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.