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