Sighs on Guantanamo

I'm trying to wrap up an article on Kathy Acker and the prisons at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Grayib. My rough argument is as follows: that while critics on left and right tend to offer sewn-up narratives with clear actors and motives (of the sort with a family resemblance to conspiracy theory), Acker's uneven, disturbing connections between power, torture, and the intimate world of the bourgeois subject offer a less easy, and so more ethically productive, way of identifying with the prisoners than do these other articulations.

The stand on the Right is more or less clear, and well summarized by David Luban in an article about the so-called "ticking time bomb" scenario, whereby the unbounded detention and even torture of a nation's others are justified by an impending mass death. I've had more trouble in finding a similarly straightforward narrative on the Left, thought the continually reiterated versions of Agamben's "state of exception" seem to offer one possibility. The problem, in part, is that there are plenty of people on the Left who are very concerned with identifying with the prisoners, perhaps too much so. When one digs into research on Guantanamo, one finds that the prisoners are indeed referenced as people with specific histories, and that the wide-ranging argument--that we're all prisoners of Guantanamo--is harder to find. That's mostly because it's a specious argument, and so not made very frequently. The stronger argument is one raised and scrutinized by Jinee Lokaneeta in a recent Theory and Event article: how do liberal states like the United States, who define themselves in part by their restraint from excessive violence (fighting "just wars," executing prisoners "humanely") justify their willingness to use forms of torture. In Lokaneeta's reading, the people of the United States and the prisoners and Guantanamo are connected not because, speciously, they too can be subject to torture under the auspices of some broad-ranging "state of exception," but because the visibility of Guantanamo and Abu Grayib violates a meaningful self-image for the United States, as a non-authoritarian, democratic state, who adheres to the rule of law and promotes individual rights. The latter point, of course, is controversial in relation to Guantanamo, since the detainees there were, by any measure, denied the same rights to speedy trial and so on accorded to Americans. Indeed, David Luban has argued that the "ticking time bomb" trope is developed in part to respond to this contradiction; the threat of immediate, mass, death represents the lengths to which the liberal state must go to justify its use of torture.

For Benjamin, history is hazily understood, and the multiple histories circulating around Guantanamo are never "accurate" but may still be meaningful. The haze of articulations that Acker offers in Empire of the Senseless, a half-understood sense of power exerting itself, coalescing and uncoalescing into authority figures, mapping and remapping onto new circumstances, new events. MK ULTRA is emblematic of a certain story about CIA information retrieval, a story that is never fully true and never fully false. Acker retains cognizance about this falsity, reminds her readers that all stories about power are in some sense myths, and so, it follows, are the stories about Guantanamo, left and right.

The ones on the right matter, I think. Listening to Arcade Fire tonight, it occurred to me just how much the reality of September 11th, and even the Obama administration, are obscured by the demonic caricatured Right (following, perhaps, in the footsteps of the disdain around Nixon's Checkers speech). The more the Left focuses on and amplifies the Right's shortcomings--even around something as obviously flawed as the practices in Guantanamo and Abu Grayib--the less the Left confronts its own political reality, in this case a rapidly shifting world from which it is all too easy to retreat from, into a tiny screen spitting back our own opinions to us.

Paranoia as a hinge

Following in the footsteps of Patrick O'Donnell and others, Anne McClintock defines paranoia, in the context of the war on terror, as a particular way of seeing the world as articulated by government officials, the media, and others who create linkages from ordinary life to national life:

Paranoia is in this sense what I call a hinge phenomenon, articulated between the ordinary person and society, between psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that sense dialectical rather than binary, for its violence erupts from the force of its multiple, cascading contradictions: the intimate memories of wounds, defeats, and humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and revenge, in such a way as to be productive at times of unspeakable violence. For how else can we understand such debauches of cruelty?

Not incidentally, this is an argument that one sees in literature over and over again, from Don DeLillo's Libra to Toni Morrison's "Recitatif": the great arcs of culture (respectively, class struggle and post-sixties racial struggles) occur in tension with the private, painful struggles of the individual, the "wounds, defeats, and humiliations" that give cultural fantasies purchase on the individual psyche. McClintock, in struggling to understand how Abu Grayib could take place, widens paranoia into an interpellative, yet generative, force, one that simultaneously welcomes the wounded individual into a cultural order and absorbs the force of individual pain to push torment and power out into the culture.

Everybody's Family Romance

This is one of the smartest, most lively books I've seen this year: I really love how Harkins takes an issue traditionally framed in terms of gender studies (incest--and "framed" is likely too weak a term for the polarizing, energizing role that sexual abuse plays in feminist studies), maintains the force of the gender studies account of incest, but shows its limitations, then proceeds to expand, contextualize, and rework this account within the broad historical arc of the economic and cultural changes usefully grafted together as neoliberalism. She builds on the groundwork laid by Wendy Brown and Lisa Duggan in demonstrating the critical usefulness of the neoliberal idea for a range of cultural studies, showing that neoliberalism is far from a liberal catchword.

The Neoliberal Conspiracy

In his touchstone Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey offers a succinct, but detailed, account of how neoliberal ideas about markets and governance came to be hegemonic in much of the world. With some verve, he describes neoliberal policies as an exended effort to regain class power on the part of the top 10% of wealth-holders, a group that had lost some ground under the progressive taxation and union-corporate cooperation of the period Harvey reterms as "embedded liberalism." (I say "reterms" because he seems to be describing the same historical period that he earlier called "Fordism," for reasons that he doesn't really spell out, except that presumably "Fordism" has too narrow a focus.) During the time period 1973-2004 (Harvey's book is published in 2005), elite interests began to act as a class to dismantle much of the gains made by working-class organizations, municipal governments, and other institutions resistant to the relentless accumulation of wealth under late capitalism. Not much there that doesn't appear in the NY Times regularly: privatization, urban renewal, the Right's focus on markets, and the new gilded age have all received much press in recent years. Nevertheless, the will Harvey attributes to moneyed interests--the deliberate power-grab at work in, for example, Citibank's chair's forced restructuring of NYC debt in the seventies in order to cripple municipal unions and disable social programs--is shocking, and leaves one rushing to check the publication press to make sure Harvey hasn't lost it (it's Oxford, and hell no, he hasn't). Harvey asserts that the high rate of returns historically enjoyed by such elites weren't enough, and that the restructuring of the tax code, deregulation of financial markets, and defeat of unions all form part of a class war in which elites work to grab more money (and man, has it worked, with the share accorded the top 1% growing with no apparent end in sight). All of this means, really, that some amount of conspiracy theory is exactly right, at least if one trusts Harvey and his sources: there are moneyed interests working to manipulate the public to further their narrow ends. And yet while I see many strands of Left thought participating in conspiracy theory, I'm unwilling to brand Harvey as such, because his evidence is too compelling. The concentration of power and capital at the top during the past forty years--the time period of my study--means that conspiracy theorists, even those as wacky as Glenn Beck, are on to something when they figure themselves as little pawns among great chess masters. But just because they're right in some ways doesn't mean they're not paranoid, I suppose.

In scrutinizing conspiracy theories, I seek new models for the articulation of gender identities under neoliberal governance, or, at least, a way to examine how nostalgic versions of the relation masculinity/state are deployed in the context of destabilized flows of labor and capital. If neoliberalism presents a social landscape in which the "stabilities" of state/workplace/father" have been shakily disrupted, some conspiracy theories offer a way to restore, in the space of the imagination, such gender stability. Jameson and others have described conspiracy theory as a means for the subject to grapple with the vastness of global networks; I'd add that the central tropes of conspiracy theory, while they emerge out of a Cold War context of relative state stability, are refigured as a consolidating movement around gender in the post-Cold War moment.

Conspiracy theory and late capitalism

In her smart Publicity's Secret, political theorist Jodi Dean posits that contemporary, media-saturated political cultures legitimize the notion of an intact "public" through the mechanism of publicity, a widely-telegraphed sense that all information is always available, whether about celebrities or politicians. She implies that the "exposure" culture of the nineties and aughts, and the technology that perpetuates this culture, allows the notion of a democratic public sphere to be propagated, in the face of real social antagonisms and rifts that would otherwise render the "public" unrecognizable. It's a sensible argument, and quite persuasive in the context of the political cultures of the past twenty years, which have thrived on scandal as substitute for participation. By implication, she describes the larger (middle-class, Western) conditions of contemporary citizenship (a term I don't invoke often): mediated through consumerist and market models, and accessed through a range of some distancing, some integrating forms--cable television, user-produced content, niche Web sites, and so on. (These give the citizen/political subject a simultaneous sense of greater intimacy with the political proper/political celebrity and greater distance from fellow citizens). Dean goes on to argue that the very (fictional) notion of a "public" is sustained by a belief that there is always something the public doesn't know, and that once such secrets are unveiled, democratic participation will be perfect. To some degree, then, Dean extends the motive of the conspiracy theorist--if only they knew--to the entire public. (Negating, then, the self-aggrandizing of the conspiracy theorist--though perhaps the conspiracy theorist is the One Who Knows Even More.)

Within this context, Dean argues that conspiracy theory functions as the trace of democracy, and the representation of freedom:

More powerful, more persuasive, than market or consumerist conceptions of freedom, freedom as information gathering confirms a conception of democratic engagement long part of the ideal of the public sphere: the public has a right to know. Citizens are free, so long as nothing is hidden from them. They must watch, surveil, expose, and reveal (54).

Dean examines the conditions of political existence in the late capitalist political. She argues that the contemporary citizen not only believes she knows, but that there is always something she can't know. The "freedom" Dean describes, then, lies in a form of democratic engagement well suited to the paradoxical connection and disconnection of the Information Age: gathering and organizing information (a trait, of course, that is easily attributed to the conspiracy theorist, and which has been a hallmark of conspiracy theory since at least the Kennedy assassination). Dean, then, identifies the form of participation taken by the conspiracy theorist, but does not acknowledge the potential unevenness with which different subjects will participate in such practices. (Still, though, if she's right, and these are the state of affairs--why does Glenn Beck's whiteness and maleness matter, because surely it does matter?) I like, though, how she points to the practice of information organization/gathering as a form of freedom, though, one might add, the form of freedom here is both imaginary and circumscribed (Dean implies this elsewhere in Publicity's Secret.)

Dean figures these practices as more or less universalized in contemporary political cultures. She questions the idea of publics or counterpublics as limited by or manifested by the ideology of consumer choice, but does that mean that there are not power differences among subjects' perceptions? And do these matter? Isn't the barest of progressive achievement--the appointment of consumer rights' advocate Elizabeth Warren, say--undercut by the masculine dismissals of conspiracy theory? And doesn't gender continue to matter (it's quite easy to conclude reading Dean--or Zizek--that little matters, that a widespread cynicism, or acceptance of ideological saturation, is one's only logical conclusion from the circumstances at hand)?

Ultimately, Dean is quite utopian--or at least optimistic--about the democratic potential of the conspiracy theorist, or at least the potential for the conspiracy theorist to unveil the lack of unity promoted by the publicity-logic (she offers examples from the Revolutionary War, in which conspiracy theory was apparently widespread--ref: Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood). While I appreciate that Dean (and Bratich, and Fenster) demonstrates that conspiracy theory is part of a wider logic of citizenship, and that it need not be relegated to the margins, I sense that she's a bit too sunny about its potential. Part of my project, then, will be to examine the lively, democratizing spirit that these critics assign conspiracy theory and to set such optimism against the stark logic of gender inequality, to examine how gender serves to delimit where conspiracy theory's democratic possibilities cease.

What is conspiracy theory?

This is a question that people have asked me at all stages of my project: what do you mean by conspiracy theory? For many years, the answer seemed obvious: it's what they talk about on the X-Files, it's a belief that the Kennedy assassination was rigged, it's a belief that a secret society is running the government. Recently, though, I've begun giving thought to a narrower, more useful definition: conspiracy theory is the belief that some clandestine group--whether governmental, corporate, upper-class--have rigged some segment of history. Often--though of course not always--this group is composed of men. In part, this implication rests with the historical power accorded men--and the R.W. Connell argument that powerful institutions continue to have a masculine character. In a theoretical sense, this group is imagined as masculine actors, people who act upon history and are not acted upon by history, people who make themselves and their world, and who are not made by the world.

Take, then, the recent study that showed 40% of Republican voters have doubts about Barack Obama's citizenship. Well, is that a conspiracy theory? On the surface, no--it's an expression of doubt that "he's one of us," the xenophobia of the immigration debate grafted onto the figure of the first African-American president, it's the longstanding mistrust between American whites and American blacks. But if one considers the implications of this belief--that Obama somehow ran around a key provision of the Constitution, that he was aided in such by presumably powerful people, and that his election was manipulated by such forces--then we're in the realm of conspiracy theory. Moreover, the the only people who know about this pseudo-coup are a select few right-wing analysts--so we also have a powerful identification, or self-aggrandizement occurring around this conspiracy theory. Asserting that Obama is not a US citizen, and that I have the evidence, is a rhetorically powerful move, even if such rhetoric is not always persuasive to all audiences. (Something similar happened with the 2004 election and Diebold, where a few left-wing analysts believed they had found evidence of a coup.)

Why, though, would such a group be comprised of men? Certainly, the names that come up on Glenn Beck's chalkboard are frequently men, and the names that appear in the video promoted by WND. But my argument rests upon a more general proposition (one that may unfortunately fall into the realm of "common sense"): that when "one" imagined a small room of conspirators, the occupants of that room are wearing ties, not dresses, and that the color of their skin is white, not brown. Certainly, some conspiracy theorists--Texe Marrs, for example--explicitly name the conspirators as male. But I'd argue that even when the designation is not explicit, the implication is that the conspirators are men, because, to paraphrase Connell in a rough approximation of the way the world works (itself a weak argument), powerful actors are men. There's also the argument, I suppose, that the conspirators' room is a markedly non-domestic place, and that part of the imaginary around it derives from historically male-only spaces: secret societies, smoke-filled back rooms, the Presidential "war room." Conspiracy theory validates the logic of such spaces, even as it questions the need for their existence.

While, as Connell observes, the history of masculinity, like the history of any social category, is fraught with "dominant, subordinated, and marginalized masculinities are in constant interaction, changing the conditions for each others' existence and transforming themselves as they do" (198), nevertheless, the association between masculinity and financial, social, and political power persists. Even if "patriarchy" is a too-narrow and too-simple way to understand the gender order, the uneven distribution of power between men and women, and between white men and men of color is an inarguable reality. Indeed, as Connell argues, while feminist, gay, and other activists have worked to disrupt the notion of a naturalized masculine power, the upper-class men of metropolitan countries now possess a greater percentage of wealth and power than at any point in history. The question for my study is what role conspiracy theories--theories that affirm and reinforce the notion that powerful men control the world (is this news?) play in negotiating the stark facts of power imbalances between powerful men and everyone else.

Another question for my study is this: what does the knowledge of that coup mean to the people that "uncover it." Even if, in many cases, the people doing so are women (Orly Taitz), what gendered version of the world is promoted by the assertion of such knowledge? I'm going to argue that it means several things: first, that the world is populated by Oliver Norths and Jack Bauers, men willing to commit clandestine acts for some higher cause; ironically, of course, North and Bauer are working for the other team in this case, but still, this is how the world works. It also means that the world is somewhat fixed and limited, that in place of all the complexities of late-capitalist politics, we have the immediate, graspable problem of men behaving like men. Finally, it means that I have a place in the world, that I can participate in politics and power in a direct, meaningful way: by exposing the actions of North and Bauer. In this way, the distanced, fragmented, shifting world of late capitalism, post-Fordism and post-civil rights is distilled into coherent, recognizable structures--structures bound up in a reactionary view of gender.

The rhetoric of masculinity and conspiracy theory

In Ragged Dicks, his study of the self-made man and the steel industry, James Catano does great work with a rhetorical construction of masculinity, a process that Catano describes as operating between the individual subject and what Catano, drawing on Bourdieu, calls doxa, the “desires, needs, rituals, beliefs, and practices” which are absorbed and internalized by the individual subject, and later experienced as if they were eternal truths that the subject discovers. Within this framework--a version of the classic ideological determinism puzzle about individual freedom that Zizek explores in The Sublime Object of Ideology--Catano finds the self-made man idea playing a paradoxical role:

The deep irony of masculine self-making lies in its claim to offer the ultimate in freely formed, self-created individualism, while it actually serves to establish a social subject, a set of behavioral patterns that are already prescripted (3)

He then quotes Butler from Bodies That Matter to the effect that such masculine subjectivity “draws on and covers over the constitutive conventions by which it is organized” (227), which is, again, a classic case of the ideologically-formed subject who believes himself to have sprung fully-formed from Zeus's head. (Actually, it's more the subject's belief in his own originality that seems at issue here.) Throughout my work, I'm trying to make the case that believing, articulating, studying a conspiracy theory has, while in a bit more of a roundabout manner, the same effect as autobiographizing oneself as "self-made." In announcing a conspiracy theory, the conspiracy theorist declares himself to be, in relations to the powers that rule his world, a subject in the know--a subject not, perhaps, self made in the conventional sense, but free from influence, free from implication in the forces that shape him. To put it in more broad terms, the conspiracy theorist, in his purest form (his theoretical form, I suppose, since that's what we're doing here), asserts himself as free from history itself, just as the conspiracies that form his fantasy are themselves--in the sense of influencing, not being influenced by, history.

Of course, then, conspiracy theory offers a similar set of ironies to those Catano identifies around the self-made men. The conspiracy theorist describes other selves utterly in thrall to the powers that control it, even while he claims a wide set of freedoms for himself to articulate and identify such powers; he claims to uncover wild new material, even while he reuses tropes familiar from other conspiracy theories: secret societies, men in small rooms, lone gunmen, and mind control. The conspiracy theorist decries the individual subject's loss of autonomy, even as he fervently celebrates the individual possibility that would flourish were the conspiracies to be defeated; the conspiracy theorist claims his every discovery is original, even as he tells the same stories over and over.

As Jodi Dean has pointed out, the conspiracy theorist that I describe here hardly fits the disjointed list of questions that form the basis for conspiracy theorists' works from Mark Lane's Kennedy assassination Rush to Judgment to Robert Epperson's wide critique of power in American society New World Order. Each work does not offer the kind of narrative throughline that my use of terms like "articulation" and "tropes" implies. One must look instead at the presumptions at work in such texts: the presumption that history always has a Real Story, and that the conspiracy theorist, even while at times offering little in the way of narrative coherence, nevertheless conveys the psychic landscape--the libidinal investments, the sheer force of desire--at work in conspiracy theory. Indeed, this is how Mark Fenster has described conspiracy theories, as rushing forward from conclusion to conclusion. This is also the role that writers like Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Denis Johnson assign the conspiracy theorist: the plot of The Crying of Lot 49 and Oedipa's desire to be relevant, to "put something of herself" in the dissembled landscape of Pierce Inverarity's will, are one and the same. Like Lane and Epperson, Oedipa becomes seduced by the desire to evade history, to become part of a force beyond the entrapping tower of Kinneret. This is the desire of the conspiracy theorist, to knit together a world; such knitting begins with questions.

The ideology of individual meritocracy

In my article on the Left Behind books, I argued that neoliberalism--a feverish dependence on markets across a variety of social and political contexts--shaped the books' worldview more than either hardcore fundamentalist Christianity or conspiracy theories. Part of neoliberalism, as I defined it using models from Wendy Brown and Lisa Duggan, means reiterating meritocracy as a overriding logic of social promotion; one of the shocking things about the Antichrist, I noted, is that he hires Christians, but only because such Christians are the best-qualified candidates for the position--a logic that the books naturalize. This logic is likely encoded into the cult of the expert, a sense that someone out there Knows, someone out there is amazingly qualified. Though of course, as Ulrich Beck observes in The Risk Society, the need for experts is less cultish and more a function of the complicated systems that surround late capitalist subjects. Moreover, the whole point of a meritocracy is that it supposedly judges people only on their qualifications, without regard to social connections, race, gender, age, region, ethnicity, and so on.

Arguably, a steadfast belief in meritocracy underscores all sorts of conservative talking points, but particularly the "colorblind" logic of anti-affirmative action. "I judge a man by what he shows me on the field of battle, Sargent," the lightly anti-Semitic Captain Barret tells the Jewish Nathan Marx in Philip Roth's 1959 "Defender of the Faith."Such sentiments (do they originate in the armed forces?) have dominated a certain "post"-racist discourse ever since. At this point in history, meritocracy seems so ingrained into the social that it's hard to remember that such discourses once competed with genuinely racist ideas--of biological superiority--for dominance. This is the exact breakdown that historian Matthew Lassiter identifies at work in the postwar New South (a region whose politics Lassiter views as emblematic for the country as whole). Throughout The Silent Majority, Lassiter demonstrates how fully blinding a belief in meritocracy can be. Lassiter argues that a Sunbelt moderation of segregation was accomplished “only by replacing the civil rights agenda of social justice with an ostensibly race-neutral discourse of regional progress and individual meritocracy liberated from history itself, the latest and most resilient version of the New South mythology” (30). It's not much of a stretch, then, to argue that, at least in Lassiter's view, meritocracy forms a pillar of the current dominant ideology.

When conspiracy theory is read juxtaposed with such meritocracy, a mixed set of ideas emerge: at first glance, conspiracy theory would seem to undercut meritocracy, because meritocracy must be apparent on the surface, and conspiracy theory's back-room dealing would seem obscene to the meritocratic order. In fact, it's arguable that this is one of the things that fires up Glenn Beck and his audience--that their meritocratic rights are being undermined by a stealthy liberal conspiracy. On the other hand, conspiracy theorists resolutely affirm a belief in hierarchy: the very fact that the conspirators are in place affirms the existence of hierarchical social relations; the Antichrist, after all, still follows good market logic, despite his overwhelming evil. It's more likely, though, that the world of meritocracy--a sunny world where no effort goes unrewarded--in fact forms the obverse of conspiracy theory, the bright, efficient world that's left once the conspiracy theorists win and the conspirators get their grubby hands off America. The conspiracy theorists are the ones "playing by the rules" in a meritocracy. Where, then, does the ressentiment, the conspiracy theorist's envy, desire to occupy the place of the conspirators, play in this framework? Well, first, conspiracy theories provide, of course, a way to account for one's failings in the meritocratic world; I would have been a contender, if not for those conspirators. Second, is it possible that what men want, in a homosocial, envious mode, is to take the shortcuts themselves, to transcend their frustrated lives into the uber-successful world of the conspiracy?

The Space of Conspiracy Theory

One of the issues I struggle with is how historically-rooted to make my project; in the last post, I questioned whether my model of gendered conspiracy theory is salient for only the past fifty years, or whether it applies to a range of historical periods. Sedgwick's Between Men, a text I finished today, does a nice job of splitting the difference--it's primarily theoretically-informed close readings (the richest close readings one could imagine) but still points regularly to the readings' historical context. But of course, that book emerged at a different time for the field, when, perhaps, both close readings and pure theory were more readily accepted.

Still, towards historicizing my conspiracy theorists, it may be possible to locate them in the suburban single family home, which, in his study of postwar Oakland and the politics of suburbia vs. the city, historian Robert Self calls "the preeminent site of political interest and commitment” (293), a judgment Matthew Lassiter echoes in his excellent re-evaluation of postwar anti-integration politics, The Silent Majority. Both Self and Lassiter find in the suburbs a celebration of individualism, and a resistance to a New Deal sense of the public good. Lassiter concludes,

“The suburban realignment of American politics ultimately helped to establish an underlying consensus in a postliberal order, a bipartisan defense of middle-class entitlement programs and residential boundaries combined with the futuristic ethos of color-blind moderation and full-throttled capitalism at the center of the Sunbelt synthesis” (227).

What about this, though, locates a conspiracy theory sense of "amongst men" in these suburbs? Certainly, they celebrate meritocracy, certainly, the foment anti-government feeling, undoubtedly, the sentiments that circulate on the Glenn Beck show have their origins in the rough alignments these historians describe. Beyond this, though, the defend-my-home trope that surfaces in Left Behind (the home as militia compound), coupled with the dissociation from community that Ulrich Beck, Giddens, and others observe of the postwar era, make the suburban home a detached (physically and psychologically) space that offers a premier site for the imagined "amongst men" of conspiracy theory.

The individualist suburban home joins with the globalized corporation to provide the general backdrop in which white male gender identity forms in the postwar era. Doubtless, the suburb is the space of the white male conceived as such (the famed "white flight," though both Lassiter and Self take pains to challenge the simple logic of this concept), and at the least, symbolizes the detachment--the erasure of physical proximity that Sedgwick finds producing homosociality--that evokes a yearn to be amongst men. (Ford's Richard Bascombe could well join the list of detached males of my study.)

The homosociality of conspiracy theory--starting thoughts

While published over twenty-five years ago, Eve Sedgwick's Between Men remains a touchstone for a wide range of queer and masculinity studies. (footnote here on works that cite Sedgwick). Her reading, primarily theoretical but grounded in a Marxist sense of historical change, suggestively articulates structures of male homosocial affiliation, as these structures relate to, famously, women and homosexuals, but also of intraclass relations amongst different kinds of men. She offers a powerful set of theoretical paradigms for understanding not just how men relate to one another, but for how they imagine they relate to one another, women, homosexuals, racial others. My title deliberately invokes Sedgwick's, in part because I view this project as extending her notions of homosociality into a late capitalist and post-Fordist time frame. If Sedgwick in part charts the decline of a local, artesinal masculinity and its replacement with an industrial (wage-driven) middle class masculinity, my project seeks to scrutinize male bonds as they exist in a globalized, shifting late capitalist world--a world in which, as critics from Fredric Jameson to Peter Knight observe, conspiracy theory becomes a necessary figure for imagining how political and economic power is organized. Writing of The Pickwick Papers, Sedgwick writes:

In these male homosocial bonds are concentrated the fantasy energies of compulsion, prohibition, and explosive violence; all are full structured by the logic of paranoia. At the same time, however, these fantasy energies are mapped along the axes of social and political power; so that the revelation of intrapsychic structures is inextricable from the revelation of the mechanisms of class domination (162).

As she does throughout her book, Sedgwick offers so much rich material here that I'm amazed she packed it into two sentences. First, bonds between men--amongst men, in my formulation--serve as concentrations of fantasy energies: the things that men are compelled to feel, are prohibited from feeling, and the violence that proliferates when compulsion or prohibition is challenged. Moreover, of course, the primacy of gender--the gravity it exerts in the social sphere--means that such fantasies will tend to concentrate around issues of gender identity--and that gender identity shapes and organizes even those fantasies that seem only loosely connected to gender. Gender is the magnet beneath the surface of the iron shavings of raw fantasy (raw narrative imagination?), forming it into shapes that only appear to take shape on their own terms. Second, these energies--because men are the ones who run things, who manage the social, political, and economic realms--become mapped onto "axes of social and political power"--the power relations writ large into the culture, particularly those of class, but likely those of race as well. That is--and this is Sedgwick's take through and through, following as she does Foucault--gender issues shoot through the social, providing the base desires around which "social and political power" take shape and/or are perceived as. (Need to add here: examples of work that continues in Sedgwick's trajectory, among whom might be Savran, Catano, Robinson)

I argue that, within the context of the post-1960 United States, conspiracy theories maintain and concentrate what Sedgwick calls “the fantasy energies of compulsion, prohibition, and […] violence" that demarcate the lines of adhesion and resistance amongst men. Such theories create a sense of "amongst men" in multiple sites: first, the site of the conspiracy, where powerful men gather and affirm one another; second, the site of the conspiracy theorist, who feels connection with--but repulsion from--the conspirators, as well as similarly-minded conspiracy theorists. But beyond this, conspiracy theories serve as an allegory for how masculine power is organized--an argument made, without a sense of gender, by a range of critics, most prominently Fredric Jameson and Mark Fenster. In my reading, conspiracy theories offer men a way to imagine how they relate to other men Out There, in the terrifying, vertiginous world of late capitalist power, power that is, as Jameson and others have argued, always remote from one's immediate subject position. I argue, then, that conspiracy theories map the "amongst men" of the present moment, an "amongst men" that is always receding into some dimly-lit room. Recent names for these rooms include: global capitalists, neoconservatives, Wall Street, Al Quaeda, Islamofascism, the Bilderburg Group, George Soros, and ACORN. All of these names, while of course pointing to genuine axes of critique, also indicate the distant power organized amongst men. Conspiracy theory articulates contemporary structures of male-male affiliation, as located in a mass-media/culture/imaginary/fantasy realm—a social beyond the social of everyday life, reproducing the sense of distance that Jameson finds operating in the films of The Geopolitical Aesthetic, but finding there men, talking to other men, affirming each other, managing the world, affirming the logic of alterity, affirming the centrality of male management, resuscitating the reassuring structures of male-male relations into a space paradoxically distant from (in the sense that the conspirators can never be found) and accessible to (in the sense that one's imaginary can operate anywhere, and one need "achieve" nothing to "encounter"--have knowledge of--the conspiracy) every man.

In scrutinizing the homosociality proffered by conspiracy theory, I bear in mind RW Connell's dictum that “masculinity must be understood as an aspect of large-scale social structures and processes” (Masculinities 39). The difficulty, of course, will lie with getting enough social/historical evidence to frame this "late 20C imagined homosocial" argument, but a journey of a thousand miles and all that, and the force of a good (or at least augmented/tightened of existing good) argument is certainly the start of acquiring such evidence. One area that seems potentially productive is the status of domesticity in the previous 40 yrs--what is it, in other words, that these men seek to escape. But is this part of my introduction or just more brainstorming? And do the past 40 yrs serve as a particularly acute example of a transhistorical phenomenon (has conspiracy theory always operated in just this way), or do the historical circumstances of the past 40 yrs make the kind of homosocial bonds narrated by conspiracy theory salient? Might it be, along these lines, that conspiracy theory manifests a mode of male identity which is widespread in the current moment? Still need the history, the research, the support for all this but the idea itself feels right and exciting and innovative, potentially offering a new way to account for the Glenn Beck fans and the Left Behind readers of the world, but also, of course, the convinced-its-all-rigged 9/11 truthers of the world.

Is it pushing it to say that Fordism offered a tactile, immediate world, a world where the "amongst men" was "management," "the Hoover administration," "city hall," at worst "the Jews," "the Reds"--all more localizable, less dispersed into ether than the high-tech machine of management under Empire? Of course, though, what I've argued is that, in part, conspiracy theory offers nostalgia for this immediate world, even while pointing to a far less immediate, far less manageable world. But conspiracy theory, as it functions under post-fordist, late capitalist regimes, allows men to navigate and identify a world gone vertiginously complex.

While she takes care to acknowledge the unevenness of masculine authority, noting that lower-class men are frequently feminized in relation to middle-class men, Sedgwick's work is primarily about middle-class men. As men's studies authority R.W. Connell has famously argued, any give historical time and place features a "hegeomonic" form of masculinity, against which other men need measure themselves. In the globalized world, Connell has recently noted, the hegemonic man is the man best able to navigate global networks, the petit bourgeois who circumambulates the globe with ease. My study will identify a tension between this hegemonic masculinity and the inevitable position of men who can't quite achieve such dominance. While I will focus on men who envy such hegemonic men--the men who, in my reading, function as conspirators--all men are subject to the anxieties of believing themselves the conspiracy theorist and not the conspirator.

In identifying these tensions, I draw on a recent work that has become paradigmatic in its own right: Dana Nelson's pathbreaking reading of antebellum masculinity, National Manhood. Throughout her work, Nelson argues that masculine authority is rooted in the management of masculinity's others: natives, African-Americans, women, criminals, but also that such management never provides a secure identity, that it must be, following Judith Butler's theories of gender, reconstituted again and again. The position of men, then, is both tenuous and powerful, both conspiracy theorist and conspirator. The hegemonic men--the men who run the world, then men whose behavior is to be envied by all other men--are no more secure then those that envy them.

Connell describes masculinity's relationship to late capitalism as follows:

“[T]he world in which neo-liberalism is ascendant is still a gendered world, and neo-liberalism has an implicit gender politics. De-regulation of the economy places strategic power into the hands of particular groups of men—managers and entrepreneurs. I have suggested (Connell 1998) that these groups are the bearers of an emerging hegemonic form of masculinity in the contemporary global economy, which I call ‘transnational business masculinity’” (Masculinities xxiii)

I will argue that conspiracy theory offers a powerful set of metaphors for the way contemporary men imagine themselves in relation to the global systems that pervade their lives. Powerless in the face of increasingly complex global systems, and of shifting authority accruing to white men, men turn to conspiracy theories in order to rhetorically construct their identities, to resuscitate a version of themselves that is, by virtue of its proximity to raw power, authoritative, active, and bonded to the actions of other likeminded men.

Still, while the homosociality promoted by conspiracy theory--the sense of real or imagined managers at work running the world--is widespread, it, like other hegemonic formulations, is subject to resistances and retrenchments, and so an additional question this book poses is a favorite of conspiracy theorists: who benefits? In his landmark study Masculinities, RW Connell describes masculinity as a complex configuration of political imperatives, social institutions, and individual identities, concluding that the “ production of particularly exemplary masculinity require(s) political struggle [and] the defeat of historical alternatives (30). Using the example of Jock Phillips’s study of New Zealander identity, and the role played by public articulations of football, politics, and native identity, Connell demonstrates that masculine identity—far from being inherent in any particular social order—is continually asserted and promoted to the exclusion of other masculine identities.

In the following chapters, then, I will repeatedly ask: how do such narratives of suspicion, about the operation of secret power, reflect, refract, and enhance these men’s sense of themselves and the world? What imaginary relationships—fraternity with like-minded men—do these narratives conjure?

Is "nation" a woman?

After reading Between Men more thoroughly, I am not sure if "woman" is assimilable to "nation" or "country," simply because both need saving. Sedgwick is making a very specific argument about the role of women in homosocial relations, and I don't think this specific argument is readily graftable onto the more abstracted exchanges that occur around conspiracy theory. Still, Sedgwick's argument as a whole, concerning the great chains of male being that are continually recreated across cultures and historical periods, well suits the homosocial relations I see narrated in conspiracy theory.

I'm still sure that there's something retrograde about the "saving the nation" trope, but it simply can't be narrowly grafted onto Sedgwick's formulation.

Why literature?

Sedgwick outlines a universe of male-male relations, as manifested in literature: she demonstrates how men differentiate from, adhere to, seek to defeat, and struggle for status with one another. A matrix of male-male relations dominates the social (or at least the social as seen from the relatively elite standpoint of literature, and the relatively limited time/space frame of her study), and is more or less synonymous with power. Such relations use women and "homosexuals" as a symbols through which to accrue meaning and hierarchical status, and the particular shape of such relations at a given historical moment is encoded into the culture. She holds up literature as a more or less direct site for the scrutiny of such ideas, presuming that literature reflects, or at worst refracts, the social relations that shape its emergence. (She implicitly shares ground with Jameson here, and I'm surprised, actually, at just how much she makes use of Marx.)

Of course, in the current historical moment, literature has nowhere near the privileged and central cultural position that it occupies in the time frame of Sedgwick's study (roughly, 1550-1870). But literature, or at least the novel, by its very project of attempting to recreate the social, necessarily carries some vestige of its historical moment's conflicts and struggles, and the texts of my study engage with the present moment on simultaneously a micro and macro level, attempting to imagine simultaneously the grand systems that determine subjectivity and the subjects who imagine these systems. The fact that conspiracy theories are culturally significant over the past thirty years is nearly inarguable, and has been cogently articulated by critics like Peter Knight, Mark Fenster, Jodi Dean, and others. So to some degree, the literature I study assumes cultural significance merely because of the material it takes up. (I say all this to make the likely unnecessary point that literature retains some privilege among texts that scrutinize conspiracy theory; by virtue of its project, literature seeks to understand how conspiracy theory integrates into the social.)

I argue that the literary texts of my study offer particularly rich critiques of conspiracy theory's identity-forming role. In wrapping a social realm around a conspiracy theory--say, that expressed by Oswald or by Oscar Wao--literature examines conspiracy theory's integration with other texts, its position amongst other social actors, and the role it plays for an individual subject in integrating them into--or alienating them from--a social realm. Indeed, literature is particularly good at bridging (often violently) social spaces otherwise distinct in terms of power, class, gender, and region. In Libra, Don DeLillo articulate a relationship amongst men that is essentially impossible in actual social space: a tie between the disempowered Lee Harvey Oswald and high-powered operatives in the CIA. Literature itself, by virtue of its insistent intertextuality, studies and critiques the circulation of conspiracy theory in a social realm. Like the texts of Sedgwick's study, it manifests a matrix of male-male relations, though such relations are less inscribed in the social as in an adjacent imaginary realm that floats above the social--what Zizek and others call fantasy. Fantasy interweaves into the social, determining the relations of social actors, but in particular, how such actors imagine themselves in relation to real and imagined others. Fantasy, of course, intertwines with the constructedness of the subject, the forces that (to use Sedgwick's words) antedate the subject, often described in terms of class, gender, and race, though these are categories to which power, status, money, work, and institutions adhere meaning. Conspiracy theory likely works on the interface of ideology and fantasy, offering a means for the subject to resist (or presume to resist) the forces constructing him, but simultaneously replicating and reinforcing the heft of such forces.

Gender is the conspiracy

Sedgwick: “As in Sentimental Journey, too, it is the ideological imposition of the imaginary patriarchal Family on real, miscellaneous, shifting states of solitude, gregariousness, and various forms of material dependence, that rationalizes, reforms, and perpetuates, in the face of every kind of change, the unswerving exploitations of sex and of class” (117). As everywhere in BM, S uses a very Foucauldian framework here to show how the seemingly inevitable form of the patriarchal family obscures the uneven, messy forms of shared human life, connected a thousand different lines of kinship and friendship, but limited and constrained by the stark symmetry of man-woman-child. And as Sedgwick implies, it's the patriarchal family that intensifies and sharpens gender differences, and reinforces the homosocial authority bound into patriarchal culture.

“It is the very minimalness, the arbitrariness, of the differentiation between male heterosexuality and its ‘opposite’ that has lent this distinction its power to organize complicated, historical transactions of power, including power of or over women” (118).

The stability of homosocial bonds

Returning to Between Men, finding it a more brilliant and useful book than last time, particularly in its articulation of how male/male bonds work to uphold the social. Reading Shakespeare's sonnets, Sedgwick observes in the sonnets a volatile difference between male/male and male/female relationships: “Differently put, for a man to undergo even a humiliating change in the course of a relationship with a man still feels like preserving or participating in a sum of male power, while for a man to undergo any change in the course of a relationship with a woman feels like a radical degeneration of substance” (45). Call me crazy, call me Ishmael, but this dynamic is at work in conspiracy-themed texts, from Libra (Oswald and Everett flee domesticity), to Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (English flees Leanora), to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Oscar feels dissipated by women, but renewed by the life-struggle against the fúku; okay, there’s difference there, since Oscar frequently imagines saving the woman), to The Crying of Lot 49, where Oedipa sows dissolution and chaos everywhere she goes. Larger point: male-male relationships in the conspiracy paradigm are (relatively) stable; in these texts, when women enter them, things quickly become less stable.

Questions, then: what historical circumstances make domesticity fraught with peril during the postwar period? The charged state of gender relations, the destabilizing force of shifting economic conditions, the establishment of the suburban nuclear family as paradigmatic, the decreasing dislocation of said family from community and government.

No democracy, no freedom

In the latest issue of Theory and Event, Wendy Brown, one of my favorite political theorists, restates a Foucauldian truism to critique the idea of democratic freedom:

The simple idea that we and the social world are relentlessly constructed by powers beyond our ken and control immolates the liberal notion of self-legislation achieved through voting and consent.

She explicitly invokes the corporatization of government in the forms of slickly-managed elections, the "informed populace" farce of infotainment, and the many tendrils of privatization (prisons, schools, voting machines, universities, symbolized richly by the "Western" form of corruption--bidless contractors--that competes with old-school bribe taking in current Afghanistan), arguing, essentially, that democracy is a sheen for its opposite--the almost total control of public governance by private capital and its representatives/narratives/frameworks. What's worth remembering here, in terms of my project, is the degree to which conspiracy theory operates within the framework of fictional democracy, yet simultaneously struggles against the "relentless construction" decried by Brown. As Mark Fenster, Jodi Dean, and Jack Bratich have argued, there is a kernel of democratic utopianism in conspiracy theory. But perhaps it is the contradiction that Brown indicates--between the fiction of democratic freedom and the reality of external self-construction--that forces conspiracy theory into the relatively narrow narrative frameworks in which it operates, all of which, I argue, tend to reinforce masculine ways of being, and by extension, masculine limits to the social world. Perhaps, too, that masculine forms tend to emerge in concert with the nostalgia for democracy Brown theorizes. There's a limit to what anyone can imagine in terms of democracy, Brown implies, and it's not surprising that conspiracy theory operates within these (hegemonic) limits.

Private, individual resistance

Writing of the political potential of queer S/M practices, which, he argues, were valorized in the 80s and 90s, alongside poststructuralism, as premier sites of political resistance, critic David Savran theorizes that such practices hold appeal in part because of their limited scale. Teaching, bondage, criticism, theorizing the decline of the subject, all operate on an individualist and private scale, in direct contrast to the large-scale strikes and protests of the 1930s (or, to go back further, of the anticapitalist actions of the late 19th century). For Savran, it's telling that the privatization and individualization of resistance take place within a historical moment when anticapitalist struggle has all but died out (I note that Savran's book was published in 1998, a year before the Seattle protests brought antiglobalization to public view.) He's talking about the Left, of course, and particularly the Left under Reagan/Clinton; it's entirely possible that something different, if not precisely anticapitalist radical, has emerged in the recent confluence of MoveOn.org, antiglobalization, the recharged SEIU, and other Leftist organizations posing genuine questions about capitalism and capitalized war. Savran writes:

“Obsessed with locating and valorizing sites of transgression and resistance, both poststructuralism and the discourses of sexual dissidence tend to imagine resistant political practices not in the collectivist terms of the 1960s (or the 1930s, for that matter) but in strictly individualistic terms. For both, resistance has become a purely privatized affair, restricted to one’s scholarship, one’s teaching, one’s bedroom, one’s dungeon” (239) .

I bring this up because this is one of the points I've long sought to make about conspiracy theory, that it offers the appeal of a privatized and individual resistance, at least in the post-Kennedy forms I critique (the widely-telegraphed conspiracy theories of a Hitler or Ahmadinedjad pose a different case). The researcher, alone in his bedroom with his facts, practices a resistance that is purely private. Here, I would differentiate 9/11 Truthers or Beck fans from anticapitalists (though obviously, Tea Partiers are not limited to private, individual acts). Savran provides, in this aside, a fine way to think about why this conspiracy theory model of masculinity fits this time frame, and also, how it carries forward to now. (progress, progress, progress).

Re-encountering David Savran

Savran’s argument in Taking it Like a Man is wide, but deep, and he employs the “reflexive masochism” idea to a diverse, but linked, set of ideas and examples. On the one hand, the self-injurious, rising-above-it, got-the-Right-Stuff-despite-the-sixties straight white man quite simply imagines himself as a victim, but sees in that victimhood a chance for transcendence. But beyond this, the straight white man, in a range of contexts that Savran originates with Mailer’s “White Negro,” frequently places himself in the position of one or more minorities themselves, as, variously, Native American spirit guide, White Aryan Resistance “new nigger,” mythopoetic African folk hero, Rambo native tracker, and so on—an extension of, but not a precise repetition of, the “man who lives with Indians” and/or the Modernist fetishization of the primitive as a source of power and renewal for a dead culture. The “desire to be the other,” though, quickly emerges as a “terror of the other,” as it does for the man who lives with Indians. This is a sometimes-muddled, but ambitious and largely-successful book.

From this: the conspiracy theorist obviously imagines himself (and his nation) as victimized, usually by a big Other of powerful, colluding men. This idea generates danger and terror—a fear of oblivion—but simultaneously, the possibility for transcending the danger, by linking oneself to and identifying with the conspirators (as, most clearly, does Oswald, Texe Marrs, Leonard English), reflexively, but in the manner of Patrick O’Donnell’s postmodern version of reflexivity. I’m not entirely sure this pushes past my original argument, but through Savran’s lens, it’s likely that some portion of the big Other is bound up in conceptions of dark-skinned, gay, or female Others who themselves are alleged to possess overwhelming powers (Red Chinese massing in the national parks, minorities overbreeding, the homosexual agenda, feminazis).

Starting thoughts on Glenn Beck

Limiting the scope

"Glenn Beck," of course, is an amalgam of texts: Beck's television and radio shows, his nonfiction books, his fictional work, the guests he has on his show (among them fiction writers): it is nearly impossible to limit or delineate the range of places where his ideas--and those of his audience--circulate. Of course, as literary theorists have argued for years, Diaz's text is similarly hard to limit, as it incorporates not just the some 400 pages of his novel, but also the interviews Diaz has given about the novel, the reviews published on the novel, Diaz's other work, the work of other Latin American writers, the documented lives of people like Oscar (whom Diaz has cited in interviews), the works influencing Diaz, and so on. "Glenn Beck" and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, then, exist as texts with which to identify in complex, multifaceted ways. And if the identifications around Beck at first seem stronger than those around Diaz's novel, such an assumption likely underestimates the powerful role fiction--particularly Pulitzer-Prize winning fiction, and particularly ethnic fiction--plays in the lives of its readers, and shapes how these readers view themselves and their world.

Racism in the era of post-whiteness

It's difficult, in some ways, to frame Beck in the language of race and racism, since these charges have been endlessly circulated and defended against around the Tea Party movement. It's likely true that racism is simply too overdetermined in the case of an African American president, or that the present context is one of, in Mike Hill's words, after whiteness, where even the most regressive organizations must play lip service to egalitarianism, or, in an even more extended sense, where every organization, and every American, imagines themselves beyond racism by virtue of Obama's election. It's likely, too, that something similar has occurred with gender, that, like the Promise Keepers, Beck and his crew (hardly anti-woman, given the prominence of Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin) present themselves as beyond gender relations as well. Though hopefully my analysis here goes beyond simple questions of Beck's misogyny, any question of gender identity is complicated by the disavowals--and easy targets--presented by Beck and followers.

Glenn Beck and Oscar Wao

How does one account for how grand narratives--like conspiracy theories--become part of one's identity? In particular, how does one account for how such narratives intersect with one's gendered identity--one's sense of oneself as a woman or man in real or imagined social space? (One way, perhaps, to define gender, though "woman" or "man" are of course limiting.) To start, one must examine how narratives--self-created, amalgamated from others', reworked--becomes part of one's identity. Literature, because it is always borrowing narratives and often concerns its own intertextuality, provides an excellent realm in which to interrogate these questions. Frequently, literature foregrounds how characters borrow from existing narratives, drawn from popular culture, literature (famously, Emma Bovary), spy movies (Oswald in DeLillo's Libra). In each of these cases, the text establishes an uneasy continuum between exterior narratives--those outside one's identity--and the narrative that the character tells herself. Such narratives frequently supplement, or even replace, the limited narrative that a character draws from her immediate circumstances.

To take one example, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the title character struggles with his masculinity: living in a heavily gendered Dominican-American context, Oscar is nearly unrecognizable as a man to himself, his family, his friends, or--most desparately--the women who Oscar desires. In the real, everyday world of the novel, Oscar's identity is badly limited. But in the imagined world of fantasy, which Diaz wraps around his characters, Oscar is a hero, an avenger, the family's last bulwark against the mystical, all-encompassing fuku--a global-grade curse with the same heft as a conspiracy. Oscar's masculinity, then, functions more effectively in this imagined realm than in the real world. But beyond this, Diaz continually demands that readers view the "fantasy" narrative and "real" narrative as inextricable from one another, because of the language his narrator uses to describe Oscar: at one point, Oscar is kidnapped by two police thugs that Yunior names Gorilla Grod and Solomon Grundy, both names drawn from comic books. Because Yunior never calls the two anything but, the reader can't help but picture, at least momentarily, supervillains from the DC universe dragging Oscar into a cane field.

In the following post, I'm going to hazard that Oscar isn't alone, by comparing his case to the vastly different case of Glenn Beck and his followers--a set of texts that also rely heavily on an imagined realm to solidify their subjects' gender identities, though admittedly such gender identifications are more dispersed and less overt than that of Oscar. This comparison is rich with possibilities in its contrasts: both texts emerge in the same timeframe (Oscar Wao is published in 2007; Beck rises as a national figure in 2008 in connection with Obama's election), both texts traffic in conspiracy material; both feature protagonists who fuse their figures to the grand sweep of History, imagining such history in terms of great narrative arcs--the end of days, a curse, the Great Threat to Our Way of Life. Both figure themselves as beset minorities, both attempt to work out some grand wrong, first a wrong in History, in the grand sweep of government and mystic organizing forces, second a wrong in the personal, the self as it navigates the world, the latter struggle manifested, at least in part, in terms of gender. For Beck and crew, the masculine lack starkly visible in Oscar is less overt, since, of course, Beck doesn't focus on what he and his followers lack. Of course, Beck continually claim a position of loss--of some America slipping away (implicitly bound up, as countless commentators have shown, in both gender and race).

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is Diaz's postethnic, postpostmodern, pop-culture situated, Dominican-framed tale of Oscar and his family, their immigration and relationship dramas as they take shape under the long shadow of the Trujillo dictatorship. Real history, real struggle--but an imaginary curse. In contrast, Glenn Beck offers an imaginary history, an imaginary struggle--and, perhaps, a real curse, in the form of the cascading political and cultural fallout from the radical ideas expressed on his television and radio shows, books, blog, and speeches. Formally, Beck offers a diverse amalgam of infotainment, right-wing conspiracy theory, new male emotionalism. It emerges under the Obama administration, but is shaped by the conspiratorial tone of the Bush years, the widely-telegraphed sense of a country under siege, a rhetorical stance repeated throughout conservative history, but intensified by the events of 9/11. In many ways, of course, these two texts couldn't be different: one text is a literary novel, written by a Dominican-American author who teaches at MIT, and which concerns a poor Dominican family. As a novel, the text occupies a relatively "elite" space, and yet its subject matter is anything but elite. Beck's show, in contrast, is utterly populist (and regularly described as much) and yet its subject matter--the plight of rich white men--is implicitly elite. He works the same contradiction as circulates elsewhere on the Right: we're mainstream, the real America, and yet we're also the minority, those threatened with extinction.

It's Oscar, though, who's really threatened with extinction--or at least his species is threatened. Oscar is failed, obscure, unsuccessful by his chosen measure--getting laid, which is what is appears to be, but also, as Diaz explains in an interview, about much more--a sense of rootedness and home which is the diasporic subject's continual desire. Oscar is cast in obscurity, meaningless, alone in his room with his role-playing games and fantasy novels--pop culture profferences of meaning, a place to locate himself as beseiged postapocalyptic survivor, the only one who can save Maria (she with the coke dealer boyfriend) from the Grand Forces threatening her. Oscar fails in the everyday world; he is unable to achieve mastery over the forces shaping his life; he is unable to be legible as a man in his cultural context. How much Trujillo, or immigration-shaped poverty--has to do with Oscar's plight is never quite clear. But what is clear is that his life is not wondrous without a layer of the imagination, without framing his experience in terms of the fuku.

And here's where he has something in common with Beck's presumed viewers, who also grasp hold of an imagined grand narrative to make sense of themselves in the world, to see themselves as successful--though threatened--in their cultural context, as white men after whiteness, who perceive that the culture no longer automatically grants them phallic power, that phallic power is something granted to others (perhaps others with darker skin, perhaps others who embrace the contemporary world).

Fantasy saturates both worlds. Both texts draw, it seems, on pop cultural forms for heft and shape: Diaz on fantasy, comic books, scifi, hiphop, Beck on political thrillers. Beck has not only repeatedly interviewed thriller authors, he's authored one himself (a thriller he refers to--as if to drive home the point--as "faction," a mix between fiction and fact). The thrillers tend to share a theme: a small, dangerous group seeks to take over the United States, and only a few, brave, patriotic souls have the wherewithal to stop them. This story, fictional, repeatedly crosses over into Beck's nonfiction political analysis, which itself often sounds like a political thriller, wherein Obama and Acorn, Obama and Marxists, Obama and the Left are plotting to take over the country and impose fascist rule. I'm less interested in what Beck is saying, though, then the way he's saying it--the thriller, conspiracy-tinged narratives on which he draws, narratives which assert a particular identity, or at least frame a set of stakes for identity, in gendered terms. Arguably, Beck uses thrillers in the same way Oscar uses scifi and comic books, as a way to organize, condense, and rearrange his world, so that people like him are validated, and people not like him (for Oscar, brutally masculine men; for Beck women, minorities, leftists) are invalidated.

In Oscar Wao, it doesn't seem a stretch to say that gender is the conspiracy. The book is rooted in Oscar's life, of course, and Oscar's main problem is that he can't get laid--though as Diaz emphasizes, getting laid is a synecdoche for having a home, for feeling secure, for feeling rooted despite one's diasporic existence. So for Oscar, to get laid is to have a legible self. Moreover, nearly all of the family's tragic trajectory results from the choices of violent, domineering, patriarchal men, from Trujillo himself, who imprisons and destroys Oscar's grandfather, to The Gangster, who causes Beli to be nearly killed and then exiled, to the police captain who ultimately kills Oscar. In each case, too, the brutality stems from these males' violent sexual conquests, their imperial gaze suffused over the women of the book (The Gangster's brutality is augmented by his wife; still, one could argue that she herself engages in an imperially masculine brutality). Evil, in Oscar Wao, stems from the brutal carelessness of male desire (arguably, this is the lesson that Yunior needs to learn by the book's close). There is no de Leon family tragedy without the possessive desire of men for unlimited sexual conquest. It's not power, not greed, not unexamined privilege that forms the root of the problem here (as it does in other conspiracy novels): it's a destructive form of masculinity run rampant. Incidentally, this nicely intersects with Sedgwick's argument in Between Men: that power accrues to men, who use people like Oscar and the female de Leons as symbolic trophies of conquest.

Back to Beck, then, and the next question for my research: is it possible that some form of gender identity shapes his paranoia--his sense of how power operates in the world? One thing that I've begun to track re: Beck--and Rachel Maddow tore up the Right on this topic recently--is that much of Beck's Obama-paranoia seems to take shape around racial issues: Van Jones is black and worked on behalf of poor blacks, Acorn is nearly all minority and works on behalf of poor minorities, and, of course, the Shirley Sherrod NCAAP dustup. More widely, the underlying tone of "they're taking it from me" is frequently manifested as "minorities are getting my money," a statement that likely translates into "minorities are supplanting me," in an echo of the struggles over Alan Bakke, busing, and welfare that occurred in the late seventies and early eighties. There's an interesting symmetry, then, between Oscar Wao and Beck: one is a minority who re-imagines himself as significant via conspiracy, the other who uses conspiracy to imagine himself as insignificant, as somehow detached from the multiplying privileges of whiteness.

Conspiracy theory and melancholy life

I won't get this right the first time around, but something David Savran writes about Burroughs stirs me to think about conspiracy theory as offering respite for not just the white male subject, but for the melancholic late capitalist subject in general. Savran observes:

For Burroughs, as for so many other rebel males of the 1950s, political activism is suppressed in favor of retreat to an imaginary world in which control, the flesh and the word are simply dreamed away. Which means that the in the darkness and horror of Cold War culture, the end of writing—both its goal and its ruination—is utopia (103).

Savran is arguing, essentially, that Beat culture fails because, while they see clearly the terrifying control systems set in place in the immediate postwar years, writers like Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac fail to grasp their own implication in these systems. In order to "disavow" this failure, Savran argues, artists like Burroughs retreat into the utopia of writing, finding there a "dream," an "imaginary world" that avoids the contradictions of, to put it plainly, being white and male and rebelling against a system that authorizes white men, and as a result, he, and his fellow Beats, developed large blind spots. Savran is critical of the Beats in a familiar way--they didn't go far enough, they ignored racism, misogyny, homophobia, they refused politics in favor of aesthetics. But as I write this, I think of what the postwar moment felt like: first, one felt the full horror of Auschwitz and Hiroshima; second, one witnessed the different horrors of unloosed supercapitalism--the rapid suburbanization of America, the quickly-widening consumerism, the expansion of disposable culture (everything we uneasily laugh at on Mad Men); third, one felt the stinging failure of the Communist Left, a great force of organized opposition to the excesses of the State and Capital. In short, the temptation to escape--to seek an "imaginary world" of dream--must have been immense for anyone on the Left. (Indeed, other writers have argued that Ginsberg was no less Leftist than his predecessors in the Popular Front, but the threat of (homophobic) McCarthyism forced him to adopt survival strategies that appeared apolitical--dreamy.)

And here is where I sense a wide, largely undiagnosed set of appeals for conspiracy theory: however dark its mutterings, it offers still a kind of utopia, a kind of no-world where someone is in control, and the conspiracy theorist has the tools to resist such control. In the midst of the melancholic summer of 2010, with a failing Obama presidency, a dying Gulf of Mexico and two endless, nonsensical wars, and a general increase in real human suffering--homelessness, unemployment, untreated illnesses--the temptation of conspiracy seems clear. Blame it on Acorn--blame it on the still-influential neocons. Because at least then it feels better--there's a limit to the melancholy. The oft-repeated joke is that we need conspiracies in the absence of God. But perhaps one can't be patronizing about the appeal of the dream, even if the dream is politically inutile.

Masculinity

Why is it so hard to define gender? Is it because gender is hammered into us from such an early age that it becomes impossible to view critically? Here is what I have on masculinity: it has something to do with the "positive Oedipal complex," whereby, presumably, a boy rejects maternal "jouissance"--the pleasurable, unstructured, sense of oneness with the mother--in order to enter language, and in so doing, accept the Law of the Father and by implication, the chance to be the Father--to possess the phallic authority invested in the patriarch. This is how Catano describes the process, roughly, and he follows Silverman in her articulation of the dominant fiction, the ideological story that secures the functioning of this identification. (Both draw on Lacanian theory; neither markstheir reading as deviating from Lacan on this count.) That said, one should pay attention to the fictional aspect of the dominant fiction--that this is a story told, which circulates widely but which is not carved in stone. It is, as Connell describes it in a different context, hegemonic--subject to struggle and redefinition. This structure is also subject to being subverted, evaded, sidestepped. Here is where Butler's critique in Gender Trouble comes in handy: she effectively describes an Oedipal complex that doesn't quite take, or that itself is ideological. For Butler, every assumption of a gendered identity is uncertain and needing continual reinforcement. Masculinity critics also recognize this imperfectly assumed identity; Kimmel, like others, quotes the sixties sociologist Erving Guffman to the effect that

“There is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and recent record in sports. Every American male tends to look out upon the world from this perspective… Any male who fails to qualify in any one of these ways is likely to view himself … as unworthy, incomplete, and inferior” (128; quoted in Kimmel 2001 271)

This means, in short, that for the majority of men, a masculine identity will be imperfectly assumed: that most men will blush, will feel uncertain that they conform to this standard. Of course, for Butler, the problem goes beyond a simple feeling of not living up to one's gender: "[T]he ‘coherence’ and ‘continuity’ of ‘the person’ are not logical or analytical features of personhood, but, rather, socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility. Inasmuch as ‘identity’ is assured through the stabilizing concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality, the very notion of ‘the person’ is called into question by the cultural emergence of those ‘incoherent’ or ‘discontinuous’ gendered beings who appear to be persons but who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined” (17). For Butler, gender is not, nor was it ever, a quality of the subject that comes from within; gender is a scam, a "regulatory fiction" that tells us which kinds of people deserve subjectivity and which do not. If gender is undercut by persons who do not clearly conform to either gender--hermaphrodites, homosexuals--than so is identity.

Of course, as Butler points out, none of this means that men are not in a privileged position in relation to the regulatory fiction of gender: “The univocity of sex, the internal coherence of gender, and the binary framework for both sex and gender are considered throughout as regulatory fictions that consolidate and naturalize the convergent power regimes of masculine and heterosexist oppression” (33). Gender itself works like a conspiracy, serving to consolidate and regulate the distribution of power, primarily in the direction of heterosexual men.

Where, then, does this leave men? And how does one avoid, as Judith Halberstam warns, "detailing the forms and expressions of white male dominance" (3), which, as she rightly notes, have been documented "ad nauseum," not just by critics of masculinity, but by large swaths of the culture bent on reifying and reinforcing white men. In part, this leaves men, like everyone else who has not explicitly been cast out of a gender regime, struggling to maintain their coherent subjectivity. As countless examples show, from Nazi Germany to abusive husbands, subjects that are insecure about their identity are dangerous. In their everyday behaviors, men are apt to behave in ways that reinforce their sense of dominance and control, whether this means limiting women, fighting other men, owning guns, struggling with their fathers, joining men's organizations, playing sports competitively, and other embodied activities. David Savran describes white males' "precarious" hold on gender identity as something that must be "fought for again and again and again" (38). While, of course, in Butler's view, struggle and gender identity go hand and hand, Savran's particular choice of words--fight--point to something more troubling about the white male's ill-assumed gender identity. It's the problem a number of masculinity critics point out--that uncertainty about one's identity has terrible consequences if one has been convinced that one's identity should be 1) more secure than others' and 2) more powerful and controlling than others. The violence to which Savran points--"fighting" is different than "struggle," and while Savran doesn't cover Palinhauk, Fight Club seems to bear out his argument well--results from the dissonance of a supposedly powerful white man realizing that his identity is an illusion. Arguably, other subjects--women, minorities, homosexuals--feel this dissonance less violently, because they've been less subject to the illusion of power and control. (Drawing in broad strokes here, but still, this argument seems worth spelling out.)

But in my reading, men also seek out narratives that reinforce their sense of the world, narratives that themselves work a kind of rhetorical violence, or at least exclusion. As critics from Charles Taylor to Linda Hutcheon have asserted, identity is bound up in telling a story. The stories that men tell are likely, then, to seek out sources of phallic authority and dominance. Such stories, then, are apt to be replicated and telegraphed by men, particularly in historical moments where masculine authority is perceived to be under challenge. Part of my argument here, then, involves why conspiracy-theory-like stories have such wide appeal (at least in the versions propagated by Glenn Beck) at this historical moment. Yes, as Peter Knight and Fredric Jameson argue, conspiracy theories work to acknowledge the complexity of an ever-more complex world, or seek to "shrink down" this world for all subjects. But conspiracy theories also hone down those aspects of contemporary life that seem most disruptive to the male subject.

It's a long road, figuring out how to articulate my version of how masculinity works, and then how masculinity works in relation to conspiracy theory. The psychoanalytic model seems most compelling and, among literary critics, the most widely used (though it's also the one with which I'm most familiar, and I may be selecting those studies that seem compelling based on their adherence to Lacanian thought). But still, masculinity studies is a huge field, and I'm going to have to keep hammering on it to get it right.

Female masculinity

Went through Halberstam's book again yesterday, and while it contains some great points, I can't help finding it a little defensive and unstructured. Caveats: I have great respect for queer theory, and it's informed my thought on gender in countless ways. And in general, the gender-queer position is a tough one to occupy; the anecdotes about Halberstam being snickered at in an airport bathroom are heartbreaking and infuriating. Having said all that, I have trouble pulling any substantial claims about masculinity from this book, except implicitly--she views masculinity as a great generator and perpetuator of privilege, and seems to see female masculinity as a logical response to a system that offers men so much mobility, profit, and freedom from discrimination. At the same time, she seems to view female masculinity as a position to be defended from those who would confuse it with lesbianism, feminists who damn it as capitulation to patriarchy, and female to male transsexuals who put too much emphasis on passing as male. Throughout her work, masculinity remains an implicit concept--she writes, for example, of "stone butches" who wear their masculinity on the streets, and who don't want to give it up in the bedroom, but never defines what this worn masculinity means.

The point that "male" and "masculinity" are too often understood as synonymous--a point she makes in her intro--is compelling, and her critique of Kimmel, among others, as reproducing the anxieties of a dominant class, effective. And the idea that female masculinity as a “major step toward gender parity” (272) is lively in this context.

Overall, while I continue to find the point about masculinity adhering to female bodies compelling, and agree that female masculinity potentially subverts gender orders, I have a hard time pulling anything structured and productive away from this book. In part, I suppose, the title fools one--the book is less an argument on the topic than a series of examples of embodied female masculinity.

Lone gunmen redux

In Masculinities, RW Connell tends to see most dominant political issues-- national security, family values, corporate profit, or religion, or freedom--as implicitly reinforcing masculinity. These issues are masculine by default, the argument goes, because the institutions and practices they tend to affirm primarily concern men. To take one example, national security relates directly to military spending, and the military continues to be dominated by men at all levels. When men--and women--argue for greater focus on national security, then, they are reinforcing the power of men, or masculinity, without needing to do so overtly. Connell's reading here fits with his more general framework of masculine hegemony, as something that "happens" through historically-formed practices and institutions, and so which seldom needs to be named, unlike feminist struggles, all of which must occur in the name of woman.

The one exception to this rule, for Connell, is gun politics:

Gun organizations are conventionally masculine in cultural style; hunting and gun magazines dress their models in check shirts and boots to emphasize their masculinity. The gun lobby hardly has to labour the inference that politicians trying to take away our guns are emasculating us. At both symbolic and practical levels, the defence of gun ownership is a defence of hegemonic masculinity (212).

Obviously, this derives partly from a left-wing prejudice against guns, and the continued depiction of guns as anathema to all things progressive. But is Connell onto something? He cites the "gun is penis" idea dismissively, but also invokes William James Gibson's well-researched, and ambivalent, study of gun cultures Warrior Dreams. If Connell is right--that gun politics is about masculinity--this adds an additional (though painfully obvious) dimension to my reading of the "lone gunman"--every man with a gun is ultimately alone, defending his home and family against a hostile world (shades of the frontier, particularly the frontier invoked by Richard Slotkin, here). So when the phrase "lone gunman" circulates, it carries with it all the fantasies of gun ownership.

From an interview with energy policy expert Jörg Friedrichs on the shift from cheap oil to expensive oil:

When social glue and traditional lifestyles have eroded, they are not easily recovered. After several generations of individualism and affluence, Westerners will have a hard time accepting that they need to rely on communities and must revert to a sustainable lifestyle.

Nicely gels with McGirr's account of Sunbelt development in Orange County--individualism and affluence seem to be the drivers of paranoia; how will these take shape once wealth is threatened by expensive energy?

Suburban anticommunist thrills

In Suburban Warriors, Lisa McGirr describes the vivacious energy produced around anticommunism in 1960s Orange County. Ordinary residents, convinced of an “imminent communist takeover,” created social networks, screened anticommunist films, listened to speakers at the Orange County School of Anti-Communism, all in the fervored sense of an impending apocalypse. McGirr attributes the particular shape of the anticommunist agenda to Fred Schwartz, anticommunist orator given to statements about “communist plans for a flag of the U.S.S.R. flying above every American city by 1973” (quoted in McGirr 61). Doubtless, the people McGirr describes were genuinely worried about their children’s education being corrupted by Communists, and the threat of nuclear war certainly gave anticommunism heft. And as McGirr demonstrates, the atmosphere of anticommunism in Orange County was shaped by a defense industry that fed on anticommunist hysteria, as well as a disconnected social environment that lead residents to seek community wherever it was proffered, first in right-wing churches, and second, in right-wing organizations like the John Birch Society. Still, though, one gets the sense that for many of the people in McGirr's study, anticommunism provided a great deal of thrills. Inasmuch as the landscape of Southern California is disconnected and anticommunity, it's also simply boring, and the fiery rhetoric of anticommunism--the sense of being a "warrior"--had to offer a sense of adventure.

This is a brilliant book, which nicely articulates social fabric out of which political adventuring emerges. McGirr nicely delivers on the contradictions of her title; out of the sleepy, uneventful suburbs emerge Don Quixotes fighting Communist windmills that they see everywhere. This is the adventurous impulse I find operating in conspiracy theory, the bedroom transformed into a bunker, the garage transformed into a meeting place for rebel cells (literally, JB founder Welch modeled meetings after Communist cells). Communism certainly serves as the ultimate conspiracy for the residents McGirr describes, though of course when one reads David Bennett’s The Party of Fear, one recognizes that the pattern of thought which frames anticommunism—stealthy enemies at work everywhere—is similar to that which emerges around other shadowy enemies-Catholics, anti-abolitionists, the Illuminati, Masons—throughout American history. This sense of thrill is an aspect of conspiracy theory that I keep trying to draw out: that as much as conspiracy theory offers answers, as much as it offers its participants meaning, it also offers them a rush--the rush at seeing connections between the local ACLU and a Communist takeover, the rush of connecting events in China to one's backyard, the rush of being in the know, or at least of imagining oneself in the know.