Higher criticism
Although nearly all researchers of the JFK assassination focus on evidence
and theories, the classical minutiae of the case, a small but growing body of
scholars are beginning to examine the assassination from very different
perspectives. These scholars are much less interested in who did it and how we
can know, and most interested in aspects such as how this major
twentieth-century event interacted with the rest of our postmodern culture. They
are concerned with question such as the kind of discourse that has spring up
around it, how its knowledge is organized (relative to knowledge of earlier
major historical events), the role of the media in reporting the assassination
and its aftermath, how postmodernism and conspiracy theory interacted, and how
knowledge about the assassination was (and is being) produced.
This section can take only the most introductory look into these new and
evolving aspects of the assassination. For the moment at least, it is limited to
three articles from the recent literature and references to ideas presented in a
small number of books. I expect that this part of the course will grow
considerably as time progresses. The paragraphs that follow constitute an
extremely brief introduction to some of the ideas discussed in these articles
and books.
Jeff Schwartz
The first article is also the longest. Jeff Schwartz's 1992 M.A. thesis in
Popular Culture Studies, Bowling Green University, Ohio, is entitled "Postmodernity,
History, and the Assassination of JFK." In it, he examines subjects such as
how "the discourse of conspiracy theory surrounding the assassination of
John F. Kennedy is the most fully developed example of a new organization of
knowledge of past events." With "the full-scale employment of new
media," knowledge about this event was gathered differently from all
previous major event. Schwartz considers the "information glut and the
resultant epistemological/historical crisis" that it created, as well as
other very interesting related topics such as the rise of the "uncredentialled
revisionist historian, the conspiracy theorist." The three main chapters of
his thesis examine the relation between postmodernist theory and conspiracy from
three standpoints: "first to trace the disintegration of Oswald's
subjectivity, and then to describe the double movement of conspiracy writing: a
schizophrenic breaking of causality accompanied by the paranoic restoration of
narrativity by means of a fictional supplement."
Jeff Schwartz, "Postmodernity, History, and the Assassination of JFK"
Roger Gilles
The second article, "Sophistic Synthesis in the JFK Assassination,"
by Roger Gilles of Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan, uses the "rhetoric
surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy [as a] unique testing ground
for theories about the construction of knowledge in society." He concludes
that "the current 'sophistic' theories of rhetoric offer the most effective
models for analyzing and understanding the JFK assassination theories and, more
generally, the histories we Americans are currently creating for
ourselves." As subject matter, Gilles focuses on Jim Garrison's On the
Trail of the Assassins, and concludes that "...as [a synthesis of
argument and narrative] the book suggests the form and style that successful
assassination theories--and perhaps successful histories in general--will most
likely follow in this culture in the near future. Judged in Aristotelian terms,
the book is perhaps not a rigorous or plausible as several other assassination
theories; judged in sophistic terms, however, it stands out as the most
successful of the dozens of published theories."
Roger Gilles, "Sophistic Synthesis in JFK Assassination Rhetoric"
Catherine Liu
The third article, Catherine Liu's "Conspiracy (Theories)," makes
considerably shorter reading because it devotes only a page to the origin of
conspiracy theories for the assassination, after taking several pages to set up
her overall subject of "psycho-Marxism." She proposes that JFK
conspiracy theories "forge a critique that would include psychoanalytic
theory and ideological critique at the same time." I include the
relevant pages from her article so that you can see something of the parallel
she is drawing with other manifestations of psycho-Marxism.