A failure of imagination: Competing narratives of 9/11 truth

Diogenes ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 62 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 121-129
Author(s):  
Mark Fenster
Keyword(s):  
World Trade Center ◽  
Conspiracy Theory ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Intelligence Services ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Trade Center ◽  
Cover Up ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This essay describes the emergence of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon as an object of conspiratorial intrigue and imagination, offering a snapshot of the “9/11 truth movement” and its various theories as they began to reach full bloom. Theories about the attacks have come to constitute the dominant conspiratorial present – a present that looks remarkably like the mid- and late-twentieth-century past, despite significant changes in information technology and the continuing institutionalization and ironization of conspiracy theory as an influential form of popular politics. In addition to the 9/11 conspiracy community, the essay considers the battle over the 9/11 Commission’s review of the government’s failure to anticipate the terrorist attacks. The Commission engaged in knowing and savvy efforts to respond to conspiracy theories and to preempt popular belief in them, offering an authoritative narrative (or, more precisely, set of narratives) to explain what occurred. Meanwhile, the 9/11 truth movement made equally knowing and savvy efforts to critique the official account, responding with its own efforts to reinterpret and re-narrate the attacks, their causes, and what they signify about the contemporary world. While the 9/11 Commission may have criticized the federal government and its intelligence services for their failures of imagination prior to the attacks, the truth movement criticized the Commission either for a failure of imagination – an explanation for the attacks that could see through the “official” account – or for a quite imaginative cover-up of the hidden truths of 9/11. By considering the clash between official authorities and an active conspiracy community, this essay considers how the movement attempted to form a collective political and scholarly community, producing a blizzard of texts offering narratives that compete with the ones told by the Commission that seek the impossible grail of conspiracy theory: the truth. The essay also considers the effects, if any, of the state’s attempt to preempt and respond to conspiracy theories.

Beckett's Present Moments

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-25
Author(s):  
Rodney Sharkey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
European Society ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Liberal Capitalism ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

As a comfortable middle-class Protestant in Southern Ireland, Beckett was well placed to live the life of what Badiou ironically refers to as ‘the deserving body’ (59). However, Beckett moved beyond such home comforts to witness at close hand some of the most disruptive moments of twentieth century European history. This essay proposes that his work is both a manifestation of that history and a complex response to it in its content, and, particularly, in its form. In Aesthetic Theory, Theodore Adorno proposes that ‘the unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form’ (7). Exemplifying Adorno's proposition that ‘aesthetic form is sedimented context’ (9) Beckett's work remains disruptive of Western late capital commodification through the restatement of historical antagonisms that involve characters having to choose between privilege and impoverishment, quietism and protest, and being and its obliteration. The result is a body of work that continues to present, for its readers’ consideration, the parameters of a politics of choice which are repeatedly instantiated by the traces of the tumultuous history the work carries within itself. As the decisions facing Beckett's characters reflected those faced by late twentieth century European society, so too his work now resonates in the present moment as the contemporary world struggles in the shadow of neo-liberal capitalism and COVID-19.

scholarly journals Conspiracy and Autoimmune Suicide: September 11, 2001 Twenty Years Later

Polylogos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (№ 3 (17)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Dragan Kuyundzhich
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Terrorist Attack ◽  
World Trade Center ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Mass Consciousness ◽  
Trade Center

The article analyzes the political and psychological foundations of "conspiracy theories" in the mass consciousness on the example of interpretations of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. The prerequisites and reasons for the emergence of "9-11" conspiratorial theories in American and global politics in the 1990s and the early 2000s, are considered. In this context, the article examines the ideas of Jacques Derrida that formed the basis of his book "Philosophy in the Age of Terror"; in particular, ршы idea of a specific phenomenon, the so-called "autoimmune suicide". 

Conspiracy Theories and the Internet: Controlled Demolition and Arrested Development

Episteme ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Clarke
Keyword(s):  
World Trade ◽  
World Trade Center ◽  
Hard Core ◽  
September 11 ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Arrested Development ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
The World ◽  
Research Programmes ◽  
Trade Center

ABSTRACTFollowing Clarke (2002), a Lakatosian approach is used to account for the epistemic development of conspiracy theories. It is then argued that the hypercritical atmosphere of the internet has slowed down the development of conspiracy theories, discouraging conspiracy theorists from articulating explicit versions of their favoured theories, which could form the hard core of Lakatosian research programmes. The argument is illustrated with a study of the “controlled demolition” theory of the collapse of three towers at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

The Societal Consequences of Higher Education

2020 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Schofer ◽  
Francisco O. Ramirez ◽  
John W. Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Tertiary Education ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Sociopolitical Change ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Key Dimensions ◽  
Global Movements ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Cross National

The advent of mass schooling played a pivotal role in European societies of the later nineteenth century, transforming rural peasants into national citizens. The late-twentieth-century global expansion of higher education ushered in new transformations, propelling societal rationalization and organizing, and knitting the world into a more integrated society and economy. We address four key dynamics: (1) Higher education sustains the modern professions and contributes to the rationalization of society and state. (2) The supranational and universalistic orientation of higher education provides elites with shared global cultural frames and identities, facilitating globalization. (3) Consequently, tertiary education provides a foundation for major global movements and sociopolitical change around diverse issues, such as human rights and environmental protection as well as potentially contentious religious and cultural solidarities. (4) Higher education contributes to the reorganization of the economy, creating new monetarized activities and facilitating the reconceptualization of activities distant from material production as economic. In short, many features of the contemporary world arise from the growing legions of people steeped in common forms of higher education. Panel regression models of contemporary cross-national longitudinal data examine these relationships. We find higher-education enrollments are associated with key dimensions of rationalization, globalization, societal mobilization, and expansion of the service economy. Central features of modern society, often seen as natural, in fact hinge on the distinctive form of higher education that has become institutionalized worldwide.

Conspiracy theories and their truth trajectories

Focaal ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 (59) ◽  
pp. 66-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathijs Pelkmans ◽  
Rhys Machold
Keyword(s):  
Conspiracy Theory ◽  
Use Value ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Neutral Term

This article aims to reinvigorate analytical debates on conspiracy theories. It argues that definitional attempts to set conspiracy theories apart from other theories are flawed. Blinded by the “irrational” reputation of conspiracy theories and deluded by the workings of institutionalized power such approaches fail to recognize that there are no inherent differences between the two categories. We argue that assessments of conspiracy theories should focus not on the epistemological qualities of these theories but on their interactions with the socio-political fields through which they travel. Because “conspiracy theory” is not a neutral term but a powerful label, attention to processes of labeling highlights these larger fields of power, while the theories’ trajectories illuminate the mechanisms by which truth and untruth are created. As such, this article offers a way forward for assessing both the truth and use value of conspiracy theories in the contemporary world.

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