Column Title: Meaningful-Faith: Words, the Word, and a Life of Substance
Column Entry: “How the Age of Conspiracy became Inescapable, and How to Escape from It”
By Mark Williams, Ph.D.
Professor of Rhetoric, California State University, Sacramento
July 2025 / March 2025 / February 2025 / January 2025 / July 2024 / June 2024 / May 2024 / November 2022 / October 2022 / March 2022 / February 2022 / November 2021 / October 2021 / September 2021 / August 2021 / June-July 2021 / April-May 2021
According to the French philosopher Alain Badiou, we live in a world that has (incorrectly, Badiou believes) reduced all of life to only two subsets: bodies and language. Nothing else is treated as if it were important or even real. There is nothing else available to a mind and soul working in the contemporary world under the world’s assumptions. But a world where there are only things and words about things is a world where words are severely limited in what they can mean.
We might yell our “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world” as Walt Whitman says.[i] That is, we can engage in untranslatable self-expression. When we use words in this way—as self-expression—language becomes infallible, of course. If all you are doing is yawping your barbaric yawp, there is no way to yawp wrong. There is no correcting you and no need to correct you. Barbaric yawping and erring in the content of your barbaric yawp are mutually exclusive. Yawp away with an absolute, fundamentalist certainty that you are doing it right!
In the Bodies-and-Language world, about the only alternative to imprinting oneself infallibly (but probably irrelevantly) on this passing moment by an act of self-expressive yawping is to use language as an act of manipulative power to govern and regulate other bodies. Language can express the self, or it can work to have power over the other. That’s it. That’s all words are good for. Under these rules, every time anyone says anything (so long as it is not a barbaric yawp), they are constructing webs of power to forward their agenda or weaken someone else’s agenda. Every public discourse is a thinly veiled exercise in manipulation.
If you want to understand why we, today, fall so quickly and so easily into conspiracy theories, look no further. In a world of only Bodies-and-Language, words are always conspiratorial. So, your weird uncle was, in one way, right. The conspiracy theorists have a diagnosis that cannot be too easily dismissed: we actually are, in fact, surrounded by constant attempts to mislead and manipulate us, and every offering evidence is actually a façade manufactured to mask an agenda of identity or self-serving policy. Under the Bodies-and-Language worldview, manipulation is the sole form of public discourse. But it is not some Them (the illuminati, or the Templars or MAGA or the Dems) that is out to get you. Manipulation is simply the only way to interact in public discourse (as opposed to private, emotive, yawping).
I have seen the Bodies-and-Language assumptions among academics and fundamentalists, evangelicals and atheists, PhDs and people who dropped out of High School, Catholics and Muslims. It is almost the uniting theme of our culture. No matter what one says they believe, this assumption is a foundational part of the worldview, I would guess, of twenty-four out the last twenty-five people you’ve talked to. It is the defining vision of every person who has not escaped both the Modern vision of the world and the Postmodern vision of the world. As much as we like to believe these two are in some sort of cage-fight to the death, they are cooperative mirror images of each other. The Modernist and the Postmodernist are both fundamentalists, nurturing a certainty and believing that you can only construct a flourishing human life if you build on its own brand of certainties.
Modernism insisted that material and objective certainties should be the exclusive foundation of human choices. Postmodernism simply duplicated the Modern’s limited scope of thought, but it substituted psychological and subjective certainties for the material ones. But the problem is certainty itself. Or at least one big part of the problem. What we need is ignorance, hesitation, doubt (which is to say, faith).
In that world of Bodies-and-Language, words seek out certainties rather than nuance. But there are only two realms of certainty in this world: mathematics and fanaticism. Conspiracy theories are simply a species of fanaticism; perhaps the two are consubstantial. The conspiracists settle on a flattering absolute (I am the Chosen; I have seen the hidden mysteries others have missed), and these individuals can at least order their own interior life, with some sense of agency, in the midst of all the manipulative horrors that make up the present chaos of public language.
But let us be careful! The fanatic is not them alone. Rather it is us, too—so long as we remain within that interpretive frame of Bodies-and-Words. We are all trapped in precisely that social context, and just because we reassure ourselves that we have escaped from it does not mean we have escaped from it. Escaping the illusion is exactly what a conspriacist calims, remember. And we are all conspiracy theorists, if we accept Badiou’s diagnosis. But not all hope is lost. It really is possible to edge our way out of that frame and reintroduce what Badiou says this Bodies-and-Language world excludes. We might reintroduce Truth.
Truth, Plato says, requires two things. First, the person who wants Truth must acknowledge that things like justice and goodness and beauty are not, at their very core, matters of personal preference. They exist, instead, apart from our opinions about them and our words about them, and they are not changed by our private opinions and words. Second, and closely attached to the first, it follows that I might be wrong about what I think is good and right and beautiful (just as I might make a mathematical mistake in calculating the area of a trapezoid). In other words, I must admit to some measure of ignorance. I must approach these True realities with a humility that invites others (who have rejected the Bodies-and-Language world view) to talk to me and to teach me. And I expect of them an equal humility: to be willing to listen to me and to learn from me. And suddenly, when a world of Bodies-and-Language becomes the world of Bodies-and-Language-and-Truth, words are rehabilitated, and language blooms again. Now, we can talk to each other, where before we could only use or dominate each other’s bodies.
And how is faith and doubt related to this idea of Truth and ignorance? Stay tuned.
* The views of any CCSN columnists are their own, and do not necessarily represent the views of the CCSN. We invite and embrace a wide range of views and critiques on important communication and cultural issues from a Christian perspective. The CCSN is a community of Jesus followers who study communication. We do not support or promote a particular social, political, or denominational agenda.
[i] Song of Myself, 52, line 3.