history of racism would ensure their disproportionate incarceration. In theory, none of that would require of Reagan any special conspiratorial action, apart from his already well-publicized policy orientation. For all the ways Reagan did expand government’s power and increase spending, in this area he only needed to curtail the federal government’s activities, to govern less, in order to accomplish the aims of white supremacy—as was also the case during Reconstruction and Jim Crow. This, of course, is one obvious meaning of “states’ rights.” The consequence of this reasoning is that even if a conspiracy to invent crack cocaine was carried out by Reagan, this would still not necessarily be the most important target of activist resistance to Reaganism, because without neoliberal and neoconservative policies and rhetoric, finding operatives for such a conspiracy would not be possible, and with such policy and rhetoric, such a conspiracy is superfluous.
What does require interpretive sophistication and education is the ability to recognize the consequences of one’s own interpretive defaults, which one unwittingly universalizes like the proverbial fish in water. Public opinion in the eighties seems to have drifted toward the default assumption that crack and AIDS, not to mention the decline of the Black Panthers and other civil rights struggles, were “special interest” problems germane only to minority groups, even problems those groups brought upon themselves, not affecting “normal” or “mainstream” Americans. This is in some sense the implicit purpose of ad hominem disqualification, a dismissive or even demonizing definition of those who differ from one’s self-image in ways deemed salient: We disqualify others from our attention so that we can ignore or disavow the harms done to them. It is not obvious, without some interpretive effort, that this default to a self-centered or self-interested orientation entails a corollary orientation of default to conspiracy. And yet this is true whether the self-image on which I am centered is a valorized or disqualified image: To the extent that I accept the premise that the other is the standard, the norm or the mainstream of society, I am likely to implicitly define myself in relation to their agency, either as their object or else as an agent only insofar as I resemble them. This definition will condition all my explanations of my situation in society. If I am held personally responsible for positional consequences of my birth into poverty, patriarchy, white supremacy or heteronormativity, then I am likely to look for whom to hold personally responsible for the actions of power. When I am taught that systemic consequences are the effects of a personal, agential cause, I will oscillate between blaming or praising myself and blaming or praising another, like Reagan, for the situation that obtains.
It is perhaps the most sophisticated interpretive act, though it is in principle equally possible for each human to accomplish, to develop the capacity to define what immediately appears ubiquitous as a complexly constructed and particular theory. An old joke tells of a fish asked “How is the water today?” His reply: “What is water?” Asked earnestly, this is the definitive theoretical question. The quintessentially human interpretive act involves inferring the specificity of the ocean in which we swim, and the possible alternative oceans that implies, which may lead to inventing our way out of the ocean, onto dry land, launching ourselves out of our immersion in one kind of system into a previously unrecognizable alternative. After all, how else can one describe the immense interpretive transformation involved in the ongoing transition from the magical or divine blood right of aristocratic governance to the aspirational goal of equally distributed sovereignty that defines democratic governance? Such an all-encompassing transformation of social relations entails an equally holistic transformation of imagination and reasoning.
Nevertheless, along the way we will inevitably mistake water for land. West’s conspiratorial criticism of Reagan was greeted by at least one critic as an indicator of “Kanye’s black radical consciousness.”58 This makes sense if one reads “radical” merely as a synonym for “extreme” or “outside the mainstream of opinion.” But if one reads “radical” as Marx did, as indicating a concern with the “roots” of systemic oppressions,
