Like the hot spots on a polluted piece of property, where the accumulation of toxins is high enough to provoke recategorization of the entire site, the terrain of Gulf War Illness can serve as an index of contamination which demands reconceptualization of an entire system of knowledge and politics. Like the Bhopal disaster, Gulf Wae Illness is difficult to locate via origin, end, or territorial boundary. The social processes and cultural logics from which these disasters originated can be traced to too many point sources to count; no end is in site, as victims struggle to rehabilitate both their bodies and the institutions on which they depend for resources, while not knowing exactly what they need; national boundaries no longer delineate shared interests or justify adequate plans of action. The challenge is to recognize that subjects of toxic exposure are confronted with problems which profoundly unsettle how and what we know. Conspiracy theories and other ways of noting “unseemly concurrences” once would have been written off as paranoia; now they operate as locational devices, signaling social, cultural, and conceptual shifts which established technologies of knowing cannot register.
– Paranoid Presents, in Paranoia within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation (1999), p. 295