Abstract
The cultural dimensions of the state and its formation have been subject to much research in the human sciences, especially over the past two decades. Boltanski’s Mysteries and Conspiracies can be read against this background of the ‘poetics of power,’ as it tackles the broad theme of the intertwining of culture and politics. Broadly stated, Boltanski’s argument is that conspiracies answer to a mode of inquiry that is inseparable from tensions inherent to state-formation as a unifying project that institutionalizes social reality and establishes boundaries of predictability. Mysteries arise from the pitfalls of the reality underwritten by the state, that is, from abnormal events against the background of a normal order of social life maintained by state institutions. The positing of conspiracies therefore reflects a wider anxiety inherent in modern states regarding the locus of power: against the reality maintained by state institutions, inquiries into conspiracies seek to explain mysteries by positing another, deeper reality. Everything that disturbs the universality of the nation-state, from class conflict to political affairs and crime, is a source of tension between these two realities. Inquiring into those tensions therefore always involves the potential of conspiracy thinking (e.g., speaking of overreaching business elites). The argument is not gradually developed through a systematic investigation to the detriment of the work. Rather, it functions as a unifying arch between loose fragments that examine the topics of explanation, conspiracy, and critique.
This tension between two realities essential to state formation, particularly in Western democracies, finds expression in detective and spy novels. Dealing with abnormalities, and therefore requiring the normality established by the state, these genres present chronicles of challenges to the reality constructed by the state in which it is required to reinstate itself. As the author writes: The trial that faces the state in detective fiction is precisely the mystery as an anomaly in relation to reality. Reality, which the state is supposed to underwrite, is not called into question by the fact that there are criminals . . . but by uncertainty surrounding the circumstances of the crime. . . . Thus detective fiction dramatizes reality open to suspicion in all respects. (p. 19; emphasis in original)
In two chapters, Boltanski interprets embodiments of this tension in detective fiction in England and France mainly through the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Georges Simenon, respectively. The tension between the two realities that drive the book is embodied in the character of the detective, as distinct from the policeman. Whereas the latter is restricted to legal matters – ‘legality’ – the former is the right arm of the state reinstating itself as ‘normality,’ reaching beyond legality to investigate mysteries (p. 49). The detective requires liberties with respect to the legal order (blurring the public/private distinction, for instance), which attests to ‘the fact that he embodies a moral order that outranks legality’ (p. 57). In the case of French detective fiction, Boltanski finds that the tension exemplified by the split between the policeman and the private detective is located in the policeman’s split loyalty to the state as administration on the one hand, and to the milieu of citizens on the other. The author explains those differences in essentialist terms, imputing influence from the formal-legal characteristics of the French and British states: ‘In the post-Victorian liberal state, the adjustment between society and state was based on the existence of a dominant class that was at the heart of civil society and political society alike. Conversely, in the social reality that unfolds in the Maigret stories, the powers at work in the human milieu are dissociated from the powers of the state’ (p. 117). The volatile and republican French state and the English liberal state ordered different social realities that, we are told, seeped directly not only into literature in general but also into the specific genre of detective fiction and the protagonists’ psyches.
Boltanski’s interpretation of literary works and his tracing of their sociopolitical dimensions rely on a poor exposition and such scarce evidence that it can satisfy neither students of literature nor of social science. For instance, in addition to the naïve essentialism in explaining such fine differences between two protagonists, the author treats genres as if they possess an immediate ontological status vis-a-vis the social world. Rather than being fuzzy, retroactive divisions erected in relation to other, specifically literary modes, genres for Boltanski reflect contemporaneous sociopolitical processes directly. With the ‘normality’ established by the state and its tensions, we get detective fiction that embodies them.
Boltanski extends his examination of the tension at the heart of the state from detective fiction to spy novels. These reflect the same anxiety over the locus of power – ‘who is really acting?’ – but present an unstable state because ‘it is part of the very essence of the state to be at war’ (p. 127). The threat to the reality established by the state is then relocated to state enemies that do not register in the nation-state project, and it is in this light that Boltanski interprets the persecution of Jews in Europe. The barriers to the universality of the state (i.e., conspiracy) must be unveiled by finding the external, ‘missing mass of causality . . . (the causality without which events become incomprehensible and absurd)’ (p. 144; emphasis in original). This uncovering of external conspiracies serves as a transition to examining paranoia as a mode of inquiry in the following chapter.
Paranoia, which in its social dimension reflects a stance towards an apparent reality animated by invisible forces is presented as another expression of the inherent tensions in the state that give rise to conspiracies to be unveiled. Boltanski finds confirmation in mid-20th-century American studies of populism from a liberal perspective, represented by the work of Richard Hofstadter (1965). According to this perspective, radical politics on both the left and right are seen as paranoid, and both posit a reality beyond the state’s in order to explain its shortcomings. The point here is a symmetry between different modes of inquiry into the deeper reality of things: Looking at these three figures – the paranoid individual, the man of ressentiment and the downgraded intellectual . . . we see a portrait taking shape that we shall find again in spy novels or in other literary works that dramatize subversive conspiracies. It is nothing other than the theme of social criticism, and, more precisely, that of the critical intellectual. (p. 183)
At this point, what is at stake in the themes of conspiracy and inquiry takes an explicit turn: If conspiracies answer to inquiries into hidden reality that arise from tensions at the foundation of the modern state, can this be extended to all criticism? And, because social science seeks to inquire into social reality, how can it avoid conspiracy thinking? Following a tendency that has become increasingly common, Boltanski draws a similarity between ‘critical sociology’ and conspiracy thinking. Both assign intention – which ought to belong to individuals – to social entities acting in concert in order to explain the anomalies of the social world constructed by the state, e.g., inequality. 1 The author adopts this problematic from Popper’s work, mainly The Poverty of Historicism. For Popper, ‘sociological superstition’ regarding concealed processes verges on conspiracy thinking by ascribing intention and calculation to social wholes (e.g., upper classes, causal laws), instead of focusing on interacting individuals and unintended consequences (p. 237). Several sociological methodologies sketched by Boltanski contribute to overcoming ‘Popper’s curse’ (p. 240), such as network analysis, each with its own successes and failures.
The result is compliance with Popper’s position with an air of pragmatism that prioritizes individual intentions and problematizes social wholes by making their deployment in the analysis explicit, and by constantly subjecting them to reflection to make them as inductive as possible. Otherwise, inquiry risks conspiracy thinking that assigns causal power to totalities that are increasingly out of touch with social reality: ‘as the relation between conceptual systems chiefly established in synergy with the political construction of the European nation-states, on the one hand, and a reality that, in the eyes of the actors, tends more and more sharply to free itself from the arrangements that were supposed to frame it, on the other hand, begins to fray’ (p. 266). This conclusion receives little development and demonstration, except when Boltanski juxtaposes his work to that of a journalist’s (p. 260) to show how the latter’s uncritical deployment of ‘state concepts’ and social wholes grants them intentional concordance, and therefore aligns with a conspiratorial analytical framework.
The reductionism of the conclusion lies in including different forms of criticism under a single banner of conspiracy, and unproblematically accepting ‘Popper’s curse.’ Perspectives that problematize the rational actor’s intention without necessarily excluding it risk becoming inquirers into the mysteries of a reality beyond the state’s ‘normalcy,’ and therefore become accomplices in the state’s ‘conceptual system.’ Adorno and Marx, for example, become by implication on par with a journalist uncovering the global plot of oil oligarchs. It is ironic and paradoxical to attribute an ‘intentionalist hypothesis’ to these perspectives that problematize the individual’s intention, simply in order to put them on par with conspiracy thinking. This paradox become even worse when we consider how Boltanski is presented as a theorist who underscored the analytical importance of agents’ intentions, and who is liberated from the ‘god’s-eye view’ (p. xi) of all theories classified as ‘critical,’ including Bourdieu’s.
Boltanski’s Mysteries and Conspiracies poses pertinent questions regarding inquiry and explanation. The work does not deliver, however, owing to its fragmented exposition and unsupported leaps across themes. As a result, it neither meets the methodological standards necessary to provide answers as a literary or sociological inquiry; nor does it possess the logical coherence to qualify as a theoretical work. Nevertheless, the book makes a contribution to the study of culture and politics by problematizing social criticism and uncovering the political dimension of the modes of expression that are deployed in science, literature, and daily life.