Circulation of drive

Reading Jodi Dean's Blog Theory, though just finished the first chapter. Struck by how she nails the repetition-compulsion facet of social media: the way in the Twitterbook environment, it's actually really difficult, 2011 revolutions notwithstanding, to make visible the crucial connections (between the security state and the University of California, for example) which transform consciousness into radical consciousness:

the circulation of drive is functional for the prevention of [coherent enchainments of meaning] enchainments that might well enable radical political opposition. The contemporary challenge, then, is producing the conditions of possibility for breaking out of or redirecting the loop of drive (31)

I think here of how rapidly the UCD pepper spray incident has faded from public consciousness, a fading that would seem to have something to do with the "memeing" of the incident, the obsessive replication of John Pike's image. Here, a potentially transformational moment dissolved into a repeated image, a too-many times repeated idea that goes nowhere because it goes everywhere.

Conspiracy and self in Gravity's Rainbow

For the third? time, I've reached the end of section 3 of Gravity's Rainbow. This is the point where Slothrop's quest, his detective mystery of self-origin, ends, after reaching this point of what? stasis? A kind of self-reflexive joissance, the Rainbow instead of the Rocket?

and now, in the Zone, later in the day he became a crossroad, after a heavy rain he doesn’t recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural…. (626)

Up until now, throughout sections two and three, Slothrop has been after his origin-story: who is Jamf, what is Immoplex G, what did they do to me, who am I? As Margeret Lynd argues, Slothrop's quest is a failure; he can't piece together his memories into even a simple self-narrative, that which might make him integrable into the socius. He instead "becomes a crossroad," dissipates into the rhizomatic anarchy of the Zone. If the "typical" conspiracy plot involves yoking the disconnected subject to power's core, the They to the me, with attendant self-aggrandization along Oedipal lines, Pynchon's plot instead results in an anti-Oedipal diffusion of self. Perhaps, if this move doesn't quite undo the binaries of gender, it does reject the structures of male desire that support the kind of disciplinary domination that Pynchon charts throughout his novel.

Still, in this very passage, the word "cock" signifies the phallic economy that is at work throughout these pages. And ultimately, a rocket is very different, even as a deconstructed metaphor, than a geographically implicated orange. Pynchon both moves in male economies of desire and challenges them, invokes their exaggerated (s-gerat) form, only to disperse their energies, imagines counterforces in the language of Western domination. Simultaneously, a text that harnesses the anti-Oedipal energies of the sixties and acknowledges/reinforces the impossibility of genuinely dissipating these energies. In short, I suppose, it's a text with all the promises and shortcomings of Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic critiques. It's a fitting place to end a book about masculinity and conspiracy, or gender and conspiracy; as gender dissipates, it, too, returns. The original domination of gender and imperialism is everywhere in this text which nevertheless evokes and transmits the revolutionary energies of the postwar moment, including the critique of bureaucratic warmongering capitalism present in Marcuse, Mills and some of the more thoughtful elements of the New Left.

Gravity's Rainbow: all the promises, all the shortcomings of revolutionary literature.

The snake that is eating itself

I’m reading, or rereading, Stefan Mattessich’s brilliantly dense Lines of Flight on Gravity’s Rainbow. Mattessich makes the difficult point that GR is ultimately about its own terminology, and the very groundlessness of the power-oppositions which it nevertheless makes us of. For Mattessich, the opposition preterite/elect  performs itself; instead of working within a predefined set of hierarchies, in its very naming such hierarchies it creates them.

“Preterition is in its lines of flight a tendency to seek (identify with) election (in forms of autonomous utopia or transcendence, be they social or textual), a state in turn defined by not being preterite. In this paradox, one in fact recognizes the figure of praeteritio, a conspicuous omission or constitutive substitution (a figurative “passing over”) that indicates an ontological modality of exception both for the preterites in the novel and for the preterite novel. The paradox, in other words, opens in Gravity’s Rainbow the abyss or groundless ground of its own figural nature” (86).

Like Saussurian terms, these oppositions define themselves; the seeming exception of the preterite is created by conceiving of the preterite as opposite to the elect. While Mattessich is not citing Foucault nearly as much as Deleuze/Guattari, and (always less convincing for me), Baudrillard, these are pretty clearly Focauldian concepts. I wonder, too, if we’re not missing an important original opposition that works to functionally ground such seemingly groundless categories: doesn’t gender function in the novel as a kind of Prime Mover, and Slothrop’s hardon as a recognizably jarring limit to the endless substitutions here. Else how does the tyranny of the Rocket’s symbolization come to register as tyrannical? Preterition does not simply occur within an existing set of hierarchical values; it causes or conditions the space of values. It names its own exceptionality “It names the enveloping framework or limit-horizon within which it appears but also passes away, and as such it premises a possible deconstruction” (86)

The conspiracy only diverts itself from itself: “The war is a metaphor for a secret conspiracy that reduces it to the status of a diversion not from another event but from the actual event it is” (88). And that goes for the text of the conspiracy theory as well. But what to do with all this?

Such groundless illusions have real political consequences, at least for the forms opposition takes. As Mattessich argues, the Hereros invest Rocket with symbolic truth in order to empower themselves away from the rationalizing discourses that make them Other, and yet such investment paradoxically makes their desire less, not more, visible: “marginalizes desire, ensures its perpetual dissatisfaction and, more disturbingly, its lack of true substance or authority” An elsewhere that belongs to the interpreter (90).

The American divide in American Pastoral

Roth's Swede Levov is a complicated character, and his relationship with the cultural upheavals of the 60s is more complicated than the following passage suggests. Still, Roth seems to encapsulate, in his flawed, unexamined protagonist, the ideology of a certain job-creator Silent Majority:

These deep thinkers were the only people he could not stand to be around for long, these people who’d never manufactured anything or seen anything manufactured, who did not know what things were made of or how a company worked, who, aside from a house or car, had never sold anything and didn’t know how to sell anything, who’d never hired a worker, fired a worker, trained a worker, been fleeced by a worker—people who knew nothing of the intricacies or the risks of building a business or running a factory but who nonetheless imagined that they knew everything worth knowing. All that awareness, all that introspective Sheila-like gazing into every nook and cranny of one’s soul went repellently against the grain of life as he had known it. To his way of thinking it was simple: you had only to carry out your duties strenuously and unflaggingly like a Levov and orderliness became a natural condition, daily living a simple story tangibly unfolding, a deeply unagitating story, the fluctuations predictable, the combat containable, the surprises satisfying, the continuous motion an undulation carrying you along with the utmost faith that tidal waves occur only off the coast of countries thousands of thousands of miles away—or so it had seemed to him once upon a time, back when the union of beautiful mother and strong father and bright, bubbly child rivaled the trinity of the three bears (413).

The Swede here sounds like someone out of the Ayn Rand mythography, whereby looters and moochers have taken over the American dream.

Puzzling out the epistemology, or the contemporary use-value, of Gravity's Rainbow

There's no reason to reify this novel, obviously, and Molly Hite is right to historicize it as a function of certain countercultural discourses and energies. But I'm certain that Pynchon has seized something about the shift into late capitalism, and the bewildering transnational Network Societies that it breeds. In Slothrop, I will argue, he captures a consciousness torn between paranoid certainty and a disorienting embrace of multitude, the white male last subject cast into the whirlwind of flow.

Slothrop’s whole existence under the They-system is one of jarring realizations, followed by drifts into uneasy ... what I'll call for lack of a better term disknowledge, or disparanoia, the epistemological black holes which rive the Zone, the Zone itself being a jumble disknowledge/knowledge, the organization of the War Machine and the disorganization of its collapse. (In Lines of Flight, Stefan Mattesich terms this duality "drift" and "submission" (2)). “What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of solipsisms. Clearly. The two patterns create a third: a moiré, a new world of flowing shadows, interferences… “’Want me here’? What for?” (395). This dim slide of meaningless into meaning, disorientation into orientation, characterizes the shifting flows of rigid Cold War nostalgias juxtaposed with vertiginous overflows, sublime aggregations of disarrayed facts, which characterize life in the Risk Society or Information Society. All anchored, in Slothrop’s case, by the ultimate nostalgia, the one that works at you before you were born: gender.

Pynchon analysis

Pynchon's voice: the counterculture, the C. Wright Mills sociology, the Weberian analysis of bureaucracy, the technologist, all brilliantly cascading into this particularly pithy analysis of the War:

The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provided raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ‘n’ grab a piece of that Pie while there still here to gobble it up” (Gravity's Rainbow 105)

What does Benjamin say in the Theses on History that Pynchon doesn't say here?

Conspiracy theory as allegory

In an article expressing sympathy for 9/11 skeptics, Michael Truscello critiques conspiracy theory as allegory:

"[For cultural critic Jeffrey Melnick] this “grassroots rebellion” is not to be taken seriously on its own terms, but rather as a “revolt not only against governmental control over 9/11 inquiry but also as a critique of the centralized control of American media held by corporate actors such as Clear Channel” (p. 43).

Truscello critiques what he views as the wide brush with which Bratich, Fenster, Dean, Birchall paint conspiracy theory, particularly 9/11 conspiracy theory:

by assuming the label “conspiracy theory” applies to all 9/11 skepticism, they condemn even demonstrable falsehoods to what Orr and Husting call the “freak show” of postmodern American culture; and by focusing on how the theories are able to circulate, rather than whether the theories possess any epistemological legitimacy, they avoid questions regarding the very definition of conspiracy theory (33).

Truscello, then, would seem to pose an "epistemological test" for would-be conspiracy theories: if such theories have more truth value, then they should not be labeled conspiracy theory. This is an old argument, and a bit defensive, but, as Truscello notes, one that continues to be worth making as long as legitimate skepticism continues to be dismissed via the label conspiracy theory

In contrast to this group of "academic treatises" Truscello poses the more heterogeneous references to 9/11 embedded in film and television: V for Vendetta, Rescue Me, Jericho, Heroes, and others, arguing that such a field renders visible 9/11 skepticism that these academic treatises obscure:

The difference between these examples of popular culture appropriation and the academic treatises on 9/11 in American culture is that these films and TV shows at least contained consideration of the ideas in circulation online, whereas mainstream academics seemed to believe 9/11 skepticism was either marginal enough to ignore or unconvincing in the forms it has appeared (57).

The question here: why is 9/11 skepticism worth discerning? Also, does the fact that an idea resonates through popular culture translate into "useful" or "worth promoting"? After all, popular culture is a vast and uneven field, capable of harboring both the most hopeful subversions of power and the worst petty racisms...

Colonial refusal

Pynchon on colonial refusal, the zerodeath among the Herero:

A generation earlier, the declining number of live Herero births was a topic of medical interest throughout southern Africa. The whites looked on anxiously as they would have at an outbreak of rinderpest among the cattle. How provoking, to watch one's subject population dwindling like this, year after year. What's a colony without its dusky natives? Where's teh fun if they're all going to die off? Just a big hunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction or the mining--wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe its nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets. Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit (317).

Tribal death or Christian death...Hereros choose refusal.

The transcendental Swede

Criticism begins in this simple act: copying a passage, going over the words lovingly as one types it into a computer, where it hums in the virtual unconsciouss, haunting the writing that encloses, interprets, reinforces it. In copying a passage, I seek recognition, alienation, resonance, dissonance with my ideas, a process that works especially well with idea-packed texts like American Pastoral. As in this captivating series of sentences about the book's seemingly intrepid protagonist Swede Levov:

The Jewishness that he wore so lightly as one of the tall, blond athletic winners must have spoken to us too--in our idolizing the Swede and his unconscious oneness with America, I suppose there was a tinge of shame and self-rejection. Conflicting Jewish desires awakened by the sight of him were simultaneously becalmed by him: the contradiction in Jews who want to fit in and want to stand out, who insist they are different and insist they are no different, resolved itself in the triumphant spectacle of this Swede who was actually only another of our neighborhood Seymours whose forebears had been Solomons and Sauls and who would themselves beget Stephens who would in turn beget Shawns (20).

Roth continues, but that's enough: here are rich ideas, finely described, which sparkle and entice and inspire. First, the way Roth frames Levov's body as the site of Jewish desires--he'll note soon that Levov's subjectivity seems absent, that Levov functions more as embodied symbol than a human being embedded in the social, with all its swirling antagonisms. Like all such points de capiton, Levov must be more or less empty in order to function as such a transcendental signifier, and yet unlike freedom or Coca-Cola, he lives and breaths, and the purpose of the book's narrative is to draw out the messiness obscured by his canonization.

The They in the System

The world of Gravity's Rainbow is the world of biopower: statistics, measurements, great arrangements of bureaucracies, system, not individual, except in so far as the system chooses to figure an individual. So why all the Theys? Why paranoia? What signal-to-noise ratios are undone because of Slothrop's paranoia?

“So it is here, grouped on the beach with strangers, that voices begin to take on a touch of metal, each word a hard-edged clap, and the light, though as bright as before, is less able to illuminate… it’s a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders beyond the visible, also known as paranoia, filtering in. Pale lines of force whir in the sea air…pacts sworn to in rooms shelled back to their plain views, not quite by accident of war, suggest themselves. Oh, that was no ‘found’ crab, Ace—no random octopus or girl, uh-uh. Structure and detail come later, but the conniving around him now he feels instantly, in his heart” (188)

Katje's "Perhaps, after all, we were meant to meet" is at the core of this sense--the dizzying sense that this has been arranged for me, that which is not possible in the world of biopower, but that sense of which is endlessly iterable by the sirens of consumption.

What's fascinating about this particular They, for my purposes, is its insistence on gender--Slothrop's vaunted hardon--as at the root of Their conspiracy. But still, novel devoted to system, focused on They. No small rooms, but a hardon, and is this the metaphor for gender and conspiracy theory: that the conspiracy theorist longs for, or at least longs for the reassurance of, a hardon as the point de capiton of the power-knowledge-system's accumulating bureaucracies. To be identified by one's hardon is surely better than being " filed ... high on the white-sea-façade, in a room to himself" (GR 181), a formulation that dooms the individual subject to a meaningless passivity. The image of being "filed" in a hotel is the exact opposite of octopus Grigory showing up on the beach, in a vertiginous, but nevertheless comforting, in terms of being among the conspiratorial elect, planned outcome. We were meant to meet confirms that the universe has a structure, and if the God upholding such a structure is an erect penis, all the better.

Another valence of the small room

In an uneven, but repeatedly suggestive article on I Married a Communist, the political theory influenced critic Sorin Radu-Cucu offers a lively take on Ira Ringold's Zinctown cabin and its connection to two other rooms: Johnny O'Day's ascetic retreat amongst the steel mills of northern Indiana and Lenin's "anchorite room [in Zurich] where the revolutionary founder of Bolshevism had lived in exile for a year and a half ” (Roth 278, quoted in Radu-Cucu 178). In Radu-Cucu's view, Ringold's shack becomes infused with the Communist mythology of "retreat from capitalist life"; these rooms achieve meaning, then, not just in terms of their isolation from the antagonistic world of the social (to use Roth's ideas) but in terms of their legibility within a larger cultural narrative, as manifested by their visual similarity to a famous scene from such a cultural narrative, Lenin's own room. DeLillo has Oswald play with this idea in Libra (a similar text to IMAC, in many ways) but DeLillo makes clear that Oswald's motivations are personal first and political second: his shaky grasp of Communism leads to his repeating ideas like "Trotsky's cell" without a clear understanding of how Trotsky's cell figures into the larger mythology of Communism itself that Roth reproduces in IMAC.

All this is to say that the small room isn't just a recurring trope, it's also a recognizable one, one that assumes meanings--as a retreat from capitalist life, infused with a proletarian pastoral--borrowed from larger narratives.

Rationalization of everyday life

"Damned Beaver/Jeremy is the War, he is every assertion the fucking War has ever made--that we are meant for work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the senses, and other second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day" Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Like a Bible, this text, and if this quotation is a bit much, so be it; speaks to the dim routinization of life demanded by the industrial state. Ostensibly, the book is about War, but he's after Postwar, the widening gyres of bureaucratic rationality that gradually encompass all human endeavor: everything measured, as in The Postmodern Condition....

The irrationalization of imperialism

Reading GR again, the episode involving Katje's ancestor and the dodo. This segment is as good an example as any of Pynchon's continual scrutiny of the irrationality of power:

Did we tell them 'Salvation'? Did we mean a dwelling forever in the City? Everlasting life? An earthly paradise restored, their island as it used to be given back? Probably. Thinking all the time of the little brothers numbered among our own blessings. Indeed, if they save us from hunger in this world, then beyond, in Christ's kingdom, our salvations must be, in like measure, inextricable. Otherwise the dodoes would be only what they appear to be in the world's illusory light--only our prey. God could not be that cruel (111)

Scientific ridiculousness, of the sort deployed seriously in rationalizing imperial war.

Pura Vida

Roth, in I Married a Communist

[E]verything that lives is in movement. Because purity is petrification. Because purity is a lie. Because unless you're an ascetic paragon like Johnny O'Day or Jesus Christ, you're urged on by five hundred things. Because without the iron pole of righteousness with which the Grants clubbed their way to success, without the big lie of righteousness to tell you why you do what you do, you have to ask yourself, all along the way, 'Why do I do what I do?' And you have to endure yourself without knowing (318).

I especially like the "iron pole of righteousness" line: the assertion of knowing is, to Roth's Murry Ringold, a trap which has ultimately tricked even himself, making him "no less a historical casualty" than his brother Ira, who sought purity in the Communist Party.

The cultural critic and controlled demolition

I don't think I've read anything quite like Michael Truscello's "The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism in American Popular Culture," recently published in Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies. In it, Truscello, by all accounts a prolific, serious cultural critic with an awe-inspiring publication record for an assistant professor, takes the remarkable step of validating not just skepticism of the 9/11 Commission Report, which, as Truscello well demonstrates, was flawed and limited from its inception, but of the controlled demolition theory, a lynchpin of the much-derided 9/11 Truth movement whereby the three World Trade Center buildings felled on 9/11 were all demolished with previously set explosives. Academics have long played the conspiracy theory game, from philosophy professor Josiah Thompson to Berkeley's Peter Dale Scott to retired Claremont theologian David Ray Griffin. But somehow, Truscello's account, in part because it engages the cultural criticism of conspiracy theory, comes across as more serious and engaged. As a result, it's all the more jarring when Truscello figures the dizzying controlled demolition as a desired site of Left analysis.

Much of Truscello's argument regarding the 9/11 Commission Report is entirely compelling. He makes an excellent case for the report's mischaracterization of Al Quaeda as a hierarchical, established organization as opposed to the (now more accepted) view of the group as decentered and rhizomatic. Indeed, even Truscello's critique of the Bush administration pinning fault on Bin Laden comes across as thought-provoking, as does his general description of the Commission as undercut by conflicts of interest, limited access to key witnesses, and the requirement that all members have high-level security clearance, a fact that, as Truscello compellingly argues, would inevitably bias the Commission towards the answers desired by a security state. Finally, the general thrust of his article--that 9/11 should be further scrutinized as a site where radical security state changes were produced--is both sensible and laudable.

As Truscello notes, and as Bratich and Fenster have both argued, the label "conspiracy theory" frequently has the effect of limiting what truths will be recognized by a larger public. Conspiracy theory frequently denotes the point where serious analysis ends and what Ginna Huston and Martin Orr call "the ‘freak show’ of American culture in the postmodern moment" begins (quoted in Truscello 33). Truscello is basically arguing that, in regards to 9/11 conspiracy theory, this line has been drawn too aggressively, and forms of analysis which should be legible--most compellingly, around the security state--have been obscured.

But this line exists, and while it may be drawn for ideological reasons, it can and should also be drawn for logical reasons. Certainly, if the World Trade Center towers were felled by explosives, such an act would be subject to the same drive to obscure that occurred around Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo; there is no doubt that the security state works to cover its mistakes, and, as Peter Knight argues, the postwar culture of national secrecy has encouraged the proliferation of conspiracy theories. But the scope of such a coverup--and the very luridness of rogue agents destroying prominent American buildings--makes the idea difficult, if not impossible, to imagine in the real world.

Such a coverup can, of course, happen in the world of V for Vendetta, and here lies the interesting core of Truscello's article: in pointing out that 9/11 skepticism has circulated in popular culture, but resisted by serious Left critics, he muddies the boundary between the forms of critique which emerge in popular culture and the forms of critique which function as effective critical analysis. Part of the appeal of V for Vendetta is the thrill of imagining the government being so transparently manipulative as to stage disasters. But such transparency, thrilling in fiction, breaks down when confronted by the messy, uneven way in which history proceeds--not as a plan, but as a cascading series of accidents, of which political players may certainly take advantage.

So I'm not sure what Truscello is doing by including controlled demolitions in his catalog of 9/11 skepticism. Part of me suspects that this is performative; that in the same way V for Vendetta gets people out on the streets protesting, his serious treatment of controlled demolition functions as a lever which can be used to pry open the cathected security state. He may be playing a complicated game with rich implications for the use of conspiracy theory, calling attention to the problematic limiting around extreme but popular skepticism, while simultaneously acknowledging, through mimicry, the powerful allure of such extreme skepticism. Its often been observed that the contemporary media environment has little patience for sustained analysis or historicizing; it does, though, readily engage lurid, straightforward accounts of history, and it may be that Truscello, like the members of Anonymous who don V for Vendetta masks, recognizes that complex historicizing simply doesn't cut it in the post-9/11, Web 2.0 atmosphere. Renting a billboard with the words "Where's the Birth Certificate," however, does, and if the Tea Party has demonstrated anything in the past two years, it's that seemingly wild accounts of government can exert effective, policy-altering influence. Truscello's analysis exists in the wildly fun territory of violent video games and 4chan: unignorable, likely to be marginalized, but perhaps indicative of an immanent, poorly-understood future.

Insecure vs. secure paranoia

Peter Knight concludes his seminal Conspiracy Culture with a meditation on the post-Cold-War paradoxes which circulate around the idea that "everything is connected." Hardly an affirmation of the latter, Knight's account lists the multiple, seemingly hidden ways in which the globe really does seem to be interconnected--risk theory, ecology, systems theory, globalization--only to acknowledge that such interconnectedness exists only at a "deeper" level which cannot be narrated by Cold-War-era accounts of secret cabals, but towards which such accounts nevertheless point. While embedded in a range of 90s popular and theoretical cultures, Knight's argument nevertheless points to a compelling feature of contemporary conspiracy theories: that these express current amalgams of power in only allegorical or partial ways. I really like the way Knight frames cabal-type conspiracies as products of the Cold War; this fuels, certainly, my argument that the small room of conspiracy functions nostalgically. He characterizes the age as one of "insecure," or posthumanist paranoia, but points to the powerful pull that "secure" paranoia has in the present.

Secure paranoias, insecure paranoias, space of places, space of flows. Surely it's not much of stretch to say that the cabals of the Cold War are tightly bound to the civic institutions that Castells figures as failed in the Network Society. The unsettling distances that Knight finds at work in DeLillo's Underworld are also characteristic of the distances between elites and people which lie at the core of Castells' account of the social organization of the Network Society: elites are cosmopolitan, people are local.

Still, though, something about gender and identity cuts through all this. On the one hand, the conspiracy theorist's nostalgia is akin to the militia and fundamentalist nostalgia that Castells figures in The Power of Identity; on the other, the gender imaginaries circulate more widely than the local.

CIA-like anthropology in Native Speaker

How is one "known" to the Theys who operate in the small room? In Native Speaker, Henry Park thinks of "conspirator" Dennis Hoagland's perspective:

John Kwang, I can hear [Hoagland] saying with a pop in his voice, is not so important a man. At least not individually, as a single human possibility. No one is. If a client is interested at all it is because the man exercises an influence or maybe even grace on some greater slice of humanity. Or most simply, he is representative, easily drawn and iconic, the idea being if you knew him you could know a whole people (334).

Postmodernity and the evacuation of racial difference

In his wonderful, incredibly nuanced Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, literary critic David Palumbo-Liu, after first observing the extended meaning modernist marginality has for the ethnic/racial subject's double-consciousness, posits (in a faintly familiar move) that postmodernity functions as such in part because the denarrativizing logic of late capitalism serves to "flatten out" identity as much as it flattens out culture. He rereads Jameson’s postmodernity as dizzying in part because it is ethnically and racially undifferentiated:

“Postmodern schizophrenic meaningless is directly correlated with the fact that racial others are now too much like us in this (flat)line space of postmodernity—there are no hills and valleys to secure our geographies, no way to ‘map’ a position. ‘We’ are just as randomly postmodern subjects as ‘they.’ In other words, ‘white’ is no longer distinct” (325).

I find in this a sharply improved way of describing the post-sixties shifts in identity which, I argue, fuel the repeated turn to conspiracy theory during this era. Indeed, one might argue that the "birther" conspiracy theory has as its clear cultural motivation the reinstallation of such difference in the context of a dizzying sameness (which is why I've described this conspiracy theory as "exhausting" a particular logic of conspiracy theory). This also provides a way of rereading Patrick O'Donnell's theorization of postmodern paranoia as gendered and raced--the paranoid positions are best characterized as Euroamerican (white male) nostalgia for the moment of modernity, a moment when, as Liu argues, "the neither-or formula of marginality was not as pernicious for the Euroamerican subject, since it was still placed at the center of a modern teleology. Whichever way modernity was moving, that subjectivity was carried along in its flow" (321). Same argument, different valence.

Musing on the small room as a discursive formation

In conceiving of conspiracy theory as a gendered discourse, I argue that conspiracy theory continually reinforces idea that power originates in, replicates itself in, and dominates from concentrated small groups located in inaccessible places, a kind of panoptic centralization of effort which determines life behind the State, church, corporations, or other institutions. While this power may exert influence in an almost capillary way, shaping, for example, school curricula or local elections, it is ultimately organized and limited by the walls of the small room in which it operates. The kind of power imagined by conspiracy theorists, then, is identifiable and limited; it is not subject to the kind of diffusion and dispersal described by Foucault and his philosophical descendants, but remains whole and unified.

The small room of power is figured in multiple ways that feed its imaginary: it is the war room, the situation room, the smoke-filled back room, the remote gathering, the board room meeting. Historically, this room has been occupied by men, and it would seem to remain representative of masculine action and exclusion. Critics made much of the gender and race switching of the recently released photo of Barack Obama and advisors watching the Bin Laden operation. But while Obama's race and Hilary Clinton's gender do indicate shifts in the bodies allowed into the room, the form of the room, as inhabited by intact, powerful citizens, remains the same.

Within the shifting subjectivity of the postmodern moment, the famous death of the subject accomplished by everything from decolonization to niche marketing to postwar social revolutions to poststructural theory, the small room provides a stable site of identification, particularly for those with nostalgia for more stable days. The small room exposes the reassurance of disciplinary power in a biopolitical age, unveils a widespread longing for the relative fixity of the panopticon and imperialism.

If the small room operates primarily "for" white men, who perhaps experience the "loss" of subjectivity most acutely, it is nevertheless a mobile formation, shaping the imaginaries of all those interpellated by the desiring logic of white masculinity. This is what Chang Rae Lee shows in Native Speaker and Junot Diaz in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: the discourse of white male power, its nostalgic imaginaries of fixed subjects, shapes the subjectivity of nonwhite men and women, bending and warping their sense of the various Theys who occupy the small room. In tracking the trope of the small room, then, I hope to show how such nostalgic views of power continue to exert influence, everywhere from Glenn Beck's monologues to The Watchmen.

Ethnic pol

In a great article on Native Speaker, Betsy Huang concludes:

But, the problem faced by Lowe, et al. is still the tenacious inextricability of racial inheritance from the discourse of citizenship and measurements of “national competence,” whether it be for the purpose of changing the terms of citizenship from within (as Li and many Asian American political scientists would have it), or constructing an alternative and oppositional citizenship from without (as Lowe, Chuh, and San Juan would have it). We return to what is becoming a reductio ad absurdum time and again: is racial and/or ethnic “inheritance” a constitutive or an oppositional aspect of citizenship? Lee’s John Kwang, who fails spectacularly despite his ability to be “effortlessly Korean” and “effortlessly American,” suggests that the real problem is our inability to imagine a solution somewhere in between. (264)

Huang returns to a problem common in ethnic studies, familiar to readers of Ellison and Wright: is the fight for the ethnic citizen to be recognized as fully American (Ellison, to some degree) or to preserve an oppositional, critical identity. Huang argues that Kwang fails because there exists no space between these two poles, that "ethnic pols" are inevitably figured as either Other or defanged of their critique (the problem Obama faces currently--if he's simply "one of us," has he discarded the powerful historical figurations around his African-American identity?).

Musing on the small room as a discursive formation

In conceiving of conspiracy theory as a gendered discourse, I argue that conspiracy theory reinforces, and rehearses, the idea that power originates in, replicates itself in, and dominates from concentrated small groups located in inaccessible places, a kind of panoptic centralization of effort which determines life behind the State, church, corporations, or other institutions. Real power always lies behind a veil, and is always limited. While this power may exert influence in an almost capillary way, shaping, for example, school curricula or local elections, it is ultimately organized and limited by the walls of the small room in which it operates. The kind of power imagined by conspiracy theorists, then, is identifiable and limited; it is not subject to the kind of diffusion and dispersal described by Foucault and his philosophical descendants, but remains whole and unified.

The small room imaginary is figured in multiple way : it is the war room, the situation room, the smoke-filled back room, the remote gathering, the board room meeting. Historically, this room has been occupied by men, and, at least in conspiracy theory but arguably more widely, remains representative of masculine action and exclusion. Critics made much of the gender and race switching of the recently released photo of Barack Obama and advisors watching the Bin Laden operation. But while Obama's race and Hilary Clinton's gender do indicate shifts in the bodies allowed into the room, the form of the room, as inhabited by intact, powerful citizens, remains the same.

Within the shifting subjectivity of the postmodern moment, the famous death of the subject accomplished by everything from decolonization to niche marketing to postwar social revolutions to poststructural theory, the small room provides a stable site of identification, particularly for those with nostalgia for stability. The small room exposes the reassurance of disciplinary power in a biopolitical age, unveils a widespread longing for the relative fixity of the panopticon and imperialism. In an age of nomadic subjects, the small room arrests slippages around identity via the mechanism of gender.

If the small room operates primarily "for" white men, who perhaps experience the "loss" of subjectivity most acutely, it is nevertheless a mobile formation, shaping the imaginaries of all those interpellated by the desiring logic of white masculinity. This is what Chang Rae Lee shows in Native Speaker and Junot Diaz in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: the discourse of white male power, its nostalgic imaginaries of fixed subjects, shapes the subjectivity of nonwhite men and women, bending and warping their sense of the various Theys who occupy the small room. In tracking the trope of the small room, then, I hope to show how such nostalgic views of power continue to exert influence, everywhere from Glenn Beck's monologues to The Watchmen.

Conspiracy theory and the logic of the sovereign

In Michel Foucault's series of lectures published in Society Must Be Defended, he spends a long time articulating a split in seventeenth century thought which still haunts the present day: the obfuscation of what he terms the "race war" memory of the Norman Conquest by the sovereignty theory of Hobbes. At core, Foucault argues, Hobbes's Leviathan is a justification of State power, whether such power is granted by contract, acquisition, or natural rights. While political philosophers might critique the sovereign, they would rather, in Foucault's words, "give the State too much power than not enough power" (98) in order to "[ward] off a certain insidious and barbarous enemy" (99). Hobbes formed his idea of Leviathan, Foucault continues, to ward off the discourse of race war, "[the] discourse of struggle and permanent civil war" in which ultimately, it becomes clear that "we are not talking about sovereignty; we are talking about domination, about an infinitely dense and multiple domination that never comes to an end" (111). This, Foucault maintains, is the knowledge that operated amongst political struggles in the seventeenth century, visible in the writings of such groups as the Diggers and Levelers: you have conquered us by force, and all your laws, and by extension all our laws that justify your laws, are rooted in this domination, and no amount of rationalizing such conquering force in terms of sovereignty will make this reality disappear. Here is the end-logic of the Nietzschean and Foucauldian ideas that have exerted wide influence on recent accounts of colonialism, racism, gender, queerness, and the like: domination is rooted in the whole of the social, and it is no good looking for utopias in the next revolution. By extension, power is a complex, multivalent beast that operates in a host of tricky, ultimately capillary ways. Shoot the king and you get nothing, for the king's institutions persist.

So, where does conspiracy theory, as a general, popular, analysis of history with multiple strands but some general shared characteristics, stand in relation to Foucault's formulation? Well, many commentators, Mark Fenster and Peter Knight among them, seem to hold that conspiracy theory serves to unveil the continual war that writhes beneath the veneer of the social, that while conspiracy theory appears to be a fringe phenomenon with faulty analytic tools, it in fact operates as a populist instrument for detecting the widespread operation of power, for demonstrating, that is, that "the social order is a war [...] War is both the web and the secret of institutions and systems of power" (110). In identifying a war raging beneath the surface of the social order, conspiracy theory, seen through this light, functions as what Foucault calls "political historicism."

But what if it's the opposite? What if conspiracy theory, while not a fringe phenomenon, actually accrues to the logic of the sovereign, in part because it operates on one of society's fundamental binaries, that of gender. The discourse of conspiracy theory, I argue, is the discourse of the sovereign, because it focuses not on a hidden continuous war, but on the ruthless efficiency of a political order, however hidden. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow chides his aunt for believing in womanish makebelieve world of virtuous imperialism; but in dismissing the feminized version of imperialism, a move he'll continue in his denunciation of the feminized "pilgrims" floundering through the Congo, he affirms the existence of right, efficient action--what he calls "hard work." Something like the same thing occurs with the conspiracy theorist. In affirming the supernatural efficiency of conspirators' action, the conspiracy theorist denies, or at least obscures, the kind of mutable, continuous struggle that Foucault discusses, a struggle where even Marlow's aunt, by attributing to him an agenda foreign to Marlow, seeks to impose, and may succeed in imposing, her own will on Marlow. The discourse of efficiency is not simultaneous with the Hobbesian discourse of contract; and yet it would seem to form part of justifying the ways of power to men that is the target of Foucault's entire enterprise.

Not panopticism, but the plotting cell.

American Pastoral and the Logic of the Small Room

I've written about how both DeLillo's Libra and Chang Rae Lee's Native Speaker establish and reinforce the cultural logic of the conspirator's "small room," as site where masculine identity is solidified against masculinity's others and sutured to a national (paranoid) identity. The men in these rooms take refuge from a continually destabilizing world; the room delimits boundaries for male identity, and offers a reassuring meaning and structure. The room at home maps onto a hidden room of power located in a national site. Both DeLillo's Lee Harvey Oswald and Lee's Henry Park feel outside of America, primarily for reasons of class and ethnicity. Both feel, somehow, that they are less than fully men, and both turn to conspiratorial small rooms as a means of both connecting themselves to a national imaginary and reinforcing their sense of what it means to be a man. With no women or real other men in the room, the room serves as a blank space onto which ideas of connectedness and meaning can be imposed.

I'll now turn to a text by another well-known postwar writer often compared to DeLillo, whose concerns, in some ways, bridge those of DeLillo and Lee. Philip Roth's American Pastoral, similarly engages issues of masculine identity in relation to national imaginaries, but essentially effects a reversal. Like many of Roth's works, American Pastoral focuses on his native Newark, but, as its title indicates, invokes a wider American historical experience, spanning the mid-forties to the mid-90s. Narrated by novelist (and recurring Roth character) Nathan Zuckerman, the novel focuses on the life of Zuckerman's boyhood hero, the star athlete Seymour "Swede" Levov, who shines brightly in the Jewish neighborhood in which both Zuckerman and Levov grow up, and who becomes head of the successful Newark Maid glove company.

Levov's story takes place against a national history that serves to shape--though not determine--his family's relationships. Roth pegs Levov's identity to a national imaginary almost immediately: Levov emerges as a sports star amidst the end of World War II, and victory in the war is bound to Levov's victory on the field. Newark Glove experiences a familiar trajectory in American manufacturing, becoming implicated in the uprisings of the late 60s (with Amiri Baraka at its helm, Newark was at the forefront of the Black Power and Black Arts movements, and experienced six days of riots in July of 1967), outsourcing (Newark Maid moves its manufacturing to Puerto Rico once labor becomes too expensive) and white flight (Newark Maid is one of the last productive companies in Newark).

As his nickname indicates, Levov enjoys, at least initially, the full privileges of being white and male in the United States. Indeed, Levov is the American male ideal: successful at sports, wealthy, well liked--he is even married to Miss New Jersey. The "pastoral" of Roth's title refers to the good life that Levov aquires for himself and his wife, the big farmhouse in an WASP enclave called Old Rimrock to which the Levovs move from Newark (located in historically affluent Morris County. In many ways, then, Levov is the opposite of Oswald and Park: his identity, at the beginning of the book, is secure and connected. So Levov has no need for the supplement provided by the small room: his identity is complete unto itself. Nevertheless, Roth finds another set of small rooms operating, these by his politically active daughter Merry, who seeks her own connection with a national imaginary by the (admittedly unlikely) act of blowing up the local post office. Roth depicts Merry's political life as a search for meaning; she is forced into a series of small rooms when she becomes a fugitive from the FBI. Roth describes Merry's friends, from Levov's point of view, as uncontrollable and feminine, "girls who become just as militant as the boys," and whose logic Levov (and perhaps Roth) finds inscrutable.

In place of the network of male-occupied small rooms that appears in Libra and Native Son, then, we see in American Pastoral the small room functioning as a site of unknowable femininity, something both more and less than feminism. Merry's actions are tied to the anti-Oedipal impulses of the late 60s. While to be sure, the counterculture contained its own masculinity-reinforcing structures, the movement nevertheless served for many Americans as a site of strange semiotic energies, where gender identities and national coherence broke down. Merry, and the Vietnam War itself, function as anti-Oedipal forces--what Roth calls the American berserk--to the Oedipal identifications that circulate around Swede Levov.

The law/Them

“The law is not born of nature, and it was not born near the fountains that the first shepherds frequented: the law is born of real battles, victories, massacres, and conquests, which can be dated and which have their horrific heroes; the law was born in burning towns and ravaged fields. It was born together with the famous innocents who died at break of day” (50).

--Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended

“There’s something still on, don’t call it a ‘war’ if it makes you nervous, maybe the death rate’s gone down a point or two, beer in cans is back at last and there were a lot of people in Trafalgar Square one night not so long ago … but Their enterprise goes on” (628).

--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

The conspiracy of literary criticism

As I continue to crawl through prep for the intro to theory course, I keep finding specters of conspiracy haunting [literary] theory. Latest: in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), Stephen Greenblatt writes of the fiction of the totalizing society, what he describes as "posit[ing] an occult network linking all human, natural, and cosmic powers and that claims on behalf of its ruling elite a privileged place in this network. Such a society generates vivid dreams of access to the linked powers and vests control of this access in a religious and state bureaucracy at whose pinnacle is the symbolic figure of the monarch" (Lodge 558). Thewriter here, in the conventional view of Great Literature, has privileged access to the "occult network" by virtue of representing the dreams and wishes of the ruling elite, and by extension granting access to the mysteriously inaccessible figure of the monarch. The desire of literature, then, is desire for access to a sense of totality, a sense of wholeness that one can associate, without too much critical wrangling, with the figure of the big Other, who guarantees order and meaning for the subject. This is a wildly wonderful way to account for the desire of conspiracy theory and its accompanying narratives.

Greenblatt continues: "The great attraction of [the author or text as authority] is that it appears to bind and fix the energies we prize, to identify a stable and permanent source of literary power, to offer an escape from shared contingency" (Lodge 559). Replace "text" with "conspiracy theory" and "literary power" with "political power" and we've got a nicely encapsulated description of CT.

Or, the play is a conspiracy:

"[O]ne of the ideological fictions of the theater was precisely to create in its audience the sense that what seemed spontaneous or accidental was in fact fully plotted ahead of time by a playwright carefully calculating his effects, taht behind experienced uncertainty there was design, whether the design of the human patriarchs--the fathers and rulers who unceasingly watched over the errant courses of their subjects--or the overarching design of the divine patriarch. the theater when would confirm the structure of human experiences as proclaimed by those on top and would urge us to reconfirm this structure in our pleasure" (Lodge 568).

Play, like conspiracy theory, confirms that all is (patriarchically) ordered with the world.

Another version of a They

Said:

Yet--and here we must be very clear--Orientalism overode the Orient. As a system of thought about the Orient, it always rose from the specifically human detail to the general transhuman one; an observation about a tenth-century Arab poet mutliplied itself into a policy towards (and about) the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq, or Arabia. Similarly a verse from the Koran woudl be considered the best evidence of an ineradicable Msulim sensuality. Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different (the reasons change from epoch to epoch)from the West. And Orientalism, in its post-eighteenth-century form, could never
revise itself (Lodge 370).

Here Said astutely figures a Western view of the Other, as, in particular, unchanging. It's only a short leap to figure this Other as unchanging in its desire: what Muslims want is Shariah law, because all Muslims are irrationally religious. The note about the specific human detail being abstracted to a transhuman one is also worth recalling re: CT, with its voracious habit of elevating minor details into a carefully orchestrated plan.

De Beauvoir: Women are "natural" conspiracy theorists

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir muses on woman's dependence and disempowerment, and how such powerlessness breeds resentment and confusion. Obliged to "regard the male universe"--the universe of power in which she does not share, because "she would feel in danger without a roof over her head," but because she is "passive [and] out of the game" she believes "the good should be realized, and if it is not, there must be some wrongdoing for which those to blame must be punished" (109). This leaves her open to what, in de Beauvoir's view are clearly unsophisticated positions: “[W]oman thinks that ‘it is all the Jews’ fault,’ or the Freemasons’ or the Bolsheviks’, or the government’s; she is always against someone or something. They do not always know just where the evil principle may lie, but what they expect of a ‘good government’ is to sweep it out as they sweep dust out of the house” (109).

De Beauvoir, deliberately provoking male stereotypes of women, argues that women are denied access to a privileged male realm, and so are prone to imagine this male realm in terms of their immediate experience: the black and white world of prewar housekeeping. The material circumstances of woman's position have, of course, changed, and yet the paradigms here likely persist. Moreover, the general structure of her formulation--that those denied power are apt to imagine it in polarized forms--is useful for conceptualizing one facet of my argument in regards to disempowered men and conspiracy theory.

Master of puppets

Jodi Dean's Icite blog alerted me to the fascinatingly scary phenom of automated "sockpuppeting," a process whereby a political operation or operatives use Web 2.0 technology to generate hundreds of "individuals" online with, apparently, their own Twitter accounts, blogs, websites, emails, and so on. This phenomenon, while visible for some time because of a publicly-revealed government bid for "persona management software," was recently reinforced because of the triumphant document-dump accomplished by hacktivists Anonymous on the security firm HB Gary, written about by the Daily Kos here.

In the words of an actual government bid for the software, summarized nicely by Alison Diana at Information Week:

Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries. Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms.

Such individuals would then be able to generate the appearance of consensus on a political issue without needing to mobilize supporters--as a Daily Kos poster put it, it would allow for "Brooks Brothers riots" online with ease.The idea of sockpuppeting--creating fake online personas to support, or in some cases oppose, one's own issues--is almost twenty years old, but the level of sophistication referred to in the HBGary leaks is terrifying in its ability to subvert public opinion. And in the current environment, where some largish portion of public opinion is formed across blogs, Twitter, comments sections, and the like, the ability to generate and manipulate a range of online personas could theoretically shift the perception (the Overton window?) of a wider public's stand on an issue. To put this in real terms, if a wide array of voices on the Web emerge in opposition to the 2010 health care act, participants in the pro-health-care struggle may lose energy--as did the Left throughout 2009 and 2010, in the wake of the Tea Party "uprising."

It's interesting, actually, that this issue surfaces in the context of Wikileaks, an organization that promotes a utopia of absolute informational transparency, a conspiracy theorist's paradise where all of the facts are available--where nothing is classified. There are opposing ideas about information online here, one located in the promise of absolute sharing proferred by Wikileaks and one located in the phenomenal level of distrust generated by the prospect of any given Twitter or Facebook user being faked, and consensus developing from such faked users. It's particularly frightening, perhaps, in an era of leveled authority, where journalists have begun to be eclipsed by bloggers, and the "real" location of authority is online (a state of affairs which Wikileaks promotes). Crowdsourcing doesn't work if the "crowd" is one person with an agenda. This promotes, and intersects with, the "Astroturf" label often slapped on the "grassroots" Tea Party. Where is the "people"? Who can know what "everyone" believes? How soon before they can fake polls, generating a host of faked cell phones? What I believe about, say, the tenor of union-bashing matters; the Tea Party was able to drive the Left into submission in part because they seized control of a narrative.

Finally, of course, sockpuppeting is also just a metaphor for the everyday generated consensus that occurs on the Right and Left, who both repeat talking points (if they're smart) until the talking points become truth. In this sense, sockpuppeting as a phenomenon is something like the statue of Stalin atop the factory, thereby crushing the workers, that Zizek analyzes in The Plague of Fantasies: a seemingly incontrovertible proof of the system's functioning that, by working too overtly, exposes the very logic of the system. Ergo, we want wide democratic participation, but we'd be happier with a monopoly on opinion. State-sponsored social media.

...

In The Crying of Lot 49, Jesus Arrabal describes Pierce Inverarity as the exact enemy his anarchist rebels need to keep hope: capitalist, money-hungry, American, Pierce represents everything against which the anarchists struggle, and so renews their cause. One might say the same for the Tea Party and the Left; but the recent King hearings on Muslim extremism point me to what Sarah Posner calls the "Shariah conspiracy industry," whose paranoid fears are manifested perfectly in the site www.shariah4america.com. Apparently--though not certainly--created by the Muslim opportunist Ahmed Choudary, the site depicts wild results of a "Shariah takeover," in particular draping a burkah over the Statue of Liberty. This exact enemy manifesting would seem to be another example of the "sock puppet" phenomenon, whereby my exact enemy appears, confirming all my worst fears.

Meet the new conspiracy, same as the old conspiracy

Generally, conspiracy theory is framed as an equal opportunity fallacy, propagated equally on the Left and Right. First comes Michael Moore and the 9/11 Truthers, soon after comes Glenn Beck and the Obama Birthers. And historically, JFK conspiracy theorists tend to be slightly left of center, while anti-New-Dealers are squarely right. All that said, there's something fascinatingly ironic, but also familiar, in terms of the CTs that circulated around Roosevelt and Clinton, in Glenn Beck's broad appeal. As with many conspiracy theorists, Beck constructs a wide-ranging conspiracy out of assorted truths and half-truths: the Cloward-Piven strategy, Van Jones' early Marxism, ACORN's community organizing, and so on. The irony here is that the Right represents the most powerful interests in the culture-interests who benefit most from the Right's relentless agenda of more tax cuts and less regulation. So it makes sense, in many ways, that Beck has to create an agenda against people like himself, because otherwise the equation doesn't work.

From The Handmaid's Tale

which sounds terrifyingly like now--guess it's just an 80s hangover:

"We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories" (57)