Understanding and Criticizing Conspiracy Theory through Counter-Speech

If we follow deliberative democracy to solve social conflicts through discussion, we need to distinguish between intersubjectively shared true and false social problems. Although challenged by postmodern ideas, critique of ideology still helps making this distinction. Whether we see ideology as a broad system of thought or more narrowly as the rupture between being and reality, this mode of critique works by drawing boundaries between what is either morally good or bad and what is true or false.

From a cultural-sociological perspective, conspiracy theories are heterodox knowledge that seeks to explain a social problem with the help of a conspiracy. It is a ‘theory’ insofar as it makes verifiable statements about assumed conspiracies. Often, it is easy to dismiss its arguments and claims as ideology, but conspiracies become particularly challenging if the distinction between heterodox and orthodox seems blurry. This is because good and true aspects of this knowledge should remain accessible to articulate problems, but how to deal with its ‘half-truths’?

In my contribution, I introduce the use of counter-speech as a suitable method for understanding and criticizing current conspiracy theories and their blurriness. Using the example of Islamization as a powerful conspiracy of the right-wing discourse, I will show how, in group discussions, it is precisely the deliberate discursivization of knowledge and counter-knowledge that helps to examine various forms that are significant for critique of ideology. This is because the data produced allows to reconstruct knowledge along the differences good/bad and true/false, but also knowledge as contested or even as affective and not discursive. On the one hand, this gives us a better understanding of the complexity, internal contradictions and limits of right-wing conspiracy knowledge; on the other hand, it makes its academic critique more specific, robust and transparent.