Anxieties of Influence: Conspiracy Theory and Therapeutic Culture in Millennial America
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8034.2021.e80899Abstract
In this essay, originally published as a book chapter in 2003, Susan Harding and Kathleen Stewart analyse the explosion of conspiracy theories in the post-War United States. They avoid approaching conspiratorial thinking as a mere exotic hermeneutic pattern or ideology by treating it as part of a “structure of feeling”, a “nervous system” and a “metacultural discourse” diffuse and inclusive, despite being actualized at various intensities. The “anxiety of influence”, an acute feeling of being manipulated by the very systems of expertise that sustain the contemporary order, gives rise to an anxious semiotics, obsessed with reading “signs” that unveil an intentionally obscured final Truth and generate embodied practices that function simultaneously as a cure and a symptom. This paranoid framework is analysed through a careful ethnographic reconstitution of two “remnant” communities: the optimistic apocalypticism of the Pentecostal-Charismatic church Calvary Church and the tragic, but equally optimistic, extraterrestrial “escape plan” of the Heaven’s Gate movement, inspired by UFO discourse.
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