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.