“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.
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