Page 53 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

44 Graham White

THE COURTROOM AND THE CONSPIRACY

However, if the reading of social performance can be seen as offering a
significant degree of insight into the play of power emerging from the
narration of legal proceedings, we must also acknowledge that those
conspiracy theories which seem to proliferate around Diana and Dodi‘s death
tend themselves to take social performance as foundational, and perhaps to
value it above even indisputable evidence, fact and testimony. In his 1988
outlining of a model of conspiracy theorising, Frederic Jameson suggested that
‗Conspiracy is the poor person‘s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it
is a degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to
represent the latter‘s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer
theme and content‘ [Jameson, p. 355]. More recently, for Peter Knight,
‗Narratives of conspiracy now capture a sense of uncertainty about how
historical events unfold, about who gets to tell the official version of events,
and even about whether a causally coherent account is still possible. They
speak to current doubts about who or what is to blame for complex and
interconnected events‘ [Knight, pp. 3-4]]. Such analysis suggests that
conspiracy theories build on postmodern doubt concerning the ability to gain
purchase on complex and dislocating actions. ―The culture of conspiracy
surrounding the Kennedy assassination is, for Knight, so enduring, not because
it provides a compensatory sense of closure and coherence, nor even because it
led to a loss of innocence, but because it is very much in tune with a
postmodern distrust of final narrative solutions‖ [Knight, pp. 3-4]. In the case
of Diana such distrust led originally to a series of scattershot theories
regarding her demise, theories which, given the centrality of the Royal Family
to the British state, had a powerful semiotic resonance. The idea that Diana
may have been assassinated by secret service agents due to being impregnated
by a Muslim lover who she intended to marry certainly captures a range of
iconic fears and anxieties surrounding the circumstances of public affairs.
Equally, the sense of an overlap between surveillance and publicity, that
perhaps paparazzi might be as close to security services as to newspapers, was
compellingly dramatic. In such versions of the purposes of the Inquest, not
only was the extreme popularity of the Princess read as a reason for this
courtroom to become an equally popular location for the public, but the
complex of theories became a further reason for making this a compelling
show – those theories were to be put, tested and contested in a live discursive
space.