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A question of identity: the rhetoric and argument of conspiracy theories

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A question of identity: the rhetoric and argument of conspiracy theories

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A QUESTION OF IDENTITY: THE RHETORIC AND ARGUMENT OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES

by

Omri Ceren

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

December 2019

ii

DEDICATION

To Katya

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Appreciation is due my advisor, G. Thomas Goodnight, who has been an inestimable mentor
across two decades, three continents, and countless conversations held in libraries, museums, gardens,
classrooms, pubs, dining rooms, and sundry other venues. Without him this dissertation would not exist.
I would also like to thank the other members of my committee, who provided quick and
sustained assistance to ensure the success of this project. Gordon Stables is a dear friend and champion,
without whom I would not have come to USC nor completed my efforts there successfully. Ann Crigler
was invaluable in giving this dissertation final shape, coherence, and discipline.
I am forever indebted to Anne Marie Campian, who maneuvered me through the thickets of
graduate school bureaucracy with saintly patience.
Years ago, at the University of Pittsburg, I was lucky enough to find teachers and coaches who
treated my work as they would that of a colleague, and indulged any hubris as they would that of an
undergraduate. I am immensely grateful to Eli Brennan, Marcus Paroske, and Ron von Burg, who shaped
my intellectual landscape at Pitt. The sensibilities and lessons of John Lyne and John Poulakos were
formative for me and continue to influence how I approach academic and non‐academic life. My time at
Pitt was bookended by two additional great scholars, Gordon Mitchell, who brought me there to
participate in the William Pitt Debating Union, and Henry Krips, who oversaw the final paper I wrote.
This project came together over several years thanks to the breadth, depth, and knowledge of
faculty at USC Annenberg, as well as their pedagogical generosity. I’d like to thank Randy Lake, Larry
Gross, Doug Thomas, and Peter Starr for instruction across rhetorical theory, mass communication,
classical philosophy, and critical theory, which provided the basis for my comprehensive exams and
much more. My views on rhetoric were refined by seminars with Stephen O’Leary and Tom Hollihan,
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and Sandra Ball‐Rokeach provided the framework through which I still view the broader field of
communication.
I’m also grateful to my friends and fellow graduate students from Annenberg. Shawn Powers
was and remains one of my closest friends, and still provides indispensable counsel and support. My
time at Annenberg would have been far less vibrant and productive were it not for Amelia Arsenault,
Melissa Franke, Craig Hayden, Vikki Katz, John Kephart, and Meghan Moran, and I’m thankful for their
continued friendship. From my cohort, Zoltan Majdik was a vital interlocutor. I am indebted to Paul
Strait, Drew Margolin, and Steve Rafferty for endlessly productive brainstorming sessions.
In Washington DC, I have found mentors and friends who have sharpened my thinking about the
politics, policy, and communication of deliberative cultures. I would especially like to thank Josh Block,
who brought me to Washington and immersed me in the world of strategic communication, David
Reaboi, who honed my understanding of that craft, and the fellows at the Office of Special Studies,
whose influence is ubiquitous across this work.
My family – my mother, father, sister, and brother – have provided endless love and support,
and my mother especially has been a resolute advocate and supporter of my education and academic
work. They have a claim on this dissertation. And of course, I am inexpressibly thankful to Katya, who
always knew exactly how this dissertation would get done, and without whom none of this would be
possible.

v

ABSTRACT

The increasing salience of conspiracy theories in contemporary politics and culture has fueled
calls to theorize robustly their structure and dynamics. Two common scholarly approaches are
explicated: descriptivist, historical approaches that tend to be critical of conspiracism, and newer,
inverted readings, grounded in postmodern and poststructuralist commitments, that invest conspiracy
narratives with privileged epistemic status and emancipatory potential. The dissertation argues that
neither approach accounts for how conspiracism operates in deliberative spaces or corrodes public
rationality.
Drawing on the rhetorical tradition of the quaestio, this dissertation situates the debate
over conspiracy theories as one over the structure and dynamics of identity. It reconstructs post‐
Freudian social theories to trace the conditions of possibility for identification, and then excavates those
models to extract classes of rhetorical appeals and argumentative tactics that are implicated in the
consolidation of identity. Those emerge as rhetorical appeals to place, bodily integrity, and vision and
argumentative moves aimed at generating publicity, scapegoating, and anxiety. Such heterogeneous
rhetorical appeals and argumentative tactics are found to be prominent features of some conspiracy
narratives, and justify growing alarm about the acceleration of conspiracism in public life.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION .................................................................................................................................................. ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................................ iii
ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................................................... v
A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY ........................................................................................................................ viii
CHAPTER 1: A QUAESTIO OF IDENTITY ......................................................................................................... 1
Situating Identity ....................................................................................................................................... 9
The Haze of Conspiracy Theories ............................................................................................................ 15
Postmodern Recuperation ...................................................................................................................... 22
Conspiracy Theories as Self‐Sealing Arguments ...................................................................................... 29
Reconstruction, Excavation, and Rhetoric .............................................................................................. 32
CHAPTER 2: HABERMAS, PLACE, AND PUBLICITY ....................................................................................... 36
Identity and Identification in Habermas ................................................................................................. 37
Identity is Symbolic ............................................................................................................................. 37
Identity as Habituated Expectations ................................................................................................... 39
Impossibility of Identification ............................................................................................................. 40
Conditions of Possibility for Identification: Particular‐Universal Ideologies .......................................... 42
Particular‐Universal Ideologies in 18
th
Century Europe: Öffentlichkeit .............................................. 44
Particular‐Universal Ideologies in Contemporary Europe: Constitutional Patriotism ........................ 47
Consequences of Failed Identification: “Unfailing” Regress ................................................................... 49
Excavating Place ...................................................................................................................................... 51
Excavating Publicity ................................................................................................................................. 54
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 63
CHAPTER 3: BURKE, BODILY INTEGRITY, AND SCAPEGOATING .................................................................. 65
Identity and Identification in Burke ........................................................................................................ 66
Identity is Symbolic ............................................................................................................................. 66
Identity as Habituated Expectations ................................................................................................... 70
Impossibility of Identification ............................................................................................................. 71
Conditions of Possibility for Identification: Piety .................................................................................... 75
Piety Subverted by Secular Futurism .................................................................................................. 77
Piety Secured Through Religious Futurism ......................................................................................... 78
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Consequences of Failed Identification: Scapegoating ............................................................................ 79
Excavating Bodily Integrity ...................................................................................................................... 82
Excavating Scapegoating ......................................................................................................................... 86
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 90
CHAPTER 4: LACAN, VISION, AND ANXIETY ................................................................................................ 92
Identity and Identification in Lacan ........................................................................................................ 94
Identity is Symbolic ............................................................................................................................. 94
Identity as Habituated Expectations ................................................................................................... 97
Impossibility of Identification ............................................................................................................. 98
Conditions of Possibility for Identification: Fantasy ............................................................................. 101
Fantasy in the Imaginary ................................................................................................................... 101
Role of the Scopic Drive .................................................................................................................... 102
Consequences of Failed Identification .................................................................................................. 103
Excavating Vision................................................................................................................................... 105
Excavating Anxiety ................................................................................................................................ 106
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 107
CHAPTER 5: CONFRONTING IDENTITY ...................................................................................................... 109
Critical Findings ..................................................................................................................................... 113
Horizons for Further Inquiry ................................................................................................................. 118
Limits to the Study ................................................................................................................................ 119
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 120
BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................................................... 122


viii

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

This dissertation deploys non‐technical language by and large. “Conspiracy theories” are
narratives about secret plots of usually nefarious people, called “conspirators,” who shape events.
“Conspiracy theorists” are people who posit conspiracy theories, and is interchangeable with the
“conspiracists.” When conspiracy theorists offer conspiracy theories, they’re engaged in “conspiracism.”
Technical language is only used in those places where the dissertation makes a theory‐advancing
contribution to rhetoric, argument, or social theory inquiry. For example, I define “conspiracy
argumentation” as the two‐step self‐sealing process of setting untenable standards for disproof then
reframing disproof as proof, and more generally as the class of argumentation tactics in which disproof
enhances rather than dampens belief. Technical language is also used when drawing on technical
scholarly distinctions that have already been unpacked. In those places the usage is explicitly flagged.
That said, there are multiple “theories” at multiple levels across this dissertation. I reconstruct
and then excavate social theories in order to create new theories about identity and identification, and
then use those new theories to examine conspiracy theories. In passages where multiple sorts of
theories are in play, I’ve tried to use vernacular terms like “conspiracism” and “conspiracists” to limit
confusion. Additionally, to enhance readability terms about conspiracy theories and theorists –
“conspiracy theory,” “conspiracy theories,” “conspiracy theorist,” and “conspiracy theorists” – are
italicized throughout.

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CHAPTER 1: A QUAESTIO OF IDENTITY

“Conspiracy is as natural as breathing. And since the struggles for advance nearly always have a
rhetorical strain, we believe that the systematic contemplation of them forces itself upon the student of
rhetoric.”
– Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives

“’All right,’ said Susan. ‘I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable.’
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE
PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.”
– Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

Rhetoric and argument – as distinct but entangled practices of persuasion, norms of discourse,
and methods of analysis – had already diverged decades before Plato and Aristotle philosophized the
practices and conditions of human encounter as knacks, arts, systems of discovery, and so on.
Describing the dialogue between envoys at the beginning of the 416 BC Athenian expedition against
Melos, Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War had the two sides open by debating over the
appropriate criteria for evaluating the disputation. What appeals were relevant to the situation, what
persuasive moves should be considered valid, and what should each side be allowed to get away with?
The Melians had deliberately limited the forum to just a handful of their leaders, and the
Athenians began by dryly commenting that inasmuch as the Melians were trying to prevent them from
making public speeches that might be “seductive,” the Melians should also forgo oratory and let the
dialogue proceed on the basis of facts and propositions (Thucydides 1996, 351). The Melians, after
complaining that everything was being done under the threat of force anyway, conceded “the
discussion, if you please, can proceed in the way which you propose,” at which point the Athenians
made their infamous assertion that “as the world goes… the strong do what they can and the weak
suffer what they must” (Thucydides 1996, 351–52). The Melians responded to the universalist claim by
trying to reopen the debate over the debate, this time in the guise of an appeal to ethics. They granted
that under normal circumstances evaluation would proceed along strict lines, but insisted that given the
concrete danger they faced they should be permitted not just to moral arguments but “even to profit by
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arguments not strictly valid if they can be persuasive” (Thucydides 1996, 352). The Athenians rejected
the moral appeal explicitly and the request for argumentative leniency implicitly. The dialogue went on
for dozens more passages and then Thucydides closes Book V with a few terse paragraphs about how
the Athenians conquered Melos, killed all the men, and sold the women and children into slavery.
Over subsequent decades and centuries the differing clusters and sensibilities that run through
the Melian Dialogue coalesced into distinct but overlapping approaches to rhetoric as situated power
and argument as reasonable prudence. The traditions account for persuasion at different registers.
Neither exhausts how encounters unfold interpersonally or relations evolve institutionally. Rhetorical
theorists have tended to emphasize the situated conditions that structure and call for appeals. Rhetoric
oscillates between explaining persuasion as a function of the classical tropes, on one side, and
identification with the audience, on the other (Birdsell 1993; Burke 1969b; Day 1960; Bitzer 1992).
Argumentation theorists have leaned more toward abstract and universal conditions of validity, carving
out spaces where the force of the better argument should and does carry the day (Goodnight 2004;
Houtlosser and Rees 2014; Van Eemeren 2015).
In the 20
th
century new disciplinary approaches to discourse developed in the academy. In the
first half of the century, modern concerns with the classics and the structural autonomy of texts focused
on descriptions and analysis of context for occasioned address. Postmodern and poststructuralist
approaches undertook critiques and interrogations of the canon, inflected through new models of
language. These latter approaches are methodologically and ontologically aggressive in the sense that
they reduce much of the world to texts ripe for and amendable to discursive analysis, not just images or
physical artifacts but mathematics and computer programming code (Marino 2006; Jameson 2012;
Amariglio, Cullenberg, and Ruccio 2013). Postmodern approaches tend to place a priority on tension and
contradiction, so that eventually postmodernism itself emerges as “a contradictory phenomenon that
uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges” (Hutcheon 1987, 10). The
3

moves are not just epistemological but also broadly normative. French philosopher Jacques Derrida,
who developed the cornerstone methodology of deconstruction, stated that the postmodern condition
marks both “the sad, negative, nostalgic, [and] guilty” and “the joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the
world and without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation” (Derrida 1993, 240).
Postmodern and poststructuralist theories are also deeply skeptical of identity, at least and
especially as it has developed through the Western metaphysical tradition. The foundational
postmodern problems involve the dissolution of metanarratives that ground identity and the instability
of language that structures identity (Lyotard 1984; Derrida 2016). Power is theorized as circulating
through discourses of knowledge, which are channeled through language and locked in at the level of
symbolic identity (Wetherell, Yates, and Taylor 2001; Foucault 1990). Resistance to power means
rejecting identification as neither possible nor desirable, so that emancipation becomes intimately
linked with “resistance to the definition of limits in terms of identity” (Williams 2014, 11; Laclau and
Mouffe 2001; Markell 2000). The challenge of theorizing stable human identities stretches back to a
fundamental theoretical question that emerged in the decades after Freud. Modern theorization sought
to retain the core psychoanalytic insight that there is subject constituted by desire, while incorporating
new developments about the constitutive role of language in structuring subjectivity (Elliott and
Spezzano 1996; Alford 1987).
Debates over postmodern theories and deconstructive methods have ebbed and flowed in the
academy for decades. Defenders insist that scholarly debates have exposed literary, cultural, and
political dynamics that would have otherwise remained obfuscated. Critics charge that even when some
claims seem tenable, the analysis it too obscure to credit and the conclusions are too broad to accept
(Lubet 1997; Gross and Levitt 1998; Sokal and Bricmont 2003). They argue that the methodological and
ontological aggressiveness enables theorists to make moves that ‘level’ otherwise relevant distinctions
about texts, physical artifacts, and controversies, and which set up sweeping claims about equivalences,
4

inversions, and contradictions that are internally coherent – and therefore difficult to counter on their
own terms – but externally untenable. The main criteria for evaluating scholarship becomes theoretical
cohesion, a wholly internal dynamic, and as a result analysis tends to become untethered from the
objects being analyzed. These debates have recently sharpened in controversies where new empirical
findings are at odds with postmodern or poststructuralist accounts, calling into question not just the
analyses but the underlying approaches (Haack 2019; Göhner and Jung 2016)
1
.
Academic scholarship about conspiracy theories has of course not been immune to the
methodological shifts, away from descriptive analysis of texts and toward postmodern critiques and
reversals. In recent decades postmodern theorists have created a thicket of theory in which
conspiracism is granted privileged social utility and epistemic status (Fenster 2008; Dean 2000). These
efforts largely draw on commitments that enable now‐familiar sweeping claims about discourse, society,
and epistemology. They rely on a set of overlapping arguments for why conspiracy theories are
emancipatory tools to disrupt power and “inseparable from reason, part of the very operation of
reason” (Dean 2000). Even more recently, scholars interested in combatting rightwing populist
conspiracy theories have nevertheless insisted that conspiracism needs to remain a tactical option
against they take to be actually‐existing, right‐wing controlled electoral institutions (Hellinger 2019).
These “recuperative” projects are in tension with, and in many cases have been set against,
decades‐old lines of inquiry. In his canonical 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics historian

1
Debates over how theories and methodologies mediate experience and knowledge stretch back centuries,
including the roughly contemporary arc that goes from positivism through postmodernism and into contemporary
debates (Friedman 2000). There is no doubt that “theories become incredibly powerful since they delineate not
simply what can be known but also what it is sensible to talk about or suggest,” but there is enormous debate
about the degree to which theories inevitably overdetermine analysis or whether objects can in a sense push back
(S. Smith, Booth, and Zalewski 1996, 13; Colapietro 1989; Haack 1976). Those debates are far beyond the scope of
this dissertation, which limits itself to the more modest position that recuperative approaches to conspiracism are
so at odds with how it operates in contemporary political culture that there is reason to suspect the recuperative
analysis has become untethered from social reality, and to revisit it.
5

Richard Hofstadter analyzed conspiracy theories by “using political rhetoric to get at political pathology,”
and concluded that the paranoid style which marks them “has a greater affinity for bad causes than
good” and “has been the preferred style only of minority movements” throughout U.S. history
(Hofstadter 1996, 4–7)
2
. The move was mirrored in the foundational works of other fields where
conspiracism was theorized. In epistemology Brian Keeley published a field‐structuring article in 1999 in
the Journal of Philosophy that carved out a set of conspiracy theories “to which we should not assent, by
definition” (Keeley 1999, 111)
3
. The bulk of early psychological and social psychological research didn’t
polemically identify conspiracy theories as pathologies but nevertheless understood them as vectors for
the spread of disinformation (Uscinski 2017). Academic sensibilities were reflected in mainstream
political discourse, in which conspiracy theories were treated as corrosive and consigned to the fringes
(Barkun 2017).
These recuperative projects, which downplay the risks and assert the merits of conspiracism,
are also in tension with how conspiracy theories are being encountered in contemporary socio‐political
discourses. Conspiracism, accelerated by and channeled through new communication technologies, is
encroaching on vast swaths of social life (Barkun 2017; Rosenblum and Muirhead 2019; Uscinski 2017;
Hollander 2018). The emergence of new communications technologies in the Cold War and post‐Cold

2
Hofstadter’s essay was first delivered in Oxford as the Hebert Spencer Lecture in November 1963, then expanded
into an essay published by Harper’s Magazine in November 1964, and then bundled into a book along with other
essays later that year. At the time Barry Goldwater was ascendant in the GOP, and Hofstadter traced the
development and role of what he called “a style of mind, not always right‐wing in its affiliations, that has a long
and varied history… a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself,” and which at the time was being
exemplified by “the Goldwater movement” (Hofstadter 1996, 3–4).
3
Epistemology has also recently seen scholarship sympathetic to conspiracy theories, but of a very different sort
than what’s emerged from postmodern theories. The epistemological debate is over whether there is any prima
facie reason to discount conspiracy theories as explanations versus competing explanations (Coady 2006; Douglas
et al. 2019; M. W. Pfau 2005; Uscinski 2017). The epistemologists engaged in those debates have explicitly
distanced themselves from the postmodern approaches. David Coady has offered one of the most sustained
defenses of conspiracism from within formal epistemology, which he builds by contrasting the relative risks of
accepting false conspiracy theories versus rejecting true ones. He concludes there should be no presumption
against conspiracy theories (Coady 2006). Nevertheless Coady distances himself from postmodern recuperative
scholars, describing their approach as “misguided” because it treats all claims as constructed and levels the ability
to make distinctions on the basis of tenability (Coady 2006, 11).
6

War eras, and especially of new digital platforms, was accompanied by a transition of conspiracy
theories into the mainstream. Hofstadter had already worried in the 1960s that the development of
mass media technologies might allow conspiracy theorists to sharpen and spread their beliefs in new
ways (Hofstadter 1996). By the late 1980s Romanian‐French social psychologist Serge Moscovici
commented that between the United States and the Soviet Union, “other centuries have only dabbled in
conspiracy like amateurs. It is our century which has established conspiracy as a system of thought and a
method of action” (Moscovici 1987, 153).
The sheer volume of conspiracy theories on the Internet has undermined even the most
advanced efforts to stem them. One 2018 study found a network of 9,000 videos on YouTube pushing
political conspiracy theories in which “[e]very religion, government branch, geopolitical flashpoint issue,
shadow organization – and every mass shooting and domestic terror event – are seemingly
represented,” despite YouTube’s efforts to remove videos pushing false information (Albright 2018). The
range and effects of conspiracism have also expanded. For the first time in decades, domestic political
violence driven by conspiracy theories not only cannot be ruled out, but is in fact happening (Barkun
2017; Neville‐Shepard 2019). In May 2019 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for the first time
found that conspiracy theories constituted a terrorist threat, assessing that “political conspiracy theories
very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to engage in criminal or violent
activity” (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2019, 2)
4
.
Seemingly all at once, the cross‐disciplinary consensuses about conspiracism have eroded and
conspiracy theories appear to be simultaneously undertheorized, overtheorized, and mis‐theorized.
Scholars especially in empirical fields have recently generated a wave of studies that treat conspiracy
theories as pathological and study their viral diffusion, but those projects remain disconnected from

4
The report described several cases where attacks were either attempted or committed, in which the perpetrators
said they were driven to act because they believed that global events were being shaped by vast conspiracies.
7

theorizing in the humanities and from other research trajectories in the sciences (Uscinski 2017).
Conspiracy theories turn out to be notoriously difficult to define, and scholarship has diverged even on
fundamental questions of what they are, which in turn has stymied the sort of taxonomy‐building that
would serve as a basis for boarder theorizing (Birchall 2004; 2006; Jameson 1990; Keeley 1999)
5
. One of
the most comprehensive interdisciplinary analyses of conspiracy theories to date, which drew on studies
from psychology, political science, sociology, history, information sciences, and the humanities,
concluded there is no accepted measure for evaluating questions and answers, there are significant lines
of research without conclusive answers, and where theoretical work has been done it has focused on
psychological causes but not social consequences (Douglas et al. 2019).
Meanwhile theoretical debates have largely been left open to recuperative scholarship.
Hofstadter’s book, while a pointed rebuke to McCarthyism, was explicitly and by deliberately
descriptivist, designed “simply to establish the reality of the [paranoid] style and to illustrate its frequent
historical recurrence” (Hofstadter 1996, 7). He and similar scholars proceeded by tracing conspiracism as
it coalesced and spread across historical cases or contemporary controversies, describing and analyzing
“basic elements” as they emerged (Hofstadter 1996, 29). There are few resources in that theoretical
tradition to muster against the sweeping claims enabled by postmodernism and poststructuralism.
Theorists who seek to articulate the theoretical basis for concerns about conspiracism are simply
outgunned.
This dissertation seeks to address that theoretical imbalance. I situate the debate over
conspiracism as a debate over identity and identification, which are of necessity – either explicitly or
implicitly – central concepts and fundamental commitments in recuperative scholarship. I reconstruct

5
Epistemologists routinely deploy definitions of conspiracy theories, but those are top‐down approaches in which
they stipulate criteria for what counts as a conspiracy theory and debate the epistemic reasonability of whatever
has just been defined. The goal is to create technical distinctions for philosophical debates not to sort out actually
existing conspiracies (Basham 2003; Clarke 2002, 200; Coady 2006; Keeley 1999).
8

and then excavate three leading theories of communication: the communication pragmatic theory of
Jürgen Habermas, the literary dramatism of Kenneth Burke, and the poststructuralist psychoanalysis of
Jacques Lacan. These three scholars are themselves associated in various ways with post‐Freudian
efforts, and their theories are among the most sophisticated attempts at accounting for discursively‐
constructed identity and subjectivity
6
.
In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, I excavate two concepts each from Habermas, Burke, and Lacan’s social
theories in turn. First, what sorts of rhetorical appeals are likely to be entangled in consolidating
identity? Discursive appeals to place (Habermas), bodily integrity (Burke), and vision (Lacan) operate in
those registers. Second, what sorts of structural mechanisms are in play when identity is being
consolidated? These emerge as tactics based on publicity (Habermas), scapegoating (Burke), and
generating anxiety (Lacan). These innovations provide resources for describing why, far from opening up
emancipatory possibilities, conspiracism reinforces particularly pernicious sorts of identities.
In Chapter 5, I outline some consequences that these innovations have for debates over
conspiracy theories. To the extent that conspiracists across contemporary communications platforms
utilize these rhetorical appeals and mechanisms, I argue, conspiracism will be more likely to consolidate
identity rather than disrupt it. The dynamic is shown to undermine the recuperative readings in which
conspiracy theories provide momentum for resistance, understood in postmodern and poststructuralist
terms. Conspiracism is not equalizing or emancipatory but has predictable risks and real costs. Analysis
suggesting otherwise – at least the contemporary postmodern versions of that analysis – is ultimately
incoherent.

6
Though each of these theorists has distinctions internal to post‐Freudian debates over identity, which I explore in
turn, the definition is correct as a general description for all of them.
9

In the rest of this chapter, I will: establish and justify the centrality of identity as a category for
evaluating conspiracism and disciplinary scholarship about it, evaluate the contemporary trajectory of
political and social conspiracy theories, trace previous scholarship on the subject including the division
between “descriptivist” and postmodern recuperative approaches, theorize the argumentative structure
of conspiracy theories to facilitate subsequent analysis, and anticipate the development of the rest of
the dissertation.
Situating Identity
Identity and identification are central but contested terms in debates over social theory, and are
notoriously difficult to define. They’re entangled in debates over the self, emotion, narratives,
introspection, agency, and the mind/body problem, all of which are then entangled with each other,
stretching back in some cases to the origins of philosophy (Beauchamp and Thomas 2009). They are core
terms in rhetorical theory, going back to the Greeks and through contemporary communication theory
(Burke 1984a; Too 2009). Modern efforts to operationalize them in empirical research go back at least to
the social interactionists, who theorized identities as the roles people take on across different
interactions (Mead 1934). Read against the classical definition of rhetoric as a method for discovering
the available means of persuasion, identification becomes a strategy for making particular kinds of
appeals to move listeners and readers by shaping their attitudes or bending them towards the rhetor
(Iser 1995). In the context of public communication, appeals to identity have in recent decades become
a site of contestation in efforts to craft national and post‐national institutions (Berezin and Schain 2003).
Outside of the academy identity has taken on resonance in cultural debates and is deployed “as an
explanatory concept for motivations and actions,” which itself has been theorized as a mode of social
representation (Chryssochoou 2003, 227).
There is suggestive evidence that beliefs in conspiracy theories are entangled in issues of
identity as operationalized by psychology, roughly as a set of core beliefs. Studies going back to the early
10

2010s suggest that not only are conspiracy theories highly resistant to fact‐based refutation, but that
presenting facts which refute those theories creates a “backfire effect” that perversely strengthens the
conspiracists’ beliefs (Rob Brotherton 2017; Nyhan and Reifler 2010). More recent studies with much
larger samples suggest that corrections can sometimes work, both in general and in the context of
conspiracy theories, but that emotions related to identity determine the degree to which they do (Bode
and Vraga 2017; Trevors et al. 2016; T. Wood and Porter 2019).
As inherited from Sigmund Freud, identity is straightforwardly one’s sense of self. Identification
occurs when an identity is consolidated: when it is stabilized, bolstered, fixed, secured, and so on (Boag
2014). In Freud identity is a function of biological drives associated with and attracted to different zones
of the body, from which gratification is derived when biological needs are satisfied. Some of those drives
are socially suppressed and some of which aren’t, and the resulting interplay of repression and desire
conditions the subject. Post‐Freudian theory ‘linguistifies’ Freud by rereading biological processes as
symbolically‐driven, so that many dynamics which seem relatively stable albeit contingent in Freudian
theory emerge as significantly less determined (Cook 2002; D. Davis 2008; Gordon, Hammer, and
Honneth 2019; MacNeil 2017; Sherman 2007). The broad trajectory of post‐Freudian theory seeks to
retain Freud’s observations and to some extent structures of the psyche, while embedding them in
social theories that also incorporate developments highlighting the constitutive role of language in
structuring subjectivity. Identity becomes both irreducibly social and irreducibly symbolic
7
.

7
This model of identity is one familiar to communication scholars and has been reinforced by psychology and
neuroscience. Human beings are animals interacting with the world, each other, and themselves using symbols
including language. The nature of those interactions is open‐ended in some senses, but also conditioned by the
underlying operation, opportunities, and limitations of language. Wayne Booth has recommended the work of
neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, as “a strong scientific argument of how all reasoning depends on the brain’s
rhetorical processes – especially our emotions” (Booth, 2004, p. 178). In that model identity is linguistically
mediated: narratives condition how the brain forms from early in childhood and brain states are experienced as
narratives throughout life (Damasio 2000; Thiele 2010). The model reinforces the plausibility of a linguistically‐
mediated subject to which appeals can be made through multiple registers, including the register of identity. This
dissertation does not engage the numerous debates around Damasio’s work, many of which revolve around
judgment and philosophy of consciousness.
11

One immediate structural consequence of the post‐Freudian approach is that identity becomes
equivalent to one’s habituated symbolic understanding of the world, our implicit discursively‐inflected
expectations for navigating lived experience. When the world in a sense ‘pushes back’ and upsets
expectations – which is to say when it exhibits recalcitrance – that pushback is also felt as a rattle in our
self‐understanding. Alternatively, when our self‐understanding is rattled, it is felt as the world is pushing
back.
A second equally crucial consequence is that identification becomes structurally impossible.
Habermas, Burke, and Lacan have different primordial metaphysical and ontological commitments, but
they end up with a similar theory of language: symbolization is structurally unstable. It is always already
disrupted by distortions, gaps, and lacks. Since identity in their post‐Freudian models is linguistically
constructed, the disruptions in language will eventually be experienced as disruptions in identity.
Identification can take hold for a time by recourse to fantasies that efface those disruptions but since
the fantasies are also symbolic they are also structurally unstable – and so they too will therefore break
down, and identification will fail again. Lacanian scholar Yannis Stavrakakis describes the dynamic as one
in which “the ontic horizon of identification is that of ultimate failure; its ontological horizon that of
impossibility” (Stavrakakis 1999, 30).
Both of these dynamics are subtle and this dissertation explores how they work in turn in
Habermas, Burke, and Lacan to develop new resources for clarifying debates over conspiracy theories.
More specifically, the dissertation excavates from each social theory an embedded theory of identity,
then extracts from that theory of identity an account of what rhetorical and structural moves are likely
in play when identity is consolidated, and then brings those to bear on debates about conspiracy
theories.
My focus on identity serves 4 purposes.
12

First, reading social theorists from the angle of identity offers scholars a new way to explore
how some conspiracy theories operate at least some of the time. Differentiation and discrimination
among different conspiracies should increase the sophistication of interpretation and possibilities for
insight. Previous scholarship on the topic either left issues of identification undertheorized, as with
descriptivist approaches, or mis‐theorized, as with recuperative approaches. In an environment
increasingly marked by incoherence and divergence, the focus also enables theorists to carve out
particular clusters of conspiracy theories – those that appeal to particular rhetorical tropes likely to be
entangled in identity – and compare them to clusters that don’t.
Second, the focus is theoretically generative. Understanding how conspiracy theories work on
identity requires theorizing not just identity but also the process of identification, as they are situated
within the broader theories of Habermas, Burke, and Lacan. Part of that theorization requires analyzing
the conditions under which identification succeeds or fails, and identity takes hold or doesn’t. This
dissertation produces two sets of theoretical innovations out of that analysis. First, it establishes that
rhetorical appeals to place, bodily integrity, and vision are likely to operate at the persuasive register of
identity. Second, it establishes that the argumentative mechanisms of publicity, scapegoating, and
anxiety are mechanisms and processes that facilitate identification.
The focus on identity also connects this dissertation to wide‐ranging debates over language and
subjectivity across rhetoric, philosophy, and critical theory, because of identity’s particular structural
equivalence to habituated symbolic expectations. Debates over symbolic identity in the context of
recalcitrance are entangled in issues of epistemology and even metaphysics from American pragmatism
through Habermas’s formal‐pragmatic theory (Haack 1976; Cook 2002). Efforts to link rhetorical theory
to epistemic debates over recalcitrance – roughly, the real world’s resistance to symbolization – have
spanned scholarship from Burke to more recent developments in the rhetoric of inquiry (Ceccarelli
2001; McGuire and Melia 1989; Prelli, Anderson, and Althouse 2011). Empirically, new developments in
13

Expectancy Violations Theory have stitched together findings from interpersonal communication on
attraction, credibility, persuasion, and smooth interactions, and the same cluster of problems is being
explored in cognitive science (Tillmann 2012; Burgoon 2015).
Third, the focus is methodologically generative. As an approach, it orients scholars toward a
strategy in which internal excavations of robust social theories are read against external objects of
analysis. Recuperative approaches to conspiracy theories have at times seemed to validate the charges
made by critics of postmodernism and poststructuralism, that theory‐heavy analysis becomes
untethered from its objects of analysis. This dissertation also engages in deep theoretical work, but of a
type that allows the results to be applied back to objects of analysis without ‘leveling’ them. I trace the
internal details and mechanisms of wide‐ranging social, critical, and literary theories which crisscross
social, political, psychological, economic, and epistemic controversies, and extract out of them the
dynamics of identity and the conditions of possibility for identification. I then examine conspiracy
theories to evaluate the degree to which they are likely to be entangled with those dynamics and
conditions. Theoretical architectonics provide ways of linking discourse and process, across the
backdrop of a particular time. Since identity is embedded deeply in these theorists’ respective
architectonics, analysis tethered to identificatory dynamics can’t be dismissed or theoretically untangled
without addressing the bulk of each scholars’ theorization. The approach provides both a
methodological check against picking and choosing parts of theories to align them with objects of
analysis, and an argumentative check against too quickly dismissing insights when they’re tethered to
and reinforced by additional plausible theorization. However, my approach does not have to be limited
to identity: rather, contemporary theories exhibit an array structures and commitments that can be
excavated along the same lines, and analysis done that way carries with it significant theoretical weight.
Fourth, the focus ensures that this dissertation has sufficient theoretical depth to respond to
recuperative scholarship about conspiracy theories. Considerations about identity are fundamental to
14

the postmodern and poststructuralist moves of recuperative scholars, but they often leave the issue
implicit or undertheorized. If conspiracy theories are more likely to generate identification rather than
disidentification – if it turns out that conspiracists do their persuasive work by rhetorically or structurally
consolidating identity – it becomes unlikely that the recuperative case can be sustained.
In generating new theory, this dissertation is a response to the call of G. Thomas Goodnight and
John Poulakos to reinterpret conspiracy rhetoric in a way that can “account for the usefulness of this
appeal to mainstream speakers and audiences” (Goodnight and Poulakos 1981, 300). Methodologically
my posture also extends and leans on Wayne Brockriede’s development of perspectivism as a “strategy
of emphasis” in which one part of a theory is highlighted without rejecting other salient characteristics
of the theory (Brockriede 1985, 153). The strategy orients scholars toward understanding rhetorical
communication as “a series of intertwined and interacting perspectives,” in which those perspectives
are explored by rummaging inside theories, extracting salient processes, and tracing their operation
(Brockriede 1985, 153). Brockriede focused on the term “understanding.” This dissertation repeats the
move but for the category of identity, and then evaluates how it operates internally inside theories and
externally as it relates to conspiracism.
Tactically, this dissertation draws on a much older rhetorical tradition, that of the quaestio. The
concept emerges from the forensic technique of stasis, which was influentially developed by
Hermagoras around 150 B.C. and taken up by later Greek and Latin rhetors and scholars through whom
we get his writings (M. Carter 1988; Nadeau 1959; Dieter 1950)
8
. Most technically, it is a procedure by
which legal disputants would analyze a case by moving through questions of fact, definition, quality, or
appropriateness of jurisdiction. The process is one of discovery as well as disputation, meant to identify
the issue on which the case turned: is the defendant claiming he wasn’t there or that he didn’t do it? Or

8
Gestures toward a theory of stasis appear earlier, including in Aristotle, albeit in implicit and incomplete forms
(Thompson 1972). It is a core element of his physical theory (Dieter 1950).
15

that he did do it, but it was self‐defense? Once the rhetors settled on a point of stasis – the question on
which they disagreed – the appropriate rhetorical options would emerge. Questions of fact could be
disputed, for instance, in terms of motive or ability (M. Carter 1988).
Roughly speaking quaestio is that point of stasis, read against the backdrop of a broader
understanding of stasis as a “doctrine of inquiry” rather than just a legal practice (M. Carter 1988, 100).
By the time we get into the middle of the Roman period “it was already being used in a bewildering
number of different senses,” but always in the context of being “the Question” around which debates
turned (Dieter 1950, 362, 365):
[B]oth ancients and moderns are in substantial agreement that, when a stasis or issue occurs, it
takes the form of a question used as a focus for the contrary views of proponents and
opponents. Those presenting the better answer to the question succeed in breaking the
stasiastic impasse in their favor. (Nadeau 1959, 55)
There is an ongoing debate over whether conspiracy theories are socially productive or corrosive. What
is at stake technically? Technically it’s a question about whether conspiracy theories can disrupt power
as understood in postmodern and poststructuralist terms. How do we evaluate the effects of power in
those terms? By reference to its effects on identity. The quaestio then becomes one about the degree to
which conspiracy theories disrupt identity. Recuperative scholarship must gamble that conspiracism can.
That gamble emerges as unlikely to pay off once identity is robustly theorized and read against
conspiracism, and instead a case is made for returning to traditional skepticism toward conspiracism.
The Haze of Conspiracy Theories
Though have been recurring episodes in American history that prominently featured conspiracy
theories, as a matter of public repute they largely remained disrespectable and associated with history’s
greatest horrors and modernity’s greatest ills, from plagues to genocides (Barkun 2017; Byford 2011;
Douglas et al. 2019; Pipes 1999). The political marginalization was reflected, and remains embedded, in
interpersonal norms and argumentative tactics. Labeling an opponent’s claim a conspiracy theory is
16

perceived as an aggressive attempt to dismiss their claim, and the accusation is disproportionately likely
to escalate an argument as compared to other dismissive moves (Husting and Orr 2007; M. J. Wood
2016; M. J. Wood and Douglas 2013; L. deHaven‐Smith 2014). Conspiracy theorists themselves have
been so sensitive to the characterization that some have claimed the label “conspiracy theory” was
invented by the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1960s to discredit conspiracy theories (Blaskiewicz
2013a).
While studies of the role that the Internet and contemporary social media play in the spread of
conspiracy theories diverge – there are different results for different types of investigations and
audiences –empirical research broadly suggests that at a minimum the Internet allows more
misinformation to spread, that the misinformation includes conspiracy theories, and that the conspiracy
theories are attractive to already polarized communities and in turn deepen those communities’
polarization (Southwell, Thorson, and Sheble 2018; Zollo et al. 2015; Bessi et al. 2015; Douglas et al.
2019). Whatever the causes and correlations are with digital platforms, conspiracy theories have steadily
moved inward from the fringe culturally and politically.
In 1993 the Fox network launched its science fiction show The X‐Files, in which FBI agents Fox
Mulder and Dana Scully chased a secret government conspiracy involving alien colonization of Earth. It
became one of the most influential shows of its era, and established an ongoing legacy that continues to
shape contemporary television and culture, though it was already criticized at the time and since for
indulging in conspiracism (Dawkins 1998; Knight 2000; Uhlich 2016). In 2003 novelist Dan Brown
published The Da Vinci Code, in which the hero Robert Langdon chased a millennia‐old patriarchal plot
by the Catholic Church to cover up the marriage of Jesus Christ, and it spent months on global best‐seller
lists. Brown declared that its depictions of secret rituals and society were historical facts and that it
17

would have been no different had he written the book as a nonfiction history (Mexal 2011)
9
. By the
beginning of the 21st century it was a journalistic commonplace to observe that the United States had
entered an era of conspiracism, and that conspiracy themes had not only become cultural markers but
were increasingly being published as political explanations for world events (Goldberg 2001).
By the mid‐2000s polls showed that two‐thirds of Americans believed the U.S. government was
covering up warnings the government had received about the September 11
th
terrorists attacks, that
more Americans than not believed government officials knew in advance about the JFK assassination,
and that thirty seven percent believed the government was hiding the truth about alien UFOs (Soltis
2007). Contemporary polls show that functionally everyone believes in at least one conspiracy theory,
and that conspiracy theories have become a driver of political discourse (J. M. Miller, Saunders, and
Farhart 2016; Uscinski 2018). Theorists have increasingly targeted the legitimacy of democratic political
institutions, and with increasing success. Every election since the Cold War in which the presidency
changed parties has been followed by claims of illegitimacy, which communication scholars have
ascribed to among other things changes in media and online political discourse (Martinez 2017;
Silverleib 2011; Wilentz 2019). The conspiracy theories about presidential illegitimacy can be partly
explained as coping mechanisms or denial, but those are not the only ones that have made their way
into electoral politics, nor the strangest ones. For example in the 2008 election candidates and pundits
had to address claims about a secret plot to merge the United States, Canada, and Mexico in to a single
North America Union (See‐Dubya 2007).
Publics are confronted with an array of different, overlapping types of conspiracy theories driven
by different, overlapping motivations. There are theories which are inherently about the existence of a

9
Brown’s insistence on the tenability of his books eventually caused semiotician and author Umberto Eco to quip
to the New York Times that “Dan Brown is one of the characters in my novel, ‘Foucault’s Pendulum,’ which is about
people who start believing in occult stuff” (Solomon 2007).
18

conspiracy: the global financial system is controlled by a Jewish cabal, history has been guided by the
Bavarian Illuminati, or international affairs are oriented toward securing a New World Order run by
global elites (Landes 2007; Spark 2000). There are other sorts of theories that aren’t inherently about
the existence of a conspiracy, but fairly quickly have to invent one to explain away the lack of evidence
for their unbelievable claims: vaccines cause autism, Elvis faked his own death, or that Shakespeare
didn’t write some or all of the plays attributed to him (Denisoff and Plasketes 1995; Jolley and Douglas
2014; Trosman 1965). There also theories, however, that are often discussed as conspiracy theories but
are neither directly about a conspiracy nor readily lend themselves to inventing one: the Earth is flat, a
hidden planet is going to crash into Earth, there are lizard people living underground, or aliens built the
Egyptian pyramids (Coady 2007; Garwood 2008; Lewis and Kahn 2005; Reyes and Smith 2014; Wynn
2008).
The motivations of conspiracy theorists are similarly diverse. Clinical psychologists have found
psychological and social correlates to anti‐Semitism and noted that patients who suffer from
schizophrenic delusions will sometimes attempt to make sense of the world through conspiracy theories
(Dunbar 1997; Gough 1951; Langdon and Coltheart 2000). Evolutionary psychologists have theorized
conspiracism is linked to evolved cognitive heuristics for pattern recognition and motivated action, citing
mechanisms developed tens of thousands of years ago (Shermer 2011)
10
. Rhetorical scholars have
posited that conspiracy theories are actually rhetorical genres (Creps 1980; Reyes and Smith 2014).
Epistemologists have explained the appeal of conspiracy theories as a function of the epistemic virtues
of unity and range of explanation (Keeley 1999). What’s often at stake when people assert that vaccines

10
According to this line of argument, which is about so‐called agenticity, early humans who heard rustling outside
the cave and went to investigate – because the rustling might be a predator – tended to live longer than ones who
assumed it was just the wind and stood down (Shermer 2011). Putting aside whether those explanations are true,
the approach can’t exhaust abstract questions in philosophy and other humanities about the plausibility of
conspiracy theories. There are events like the JFK assassination, after all, in which all explanations somehow
involve a conspiracy and so recourse to accounts about agenticity can’t explain what’s at stake (Coady, 2006).
19

cause autism ranges from parental rationalizations to socioeconomic considerations (Gray 1994; Gupta
2010; McNutt et al. 2016). Some conspiracy theories are coping mechanisms for events that would
otherwise be psychologically overwhelming, such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the
September 11
th
terrorist attacks, or the death of Princess Diana (Aspray and Cortada 2019). Conspiracy
theories about the illegitimacy of elections are often insulation for basic denial over the results
11
. Other
times theorists are conspicuously and opportunistically trying to weave events into a conspiracy theory
in which they’re already invested. Anti‐Semites for instance might make the September 11
th
attacks
fodder for theories about Jewish control. Some theories have the feel of simple psychological bitterness,
including some which have touched the world of academic communication: Marshall McLuhan believed
the professional success of his rival Northrop Frye was part and parcel of a global Satanic Masonic
conspiracy from which Frye was benefiting (Powe 2014).
Some scholars have tried to carve out comprehensive taxonomies based on the scope or
content of conspiracy theories. Barkun for instance carves up the categories that emerge intuitively from
lay taxonomies as “event conspiracy theories,” “systemic conspiracy theories,” and “super‐conspiracy
theories” (Barkun 2003). Walker has a taxonomy of five conspiracy theories, and parts ways from some
other scholars by including conspiracies in which the conspirators are benevolent rather than nefarious
(Walker 2013). In psychology and social psychology theorists have conducted studies with the hope that
meaningful theoretical distinctions would emerge (Rob Brotherton 2017; Robert Brotherton, French,
and Pickering 2013; Goertzel 2010; McCauley and Jacques 1979). These efforts have not generated
consensus on what distinctions make a difference and it’s not clear they can in the absence of prior

11
Conspiracy theories about electoral illegitimacy wear off as the reality of the election sets in. The conspiracies
are insulation for underly fantasies of denial: that if only the election can be shown to be illegitimate, then the
president will be expelled, and all his policies reversed as if they never happened. That fantasies become more
untenable as it becomes more difficult to imagine that world, and so the conspiracy theories lose their attraction
and purpose. For example conspiracism about former president Barack Obama’s birth certificate declined simply as
time wore on, largely unconnected to new evidence emerging (M. Sheridan 2010).
20

theorization (Barkun 2003; Walker 2013). There have been divergent psychological studies about
motivations for believing conspiracy theories about former President Barack Obama, the terrorist
attacks on September 11
th
, and alien abductions (Pasek et al. 2015; Swami, Chamorro‐Premuzic, and
Furnham 2010). It’s difficult to see how and why those disagreements have become so widespread: did
some of the studies go sideways because of mistakes or unlucky sampling, are the different findings the
result of studying different sorts of things, and so on (Clarke 2002; 2006; Coady 2006; van Prooijen and
van Vugt 2018)?
The haze of surrounding the study of conspiracy theories – of types and motivations – reinforces
the skepticism of scholars who suggest taxonomy‐building is likely to be unproductive because the
contemporary communications environment is one in which conspiracy theories overlap, resonate with
each other, mutate, and change (Goodnight and Poulakos 1981; M. Pfau and Zarefsky 2000; Griffin
1950). The position aligns with empirical findings from large network analysis studies, which show that
conspiracy theory communities tend to be heterodox in the rumors and disinformation they amplify and
defend (Edy and Baird 2012; Albright 2018).
However, there is no denying the value of categorization, if not necessarily of taxonomy‐
building. Carving out different categories of objects, cleaved according to distinctions that make a
difference, is a vital prerequisite to broadly theorizing the qualities, dynamics, and consequences of
similar and different sorts of objects. The challenge lies in ensuring the distinctions do in fact make a
difference. Charles S. Peirce, America’s greatest philosopher, described the process as a function of
three kinds of reasoning – deduction, induction, and abduction – in which categories arise from the
study of objects and objects strain against the adequacy of categories to account for them (Staat
21

1993)
12
. Alongside that dynamic are questions about the internal coherence of theories themselves,
which create expectations about what sorts of objects are out there ‘in the wild.’
This dissertation approaches the challenge of conspiracy theories along Peircean lines. I excavate
post‐Freudian theory to trace the dynamics that are likely at work when identification occurs, according
to commitments and consequences wholly internal to those architectonics, and draw consequences
from those dynamics including what rhetorical appeals are likely to be operating in that register.
Inasmuch as those appeals are found in the wild in clusters of conspiracy theories, there is reason to
suspect those clusters are doing their work at the level of identity. From the other direction, there are
conspiracy theories that aren’t easily accounted for by most descriptions of conspiracism, which focus
on pathologies, rationalizations, extremism, and so on. There are theories that are weird or marginal, or
come out of nowhere, or don’t otherwise seem to have a good reason for existing – and yet gain
enormous social traction. Those theories call for an explanation, which I suggest can partly be sketched
by reference to the way in which they are bound up in identificatory appeals.
This approach builds on traditional descriptivist approaches, which were skeptical of
conspiracism, while embedding them in robust social theories. Hofstadter had emphasized at the outset
of his essay that “the term ‘paranoid style’ is pejorative, and it is meant to be” because of its politically
dangerous influence (Hofstadter 1996, 5). He and other historians traced political conspiracy theories
through arguments preceding the American Revolution, persisting across the Cold War, and into
contemporary controversies, and found evidence for the dangerous influence of conspiracism again and
again (Hofstadter 1996; Stewart 2002; Rosenblum and Muirhead 2019)
13
. Contemporary recuperative

12
The Peircean architectonic is vast and well beyond the scope of this dissertation, but the emphasis on abduction
is crucial. Invented by Peirce to explain the process of science, abduction describes a kind of non‐deductive
inference in which hypothesis are formed: as opposed to top‐down deductive reasoning or bottom‐up induction,
abduction is the moment in which a new idea is formed.
13
Conspiracy theories are by no means limited to the United States. They were a prevalent part of modern
European political discourse before and after World War II, in some cases stretching back decades, and anti‐
22

projects have been able to dismiss that analysis through sweeping theoretical moves about discourse
and identity, which descriptivist approaches lack the resources to counter.
Postmodern Recuperation
The theoretical imbalance is a function of the relative theoretical thinness of the descriptivist
approach versus the dense theory of recuperative approaches. Hofstadter’s framework was explicitly
and by design descriptivist, where the goal was “simply to establish the reality of the [paranoid] style
and to illustrate its frequent historical recurrence” (Hofstadter 1996, 7). He catalogued the “basic
elements” of conspiracy theories, which were then taken up in subsequent studies as concepts for
sustained research (Hofstadter 1996, 29). These elements are now well understood. Conspiracy theories
explain historical events by reference to the deliberate actions of a group of persons acting in secret,
usually but not always enemies acting nefariously
14
. There can be no compromise with these imagined
enemies and they must be eliminated, and so conspiracy theories evoke and revolve around apocalyptic
themes. The theories tend toward totalization: epistemologically, they explain and stitch together
unrelated facts, and ontologically, they posit transhistorical and ubiquitous forces.
Totalization sets up the argumentative move characteristic of conspiracy theorists: when asked
to account for a lack of proof or presented with disproof, they will expand their theories so that the
challenges are recharacterized as confirmation of the conspiracy, and more specifically evidence that it
is of such depth and sophistication that it can eliminate evidence of its existence or generate contrary

Semitic conspiracy theories have been a consistent feature of European discourse stretching back centuries
(Neumann 2017; Stern 1974; Voigtlander and Voth 2012). In France four out of five people believe in a conspiracy
theories, in Britain it’s three out of five, and in Italy anti‐vaccine conspiracy theories are so widespread they’ve
been institutionalized in legal forums (Agence France‐Presse 2018; Addley 2018; Mancosu, Vassallo, and Vezzoni
2017) Conspiracy theories are so ubiquitous in the Middle East that one cross‐cultural study described them as
functionally universal, if not necessarily uniform in their appeal (Zonis and Joseph 1994).
14
Walker has a taxonomy of 5 conspiracy theories in which four involve nefarious enemies and the fifth is about
“Benevolent Conspiracies” (Walker 2013).
23

evidence
15
. Psychologically and epistemologically, the passion of a conspiracist is buoyed by the promise
that exposing the conspiracy will collapse it. Stylistically conspiracy theorists tend to be intensely fact‐
based and will pile on evidence to the point of absurdist pedantry, which Hofstadter linked to the
rhetorical and argumentative urgency to make fantastic conclusions seem believable (Clarke 2002;
Coady 2007; Hofstadter 1996; Kay 2011)
16
. Socially, they situate themselves opposite mainstream
explanations.
Despite its theoretical thinness, Hofstadter’s approach set the tone for productive scholarship
over the next several decades. Much of that scholarship traced those different elements in conspiracy
theories – the apocalyptic themes, argumentative tactics, and epistemological maneuvers – across
historical controversies, including debates over how to structure the American government, what to do
about slavery, and whether to annex Texas (Bailyn 2017; D. B. Davis 2008; Gribbin 1974; Griffin 1950;
Hogue 1976; M. W. Pfau 2005; M. Pfau and Zarefsky 2000; Uscinski 2017; G. S. Wood 1982). Other
scholarship catalogued new features and context. In his 1980 dissertation “The Conspiracy Argument As
Rhetorical Genre” Creps identified a set of discourses about conspiracy theories characterized by 10
elements, including the threat from an evil force, the epistemological tactic of transforming disproof
into proof, and a literal‐mindedness that Hofstadter had described as the rationalistic tendencies of
conspiracists (Creps 1980). A year later Goodnight and Poulakos called for a reinterpretation of
conspiracy rhetoric on the basis of how the Watergate scandal had unfolded, and more specifically how
evidence was marshalled in the service of public argument against the backdrop of the unfolding
controversy (Goodnight and Poulakos 1981). In 1984 David Zarefsky built on the Creps mapping of the

15
Keeley has called attention to the same maneuver from within epistemological theory: “conspiracy theories are
the only theories for which evidence against them is actually constructed as evidence in favor of them” (Keeley,
1999, p. 120). Sunstein and Vermeule have described the unique problems that it poses for governments and
government officials (Sunstein and Vermeule 2009).
16
Canonically, the conspiracy theorists’ error appears to be one of judgment, which in Hofstadter’s language is
characterized by a “characteristic paranoid leap into fantasy” (Hofstadter, 1996, p. 11)
24

genre of conspiracy argument, and added elements about how conspiracists shift the burden of proof
and adjust inferences (Zarefsky 1984).
In most respects these topics, methods, and sensibilities all overlapped with the original
Hofstadterian approach. For instance Lee Griffin traced how conspiracy rhetoric surrounding the
Freemasons was woven into the early days of the Republic, and specifically how the ability to attribute
the unfolding of historical events to covert, powerful, and sinister forces worked in shaping
controversies around early American political institutions (Griffin 1950).
Though all descriptivist methodologies inevitably risk missing salient theoretical dynamics,
which in turn impedes theoretical paradigms from coalescing, the risk is mitigated when studying
conspiracy theories historically because most of the basic elements are in fact intertwined, and so will
end up emerging regardless of one’s starting point. For example, the trend toward totalization, which
insulates the conspiracy theory from disproof, also makes the imagined conspiracy more sinister, and
heightens the need to counter the conspirators:
The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or
plots here and there in history, but that they regard a "vast" or "gigantic" conspiracy as the
motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of
almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods
of political give‐and‐take, but an all‐out crusade… Nothing but complete victory will do. Since
the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally
eliminated (Hofstadter 1996, 29–31).
Nevertheless, the theoretical thinness of the descriptive, historically‐grounded approach has had a
range of adverse consequences. It has stymied efforts to generate synergy between compatible claims,
because without a sense of what the theoretical terrain looks like it becomes difficult to evaluate
whether scholars and researchers are exploring the same area or homologous structures. It has also
stymied efforts to resolve competing claims when theories diverge about seem to be similar dynamics.
25

For example, Hofstadter theorized that what was distinctive about conspiracism was skewed
judgment, which stitches disparate facts into gigantic conspiracies, and he spent considerable time
tracing how that move puts into motion the conspiracists’ apocalyptic fantasies against imagined
enemies (Hofstadter 1996). Other scholars have suggested that conspiracism is attractive because it
satisfies a psychological obsession with an imagined enemy, and it’s the imagined enemy that puts into
motion the apocalyptic confrontations, while others have flipped the order and theorized that the
apocalyptic resonance is what fixates conspiracists, and the enemy is constructed to be an actor in the
larger drama (Barkun 2003; Cohn 2011). Argumentation scholars have foregrounded the argumentative
moves all but distinctive to conspiracism – turning disproof into proof – which in turn makes the
conspiracy that much more sinister and the need to confront imagined enemies that much more
pressing (Reyes and Smith 2014). Some scholarship suggests that accusations of secret societies and
plots, which put a sheen on visions of nefarious enemies, provide a sort of occult attraction (Bellon
1999; Fenster 2008). These can’t all be the essential structural element that gets everything else going.
Challenges become particularly pointed when humanistic descriptivist approaches don’t align
with empirical research. Creps utilized a “functional approach” that remained theoretically agnostic
about different accounts of motivation, and mapped conspiracy theories based on how they
distinguished between problems of evil (Creps 1980, 86). Citing Creps, Zarefsky concluded that
conspiracy theories only gain their legitimacy to the extent they can provide simpler explanations for evil
than mainstream explanations (Zarefsky 1984). Contemporary interdisciplinary research, however,
suggests a range of ways that conspiracy theories take hold psychologically. It is difficult to empirically
align claims about the motivational primacy of evil with the variety and popularization of increasingly
outlandish conspiracy theories.
Another consequence of descriptivism’s theoretical paucity is that it provides few resources for
responding to theory‐laden recuperative projects. The result has been an imbalance between skeptics of
26

conspiracism and a cluster of scholars who began to generate work in the 1990s, much of it grounded in
explicitly postmodern commitments, to recuperate conspiracy theories. Recuperative approaches
differed slightly in topic and emphasis from the previous descriptivist work – they were more likely to be
about television shows and fringe theories than pivotal historical controversies – but differed
dramatically in theoretical density, in that their scholarship was conducted against the backdrop of
postmodern commitments (Barkun 2003; Dean 1998; Knight 1999; 2000; Markley 1997; Melley 2000;
Reyes and Smith 2014).
Like scholars grounded in the descriptivist tradition, recuperative scholars are only a small
amount of the scholarly writers who have grappled with conspiracy theories, though they do so from a
different perspective than most cross‐disciplinary work. They are optimistic about the emancipatory
potential of conspiracism and skeptical about its risks. To cover for the flaws and implausibility of
conspiracy theories, recuperative scholars have drawn on three overlapping defenses: an
epistemological argument that conspiracy theories are plausible, a political argument that though
conspiracy theories may be implausible they’re justified by their political utility, and a theoretical
argument – which leans most heavily on postmodern stylings – that conspiracy theories don’t have
epistemic stakes at all and are fragmented narratives justified by their ability to disrupt the circulation of
power, which is positioned as an inherently positive move (Dean 1998; 2000; Fenster 2008; S. Miller
2002; West and Sanders 2003). The epistemic and political arguments have generated some responses
from within the horizons of epistemological and political theory. The heavily postmodern arguments
about non‐epistemic fragmented narratives have rarely been robustly addressed on their own terms.
These defenses are in tension with each other, and with the claims made by conspiracy theorists
themselves. The core commitment of conspiracists is that if only they could publicize what they know,
the conspiracies they insist they’re uncovering would collapse (Hellinger 2019). The assertion is
straightforwardly at odds with postmodern recuperative moves, which deny the importance of
27

epistemic content in conspiracism. Those postmodern moves are moreover also at odds with the two
other theoretical defenses about plausibility and utility, which are much closer to the claims of
conspiracists themselves. Nevertheless, scholars tend to mix‐and‐match the defenses, and even the
claims about epistemic plausibility are often inflected through postmodern commitments.
For example, in 1999 George Marcus published a literal textbook, Paranoia Within Reason: A
Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation, that provided an epistemic defense of conspiracy theories
against the backdrop of orthodox postmodern problematics including the dissolution of metanarratives
and the crisis in symbolic representation. He assembled a variety of case studies, from global warming to
corporate malfeasance, with the aim of demonstrating that conspiracy theories are pervasive,
recognizable, and epistemically justifiable explanations in the post‐Cold War era (Marcus 1999)
17
. In a
review of the book, Jodi Dean summarized the position:
To think conspiratorially, to posit links between actions and events, to imagine that there is an
other working behind the scenes, may well be reasonable, inseparable from reason, part of the
very operation of reason. Indeed, could it not be the case that denying this paranoid core is
precisely that intrusion of irrationality, of affective extremism, that empowers reason with its
undeniable coercive force? (Dean 2000)
Other reviews of the Marcus textbook proceeded much the same way: “Everyone now knows
conspiracies are real; it follows that those who suspected their presence were not unreasonably
paranoiac... what we previously thought was paranoia just might have turned out to be a form of
heightened awareness!” (Pratt 2003, 256).
The second set of defenses straightforwardly argues that epistemic shortcomings in conspiracy
theories should be overlooked because conspiracism has utility as a political tool for calling attention to

17
The observation that sometimes conspiracy theories turn out to be true is not a new one. Goodnight and
Poulakos sought to adjust Hofstadter’s critique in light of the Watergate scandal, and reread conspiracy
controversies as contested battles over social reality (Goodnight and Poulakos 1981). They however remained
acutely aware that when rhetors do cross into paranoia, the risks described by Hofstadter may become acute,
including the creation and persecution of out‐groups.
28

societal ills that need to be addressed: “just because overarching conspiracy theories are wrong does not
mean they are not on to something,” “we must be able to move beyond treating conspiracy theories as
flawed arguments” and appreciate them as social critiques, “sometimes conspiracy theorists are wrong
for the wrong reasons… [but that] is probably a price worth paying,” and so on (Fenster 2008, 67; S.
Miller 2002, 41; Uscinski 2018, 6)
18
.
The third move, which is heavily inflected through and committed to postmodern
understandings of language and society, asserts that conspiracy theories are inherently fragmentary and
so aren’t engaged in the business of offering claims to be proven or disproven at all:
All we know are bits and pieces without a plot. This is the way conspiracy theories work. Most
fail to delineate any conspiracy at all. They simply counter conventionally available narratives
with questions, suspicions, and allegations that, more often than not, resist coherent
emplotment or satisfying narrative resolution… Fear and unease are always conspiracy theory's
residue. We might say, then, that conspiracy theories are critical theories, critical theories
generally misread as empirical theories (exposés) (Dean 2002, 51).
The move to block epistemic evaluation sets up a normative move, where the narrative fragmentation is
part and parcel of a strategy of resistance aimed at disrupting hegemonic configurations of power:
“Rather than mapping totality, conspiracy's questions and insinuations disrupt the presumption that
there is a coherent, knowable reality that could be mapped” (Dean 2002, 51). Conspiracism becomes a
method of resistance against the backdrop of inchoate lived experience.
These are powerful theoretical moves. They level and overwhelm descriptivist accounts of
conspiracism by positing that politics, discourse, and identity don’t work the way that descriptivist
accounts assume they work. There has been a paucity of theoretical resources to counter those moves.

18
Critical theorists skeptical of conspiracism have pushed back on these claims. Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson,
as part of his broader critique of postmodernism and its emphasis on fragmentation, described conspiracy as “the
poor person's cognitive mapping… the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to
represent the latter's system” (Jameson 1990, 356). Conspiracy theories may breed political paranoia, but the
precise kind of political paranoia they breed seems likely to infantilize citizens and bolster government power,
rather than mobilize opposition (Dorsey 2002; Sturken 1997).
29

Conspiracy Theories as Self‐Sealing Arguments
There is a long tradition of bringing together theories drawn from rhetoric and argument, and
then bringing the results to bear on conspiracy theories (Billig 1988; Creps 1980; S. Miller 2002; O’Leary
1998). When scholarship proceeds along these lines, the theoretical tools of argumentation theory can
be used for evaluating discourse in particular ways – for instance, in terms of validity – and also to clarify
structures for evaluation from multiple perspectives, including rhetorical theory.
There is a structure to conspiracy theories that has remained undertheorized, and the under‐
theorization has in turn confounded analysis and categorization. David Zarefsky has oriented scholars
toward “what techniques of argumentation help to make the conspiracy charge credible,” and called
particular attention to what he called the “self‐sealing” quality of conspiracy theories, in which disproof
is transformed into proof (Zarefsky 1984, 63, 66).
First, the conspiracist sets an impractically high standard for what would count as evidence
against the conspiracy, either in the form of lack of proof or as disproof. Second, if that standard is met,
the conspiracist will insist the apparent rebuttals are actually evidence for the conspiracy theory,
because they suggest the conspiracy is of such depth and sophistication that the conspirators are able to
suppress true evidence and manufacture false evidence. That second move, in which evidence against
the existence of the conspiracy is reframed as confirmatory evidence, is the essential structural hallmark
of conspiracy argumentation (though not exclusive to it
19
).
Scholars had long known conspiracy argumentation was entangled with several other basic
features of conspiracy theories which rhetorically and argumentatively reinforce the move. For instance

19
In fact, there are ways of generating self‐sealing arguments that do not involve conspiracy theories at all. In the
philosophy of science, Kuhn and Lakatos have described different ways scientists try to insulate their theories from
anomalies and discrepancies, by reference to everything from instrumental failure to luck (Gholson and Barker
1985; Kuhn 1971). Clarke has specifically applied Lakatos’s “degenerating research programme” as a heuristic for
evaluating conspiracy theories (Clarke 2002; 2007). In epistemology, relativism up to solipsism can be used to
discount disproof by appealing to privileged knowledge, personal experiences, or intuitions, and by definition
radical skepticism can always provide a justification for ignoring evidence (Coady 2006; Haack 1996).
30

conspiracy theories’ tendency toward totalization, in which conspiracists stitch together a wide range of
seemingly disparate facts and occurrences, provides those theories with superior coherence and
consistency than messy mainstream explanations have (Creps 1980; Goodnight and Poulakos 1981;
Hofstadter 1996). Zarefsky’s contribution was to identify the self‐sealing move as an argumentative
tactic, rendering it structurally distinct and argumentatively arbitrary.
Separating the content of conspiracy theories from the tactics used to insulate them provides
structural clarity and sharpens objects for subsequent analysis. Popular and even academic discussions
about “conspiracy theories” often conflate the two different elements: the core unbelievable assertion,
which can be about functionally anything, and a self‐sealing conspiracy theory that purportedly explains
away why the core assertion is unbelievable (Hofstadter 1996, 36).
To be sure, sometimes the core assertion will provide resources for the self‐sealing move. When
the core assertion is about the existence of a conspiracy – Jews controlling banks, the Illuminati
controlling governments, and so on – then naturally the imagined conspirators will also be blamed for
covering their own tracks. Other times a conspiracy will be suggested but not explicitly asserted. To
insulate the belief that vaccines cause autism, which is just a scientifically wrong claim not a conspiracy
assertion, conspiracy theorists also need to articulate an additional claim about conspiracies in the
medical industry suppressing evidence. The claim about autism is distinct from the claim about a
medical conspiracy, but the two are tightly knit together, and the former suggest the latter.
In other cases, however, the core assertion will just be about something that’s wildly incredible,
without any ready suggestion about what sort of conspiracy would be covering it up. For instance, there
are conspiracy theories around claims that the Earth is flat or that aliens built the Egyptian pyramids,
because the people who advocate those things need to account for the underwhelming evidence
backing their claims, and so they invent conspiracies. In the absence of any ready motive for a
31

conspiracy, the have to invent a whole new set of claims – and those inventions can be mostly arbitrary.
Online conspiracists have linked the coverup of the Earth’s flatness to everything from NASA having a
financial motive to a global conspiracy involving Nazis, space aliens, and underground cities (Paolillo
2018). In the abstract one can generate a conspiracy to insulate any claim. Why not?
Self‐sealing arguments are a formal argumentative structure that insulates core conspiracy
claims, which have analogues and synergies with other argumentative tactics that are used to insulate
conspiracy theories from epistemic and normative criticism. In the language of argumentation theory
these are fallacies against critical thinking. This dissertation excavates three such tactics from
reconstructed theories of identity: publicity, which has an interpolative dimension that undermines
what are otherwise theorized as tactics which hold the government accountable, scapegoating, which
provides conspiracy theorists with ever‐new imagined conspirators, and anxiety, which channels the flux
of identity back toward tightly‐held beliefs.
The interplay between these two structural elements reinforces that contemporary conspiracy
theories are structurally contingent, sociologically heterodox, and constantly mutating. They are a mix of
tactics and content, which can spiral and flow, and move from serving one purposes to being
repurposed for another. They range from the trivial to the fantastic. They are also accelerating. The
traditional politics of the republic and the discourses of public communication are being put into
competition with discursive strategies that attribute the causes of events, the motives of actors, the
outcomes of actions, and the normalization of routine activities to unknown, unforeseeable, hidden
causes, private motives, and outlandish schemes.
Meanwhile descriptivist and recuperative approaches to conspiracism have talked past one
another, and neither have engaged social science research, which itself has made limited progress
converging because of taxonomic confusion. Instead of categorizing and then trying to draw taxonomic
32

conclusions about conspiracy theories scholars may instead approach them by reference to rhetorical
features, argumentative tactics, and what robust social theories about communication suggest may
likely be occurring. and structural features of core assertions.
Reconstruction, Excavation, and Rhetoric
This dissertation engages the social theories of three prominent 20
th
century scholars to
investigate how a fundamental category at stake in contemporary theorizing – identity – can be broadly
theorized and then read against conspiracy theories. Habermas, Burke, and Lacan developed particularly
robust social theories, with a range of explicit and implicit resources, including and especially for
addressing identity. There are deep homologies between them up and down their theories of
identification, so that comparisons and contrasts can be usefully drawn. They seem to be exploring the
same terrain in the same ways, and bumping into the same structures, to the point that scholars have
created hybrid theories incorporating homologous structures across their theories
20
.
The homologies are suggestive because each of these thinkers is representative of entire subfields
of theory and inquiry. Jürgen Habermas has a colorable claim to being the most influential German
philosopher of the second half of the 20
th
. His work across more than five decades integrates
metaphysics, epistemology, and psychology, and turns them to the problems of political, social, and
legal theory oriented towards the imperatives of communication and argument. Kenneth Burke was an
American literary theorist whose contributions to criticism, rhetoric, and aesthetics in the context of
symbolic action made him by far one of the most influential 20
th
century American theorists. Jacques
Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and a towering figure in the field, perhaps second only to Freud, who
has spawned entire subfields across film and literary theory, philosophy, and critical theory.

20
These include explorations of the unconscious in Burke and Lacan, and the cooperative ideal in Burke versus the
ideal speech communities in Habermas (K. Johnson 2007; Cheney, Garvin‐Doxas, and Torrens 1999)
33

Of course these three theorists do not exhaust the space of social theory, but they all converge in
different ways on a model of identity that is of particular relevance in the evaluation of conspiracy
theories, in part because it is overlaps with the assumptions embedded in recuperative scholarship: an
identity that is always‐already unstable because of distortions in language, and which can only be fixed
by symbolic acts of persuasion that overcome those distortions, and then only for a time. Moreover, all
three come from dissimilar fields in which they conducted field‐defining work and all three converge on
a structurally similar theory of identification which – after sufficient theorization and analysis – suggests
that conspiracy theories are corrosive to political deliberation and undermine recuperative projects that
suggest the opposite.
I conduct that theorization over the next four chapters. In chapters 2, 3, and 4 I reconstruct and
then excavate the three theorists’ concept of identity and identification. In Habermas identity is largely
implicit, in Burke it’s theorized, and in Lacan it’s not just explicit but arguably the central topic of inquiry.
In chapter 5, I create from the results a set of new approaches to pursuing questions about conspiracy
theories.
Though there are structural homologies and potentially even some identities across Habermas,
Burke, and Lacan, their views and approaches are distinct. Often, they are working at different levels of
analysis. Other times one scholar will theorize a process as necessary, while another will bump into it
but assume it is contingent. So, while all three theorists end up tracing processes of identity and
identification that are structurally – strikingly – similar, they have different explanations for why those
dynamics unfold in those ways.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 proceed systematically through 5 thematic sub‐sections that unpack those
dynamics, with the caveat that each theorist gets where he’s going through different routes.
34

 In each of subsection 1, I reconstruct identity according to the commitments embedded in
each theorist’s social theories. These sections describe the particular ways each one
linguistified Freud, and the two immediate theoretical consequences – the role of identity
as habituated symbolic expectations as well as the structural impossibility of identification.
For all three, the impossibility is a function of the distortions, gaps, and lacks in language.
This section is where Burke’s definition of humans and Lacan’s taxonomy of
Imaginary/Symbolic/Real are discussed, in chapters 3 and 4 respectively.
 In each of subsection 2, I reconstruct how identification occurs and identity get fixed for a
time, according to each theory. Structurally the dynamic is the same across all three
theorists: a fantasy that effaces the structural impossibility of identification somehow has
to take hold. In Habermas the task is described as creating particular‐universal ideologies,
which include explications of his views on constitutional patriotism. In Burke the task is to
move towards piety, which I read against the backdrop of a specific Burkean passage on
futurism. In Lacan the technical language is explicitly one of fantasy, which is bound up in
his work on the scopic drive and its object the gaze.
 In each of subsection 3, I reconstruct how the consequences of failed identification
cascade according to each theorist, which occur in structurally analogous but contingently
different ways. Universally, the consequences are individual anxiety and political
dislocation, including potentially catastrophic violence. In Chapter 3, on Burke, this
subsection is where the canonical guilt‐redemption cycle is discussed.
 In each of subsections 4, I excavate the reconstructions to theorize what sorts of rhetorical
appeals are likely to be entangled in identity, according to the implicit commitments of
each scholar. Moving through Habermas, Burke, and Lacan respectively suggests that
appeals to place, bodily integrity, and vision operate in that register. I then illustrate how
35

conspiracy theories might be evaluated against the backdrop of those appeals, and
evaluate the degree to which such analysis undermines recuperative scholarship.
 In each of subsection 5, I excavate the reconstructions to theorize what sorts of
argumentative and social tactics are likely to be structurally implicated in consolidating
identity, according to the implicit commitments of each scholar. Moving through
Habermas, Burke, and Lacan respectively suggests that tactics around publicity,
scapegoating, and generating anxiety work that way. I then illustrate how conspiracy
theories might be evaluated against the backdrop of those tactics, and evaluate the degree
to which such analysis undermines recuperative scholarship. In Chapter 2, Habermas, there
is a discussion on differing interpretations of critical differences in translations of
Öffentlichkeit, conventionally translated into English as “public sphere,” that has
theoretical implications for theories of deliberation.
Chapter 5 extends the results of these excavations to clear ground for analyzing conspiracy theories in
new ways, beyond theoretically‐thin empirical skepticism or theory‐heavy postmodern recuperation.
The result reinforces growing public alarm over the encroachment of conspiracy theories into social and
political domains, where they have emerged as increasingly ubiquitous and deeply pernicious forms of
public communication across legacy and digital platforms.

36

CHAPTER 2: HABERMAS, PLACE, AND PUBLICITY

“The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.”
– Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

Jürgen Habermas’s work took on fresh relevance amid the deepening crisis regarding European
identity. The crisis, going back at least as far as the French and Dutch rejections of the European
Constitution in 2005 and through the long‐standing deadlock over Brexit, has put pressure on social
theorists to account for a range of dynamics. The immediate post‐Cold War era was marked by
momentum toward supra‐ and post‐nationalism, which is now being checked by a wave of nationalist
populism. The current moment is a mix of institutionalized European bureaucracies, national and
transnational populist movements, and migration from beyond Europe. These events call for
theorization.
The Habermasian project is focused on stabilizing the project of Enlightenment modernity – a
universalist, norm‐based policy project – in the context of contemporary European politics. Habermas
has been engaged in trying to craft a European identity since the middle of the 20
th
century, and his
work can be read alongside and tested against contemporary developments. It is at least as valuable for
what is implicit in the theory: Habermas’s model of identity is grounded in a coherent model developed
over decades and examining what makes it cohere – conditions of possibility, consequences, analogies,
and so on – can orient critics toward the structural opportunities and challenges of identity formation in
general. The model begins with Freud understood linguistically, and develops into a model of
subjectivity that is irreducibly intersubjective and communicative.
The political salience of the Habermasian project overlaps with concerns over the notion of
“place,” as controversies over territory, borders, and sovereignty threaten to erode the nearly‐centuries
old project to advance European integration. Controversies over national sovereignty and globalization
are increasingly articulated through the language of territory, which “takes on an epistemological
37

monopoly that is understood as absolutely fundamental to modernity” (Agnew 2009, 29). Nevertheless,
the rhetorical role of specific appeals to place remains undertheorized, and relatively little work has
been done on why those appeals consistently emerge in contexts where identity is contested.
This chapter excavates Habermas’s concept of how identification occurs in the context of
contemporary political communities. Stable identification is structurally impossible. First, it is precluded
by inherent distortions in language which serve as the basis for identity. Second, there are
contradictions built into the sorts of identities that are contingently possible in modernity that render it
unstable. Identification can occur for a time, however, by recourse to a particular‐universal fantasy –
which Habermas from early in his career described as an “ideology” – that has sufficient resonance to be
establish itself but remains sufficiently universal to preserve the Enlightenment promise.
The chapter establishes that place is a constitutive albeit often implicit factor in identity, which is
then inflected rhetorically as a condition of possibility for identity taking hold. Calls to place are doing
their work at the level of identity. The chapter also describes the role that the technical concept of
publicity, first developed as a key concept in in Jürgen Habermas’s earliest work The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (STPS), plays in
fixing identity. I advance the theoretical understanding of publicity by rereading it as a subjectifying
dynamic that doesn’t just provide discursive material for identification but plays an active role in
consolidating identity.
Identity and Identification in Habermas
Identity is Symbolic
Habermas had inherited from the Frankfurt School the project of utilizing Freudian and post‐
Freudian theory to explore and critique modernity as a misalignment between human desires and
actually‐existing social reality, in which that misalignment was managed by suppressing those desires in
the interest of reproducing social configurations (Alford 1987). The main figures of the Frankfurt School
38

– Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse – deployed Freud’s technical work on
human drives, with a focus on technical aspects related to id‐psychology – to advocate that the proper
response was disidentification with modernity (Alford 1987)
21
. Inasmuch as the misalignment between
human drives and modernity was impossible to overcome, the solution was to reject modernity.
Habermas shifted from that id‐focused psychology – which cashes out among other things as a
theoretical focus on the individual – to an understanding of identity that was more intersubjective. His
theoretical focus was more communicative, and oriented toward a politics of mutual understanding
achieved through rational argument
22
. The theoretical shifts were explicitly not aimed to replace id‐
psychology wholesale but to linguistify Freudian theories through “a communication‐theoretic
interpretation of approaches deriving from Piaget and Freud” (Habermas 1984, 245). The essential
insights of psychoanalysis were to be retained, while the new orientation toward intersubjectivity would
overcome theoretical deadlocks in the field and reconcile psychoanalytic insights with the results of
empirical scholarship. He moved to supplement the orthodox Freudian model with an ego‐theoretic
model grounded in cognitive developmental psychology, a trajectory that put him in opposition to what
he variously described as the philosophy of the subject or the mentalist paradigm, and which was
motivated at least in part as a reaction to German Idealism and its Continental successors. Drives and
modernity could not be wholly aligned, but the misalignment could be dealt with through the norms and
practices of reasoned communication.

21
Marcuse treated drive theory as emancipatory to the extent that it suggested a route for a radical reshaping of
society.
22
Habermas arrived at the Institute for Social Research in Goethe University Frankfurt in 1956 to study with and
assist Adorno, but left for the University of Marburg in 1959 after his thesis – which would later become STPS –
became untenable due to demands from Horkheimer (McCarthy 2017; Wiggershaus 1995). In general Habermas’s
work was treated as too optimistic about the emancipatory possibilities of the Enlightenment legacy, and
Habermas in turn considered the criticisms too pessimistic about the alienating effects of modernity. He also
specifically differed with Marcuse about the degree to which technology could be instrumentally aligned with
human needs, rather than treating technology as an inherently alienating instrument (Feenberg 1996; Stockman
1978).
39

The Habermasian subject retains the structural features of a recognizable Freudian split subject,
alienated from the external world and itself, which is experienced as “a threefold diremption of the
modern ‘I’: from external nature, from society and from internal nature” (Habermas 1974, 95). He
retained core Freudian structures across his theorizing, including and specifically in the context of
identity, emphasizing that “[t]he growing child develops an identity to the extent that a social world to
which he belongs is constituted for him, and complementary to that, a subjective world that is marked
off from the external world… the ‘I’ and the ‘me’… these two concepts of self correspond in a certain
way to the moments of the ‘id’ and the ‘superego’ in Freud’s structural model” (Habermas 1987, 99).
The Habermasian subject “is communicatively generated, consolidated in the medium of linguistic
symbols, and secured finally through cultural tradition” (Freundlieb, Hudson, and Rundell 2004;
Habermas 1987, 10)
23
. Internally, the subject’s ability to access inner experience is mediated by
communicative relationships, such that higher‐level subjectivity is “distinguished by the fact that it can
turn back upon itself only mediately – via complex relations to others” (Habermas 1987, 10). Externally,
the subject is an ego thrown into an intersubjective lifeworld, oscillating between shared norms and
coercive institutions, with both the norms and the institutions having been legitimated via democratic
deliberation mediated by argumentation (Habermas 1996a).
Identity as Habituated Expectations
According to Habermas identity projections also provide filters at the most basic
phenomenological and epistemic levels for comprehending the world, gaining “significant influence on

23
The Habermasian subject has been criticized for its thinness, which among other things limits the need for
internal coherence since there’s a relative lack of commitments to cohere, which in turn feeds a criticism that
Habermas lifts different conclusions on identity wholesale from individualistic ego psychology, systems theory, or
basic economics without regard for potential contradictions (McCarthy 1985; Poupeau 2001; Warren 1993). There
is in fact a well‐developed theory of the subject in Habermas, which is implicit but robust already in STPS and
rounded out over subsequent decades. Much of his work across that trajectory focused on reconciling the
theoretical and empirical findings from different models of subjectivity – ego psychology, systems theory, basic
economics, and so on – he is criticized for having incorporated.
40

how the members of society understand themselves and how they comprehend the world” (Habermas
1974, 101):
[G]eneralized behavioral certainties—beliefs that have congealed into behavioral habits—form
the background that, as it were, hones dissonant perceptions into negations of expectations,
thereby according them the sense of a repudiation experienced in practice, of a necessity to
revise existing beliefs. In perceiving an unsuccessful action, the actor ‘rubs up’ against a
frustrating reality that terminates its hitherto attested willingness to play along, as it were, in an
action context that is no longer functioning… what agents experience when their actions fail in
confrontation with reality is itself linguistically structured, but this is not an experience with
language or within the horizon of linguistic communication. A perception that is contrary to our
beliefs destabilizes our certainties about how to act (Habermas 2003, 154).
This dimension of identity emerges as particularly salient as identification begins to break down,
because it ensures that the breakdown will be experienced in multiple ways and multiple registers.
Though Habermas is generally taken as a cautious thinker, these multiple dimensions of identity help to
explain why the consequences of identificatory failures are as severe in Habermasian theory as they are
in other post‐Freudian theories, and round out why the ultimate impossibility of identification is such a
concern
24
.
Impossibility of Identification
Pre‐modern societies had enabled individual identity formation on the basis of stable collective
identities, ranging from tribes to nations, by functioning at two levels. First, the distinctiveness of any
particular group had enabled ego individuation opposite clearly differentiated non‐members. ‘Us’ and
‘them’ were easily delineated, enabling identification with the ‘us.’ Second, that particular group

24
There is a broader, prevalent misreading of Habermas as a sort of soft vaguely communitarian theorist of
abstract dialogue, who advocates for spaces emptied of power in which the ideal speech situation is allowed to
flourish. Habermas is in fact clear‐eyed and unapologetic about the need for coercion. Throughout Between Facts
and Norms he treats good reasons as too weak to compel action in the absence of habit, which is instilled among
other things through the facticity of law, noting that use of the law “can offset the weaknesses of a morality that
exists primarily as knowledge” (Habermas 1996a, 114). Regarding identity, his theories remain tethered to
fundamental Freudian commitments, including the tenacity with which subjects will cling to identity. When
identities become destabilized, the result is personal anxiety and social dislocation, sometimes on the scale of
mass violence.
41

identity was loaded with sufficient affect to secure political attachment. ‘Us’ was an identity that could
secure loyalty and enable political mobilization
25
.
As Christianity developed it slowly unmoored individual identification from particular social
groups and advanced the formation of ego‐identities on the basis of universal association. The
development threatened to undermine that first, individuating, function but for a time the inertia of
pre‐Christian life – stubborn social formations, lingering demarcations, and so on – remained sufficiently
robust to enable group delineations despite Catholic universalism
26
.
After the Enlightenment the problem of identity formation became acute. Enlightenment
universality eventually leveled the social particularisms that had once provided the basis for
individuation. Trying to ground identity in genuine universalism could not be a solution inasmuch as, by
definition, there is no human other to humanity, and thus no basis for individuation
27
. Recourse to some
new particularism was needed, but it was not clear which if any sufficiently distinct identities were
available, because “on the basis of universalistic norms no particular entity possessing an identity‐
forming power (such as the family, the tribe, the city, state or nation) can set up bounds to demarcate
itself from alien groups” (Habermas 1974, 94).

25
The constitutive role of affect reemerges in practices of political communication, where the use of emotion and
the mobilization of affect are prerequisites to effective communication: “Emotions are essential to the process of
communication and are conveyed through different messages and channels… Without emotion, it is impossible to
convey political messages, form preferences, express the intensity of opinions or even make political arguments”
(Crigler and Just 2012, 211–12).
26
Engaging George Herbert Mead, Habermas emphasized that individuation was not just a critical process in the
subject’s identity formation, but a dynamic coextensive with the process of socialization (Habermas 1987). The
move is a critical one in Habermasian theory, establishing intersubjectivity as primordial. Identity is not, however,
wholly reducible to intersubjective, communicative relationships: “inner nature is in no way vaporized into
culturalistic haze” and there is no guarantee that “the substratum of inner nature has to fit harmoniously into
linguistic structures, and even be utterly absorbed into them” (Habermas 1984, 245).
27
Habermas acknowledges as a caveat that an invasion of aliens from outer space could potentially alter this
analysis.
42

Beyond the structural impossibilities and contradictions introduced by modernity, the
constitutive role of language in Habermasian identity ensures that identity will always be unstable, even
‘downstream’ as they expressed in democratic politics. Habermas had already identified “the broken
nature of all intersubjective relationships” in the mid‐1960s, which are a symptom and a cause of
distorted communication, and run through different aspects of his work (Calhoun, Mendieta, and
VanAntwerpen 2013; Habermas and Dews 1992). Those intersubjective failures mean that “individuals
must maintain their identity through an extremely frail equilibrium between full identifications… and the
refusal of any identifications” and that “each individual and every community thus experience the
dialectical process of aiming at this equilibrium, and the threat of failure is always around the comer”
(Blanchard 2004, 13). The Habermasian subject is embedded in an intersubjective world of linguistically‐
mediated communication, and so the inevitable breakdowns in language disrupt intersubjectivity and
rattle identity.
Conditions of Possibility for Identification: Particular‐Universal Ideologies
Nevertheless – despite the structural impossibilities – modern philosophy according to
Habermas had inherited as its mandate the task of developing an “ideology” that would provide the
ability to fix identities appropriate to modernity, in which citizens recognize themselves and their fellow
citizens as equals precisely by virtue of their mutual citizenship, (Barnett 2008; Hayward 2007; Markell
2000; Habermas 1974). He had taken up the problem early, describing that ideology as a kind of modern
identity that could replicate both functions of earlier particular identities – being sufficiently distinct to
enable individuation and sufficiently robust to secure political attachment – without forgoing the ethical
imperative of Enlightenment universalism: a particular‐universal conceit that could serve as the basis for
an identity. Structurally it would serve as “the counterweight to the structural dissimilarity between
collective identity tied to the concrete state and ego identities formed within the framework of the
universalistic associations” (Habermas 1974, 93).
43

The approach can be successful, for a time. Nation‐states managed to construct state identities
that mixed the universal norms of citizenship with the historical particulars of nationhood, embracing a
tension between the ethos of citizens who are “supposed to constitute themselves as an association of
free and equal persons by choice” and nationals who “find themselves formed by the inherited form of
life and the fateful experience of a shared history” (Habermas 1996b, 131).
Habermas also rejected the state as a locus on theoretical grounds, as being inadequately
coherent or universal. Karl Marx had shown that the state was internally riven by class antagonism,
while global capitalism had eroded the state’s sovereignty from the outside and its organic structure
from the inside, bringing to bear a range of influences from cultural exchanges to physical immigration,
according to Habermas (Habermas 1974). The state could no longer structurally serve as the basis for
universalist identification. Habermas has instead sought to trace how a European identity might take
hold instead.
Of course, those ideologies, which are functioning as fantasies to efface the disruptions in
identity created by the distortions in language, will ultimately fail as well. They are structurally unstable,
not least of all because they’re not true. The particular persists and undermines the universal
pretentions of states and individuals: “there is this tension between the universalism of an egalitarian
legal community and the particularism of a cultural community joined by origin and fate,” “the
transformation of social groups into persons who fuse into unity is, of course, a phantasy, and one that
is always at odds with an empirical reality of conflicting social identities and interests,” “historical
institutions and concrete cultures… never are quite equivalent to the universal principles they purport to
embody,” etc. (Habermas 1996b, 131; Mah 2000, 155; Markell 2000, 39). Eventually what is structurally
impossible contingently fails.
44

The Habermasian point is that success for a time is preferable to persistent and pervasive
disidentification, which eventually would be expressed as political violence. Identification can be
achieved for a time and, to the extent that the identities in play have a universal horizon, can produce
liberal democratic societies. So, there is an imperative good reason to theorize the conditions of
possibility for fixing identity.
Particular‐Universal Ideologies in 18
th
Century Europe: Öffentlichkeit
There is a model of identity in STPS that, while it remains largely implicit and requires
excavation, is in many ways more robust than any that Habermas would come to rely on in later
decades. The theoretical differences between his early and subsequent work are partly a function of
biographical development and partly of theoretical compatibility with the rest of his developing work.
Biographically, he was still at the time transitioning into what would become a deeper reliance on ego
psychology, though he was already emphasizing that subjectivity is “always already oriented to an
audience” (Habermas 1989, 49)
28
. Methodologically, the approach in STPS is historiographic, which
differs from some of Habermas’s later more abstract philosophical and sociological approaches, and
lends itself to relatively deeper theorizing.
STPS charts how a particular‐universal identity did historically develop in 18
th
century Europe, in
which particular citizens coalesced into an abstract public that demanded accountability from
governments on the basis of universal principles. Citizens literally and metaphorically left the home,
which had been “the wellspring of a specific subjectivity… in the sphere of the patriarchal conjugal
family,” where “through letter writing the individual unfolded himself in his subjectivity,” and coalesced

28
Habermas’s emphasis on communicative intersubjectivity has been challenged as an overcorrection that
empirically fails to account for uses of speech not aimed at securing agreement and theoretically neglects tools
and tactics that might be used to address social and political controversies (Freundlieb, Hudson, and Rundell 2004;
Gregersen 2012).
45

into a democratic polity (Habermas 1989, 43, 49). It distinguishes between “literarische Öffentlichkeit”
(literary publicness) and “politische Öffentlichkeit” (political publicness).
Literary publicness marked a kind of social equality that took hold as businessmen began to
gather in the public spaces that famously marked the Enlightenment – coffeehouses in Britain, salons in
Paris, and reading societies in German – and debated literary themes that they took to be universal
because they were rational, referencing specific texts in ways they had agreed met those conditions. To
facilitate their discussions, they explicitly made a point of putting aside social and hereditary privileges.
Political publicness emerged as businessmen began to take up topics of state using the same
argumentative norms. Inasmuch as they conducted these new deliberations against the backdrop of the
same purportedly universal rules, they could colorably understand themselves as abstracted human
beings in the new political domain as well. They began to assert in speech and print that they were part
of a public accessible to anyone willing to accept those norms
29
. A democratic polity based on certain
universalist argumentative principles took shape in which the “bourgeois public's critical public debate
took place in principle without regard to all preexisting social and political rank and in accord with
universal rules” (Habermas 1989, 54). Businesspeople who participated in politics began to do so as part
of the public, not just as another special interest making petitions, where that public was reflexively
characterized by their participation
30
.

29
The images and their metaphorical resonances are linked to – though they do not determine – fundamental and
ongoing controversies regarding the degree to which contemporary democratic deliberation can account for and
accommodate plurality (Fraser 1990). Contemporary debates over the public sphere, which focus significantly on
the contemporary conditions for deliberation, seek to determine how the contingent historical development
described by Habermas – in which a privileged subset of society moved to position itself as a universal public –
relates to contemporary norms (Calhoun 2005; J. L. Cohen 1996).
30
A parallel dynamic operated on the level of individual identity, with “the subjectivity originating in the interiority
of the conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity about itself” (Habermas 1989, 51). The public
that came to a self‐understanding via communication was constituted by subjects capable of, willing to, and
actually doing so.
46

The two forms of publicness are conceptually distinct but overlapped as a matter of lived
experience. They were expressed in the same physical locations, as expressions of different sensibilities
and interests. Sometimes both found expression in the same cluster of objects, including through
discussion of political emancipation that revolved around novels.
The conceit, however and of course, was a “fiction” (Habermas 1989, 56). Property‐owning
businessmen had shifted from being a particular social group to presenting themselves as a one and
indivisible public made up of abstracted human beings, and their specific interests came to be seen for a
time as the promotion of individual freedom writ large
31
. Though the particular‐universal move
structurally aligns with what Habermasian theory suggests might succeed, and though the conceit had
developed out of discourses that had been coalescing for decades, there was no guarantee that it would
take hold. It succeeded for a time because it happened to be a productive framework for addressing for
actually‐existing challenges. There was a material cluster of problems inhibiting political and economic
life in the 18
th
century that could be improved by accepting the political fiction that government was in
dialogue with an abstract public filled with abstract citizens pushing for solutions to those problems. The
fiction also “had positive functions in the context of the political emancipation of civil society from
mercantilist rule and from absolutistic regimentation in general” and to that extent “the interest of the

31
The starting point for the critique of Habermasian democracy by radical democracy theorists is that any unitary
public must be a double fiction: it effaces both the social particularism of those inside and the exclusion of those
outside (Laclau and Mouffe 2001). Under that critique, the universalist claim is an act of violence that excludes
marginalized subjects and worldviews. The alternative is to forgo rationally‐driven consensus building and instead
emphasize irreducible difference. The theoretical disagreement between Habermas and these critics is not over
the structure of the public – the public sphere is, indeed, a structurally unsustainable fiction – but over the degree
to which the radical democracy is a better alternative than either actually existing democracy or the alternatives
presented by critiques of it. Against radical democracy, both deliberative democrats and critical theorists have
suggested that the alternative to consensus building will not be acceptance of difference but the reassertion of
reactionary populism and raw power (Žižek 2006). From a Habermasian perspective, the response has been to
emphasize the emancipatory potential of universal claims: if the public must at any given time be constituted by
particular groups and therefore fall short of actual universality, then the emancipatory move is to ideologically
embrace a particularism that builds in universality, so that state institutions have to at least in principle claim to
represent all citizens, and citizens have the option at least in principle of demanding accountability on those terms
(Habermas 1989, 85).
47

owners of private property could converge with that of the freedom of the individual in general”
(Habermas 1989, 56).
The treatment of the public sphere in STPS was a historical one, a part of Habermas’s effort to
articulate how rational communication could be leveraged in modernity to create appropriate
particular‐universal identities grounded in universal norms. Political allegiance in pluralistic societies
would be generated not by gesturing to shared ethnic traits or narratives of national origin, but by
reflexive reference to an already‐developed shared culture of democratic processes and communicative
values. In additional to the nation‐state’s structural inadequacy as a locus for universal identification,
Habermas sought to move beyond nationalism in the aftermath of the catastrophes of World War I and
World War II, which had among other things created a post‐war need in Germany for new approaches to
international relations and national identity
32
.
Particular‐Universal Ideologies in Contemporary Europe: Constitutional Patriotism
In the 1970s Habermas had hoped that shared pride in relatively abstract democratic
procedures could generate allegiance from citizens living in complex societies. However, within a decade
he had transitioned to a more specific advocacy of “constitutional patriotism” (Verfassungspatriotismus)
that drew on Germany’s national post‐World War II constitutional order as a basis for a post‐national
identity
33
. The second appendix of the English‐language edition of Between Facts and Norms (BFN) was

32
Politically, the goal was to articulate the identity for a European political system that would block efforts in
Germany to revive nationalism, which would have turned the country toward Central Europe and the Soviet Union
and away from the West (Habermas and Michnik 1994).
33
The Habermasian appropriation of “constitutional patriotism” developed in the context of the Historikerstreit –
the “historians’ quarrel” – regarding the nature and legacy of National Socialism. The theory had been introduced
in 1979 by Dolf Sternberger as a way of mobilizing citizens in defense of democratic institutions, and Habermas
reworked it in a 1986 essay for Die Zeit in which he accused political opponents on the right of seeking to craft a
German identity that would sever links between the West German Republic and the rest of the West: “the only
patriotism which does not alienate us from the west is a constitutional patriotism. A commitment to universalistic
constitutional principles which is anchored by conviction has unfortunately only been able to develop in the
German Kulturnation since – and because of – Auschwitz. Whoever wishes to exorcise the shame surrounding this
fact… whoever wishes to call Germans back to a conventional form of national identity, is destroying the only
reliable basis for our link with the west” (Habermas 1988, 541). The Historikerstreit served as a backdrop to both
Habermas’s historical work on German atrocities during World War II and his project on European integration (Bell
48

turned over to unpacking what Habermas called “the continually misunderstood concept of
constitutional patriotism” (Habermas 1996a, xliii).
Nominally the essay traced how three then‐contemporary developments – German unification,
the consolidation of the European Community, and the influx of immigrants into Europe – were
reconfiguring nationalism on the Continent
34
. As a matter of theoretical argument, it laid out two
related positions: identity is more malleable than critics of constitutional patriotism assume and
contemporary nationalism was more contingent than those critics took it to be. Nationalism had
commanded loyalty in 19
th
century Europe and facilitated the emergence of integrated liberal‐
democratic states, but now alternative universally‐oriented identities could be imagined and could
realistically take hold (Habermas 1996a).
Constitutional patriotism emerges as precisely that sort of ideology, built on the right sort of
universalist particularism, suitable for identification in complex societies. It is weighted down by what
Habermas refers to as a “particularist anchoring” which provides the affective resonance necessary to
mobilize allegiance. As a matter of content, however, the principles are universalist and should be
inculcated into political institutions so that “every citizen [is] socialized into a common political culture”
(Habermas 1996a, 500).
Individuation would still be enabled because the legal regimes and political life across modern
democracies – with their different combinations of constitutions, common law, federal arrangements,
institutions, and police powers – are sufficiently distinct to serve as demarcations of identity. Insiders

2008; Hayward 2007). Matthew Specter has read constitutional patriotism alongside the development of
Habermas’s two other key concepts from the 1980s – his exploration of modernity and his anti‐nuclear advocacy –
and has argued that the three advocacies overlap and reinforce each other (Specter 2010).
34
Debates over constitutional patriotism overlap and are entangled with debates between nationalism and
outright cosmopolitanism. It has not always been clear where Habermas situates constitutional patriotism along
that spectrum. Constitutional patriotism is by design a post‐national kind of identity, but it also by design stops
short of being an all‐out embrace of cosmopolitanism, and in fact is designed to be more robust than cosmopolitan
post‐nationalism.
49

and outsiders can be distinguished based on how they have institutionalized universal imperatives.
Those institutions, which find expression in everything from electoral politics to individual habits, can be
distinct like families, tribes, cities, and nations.
Political attachment would still be secured and political action mobilized because citizens would
take pride that this way, rather than that way, was how they had collectively built their particular liberal
societies. Markell, who has doubts about the ultimate success of the Habermasian move, has labeled it a
“strategy of redirection” through which the affect necessary to fix identity is aligned with the needs of
democratic citizenship by replacing exclusionary pre‐modern attachments with civic attachments
(Markell 2000, 39)
35
.
Consequences of Failed Identification: “Unfailing” Regress
The orthodox postmodern response to the instability of identity is not to search for stopgaps but
to embrace the dynamic, justify that embrace by theorizing why failed or foregone identifications can be
productive. Patchen Markell among others has repeated the move from inside Habermasian theory,
urging ambivalence and developing interpretations that provide a praxis for resisting identification
(Markell 2000).
Those moves have in turn been criticized both for being ultimately untenable – Habermas has
emphasized the importance of democratic identity for over half a century – and because they face
significant empirical challenges (Habermas 1974; 1996b; Habermas and Pensky 2001). Results from
empirical psychology strongly suggest that personal identities are tightly held, so much so that people
will not only filter out disconfirming evidence about their core beliefs but, if forced to confront that

35
Empirical scholarship has also been mobilized to try to clarify the debate. It is relatively straightforward to test
whether thin identities in general can influence individual behavior, and a variety of studies converge on the idea
that even strikingly thin identities can influence behavior (Hayward 2007). The efficacy of constitutional patriotism
as a more specific kind of thin identity has also be experimentally probed, and some empirical scholarship has tried
to evaluate whether post‐national and non‐national identities can replicate the integrative affect generated by
nationalism, and those studies are inconclusive (Calhoun 2005; Olson 2007).
50

evidence, they’ll defensively and paradoxically strengthen those core beliefs (Ross and Anderson 1982;
Sanna, Schwarz, and Stocker 2002). When contemporary liberal identities have disintegrated in recent
years, the result hasn’t been suspended ambivalence but rather the embrace of ethnic identities, and in
many cases anarchy and violence.
The role that identity plays as symbolic habituation makes disidentification untenable. The
stakes for failure are high, and if identities fail they quickly become “fallible in an extremely painful way,
if they further a false identity, they hurt in the same way as does the course of a disease” (Habermas
1974, 101). If a dislocation is jarring enough then an individual will experience, at least for a time, the
anxiety of failed identification. In psychoanalytic terms reality pushes back in the form of symptoms. For
Habermas the unease is encountered as recalcitrance.
At the social level, stabilizing identity, if only for a time, enables the “integration of the
individual beings with their particular political community within the horizon of a universal cosmic
order,” allowing for beneficial organizations of political life. Failure means that “universalistic morality,
in the same way as the ego structures consistent with it, would remain a mere postulate… without
substantially grounding social life” (Habermas 1974, 94–95). The breakdown of identity generates a slide
back to pre‐modern and national identification.
Habermas worried as early in the mid‐1970s that in the absence of a robust universalist ideology
individuals will “unfailingly” regress toward particularisms, and in the mid‐1990s he predicted that social
and economic dislocation in Eastern Europe risked causing identificatory crises in which citizens would
“latch on to something concrete: skin colour, race, nation, external characteristics” (Habermas 1974, 98;
Habermas and Michnik 1994, 8). Ultimately, if a particular‐universal political identity can’t be
recuperated even for a time, the result will be mass political violence: “When in the course of the French
Revolution the imperative of representing the public as a mass subject runs up against the impossibility
51

of doing so, the result is a continuous political crisis, resolvable only by political domination and terror”
(Mah 2000, 172). Political violence has continued to cyclically visit Europe in the context of struggles
over identity.
Excavating Place
In balancing particulars with universals, Habermas recognized that one sort of particularity –
that of place – was exceptionally significant. Attachment to constitutionally‐established processes might
theoretically never be secured in a “placeless place,” and he described that as an empirical question that
“one cannot answer adequately at the level of theory” (Habermas 1990, 16).The challenge is to craft an
ideology that is simultaneously particular enough to secure political mobilization while universal enough
to be appropriate to a democratic polity. Political mobilization, therefore, requires mobilizing affect with
something “stronger than those somewhat abstract ideas of human rights and popular sovereignty” so
that identity can crystalize around the notion of a nation and make “people spread over large territories
feel politically responsible for one another” (Habermas 1996b, 129–30).
The notion of “place” has been intertwined with rhetoric since the field’s beginnings. In the
classical era, Aristotle described topoi as the metaphorical “places” where the tools of persuasion could
be found, which became loci in Cicero, and in recent years theorists have examined how place is
rhetorically deployed by social movements, and in many cases have directly linked it to issues of identity
and public memory (Aristotle 1991; Cicero 2006; Dickinson 1997; 2002; Dickinson, Blair, and Ott 2010;
Endres and Senda‐Cook 2011; Rubinelli 2006; J. Wood 2018)
36
. Theorists of indigenous rights have gone
so far as to speculate that “every significant identity carries with it a sense of place” (Poole 1997, 423).

36
Work done elsewhere in sociology and geography has long treated place as constitutively tied to identity, as a
concept through which the moral and aesthetic debates that inform democratic political communities are inflected
(Entrikin 1999; Sack 1999).
52

The identificatory role of “place” emerges as a core condition of possibility for particular‐
universal identities taking hold. In the context of debates over deliberative democracy, they emerge as
challenges to the possibility of trans‐national deliberation in a geopolitical environment where identity is
still bound to territorially‐defined nation‐states (Fraser 2007). In the context of technical debates over
Öffentlichkeit, they emerge as questions about whether the concept in any form has a coherent
meaning if it is ‘de‐territorialized’ from a specific location (Volkmer 2010). In the context of
constitutional patriotism, let alone less modern forms of identity, the role of location is constitutive and
determinative – it is a prerequisite to structuring the identity and will determine its relative robustness:
The weakness of socialist internationalism was that it had difficulty creating a sense of solidarity
without place. The geography of emotions therefore appears to be important in nurturing civic
loyalties, emotions and commitments. Political attachments need memories and rituals, and
collective memories need a location where these common rituals and symbols can be enacted.
Commitments need collective effervescence. A placeless cosmopolitanism would also be
vacuous and ultimately dull and lifeless… Without such a geographical sense of place,
republicanism would commit the same mistake as nineteenth‐century socialist internationalism.
It would be devoid of any sense of emotional specificity (Turner 2004, 285–86).

The theoretical importance of place has practical consequences. The question becomes how far one can
‘stretch’ a civic identity over a particular territory before it becomes too thin to secure political
mobilization. For example in trying to craft a sustainable European identity as crises took hold across the
Continent, Habermas in 2014 acknowledged that European institutions would have to be redesigned so
that the union would have “a core and a periphery” that would be better able to handle challenges from
countries such as Britain and Turkey (Habermas 2014).
Recuperative theorists assert that conspiracism disrupts identity in emancipatory ways but in
practice when conspiracy theorists rhetorically link place to identity they tend to do so in pernicious
ways. Scholars have in particular picked out the enemy‐constructing elements of conspiracy theories as
riddled with xenophobic rhetoric (Stavenhagen 1996; Wistrich 2013). The conspiracy theories in these
environments then overlap, borrow from each other, and mutate. European populist movements that
have tipped into conspiracism, for instance, embrace a range of them including prominently vaccine
53

conspiracy theories (Mancosu, Vassallo, and Vezzoni 2017; Mareš and Havlík 2016). Bizarre conspiracism
revolving around calls to place, which nevertheless gain traction and call for theorization, are
symptomatic of that dynamic.
To take one example, in the mid‐2000s a conspiracy theory about a North American Union
(NAU) – which held that President George W. Bush of the United States, President Felipe Calderón of
Mexico, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada were engaged in a secret plan to merge their
countries and currency – moved in a couple of years from fringes of rightwing movements to one of the
most widely‐believed political conspiracy theories In America (Berlet 2009). For a time, it seemed
functionally immune to either debunking or derision, and not for lack of mainstream conservatives
trying. It was ridiculed not just by establishment conservatives such as Charles Krauthammer and Mark
Steyn, but also by grassroots conservative bloggers (Allahpundit 2007; Hawkins 2007b). Writing about it
for the Claremont Institute, an influential conservative thinktank, Richard Reed excoriated conspiracists
under the headline “We’ve Got Our Nut Jobs Too.” A post about it on the grassroots weblog Hot Air was
titled “NAU Conspiracy Theory Pummeled By Exasperated Conservatives” (See‐Dubya 2007). Critics
called explicit attention to the argumentative tactics that were being deployed to mainstream NAU
claims:
[O]nce you decide to respond to a conspiracy theory, you have a very basic problem: the people
who believe in this theory didn’t reason their way into it, so it’s extremely difficult to use reason
to convince them that there’s nothing to it… That’s why conspiracy theorists love to try to bog
people down in minutiae… With the North American Union conspiracy theory, nobody ever talks
about how this could practically be brought about when it would be almost universally opposed
by the American people and would likely require a Constitutional Convention to pull off… They
don’t want you to consider that there have been no leaks from the Bush Administration about
this conspiracy even though thousands of people would have to know about it… This is what the
conspiracy theorists don’t want you to realize because once you get out of the weeds and stop
talking about roads, obscure reports, and professors, it becomes obvious that this conspiracy
theory doesn’t hold water (Hawkins 2007a).

Though the NAU conspiracy theory was subject to broad and systematic responses across the right, it
moved steadily into the mainstream. In 2006, in the 109
th
Congress, Rep. Virgil H. Goode Jr. had
54

introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives opposing the creation of “a North American
Union with Mexico and Canada” with 6 cosponsors all of whom were Republican (H.Con.Res.487 ‐ 109th
Congress (2005‐2006): Expressing the Sense of Congress That the United States Should Not Engage in the
Construction of a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Superhighway System or Enter into a
North American Union with Mexico and Canada. 2006). When he reintroduced the resolution a year
later, in the 110
th
Congress, the NAU theory had become so widespread that nearly 10 times as many
members – 52 representatives, and this time drawn from both parties – eventually joined as cosponsors
(H.Con.Res.40 ‐ 110th Congress (2007‐2008): Expressing the Sense of Congress That the United States
Should Not Engage in the Construction of a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
Superhighway System or Enter into a North American Union with Mexico and Canada. 2007). In August
2017 Bush, Calderón, and Harper were asked about it at a joint press briefing in Montebello, Canada
(“President Bush Participates in Joint Press Availability with Prime Minister Harper of Canada, and
President Calderón of Mexico” 2007). Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul made it a central part
of his campaign (Bennett 2007).
Scholars have sought to theorize the quick popularity of the NAU conspiracy theory as a function
of social alienation (Bennett 2007; Drezner 2007). That explanation is tenable but unlikely to be
exhaustive. Alienation can generate conspiracy theories in general as ways of approaching social reality,
but it can’t account of which kinds of conspiracy theories become popular. A focus on identification can
provide an additional part of the account by accounting for the rhetorical efficacy of appeals to place. The
focus also orients theorizing toward what must be going on as discourses flow through social and political
spaces, including structural mechanisms.
Excavating Publicity
A close reading of Habermas’s implicit theories on identity – especially in STPS – also suggests
previously untheorized dimensions to his central concept of publicity. Democratic identity of the kind
55

traced by Habermas is not just fixed on the basis of a particular particular‐universal ideology. It is fixed in
a particular way, on the basis of publicity. The German title of STPS is Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit:
Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, where Öffentlichkeit can take on a
range of meanings including “(the) public,” “public sphere,” or “publicity”
37
. The standard English
translation by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence has Öffentlichkeit as “public sphere” almost
across the board, including of course in the title
38
. The choice selects out of the varied meanings a
spatialized version of the concept, evoking a kind of space that a person can enter and thereby become
part of the public.
Spatialization can be theoretically clarifying, and usefully calls to mind the material places where
Habermas described 18
th
century public life as having been incubated. There really was a historical
trajectory to the incubation of argument in the places where businessmen gathered nonpolitically –
coffeeshops, salons, and so on – and where they treated each other as abstract human beings unmarked
by privilege, the better to engage in debates over letters conducted along universal lines. A
metaphorical space for debate did coalesce that is analogous to those physical places where literary
themes had been discussed, and it migrated outward, and the conditions for participation were
ostensibly the same: submission to rational argumentative practices.
Berger and Lawrence’s emphasis on a public sphere has nonetheless been criticized for
privileging that spatialized notion of 18
th
century Öffentlichkeit (Mah 2000; Schmidt 2013). While it
captures one dimension of how individuals organized themselves the time, it risks reifying that notion.

37
Debates over how to properly translate Öffentlichkeit go back to the earliest debates about Habermas, and it
was the opening topic of an irritated 1964 review of STPS penned by English sociologist W.G. Runciman, 3
rd

Viscount Runciman of Doxford, CBE, FBA (Runciman 1964).
38
Burger and Lawrence open their Translator’s Note flagging the choice: “Habermas's The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere contains a number of terms that present problems to the translator. One of
these, Öffentlichkeit, which appears in the very title of the book, may be rendered variously as "(the) public,"
"public sphere," or "publicity." Whenever the context made more than one of these terms sensible, "public
sphere" was chosen as the preferred version” (Habermas 1989, xv).
56

STPS much more broadly traced how identities evolved from medieval Europe through modernity, and
how they operated in diverse ways in between during the Enlightenment.
The reification elides the temporal evolution of Öffentlichkeit before and after the 18
th
century.
There were feudal modes of Öffentlichkeit that marked life before the 18
th
century and there are
modern modes that evolved afterward, many of which are not usefully captured by reference to a public
sphere. The differences are laden with theoretical significance. Habermas devoted a not insignificant
amount of space in STPS, as well as an early explicitly titled section, to describing “representative”
Öffentlichkeit, a feudal mode of organizing political life suitable to medieval courts in which identity was
bound up in display and spectacle rather than argument, and which eventually gave way in important
senses to humanism. Meanwhile the final chapters of STPS are turned over to critiquing the
refeudalization of political life, a term chosen precisely to emphasize that in theoretically significant
respects pre‐Enlightenment and post‐Enlightenment Öffentlichkeit are more similar to each other than
they are to the public sphere that emerged in between.
The reification of the spatialization of “public sphere” also risks eliding the multi‐dimensional
ways in which Öffentlichkeit operated even during the 18
th
century. Even for the purposes of tracing
political organization through the 18
th
century there were salient dynamics – the emergence of a public,
the leveraging of publicity, the privileging of a particular kind of publicness – that risk getting lost if
Öffentlichkeit is spatialized. As the really‐existing debates in really‐existing spaces of Enlightenment
Europe turned toward political matters, a new kind of identity arrived on the historical scene, the one in
which citizens began perceiving themselves as part of a singular public, which was an entity capable of
having its own opinions, obligations, and rights, that the state had to take seriously to the extent they
had been aired and rationally debated. The public channeled their views and demands to the state via
new vehicles of publicity.
57

The central role that STPS carves out for publicity – understood plainly as the dissemination of
facts and gossip, but also as the set of institutions and practices turned over to that dissemination – has
not always been appreciated, especially in Anglo scholarship, though even the Burger and Lawrence
translation describes publicity as the “organizational principle of our political order” and “the principle
of the public sphere” (Habermas 1989, 4, 140)
39
. In a straightforward sense publicity is the mechanism
by which a democratic polity enforces accountability against government actors and actions, an
understanding that goes back to Kant, with equal citizens subjecting laws and arguments to rational
inquiry
40
. In one direction publicity conveys the goings‐on of institutions to the public, operating as a
vehicle for news about new government policies, gossip about legislative affairs, and so on. In the other
direction publicity channels public opinion back into institutions, signaling among other things approval
and disapproval
41
. That dynamic, however, rides atop a more subtle dynamic, in which the back‐and‐
forth of publicity functions as a subjectifying mechanism that stabilizes the identity of the public in
dialogue with the state, and necessarily the identities of the citizens included or excluded from the
public.

39
By contrast the French version of the work is titled L’espace public: Archéologie de la publicité comme dimension
constitutive de la société bourgeoise, and some scholars have suggested that the English edition of the book would
have been better titled “The Structural Transformation of Publicity” as well (Schmidt, 2013). Publicité is in this
context “publicity.”
40
Historically publicity developed as a tactic to expose priestly deception and counter cabinet secrecy. Habermas
quotes a 19
th
century treatise on German constitutionalism in a footnote: “Complete publicity therefore consists…
in treating all affairs of state as matters of common concern to the entire state and all its citizens, and accordingly
in making them accessible to public opinion by arranging that they may be seen and heard to the greatest possible
extent, through public presentation and the freedom of all publicistic organs” (Habermas 1989, 275). The
theoretical ground is Kant's discussion on the link between morality and politics in Appendix II of Perpetual Peace:
Kant explicates “the form of publicity” and provides the formula for public law that “All actions relating to the right
of other men are unjust if their maxim is not consistent with publicity” (Kant 1983).
41
Habermas extends publicity requirements to cover the public sphere’s non‐state actors: “The public sphere
commandeered by societal organizations and that under the pressure of collective private interests has been
drawn into the purview of power can perform functions of political critique and control, beyond mere participation
in political compromises only to the extent that it is itself radically subjected to the requirements of publicity, that
is to say, that it again becomes a public sphere in the strict sense” (Habermas 1989, 208).
58

The norms of publicity were crucial in allowing the new political formations which were
emerging in the 18
th
century to coalesce. They enabled the back‐and‐forth in which the particular
businessmen standing in for a universal public petitioned the government on the basis of ostensibly
universal arguments and demands, and provided the government with a vehicle for responding. The
result was an upward spiral of legitimation, for both the individuals coalesced into a public and the
government that treated them as such: “[b]ecause it turned the principle of publicity against the
established authorities, the objective function of the public sphere in the political realm could initially
converge with its self ‐interpretation derived from the categories of the public sphere in the world of
letters” (Habermas 1989, 56). Eventually the back‐and‐forth would be codified in the form of
transparency requirements on government institutions, with those institutions being judged in part by
how readily they made information available to the public, and how ably they responded to public
feedback.
The dynamic was based on a particular‐universal fiction, but it was not entirely or necessarily
cynical. The norms of publicity had genuine emancipatory potential to the extent that the new political
formations coalescing based on universal commitments would be called to account if they violated
those commitments. Publicity provided something of a guarantee, so that “the new constitutions,
written and unwritten, referred to citizens and human beings as such, and indeed necessarily so, as long
as ‘publicity’ constituted their organizational principle” (Habermas 1989, 84–85). As long as government
actors and powered interests had to provide justifications for their actions in universalist terms, the
presumption created its own constraints and even its own inertia, so that “as long as publicity existed as
a sphere and functioned as a principle, what the public itself believed to be and to be doing was
ideology and simultaneously more than mere ideology” (Habermas 1989, 88).
The notion of ‘the public’ is a dynamic one, however, and publicity provides the state with a
vote over who gets included. When a petition is presented with pretentions of being on behalf of ‘the
59

public,’ government actors will choose whether to ignore it, whether to treat it as a petition by just
another special interest, or as a legitimate request from the public – which they thereby seek to define.
The potential for political abuse and marginalization, especially in the context of simply ignoring groups
of citizens, has been extensively theorized (Benhabib 1996; Fraser 1990).
What has received less attention is the degree to which that dynamic is entangled in Habermas’s
theory of identity. Any back‐and‐forth between government actors and individuals who constitute ‘the
public’ is a dynamic one fraught with risk. Government actors in some sense get to pick out this group
rather than that group, and go into dialogue with it as the public, so that “[l]aw and the state produce
identifications by addressing people as citizens; that is, as both subjects and authors of the institutional
order that governs a given territory” (Markell 2000, 49). If the individuals are acknowledged as ‘the
public’ petitioning the government on that basis, the dynamic fixes an identity consistent with that role:
an identity that can tenably shed its particular social specificity and issue demands as a unitary public
subject, stabilized in that abstractness. If government actors don’t respond on that basis, the usual
mutual spiral of legitimation stalls, and the individuals risk exposure as just another special interest. The
stakes here are not just political but also occur at the level of identity.
The identificatory dimension of publicity bears theoretical similarities to the theory of
interpellation developed by Louis Althusser, in which individuals are subjectivized inasmuch as they are
hailed by state institutions reproducing ideology at the level of discourse, though it leaves more room
for individual agency and citizen action than Althusser’s full‐blown theory of interpellation (Althusser
2001). State actors have options in responding to citizens’ demands, but their options are circumscribed
by political and economic realities. State officials embedded in the institutions described by Habermas,
against the backdrop of public will formation and culturally mobilized public spheres, know that if they
choose wrong, citizens maintain the ability to withhold legitimacy, express electoral dissatisfaction, or
move to public unrest.
60

Nevertheless, publicity enables the state to both theoretically and in practice play a part in
selecting and stabilizing identity identities of individuals who get to count as the public, and
undermining the civic identities of those who don’t. Complex societies as theorized by Habermas exhibit
mutually supportive relationships that unfold both as symmetries of mutual recognition and as
naturalized forms of behavior, and provide substance to the democratic process in its legitimating
function. As societies grow more complex and administration becomes more anonymous, however, the
operations of government become fodder for conspiracy theorists.
The intimate relationship between identity and publicity in Habermasian theory reemerges in
his description of what happened historically and theoretically to the emancipatory potential of publicity
as the democratic identity that formed in the 18
th
century began to erode. Whereas publicity once
“meant the exposure of political domination before the public use of reason; publicity now adds up the
reactions of an uncommitted friendly disposition… shaped by public relations, the public sphere of civil
society again takes on feudal features”: so that “the principle of the public sphere, that is, critical
publicity, seemed to lose Its strength” (Habermas 1989, 195, 140).
The declining political efficacy of publicity as a mechanism for public rationality and
argumentation, however, has paradoxically increased the strength as a subjectifying mechanism. In the
later parts of STPS Habermas returns to the canonical Frankfurt School concern that the emancipatory
potential of publicity has been coopted by culture and market, and that as “[p]ublicity loses its critical
function in favor of a staged display; even arguments are transmuted into symbols to which again one
cannot respond by arguing but only by identifying with them” (Habermas 1989, 206)
42
.

42
Publicity repeatedly reemerges across different parts of the Habermasian project. When he canonically
introduces communicative rationality at the beginning of Volume 1 of Theory of Communicative Action, he adds a
footnote recommending the reader to a work by David Pole in which “[t]he aspects under which Pole explicates
the concept of rationality are, above all, objectivity, publicity and interpersonality, truth, the unity of reason, and
the idea of rational agreement” (Habermas 1981, 408). In BFN he inflected the constitutive role of argument in
institutions through publicity: “the publicity of political communications (emphasized by Kant), in
61

Contemporary government actors also have more options for controlling publicity than ever
before, as a matter of technical communication practice. Publicity is deliberately channeled through
specifically chosen media platforms consumed by specifically selected audiences – which are framed in
specifically cultivated ways. Government actors quite consciously choose preferred venues and
audiences, which can be empowered or disempowered by controlling the amount or types of response.
The opportunities for shaping audiences – by refusing to answer, by refusing to answer them as
representatives of the public, etc. – are straightforward. In highly‐anonymized administrative
bureaucracies such as the European Union, and increasingly federal and even state governments,
procedures that were established to provide transparency via publicity have lost their implicit ability to
confer not just rightness but even the benefit of the doubt. The results have been felt as public apathy,
electoral doubts, and sometimes violent disruptions.
The dynamic reappears across actual and theorized conspiracy theories. Despite Habermas
being superficially hospitable to conspiracism, including but not just because of his emphasis on
publicity, recuperative scholars have drawn sharp contrasts with him and his work (Dean 2001)
43
. Dean
has gone so far as to reread publicity as an empty compulsion that exposes the futility of public
deliberation, in which the gamble is precisely not that “democracy is a system through which free and
equal citizens rationally discuss and decide matters of public concern,” but that if citizens go through the
motions of publicity as if society were structured in that way, the effect may be disruptive and
emancipatory (Dean 2002, 53). In this reading conspiracy thinking “literalizes the claims of publicity as a

connection with the expectation that proponents are consistent in their utterances and explain their proposals
coherently, already exerts a salutary procedural force” (Habermas 1996a, 340).
43
Passages throughout STPS, for example, utilize the rhetoric of transparency and secrecy that superficially align
with the rhetoric of conspiracists: “only in the light of the public sphere did that which existed become revealed,
did everything become visible to all” or “the polemical claim of this kind of rationality was developed, in
conjunction with the critical public debate among private people, against the reliance of princely authority on
secrets of state. Just as secrecy was supposed to serve the maintenance of sovereignty based on voluntas, so
publicity was supposed to serve the promotion of legislation based on ratio” (Habermas 1989, 4, 53).
62

system of distrust” through pedantic attention to detail and its insistence that disproof is suggestive of
even‐more‐hidden dynamics (Dean 2002, 49)
44
.
Nevertheless, actually‐existing conspiracism and conspiracy theorists ubiquitously embrace the
notion of publicity. For conspiracy theorists, the overarching notion that the public is being deceived is
definitional, and is nearly always paired with an obsessive drive to reveal the deception and unmask the
conspirators. The implicit conviction is that, if the public only knew what was really going on and who
was doing it, the conspiracy would collapse. The dynamic is intertwined with the crystallization of
enemies, so that “extremists believe in the existence of a conspiracy, which, when identified, allows one
to know who the enemy is” and “there are many dupes… who probably wouldn’t behave as they do if
they only knew better” (Sargent 1995, 2).
The conspiracist emphasis on publicity can’t be reconciled with accounts in which conspiracy
theories are used tactically to disrupt the flow of institutional power, let alone to disrupt subjectivity as
it is broadly treated in postmodern accounts. To some degree – not completely, but to some degree –
the back‐and‐forth dynamic of publicity imbues government actors with the ability to acknowledge,
constitute, and fix a particular kind of identity. In reaching for publicity as a mechanism, conspiracists
position themselves as members of a universal public speaking in terms of universal accountability, and
ask to be acknowledged as such. The dynamic cedes significant tempo to institutional actors. If
government actors, for instance, decline to acknowledge conspiracy theorists as representatives of an
abstract public those conspiracists have asked for recognition and failed. If they are acknowledged as a
public, they take on a particular kind of identity that hews closely to the conventions and state
prerogatives of recognizable democratic politics. The result may have political upshots in a conventional

44
The contrasts are justified. Habermasian argumentation theory turns out to be inhospitable to conspiracism,
including because of a core commitment that arguments have to be criticizable, which is a possibility that is
foreclosed by the self‐sealing nature of conspiracy claims (Johnstone 1978).
63

sense, but from a theoretical perspective it consolidates rather than disrupts democratic identity. That
dynamic is positive from a Habermasian perspective, but straightforwardly introduces theoretical
challenges that make recuperative academic work untenable. The double‐bind emerges because of
publicity’s structural role as a subjectifying mechanism in which citizens take on a particular abstract
identity to wield publicity against government actors on behalf of the public.
Conclusion
This subjectifying mechanism emerges as a function of Habermasian identity, which I
reconstructed at the beginning of this chapter. Identity in Habermas’ view is implicated in
Communicative Action, which is made possible by intersubjective knowledge among people who engage
in valid speech acts, which in turn grounds the normative concept of communication. The Habermasian
subject is immersed in a lifeworld that is both irreducibly intersubjective and mediated by language, so
that distortions in language become distortions in communication and gaps at the level of identity.
Identification can occur for a time by mobilizing sufficient affect to secure assent to a fantasy of a
particular‐universal ideology, in which a kernel of particularity is subsumed by and as a universalist
conceit. This chapter explored two historical developments of that conceit: in 18
th
century Europe, when
for a time the group of businessmen came to stand in for the public on the basis of claims toward
universalism, and in contemporary Europe, where the Habermasian project has been oriented towards a
version of Constitutional patriotism in which the legacy of nation‐states might still provide sufficient
particularisms to secure identification with post‐national liberal political structures. When identity fails
to take hold, however, the consequences have historically been catastrophic. Failed liberal identities
regress toward illiberal ones and, if those don’t take hold, the results have been cycles of mass political
terror.
The question then becomes: if identification unfolds along Habermasian lines, what must be the
constraints and enabling conditions in play? Excavating Habermas’s social theory revealed two dynamics
64

relevant to the analysis of conspiracy theories. First, that rhetorical appeals to place are likely entangled
in appeals to identity. Habermas acknowledges that trying to create a placeless identity is a non‐starter,
because it becomes too ‘thin’ to take hold, and notes that the question will have to be empirically
investigated because it can’t be answered entirely theoretically. Second, publicity emerges as an
argumentative mechanism that consolidates particular kinds of identity, a kind of call‐and‐response
where institutional actors can partially shape which groups of specific citizens get to stand in for a
public.
These dynamics are entangled with conspiracy theories as well as the crisis of European identity
with which this chapter opened. Habermas’s social theory locates conspiracy in the hazards of place and
the imperfect constitution of publics. Politics risk sliding into conspiracism, as the mobility of
populations stresses institutions already straining under questions of legitimacy, and suspicions arise
about the motives and competencies of elites. These national and supra‐national political dynamics, of
course, are first and foremost experienced by citizens who are individuals, and so conspiracies are
refracted at the individual level. They seep down from the public to the private, personal concerns of
the body. The next chapter works out relations between identity, the rhetoric of bodily integrity, the
argumentative mechanism of scapegoating, and conspiracy theories. I reconstruct the theory a theory of
identity based on Burke’s work, including notorious Cult of the Kill.

65

CHAPTER 3: BURKE, BODILY INTEGRITY, AND SCAPEGOATING

"‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’
‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.
‘I don't much care where‐‐’ said Alice.
‘Then it doesn't matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.”
– Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland

If Habermas’s project has become increasingly pressing amid the crises over unity and
sovereignty convulsing Europe, Kenneth Burke’s work continues to hold the promise of moving past
impasses in the academy involving critical theory, with an eye towards crafting sustainable political
projects. Burke began his career as an editor and music critic. He established his career as a literary
scholar trained on and steeped in the close reading of texts, whose interpretations he extrapolated and
extended to controversies across rhetorical theory, philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, and –
significantly for him – environmentalism and technology.
Burke’s epigraph in A Grammar of Motives is ad bellum purificandum, “toward the purification
of war.” His project foregrounds the inevitability of failure, frustration, and conflict as functions of
humans’ symbolic existence. The nature of humans as symbol users guarantees – because of the
distortions, gaps, and lacks in language – that their identities will be unstable and occasionally break
down. As identification falters the dislocation is experienced bodily, as the jarring sensation of
recalcitrance, and symbolized as a bodily condition, one of impurity, which in turn spurs the need for
purification. When identity is consolidated the experience is felt as an alignment with the world. The
challenge for critics and theorists is to acknowledge the inevitability of those breakdowns and craft
mechanisms for limiting the resulting tensions, in part by acknowledging the corporeal aspects of these
cycles.
Rhetorical theory for its part has long emphasized the role and persistence of the body in
discursive contexts since the Classical era. The emphasis on embodiment was an early and crucial
66

distinction between and other developing fields of knowledge and praxis, including and especially
philosophy (Poulakos 1995). The canons of rhetoric are grounded in material bodily dynamics such as
memory, and in recent years the role of the body in producing meaning has reemerged as a topic for
theorization in rhetorical and linguistical scholarship (Hawhee 2009; 2017; Reynolds 2013; Ruthrof
1997).
This chapter establishes that the tropes and concerns with bodily integrity are entangled in
issues of identity across Burkean theory. The chapter also describes the structural role of scapegoating
in Burke’s guilt‐redemption cycle, which is the core of his dramatistic theory of identification. There are
two theoretical innovations in this chapter. I advance the theoretical understanding of scapegoating as
an inherently strategic option in the context of social controversies. I also reread a short four‐page
discussion of futurism that Burke conducts in The Grammar of Motives alongside his separate
theorization on the guilt‐redemption cycle, with the aim of situating the work in our contemporary
techno‐utopian social environment.
Identity and Identification in Burke
Identity is Symbolic
Burke discovered Freud early – sometime in the 1920s – and spent much of his career trying to
understand Freudian insights inflected linguistically (D. Davis 2008). He went beyond other scholars who
linguistified Freud and specifically rhetoricized him, developing a post‐Freudian theory that retained
core concepts such as identification while making Freudian structures and concepts amenable to
rhetorical investigation and criticism. (D. Davis 2008; Hart, Daughton, and LaVally 2018; Wright 1994).
The approach allowed him to use literary analysis to conduct close readings of texts, including early and
canonically Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and thereby develop bottom‐up “empirical” definitions of
humans and human identity, which served as the grounding for subsequent theorization about social
relations.
67

Burke followed and deepened Freud’s theories describing how human sexuality, which
biologically revolves around bodily drives and desires, becomes a symbolic network of contingent
sensations and relationships. Sometimes the mappings do take the form of sexuation, and desires get
mapped onto the body and body parts. Other times psychic commitments get transferred “from a father
to a father‐government” or even to a “parent‐symbol” such as a beloved childhood tree, so that one
would feel “a strange misgiving” about seeing it chopped down (Burke 1984b, 71). Burke emphasized
that the dynamics of transference were not just inherently symbolic but symbolic in the particular way
that rhetorical theory describes:
Particularly in the Freudian concern with the neuroses of individual patients, there is a strongly
rhetorical ingredient. Indeed, what could be more profoundly rhetorical than Freud’s notion of a
dream that attains expression by stylistic subterfuges decided to evade the inhibitions of a
moralistic censor? What is this but the exact analogue of the rhetorical devices of literature
under political or theocratic censorship? The ego with its id confronts the super‐ego much as an
orator would confront a somewhat alien audience, who susceptibilities he must flatter as a
necessary step towards persuasion. The Freudian psyche is quite a parliament, with conflicting
interests expressed in ways variously designed to take the claims of rival factions into account
(Burke 1969b, 37–38)
Burke’s image of the self as an inner parliament, pitting advocates of impulse against advocates of
norms, is a powerful metaphor. It elicits parallels to traditional rhetorical understandings of deliberative
forums, and suggests that identity may be amenable to audience‐centered rhetorical criticism. The mix
of motives that the individual has to consider are the mix of motives that parliamentarians and other
speakers utilize in offering reasons and exhorting action.
To be sure human identity is not reducible to discourse, least of all for Burke. Identity must
remained tethered to the body if only because humans are animals, and so sometimes “any symbolic
structure is hollow as compared with the physiological immediateness of the ‘Animality’” (Burke,
Rueckert, and Bonadonna 2003, 267). The bulk of human of human experience and human affairs is
nevertheless symbolic, and therefore rhetorical, and in any case rhetorical theory has always accepted
an interplay between the corporeality in discourse and abstract symbolization (Reynolds 2013).
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Burke’s rhetorization of Freud allowed him to approach questions of identity as a literary
analyst, subjecting texts to close readings in order to extract relevant dynamics
45
. His early work
outlined structures that would become embedded in and be explained by later theories. In 1939 he
published “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle,” in which he traced Hitler’s efforts to persuade Germans to
unify around the Furher by analyzing Mein Kampf (Burke 1973). Burke’s analysis catalogued and
categorized elements that would later become familiar in social theory and analysis of conspiracy
theories. One overarching element of Hitler’s campaign, according to Burke, involved his effort to
materialize the place of Munich as a location for identification, a tactic that emerged in the previous
chapter of this dissertation as an appeal to identity according to Habermasian social theory (Burke
1973). As with Hofstadter in the context of conspiracy theories, Burke used political rhetoric to diagnose
political pathologies, but he went further and used those pathologies as prompts and checks to develop
deep theories that explained why and how they emerged. The “Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle” implicitly and
to some extent explicitly demonstrates a method of analysis that parted ways from many of the critical
approaches coalescing at the time and that would coalesce in the next few decades. A Habermasian
reading, for example would have mobilized the norms of communication and the force of the better
argument as lenses for criticism. Burke’s approach emphasized the double‐sidedness of rhetoric, so that
Hitler’s sociopathic instrumentalization of scapegoating also became a case study in fidelity to identity of
the most horrible kind.
Eventually Burke developed and incorporated an “empirical definition” of humans, extrapolated
from close readings not developed through top‐down theorizing. He subsequently rounded out these
essentially literary insights over time, his literary theory grew more speculative, and he began to extract

45
Those moves, in turn, enabled Burke to conduct interventions in which he turned the category of identity toward
emancipatory ends by critiquing power relations that shape actually existing identities (Branaman 1994).
69

more explicitly the structures of identity and the human condition from the texts he studied
46
. He
canonically defined humans as the symbol‐using animal, inventor of the negative, separated from his
natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy, and rotten with
perfection (Burke 1963). There are significant debates about whether all of these definitions are equally
fundamental, or if for example humans’ orientations to perfection or hierarchy are set in motion by the
invention of the negative (Branaman 1994; Desilet 1989; Hawhee 1999). By the time identity is at stake
and identification is occurring, however, all of these dimensions are relevant in enabling and
constraining communication, and so available as objects for critique and theorizing.
Burke’s rhetorization of Freud also entailed inflecting the underlying theories of identity
socially
47
. He distinguished between the roughly interior Self and intersubjective identity, noting that
“the self is merely vagueness of identity” because identity is fundamentally and irreducibly a function of
social relations (Burke 1984a, 271). Humans must even perceive their own “most ‘animalistic’ traits
dimly through the symbolic fog arising from the social order” (Burke 1984b, 288). Humans identities
emerge to the extent they find commonalities with their communities, the institutions and structures of
those communities, and other individuals. People learn languages, and with those languages they
internalize the consensus names for objects and the resources available for communication. Until they
do so they are limited to a Self that is “a physiological organism, separated from all others of its kind at
the moment of parturition” (Burke, Rueckert, and Bonadonna 2003, 145). The process is one of

46
The Rhetoric of Religion, first published in 1961, only had the first four of the five definitions (Burke 1970).
“Rotten with perfection” was added in Burke’s 1963 review article on the topic in Hudson Review, with the
explanation that the “principle of perfection is central to the nature of language as motive. The mere desire to
name something by its ‘proper’ name, or to speak a language in its distinctive ways is intrinsically ‘perfectionist’”
(Burke 1963, 507). He drew a parallel to Aristotle’s teleological concept of “entelechy,” in which beings are inclined
to develop in actuality the way they are supposed to develop potentially.
47
Significant theoretical work has been done emphasizing the exteriority of Burkean identity, including in its
relevance to contemporary theory, which has contributed significantly to scholarship about how Burke’s theory
can contribute to contemporary debates over the nature of identity (Biesecker 1997; Condit 1992; Thomas 1993;
Wright 1994). This dissertation deepens those efforts by excavating Burke’s theories on their own terms.
70

intersubjective consubstantiality, in which persuasion occurs as identification, the rhetorical act in which
the speaker succeeds in “identifying your ways with his” (Burke 1969b, 55)
48
. Consubstantiality is
fundamental and “may be necessary to any way of life” (Burke 1969b, 21).
Identity as Habituated Expectations
Burke’s understanding of recalcitrance is contested and has been debated across several fields,
and he theoretically diverges from pragmatist theorists for whom recalcitrance is a core concept
(Hildebrand 1995; Prelli, Anderson, and Althouse 2011). There is a full section on the topic in
Permanence and Change on the topic linking the role of symbolicity as expectations to his broader
theory of ethics and identity:
[A]ll universe‐building is ethical universe‐building… our interests (in the widest sense, our
vocations) are essential in shaping the nature of our discoveries, tentatives, and revisions. And
our interests are ethical. The grasshopper will find a universe that is different from ours because
the vocation or ethics of a grasshopper is different… Each approaches the universe from a
different “point of view,” and the difference in point of will reveal a corresponding difference in
the discovery of relevant “facts”… interpretations themselves must be altered as the universe
displays various orders of recalcitrance. (Burke 1984b, 256).
When our schemas are inadequate, we ‘bump into’ the world, which pushes back. The experience is felt
as if we have missed something, and there is a compulsion to reorient our symbols. Burke’s ambivalent
attitude toward recalcitrance is to the point here: in an epistemic register the universe is pushing back
against expectations built on symbols that should be reevaluated. Conversely, identification will be
experienced in part as the stabilization of a schema for navigating the universe. However, of course, that
schema will in turn inevitably be disrupted by the underlying instability in language that disrupts
identification.

48
It’s easy to misread Burkean processes as individualistic or psychologistic, as if – for instance – humans
internalize identity or create enemies on their own. Burkean identity is irreducibly relational and Burkean dynamics
are fundamentally rhetorical. Identification and consubstantiality are a function of persuasion, of speakers and
audiences.
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Impossibility of Identification
In the textbook reading of Burke, the world is pure positivity – a hole is just a hole not the absence
of dirt – until the introduction of the negative through language, which enables symbolization and
differentiation. The introduction is constitutive of subjectivity, and so Burke quips that it is more
accurate to say the negative invents humans than the other way around (Burke 1963). However, it also
disrupts and distorts symbolization in much broader ways, because the full range of human experience
is inflected through language. The negative also provides the impetus for the fundamental dynamic that
fixes identity – identification achieved through persuasion – though that too cannot be sustained
indefinitely because, structurally, the negative that enables it returns to disrupt it and, contingently, it is
based on a conceit of shared motives that eventually erodes. The inevitable frustration is channeled
through symbolically‐driven compulsions that are impossible to satisfy but humans nevertheless pursue
to the point of self‐destruction. Identity is structurally unstable and inevitably doomed to fail, if only for
a time.
Psychologically the negative introduces the experience of failure. One of its prime uses “involves
its role with regard to unfulfilled expectations,” which distorts not just communication and persuasion
but the symbols that individuals use to understand their own identities (Burke 1963, 499). Ethically the
negative enables differentiation on moral grounds, and so humans become “moralized by the negative”
inasmuch as it enables them to juxtapose opposites. Rhetoric abounds with distinctions: “true‐false,
order‐disorder, cosmos‐chaos, success‐failure, peace‐war, pleasure‐pain, clean‐unclear, life‐death, love‐
hate” (Burke 1963, 501). While the basis for the differentiation is semantic – words that denote objects
such as table don’t have opposites like anti‐table – it is refracted morally, including as social division.
Separation is a primordial condition for humans: we are distinct, individuated, physical
organisms. The introduction of the negative, however, allows us to symbolize that separation as division
– and sets off an “earnestness” to overcome the division through identification (Burke 1969b, 22). We
72

seek consubstantiation, in which we persuade or are persuaded by others that we share desires or
interests, which in turn establishes a common context for action. The means of persuasion are rhetorical
and another avenue through which Burke rhetorizes Freud, opening up to criticism the concerns and
controversies of psychoanalytically‐understood identity. In that sense “rhetoric is concerned with the
state of Babel after the Fall” and positioned to uniquely theorize some aspects of identity (Burke 1969b,
23).
The negative creates a motivation for unity through identification but ensures that eventually
division will reemerge. It will inevitably intrude at the level of language and communication, and
intersubjective efforts aimed at understanding will fall short. More often the failure will occur
contingently for political or interpersonal reasons.
Consubstantiality occurs when people are persuaded that they are sufficiently common in some
salient way that they have a shared basis for collective “acting‐together” (Burke 1969b, 21). The
consensus is necessarily secured by people making a “partisan” decision to temporarily overlook “the
ways in which individuals are at odds with one another, or become identified with groups more or less
at odds with one another” (Burke 1969b, 22). That conceit can only last so long, and it is vulnerable for
multiple reasons. Individuals may realize that the appearance of shared motives was only achieved
because the parties implicitly agreed to a certain level of vagueness, and that in fact upon closer
examination the motives actually diverge. Alternatively, there could really have been shared a shared
motive, but divergent allegiances in other contexts then begin to take precedence. In any case
eventually the intersubjective conceit of consubstantiality will come under strain and – inasmuch as the
shared identification is constitutive of individual identity – identity will come under strain as well.
Burke’s definition of humans revolves around dynamics that undermine identification. The
introduction of the negative by symbolization is the underlying ontological way of reading the dynamic,
73

but it’s also expressed in the way that rottenness with perfection affects identity. Language is inherently
inadequate for articulating the full multiplicity of experience, even bracketing the distortions and
failures introduced by the negative (Burke 1984b; Prelli, Anderson, and Althouse 2011). The inadequacy
requires selecting what matters and what doesn’t, and human animals are inclined toward filters that
select more rather than less relevant details, if only as a matter of biological survival (Desilet 1989).
Rather than accept that their experience in the world and their understanding of it is necessarily
selective and limited, however, humans instead are driven by a “principle of perfection,” which works at
the level of language as a compulsion to align our symbols with our expectations of the world (Burke
1963, 507).
The compulsion toward perfection also operates at the level of human relationships and affairs,
as people try to align their interpersonal and intersubjective relationships with their expectations, even
when those efforts come at the expense of those relationships:
Is not the sufferer exerting almost superhuman efforts in the attempt to give his life a certain
form, to so shape his relations to people in later years that they will conform perfectly to an
emotional or psychological pattern already established in some earlier formative situation?
What more thorough illustrations could one want, of a drive to make one's life "perfect,"
despite the fact that such efforts at perfection might cause the unconscious striver great
suffering? (Burke 1963, 509).
The emphasis on suffering has psychoanalytic resonances, in which the death drive compels subjects to
pursue pleasure to the point of self‐destruction (K. Johnson 2009). Rottenness to perfection is a
compulsion almost in the clinical sense, and individuals will pursue it for its own sake out of compulsive
need
49
. It is also structurally impossible to satisfy. The introduction of the negative and the inadequacy
of language inevitably ensure that symbolization falters. Even in the absence of pitfalls and frustrations

49
The description sets up a quintessential Burkean move, which is to evaluate and understand motivation and
identity on their own terms: for instance criminals committing crimes may be breaking the law, but still faithful to
their identities provided those identities embrace criminality (Burke 1984b).
74

introduced by the contingencies of human affairs, our efforts to bring our relationships into perfect
alignment with our expectations would fall short.
Being goaded by hierarchy is a third aspect of the human condition, alongside the introduction
of the negative and rottenness with perfection, that undermines identification. Humans have an innate
orientation toward social order, which can be derived by observing everything from feudal societies to
the property laws in complex societies, and which is experienced as a compulsion to reestablish that
order if and when it begins eroding (Burke 1963). Order in turn has a certain Mystery to it, which
sustains the order and provides it with a measure of opacity. In primitive societies Mystery is provided
and enforced by priests, who simultaneously promote social cohesion while nevertheless orienting the
society in a direction that favors some at the expense of others (Burke 1984b)
50
. In contemporary
societies the priestly function of creating a sense of Mystery is distributed across institutions, and falls to
“educators, legislators, journalists, advertising men, and artists” (Burke 1984b, 276)
51
.
Nevertheless, order is bound to erode. Mystery can insulate it but not indefinitely. Eventually
social antagonisms will emerge, including class antagonisms to which Mystery is the “obverse” (Burke
1984b, 278). Even in the absence of underlying social dynamics that generate dislocation, the structural
symbolicity of order and Mystery guarantee their ultimate erosion as the negative intrudes. The result is
experienced as hierarchal embarrassment and a compulsion to restore previous relations (Burke 1963).
Persuasion is inserted into the middle, between order and disorder.

50
The priests may orient the society in a way that disproportionately favors some over others even at the expense
of the tribe’s overall prosperity, and in those contexts the opacity provided by Mystery becomes useful not just in
directly insulating the priests from criticism but in maintaining the overall cohesion of the tribe.
51
Burke in particular focuses on property norms, which are ripe for analysis and critique both because of
property’s centrality in capitalism and because those norms are “made possible by the ‘symbolicity,’ or
terminology, of deeds and contracts, and by the negativity of the law” (Burke 1970, 41).
75

Conditions of Possibility for Identification: Piety
Burkean identity is a system‐building endeavor of aligning our symbols with our expectations of the
world through persuasion. Knowing that identification will inevitably fail does not relieve the
compulsions that propel it – rottenness with perfection and being goaded by hierarchies – and so
humans will continue trying to consolidate their identities, if only to reduce the anxiety generated by
those compulsions, and if only for a time. The Burkean term for identification understood in this register
is piety. When piety is secured it’s experienced as regularity and order, which in turn is experienced as
propriety, and the compulsions are momentarily quieted.
Piety is “system‐building, a desire to round things out, to fit experiences together into a unified
whole” or to give things their proper names (Burke 1963; 1984b, 74). It is a process of integration that
“involves the putting together of experiences,” which aims at “a schema of orientation” (Burke 1984b,
76). The integrative dynamic ensures that piety is experienced not just at the level of language but
across the individual, interpersonal, and social levels, and also makes it necessarily dependent on an
individuals’ background, from childhood experiences to their inclinations toward self‐sacrifice (Burke
1984b). Symbol users have different options for aligning their symbols with expectations, including by
stretching them to encompass the unexpected or downplaying the unexpected to maintain the integrity
of the symbols.
At the level of social relations, piety “extends through all of the texture of our lives” (Burke
1984b, 75). It is experienced and habituated as propriety, which involves remaining loyal to one’s
sources of identification, which are then inflected into one’s sense of self (Rosteck and Leff 1989). There
is an “interaction” with the deeper level of system‐building: if piousness as propriety becomes too
misaligned then the bird may die or the criminal may have to reform (Burke 1984b, 78). Incongruities
and misunderstandings that emerge in the absence of piety allow calls for propriety to be wielded in
76

interpersonal and intertextual contexts, either as demands for unity or division, reflecting the more
fundamental role of the negative and symbolization in differentiating concepts (Rosteck and Leff 1989).
Piety does not even have to be biologically beneficial or advance the health of the organism,
since those aren’t the compulsions that are at stake. A bird that is part of a flock is pious to the extent
that it rises and dips with its flock in response to the flock’s ‘collective assessments’ of threats and
opportunities, whether those assessments are correct or incorrect.
Achieving piety ensures a sense of “regularity” and habituation, in which we feel confident that
our expectations of the world are sufficient to maneuver through it (Burke 1984b, 276; C. A. Carter
1996; Griffin 1969; Howell 2012). It also involves “a distribution of authority” that coalesces into
arrangements such as rules and services or loyalty and obligations (Burke 1984b, 276). Mystery may
become pervasive and help to insulate piety and the stabilized background social order. Compulsions
toward perfection and hierarchy are momentarily subdued.
Identification in the form of piety will inevitably fail, but the risks are contingently exacerbated
when one’s expectations of the world are unrealistic. Recent scholarship has sounded notes of warning
about the role of technological advance in that regard, which has built expectations for change that are
in turn mapped onto promises of social cohesion (Borup et al. 2006; Ha 2018; Jasanoff and Kim 2015).
These discourses have generated techno‐futurist and outright techno‐utopian promises of impending,
radical, and even in‐principle unknowable change (Pilsch 2017). Burkean scholars for their part have
emphasized Burke’s fears of technologically‐driven totalitarianism (Adamczyk 2019; Herrick 2017;
McClellan 2019)
52
. When rhetors sketch the possibilities of future worlds, it all but necessarily involves a
certain erosion of piety and identity.

52
Burke had been critical of technological progress throughout his career, and grew more worried as technology
continued to develop: he “relentlessly ‘attacks’ hyper‐technologism for the ways in which it is polluting the globe
and threatening us in other ways” and he refused to take a position on “whether the world will be ultimately
77

Piety Subverted by Secular Futurism
Burke has a structural treatment of futurism in The Grammar of Motives in which he traces its
two abstract forms, secular futurism and religious futurism, which stood in for two generic orientations
toward the future
53
. The danger with any sort of projection into the future is that the compulsion for
perfection becomes acute, because “[i]f there is a drive, why not drive with it, towards an ideal end?”
(Burke, Rueckert, and Bonadonna 2003, 61) Materially, technological progress creates inertia so that its
negative consequences are treated as reasons to pursue and accelerate technological progress (Burke,
Rueckert, and Bonadonna 2003)
54
. Symbolically, even preservation becomes valuable only to the extent
that it serves as a marker for future progress, and “vast treasures must be dug up, transported,
processed, bought, sold, catalogued, recorded in archives of one sort or another, so that but a single
day’s input may be fed into the maws of our many communicative media, thus providing material of
some sort for the creativity of symbolic action” (Burke, Rueckert, and Bonadonna 2003, 46). Secular
futurism is disproportionately dangerous in that regard.
Secular futurism “reduces the present to the future,” celebrating progress and goods that are
supposed to occur in the future, and trying to make them a reality in the present (Burke 1969a, 334).
Secular futurism is rottenness with perfection extrapolated to the level of the grandest social visions.
Trying to perfect the relationship between the symbol ‘tree’ and a really existing tree is guaranteed to
fail because it is foreclosed by the negative and the inherent inadequacies of language, but it is a
semantic dynamic. Trying to perfect the relationship between a future utopia and the really existing
world is also guaranteed to fail, and for structurally similar reasons, but it will potentially play out as

better off or worse off as the result of the changes that technology has already brought or may bring in the future”
(Burke, Rueckert, and Bonadonna 2003, 1,38).
53
Elsewhere Burke slipped between three distinct levels of analysis – forms of futurism, examples such as
industrial capitalism, and specific technological developments – mirroring much of Burkean analysis, which slips
between general principle, illustration, and consequence. The descriptions of secular and religious futurism
clarified Burke’s theories of futurism at the highest level of abstraction.
54
Burke gives the example of a lake which becomes a cesspool because of developments around it. The logic of
technological progress would suggest commodifying it for further progress and development.
78

catastrophic social violence. The grander the vision, the more devastating the let‐down, and the more
devastating the let‐down, the more hysterical the scapegoating.
Piety Secured Through Religious Futurism
Religious futurism works by “reducing the future to the present,” insisting that what’s being
reached for in the future is already embedded in society but has yet to be actualized (Burke 1969a, 334).
It is ‘religious’ in the sense that it draws on theological concepts: “the potential, the ideal future, was
there proclaimed to be the very substance of the present (the Kingdom of Heaven is within you)” (Burke
1969a, 332). The advocacy is one of reframing not transformation, but because it unfolds temporally the
reframing can still move human affairs: in the context of a conflict, a rhetor who persuades audiences
that peace is here now but obfuscated by violence may be able to intervene. Burke acknowledges that
religious futurism is far less ambitious than secular futurism – but that relative modesty makes it
significantly less dangerous.
In an earlier less technical analysis of futurism, Burke had suggested that suitably modest
futurism could be used to persuade audiences to meet failures and frustrations with at least a sense of
resignation. In Attitudes Toward History he critiqued the aesthetic futurism of Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti, a 19
th
and 20
th
century theorist who founded the Futurist movement and penned the first
Futurist Manifesto.
Burke criticized Marinetti for promising too much in his manifestos, so that when he tried to
represent or actualize them the results were “necessarily a let‐down” (Burke 1984a, 32). The criticism is
a version of what would become his criticism of secular futurism. However Burke also extracted from
the theorist an implicit “sentimental” futurism in which the present was celebrated for being a kind of
future, and so could provide “the most rudimentary kind of solace” (Burke 1984a, 33). As Marinetti
developed it, that version of futurism was too passive to be a productive force in human affairs, but the
passivity did constitute a kind of “frame of acceptance,” albeit an underdeveloped one (Burke 1984a).
79

Frames of acceptance, when fully developed, are “more or less organized system of meanings by
which a thinking man gauges the historical situation and adopts a role with relation to it” (Burke 1984a,
5). These frames become particularly salient during times of political or social change, when authorities
are in disarray and “one constructs his ‘frame of acceptance’ for the present by reference to these
futuristic norms” (Burke 1984a, 159).
Consequences of Failed Identification: Scapegoating
Eventually the structural instability built into identity will ensure that attempts to secure piety
falter and occasionally fail, and that individuals will encounter a misalignment between their
expectations and the world. At the level of meaning‐making the encounter is experienced as jarring
recalcitrance, which renews anxiety about the adequacy of our symbols, and reanimates compulsions
toward perfection and hierarchy
55
. At the level of human affairs, it’s experienced as a loss of Mystery
and erosion of order. The encounter sets off the canonical guilt‐redemption cycle – the Cult of the Kill –
aimed at recuperating identity. Individuals choose between mortification, which involves accepting that
symbols will always be imperfect and social order will always be tenuous, or victimage, which involves
blaming the destabilization on an external scapegoat, with the implicit promise that eliminating the
scapegoat will restore order and reconsolidate identity. The latter path, which is almost always the one
that gets chosen, risks catastrophic violence aimed disproportionately at already‐marginalized groups.
The dislocation and erosion of piety at the level of language is infused with significance and felt
as bodily uncleanliness. When we feel our symbolic understanding of the world being shaken it is
experienced bodily, just as when bodily dislocations occur they are inflected symbolically. A cycle begins

55
Habermas makes a structurally similar move. Identity projections filter how human beings understand
themselves and the world, and so fixing identity creates a robust framework for that understanding. When those
filters fail the unexpected encounter with the world is jarring and can force the need for reevaluation. The parallels
reinforce the assessment that Habermas and Burke are exploring the same structures.
80

to recuperate identify – and thereby restore the sense of alignment between symbolic expectations and
the world – through a process of ritual cleansing:
Piety is the sense of what properly goes with what. And it leads to construction this way: If there
is an altar, it is pious of a man to perform some ritual act whereby he may approach this altar
with clean hands. A kind of symbolic cleanliness goes with altars, a technique of symbolic
cleansing goes with cleanliness, a preparation or initiation goes with the technique of cleansing,
the need of cleansing was based on some feeling of taboo – and so on, until pious linkages may
have brought all the significant details of the day into coordination, relating them integrally with
one another by a complex interpretative network (Burke 1984b, 74–75)
In Christianity the trajectory is from Original Sin to Redemption, and Burke’s theory of
Dramatism is aimed at locating “the possible secular equivalents” of dynamics that religion had
encountered and loaded with theological meaning (Burke 1984b, 283). Dramatism offers a way to
understand human relations and identity by reference to motivations as expressed – both of which are
entangled in identity – by reference to the unfolding of a drama, or more specifically from a perspective
that “treats language and thought primarily as modes of action” (Burke 1969a, xxii). As Burke developed
the method it evolved from a way of approaching texts to a lens through which to analyze philosophical
problems (Brock 1985). It differs from most other philosophical approaches not just in its objects of
analysis, inasmuch as Burke continued to lean heavily on literary artifacts, but also in the degree to
which it credited language with the ability to structure thought, including to limit language and concepts
available to people.
The loss of piety is felt at the level of language as a misalignment between symbols and the
world, and experienced socially as profound alienation (Brock 1999). The breakdown in piety sets into
motion a cycle to reconsolidate identity by restoring expectations and relationships.
Entrance into the symbolic order brings with it exposure to pollution, which in a secular sense is
a constant anxiety about the adequacy and consistency of symbolization (Brock 1999). When piety
inevitably becomes dislocated – when expectations falter – the compulsions toward perfection and
81

hierarchy are reanimated, anxiety is heightened, and the stress is linked to the pollution (Burke 1984b;
Griffin 1969). Guilt is generated, which is grounded in a sense of failure: humans feel individual and
collective responsibilities to maintain social order, and the sensation that they’re failing creates
embarrassment, anxiety, disgust, and so (Brock 1999; Burke 1984b)
56
.
The introduction of guilt carries with it “the need for redemption, which involves sacrifice, which
in turn allows for substitution,” a model of “’redemption’ through victimage”(Burke 1970, 314; 1984b,
284). In a theological context guilt generated by Original sin, tribal inheritance, or individual behavior is
heaped upon a scapegoat, which has been perfected so it is able to bear the full burden of the guilt, and
is then sacrificed to secure one’s own purification (Burke 1984b; Howell 2012).
In secular contexts “language, through the symbol of the negative designating the prohibited,
the unclean, the blameworthy, perfects the welding of order and sacrifice” (Desilet 1989, 68). The
scapegoating occurs through the targeting of actually existing individuals and social groups, and often
those are already marginalized and vulnerable. The most likely result in modernity, according to Burke,
will be “some variant of the Hitlerite emphasis” (Burke 1984b, 288).
There is an intimate theoretical link between this process and secular futurism. An idyllic or even
utopian image of the future is presented and then pursued which, when coupled with humans’ innate
compulsion to perfection, risks cycles of victimage. Either no one can colorably claim to be pursuing the
promise – “the future forever is not” – or someone does try to bring about the idyllic image and falls
short (Burke 1969a, 334). Those who have bought into the discourse are let down, but instead of giving
up on the promised future as unrealistic, which would be a form of mortification, they ritually seek out
scapegoats who can be blamed for the failure:

56
The feeling of failure is entangled in a sense of personal and collective responsibility for maintaining social order:
“If order, then a need to repress the tendencies to disorder. If repression, then responsibility for imposing,
accepting, or resisting the repression. If responsibility, then guilt” (Burke 1970, 314)
82

When the restricting of investment proceeds without a corresponding change in men’s concept
of motives, you must get the aggressive futurism of National‐Socialist expansion and (or) the
balked futurism of would‐be business enterprisers who, deprived of an outlet for their
ambitions, and with no other conception of effort to replace these, turn in their disgruntlement
to a hatred of Jews, foreigners, Negroes, "isms," etc., as a ritualistic outlet (Burke 1969a, 335–
36)
The future is said to belong to those willing to align with the new order, where the alignment is both a
social exhortation about duty and a matter of piety understood technically. Those who express
skepticism or disagreement are evidence of ongoing pollution, which requires purification.
There are few good options for avoiding cycles of victimage. People are compelled to ensure that
their symbols work and order is maintained, despite the negative’s guarantee of failure. When they
inevitably fail, they are motivated to blame others rather than confront their compulsions, setting in
motion the guilt‐redemption cycle. Burke nevertheless calls the reader’s attention to the possibility of
mortification, in which one accepts that indefinite piety is unrealistic.
Mortification aims to limit the compulsions to perfection and hierarchy that put into motion the
guilt‐redemption cycle. Piety is experienced as a failure of symbolic expectations at the level of language
or in the context of social order. The alternative to externalizing blame for those failures is by definition
to internalize it, which involves taking on the blame as one’s own. When the source of failure is
unrealistic expectations, mortification takes the form of modulating those expectations, which includes
acknowledging the inevitable limitations of understanding and the fragility of social forms. Burke
recommended creating educational structures that would “aim at the kinds of contemplation and
sufferance that are best adapted to the recognition and acceptance of a social form inevitable to social
order” (Burke 1984b, 294).
Excavating Bodily Integrity
Dramatism already provides theoretical reasons to be skeptical of conspiracy theories.
Conspiracists lean heavily on the persuasive appeal of visions of redeemed futures. Hofstadter’s
83

cataloging of conspiracy rhetoric highlighted that conspiracy theorists do much of their persuasive work
by positing an enemy that is responsible for current malaise and then offering an idyllic vision of the
future that would follow should the enemy be removed. Hitler engaged in a structurally similar move,
offering vision of an empowered Germany rising from the sad state of the Weimar Republic (in the
technical language of Dramatism Hitler took an additional step, which was to elevate Jews into
perfected scapegoats, so that eliminating them would also purify guilt). Even when they’re innocent,
appeals to redeemed future necessarily – structurally – entrail an erosion in piety.
More subtly, the tropes and structures of identification and its breakdown – pollution, purity,
mortification– are intensely corporeal. The sexual drives described by Freudian psychoanalysis are
largely refracted by Burke through language and subject to transference, but not all of them, and some
remain tethered to the body and sexuation. Scholars have even speculated that Burke’s biographical
experience working in scientific and medical fields influenced his later theorization, including the role
that bodies play in his formal literary analysis (Brummett 1985; Crable 2003; Hawhee 1999; Jack 2004;
Woods 2009)
57
.
Embodiment is crucial to Burke’s fundamental distinctions between action and motion, in which
the physical movements of animal bodies become meaningful motion to the extent that they are
symbolized (Burke 1978). The result is an “inseparability of bodies and language, of bodies and
economy, of bodies and politics, of bodies and life” (Hawhee 2009, 10). In Language As Symbolic Action
he wrote “a section of the book began writing itself, a systematic concern with ‘the thinking of the
body’… poetry mimics the body’s purgative ways of giving off, when unburdening itself of impurities”

57
He spent formative years employed with the Bureau of Social Hygiene and penned pamphlets on drug use and
criminality, and would later emphasize the analogies between rhetoric and medicine (Burke 1964; Jack 2004).
84

(Burke 2013, 126). Those themes become sublimated rhetorically into appeals, anxieties, attractions,
and concerns about the body.
The guilt‐redemption cycle is animated by sensations that the political order has become
polluted and the body has become impure. The theological parallels of symbolic sacrifice and symbolic
mortification are physical killing at the altar and physical mortification of the flesh. Mortification read
against the backdrop of futurism has to do with bodily sensations, so that in Marinetti’s mobilization of
affect one can “advocate an uncritical cult of noise” or if there’s a stench one can “discuss the ‘beauties’
of stench” (Burke 1984a, 33)
58
.
It's not a surprise, then, that conspiracy theories are riddled with anxiety over maintaining the
integrity and purity of the body. It’s a prominent feature conspiracism ranging from political to
supernatural conspiracies, and by definition is the topic of increasingly ubiquitous medical conspiracy
theories (Blaskiewicz 2013b). The Cold War was marked by discourses that revolved around bodily
invasion, and more broadly through contemporary discourse “the imperceptibly altered body is a staple
of the paranoiac world” (Hendershot 1998). Invasion of the Body Snatchers an exemplary film of the
genre, and ends with Kevin McCarthy’s character Dr. Miles Bennell breaking the Fourth wall, looking
directly into the camera, and shouting “They’re here already! You’re next!” (Mann 2004).
Reports of medical probing are such a common part of alien abduction narratives that they’re
used as the basis for social science experiments examining the physiology of reported trauma, the
construction of memories, and the robustness of psychopathological methods (Forrest 2008; McNally

58
Burke rejected Marinetti’s sentimental futurism as ultimately untenable because it required blanket acceptance
and therefore political and social passivity. Frames of acceptance are filters that are aimed at selection and
discrimination, and so sentimental futurism is at best a degraded frame of acceptance. Nevertheless, Burke
suggested that it was structurally parallel to religious futurism, in that it instantiated the future in the now, and
effectively parallel to frames of acceptance, in that it “could provide the most rudimentary kind of solace” (Burke
1984a, 33). It presents one model for how affect could be mobilized against the backdrop of futurism without
slipping in cycles of unrealistic expectations and disappointment, which end in failure and generate guilt.
85

2012; McNally et al. 2004). They are used as the basis for analysis not just by critics of conspiracy
theories but by recuperative scholars (Dean 1998). They have been the subject of South Park cartoons
and of academic writing about those cartoons (Weinstock 2008). The dynamic is ripe for theorization:
there is no easy explanation for why tropes about violations of bodily integrity consistently appear
across otherwise unrelated conspiracy theories.
Rhetorical theorist Edwin Black used the figure of the “cancer of communism” as the basis for
his canonical article on the Second Persona, in which the possibilities and challenges introduced by the
audience are in dialogue with the rhetor, rather than a given (Black 1970)
59
. Conspiracy theories about
nefarious government motives for putting fluoride in public water supplies go back to the 1940s, and
were cited by Hofstadter in The Paranoid Style as “catnip for cranks of all kinds” (Freeze and Lehr 2009;
Hofstadter 1996, 5). More recently conspiracy theories have emerged about the availability and
prescriptions of testosterone products, which has emerged against the backdrop of a cottage industry
linking testosterone to leadership ability (Adams 2015; Sheahan, Martinez, and Golden 2015).
Conspiracy theories about the safety of vaccinations have entered the mainstream in recent years,
producing international consequences so that many areas – including disproportionately wealthy parts
of the United States – are dropping to potentially catastrophic rates of vaccination (Bean 2011; Jolley
and Douglas 2014; Kata 2010; MacDonald, Smith, and Appleton 2012).
On the other side Dean argues that the ubiquitous images of aliens in American popular culture
“provide icons through which to access the new conditions of democratic politics at the millennium,”
and that narratives specifically about abduction “reconfigure the present’s acceptance of passivity,
suspicion, paranoia, and loss as, themselves, forms of action” (Dean 1998, 7).

59
The recharacterization of the audience as a persona also created the opportunity for critics to examine the
ideology and strategies used by rhetors who project and construct audiences, as additional dimensions for
rhetorical criticism.
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These scholars diverge on whether persuasive appeals to bodily integrity in conspiracy theories
are productive. There is a convergence, however, on the question of where the work is happening: the
trope is entangled with deep notions of personal identity, which helps account for the diversity of
contexts in which it’s found. The theoretical and to some extent practical question then becomes how
those appeals are channeled by conspiracists tactically and structurally, which orients theorists toward
Burkean accounts of anxiety, scapegoating, guilt, and redemption.
Excavating Scapegoating
The structural significance of scapegoating is often discussed against the backdrop of its lay usage,
as something that occurs when someone is targeted on the basis of a pretext. Critics might say that
economically‐marginalized racists who blame minorities for lost jobs are ‘scapegoating’ them. In that lay
usage the scapegoat is just an evil imagined enemy. In Permanence and Change Burke took pains to
untangle his theorization of scapegoating from the lay understanding, which he described as an error in
interpreting his account (Burke 1984b)
60
.
In Burke’s usage scapegoating occurs through a transference of guilt from an individual or group to
a sacrifice against the backdrop of pollution, in order to purify them from that guilt. While the scapegoat
might be the imagined source of the pollution – crucially – it doesn’t have to be. The theological
resonance and symbolic significance are in the transference, and that transference is arbitrary:
[I]t follows, by the ultimate logic of symbols, that the compensatory sacrifice of a ritually perfect
victim would be the corresponding ‘norm’… We are here discussing the problem in its widest
aspects. As regards particular cases, the particular choice of the “fragmentary” scapegoats may
be even fantastically and morbidly irrelevant. (Obvious drastic recent example: the Hitlerite
promoting of social cohesion through the choice of the Jew, considered generically, as “perfect”
ritual offering.) (Burke 1984b, 284)

60
Burke is after all engaged in tying contemporary discursive practices to theological patterns, in this context
actual sacrifices of animals. A lamb killed on an altar isn’t an enemy, it’s just a vessel that takes on the guilt of
those participating in the sacrifice. The crucial dynamic is the transference.
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The theorization can be read against the backdrop of Burke’s early exploration of scapegoating in “The
Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle,” in which he described how Hitler selected Jews as scapegoats for a range of
strategic rhetorical and economic reasons. He had to account for the broad decline of German power
across political, economic, diplomatic, social, and military spheres. He blamed a variety of causes, which
through one narrative path or another led to Jews:
Never once, throughout his book, does Hitler deviate from the above formula. Invariably, he
ends his diatribes against contemporary economic ills by a shift into an insistence that we must
get to the “true” cause, which is centered in “race.” The “Aryan’ is “constructive”; the Jew is
“destructive”… the Jew, who thereupon gets saddled with a vast amalgamation of evils, among
them being capitalism, democracy, pacifism, journalism, poor housing, modernism, big cities,
loss of religion, half measures, ill health, and weakness of the monarch (Burke 1973, 204–5)
The demonization, however, is not the moment of perfecting the scapegoat. Demonization is a social
mechanism deployed to facilitate violence, but it does not set up the transference of guilt that marks
scapegoating. Burke emphasizes that the dynamic by which Jews were crystalized as enemies is separate
and distinct from the dynamic by which they were perfected as scapegoats. The essential quality of a
scapegoat is the perfected ability to take on the weight of sin and guilt, not purported evilness. In the
context of Hitler’s scapegoating, the quality was tied to Jewish survival, which ensured they could
shoulder the burden:
[T]he major vice of the Jew was his instinct for self‐preservation; for, if he did not have this
instinct to a maximum degree, he would not be the “perfect” enemy – that is, he wouldn't be
strong enough to account for the ubiquitousness and omnipotence of his conspiracy in
destroying the world to become its master. (Burke 1973, 209).
The symbolic scapegoating among other things provided Germans with projection devices so they could
be purified by dissociation and with symbolic rebirth through which they could move forward toward a
goal. The inherently symbolic nature of transference provides rhetors with the option of selecting
scapegoats strategically based on a range of criteria. In some cases, scapegoating could be deployed
strategically in order to target political enemies or economic enemies. In other cases, it might be used to
account for misfortune or disaster. Conspirators have flexibility, provided they can symbolically ‘perfect’
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the scapegoats into vessels capable of assuming the full weight of guilt. These two moments are often
conflated in readings of Burke, especially when the targets are rhetorically produced as both perfect and
evil, though they are structurally and conceptually distinct.
The arbitrariness becomes significant in evaluating how scapegoating is deployed in the context of
conspiracism. The flexibility provides conspiracists with strategic options. Populations can be assembled
rhetorically from a mix of race, class, gender, and socioeconomic statuses. The selection occurs,
however, for the purpose of pushing individuals and populations away from mortification and toward
pathways in which identity is consolidated, and in particularly dangerous ways. Evaluating the dynamics
of the guilt‐redemption cycle alongside the structures of conspiracy theory suggests that the two are
mutually reinforcing, which deeply undermines the possibility that conspiracy theories can be
emancipatory or disrupt identity.
The guilt‐redemption cycle in Dramatism and the course of conspiracism according to
Hofstadter have deep parallels, and some scholars have argued that they theories are functionally
homologous (Howell 2012). Hofstadter described a dynamic that overlaps significantly with Burkean
scapegoating understood from within the horizon of Dramatism. Conspiracy theorists imagine an
absolute enemy that has to be eliminated because the enemy can’t be reasoned with. Of course that’s
often the case in practice, where the scapegoat which has been perfected into a vessel to carry guilt is
also constructed as “the material embodiment of an ‘idealized’ foe,” but the two are distinct (Burke
1984b, 288; Hofstadter 1996).
However, there is another more subtle description in Hofstadter of how enemy conspirators are
imagined, which aligns even more closely with Burkean scapegoating. The imagined conspirator is also
described as “a kind of amoral superman… He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history
himself” (Hofstadter 1996, 31–32). He is so powerful, in fact, that he has the ability to hide evidence of
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the conspiracy: “he controls the press… he has a new secret for influencing the mind… he is gaining a
stranglehold on the educational system” (Hofstadter 1996, 32).
Conspiracy theorists have different reasons for imagining all‐powerful enemies. The construction
facilitates arguments for why those enemies are able to hide evidence of the conspiracy, and sets up the
self‐sealing move that insulates conspiracy argumentative. As with how Burke described Hitler, they
deploy scapegoating strategically. One consequence is that the conspiracy claim is argumentatively
insulated. It works out, however, that another consequence emerges when the dynamic is viewed from
a Burkean perspective: an enemy that is infinitely powerful is also infinitely perfected to take on guilt
and be sacrificed as a scapegoat. It sets guilt‐redemption cycle in motion toward victimage.
The guilt‐redemption cycle produces scapegoats, who have been arbitrarily chosen to take on
guilt, to the extent that there’s a tenable pretext not to choose mortification. Scapegoating falters when
only when failure becomes so pronounced that the only reasonable option is to accept limitation and
therefore blame. Meanwhile conspiracy theories produce conspiracy argumentation, the recognizable 2‐
step move in which disproof is described as proof because it’s taken to show the depth and
sophistication of the conspiracy, to the extent that there’s some available group to blame. Conspiracism
falters only when conspiracists run out of groups that can colorably be characterized as reasonable to
blame.
The two reinforce each other. On the basis of its own logic the guilt‐redemption cycle produces
ever‐new outgroups that, from within the logic of a conspiracy theory, are candidates for a conspiracy.
On the basis of their own logic conspiracy theories produce reasons why failure was the fault of a
shadowy and hidden group, providing a pretext to choose victimage over mortification, since the failure
can be ascribed to the work of conspirators. That dynamic understood through Dramatism suggests that
conspiracy theories risk unchecked cycles of violence against vulnerable groups, not just because the
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determined produce endless enemies on their own term, but because they can produce endless
scapegoats to argumentatively insulate their theories against disproof. Often, they choose precisely the
groups that can colorably be claimed to be burying evidence of the conspiracy, or groups that can be
claimed to control them.
Conclusion
This chapter reconstructed Burkes notion of identity based on consubstantiality. Identification is
achieved when motives align and people are, in a sense, speaking the same language. However,
language, in constituting and channeling identity, also extracts costs and imposes limits. The tensions
are integrated into Burke’s definition of humans. The use of language involves implicit promises of
coherence and order, creating a hierarchy that works at two levels: epistemically, as understanding the
world; and socially, as locating ourselves within it. Burke speaks of language making humans “goaded by
hierarchy” and “rotten with perfection,” so that when shortfalls inevitably happen and frustrations arise
– when the implicit promise is broken – the negative moment shakes both our sense of self and others.
The introduction of the negative into language makes shortfalls, and therefore such moments,
inevitable. The inevitable failure is experienced bodily as pollution and impurity, which generates guilt,
and sets in motion a cycle where people seek to expiate that guilt and be redeemed. Rather than
acknowledge the inherent impossibility of perfection, however, people search for scapegoats who will
take the guilt on themselves, and in being sacrificed provide exoneration. The dynamic becomes
increasingly dangerous when identity is tied to visions of the future that are not just structurally
unrealizable – in the sense that symbolization will ensure reality never quite lives up to the visions – but
materially unrealizable. We demand explanations for the failure to realize our visions. Conspiracy
theories offer ready explanations. Someone or something unknown must be stymying progress.
The centrality of the body and pollution in identity accounts for why such fears are amplified by
public claims vulnerability. Concerns over pollution and purity are at the core of the guilt‐redemption
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cycle, which is an identificatory process, and so discursive appeals about the body become not just
interventions into that process but condition its contours and possibilities. In the ensuring search for a
scapegoat, the choice is essentially arbitrary: its success turns on the ability to perfect the scapegoat as a
vessel of guilt, not any purported evilness. The result is that there is a theoretically striking and
pernicious synergy between the guilt‐redemption cycle and conspiracy theories.
Conspiracists are not the only ones who make appeals to bodily integrity, which are after all
embedded deep in processes of identity, but they particularly thrive by generating fears for the body. As
threats multiply, anxieties are generated and reassurance is sought. The next chapter takes up identity
in that context, as a response to and generative of insecurities, neuroses, obsessions, hysteria, and so on
from within the horizon of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. In contrast to Habermas and even to a
certain extent Burke, Lacan explicitly foregrounds identity and identification, and much of his work is
oriented towards explaining their instability and ultimate impossibility. However, many of those reasons
are subtle and connect in ways that are of particular relevance to debates over conspiracy theories, and
so the chapter will proceed with an eye toward excavating the generative implications for rhetorical
tropes and argumentative mechanisms that consolidate identity – though only for a time, until
dislocation inevitably occurs and anxiety reemerges.

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CHAPTER 4: LACAN, VISION, AND ANXIETY

“It is harder to fight against pleasure than against anger”
– Heraclitus as quoted by Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Much contemporary work revolves around a cluster of key terms that are deployed to name the
overlaps, tensions, and disorder of communication. Flow, meme, indeterminacy, rhizome, difference, and
so on have become theoretical touchstones. These clusters do not have a single overriding commonality,
but they all suggest the need to theorize disconnections, contradictions, and to a certain extent play.
Traditional methods for theorizing discourse tend to rely on continuities and commitments, and so are
not always well‐suited to analyzing subjects against the backdrop of these postulated heterogeneous
dynamics
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.
Postmodern and poststructuralist approaches have taken hold across the humanities in part
because they at least speak to those dynamics, inasmuch as they foreground dislocation and
indeterminacy. Many of those approaches, however, have significant shortcomings, especially in the
context of theorizing conspiracism. First, they’ve been used to generate recuperative readings that are
manifestly inadequate for the current moment, in which conspiracism is corroding public discourse and
generating domestic political violence. Additionally, many – though importantly not all – poststructuralist
and postmodern approaches dissolve the subject into the chain of signifiers and symbols that constitute
language (Copjec 1994). Whatever methodological or normative merits that move might have, it makes
those approaches inapt for theorizing identity. To the extent that theoretical and empirical work suggests
identity is bound up with conspiracy beliefs, it also renders them inapt for distinguishing between and
critiquing varied versions of conspiracism.

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Postmodern approaches, which are oriented toward disconnects and play, are also ill‐suited for analyzing the
identity of subject since they dissolve subjectivity (Copjec 1994). The debate between Lacanian theory and
postmodernism is beyond the scope of this dissertation, but it does seem straightforward that if the task is to
explain how particular identities take hold, postmodern theories which posit the impossibility of identity are going
to be inadequate.
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The poststructuralist approach of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan offers a way through this
impasse. As with most approaches from that research trajectory, the Lacanian approach emphasizes
impossibility, frustration, and fragmentation, and so is well‐suited for theorizing the communication
practices often interrogated by critical theorists, especially in the digital spaces where conspiracy theories
increasingly thrive (Stoltzfus 1996). Unlike most other post‐structuralist approaches the Lacanian project
is not aimed at dissolving the subject into a chain of linguistic signifiers, but rather at accounting for the
persistence of subjectivity and identity in light of the chain of signification.
Lacan focuses critical and theoretical attention on the libidinal, which has consequences for the
unfolding of identity and provides alternative explanations for otherwise familiar dynamics. Desire in
Lacan is both a technical term linked to the desire of the other, which is unknowable and in turn propels
one’s own desire, and understood in the conventional sense of wanting something (Fink 2004). The
consequences of foregrounding a desiring subject are significant. Desire and the related term of
jouissance, usually translated as “enjoyment,” become not just explanations of motives but underwrite
methodological approaches to analysis
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.
The resistance to linguistic reductionism and the emphasis on the libidinal keep Lacan in a sense
tethered to certain recognizable notions of bodily desire, though ironically – and in contrast to other
post‐Freudians – he was not particularly interested in retaining most of Freud’s original clinical findings
and assertions
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. Nevertheless, he built upon the central Freudian notion of biological drives, which are
associated with and drive desire for different parts of the body. He identified four partial drives,

62
The breadth of Lacan’s move is in a sense easier to explain in social scientific terms than from within critical theory.
Lacan’s methodological gamble on the importance of jouissance can be analogized to how economists treat utility
and political scientists treat power. Those concepts are simultaneously objects of study, explanations for behavior,
and most fundamentally constitutive of the fields doing the studying and explaining.
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He framed his project as a “return to Freud,” which he clarified means a “return to the meaning of Freud,” which
he clarified to mean that “the unconscious is structured like a language” (Lacan 2001, 89; Žižek 2007).
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including the scopic drive associated with the eyes and seeing, which is of particular theoretical
relevance for identificatory dynamics.
Lacan’s theory of identity is explicit but its application to the approach of this dissertation, in
which identificatory rhetorical appeals and argumentative mechanisms are extracted from social
theories, requires excavation. This chapter traces how identification occurs in Lacan’s theories. As with
other post‐Freudian theories, the subject reaches for a fantasy to suture lacks in identity, which are lacks
in language. It establishes the rhetorical significance of appeals to vision as entangled with identity. I
also advance the theoretical understanding of how anxiety operates within the horizon of identity, and
articulate the risks associated with deploying it as a mechanism for resisting identity.
Identity and Identification in Lacan
Identity is Symbolic
Lacan has been broadly criticized for being deliberately obscure, not least of all because he
occasionally defended obscurity as pedagogically valuable
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. Nevertheless, there is a coherent model of
subjectivity and identity in his work.
That model of subjectivity is embedded in a more expansive social theory that includes theories
of language. Experience occurs across three registers that structure identity. The Imaginary is the
domain of images and visual meaning, and is closely tied to the immediacy of biological experience,
though it is intertwined with and inflected through language in human animals
65
. The Imaginary is
connected to a range of Lacanian concepts but “derives from the experience of the image – and of the

64
Describing the early atmosphere in France as Lacan began writing and teaching, Dufresne quotes Lacan saying
“… the less you understand the better you listen. For I often say very difficult things and see you hanging on my
every word, and I learn later that some of you didn’t understand. On the other hand, when you’re told things that
are too simple, almost too familiar, you are less attentive” (Dufresne 1997, 3). He has also been accused more
broadly of incoherence, especially for attempting to mathematize his concepts of the psyche (Plotnitsky 2002;
Ragland 2015; Sokal and Bricmont 2003).
65
The dynamic is analogous to Burke’s recognition that the physiologically immediacy of animality occasionally
intrudes into symbolization.
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imago – and we are meant to retain its spatial and visual connections” (Jameson 1977, 351). It functions
in some ways as “a kind of pre‐verbal register whose logic is essentially visual” (Jameson 1977, 353).
The Symbolic is the domain of language, which is understood in Lacan largely in the Structuralist
terms of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, in which meaning is created out of chains of conceptual
signifiers that never quite reach their signified object, and as a result language is in principle inadequate
for articulating the totality of the world (Marta 1987).
The inadequacy of language is deepened by the Real, the third register of experience in Lacan,
which disrupts symbolization. As a matter of definition, the Real is “that which resists symbolization,”
which in clinical terms equates to trauma that the subject would like to articulate but can’t, while in
structural terms it describes the dynamic by which symbolization is interrupted (Žižek 2009b, 74). It is
“the rock upon which every attempt at symbolization stumbles, the hard core which remains the same
in all possible worlds” (Žižek 2009b, 190)
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. The Real disrupts the Symbolic and – in part because the
Imaginary is intertwined with the Symbolic – it sets into motion Imaginary dynamics as well. As with the
Imaginary and Symbolic, the Real is a conceptual and primordial register of experience, not something
that ‘happens.’ Lacan described it as a frame: something that emerges in its capacity as itself only when
a portrait is placed in it, but that was nonetheless always a frame (Barnard and Fink 2002).
The Lacanian subject, then, is a linguistic subject against the backdrop of a discursive model in
which language is marked by lack, which destabilizes all symbolization including identity. The result puts
into motion a desire, interwoven with jouissance, to suture that lack and stabilize identity, but that

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Importantly, normal experience does not occur ‘in’ any of the Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, but as an interplay
between them. They can be productively abstracted and described, provided those abstractions are understood as
idealizations, otherwise theorists risk “perpetuat[ing] the illusion that we could have a relatively pure experience”
of one register (Jameson 1977, 349). Identity and subjectivity in this reading are not reducible to the play of
language, but are refracted through three registers: the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real. In a nontechnical but
usable sense, the Imaginary is the register of visual meaning, the Symbolic is the register of discursive meaning,
and the Real is that part of reality that exists outside of the Imaginary and Symbolic and resists symbolization.
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stabilization is structurally foreclosed. It is experienced in part as a compulsion to achieve fullness – to
plug the gaps in the symbolic order – and so “jouissance always has ‘the connotation of fullness’”
(Stavrakakis 1999, 45).
So far, so familiar. For all of Lacan’s purported opacity, this model is in its broad outline not
much different from the dynamics that Habermas or Burke also discovered as part of their efforts to
reconcile Freudian psychoanalysis with linguistic advances. There is, however, a difference in emphasis
that functionally rises to a difference in kind. In Habermas instability is experienced almost entirely as a
function of political rationality and contradictory identity formations, and the structural foreclosure is
effaced. In Burke negativity and impossibility are at the basis of what it means to be human, but most of
the analysis occurs downstream. With Lacan the subject is thoroughly riven by gaps, lacks, and bars, and
the effects are ubiquitous.
The subject’s constitutive split is expressed across a range of registers. One canonical way of
approaching the dynamic is by reference to how the real inevitably disrupts signification, including
signification about identity (Glynos 2003). It is felt as a split between the subject of the énoncé
(statement) and subject of the énunciation (enunciation), so that when the subject hears itself talking
about itself – which should be a moment of unity – what instead happens is that a radical division is
introduced and the promise of unity fails (Lacan 2001; Stavrakakis 1999). Another constitutive split is by
reference to the “bar” that separates the signifier, very loosely understood as symbol, from the
signified, very loosely understood as external reality (Friedlander 2008; Stavrakakis 1999). There is also
the unconscious, but in contrast to the repressed wild urges and traumas of the Freudian unconscious, it
is an exterior symbolic space that “speaks out” in its own logic (Žižek 2007, 3). Not all of these are
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equivalent, and there are extensive debates about which are, but the variety and range speak to the
degree to which symbolization and identity are unstable according to Lacan
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.
Identity as Habituated Expectations
Lacan focuses much of his work on how those inevitable failures in symbolization manifest
themselves clinically, in the context of past and then‐contemporary psychoanalytic theory. Understood
in those terms the subject is experiencing the return of repressed Things that have been traumatically
excluded from the subject's consciousness, and thus disrupt the subject's attempts to construct a
coherent account of identity and of reality.
As with other post‐Freudians, identification in Lacan occurs to the extent the subject internalizes
at least for a time the fantasmatic conceit that symbolically‐constructed and linguistically‐inflected
reality is coherent and cohesive. The Lacanian term for that concept is the “big Other.” In the broadest
sense, the big Other is the symbolic order – language – which, crucially, guarantees consistency in the
subject’s understanding of reality. Contingently that reassurance can be experienced in different ways,
so that for children parents can serve as stand‐ins for the Big Other and in other contexts “God is the
Lacanian big Other: a machine that follows its inherent ‘natural’ laws” (Žižek 2009a, 102) . Structurally
the subject is asking for a guarantee from the big Other that the subject’s symbols are aligned with and
adequate for understanding a coherent reality (Stavrakakis 1999).
One immediate consequence is that the subject requires something radically external to itself
not just for libidinal purposes, or even for the purposes of identity, but for its understanding of the
world. The externality of the symbolic order, and of the big Other, constitutes a radical “decenterment”

67
That said, the gaps and lacks and that disrupt symbolization also provide the condition of possibility for
subjectivity itself: “[I]f there was no gap between a thing (or an object) and the representation of that thing (or
word) then they would be identical and there would be no room for subjectivity… This gap, the gap between
nature and the beings immersed in it, is the subject” (Myers 2003, 37). The cost of subjectivity, and its inevitable
result, is failure.
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(Žižek 2009a). Another immediate and even more significant consequence is that the dynamic is
ultimately impossible because the big Other is also lacking:
Today, it is a commonplace that the Lacanian subject is divided, crossed‐out, identical to a lack
in a signifying chain. However, the most radical dimension of Lacanian theory lies not in
recognizing this fact but in realizing that the big Other, the symbolic order itself, is also barré,
crossed out, by a fundamental impossibility, structured around an impossible/traumatic kernel,
around a central lack. (Žižek 2009b, 137)
The lack in the Symbolic has at least two consequences for cycles of identification. It guarantees the
failure of identity, because the big Other is lacking as the subject is lacking, and so cannot provide the
subject with fullness. It also ensures that when those failures do occur, they will cascade not just
libidinally but all the way up to experience, and be felt as a jolt in the subject’s confidence in the
consistency of the symbolic order and of reality.
Impossibility of Identification
In some senses the Lacanian account of inevitably failed identification is the familiar post‐
Freudian dynamic. Identity is linguistic, language is inherently unstable, and so identity is inherently
unstable. That account is correct but incomplete. The Real ultimately disrupts all attempts at
signification in the Symbolic, including – critically – the signifiers that the subject uses as markers for
identity, and especially the so‐called master signifier that "represents the subject for another signifier”
(Žižek 2009b, 116). Attempts to secure identity in the Symbolic can only succeed partially for a time and
inevitably fail.
Nevertheless, Lacan was also a clinical psychologist, and humans are biological animals that
develop the physical prerequisites for cognition across infancy. Importantly for Lacan, subjects do not
‘go through’ various registers of experience as they develop. The Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real are co‐
primordial structures not stages of growth, and in fact by early in his career Lacan was deeply hostile to
ego‐psychological accounts of the psyche. As infants grow, however, they do contingently have
experiences at different times, and identification is tried and frustrated in different ways. The regularity
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of biological development ensures that for most humans most of the time the sequence will be mostly
the same.
Infants are awkward in movement and communication. They have not yet mastered an upright
posture and they require support. They exhibit frustration about their physical stuttering and
incapacities. They begin to have experiences that cause them to realize there are things which are not
themselves and external to themselves, including canonically for psychoanalysis their mother. The infant
internalizes what will be a lifelong quest to re‐achieve the sensation of connectedness and more
specifically fullness.
During those early months infants begin to recognizably behave as if they’re seeking to consolidate
their identities, understood in a clinical sense. These are the earliest stirrings of cognition and also the
dawning of awareness of external objects. Infants start to look at images of themselves, setting up
moments of recognition. They attempt identification in the Imaginary, outside symbolization, between
six and eighteen months – the all‐important “mirror stage”
68
.
The effort at this visual identification necessarily fails. No matter how much the infant identifies
with the image in the mirror, that image is not the infant. There is a physical gap between the two that
cannot be overcome, and moreover the image is inverted. However, the gestures already lock into place
some of the fundamental dynamics of desire, for wholeness and identification. Subjects are alienated
from their own objects of identification – what they ‘are’ never belongs to them – which propels the
drama of identification in the Symbolic, which extends throughout the subject’s life and in turn sets into
motion the libidinal dynamics of desire and jouissance.

68
The Lacan of the mid‐1930s described the mirror stage in developmental terms pegged to a time in the infant’s
life. Within a couple of decades, he had become so hostile to developmental psychology that he treated it as a
structural part of subjectivity, similar to the ways in which the three registers of experience are not developmental
stages but structural categories.
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Developmentally, the infant subsequently acquires language
69
. Psychoanalytically, having failed
to achieve identification in the Imaginary, the infant is compelled to seek it in the only place that’s left –
the Symbolic. Failure here is guaranteed as well of course. Attempts at symbolization are frustrated by
the straightforward inadequacy of language to circumscribe the multiplicity of experience, the intrusion
of the Real, and the various gaps, lacks, and bars in the Lacanian theory of language:
The field of discursive representation, a field extending from the linguistic to the social in
general, is constitutive in all our doomed attempts to achieve a perfect identity with ourselves.
But the central feature of language, of the symbolic, is discontinuity: something is always
missing in language, the symbolic itself is lacking. Words can never capture the totality of the
real, they can never fully represent us… language cannot say the whole truth. The words to do it
are missing; it is materially impossible (these are Lacan’s exact words) to achieve it and this is a
source of alienation in which what emerges is the lack in every representation (Stavrakakis 1999,
52).

Rather than forgo identification, however, the subject is compelled to continue seeking fullness in the
Symbolic. Different theorists account for the experience in different ways. In Burke the compulsion is
experienced as rottenness with perfection and being goaded by hierarchy. In Lacan desire and
jouissance are what propel the subject forward.
As self‐identification in the Symbolic fails too, the subject will eventually turn outward to seek
an object from an Other and thereby, that way, acquire fullness and secure identification. The search is
propelled by desire and provides enjoyment, but it relies on an implicit promise that – at least
potentially – that object does exist and there is an Other who can provide it. The Lacanian point is that

69
It bears emphasis that the three registers are conceptually distinct but empirically entangled, and that no
experience occurs exclusively in just one of them: “Lacan explicitly points out that the articulation of the subject to
the imaginary and the symbolic Other do not exist separately. Already in the first jubilant moment of the mirror
stage… it turns back towards the one who is carrying it, who is supporting and sustaining it, to the representative
of the big Other (parent, relative, etc.), as if to call for his or her approval… [T]he specular image has to be ratified
by the symbolic Other in order to start functioning as the basis of the infant’s imaginary identification: every
imaginary position is conceivable only on the condition that one finds a guide beyond this imaginary order, a
symbolic guide” (Stavrakakis 1999, 19).
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the big Other is lacking and barred, and can’t fulfill that promise: “the object is separated from the Other
itself” (Žižek 2009b, 137). The Other cannot provide fullness because the Other doesn’t have it.
Rather than dampen the compulsion to identify, however, the experience of failure is the basis
for the libidinal economy that motivates continued efforts at identification, against the backdrop of the
implicit promise that success one day is possible. The clinical and theoretical structure of that promise is
the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy, understood both in its lay meaning – something we fantasize
about, which we believe will complete us – and in the highly technical meaning it has within Lacanian
theory.
Conditions of Possibility for Identification: Fantasy
Fantasy in the Imaginary
Fantasy is first and foremost an imaginary construct: it reinvigorates the promise that the
Other’s lack can be filled, so that the Other can give the subject something that fills its lack. The dynamic
is the basic one that sets desire in motion and keeps it in motion. The pursuit of that desire generates
jouissance, which is also deferred because it is inevitably followed by disappointment (Stavrakakis 1999).
The logic of fantasy, however, ensures that it cannot remain in the Imaginary and has to intrude into the
Symbolic, because what fantasy promises is to plug the Other’s lack, and that lack emerges in language:
“fantasy emerges as a support exactly in the place where the lack in the Other becomes evident; it
functions as a support for the lacking Other of the symbolic” (Stavrakakis 1999, 46).
Fantasy is a structural necessity to suture lack and is intertwined with desire and jouissance for
deep theoretical reasons, but contingently the desire of actually‐existing people has to be for something
that actually exists. The Lacanian term for that something is the objet petit a, the cause of desire for an
embodied human subject. There are subtle distinctions between the cause of desire and the object of
desire, but what is experienced libidinally, cognitively, and bodily is jouissance backed by the implicit
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promise of fullness (Friedlander 2008). Of course, neither the objet petit a nor the object of desire can
ever deliver on the promise.
Role of the Scopic Drive
Freud had developed a notion of drives in which erogenous zones are a function of objects on
the body going back to infancy, and which became the focus of desire as humans develop. Lacan’s
theory of the drives differs in that it is not developmental – the drives are fundamental – and that the
drives are theoretically linked to desire and so, structurally, are both symbolic and unsatisfiable (Lacan
1998). Lacan nevertheless extended the relationship between drives, zones, and objects. There are four
partial drives in Lacan: oral, anal, scopic, and invocatory. Each is linked to an erogenous zone on the
body: lips, anus, eyes, and ears. Each has an object associated with it: breasts, feces, the gaze, and voice.
The scopic drive and its object the gaze are particularly critical for Lacanian identity and
identification
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. Like other drives, the connection is felt libidinally in the context of the body, and is
experienced as gratification: “the gaze is central to scopic drive gratification, and… its main activity
consists of ‘making oneself seen’” (Vanheule 2011, 7). In that precise sense “the gaze may contain in
itself the objet a… the gaze, qua objet a, may come to symbolize this central lack” (Lacan 1998, 76–77).
The specific dynamic of jouissance associated with the gaze becomes significant in the context of
identification. There is an indeterminacy that unsettles the subject but also provides an opportunity for
fixing identity. The experience is “unsettling, but enthralling… alternatively positioning the subject as

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A full analysis of those concepts across Lacan’s work is far beyond the scope of this dissertation. Martin Jay has
written “it is impossible to summarize Lacan’s complicated dialectic of the eye and the gaze in any simple formula”
(Jay 1994, 367). Entire subfields have coalesced around some of these theories, including and especially Lacan’s
theory of the gaze. It has structured much of critical film theory, which was turned over to analyzing, applying, and
in recent years trying to work past the concept (McGowan 2007; T. Cohen 1995; Columpar 2002). There are also
enormous and highly technical debates about the dynamics of the gaze as they relate to reflexivity: the experience
of being seen, the experience of experiencing oneself being seen, and so on (Krips 2010; Bracher 1994; Friedlander
2008). For the purposes of probing the rhetorical resonances of the scopic drive and the gaze, it’s sufficient to
point out the centrality of figures of vision in the cycle of identification.
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viewer and viewed, creating both ‘unrealistic anxiety’ and a sense of self‐scrutiny” (Friedlander 2008,
12). It provides a clearing for stabilization:
The gaze, a “meaningless stain,” which threatens the image’s symbolic coherence, belongs to
the order of the objet a as the object of the scopic drive. As Henry Krips explains, through the
gaze, the dual needs of the scopic drive – to see and to be seen – are… engaged, bringing
pleasure to the viewer “by stabilizing the libidinal flux associated with such paired needs,
neither of which fully fixes upon its object” (25). By provoking anxiety from the viewer who is
unable to master her visual field, the gaze seduces viewers to “look back at what they have
seen, thus scrutinizing themselves, and specifically their own role as viewers… [T]hey feel
themselves to be the object of a ‘look’ coming from the object’s vicinity”… (Friedlander 2008,
56).
The orthodox Freudian reading is that all drives can stabilize identity for a time by producing pleasure
paired with biological gratification. The same is roughly true for Lacan, adjusting for his retheorizing of
all the drives, but the scopic drive and the gaze do work in particular ways that lend themselves to
identificatory dynamics. The inherent indeterminacy to the gaze, where experience and pleasure involve
both seeing and being seen, produce an oscillation that paradoxically facilitates recognition. One can in
a metaphorical sense – and to a certain extent a literal one – get a glimpse of one’s place in the world
(Krips 1999) .
Consequences of Failed Identification
The ontological brute existence of lack – gaps in symbolization, the bar between the signifier
and signified, the intrusion of the real, and so on – will eventually in some way disrupt fantasies of
fullness and completion. The effects are jarring, both because the subject is libidinally invested in those
fantasies and because they are intertwined with investments in the big Other, which involve the
subject’s habituated understandings of the world. When fantasmatic filters fail – when reality intrudes in
unexpected ways – the encounter is felt as a symptom, which “interrupts the consistency of the field of
our construction of reality” (Stavrakakis 1999, 64)
Structurally, what is occurring is that the subject’s efforts to find fullness and suture lack by
recourse to the big Other have failed (which was inevitable, because the big Other is lacking). What the
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subject experiences are symptoms: the experience of the fantasy breaking down. The sensation
produces anxiety but also reignites the cycle of jouissance, and the search for fullness – buoyed by the
implicit promise that it can be achieved – continues.
There is a complication, however: the cycle of failure risks undermining the promise of success.
If failures happen consistently too many times, the promise will begin to lose its efficacy. To account for
that dynamics, the subject will try to account for the symptoms through some explanation other than
the inherent impossibility of identification, which is equivalent to the impossibility of the big Other to
provide the subject with an object that provides fullness.
At this level there is an almost strict homology to Burke and to the guilt‐redemption cycle. In place
of piety the Lacanian structure is fantasy, but the process in which the subject chooses between self‐
blame or scapegoating proceeds along the same lines. The structural instability built into identity by
language will ensure that attempts to consolidate identity through fantasy will inevitably fail, setting off
a cycle in which individuals choose between accepting impossibility and limitations, or blaming the
fantasy’s failure on external actors and scapegoating them.
At the level of the social, the dynamic is one of accepting the inevitability of disorder, as a
function of the impossibility of our symbols to align with reality or with each other’s symbols, or insisting
that social ills are the result of external bad actors. Rather than give up on the fantasy of fullness – and
lose out on the promise of jouissance – citizens are more likely to push for expanding the fantasy.
Emphasizing the impossibility of those visions is not likely to dislodge the urge to expand the fantasy,
since barriers to fulfillment are any the predicate that set the cycle of jouissance into motion. The
subject becomes invested in increasingly untenable utopian fantasies and, as those fantasies fail, we
become increasingly hysterical about eliminating the imagined antagonists who we imagine are causing
those failures:
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Only if presented against the background of this ‘disorder’ the final harmonious ‘order’
promised by a utopian fantasy acquires hegemonic force. The problem is that all this schema is
based on the elimination of the first moment, of the recognition of impossibility. The centrality
of political dislocation is always repressed in favour of the second moment, the utopian
promise. Utopian fantasy can sound appealing only if presented as the final solution to the
problem that constitutes its starting point. In that sense, the moment of impossibility is only
acknowledged in order to be eliminated. (Stavrakakis 1999, 117)
The “hegemonic force” acquired by promises of order cannot continue indefinitely. That said, it can
continue as long as whoever is pursuing the fantasy has, first, the argumentative wiggle room to blame
failure on external Others and, second, the material power to keep scapegoating that Other over
purported interference in fantasmatic fulfillment. If the fantasy is held onto for too long or held too
tightly, the need to continue externalizing blame may become acute, and the “result is always horrible:
persecution, massacres, holocausts” (Stavrakakis 1999, 101).
Excavating Vision
As with much of Lacan, it is not always clear when he is talking clinically, when he is talking in
technical philosophical terms, when he is illustrating concepts in metaphors, or when he’s doing some
combination. The scopic drive, for instance, is partly and irreducibly biological: it is built on a promise of
bodily gratification. That said, its object the gaze is situated in the Imaginary register and is a place the
subject does not see but has to imagine (McGowan 2007; Friedlander 2008). The dynamic can be
treated rhetorically in the context of images, as looking and being viewed (T. Cohen 1995). Expressed as
social theory it is a Symbolic dynamic that has explanatory efficacy all the way up to institutions of
surveillance (Copjec 1994).
The consistent feature across these readings is the central importance of vision and conspiracy
theories are awash with fixations and obsessions that revolve around those visualizing figures. In the
conspiratorial imagination, the conspirators are able to have a global view and move historical events
based on that view. The conceits are built into the language of conspiracism: hiding in plain sight, they
see everything, shine a light on the conspiracy, and similar tropes. It has been a literal icon in
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conspiracist discourses for centuries, and in contemporary discourse the Eye of Providence at the top of
the pyramid on the Great Seal of the United States continues to provide fodder for conspiracists (Barkun
1996; Dean 2000). There are a variety of Internet‐driven conspiracy theories saying there is some variety
of reptilian humanoid race hiding deep underground and infiltrating world governments on the ground.
The sociology of those conspiracy theories revolves around posting and watching videos to catch public
figures blinking extra eyelids or staring creepily forward: the watching eye and the felt gaze entwine to
spark and flame anxieties (Jane and Fleming 2014).
Excavating Anxiety
Anxiety is a tangled concept in Lacanian psychoanalysis. It is generated in a straightforward
sense by lack, in that the compulsion to pursue fullness runs parallel to unease over incompleteness.
Technically and somewhat paradoxically it is also a lack of a lack: if the subject gets too close to the
fantasy, it starts to fear that it will finally fulfill what it’s been desiring all along, and it senses over the
horizon that it will no longer have an excuse to continue the pursuit, which is the source of jouissance it
enjoys. No one wants to be the dog who finally catches the ice cream truck and sits there having to
confront the question ‘now what?’
The paradoxical double‐bind makes anxiety a strikingly dangerous dynamic. Deliberate attempts
to generate anxiety may fail, in which case they will have failed because they provoked successful
defensive reactions, and the subject will reestablish the lack‐desire‐frustration dynamic that propels
jouissance. Those attempts might successful, but then then results could be far worse: as the subject
approaches the fantasy anxiety will paradoxically intensify. The successful pursuit of fantasy finally
collapses in a catastrophic wave of social violence. In a relatively healthy subject, the structure of
Lacanian identity formation channels and contains anxiety by moving through the identificatory cycle
and pursuing jouissance. Encounters with anxiety in other contexts, or anxiety that is allowed to drive
the subject indefinitely close to the fantasy, risk catastrophe.
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[W]hen this hope is reduced to the utopian operation and this utopian operation comes close to
its realisation, the only outcome can be catastrophe and anxiety, since anxiety, according to
Lacan’s seminar on Anxiety, is created by the lack of lack, a prospect entailed in the realisation
of utopian blueprints. The possibility of a total filling of a void (which should be preserved) gives
rise to anxiety (seminar of 12 December 1962). Yet, from this point of view, a full realisation of
utopia is impossible because it would presuppose the regression to a pre‐linguistic state
(Kolakowski, 1997:224) since it is language which introduces a structural lack to the human
world. The only problem is that sometimes the realisation of this impossibility requires millions
of victims (Stavrakakis 1999, 159)
However, in conspiracy discourse the generation of anxiety is a feature not a bug. Conspiracy
theorists view anxiety as productive, forcing what they take to be an inappropriately reticent public to
begin questioning government motivations and power. Recuperative scholars have backed that tactic
with theoretical work: Fenster has written that complaints about anxiety are just tactics to prevent
conspiracy theorists from raising relevant questions, and has specifically criticized Hofstadter in that
context (Fenster 2008). Putting aside accusations about good will, Lacanian analysis suggests that, as a
strategy, provoking anxiety will fail in the best case or generate catastrophes in the worst.
Conclusion
Recuperative scholarship about conspiracy theories has as its goal the dislocation of identity and
subjectivity. Conspiracy discourse partakes heavily of visual metaphors, to say nothing of using eyes in a
literally iconic way. Their explicit goal is to use these and other rhetorical tactics to generate anxiety.
Those rhetorical moves and those argumentative tactics are, however, moves and tactics that are bound
up in processes of consolidating identity rather than disrupting it.
This chapter reconstructed a theory of identity from across Lacan’s often intentionally‐difficult
work against the backdrop of how the Real ultimately disrupts identification in both the Symbolic and
the Imaginary. Cycles of desire and jouissance compel the subject to keep seeking fullness in those
registers. Those cycles involve structural cascades in which rhetorical appeals to vision and
argumentative tactics based on anxiety push the subject toward the promise of a consolidated identity.
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The dynamic is easy prey for conspiracists, who are able to draw on ubiquitous figures of transparency –
all the way up to iconic images of eyes atop pyramids – and are able to generate anxiety on the basis of
their conspiracy theories.
The dynamic emerges as a function of Lacan’s theory of identity, and the unique role ascribed to
the scopic drive and its object the gaze. The gaze engenders a sort of indeterminacy, in which the
subject is located both at the place the subject is and the place the subject is being watched from, which
facilitates identification by helping the subject locate itself and stabilizing libidinal flux. Rhetorical calls to
vision, and even literally to eyes, play on this identificatory libidinal economy. Conspiracy theorists play
on these tropes at great peril, but they play on them nevertheless.
The implicit promise of fullness can never be cashed out, and fantasies of achieving it generate
frustration and eventually despair, which are felt as symptoms. Here conspiracy theorists have a ready
answer as well: the fantasy is faltering not because it is impossible, but because of imagined
conspirators who stymie satisfaction and fulfillment. Scapegoats are found who can be blamed for the
symptoms, triggering a vicious spiral in which traumatic failures are dealt with both by widening the
promise of the fantasy and blaming ever‐new groups for the ever‐more‐traumatic failures. Lacanian
theorists have located some of history’s greatest atrocities and mass violence within the contours of this
cycle.
This chapter was the final theory chapter of the dissertation. Each chapter reconstructed a
theory of identity and excavated that theo, itry to reveal rhetorical calls and argumentative tactics that
are bound up in processes of identification. The next, final chapter of this dissertation will discuss those
elements in the context of conspiracy theories and broader debates about disciplinary theories and
methods.
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CHAPTER 5: CONFRONTING IDENTITY

“‘If the Plan exists, it must involve everything. Either it explains all or it explains nothing,’ Belbo said. ‘But
Casaubon mentioned a clue.’”
– Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare”
– W.B. Yeats, Meditations in Time of Civil War

Thucydides closed Book V of the Histories by wrapping up the events around the Athenian
conquest of Melos, in the aftermath of the Melian Dialogue. In the Dialogue the Athenians and Melians
had argued about the substance of Athens’s demands, but explicitly and implicitly they had also jousted
over what the terms of their argument should be. Should the two sides be forced to proceed according
to ultimately defensible propositions and facts, as the Athenians insisted? Or should the concrete
circumstances of the invasion determine what counts as persuasive, so that the existential threat faced
by the Melians entitled them to offer whatever rhetorical gambits they could get away with? The two
approaches stand in for, and would coalesce into, different rhetorical and argumentative approaches to
human communication.
Book VI opens ominously: “The same winter the Athenians resolved to sail again to Sicily… and if
possible, to conquer the island; most of them being ignorant of its size and the number of its
inhabitants” (Thucydides 1996, 361). The chapter transitions to deliberations inside Athens, where the
powerful statesman Nicias is trying to persuade the Athenian mob to reconsider what he predicts will be
a catastrophic invasion of Sicily, and he’s pushing for a new vote to rescind a previous vote to invade. He
appealed to geopolitical and military probabilities, saying that it would be reckless to launch an attack
abroad while peace remained partial at home, and that in the best‐case victory in Sicily would be short‐
lived because of the distance between the island and Athens. He appealed to poignancy, noting that
Athens has just gotten over pestilence and war. He appealed to prudence, and called on “older men” to
remember “how rarely success is gained by wishing and how often by forecast” (Thucydides 1996, 369).
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He appealed to democratic legitimacy, declaring “if you wish to show yourself a good citizen, put the
question to a vote, and take a second time the opinions of the Athenians” (Thucydides 1996, 369). He
closed by invoking a metaphor, telling any Athenians who rejected war they would be like physicians
who as a matter of first principle did no harm.
Nevertheless, according to Thucydides “[m]ost of the Athenians who came forward spoke in
favor of the expedition and of not annulling what had been voted” (Thucydides 1996, 370). The chapter
proceeds as Nicias’s political rival Alcibiades rises to speak. He asserted that the Athenians could achieve
success abroad without sacrificing domestic safety, and then rallied the crowd with a call for extending
the Athenian empire: “we cannot fix the exact point at which our empire shall stop; we have reached a
position in which we must not be content with retaining what we have but must scheme to extend it for,
if we cease to rule others, we shall be in danger of being ruled ourselves… we shall augment our power
at home by this adventure abroad” (Thucydides 1996, 372). He closed with a call for unity in which
“levity, sobriety, and deliberate judgement” had as their prerequisites forceful action (Thucydides 1996,
373).
After Alcibiades spoke “Nicias, perceiving that it would now be useless to try to deter them by
the old line of argument,” gave a second speech using a completely different strategy (Thucydides 1996,
373). Hoping to shock the Athenians to their senses, he sketched out what he hoped would be an array
of self‐evidently disqualifying costs in blood and treasure, which Athens would have to bear if the
expedition was to have any chance of succeeding across a territory the size of Sicily. However the
Athenians, “far from having their enthusiasm for the voyage destroyed by the burdensomeness of the
preparations, became more eager for it than ever” (Thucydides 1996, 373,375). Nicias lost, the now‐
enormous expedition departed, and the Athenians were crushed. They limped along another decade but
never recovered, and were ultimately defeated and occupied.
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If the discursive lesson of the Melian Dialogue is that communication is marked and structured
throughout by contestation at multiple levels, even at the limit where disputation is confronted by
organized violence, the lesson from the speeches of Nicias is that deliberative cultures can spiral to such
an extent that none of that matters any more. Political discourse and rationality can become so
degraded that efforts at persuasion of whatever sort give way to behavior all but predetermined by
inertia and power – and by power which excuses itself by reference to inertia. Evaluation of issues gives
way to calculation of rewards.
The tumult of our current moment has created fertile ground for conspiratorial, anti‐rational
modes of thought. That the current environment presents complicated theoretical challenges is
understandable. The flood of digital information, coupled with the ability of social media to accelerate
the pace of that information, has overwhelmed individuals and institutions, including the academic
institutions that are charged with explaining them. Those dynamics include, reflexively, social change
that engenders conspiracism and academic work about those changes. After all, inasmuch as there are
fundamental shifts cascading through society that displace knowledge production and consumption,
those will crash into academic work on conspiracism, along with everything else.
We should also consider, however, that part of the reason we are having trouble cogently
theorizing conspiracy theories is because our attempts are inadequate and at logger heads, and we need
to find a way beyond historical descriptivist narratives versus theory‐heavy strategy transvaluations. This
dissertation has sought to chart one new course by illustrating how robust and coherent social theories
can be reconstructed and excavated for resources about social and psychological dynamics, and then
those resources can be brought to bear across the discourses, compulsions, and anxieties that cluster
around conspiracism.
This dissertation took as a starting point that traditional taxonomic work could be valuable but
that, given the nature of conspiracy theories as they’re actually encountered – mutating, regenerating,
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overlapping, contradictory, and above all in motion – alternative approaches should be investigated
which approach clusters of conspiracy theories on the basis of their rhetorical and argumentative
gambits. Chapter 1 discussed the degree to which conspiracy theories in the wild mix and match scope
and content. Some ascribe global control to Jews, the Illuminati, or the New World Order. Others are
about science and medicine, ranging from the politically charged, such as vaccines and autism, to the
peculiar, such as the Earth is flat, to the paranormal, such as aliens built the pyramids or are hiding
underground as lizard people. Still others claim that celebrities faked their own deaths, such as Elvis
conspiracy theories, and some claim that celebrities never lived, such as the decades‐old theory that
Shakespeare never existed. There are apocalyptic ones that posit hidden planets crashing into Earth. Of
all of these, some directly assert the existence of a conspiracy, some hint at it, and some don’t offer any
reason why anyone would try to hide evidence or proof. Given that multiplicity, this dissertation doesn’t
purport to offer a playbook for how to deal with conspiracism, but rather offers a strategy for
approaching it.
This dissertation has drawn on the Classical hermeneutic of the quaestio to situate contestations
over conspiracy theories a question about identity. Structuring inquiry around that question establishes
substantive, theoretical, and methodological stakes. Substantively, viewing conspiracism from the angle
of identity extends scholarly investigations into the rhetorical and argumentative dimensions of
conspiracy theories, which has the potential for moving understanding and investigation toward the
particular linguistic and structural features that mark these discourses. Theoretically, exploring identity
with an eye on conspiracy theories requires a study of how identity works, which advances disciplinary
understandings of the topic and – because of deep ties between identity and notions of recalcitrance –
brings this work and its results into dialogue with a range of other ongoing scholarly endeavors.
Methodologically, this dissertation has proceeded in a particular way by rummaging inside of social
theories to extract elements that in a sense ‘must be going on’ for those theories to cohere, and then
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applied those concepts to ongoing controversies, a methodological model that has the potential to keep
theorization grounded. Finally, argumentatively, this dissertation found that a wide range of conspiracy
theories do their work by consolidating rather than disrupting identity, which presents a strong
challenge to recuperative scholarship about conspiracy theories that draws on postmodern and
poststructuralist commitments.
Critical Findings
The bulk of theory‐building in this dissertation is based on close readings of the internal
dynamics of long‐developed social theories, rather conspiracy theories as they’re mutating in the wild,
so that what is being worked on are not moving targets. The clusters of conspiracy theories demonstrate
the broad applicability of the resources being developed, provide confidence that the overlaps between
theory and discourse aren’t coincidental, and offer generative opportunities for further theorizing. The
stress on identity and the method of excavating its dynamics can orient scholars into building additional
resources through examinations of other deep theories – where the question can again be asked about
what must be happening implicitly, especially rhetorically, for theorists to be seeing and describing what
they are seeing and describing.
The Habermasian, Burkean, and Lacanian theories of identity converge in several areas. The
theories are exploring homologous structures that are bound up in identity. Subjects are
intersubjectively suspended in language and are compelled to secure identification with an external
Other, and thereby to enter into an intersubjective relationship that fixes identity at least for a time
through fantasies of stability, order, and fullness. Ultimately, however, language turns out to be
distorted and lacking.
In Habermas, the fantasy is that of a particular‐universal ideology, in which a particularity comes
to stand in for a universal. Habermas historically traces how ideologies of that sort have emerged, as in
18
th
century Europe, when for a time a class of businessmen came to stand in for the public on the basis
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of claims toward universalism. Eventually contradictions come to the fore but citizens are nevertheless
compelled to continue trying to identify, with the cost of failure being a regress to violence. He
advocates for adopting contemporary ideologies, specifically his version of Constitutional patriotism, in
which nation‐states’ particularisms mobilize affect to secure assent to post‐national liberal political
structures.
In Burke, the fantasy is experienced as piety, in which one finds one’s place in an ordered and
consistent world. The concept derives from Burke’s definition of humans: rottenness with perfection
and being goaded by hierarchy are two of the ways that Burke describes the human compulsion to
ensure our symbols are aligned with the world which is experienced epistemologically, as understanding
the world, and socially, as locating ourselves within it. Piety is inherently unstable and ultimately
impossible because of another concept drawn from Burke’s definition, that of the negative. The
inevitable failure is experienced bodily, which sets into motion the Cult of the Kill.
In Lacan the fantasy is fantasy. Human experience is inflected across the registers of the
Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real. The subject, for structural reasons that play out developmentally across
infancy, seeks wholeness. Self‐identity is foreclosed in both the Imaginary and the Symbolic, including
because the Real – a register of lack – disrupts those efforts. The subject then turns outward, to the
Symbolic itself – the big Other – and seeks fullness there. Arguably the core Lacanian insight, however, is
that the Symbolic big Other is itself barred and lacking, and can’t provide the subject with the promised
object that will provide fullness. The impossibility is experienced as failure and sets in motion a search,
propelled by and experienced as desire and jouissance, to nevertheless secure such an object from the
big Other. Sustaining that search in turn requires constructing a fantasy in which – precisely – the big
Other is not in fact lacking, has the object that will provide the subject with fullness, and can under the
right circumstances be cajoled into handing it over. Failures are experienced as symptoms and, as those
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symptoms pile up, they endanger the underlying cohesion of the fantasy. To sustain the fantasy the
subject must find ways to explain away the failures, which at the extremes entails mass atrocities.
To be sure, those theories of identity are admittedly grim. They foreground failure and predict
that, except in the unlikely event that subjects psychologically accept those failures as inevitable
limitations, frustration and violence are likely to follow. There are unfortunately suggestions that these
sensibilities make them particularly apt for our current moment and, regardless, their valence doesn’t
speak for or against their theoretical utility. This dissertation excavated them for rhetorical tropes and
argumentative mechanisms.
With Habermas, rhetorical appeals to place are crucial for identification. The contemporary
European debate between nationalism and post‐nationalism turns in large part on the degree to which
identity can be metaphorically ‘stretched’ across territory without becoming so thin it fails, situating
calls to place it at the center of identificatory dynamics. Tracing Burkean theory suggests that rhetorical
appeals about bodily integrity are likely to resonate at the level of identity. Concerns over pollution and
purity are at the core of the guilt‐redemption cycle, which is an identificatory process, and so discursive
appeals about the body become not just interventions into that process but condition its contours and
possibilities. Within the horizon of Lacanian theory, the rhetoric of vision is likely to be implicated in
identificatory dynamics. The scopic drive and its object the gaze play particular roles in stabilizing
libidinal dynamics – desire and jouissance – and notions of looking and being seen are critical to
stabilizing and destabilizing identity.
When these excavated rhetorical elements appear in conspiracy theories, scholars are justified
in orienting criticism and proceeding with analysis that includes those identificatory dimensions. That is
especially the case when the conspiracy theories are either particularly persistent, such as ‘fluoride in
drinking water’ across decades, or in some sense come out of nowhere, such as the otherwise puzzling
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NAU conspiracy theory, or are truly bizarre, such as the fixation on eyes in online videos about
humanoid lizards living under the earth.
Excavating Habermas, Burke, and Lacan also uncovers argumentative mechanisms that play
roles in consolidating identity. These are analogous to the self‐sealing tactics theorized by Zarefsky:
tactics used to insulate core beliefs, including conspiracy theories, from further scrutiny.
Habermas’s theorization of publicity goes well beyond the lay understanding of publicity as a
channel for gossip and news. A careful tracing of his development of 18th century European
Öffentlichkeit reveals publicity is a dialogue with institutional forces who help shape the subjectivity of
certain citizens embedded in publics, by selecting who is credibly acknowledged to speak in universal
conceits. The demand by conspiracists to speak for, as, and on behalf of a public necessarily requires
they be recognized as such, which is a process in which powered interests participate. Viewed from a
Habermasian perspective, the dynamic is not necessarily pernicious, because there are other checks on
government legitimacy, including electoral checks in conditions of universal suffrage. For scholars with
postmodern or poststructuralist commitments, where the emphasis is on resistance and especially
symbolic resistance, it becomes difficult to see how publicity could be productive.
Burke’s social theory reveals a pernicious synergy between conspiracy theories and
scapegoating, in which the compulsions and obsessions of each dynamic reinforce each other.
Conspiracy theorists are motivated to imbue imagined conspirators with superhuman abilities by the
logic of conspiracism: the more powerful the conspirator, the easier it is to explain away any contrary or
absent evidence. Viewed from within the guilt‐redemption cycle, however, such a superhuman
conspiracy looks like a “perfected” scapegoat, one powerful enough to take on the full burden of guilt
and be sacrificed. The process also runs in the other direction: scapegoats which are perfected due to
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the compulsions built into the guilt‐redemption cycle are particularly plausible candidates for
conspirators. Each process reinforces the other.
Finally, Lacanian theory describes a process of constructing conspiracy theories against the
backdrop of generating anxiety. The argumentative tactic is not an innocent one. Rather, anxiety is
bound up in processes that close down the interrogation of identity and push subjects toward
consolidating it. Generating anxiety in the context of identificatory dynamics risks “never‐ending,
defensive, imaginary constructs,” in which the subject rushes to recuperate the fantasy and account for
symptoms of its failures (Verhaeghe 1994, 60). The rhetorical moves of conspiracy theorists – the talk of
shadowy conspirators, the emphasis on impending doom, and even the specific rhetorical appeals to like
place, body, and vision – have as their result the consolidation of identity and insulation of the theory.
Conspiracy theories are already inherently ways of accounting for failure instead of having to confront
the impossibility of fantasy, but anxiety locks in cycles in which subjects become more and more
invested in the fantasies as insulated by conspiracy theories, now that the risks of questioning either of
them have been heightened.
Given these results, it is not clear that recuperative claims about conspiracy theories, at least
ones grounded in postmodern and poststructuralist commitments, can be sustained. Those arguments
to varying degrees implicitly or explicitly rely on models of resistance, language, and subjectivity in
which emancipation is linked to the disruption of identity. The rhetorical excavations suggest that the
opposite is happening and that identity is being shored up. Of course, that’s not necessarily true: it could
be that those appeals are aimed at identity, but at disrupting it. However, when those appeals are
coupled with argumentative mechanisms that have a direct role in consolidating identity, the
recuperative position becomes untenable. Conspiracy theories in those contexts are likely to close down
rather than open up spaces of inquiry, and they lock in often pernicious identities.
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Horizons for Further Inquiry
The question of identity should continue bringing deep social theories into dialogue with each
other. There is an enormous amount of productive work that can be done just at the theoretical level.
An examination of synergies and tensions between Burke and Lacan, for instance, holds considerable
potential for developing both rhetorical and psychoanalytic theory: Burke fills in Lacan, embedding the
granular insights of literary theory into the abstract Lacanian architectonic, which in turn has been
broadly theorized across contemporary critical theory, while Lacanian theory provides suggestive
explanations for why the artifacts Burke encounters exhibit the properties they do. There are rigorous
relationships of necessity between various psychic structures whose properties are described by Burke
at lower levels and Lacan at higher levels.
Bringing together Habermas and Lacan would infuse Habermasian theory with a theory of
subjectivity in which the structure of language is felt at the level of identity and beyond. The suggestion
is accounted for by many theories of discourse, but Habermas relegates it to a sort of black box as
distortions in communication. A dialogue would also enrich the Habermasian theory of intersubjectivity
with a theory of desire that reflects the libidinal play in human communication, opposite Habermas’s
sometimes anemic readings of desire.
The dissertation advances understanding of conspiracies without exhausting that topic or these
methods. There will certainly be other theories relevant to identity controversies and conspiracy
theories, which are developing and spreading at a pace that will undoubtedly require further
theorization. The commitments of this dissertation in any case suggest that insecurities, doubts,
transitions, transformations, and transcendence will continue to generate new vectors and sorts of
conspiracism.
119

Limits to the Study
In the broadest sense, moreover, this study is of course limited only to commenting on the
specific subset of conspiracy theories and academic theories that were studied. I utilized a group of
social theorists who developed robust readings of identity, either implicitly or explicitly. The conspiracy
theories that I explored are illustrative of method and criticism, but they are not exhaustive of the space
of conspiracism and may not be representative. The postmodern and poststructuralist approaches that I
discussed are an application of a particular approach to artifacts, and are not necessarily representative
of how such theories are deployed elsewhere, and so this work only speaks to some of the broad
debates occurring across the academy.
Recuperative scholars may have arguments that go beyond resistance or be grounded in other
forms of resistance, which this dissertation would not directly address. One can easily imagine an
argument where an advocate of conspiracy theories acknowledges that conspiracism is more likely than
not to consolidate identities, but accepts such a risk against the backdrop of different theories of
efficacy or political resistance.
From the other direction, my examinations of Habermas, Burke, and Lacan are not exhaustive.
The theories of all three of these scholars are vast, and there is much more that can be explored –
including potential areas of tension with this dissertation’s analysis. Habermas’s theory about
systematically distorted communication is significant, and inasmuch as identity is intersubjective and
linguistic, it potentially has relevance for the findings of this dissertation. Burke’s theories on comic and
tragic frames, which are relevant to the acceptance or rejection of futurist visions that have direct
implications for piety and the guilt‐redemption cycle, were also not addressed. Lacan has three more
drives that may affect how identity is shaped.
Finally, there is a structural limitation to this work that can be understood roughly as a matter of
reflexivity. This intervention is ultimately an attempt to theorize the challenges with theorizing
120

conspiracy theories, conducted through practices and platforms that are being corroded by conspiracy
theories. The conditions of possibility for such disciplinary work are unclear and badly in need of further
theorization.
Conclusion
In addition to those limitations, this dissertation also only begins to answer a question that runs
throughout: are we in Book V or Book VI of the Histories? Are there still spaces to be cleared and carved
out for persuasion, even heterogeneous gestures refracted through contemporary digital
communication platforms, or have we reached a point where discursive expressions have been
degraded into behavioral signaling?
International and domestic politics are marked by destabilized and failed political institutions,
all the way up to the level of the nation‐state. Institutions that are supposed to produce knowledge,
from academia to journalism, are increasingly viewed with distrust. Internationally, we are reentering an
era of great power competition, against the backdrop of fraying alliances and reinvigorated rivals. For
the first time in a century it’s not clear that liberal democratic governments have inherent national
security advantages over authoritarian regimes such as the People’s Republic of China, which are able to
mobilize whole‐of‐government and even whole‐of‐nation approaches to advancing their interests. The
arms control regime that constrained the United States and Soviet Russia during the Cold War is
becoming irrelevant in a world of next‐generation weapons platforms that mix hypersonic weapons,
artificial intelligence and machine learning, and space‐based systems. Mass migration has thrown into
doubt the sovereignty of states across four continents. Domestically, anti‐establishment populist
movements on the right and left are taking control not just of government institutions but of the
political parties that have dominated those institutions for decades. The neo‐liberal consensus about
free trade that held for decades is over. The country seems to be lurching from one to another crisis for
which we seem to have no good answers, from border crises to mass shootings.
121

Meanwhile we are confronted by changes in communication technologies and practices that are
regularly and tenably compared to the Gutenberg‐era mainstreaming of the printing press and movable
type, which lurched civilization out of the Middle Ages and into economic and social configurations that
had never existed before. Operationalized and studied psychologically, the matter is one of information
overload (Bright, Kleiser, and Grau 2015; Schmitt, Debbelt, and Schneider 2018). Viewed sociologically,
the sheer amount of information has simply crushed collective rationality.
The institutions built to meet those challenges are themselves buffeted by the changes, and
social formations are only now beginning to acknowledge and respond to these fundamental shifts. As a
result, conspiracy theories have emerged into the mainstream from the political fringes, where they had
been kept for the first couple of centuries of the Republic. They are now the regular fare of media
outlets, social media platforms, public discussions, judicial proceedings, and Congressional hearings. A
day’s news or political controversy will now, with regularity, be turned over to conspiracy theories or
controversies over conspiracy theories or both
71
.
In the academy frameworks that have long served as scaffolding for theorization have become
stressed. Objects that used to be clearly delineated are blurring into each other, trajectories that used to
be well‐predicted are taking unexpected turns, and expectations that used to be implicit are now
routinely confounded. Without theoretical reinvigoration, institutions that are supposed to explain and
channel change will fail to understand contemporary conditions, and will more so become disconnected
and eventually irrelevant.
It’s to be expected that the tumult around identity and the tempo of conspiracy theories have
made theory‐building challenging. Rhetorical criticism and communication theory are intuitively

71
During the first half of August 2019, as the defense for this dissertation was approaching, conspiracy theories
dominated the communication and political landscapes, coalescing around the prison death of convicted sex
offender Jeffrey Epstein. The New York Times ran with the headline “Jeffrey Epstein and When to Take
Conspiracies Seriously,” President Trump and Democratic presidential candidates floated their own conspiracy
theories, and the topic dominated social media (Douthat 2019; Gold and Bromwich 2019; Sullivan 2019).
122

productive in these contexts, because those methods enable critics to trace discourses in some senses
naively, producing close readings that deepen understanding of the arguments. Nevertheless, criticism
can be even more effective if scholars are able to draw upon resources linked to deep theories of
subjectivity and identity, so that the discourses can serve as prompts and challenges to advance theory‐
building, while the theories being built can provide additional insights about the discourses.
Framing conspiracy theories as a quaestio about identity forces the debate to a space of
theoretical disputation where – for better or worse – issues and analysis can be clarified. Is conspiracism
is more likely to disrupt or consolidate identities? If it is more likely to consolidate identities, can that
finding be reconciled with broader theoretical commitments in a way that leaves recuperative
conclusions intact? The gambit is premised on the hope that we are still, maybe just barely, in Book V of
the Histories. There are still arguments left to be made.
123

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract The increasing salience of conspiracy theories in contemporary politics and culture has fueled calls to theorize robustly their structure and dynamics. Two common scholarly approaches are explicated: descriptivist, historical approaches that tend to be critical of conspiracism, and newer, inverted readings, grounded in postmodern and poststructuralist commitments, that invest conspiracy narratives with privileged epistemic status and emancipatory potential. The dissertation argues that neither approach accounts for how conspiracism operates in deliberative spaces or corrodes public rationality. Drawing on the rhetorical tradition of the quaestio, this dissertation situates the debate over conspiracy theories as one over the structure and dynamics of identity. It reconstructs post-Freudian social theories to trace the conditions of possibility for identification, and then excavates those models to extract classes of rhetorical appeals and argumentative tactics that are implicated in the consolidation of identity. Those emerge as rhetorical appeals to place, bodily integrity, and vision and argumentative moves aimed at generating publicity, scapegoating, and anxiety. Such heterogeneous rhetorical appeals and argumentative tactics are found to be prominent features of some conspiracy narratives, and justify growing alarm about the acceleration of conspiracism in public life.

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