title: "Where We Go One, We Go All": QAnon and the Mediology of Witnessing
title: QAnon and the Mediology of Witnessing
titleType: AlternativeTitle
Creators: name: Adleman, Daniel
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: conspiracy theories
subject: media
subject: communication
subject: rhetoric
subject: cultural studies
subject: QAnon
subject: Jodi Dean
subject: Kenneth Burke
subject: Carrie Rentschler
subject: John Durham Peters
subject: Jonathan Sterne
subject: activism
subject: pedagogy
subject: algorithms
subject: social media
subject: search engines
subject: Google
subject: Facebook
subject: Twitter
subject: YouTube
subject: Immanuel Kant
subject: Enlightenment
subject: psychoanalysis
subject: philosophy
subject: Max Weber
subject: Stuart Hall
subject: COVID-19
subject: coronavirus
subject: pandemic
subject: Plandemic
subject: ecocriticism
subject: infrastructure
subject: racism
subject: sexism
subject: classism
subject: Donald Trump
subject: sovereignty
subject: Communication Technology and New Media
subject: Critical and Cultural Studies
subject: Digital Humanities
subject: Environmental Studies
subject: Epistemology
subject: Ethics and Political Philosophy
subject: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication
subject: Health Communication
subject: Political Theory
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology
subject: Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies
subject: Rhetoric
subject: Science and Technology Studies
subject: Social Influence and Political Communication
subject: Social Justice
subject: Social Media
subject: Speech and Rhetorical Studies
subject: Theory and Philosophy

description: “Where We Go One, We Go All”: QAnon and the Mediology of Witnessing When critics admonish their opponents for circulating mere conspiracy theories, they are disparaging them for subscribing to facile accounts of socio-historical phenomena that are more sophisticated and aleatory than such heavy-handed narratives apprehend. Unfortunately, this kind of disavowal has the side-effect of precluding conspiracy theories from more serious philosophical consideration. Arguably the most notorious information age conspiracy theory of the moment is QAnon, a byzantine, messianic truther echo-system that has recently irrupted into mainstream public consciousness. QAnon derives its name from “Q,” a lurid, anonymous, putatively omniscient insider who has been dropping missives on message boards about Donald Trump’s clandestine war with a satanic, sex-trafficking, election-fixing cabal that lurks beneath the liberal establishment. In order to engage with QAnon as a cultural phenomenon, my article probes the rhetorical coordinates of the popular concept of conspiracy theory through optics provided by Kenneth Burke and Jodi Dean. Drawing on the recent media scholarship of Carrie Rentschler, Kate Starbird, and John Durham Peters, I then examine QAnon culture as a misguided activist modality of witnessing (what Alain Badiou might call a “pseudo-Event”) precipitated, in no small part, by rhetorical and algorithmic architecture that subtends an ever-increasing proportion of human subjectivity. I conclude with some reflections on the viability of what media theorist Jonathan Sterne terms an "intervention."