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Knowledge Goes Pop CULTURE MACHINE SERIES Knowledge Goes Pop CULTURE MACHINE SERIES Series Editor: Gary Hall ISSN: 1743-6176 Commissioning Editors: Dave Boothroyd, Chris Hables Gray, Simon Morgan Wortham, Joanna Zylinska International Consultant Editors: Simon Critchley, Lawrence Grossberg, Donna Haraway, Peggy Kamuf, Brian Massumi, Meaghan Morris, Paul Patton, Paul Rabinow, Kevin Robins, Avital Ronell The position of cultural theory has radically shifted. What was once the engine of change across the humanities and social sciences is now faced with a new ‘post- theoretical’ mood, a return to empiricism and to a more transparent politics. So what is the future for cultural theory? Addressing this question through the presentation of innovative, provocative and cutting-edge work, the Culture Machine series both repositions cultural theory and reaffirms its continuing intellectual and political importance. Published books include City of Panic Paul Virilio Art, Time and Technology Charlie Gere Forthcoming books include Anti-Capitalism: Cultural Theory and Popular Politics Jeremy Gilbert Knowledge Goes Pop From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip CLARE BIRCHALL Oxford • New York English edition First published in 2006 by Berg Editorial offices: First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA © Clare Birchall 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Birchall, Clare. Knowledge goes pop : from conspiracy theory to gossip / Clare Birchall.—English ed. p. cm.—(Culture machine series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-143-2 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 1-84520-143-4 (pbk.) ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-142-5 (hardback) ISBN-10: 1-84520-142-6 (hardback) 1. Knowledge, Sociology of. 2. Popular culture. 3. Social perception. 4. Gossip. I. Title. II. Series. HM651.B57 2006 306.4'2—dc22 2006009546 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13 978 1 84520 142 5 (Cloth) 978 1 84520 143 2 (Paper) ISBN-10 1 84520 142 6 (Cloth) 1 84520 143 4 (Paper) Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn. www.bergpublishers.com To RRS for speculating on me These are difficult times for ‘modern’ people who believe that there are proper sorts of knowledge, usually produced and disseminated in places like universities. Today, knowledges of various kinds are being produced at all sorts of places, and disseminated in all sorts of ways. Universities can no longer claim to be the sole guardians of knowledge, even of more or less academic knowledge, which is being produced as much outside the university as inside. While both the left and the right are challenging the status of certain ways of producing and presenting knowledge, the relations between expertise and the various forms of common sense are becoming increasingly conflicted. Knowledge Goes Pop jumps into the middle of this messy terrain, and offers an incisive and insightful analysis of both sides of the line dividing cultural criticism from popular knowledge. Hopefully, Birchall’s book will set in motion a sustained and rigorous discussion of the place of ‘knowledge’ in the coming modernity. Lawrence Grossberg, author of ‘Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics and America’s Future’, Morris David Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the University Program in Cultural Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Contents Preface xi Acknowledgements xv 1 Know It All 1 2 Just Because You’re Paranoid, Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Out to Get You 33 3 Cultural Studies on/as Conspiracy Theory 65 4 Hot Gossip: The Cultural Politics of Speculation 91 5 Sexed Up: Gossip by Stealth 129 Conclusion: Old Enough to Know Better? The Work of Cultural Studies 151 Endnotes 159 Bibliography 171 Index 183 Preface WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK A voice on late-night talk radio told me that Kentucky Fried Chicken injects its food with drugs that render men impotent. A colleague asked if I thought the FBI was ‘in’ on 9/11. An alien abductee on the Internet claimed extraterrestrials implanted a microchip in her left buttock. The front page of a gossip mag screamed ‘Julia Roberts in Porn Scandal’. A best-seller suggested gender differ- ence is so great, men and women may as well come from different planets. A spiritual healer claimed he could cure my aunt’s chronic fatigue syndrome with the energizing power of crystals. This book came out of a deep fascination with the popular knowledges that saturate our experience of everyday understanding and communication in the twenty-first century. I was struck by how we mediate and are mediated by popular knowledges, how they influence the way we position ourselves in the world and shape the way we imagine the world works. I wanted to call such phenomena ‘knowledge’ in order to remind myself of its relation to the more ‘official’ knowledges that also tell us who we are, what to believe, and how to conduct ourselves socially. From Michel Foucault’s work, I knew that power relations are determined by knowledge, but I also wanted to think about the relations between knowledges in terms of power. Are popular knowledges, I wondered, marginalized by official knowledges? What challenge do they pose to traditional sites of knowledge production? Why does their presence cause so much institutional anxiety? When I began to tell people that I was studying conspiracy theories (among other examples of popular knowledge) they responded in one of two ways. They either asked why on earth people believe in such ‘nonsense’ or grilled me for what really happened to Diana, JFK, or Martin Luther King. Was September 11 a set-up to legitimize the invasion of firstly Afghanistan and then Iraq? Is there such a thing as the New World Order? Does the Bilderberg group really pull the strings? They wanted me to tell them why these stories existed or if they were true. And in some ways it might have been easier to address these concerns. I could, with regards to the second concern, occupy myself with the veracity of particular statements produced within popular knowledges. (Was Diana really xii Preface murdered? Do aliens actually abduct humans? Will this book improve my sex life? Have the latest celebrity couple truly broken up?) Let’s face it, we are all capable of becoming absorbed by the details and this is part of the pleasure to be found in gossip, conspiracy theory, alien abduction narratives and the like. Some commentators have gone down this route, debunking certain theories and ideas perpetuated by these kinds of narratives. Other commentators have addressed the first concern as to why people believe in ‘false’ or ‘fragile’ knowledge. Such approaches tend to perform symp- tomatic readings of popular knowledge in which the knowledge always takes the place of some psychosocial lack, or is read as a political act performed by usually disenfranchised agents. Francis Wheen, for example, in an article extracted from his book How Mumbo Jumbo Overtook the World writes, ‘The new irrationalism is an expression of despair by people who feel impotent to improve their lives and suspect that they are at the mercy of secretive, impersonal forces whether these be the Pentagon or invaders from Mars. Political leaders accept it as a safe outlet for dissent, fulfilling much the same function that Marx attributed to religion’ (2004: 12). Indeed, there are all sorts of routes to answer the question ‘Why do we turn to popular knowledge?’ – via psychoanalysis, philosophy, history, or anthropology – but I wanted to write a book that could open up a different way of responding to popular knowledges: one that moves beyond the truth or falsity of statements produced by a particular knowledge and the question of why people might choose to invest in them. Working against the grain of much academic work on fan communities and the idea of empowered consumers (in my field of cultural studies especially), I wanted to focus on the knowledge believed in, rather than those who believe. That is not to say that I wanted to eliminate the ‘subject’ altogether as there is always a residual concept of subjectivity in discursive mechanisms but I did not want to make claims as to these subjects’ intentions, desires, or reasons for belief. While I knew psychological motive and socio-political pressures would all inform a reading of popular knowledge’s increased circulation and employment, I felt that focusing on what makes each popular knowledge possible in the first place would allow me to consider the relationship between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’, ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ knowledges. I thought that under- standing these relationships was necessary for approaching some key events of our age. Having written this book, I still do. With so many claims on what knowledge is and what it should be – exem- plified not least by current international debates about school curricula (see Apple 2003) – I wanted to perform a timely investigation into the relationship between un-legitimated and legitimated forms of knowledge. Of course, thinking through this relationship threw up difficult self-reflexive questions about any knowledge in a disciplinary form – including cultural studies, the particular knowledge-producing discourse that I identified with – that I might mobilize Preface xiii to analyse popular knowledge. That is to say, I realized that the way in which I approached such cultural phenomena was crucial: if I approached popular knowledges according to an ideal of critical distance, say, positioning popular knowledges as the other of, foreign to, and outside legitimated knowledge, I would in effect already have decided in advance what these popular knowledges were.
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