Transparency, conspiracy, and epistemic folkways

The norms, practices, ideals, and assumptions through which knowledge is pursued and understood beyond academia might be described, following Alvin Goldman, as ‘epistemic folkways’.Footnote ⁹ As suggested in the introduction, such ‘folkways’ appear to be more relevant to international politics now than ever. Or perhaps more accurately (given that epistemic folkways must always have been significant to those following them), they currently appear with greater intensity and self-awareness than was previously the case. The examples of transparency and conspiracy theory reflect the extent to which epistemic ideals and practices shape popular engagement with international politics today. ‘Transparency’ is perhaps the most influential of the overtly epistemic notions at work in contemporary international politics. It is generally understood to be a property of institutions that sees them grant outsiders (in most cases the public) access to information about internal structures and procedures, thereby increasing their legitimacy and accountability. As a political ideal, it anticipates relations where such access is the norm. The ideal of transparency is of significant appeal in the context of complex structures of domestic and international governance operating with ever-larger amounts of data. First used in a political context by Jeremy Bentham, the term is now entrenched in political discourse, with its advocates ranging from activists to international organisations, governments, and corporations.Footnote ¹⁰

The ubiquity of appeals to ‘transparency’ in elite discourse and widespread attempts to pursue it in practice suggest that the ideal is of considerable appeal to those wielding international power. For example, the ‘Lough Erne Declaration’, which followed the 2013 G8 summit, identified transparency as key to the success of private enterprise and good governance.Footnote ¹¹ Elsewhere, 65 governments – including the UK, France, US, Brazil, and South Africa – have signed up to the multilateral Open Government Partnership which commits members to the pursuit of transparency in policymaking and public resource management. Signatories agree to take steps aimed at ‘engaging civil society and the business community to identify effective practices and innovative approaches for leveraging new technologies to empower people and promote transparency in government’.Footnote ¹² The pursuit of transparency also provides a means of allaying fears about political corruption. For example, a voluntary EU ‘Transparency Register’ lists approximately 6,500 lobbying organisations operating in Brussels.Footnote ¹³ In some cases, governments, international institutions, and corporations work together in ‘transparency initiatives’. For example, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) was created in 2003 following suggestions by the UK Government and has been supported by the IMF and World Bank.Footnote ¹⁴

As these examples suggest, the appeal of transparency is especially strong in international politics, where structures for accountability have been in short supply. Under these conditions, its potential role as a form of ersatz international democracy is a key source of transparency’s appeal – it has become a means for institutions over which citizens feel they have little control to claim legitimacy and at least give the impression of accountability. It would, however, be a mistake to assume that transparency is simply a rhetorical tool of the powerful; the promise of transparency is widely accepted by those seeking, to varying degrees, to reform or challenge the prevailing structures of domestic and international power. Perhaps the best known is the anti-corruption organisation Transparency International, but there are hundreds of others working for local or global transparency.Footnote ¹⁵ Most of these are concerned with anti-corruption initiatives, but the ideal of transparency has also been promoted by radical ‘transparency activists’ seeking to overturn existing structures of global power. For example, for Wikileaks transparency is a tool that might help citizens to ‘make their own history’.Footnote ¹⁶ On this view, international politics is currently conducted on the basis of government secrecy that can be undermined by dragging secrets into the light, a strategy the most dramatic example of which is Wikileaks’ publication of thousands of US State Department cables in 2007.Footnote ¹⁷

Whatever the political promise of transparency for elites or activists, a large if understandably less celebrated part of its appeal lies in the efficiency it promises to foster.Footnote ¹⁸ If it is assumed that social, economic, and political interaction involves the circulation of information, transparency is potentially an important source of institutional efficiency and efficacy. This dimension of transparency moved to the heart of the international system with the liberalisation of the global economy and concomitant erosion of the norm of state controlled national economies.Footnote ¹⁹ Institutions such as the IMF emphasise the need for transparency partly to demonstrate their adherence to the ideal of public accountability but also because transparency is thought to be ‘a source of effective financial management’.Footnote ²⁰ The role of transparency as a source of systemic efficiency is not confined to the economic sphere. As has been noted by several IR scholars, transparency has also been important in the development of other international regime structures, such as those governing the environment, human rights, and arms control.Footnote ²¹ This pursuit of the smooth functioning of a given sphere of activity by means of transparency extends to the interstate system. Already in the eighteenth century, Bentham was suggesting that provision of information was a means of avoiding international conflict.Footnote ²² Today, politicians still emphasise the need for information to circulate freely in a healthy international system. In these cases, transparency is less about legitimacy or empowerment, and more to do with maintaining structures of governance through the circulation of relevant information to relevant actors.

The reasons for IR scholars to concern themselves with conspiracy theories are less immediately apparent. Conspiracy is certainly a common theme in popular culture and an obsession of large online communities such as 9/11 ‘truthers’, but conspiracy theorising can appear as pathological or marginal and therefore of little interest to political scientists or theorists. However, there are no sound reasons for dismissing it as a subject of investigation out of hand.Footnote ²³ Firstly, under some circumstances, conspiracy theories have been extremely influential. Throughout the twentieth century, elites fostered conspiracy theories in order to justify and rally popular support for attacks on their opponents. Perhaps most famously, Richard Hofstadter’s classic work on the ‘Paranoid Style in American Politics’ describes the McCarthy-era obsession with Communist conspiracy, which came to dominate American politics.Footnote ²⁴ Earlier, in Germany, claims about a Communist plot following the Reichstag fire had helped the Nazis to consolidate their power. The Soviets had their own uses for such paranoia – the Stalinist show trials in the 1930s took place in the context of claims about counter-revolutionary conspiracies.Footnote ²⁵

Even where it is not accepted at an elite level, conspiracy theorising is clearly of broad popular appeal, reflecting a set of epistemic folkways through which large numbers of individuals interpret international events. Polls frequently reveal that a substantial proportion of people are sympathetic to such conspiracy theories. One recent poll suggests that as many as 28 per cent of American voters believe in a ‘globalist conspiracy’ to establish a ‘new world order’ and 37 per cent that global warming is a hoax.Footnote ²⁶ 9/11 conspiracies still abound. And conspiracy thinking is by no means an American phenomenon (a common misconception). One 2003 survey suggested that one in five Germans believed that the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks.Footnote ²⁷ Conspiracy theories are widespread in the Middle East and former Soviet Union.Footnote ²⁸ As the elite conspiracy theorising of the twentieth century shows, such modes of thinking can have significant political implications.

Even where such thinking does remain on the fringes, the assumption that examination of marginal phenomena can only provide insights that are of little significance is questionable. In fact, the widespread and often unreflexive acceptance of ideals like transparency by policymakers and researchers is in some respects a disadvantage, serving to obscure the array of assumptions – philosophical and political – which, as we will see, lie behind them. In contrast, apparently pathological or extreme phenomena can provide a means of approaching more widespread patterns, structures, or assumptions from new angles.Footnote ²⁹

Much like transparency, conspiracy theories depend on and reproduce epistemic folkways through which actors engage with or hope to engage with world politics. In fact, as will be argued below, the epistemic folkways involved in each case are similar in important respects. Like the ideal of transparency, conspiracy thinking is of especial appeal in a world that appears to be shaped by the circulation of abundant information but in which political and social structures nevertheless remain obscure and unresponsive. In keeping with the desire to make visible a hidden wealth of politically relevant information, and in much the same way as transparency advocates emphasise the importance of information, conspiracy theories draw heavily on quasi-scientific appeal to facts and experts, albeit those which are ignored by the ‘mainstream’. For example, in a piece entitled ‘The Facts Speak for Themselves’, one 9/11 ‘truther’ site lists fifty ‘facts’ about the events of 11 September 2001.Footnote ³⁰ Elsewhere, the testimony of ‘experts’ is seized upon to imbue theories with legitimacy.Footnote ³¹ At the same time, the structures of oppression that are supposedly identified reflect the rational actions of malevolent groups or individuals who can control access to information.

Both the transparency ideal and conspiracy thinking reflect, then, significant and related aspects of current epistemic folkways. These modes of thinking are related in important ways to international political practice. This is most obvious in the case of transparency, which appeals both to organisations that depend on the creation and circulation of information and to citizens who hope to influence them. However, conspiracy thinking is a common response to the opacity and complexity of international affairs. The apparent indifference of international actors and institutions and the unresponsiveness of the structures of global governance make conspiracy theorising in some respects a rational response for those who think that transparency will not come easily. In each case, knowledge is thought to involve access to previously hidden data, facts, or information. With transparency, citizens gain access to information held by key institutions. Conspiracy theorists, on the other hand, act as collectors of supposedly hidden facts about the machinations of the powerful. These epistemic assumptions are tied to assumptions about the nature of political interaction which are apparent at both the popular and elite or institutional levels. In particular, it is assumed that a significant proportion of political interaction consists of the accumulation, circulation, or protection of information by atomistic actors. Access to information is assumed to be empowering, although the mechanisms through which such knowledge leads to political influence are rarely articulated in any detail by either the advocates of transparency or conspiracy theorists. As will be argued towards the end of this article, this omission is no coincidence.

Historicising transparency and conspiracy

Reflexivists seem to be especially well placed to illuminate these epistemic folkways and their international political significance. ‘Reflexivity’ is an ambiguous term in IR, referring to a range of theories and having several applications.Footnote ³² However, a key contribution of reflexive theorising has been to cast critical light on epistemic frameworks which are usually taken for granted, but which are partly constitutive of political reality.Footnote ³³ These are structures in which scholars themselves participate. Thus, as explained by Mark Neufeld, reflexive theory is a metatheoretical stance that generates awareness of the constitutive role of knowledge within social activities and ‘recognition of the inherently politico-normative content of paradigms and the normal science traditions’ in which scholars participate.Footnote ³⁴ Reflexivist IR scholars have considered in detail the links between politics and knowledge, and they have done so in such a way that knowledge is not a matter of academic epistemology but of social and political epistemic ideals and practices.

One of the simplest but most effective strategies of reflexive IR theory has been that of historicisation, which serves to denaturalise and contextualise widespread ideals and practices and to emphasise the mutability of the social world, including the epistemic folkways upon which it might depend.Footnote ³⁵ Widely accepted norms or standards such as transparency, the advantages of which might appear to be obvious, are revealed to be the products of a particular time and place and of underlying social forces. That which, like conspiracy theorising, seems marginal or anomalous can be linked to wider social structures or trends, providing insights into what Giambattista Vico described as the ‘modifications of human mind’.Footnote ³⁶ The strategy of historicisation has been at the heart of critical post-Positivist IR from its inception, and has generally been directed against the strictures of Realism.Footnote ³⁷ For example, Andrew Linklater has employed it in his explorations of shifting forms of moral community.Footnote ³⁸ Robert Cox identifies historicisation as a key feature of Critical Theory and employs it to explore shifting configurations of ideas, institutions, and social forces in world politics.Footnote ³⁹ Such a strategy provides a useful first step in the present attempt to illuminate contemporary epistemic folkways. By means of historicisation, it is possible to provide a sketch of the relationship of such folkways to a wider constellation of epistemic ideals and practices as well as to historical trends in international politics. This sketch will provide the basis for further reflection in the second part of the article.

In broad terms, the prominence of transparency and conspiracy thinking appears to reflect the extent to which modern political practices, ideals, and experience have been shaped by the reflexive character of Western modernity. The prominence of epistemic ideals and anxieties in popular engagements with international relations is in part a product of the fact that modernity has defined itself through reflexive awareness – self-knowledge – of its own processes, including those involving the generation and distribution of knowledge.Footnote ⁴⁰ Western societies have reproduced themselves partly by epistemic and reflexive means, but also with ideals through which certain epistemic standards and practices have been elevated. Information about populations and their environment is collected but also knowledge about the systems for collecting that information.Footnote ⁴¹ With this, progress has come to be defined accordingly in terms of accurate and useful knowledge accumulated in ever more sophisticated ways. As transparency discourse and conspiracy thinking show, such epistemic definitions of progress and empowerment, whether collective or individual, can take a variety of forms and can appeal to a range of actors.

This form of society has been described in different ways by scholars including Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Ulrick Beck, and Anthony Giddens.Footnote ⁴² As Foucault shows, the shift to such a mode of social organisation is, in many respects, one to the will to knowledge or truth itself.Footnote ⁴³ Habermas’s claim that ‘if we imagine the philosophical discussion of the modern period as a judicial hearing, it would be deciding a single question: how is reliable knowledge possible?’ not only tells us about philosophy, but about the ideals and practices of modernity in general.Footnote ⁴⁴ It betrays something of the sense of impending epistemic crisis that pervades societies built around the idealisation of knowledge – that reliable knowledge might escape us or, as Habermas fears, that an unsatisfactory answer to the question of reliability might be imposed. This concern about the knowledge upon which modernity supposedly depends is central to the idealisation of transparency and the obsessions of conspiracy theorists.

In sketching a history of epistemic modernity it will be useful to distinguish between three spheres. The context for the emergence of transparency and conspiracy has been: the emergence of technical knowledge based on the creation, control, and circulation of information concerning objective reality; the normative-political rise of ideals and practices according to which no relevant actor is excluded unnecessarily from access to knowledge or participation in its production; and the existential significance for individuals who are at once objects of technical knowledge and knowing subjects – items of data, receivers of information, and interpreting members of the public.Footnote ⁴⁵

At the level of technical knowledge, forms of governance that emphasise scientific or other expertise have played an increasingly significant role in modern international relations. Scholars such as Peter Haas have identified the central role of communities of scientific experts in international relations.Footnote ⁴⁶ John Ruggie has described how international epistemic communities of experts develop around epistemes, a label for the ‘dominant way of looking at social reality, a set of shared symbols and references, mutual expectations and a mutual predictability of intention’.Footnote ⁴⁷ In fact, the emergence of modern science and statistics is closely linked to the development of modern statecraft – Armand Mattelart describes how ‘statistics’ was originally defined as ‘state science’.Footnote ⁴⁸ While new forms of mathematical and scientific reasoning were of significant military use,Footnote ⁴⁹ the eighteenth century also witnessed the emergence of the idea that the availability of information would enable cooperation and ultimately tend to make international relations more peaceful. As mentioned above, the latter idea is already apparent the work of Bentham, who identified ‘information’ as a key means of overcoming the conflictual nature of the system of states.Footnote ⁵⁰

Technical progress did not occur simply through the accumulation of facts and the elevated role of experts, but also involved collective or individual self-knowledge and the self-scrutiny and refinement of epistemic process and infrastructures themselves.Footnote ⁵¹ This is apparent in Bentham’s now infamous proposal for the ‘Panopticon’, an institution in which nothing of the behaviour of the inhabitants of the system or its operation was concealed from those managing it or from the wider public.Footnote ⁵² In Bentham’s system, information circulates, but in a controlled manner; prisoners are held in cells where they can be constantly observed and their perception of their environment tightly controlled.Footnote ⁵³ This controlled production and circulation of information is combined with reflection, from the self-monitoring behaviour of the inmates to the management’s awareness that they too are being observed.Footnote ⁵⁴ Bentham’s system reveals that the technical role of such transparency is not just a matter of ensuring access to relevant facts but also of maintaining effective systems with minimum effort – the efficiency and efficacy mentioned above.Footnote ⁵⁵

This applies to the system of states as much as any other. For example, it has been suggested that transparency played a role in the peace that accompanied the Concert of Europe.Footnote ⁵⁶ Frequent communication and increased openness between the European powers allowed for more peaceful interaction and, for a while, a more stable international system.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the second half of the twentieth century, transparency was especially important in the emergence of security cooperation, helping to increase confidence by reducing the possibilities for ‘cheating’.Footnote ⁵⁸ It was central to arms control agreements, which involved various ‘verification’ measures to ensure compliance. International transparency has even been characterised as arms control’s contribution to international politics.Footnote ⁵⁹ On this view, transparency is not only useful to individual states, but also ensures the smooth functioning of the systems in which they interact.Footnote ⁶⁰

The appeal of transparency arose not only from its role in aiding the circulation of information in pursuit of technical goals. The shift to a new form of technical knowledge was accompanied by new standards of authority and legitimacy and, ultimately, by new forms of power. In particular, the development of such knowledge required that epistemic status be detached from traditional forms of authority.Footnote ⁶¹ In international relations, the shift is reflected in that from esoteric rationales for state secrecy, according to which individuals are precluded from knowing on the basis of their social status, to technical ones, according to which secrecy occurs where it is necessary for the effective pursuit of particular goals.Footnote ⁶² In the eighteenth century, Frederick II of Prussia could still declare that ‘a private person has no right to pass public and even disapproving judgment … on sovereigns and courts … or to publish in print pertinent reports that he manages to obtain’. A ‘private person’ – at this time anyone not associated with the court – was forbidden from doing so since he or she was ‘not at all capable of making such judgment, because he lacks complete knowledge of the circumstances and motives’.Footnote ⁶³ There was a connection between social status and the ability to engage in politically relevant epistemic activity. Of course, contemporary governments still assert the need to protect state and corporate secrets. However, contemporary parallels with earlier forms of power are to some extent misleading. Assertions of the need for government secrecy are increasingly combined with a modern politics of knowledge according to which information can be, at least in principle, ‘handled’ by all relevant actors. In this new world, the latter can in principle be any citizen of the state in question. Thus, even previously top secret documents are eventually released to the public, albeit after several decades and often with considerable official obstruction.Footnote ⁶⁴ Even where secrecy is ruthlessly defended, secret information can circulate to vast numbers of relevant actors. For example, approximately five million individuals – government employees and private contractors – have access to secret or top secret documents in the United States.Footnote ⁶⁵

The change in question was a normative-political as well as technical one. Accompanying it was the increasing expectation that validity claims be justified beyond the aristocracy to a public consisting of rational actors. This principle was key to Immanuel Kant’s political theory. Kant was concerned with the procedure through which political claims are subjected to the test of publicity, a sort of communal reflection, arguing that any political maxim that cannot survive public scrutiny is not in keeping with political right.Footnote ⁶⁶ This is the political parallel of the moral reasoning that he promoted, through which maxims are reflexively tested for contradiction.Footnote ⁶⁷ While this sort of Kantian reflection is not epistemic in a narrow sense it does present the public sphere as a mechanism for testing validity.Footnote ⁶⁸ The modern public cannot be left ignorant; authority is replaced by reflection, society scrutinises itself. As modern international systems and institutions have been built around technical knowledge and the creation and circulation of information, the possibilities and demand for public reflection concerning international matters have increased.Footnote ⁶⁹

States and citizens are increasingly confronted by forces such as environmental degradation or economic breakdown, which transcend borders and, just as they demand cooperative technical responses, increase the pressure for transnational political cooperation. Moreover, the international institutions created to address such issues themselves become part of the international reality with which individuals are confronted. As Ruggie has noted, the extension of technical knowledge generates new subjects of political choice and in turn the recognition that a collective situation – ‘policy interdependence’ – exists.Footnote ⁷⁰ As well as new forms of interaction between states, this can generate the sense that there is an embryonic global public that is faced with such issues.Footnote ⁷¹ This can in turn trigger demands for new forms of transnational political interaction, including those that involve sharing information with ordinary citizens.Footnote ⁷²

Such global public deliberation would be distinct from technical knowledge. However, as suggested above, we should not lose sight of the overlap between the two. Transnational publicity requires public access to information and this information will generally be the product of technical activity. Such access is increasingly demanded and increasingly achievable, whether with the consent of the creators or owners of information or via ‘leaking’. Moreover, just as technical practices require the creation of data from complex social reality, new forms of publicity involved the elevation of some supposedly universal forms or dimensions of subjectivity and the suppression of others. This is apparent if we remember the specifically bourgeois, patriarchal, and Western origins of the modern public sphere.Footnote ⁷³ The interaction between the two spheres is further apparent if we consider the ways in which the development of new scientific instruments has spurred-on normative-political discussions in which changing ideas about the nature of knowledge have been linked to struggles over social and political power. For example, innovations in Optics in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth century-France were closely linked to discussions about political transparency, and in turn to debates between conservatives and progressives concerning the nature of political power and authority.Footnote ⁷⁴

While IR scholars have long been aware of the significance of the epistemic in international politics, the epistemically-charged nature of popular engagement with the international is increasingly apparent. Most citizens are at least partly conscious of the epistemic dimension of international relations. Perhaps not surprisingly, in the context outlined above, in seeking to address political questions about legitimacy and power that have an impact on their lives, they turn to epistemic ideals as a potential source of empowerment or progress. The hope is that access to knowledge will bring empowerment and insight in relation to structures and institutions that are currently unresponsive and obscure. This combination of the individual and the social, the ideal and the practical, the technocratic and the normative makes epistemic matters a site of tension and anxiety. Near universal popular faith in transparency depends in part on acceptance of the view that social and political interaction depend on data or information, as evidenced by widespread concerns about the importance of ‘personal data’ and the need to protect it. In the face of apparently remote and unresponsive institutions, transparency promises political by means of epistemic empowerment and is closely linked to belief in the progressive power of publicity. Access to information appears to promise a route to the inner workings of political institutions, and thereby to power and influence.

The thwarted hope for such access constitutes part of the context for conspiracy theorising. In this case, little faith is placed in the mechanisms of transparency developed in modern societies. Confronted with institutions, structures, and systems which are obscure and threatening, but armed with modern faith in the emancipatory power of knowledge, conspiracy theorists pursue the facts in ways which avoid the paths offered by governing institutions or the mainstream public sphere. However, at another level, conspiracy thinking is a manifestation of epistemic folkways which emphasise the importance of data and its circulation. In this context, the hope that the determined citizen can, through dogged pursuit of the facts, find the truth that is ‘out there’ and which powerful forces would withhold from her is paramount. As Hofstadter explains,

At this point it is useful to consider a third feature of the modern epistemic-reflexive constellation identified above – its constitutive but problematic relation to individual subjects. As Giddens points out, reflection is an existential as well as a social matter – for members of modern societies, questions about the ‘basic parameters of human life’ are posed and answered reflexively.Footnote ⁷⁶ Foucault and Habermas have both linked the emergence of modern epistemic frameworks to the development of the self. The latter places the newly emerged public and the modern subject side by side: ‘The publicum developed into the public, the subjectum into the subject, the receiver of regulations from above into the ruling authorities’ adversary.’ Foucault pointed to the relationship between self-reflection and the development of both more efficient ways of exercising power and the care of the self.Footnote ⁷⁷ In IR, Ruggie has discussed the significance of the emergence of the ‘I form’ and single fixed-point perspective for the development of modern territorial states.Footnote ⁷⁸ Richard Ashley’s account of ‘heroic practice’ draws a similar connection between the modern epistemic stance, individual identity, and modern sovereignty.Footnote ⁷⁹

The epistemic folkways apparent in transparency and conspiracy reflect the way in which individuals find themselves simultaneously in the role of objects of a particular kind of technical knowledge, having been reduced to data, but also in that of potentially knowing subjects who seek access to that data and the structures in which it circulates. With the addition of this relationship, the reasons for the intensity of interest in transparency and conspiracy are further apparent. The modern experience of being an object of knowledge or being confronted by technical or scientific practices that apparently fail to serve one’s interests or respond to one’s demands is potentially a source of alienation to which conspiracy thinking and appeals to transparency are responses.Footnote ⁸⁰ This experience will be particularly pronounced for those confronted with structures of global governance or power in which mechanisms of accountability, if they exist at all, are weak or indirect. In this context, taking the role of a knowing subject who is in theory equal to all others represents an appealing response. However, for it to be so, it is necessary that political activity, whether oriented to the technical maintenance of systems of governance, public scrutiny of those structures, or individual empowerment in relation to them, is understood partly in terms of access to and circulation of information. Thus, while the strands of modern epistemic activity identified here – technical, normative-political, and existential – are useful ideal types, it would be a mistake to distinguish too sharply between them.

Subject and object

While it is useful to link current epistemic folkways to wider historical trends, the implication that the story of modernity can be told in terms of the shift to a new epistemic stage is problematic. This is, after all, a narrative that transparency discourse and conspiracy thinking themselves draw upon and reproduce. Implicit in each is the idea of a progression, however difficult, towards an epistemically and therefore politically more sophisticated society or subjectivity. Faith in transparency reflects the belief that the particular form of knowledge represented by access to information is politically empowering. Conspiracy theorising reflects considerably less optimism, but nevertheless tends to involve the assumption that politics is a conscious epistemic struggle in which nefarious and powerful actors deliberately maintain the ignorance of the masses. For the conspiracy theorist, the truth is ‘out there’ to be triumphantly uncovered by the determined individual. The self-consciously epistemic nature of transparency and conspiracy presents a particular challenge for IR theorists seeking cognitive impact in the supposed ‘information age’ – in providing an account of modernity in terms of epistemic changes, the theorist risks obscuring the tensions, contradictions, and occlusions which might accompany the tale in question. The danger is that of uncritically accepting the claim that modern politics simply is epistemic in the ways described above, thereby diminishing any critical insights that an account of epistemic folkways in contemporary international politics might provide. The challenge is therefore that of finding some way of rubbing epistemic history ‘against the grain’.Footnote ⁸¹

This blurring of the line between theory and political reality points to a familiar but more fundamental problem concerning the possibility of separating subject and object in IR theory. With the introduction of the subject-object relationship we appear to set foot on precisely the metatheoretical detour that critics of supposed reflexivist abstraction fear. However, our brief investigation of epistemic folkways indicates that this is not simply an academic problem. As we have just seen, the technical, normative-political, and existential dimensions of epistemic activity apparent in transparency and conspiracy can be explained partly in terms of the interaction between objectification and subjectification. Actors engage in practices of objectification while, as we have seen, participating in the construction of particular forms of subjectivity from the perspective of which objectification is possible. In the hands of citizens, transparency and conspiracy are attempts to engage with and take control of the ways in which the subject-object relationship is negotiated in practice. Contrary to assertions that such matters are a distraction from concrete political problems, therefore, the subject-object relationship is of substantive political importance. Ignoring it will diminish rather than enhance any insights generated by an investigation of epistemic ideals, concepts, and practices in international politics. The task facing IR theorists is that of negotiating subjectivity and objectivity themselves while seeking to develop critical knowledge of social world in which actors are doing the same.

In the remainder of this article, it will be argued that the resources for pursuing this task and thereby building on the historical sketch outlined above can be found in the Critical Theory of Theodor Adorno. Reflection on the subject-object relationship to illuminate modern epistemic folkways, on the on the one hand, and the dilemmas of theory, on the other, lies at the heart of Adorno’s work. In order to illuminate the modern constellation of epistemic ideals and practices along with their political implications – that is, in order to achieve the ‘cognitive impact’ and insight into ‘substantive problems’ which is now being demanded of post-Positivist IR – Adorno reflexively subverts the subject-object distinction and with it the assumptions about epistemic progress central to the self-understanding of Western modernity.Footnote ⁸² Importantly for the present discussion, he identifies one of the results of current articulations of the subject-object relationship – in theory and in practice – as the desire for ‘false clarity’. This is not simply a philosophical error but a real social pathology, the social manifestations of which range from superstition and conspiracy thinking (especially anti-Semitism) to the pursuit of transparency in architecture.Footnote ⁸³ The present section outlines Adorno’s approach to the subject-object relationship, the following considers the implications for understanding the role of the transparency ideal and conspiracy theorising in contemporary international politics.

Before turning to Adorno, it is worth briefly considering some of the approaches to the subject-object dichotomy which IR scholars have drawn upon in responding to the risk of epistemic triumphalism identified above. Most post-Positivist reflection in IR goes beyond historicisation in order to draw out key features of prevailing epistemic constellations, which can then be subjected to critique. Poststructuralists and Critical Theorists have often done so by placing the subject-object relationship within context of a more fundamental intersubjectivity, thereby moving from the philosophy of the subject to the philosophy of language. In the case of Habermasian Critical Theory, the emphasis has been placed on intersubjective communicative reason. From this perspective, knowledge is not a matter of the correspondence between the subject’s concepts and an objective reality, but of the pursuit of communicatively arrived at agreement.Footnote ⁸⁴ For many Poststructuralists, following Jacques Derrida, the structure of language is such that successful representation of ‘real’ objects is impossible. This undermines the Western ‘metaphysics of presence’ according to which such signification, and therefore truth, is achievable.Footnote ⁸⁵ Whatever form it takes, this intersubjectivism helps to sustain a sense of dynamism, tension, or contradiction, which goes some way to problematising the modern narrative of epistemic progress. It challenges naïve self-reflection and modern epistemic self-confidence by undermining the ‘quest for self-awareness on the part of a stable, knowing self’,Footnote ⁸⁶ on the one hand, and the idea of objective reality, on the other.

Such reflexively-derived intersubjectivist challenges to the prevailing understandings of the subject-object relationship have provided the basis for critical accounts of international politics. For example, drawing on Habermas, Linklater identifies the ‘totalizing project’ of the modern nation state and challenges it with a communicative procedural universalism.Footnote ⁸⁷ Drawing on Derrida, David Campbell links political violence in Bosnia to the international community’s acceptance of the metaphysics of presence. Against this, he advocates an ethics of sensitivity to difference based on Derrida’s theory of writing.Footnote ⁸⁸ Richard Ashley’s criticisms of ‘heroic practice’, mentioned above, reflect a similar challenge to the theoretical and political implications of the subject-object dichotomy. In each case, the overarching sociopolitical and theoretical problem reflexivists confront is that of the reificatory implications of epistemic positions concerned with the relationship between the individual subject and objective reality. This is, in each case, challenged with a reflexively identified intersubjectivity that both enables and undermines the modern subject’s knowledge of objective reality.

This has been a productive strand of theorising, but post-Positivist IR theory has been hobbled by an overwhelmingly hostile attitude to the notion of ‘objectivity’.Footnote ⁸⁹ While this has provided some means of destabilising prevailing epistemic assumptions, it has often done so at the cost of an implicit claim to insight into formal preconditions of knowledge. As Peter Dews has argued regarding Derrida’s theory, it tends to elevate the a priori over truth – or, in other words, claims about the fundamental structure of language over the investigation of historically contingent developments.Footnote ⁹⁰ Similar concerns have been raised about the formalistic nature of Habermasian Critical Theory.Footnote ⁹¹ In either case, too much insight is being claimed for reflection, and the real dilemmas and practices of modern individuals tend to be explained away as a result.

One possible response to such problems, and also to the danger, identified at the start of this section, of uncritically affirming epistemic ideals is to reject the emphasis on the epistemic altogether. Pursuing this line of argument, Scientific Realists working in IR have asserted that questions of knowledge are distinct from questions about international political reality.Footnote ⁹² On this view, many post-Positivists commit what the late Roy Bhaskar referred to as the ‘epistemic fallacy’. In Bhaskar’s words, this is the mistake according to which it is assumed that ‘statements about being can be reduced to statements about knowledge; i.e. that ontological questions can always be translated into epistemological terms’.Footnote ⁹³ According to Scientific Realists working in IR, post-Positivists reduce the real to the epistemic.Footnote ⁹⁴ The result is that

The epistemic fallacy might even serve an ideological function. For example, Jonathan Joseph has suggested that the concern with reflexivity that characterises the critical social theory of thinkers such as Beck and Giddens is also an element in the strategies of neoliberal governance.Footnote ⁹⁶ The appropriate theoretical response, from a Realist perspective, is not to engage in further epistemic reflection, but to look for specific, real causal mechanisms.

As we shall see, there is an ideological dimension to modern epistemic ideals. However, there is no unproblematic perspective from which to search for underlying causal mechanisms. Scientific Realists understand the objectivity of reality as a precondition of science, while failing to give sufficient weight to the fact that this mode of experiencing the world has only emerged in the context of particular social conditions. That is to say, and as will be argued below, the way in which objectivity appears depends on specific articulations of the subject-object relationship which occur through the sorts of developments sketched above. While Scientific Realists acknowledge variation in ways of knowing, they prioritise a model of knowledge in which the theorist can supposedly penetrate the veil of social appearances. Such an epistemology is not neutral – the same confidence in this form of knowledge is integral to transparency discourse and conspiracy thinking. Since, as suggested at the start of this section, such phenomena serve to uncritically promote the idea of modern, epistemically driven progress, Scientific Realists risk arriving back into the sort of epistemic hubris they seek to escape.

A more convincing call for a non-Positivist account of objectivity has been made by Inanna Hamati-Ataya who argues that the development of a reflexivist IR theory with ‘cognitive impact’ requires a ‘radical move away from a priori normative foundations of classical epistemology’ in favour of a ‘strong reflexivity’ which criticises objectivism ‘from within’.Footnote ⁹⁷ From this perspective, following feminist standpoint epistemology, the problem with Positivist ‘objectivism’ is that it is not ‘objective’ enough, since it fails to take into account the inescapably contextual nature of knowledge.Footnote ⁹⁸ According to Hamati-Ataya, a move beyond the subject-object dichotomy should be informed by social and naturalised epistemology.Footnote ⁹⁹ IR theorists must recognise ‘the fact that subjects of knowledge are embodied and socially located has the consequence that they are not fundamentally different from objects of knowledge’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Adorno’s Critical Theory offers a means of developing a similar line of thinking in pursuit of cognitive impact. From Adorno’s perspective, IR theorists’ ongoing struggle with the subject-object relationship is not surprising, since the propensity of enlightened subjects to pursue various ways of making thought a ‘self-sufficient totality’ – that is, to suppress recognition that they are indebted to something non-subjective – is the abiding pathology of modern philosophy and society, one which is not easily rectified.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In line with Hamati-Ataya’s attempt to rework objectivism from within, and with Scientific Realists’ criticisms of post-Positivism, he insists on the ‘primacy of the object’ against the abstractions of subjectivism.Footnote ¹⁰² In contrast with Scientific Realism, however, the hubris of subjectivism must be challenged by means of reflection rather than a renewed faith in scientific objectivity. Unlike the Habermasian and Poststructuralist theories examined above, on the other hand, the task of reflection is the relatively restricted one of reflecting on the tensions and contradictions of current epistemic principles rather than that of uncovering preconditions of knowledge and meaning operating at some more fundamental, intersubjective level.

According to Adorno, in modern Western societies the subject has, in various ways, been elevated to the position of ‘dictator’ over things.Footnote ¹⁰³ In philosophical terms the starkest manifestation of this development is Positivism, which relegates anything that cannot be reduced to logic or empirically identifiable facts to a ‘knowledge-free zone’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This reflects a wider intellectual tendency, apparent in various ways in other philosophical traditions, according to which cognition appears to involve only that which is immanent to the enlightened subject’s system of classification and the concepts it employs, and in which unmediated knowledge is the ideal.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Importantly for the purposes of the present article, this philosophical trend has emerged hand in hand with social processes – especially capitalist commodification – through which the world, including human beings, is quantified and rendered into fungible units. The assumption that there is ‘no remainder’ when we engage with the world as rational, enlightened subjects is reflected in the key units with which modern societies operate – commodities, data, and individuals, as well as concepts. Whether in his role as philosopher or capitalist, the enlightened subject is driven by a suspicion of anything that cannot be captured with these abstract and interchangeable units. Although it has proved to be a highly effective means of controlling and therefore surviving in the natural world, this suspicion also reflects a fear of ‘social deviation’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It is a real of source of compulsion manifested in the institutions and structures which govern modern Western societies.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Because the world does not go into such units without remainder, the result is reification and suffering, or ‘damaged life’ – those institutions and structures are experienced as something alien and unresponsive.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Ultimately, this explains why ‘enlightened’ and rationalised European society found itself, in Adorno’s day, descending into unprecedented ‘barbarism’ – individuals were increasingly left with a purified, formalised subjectivity which provided very little basis for resisting cruelty and domination.

The approach Adorno proposes for disclosing identity thinking and its effects is ‘negative dialectics’, which aims to generate a ‘consistent sense of non-identity’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ He explains that ‘[t]he name of dialectics says no more than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy.’ Philosophical reflection is vital to this project because it ‘extinguishes the autarky of the concept, strips the blindfold from our eyes’ and thereby reveals that thinking is ‘entwined with a non-conceptual whole’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The aim is to point to the ‘constitutive character of the non-conceptual in the concept’ and to move, tentatively, towards a new way of relating to the world that is not based solely on identity thinking.Footnote ¹¹¹ The goal is not to abandon identity thinking entirely, however; identification of some kind is integral to thought and it is a genuine achievement of the Enlightenment to have systematised it. To abandon it would represent a real regression.Footnote ¹¹² Rather, the as Peter Uwe Hohendahl has pointed out, the aim is to show by means of critique that ‘thought processes do not [simply] reproduce facts’ and that ‘as long as those processes continue, they open up possibilities’. In other words, the social deviation which identity thinking would obstruct remains possible. Negative thought therefore has a ‘utopian moment’ which belies the promise of the factual modes of thinking, including, as we shall see in a moment, those reflected in the pursuit of transparency and conspiracy.Footnote ¹¹³

Adorno’s reflection reveals that current forms of reason and cognition are ‘indebted’ to something that they cannot fully encompass – the objective – and which they have a tendency to obscure.Footnote ¹¹⁴ This objectivity is not the ‘dead’, value-free reality associated with Positivism in IR, but encompasses the social totality which precedes the subject, the material world which the enlightened subject would subsume within its concepts, and the corporeal dimension of subjectivity itself – the subject as a ‘object also a subject.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Importantly, however – and in keeping with Adorno’s refusal to resolve or explain away the subject-object problem – while the subject is also an object, the objective cannot be understood other than as it is mediated through subjectivity. This mutual mediation of subjectivity and objectivity leads Adorno to resist the temptation to give firm definitions of either. The closest he comes is the observation that

While it is expressed in philosophical terms, this statement gives a sense of the fragile balance it is necessary to maintain in dealing with the subject-object relationship as it appears in epistemic phenomena of the kind under consideration in the present article.

On the one hand, modern individuals are presented with a society that increasingly operates through the circulation of ‘classified data’. Under these circumstances, they turn to epistemic ideals or projects promising access to data or the facts in the hope that in doing so they will come to understand or influence the structures with which they are faced. The resources with which the individual tends to approach this façade – relentless pursuit of the facts, the demand for access to information – are, however, wrongly taken to be those of the ‘objective’ pursuit of the truth. These are in fact the resources of subjects who have already been shaped by identity thinking and are losing sight of the possibility of particular experience and original judgment which would really be objective (insofar as they would avoid subjectivist reification).

Unfortunately, then, the resources that appear to promise insight, progress, and empowerment are the very bricks from which the impenetrable ‘façade’ of modern institutions is constructed. On the other hand, those aspects of experience and activity which still partly escape the systems thereby established – art, emotion, reflection, ethics, for example – are denigrated as merely ‘subjective’ and relegated to the cognition-free realm mentioned above.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In fact, since these are things that are not easily rendered into classified data in accordance with modern subjectivism, they potentially provide a better means of avoiding reified subjectivity and of illuminating its structures. To the extent that they have yet to be transferred to the ‘non-controversial’ side, such experiences and activities can give us cognitive purchase. To this extent they are more ‘objective’ than the resources offered by Positivism.

Given this critique, in his efforts to avoid identity thinking while highlighting the primacy of the objective, Adorno must take care not to claim conventional objective insight – that is, to adopt the position of a subject who can capture the facts in an unproblematic manner. For this reason, as well as proceeding on the reflexive basis just described, he frequently ‘reads’ cultural or philosophical artefacts in a way that captures the currently reified nature of the subject-object relationship while maintaining a sense that it could be articulated otherwise that it is. From this perspective, a concept or theory can be ‘true’ to the extent that it reflects some dimension of existing social conditions, but false to the extent that it gives the impression of their permanence. For example, Positivism can be described as ‘true’ insofar as it is an expression of the atomistic, alienated form of social relations shaped by the calculative rationality of capitalist society. At the same time, it is ‘false’ because it is incapable of recognising the distortion these social relations involve.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The subject-object distinction itself is ‘true’ to the extent that ‘in the cognitive realm it serves to express the real separation, the dichotomy of the human condition, a coercive development’. It is ‘false’ because ‘the resulting separation must not be hypostatised, not magically transformed into an invariant’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ This approach captures the way in which, however reified it might have become, the subject-object relationship cannot be frozen but is, rather, always open to new articulations.

The dangers of false clarity

Adorno’s critique of identity-thinking serves a ‘world-disclosing’ function – it illuminates and denaturalises the operation of epistemic assumptions that are usually taken for granted, revealing that they retain the character of rigid myths or superstitions.Footnote ¹²⁰ More specifically, it undermines their implicit claim – identified at the start of the previous section – to represent a progression to a new epistemic stage based on ever less mediated knowledge. His approach to the subject-object relationship therefore provides the means of addressing the problems that have emerged in our attempt to provide an account of epistemic folkways in international politics. It gives a sense of what is distinctive about modern forms of knowledge – technically, normatively, politically, and existentially – while at the same time undermining the impression of epistemic progress that they tend to impose. It thereby rubs epistemic history against the grain in the manner the need for which was identified above.

This was an important task for Adorno, for whom one of the primary social and political manifestations of identity thinking was the pursuit of ‘false clarity’. In keeping with the connection between enlightened thought and compulsion described above, the preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment, states that ‘[f]alse clarity is another name for myth’ which, it is pointed out, was always ‘obscure and luminous at once’.Footnote ¹²¹ Like identity thinking in general, but in a manner similar to older forms of superstition, this modern clarity is maintained by ‘tabooing any thought which sets out negatively from the facts and from the prevailing modes of thought as obscure, convoluted, and preferably foreign’ and in doing so ‘holds mind captive in ever deeper blindness’.Footnote ¹²² Moreover, the ‘concept of clarity’ to which ‘art, literature, and philosophy must conform’ is not neutral, but is defined by the ‘prevailing usages’ of knowledge in ‘science, business and politics’.Footnote ¹²³

Dialectic of Enlightenment closes with a more specific warning about the dangers of pursuing false clarity and an indication of the ways in which they might materialise. A fragment entitled ‘Isolation by Communication’ describes the operation of clarity in more concrete terms. In this case it does not take the form of epistemological boundary-setting in support of technical knowledge, but of the transparency of material structures and relationships. The authors describe ‘the glass partitions of modern offices’ in which employees ‘can be easily supervised by the public and their managers’. Under such conditions – which, it is worth remembering are only more prevalent in the present day – uniformity can spread while the space for ‘private conversations and idylls’ disappears.Footnote ¹²⁴ The same theme is repeated elsewhere in Adorno’s work where we find references to ‘society’s crystal-clear order’ and ‘cellophane shamelessness’, and to the modern view ‘that the life and experience of the people … is a kind of glass case’ as a ‘desperate abstraction’.Footnote ¹²⁵

Far from being a source of progress, then, the idealisation and pursuit of unmediated knowledge – of ready access to information – is a modern myth that tends to entangle subjects in the reification described above. As an ideal and a practice, clarity is the manifestation of subjectivism in the experiences, structures, and ideals of modern society. Its assertion is not only a matter of moulding cognition into a form conducive to technical success, but also of creating communities and individuals who present no obstacle to the pursuit of that same goal. The experience of those subjects and their interaction with one another becomes impoverished as a result. In the terms used in our historical sketch, the subject-object relationship is articulated in such a way that the prevailing forms of technical knowledge determine the pursuit of normative-political progress and the terms of meaningful individual existence.

The reificatory implications of the pursuit of clarity is apparent in both the transparency ideal and conspiracy theorising. Contemporary claims about the importance of transparency reflect the fact that we live in a world in which technical, normative political, and existential spheres described earlier in the article are shaped by the creation and circulation of the information. Certainly, within each of those strands, the absence of transparency is often experienced as a threat or obstacle. This is most obviously the case within the technical systems of global governance where it is important that the relevant actors have access to accurate information. As we have seen, transparency was also vital to the development of a modern public sphere that challenges traditional forms of authority. To this extent faith in transparency is ‘true’ in the Adornian sense described above – it reflects the realities of international power.

It is ‘false’, however, to the extent that it reflects the assumption that knowledge and social interaction are necessarily matters of the circulation of data and that, in this form, they currently provide a source of political empowerment. As suggested above, this is not a simple historical ‘fact’ but reflects a particular form of knowledge and interaction that has proved to be effective and appealing in modern societies. The reduction of large sections of life to data necessary for the creation of such information involves procedures of epistemic boundary-setting which maintain structures indifferent to the needs and experiences of the individuals whose lives they govern. It is far from clear that transparency necessarily escapes or successfully subverts this purified form of cognition. While individual instances of increased transparency achieved by campaigners – of ‘plugging-in’ to information-based systems – will often prove empowering, they provide no model for more general international empowerment since individuals will still be confronted with institutions run on the basis of the manipulation of data. As argued above, this is to a great extent the source of disempowerment in the first place. The ideal of transparency plays a role in driving this process onwards.

The dangers in question are apparent in the extent to which many of the international institutions and systems which transparency apparently promises to transform are already maintained on the basis of transparency. The following statement from the International Monetary Fund is suggestive of the problem:

While it acknowledges the importance of public accountability, the view of transparency presented here is largely that of a means to ‘efficiency’ and effective ‘management’ based on ‘accuracy’ and ‘information’. These might be important goals, but under present conditions they are distinct from those of popular political empowerment. The form of epistemic activity being promoted is one in which the world is purged of obstacles to the smooth running of technical systems, in this case the global financial system – precisely the subjective abstraction which Adorno feared was taking hold in practice as well as in theory.

As with transparency, it is possible to ‘read’ conspiracy-thinking as a cultural phenomenon with cognitive content – as both true and false in a manner which captures the ongoing articulation of the subject-object relationship. Conspiracy thinking is more obviously ‘false’ insofar as it takes the pursuit of information and rationalisation of the world to even further extremes. That such thinking does so has long been noted. Hofstadter explains that ‘paranoid scholarship’

Conspiracy theories and other forms of paranoid thinking imbue the world with coherence, purging it of all that is ambiguous or accidental by focusing on facts and rational subjectivity. As Hofstadter points out, this is a highly rationalistic erasure of contingency according to which the world is shaped through rational actions. Each of these tendencies is, of course, at odds with good scientific practice that has always emphasised contingency and the need for critical interpretation of facts. However, conspiracy thinking is scientistic insofar as it reflects unquestioning faith that empiricism and rationalism provide the basis upon which progress or insight will be achieved. Like all scientism, it is a caricature of science.

Adorno identified a similarly scientistic combination of hyper-empiricism and hyper-rationalism in his analysis of the astrology column of the Los Angeles Times. He places such superstition within the same epistemic constellation as Positivism, in which any space for reflection has been squeezed-out:

This squeezing out of the space for reflection and interpretation is also apparent in the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that accompanied the rise of fascism. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, anti-Semitism is the behaviour of ‘blinded people, deprived of subjectivity, are let loose as subjects’, it is a pathology in which subjects are ‘passively succumbing to the dazzlement of false immediacy’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Because the exploitation involved in the capitalist system is not immediately apparent, the anti-Semite looks to the immediately available scapegoat.Footnote ¹³⁰ The role of false clarity in anti-Semitism reflects the loss of judgment and of the capacity for active cognition and their replacement by readymade categories and stereotypes, a process which reflects the reification involved in enlightened thinking in general. A similar pattern is apparent in contemporary conspiracy theories, where active reflection and interpretation are rejected in favour of collection of ‘the facts’ and accounts of the world in terms of readymade stereotypes, villains, and scapegoats such as ‘mainstream media’ or ‘illuminati’.

Just as with the ideal of transparency, however, there is an important truth to conspiracy thinking. Like transparency it reflects the reality of an information society in which faith in clarity has been elevated to the status of a political ideal and defining feature of individual identity. More importantly – and in contrast with most discussions of transparency – because conspiracy theorists do not believe the sources of clarity to lie in prevailing institutions, their attitude reflects the reality that many of the current structures of governance are experienced by large numbers of people as unresponsive or as a threat, and that this cannot be rectified simply by means of access to the information institutions themselves provide. In other words, it reflects the truth that technical knowledge is generally used to promote goals other than popular empowerment, that institutions of global governance are experienced as malicious or indifferent actors, and that the normative-political resources of the public sphere are severely depleted when it comes to dealing with them.Footnote ¹³¹ Perhaps most importantly, it reflects the possibility that the means of rejuvenating that sphere might lie elsewhere than within existing institutions and their transparency policies.

Nevertheless, conspiracy thinking does draw upon the same epistemic resources as the technical practices of modern institutions, which strive to create a coherent and therefore controllable reality by generating information and facilitating its circulation. For this reason it is not fundamentally counter-cultural. The fundamental problem is not simply the crude scientism and rationalism reflected in conspiracy theories, but their participation in the purification of reason in practice such that the space available for reflection and interpretation – creative thinking – diminishes. The problem is not, ultimately, that conspiracy theorists lend coherence to a society which is in fact characterised by contingency – the success of identity thinking is such that this is not the case in any simple sense – but that, like the advocates of transparency, they accept many of the sources of the disempowerment they want to address. Conspiracy theories reduce the public dimension of reflection identified in the first section of this article to the identification rather than the interpretation of facts and to the imputation of a malevolent subjectivity operating behind the scenes. At the level of the existential dimension of modernity, conspiracy theorising serves the same consoling function as does technical knowledge according to Dialectic of Enlightenment; a world free from contingency and uncertainty is an appealing one to modern individuals, who are increasingly at the mercy of distant and obscure structures.

In his article on astrology, Adorno writes that:

The same might be said of faith in transparency and the acceptance of conspiracy theories. Both reflect an assumption that access to hidden information will offer some form of empowerment in the face of unresponsive, exploitative, or restrictive institutions and structures. In particular cases this can be true. However, at a more general level, upon close inspection, the empowerment in question turns out to extend the influence of a specific form of technical knowledge that operates by excluding and suppressing the concrete and particular. At the level of individual and collective empowerment – the existential and normative-political spheres identified above – the result is a vicious circle; empowerment in relation to institutions maintained on the basis of technical knowledge is pursued by further extending the reach of that form of knowledge. To the extent that it is assumed that access to more information simply is empowering, the circle is concealed. The utopian dimension of thought is equated with less mediated access to data.

Adorno identifies this tendency to assume that problems will be resolved for those with access to the facts as a recurring feature in modern culture:

‘Somehow’ here stands in for the possibilities for collective and individual knowledge and reflection, which are being killed-off through the progression of identity thinking, but through which individuals and groups might begin to understand how to construct a world in which their interests really were taken care of. The appeal of this ‘somehow’ – the idea that through ready access to information we are empowered – is particularly strong in the international sphere, where structures for ensuring that the interests of citizens are ‘taken care of’ are even more lacking than elsewhere. It suggests a void at the heart of contemporary epistemic folkways and their manifestations, recognition of which must be added to any attempt to provide insight into the contemporary international politics of knowledge.