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.
In fact, for many media commentators, public attendance at the Inquest was only seen as indicative of one of two attitudes – a Diana fixation which was a sublimation of unexplored psychological deviance, or a conspiracy theory obsession which was similarly illustrative of some kind of disturbance. In this case, audience members witnessing the events to an unhealthy degree become conspiracy theorists seeking Knight’s ‘compensation’ in their own reading of impossibly remote events, and also as figures whose appearance to publicly claim such a status was an unhealthy parody of the dignified but intense public grief surrounding Diana’s death. Writing in the New Statesman, Ros Wynne-Jones characterises this deriding of the regulars alongside a general ‘anti-inquest’ attitude amongst opinion formers in public and private life, as a form of defensive apology for the very un-British display of national grief after the death. ”It is as if the collective shame of that very un-British episode [the large-scale mourning] is being played out in an anti-inquest sentiment, as the proceedings are vilified by talkshow hosts and belittled by opinion-formers from cab-drivers to Question Time panellists”[Wynne-Jones]. The public whose grief appeared to be so widespread as to disarm cynicism in the immediate aftermath of the accident was not represented in this reading of the figures present. Rather, this wider, more dignified, absent, body was seen as being engaged in a double refusal – firstly to take an interest in an Inquest which should be allowing the dead lovers and their driver to rest in peace and secondly to take an interest in the absurd conspiracy narratives surrounding the event. The reading of the social performances in the environment of the courtroom provided, in Loughrey’s face-paint, in Howsam’s placard, in Witty’s giggles, evidence that the real ‘conspiracy’ was the creation and maintenance of a context in which such delusional behaviour might flourish, a conspiracy of conspiracy theorists, obsessive, socially maladroit and seeking to waste the time, energy and money of the state through the connivance of irresponsible legal business. The social performance surrounding the courtroom became confirmation of the correctness of this particular conspiracy theory – that the only figures who might become caught up in such events were those whose lives are empty – an insight which echoed with the general media characterisation of Mohammed Al-Fayed himself.