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.