Dracula as Conspiracy Theory

By Erdogan Sima

Bram Stoker’s Dracula captivates its audience, obviously by articulating the ‘fears and tensions of the society in which it originated’.[i] Less obviously however, this captivation does not preclude the endorsement of what Jacques Lacan calls paranoiac knowledge.[ii] The Malthusian anxiety of the ‘social dangers of bodily vigor and thus of youthful energies’[iii] used to pervade the society of the conspiring vampire. And now, if ‘social dangers’ is the norm, Count Dracula is all the more one of us. The Count himself is certainly not youthful, yet we can anxiously recognize the vigor of the Un-dead in the way he shakes off human assumptions. But this is hardly the last word. The gothic resistance to humanity he performs nevertheless invokes a childlike rejection, most conspicuously, of human temporality. In Gothic, the presumably stable ontological boundaries (such as the one that demarcates life from death) are almost plausibly breached by ‘mediums and communicating spirits’.[iv] In Dracula, however, the staging of the vampiric conspiracy involves both a parody of ‘stable boundaries’ and a fascination with their breach. Dracula’s childlike defiance of the laws of time by which we solemnly live and die is only the tip of the catchy plot to infect the human subject by its elusive object. The vampiric conspiracy thrives on falsity; but it is true that the more we go to the bottom of it the more we become obsessed with the inscrutable ‘return of the repressed’ that perpetuates the plot. This second-hand paranoia, I believe, allows the Dracula narrative to return indefinitely as a conspiracy-within-conspiracy.

We try hard to catch up with the runaway child, only to find ourselves one step behind. An otherwise pointless pursuit, the hunt for the vampiric conspirator proves vital for the questions it allows us to pose. The question ‘why need we seek him further, when he is gone away from us’ appears pointedly naive given the paranoiac knowledge that ‘he can live for centuries’.[v] Crucially, though, it is this feigned naivety that normalizes the obsession. The paranoiac pursuit of the childlike Other can go unquestioned precisely in its pointlessness. But what if Dracula’s point is to translate the unfamiliarity of the vampire into the familiarity of vampiric conspiracy? If the pursuit plausibly exceeds the Victorian text, that is because ‘the familiar’ constantly escapes paranoiac knowledge. For vampirism ‘spreads from the inside out’,[vi] the familiar ‘inside’ emerges as dubious as the Transylvanian outsider. Foreseeably, the Other we thought we have successfully repressed will return to its unfolding audience, not least because the hunt is grounded not in his mute unfamiliarity but in the tell-tale breach of the great wall of ‘the familiar’. As if to ironize the Freudian assumption that ‘the foreign is always embedded in the familiar’,[vii] the hunters make sense of the conspiracy not in their terms but as per the ‘more than human considerations’ that the vampiric reality dictates (202). The Count’s one-man plot ‘to invade a new Land’ (317) becomes sensible once subordinated to the spread of vampirism, namely, to the contagious otherness of Dracula. Once his virality is narratively established, the inscrutable vampire becomes an object of epistemological capture. His grounds, the ancestral dirt that is his place of rest, can now be reclaimed simply by wielding the bio-political (if not epidemiological) force of the word ‘sterilize’ (271). To paraphrase Franco Moretti, the humans could not coexist[viii] with the more-than-human invader. Instead, we can subject him to paranoiac knowledge. The narrative way-out Dracula proposes is crude but effective: either we retreat to historical irrelevance, or he submits to the mainstream paranoia of contagious otherness. In the hunt for the vampire, it becomes harder to disentangle not only the predator from the prey but also the respectable epistemology we cling to from the paranoiac knowledge that captivates us. We know, deep down, where this readerly obsession with the crumbling walls leads to. Stoker himself knew better: ’it is not the least of [Dracula’s] terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in all good’ (224). The entanglement between the good hunters and the evil vampire is a price we pay for attempting to capture the emptiness that is the ‘the Other’. There is no end to the hunt for the elusive Dracula because there is a ‘hole’ therein[ix]. As we read on, Dracula’s way out proves an initiation to the lack of substance the Un-dead performs on our behalf. Forever will Dracula dodge the wall, because he is really wielding his inner ‘hole’; his power, the narrative goes, ‘is that people will not believe in him’.[x] In Dracula, the epistemological ‘wall’ which was supposed to tell the weakness of the hunted from the power of the hunters is not only crumbling but is also the grounds of a captivating narrative of escape.

To be able to unpack the open-ended captivation with the narrative of hole in the wall, let’s turn to the ‘paradox of paranoid narrative’.[xi] It is hard to see how the fiction of vampiric ‘pollution or dangerous power’[xii] could address the societal anxiety of ‘unregulated human power’[xiii] in which it originated. But it is much easier to grasp the performative emptiness of the vampire as the ‘limit to the powers of man’ (282). His power is defined by our disbelief, and it is precisely this ‘polluting’ lack of substance that explains the unexplainable fear of youthful energies. This is to say, the paranoiac knowledge that Dracula’s viral corporeality is not ‘amenable to mere strength’ (232) did not fall on deaf ears. To the powerful (yet anxious) hunters, the vampire’s fictional virality sounds as one and same with their societal vulnerability. The busting of the vampiric conspiracy by capturing the vampire as an empirically observable viral agent is more than a fantasm; as a plausible response to the doxa ‘things are not what they seem’,[xiv] it suggests defensive distrust—i.e. the power of disbelief, to replace the limits of manly power. Paradoxically, the crumbling of the walls reads like the erection of a much-needed new wall. We may admit that the virality of the vampiric conspiracy strikes a chord with the anxiety of its reader: Dracula weaponizes her anxiety, to plausibly suggest a relentless focus on ‘that which is alien to the self’.[xv]

As the supernatural plausibly mutates into the political (or vice versa), can we now say that the relentless pursuit of the vampire harkens back to the mainstream paranoia of witch-hunts? For one, the fantasmic powers the hunters deploy mirror the contagious otherness of the hunted. They may have found an imaginative way out in the performative emptiness of their prey; notably, they imagine Dracula as the one who ‘is experimenting and doing it well’ (281). That Dracula is ‘neither entirely masculine nor feminine’,[xvi] as Butler suggests, implies a ‘new’ resistance to the taxonomy we are already plagued by. The always ‘fading clarity of the old boundaries’[xvii] demands a constantly renewed distrust towards ourselves. Not unlike a virus, or a secret cabal conspiring against the always already taxonomized humans like us, Dracula is the paradigmatic more-than-human we could imagine as an experimental prospect. Both trapped and buoyed by the hole within, ‘Dracula’ could be our best shot to dodge the epistemological obsession with self-doubt. The ambivalent persona is certainly at work on behalf of paranoiac knowledge; and yet, the ‘intense feelings of distrust’ propping the object of paranoia also serve to displace the ‘sense of powerlessness’ that haunts the paranoid knower.[xviii] So, paradoxically, in the paranoid hunt for the unregulated power it is the powerless self that gets dodged. More exactly, Dracula reveals the obsession with viral otherness as the flip side of the regulative drive ‘to invent a new classification’ (68). In the crumbling of the limits of ‘man [sic]’, the reader could discern the ‘new’ powers she enjoys. What we are powerless to define is relentlessly captured in the indefiniteness of the hunt for the vampire. At hand is a virality that spreads precisely amongst those who do not believe in it; and it could be the anxious reader’s best hope for sustaining the everyday distrust she depends on. Dracula can be (re)imagined to mimic the knowledge of powerlessness that hurts its audience. Much like a conspiracy theory, it persists for its hopeful audience as ‘the black hole of the imagination’.[xix]

Imaginably, the Un-dead survives to explain our dependence on distrust. There is an actual ‘disparity between the world and its multiple representations’[xx]; and in this case, the disparity is a fictional reminder that we are permanently bound to update ‘our world’. As long as he acts out the captivating desire for a ‘new order of beings’ (280) we can rule out safety, ‘and the assurance of safety’, as ‘things of the past’ (37). The paranoiac pursuit of the Other persists in view of the ’new order’; it is an invitation to imagine the intrinsic perils of the ‘old’ world. The imaginary vampire is ‘the least dreadful’ (ibid.) next to the terrifying image of being not at home in our own world. We can likewise imagine Dracula’s audience as a community of survivors in the constantly updated world of conspiracies. To survive the evergreen anxiety over the ‘buried secrets’ plaguing their world, the Victorians had to assume that an open-ended knowledge would go on to ‘spread light into dark corners’.[xxi] The pursuit of the viral Other is indeed home to the mainstream assumption that open-ended ‘information gathering and distribution’ would entail ‘increased public safety’.[xxii] Still, it takes a fictional Other to shake off the assumption of safety as closure. The doxa that things are not what they seem to be, predates (and trivialize) the question ‘Why mutilate her poor body’ (154). And the answer accordingly glorifies open-endedness: ‘there are things that you know not, but that you shall know’ (ibid.). The human predators cling to the Victorian ‘spiritual pathology’ (113), in which open-ended distrust trumps epistemological closure. By convention, the Other is at the mercy of the predating self; but in the hunt for the vampire, the hunters are predated by the ever-lacking knowledge of vampirism. Paranoia becomes vital knowledge, notably at Dracula’s end, when the hunters concede that the hunt is ultimately subordinated to distrust, and not to ‘public safety’. The historical Dracula is a dead end. But the childlike desire he performs allows for the endless epistemological distrust we depend on. Were there be an end to the ‘hunt’, we would probably break down and confess (as the vampire-hunters do) that ‘We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us’ (351). Imaginably we want to survive, specifically through the ‘endless’ knowledge of the Other.

By construing vampirism as an internal rather than external threat,[xxiii] Dracula seems to side with a mainstream take on paranoia. The vampire-hunters are buoyed by a radical distrust of appearances which is nevertheless ‘embedded in the cultural logic of modernity’.[xxiv] They cannot be singled out for the ‘epistemological insecurity’[xxv] we hope to survive. Yes, the radical distrust comes to a head in Dracula; but only when the reader realizes that vampiric invasion is inextricable from human invitation. That ‘[h]e may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be some one of the household who bid him to come’ (223) refers to the thin line that separates everyday distrust from self-vigilance. We do, in fact, witness the everyday blurring of this line-in-the-sand in the image of ‘productive self-doubt’.[xxvi] The gothic fiction of vampirism encourages its reader, as Baudelaire would put it, to go on and produce her ‘self’. But aren’t we already prepared to do so? Indeed, the gothic ‘fear of the self ’[xxvii] offers a readerly comfort in Dracula, where it doubles as the paranoiac knowledge of contagious otherness. A certain vigilance toward oneself is invoked, for instance, in the knowledge ‘all that die from the preying of the Un-Dead becomes themselves Un-Dead’ (200). Where anyone could become a vampire, to doubt the all-too familiar self proves an exit strategy—as in a pandemic. The mainstream paranoia that (re)produces the familiar self as inextricable from the Transylvanian Count, also captivates the reader as an imaginative way out. In short, ‘either man will disappear or he will transform himself’[xxviii]; either way, the familiar ‘man [sic]’ must never be taken for granted. Dracula’s sneaky threat ‘Transylvania is not England’ (23) raises the question whether the familiarity of England is an aftereffect of the unfamiliarity of Transylvania. There is no denying that the stylistic mask Dracula wears is familiar to ‘Western audiences’.[xxix] But the familiarity follows from the way the style replicates the ambivalence of post-colonial travel-writing. The journal entries propping up the text stand for observed data: the way a travelogue does, they uphold not only the aloofness of the (‘Western’) observer but also trivializes the precarity of the wall that insulates ‘Western science’ from ‘Eastern magic’.[xxx] The ‘mass of material’ which makes up the text (351) is, so to speak, the data that are ‘designed to make sense of the world’.[xxxi] But, at least in this case, data is what makes up the ‘world’, almost naturally, as that which cannot be taken for granted. No mass of data will be enough to do away with the disparity between the world and its representations. Whereas she can possibly observe the ‘intermedial spectrality’ of Dracula[xxxii], the reader of Dracula cannot help but view the ‘England’ (and the ‘Transylvania’, for that matter) as that which is not what it seems to be.

The nineteenth-century Spiritualism had sought to ‘appropriate scientific authority for the experimental “empiricism” of the séance’.[xxxiii] I think Dracula goes a step further: its data-like textuality invests in our blind spot for epistemological closure but only to introduce us to the open-endedness of the hunt for the intermedial conspirator. While Spiritualism is torn between the materialization of the spirit world and the spiritualization of the material one,[xxxiv] Dracula’s politics depends on paranoiac knowledge to straddle both sides of the unstable ‘equilibrium’.[xxxv] The host/parasite balance, which sustains the captivating hunt for the vampire, turns out to be a productive feature of vampirism.

Dracula is about a parasite who has successfully internalized his parasitism; to state the obvious, the vampire is unashamed of his vampirism. As a more-than-human personification of self-contentment, the parasite somehow gets along with ‘human’ self-vigilance. In contrast to, say, James Malcolm Rhymer’s Varney (1847) which is textually torn between ‘animal instinct and human control’,[xxxvi] Stoker’s textual relationship to the parasitic Other is quite at home in its relational paranoia. Being trapped in the impossibility of disentangling the parasitic conspirator from its human hosts, is Dracula’s way of captivating humans like us. The countless returns of the childlike Other are also ways of restoring the parasite/host ‘equilibrium’. In effect, about a century later, the vampire returns[xxxvii] yet again as an unashamed conspirator. This time however, he rather captivates in his ‘desire for humanity’.[xxxviii] Apparently, Dracula has switched sides. In fact, the movement from the creature of darkness to ‘a producer of “light”’[xxxix] is the new way of confirming vampirism as the ‘other’ side. The obvious moral of the recurring story-within-story amounts to the (re)drawing of the line in the sand that separates vampirism from humanity. Less obvious is that the self-vigilant humanity, could no longer be taken granted as an object of desire. It should be remembered that a century ago, Dracula had to wear the mask of a foreigner desiring to become ‘more British than the British’[xl]; in this way, he could re-imagine the object of desire (i.e. the supposedly timeless ‘Britishness’) as a means to a conspiratorial end. Ultimately though, the invader had to submit to the knowledge of what it invades. We may never know when he discovered that he was trapped by the mask he wore. The childlike Other, in other words, is hurt by the ‘timeless’ knowledge he was supposed to exploit. Textually speaking, that Dracula was initially praised to ‘know and speak English thoroughly’ (22) would subsequently confirm his parasitism. Thus, the inscrutable Other is successfully captured in Victorian pathology, as the patient zero of the viral order he portends. As per this paranoiac knowledge, it is upon us to preemptively (and perpetually) ‘sterilize’ the anxious humanity—which is the forever target of contagious otherness.

A successful conspiracy theory, for it replaces contingency with agency,[xli] cannot admit of its finitude. Neither could the vampire-hunters stop assuming that ‘there is no such thing as finality’ (177), lest they admit their prey is but a hole in the wall. According to Moretti, Dracula can be likened to Capital as they are both geared to the ‘unlimited expansion’ of their respective domains.[xlii] I rather tend to understand this paradigmatic analogy in terms of the dictum ‘you can never be paranoid enough’.[xliii] Or in Aupers’ terms, because ‘[n]othing is what it seems’[xliv] Dracula’s is a never-ending narrative. As an expansive text about ‘unlimited’ expansion, it really is the story of the one that is not what it seems. The vampiric conspiracy can be dismissed, but in order to be dismissed the compelling story must be read anew, and anew. In sum, this is but a defensive reading; it amounts to switching sides, always all the time. In a hectic movement from ‘human “individualism”’ to ‘vampirical “totalization”’,[xlv] the reader of Dracula is compelled to surrender to the indefiniteness of more-than-human temporality. The timeless persona ‘Dracula’ is likely to captivate its time-bound audiences as a glimpse into the new order. Yet the captivation depends on the paranoiac knowledge that time is not on our side—even as we keep switching sides, all the time, from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’. Our hectic lives will be definitely shorter than the story of the not-what-it-seems Un-dead.

Erdogan Sima is a Ph.D. researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Lapland. The focus of his research is on the emergent subjectivities that challenge the ontological coherence of the neoliberal conception of security. His research has been published in journals such as New Political Science and Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook. He is currently completing a dissertation titled ‘“Placeless” defense: The normative turn in military technology.’

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[i] As Erik Butler suggests in ‘Writing and Vampiric Contagion’ (p.13) Stoker’s text effectively inscribes itself  in the anxieties and uncertainties of its times.

[ii] ‘Others hurt us with their knowledge, with what they say, as do we’. So we cling to the question ‘What will the Other do next’. In this sense, ‘our relation to knowledge is fundamentally paranoiac’ See: Mills, J. ‘Lacan on Paranoiac Knowledge’, p. 32.

[iii] Wiener, M. J., Reconstructing the Criminal, p. 29.

[iv] See: Sword, H. Ghostwriting Modernism, p. xi.

[v] Stoker, B. Dracula, p. 292. Further page references to the book will be parenthetical.

[vi] Butler, E. Op cit., p. 21.

[vii] As mentioned by Lotte Pedersen in ‘Conditions of Homelessness’, p. 225.

[viii] For ‘his nature forces him to struggle to be unlimited, to subjugate the whole of society’, Franco Moretti emphasizes, in Signs Taken for Wonders, p. 92.

[ix] The efforts to catch up with the Other, Lacan notes, renders visible ‘a fault, hole or loss therein’, as cited in Stavrakakis’ Lacan and the Political. Routledge, p. 253.

[x] Thus speaks Van Helsing, the lead vampire-hunter, in the stage and film versions of Dracula. See: Skal, D.J. Hollywood Gothic, p. 11.

[xi] It is suggested that the paradox lies in the narrative’s ‘exposure of social antagonisms it may want to repress and the reinforcement of a status quo it may wish to subvert.’ See: Dunst, A. Madness in Cold War America, p. 126.

[xii] McWhir, A. ‘Pollution and Redemption in “Dracula”’, p. 32.

[xiii] See: Wiener, M.J. Op cit., p.11.

[xiv] Wiener, M.J. Op cit., p. 248.

[xv] Mills, J. Op cit., p. 32.

[xvi] Butler, E. Op cit., p. 17.

[xvii] As observed in the fading of the ‘profound difference between deviance and normality’. See: Wiener, M.J. Op cit., p. 253.

[xviii] See: Pourgiv, F. et al., ‘Paranoia vs. Anti-paranoia’, p. 52.

[xix] See: Skal, D. J. Op cit., p.5.

[xx] The disparity finds a reflection in the ‘ever-present paranoia’ of ‘finding hidden intentions beyond the apparent order of events’. See: Pourgiv, F. et al. Op cit., p. 54. Elsewhere, it is likewise suggested that Dracula’s ambiguous take on Dracula ‘encourages the reader to see the frequent discrepancies between their professed beliefs and their actions’ See: Senf, C. A. ‘The Unseen Face’, p. 161.

[xxi] Wiener, M.J. Op cit., p. 246.

[xxii] Wiener, M.J. Op cit., p. 247.

[xxiii] Senf, C.A. Op cit., p. 165.

[xxiv] See: Aupers, S. ‘Modernization, Paranoia and Conspiracy Culture’, p.23.

[xxv] According to Stef Aupers, the ‘attempts to capture the real truth in countless conspiracy theories can only further contribute to the epistemological insecurity that motivated the rise of conspiracy culture in the first place’. Op cit.,. p. 27.

[xxvi] See: Stavrakakis, Y. Op cit., p. 112.

[xxvii] This narrative fear, akin to that of Robinson Crusoe when he had to face up to the ‘print of a man’s naked foot’, could as well suggest the readerly pursuit of the ‘the hidden self-other structure’, that is, the de-closeting of the double on which we depend. See: Lee, Hye-Soo ‘The Double in Roxana’, pp. 43-44.

[xxviii] Blanchot, M. Friendship, p. 101.

[xxix] Dittmer, J. ‘Dracula and the cultural construction of Europe’, p. 242.

[xxx] See: Dittmer, J. Op cit., p. 243.

[xxxi] Kitchin, R. ‘ Big Data’, p. 3.

[xxxii] Whereby, ‘one material form is translatable into another: the humanoid, the wolf, the bat, and fog’ note Denson and Mayer in ‘Spectral Seriality’, p. 114.

[xxxiii] See: Luckhurst, R. The Invention of Telepathy, p. 54.

[xxxiv] Sword, H. Op cit., p. 18.

[xxxv] In paranoia, as Lacan notes, the ‘imaginary equilibrium with the other always bears the mark of a fundamental instability’. See: Dunst, A. Op cit., p. 118.

[xxxvi] Fall, W. ‘Reflections in a Dark Mirror’, p. 209.

[xxxvii] The reference is to Dracula (2013), a horror drama TV series produced by Carnival Films and cancelled just after ten episodes.

[xxxviii] See: Genz, S. ‘Austerity Bites’, p. 48.

[xxxix] Genz, S. Op cit., p. 44.

[xl] In the words of Jennifer Wicke (in ‘Vampiric Typewriting’, p. 490), and as based on the narrative fact that Dracula’s library (to the ‘great delight’ of one his preys) comprises ‘a vast number of English books’(Dracula, p. 22).

[xli] See: Aupers, S. Op cit., p. 30.

[xlii] Moretti, F. Op cit., p. 91.

[xliii] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reminds us that, that ‘people have enemies’ is inextricable from the open-endedness of paranoia. See: Touching Feeling, p. 127.

[xliv] Aupers, S. Op cit., p. 27.

[xlv] See: Moretti, F. Op cit., p. 97.