SubStance

What Outside?

The title of Outsider Theory is artfully contrived. By the end of the book, it figures as a near tautology, for Jonathan Eburne here contributes to the study of knowledge production a disclosure of high theory’s intimacy with unrespectable systems of ideas. These systems include the outsider science of Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision, the amalgam of outsider science and the pick’n’mix theology that is Scientology, and gnostic fictions that tease with a key to all mysteries such as The Da Vinci Code. The book’s first origin story, one out of many, is related in its Preface, with Eburne’s purchase of a large library of popular esoterica, “hundreds upon hundreds of titles” (xiii) found on Craigslist; this library was surely awaiting Eburne and he was primed to receive it. As a starting point, it immediately reconfigures “outsider” as a popular and pervasive phenomenon, something akin to conspiracy theories. The subsequent Introduction sets out the stakes: Eburne brings his discussion of the Sokal hoax to bear on a present where any scientific evidence can be dismissed as ‘just a theory.’¹ What is striking, though, is the subtlety of Eburne’s take on Sokal; what he traces is the perverse effect of a hoax designed to strengthen the boundaries of scientific thinking under pressure from social constructionism, in serving a popular hermeneutics of suspicion that rebounds upon scientific evidence.

Outsider Theory tracks the way in which esoteric systems form out of existing intellectual debris and seed new knowledge-worlds, whether evidently paranoid, whether poignant or violent expressions of desire on the part of oppressed groups, or whether poetically productive or generative of academically credentialed theory—or even returning time and again newly credentialed, as, for example, Lamarckian evolution. That Eburne’s investigations were prompted by mass-market paperbacks immediately challenges the esotericism of so-called esoteric knowledge, and where and how Outside can be situated—for the term ‘esoteric’ derives [End Page 188] from the ancient Greek for ‘within.’ It all depends on where you stand. If millions believe that Armstrong’s moon landing was a false flag operation or that vaccination against measles is a dastardly plot, Outside has to be reformulated in a way that no longer refers primarily to the isolated crank or the social outcast. The Outside is everywhere, and turn and turn about, the rationalist may find herself the outsider.

Outsider Theory, subtitled Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas, might at first entice as a collection of case studies of sometimes crazed ingenuity. While it does afford the pleasures of wonderment at human gullibility and creative misconception, the book is far more ambitious than that; its attention is trained on the afterlife and dispersal of outsider theories, and on claims about the unacknowledged persistence of outsider theories within respectable, accepted bodies of knowledge, however ‘within’ and ‘without’ might be situated and enforced. At some level, I would suggest, and on some occasions, scholars and artists come to recognize the near madness of the colleague whose intellectual world is determined by adherence to a particular theoretical system, just as we recognize, in vertiginous moments, the madness in our own dearest adherences. These have become our fields and we tend to walk their boundaries. In cunningly dilapidating the walls between the peer-reviewed and the cultish, between the canonical and the isolated, Outsider Theory sits alongside Daniel Tiffany’s My Silver Planet (2013), whose gleeful display of the embarrassing proximity of lyric poetry to kitsch and of poetic fakery to authenticity is a similarly provocative assault on enclosed fields. The drift of paranoid conspiracy theories into mainstream political discourse makes these studies particularly timely; it might be argued that the fragmentation of all-encompassing systems of knowledge accepted by large populations, whether Roman Catholicism, liberal capitalism or Maoism (systems with variable capacity to accommodate or hybridize with local cultures before destabilizing mitotically), has resulted in a plethora of outsider theories that mutate, combine, split, but they no more show a propensity...