>And was it a lone gunman who killed King, B. Kennedy , et al. too ?
>I don' t think so.
From Slavoj Zizek's essay on "The Matrix":
>The theory of risk society and its global reflexivization is right in
>its emphasis one how, today, we are at the opposite end if the
>classical Enlightenment universalist ideology which presupposed that,
>in the long run, the fundamental questions can be resolved by way of
>the reference to the "objective knowledge" of the experts: when we are
>confronted with the conflicting opinions about the environmental
>consequences of a certain new product (say, of genetically modified
>vegetables), we search in vain for the ultimate expert opinion. And the
>point is not simply that the real issues are blurred because science is
>corrupted through financial dependence on large corporations and state
>agencies - even in themselves, sciences cannot provide the answer.
>Ecologists predicted 15 years ago the death of our forrests - the
>problem is now a too large increasee of wood... Where this theory of
>risk society is too short is in emphasizing the irrational predicament
>into which this puts us, common subjects: we are again and again
>compelled to decide, although we are well aware that we are in no
>position to decide, that our decision will be arbitrary. Ulrich Beck
>and his followers refer here to the democratic discussion of all
>options and consensus-building; however, this does not resolve the
>immobilizing dilemma: why should the democratic discussion in which the
>majority participates lead to better result, when, cognitively, the
>ignorance of the majority remains. The political frustration of the
>majority is thus understandable: they are called to decide, while, at
>the same time, receiving the message that they are in no position
>effectively to decide, i.e. to objectively weigh the pros and cons. The
>recourse to "conspiracy theories" is a desperate way out of this
>deadlock, an attempt to regain a minimum of what Fred Jameson calls
>"cognitive mapping."
>
>Jodi Dean(3) drew attention to a curious phenomenon clearly observable
>in the "dialogue of the mutes" between the official ("serious,"
>academically institutionalized) science and the vast domain of
>so-called pseudo-sciences, from ufology to those who want to decipher
>the secrets of the pyramids: one cannot but be struck by how it is the
>oficial scientists who proceed in a dogmatic dismissive way, while the
>pseudo-scientists refer to facts and argumentation deprived of the
>common prejudices. Of course, the answer will be here that established
>scientists speak with the authority of the big Other of the scientific
>Institution; but the problem is that, precisely, this scientific big
>Other is again and again revealed as a consensual symbolic fiction. So
>when we are confronted with conspiracy theories, we should proceed in a
>strict homology to the proper reading of Henry James' The Turn of the
>Screw: we should neither accept the existence of ghosts as part of the
>(narrative) reality nor reduce them, in a pseudo-Freudian way, to the
>"projection" of the heroine's hysterical sexual frustrations.
>Conspiracy theories, of course, are not to be accepted as "fact" -
>however, one should also not reduce them to the phenomenon of modern
>mass hysteria. Such a notion still relies on the "big Other," on the
>model of "normal" perception of shared social reality, and thus does
>not take into account how it is precisely this notion of reality that
>is undermined today. The problem is not that ufologists and conspiracy
>theorists regress to a paranoiac attitude unable to accept (social)
>reality; the problem is that this reality itself is becoming paranoiac.
>Contemporary experience again and again confronts us with situations in
>which we are compelled to take note of how our sense of reality and
>normal attitude towards it is grounded in a symbolic fiction, i.e. how
>the "big Other" that determines what counts as normal and accepted
>truth, what is the horizon of meaning in a given society, is in no way
>directly grounded in "facts" as rendered by the scientific "knowledge
>in the real." Let us take a traditional society in which modern science
>is not yet elevated into the Master-discourse: if, in its symbolic
>space, an individual advocates propositions of modern science, he will
>be dismissed as "madman" - and the key point is that it is not enough
>to say that he is not "really mad," that it is merely the narrow
>ignorant society which puts him in this position - in a certain way,
>being treated as a madman, being excluded from the social big Other,
>effectively EQUALS being mad. "Madness" is not the designation which
>can be grounded in a direct reference to "facts" (in the sense that a
>madman is unable to perceive things the way they really are, since he
>is caught in his hallucinatory projections), but only with regard to
>the way an individual relates to the "big Other." Lacan usually
>emphasizes the opposite aspect of this paradox: "the madman is not only
>a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a
>king," i.e. madness designates the collapse of the distance between the
>Symbolic and the Real, an immediate identification with the symbolic
>mandate; or, to take his other exemplary statement, when a husband is
>pathologically jealous, obsessed by the idea that his wife sleeps with
>other men, his obsession remains a pathological feature even if it is
>proven that he is right and that his wife effectively sleeps with other
>men. The lesson of such paradoxes is clear: pathological jealously is
>not a matters of getting the facts false, but of the way these facts
>are integrated into the subject's libidinal economy. However, what one
>should assert here is that the same paradox should also be performed as
>it were in the opposite direction: the society (its socio-symbolic
>field, the big Other) is "sane" and "normal" even when it is proven
>factually wrong. (Maybe, it was in this sense that the late Lacan
>designated himself as "psychotic": he effectively was psychotic insofar
>as it was not possible to integrate his discourse into the field of the
>big Other.)
>
>One is tempted to claim, in the Kantian mode, that the mistake of the
>conspiracy theory is somehow homologous to the "paralogism of the pure
>reason," to the confusion between the two levels: the suspicion (of the
>received scientific, social, etc. common sense) as the formal
>methodological stance, and the positivation of this suspicion in
>another all-explaining global para-theory.