Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Cosmopolis/DeLillo/Filmic Violence

First take on Cronenberg's Cosmopolis. Heard a lot about this film at the DeLillo conference back in April.
A lot of the commentary predictably and compellingly focused on the film/novel's invocation of global technocapitalism and its discontents, focusing with particular urgency on the protest scene at the film/novel's center, as well as the protagonist's self-destructive drive to self-immolate through a radically risky bet on the Japanese yen (the third most traded currency in the foreign exchange market, per wikipedia). Many of the film's reviews, such as this excellent one in Salon, emphasize the same themes. While I see these themes undeniably active in the film, and also well in keeping with the themes circulating around post-08 capitalism, I also think the film version does a good deal to emphasize the novel's violence, beginning with the grisly public assassination of an IMF official live on television. The blood gushing out of that official's eye prefigures the abrupt gunshot that Pattinson's Packer uses to kill his bodyguard and ultimately the tense, violent exchange between Packer and Benito Levin.

What difference, then, does putting Cosmopolis to film make? Many of Cronenberg's reviewers spend a lot of time talking about how faithful he is to DeLillo's text: he makes few significant changes, aside from rerouting some dialog from Packer's head into conversation. For the most part, the film is meticulously adherent to the novel, radically unlike Cronenberg's take on Naked Lunch. But in transfer to film, of course, the narrative changes, and I would argue that one of the most startling areas of change lies with the novel's violence.

Because this is the first filmed version of a DeLillo novel, it foregrounds the long association in DeLillo's work between violence and film, most centrally with the Zapruder film in Libra, Underworld, and the American Blood essay (as well as with the Frank Volterra character in The Names and David Bell in Americana). DeLillo has written and spoken about the influence of assassination and Zapruder film on his work, and in the following I want to call attention to the way this original piece of filmic violence emerges in Cosmopolis's own filmic violence. The physical representation of this violence, juxtaposed with the self-conscious conversation that Levin and Packer have at the end, serves to disrupt the uneasy association between abstraction and violence, the continual, difficult question that DeLillo explores: how and why does violence become a useful way to overcome the anxieties of postmodernity, to assert a meaningful identity in the context of forces that would erase such identity? But when the violence appears onscreen, particularly in a Cronenberg movie, it can no longer serve as an abstraction: the film enters into the very media world that DeLillo has long critiqued, by virtue of the very visual imagery deployed by Cronenberg. I raise these issues not to criticize Cronenberg's use of violence, since his oeuvre has repeatedly queried the filmic deployment of violence, and often seems in self-conscious dialog with filmmakers who use violence more instrumentally. Rather, I assert that DeLillo's violence become something different onscreen, and that experiencing its physicality alters, at least in part, DeLillo's long fascination with the irruption of violence through the medium of film. Cosmopolis self-consciously engages the troubling confusion of filmic violence with transcendence (an argument the book itself seemingly takes up as well). Moreover, the filmed version of Cosmopolis represents, in some ways, a return to the scene of violence that DeLillo claims created him as a writer: the Kennedy assassination and its famous filming.

Cosmopolis has multiple parallels with the Zapruder film: Both films focus on a limousine. The limo's slow crawl across the city mimics the way the Zapruder film is often seen, in slow motion.The film contains within itself a filmed assassination, of the IMF officialPacker expects his own assassination, to the point that when Torval points out a "threat level," Packer presumes it applies to him, not to the real U.S. president visiting New York.  The film's climatic moment concerns an encounter between a deranged loner and a powerful man. Even Packer's destination, to get a "haircut," recalls Kennedy's decapitation, given the long history of linguistic jokes about haircuts and decapitations. In a larger sense, the scenes of Packer intact in his limo as an anti-capitalist riot occurs outside invites questions of Kennedy's opposite vulnerability, and the rigid barriers between power and people that are a legacy of the assassination. . Even the "faux assassination," involving a pie-thrower, echoes the roughing up of Adlai Stevenson in the months before the Kennedy assassination.

Of course, describing the up-to-the-minute Cosmopolis in terms of the half-century-old Kennedy assassination seems a bit anachronistic; the former has its protagonist complaining about the "old-fashioned" terms "skyscraper" "ATM machine" and "office," while reveling in the hyperfast exchanges of capital on dozens of tiny screens, while the latter, while framed justifiably as the "first postmodern event" (Jameson), is nevertheless recorded on Kodachrome II 8 mm safety film and takes place not in a start of the art "Prousted" stretch limousine, but in a 1961 Lincoln Continental, admittedly upgraded to serve as a "presidential limousine." The Zapruder film seems to have reached a kind of apotheosis in Oliver Stone's JFK, though continuing to circulate through both art and conspiracy theory cultures.

But there's no doubt at all that the Zapruder film is central to DeLillo's work. DeLillo not only uses the film throughout Libra, he also talks about it extensively in one interview and features it prominently in Underworld. If Cosmopolis overtly concerns global capital and its discontenteds, it is, like Libra, intricately concerned with the assassination of powerful men; threats to Packer keep recurring, and if DeLillo firmly establishes the assassination as a form of meaning-making in Libra, this idea also courses through the latter text.

The Zapruder film is more or less synonymous with filmic violence: Zapruder himself claims to have had a nightmare in which he saw a billboard in Times Square reading "See the President's head explode." In reading Cosmopolis as a kind of extended meditation on the Zapruder film, multiple vectors around the film emerge: its focus on mediation, privilege, and distance; the intersection between the what Slavoj Zizek calls "structural violence" of capitalism itself and the more immediate, subjective violence of assassination. As Mark Osteen has demonstrated, the idea of the rat as currency comes from Zbigniew Herbert, who frames it as "expos[ing] the vanity of wealth and asserting against it the fact of mortality." The Zapruder film was almost immediately commodified, sold to Time/Life, before becoming the most expensive piece of film ever sold. Violence and commodification are intricately bound up in Cosmopolis, then.

DeLillo has never been a bloody writer; he is no Cormac McCarthy or Burroughs. Even when DeLillo describes overt violence, as he does in Cosmopolis, his work seldom functions as visceral; the famously detached language, his focus on sociological and philosophical abstraction, the very themes of his work (The Names isn't about murder, nor is Libra about an assassination) divert readers' eyes from any actual violence. The same cannot be said for Cronenberg, of course, most of whose opus has concerned violence in one way or another, and who has worked the theme with particular intensity in a pair of films from the mid-aughts, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Whereas another filmmaker, then, might choose to cut away from either the stabbing death of the IMF official or the gunshot to Torval, Cronenberg gives these scenes a visual intensity that sharply contrasts the film's otherwise deadness (much has been made of the intersection between Cosmopolis and Pattinson's more famous role).

Within the register of DeLillo's work, violence serves a role that is not quite redemptive, but nevertheless is set in opposition to the banality of mass culture. In her wide-ranging meditation on the depiction of cruelty, Maggie Nelson observe a distinction between "benumbing banality" and "unthinkable, rupturing calamity," with the representation of the latter serving as a kind of truth (42). Throughout her work, Nelson seeks to complicate such easy oppositions, and certainly DeLillo does not draw such easy oppositions. Nevertheless, the showdown between Jack Gladney and Mr. Gray in White Noise features some sense of Gladney cutting through the "white noise" of consumer culture to something real, and Nick Shay's nostalgic memories of the Bronx, set in opposition to the overriding "waste" of present-day Underworld, are also connected with an act of violence. One could continue: Libra seems to privilege the "man on the slab" over the false representations of Oswald. It is no surprise, then, that in Cosmopolis, the immediate, or real, has similar associations with violence: Packer, hungry all day for sex and food, identifies his immediate scene with the barbershop of his youth, a barbershop in which Packer is handed a gun by the barber (and, one might add, shaved with the same kind of razor that kills several characters in Eastern Promises).

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Great piece on rise New Right, postmodernism, Lot 49

Nicely historicizes Lot 49, rightly figures New Right as postmodern phenomenon by reading traces of Southern California rise NR in Pynchon's novel:

http://journals.ohiolink.edu.ezproxy.libraries.wright.edu:2048/ejc/pdf.cgi/Shoop_Casey.pdf?issn=15489949&issue=v53i0001&article=51_tppatrotnric

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Zero history, antibranding, effective masculinity

Reading Gibson's Zero History, the third in his "Blue Ant" trilogy, which have as their topics international intrigue, but of the postgovernment marketing variety.The landscape here is effectively meaningless in that no governments will be overthrown, no peoples oppressed or unoppressed, no secret technologies will be revealed or hidden. Instead, nearly all of the novel's energies concern branding and trademarks: the wild schemes put in place here, making use of private drones, camera-fooling t-shirts, and "darknets" ("Deep. Very deep.") all have at their root a struggle between warring designers, though one of those designers happens to also be a military supplier/glorified gunrunner.

The plot concerns two quests initiated by Hubertus Bigend: first, the identification of the "Gabriel Hounds" designer (who turns out to be Cayce Pollard) and second, finding a design for military uniforms, what Bigend describes as "the only stable market in this economy," and which the book positions as intricately linked with conventional fashion, the idea being that midcentury men's fashion was heavily influenced, and continues to be influenced, by American military styles, but that now such styles have become part of a feedback loop, whereby fashion also influences the military.

I'm most fascinated by the cultural thread Gibson applies to "mall ninjas," whom Bigend describes as:
Young men who dress to feel they'll be mistaken for having special capability. A species of cosplay, really. Endemic. Lots of boys are playing soldier now. The men who run the world aren't, and neither are the boys most effectively bent on running it next. Or the ones who're actually having to be soldiers, of course. But many of the rest have gone gear-queer, to one extent or another. [...] It's an obsession with the idea not just of the right stuff, but of the special stuff. The costume and semiotics of achingly elite police and military units. Intense desire to possess same, of course, and in turn to be associated with that world. With its competence, its cocksure exclusivity" (213).
Bigend's comments bind tightly to the object-fetishization coursing through Gibson's recent work, which serves for his characters as the full locus of agency: these are characters whose actions are subsumed beneath their clothing, who are, in some fundamental way, their Hounds denim jacket or Buzz Rickson MA-1 indistinguishable from their effectiveness in the world. Part of Gibson's point seems to be that consumer goods, in the Network Society, substitute for identity, or serve as some overdetermined site of meaning, connection to larger systems (the military, in this case), and occupation: all the truths of the old order.

My interest here lies with thee men, who adopt some sense of not just who they are, but of how the world works (the men with cocksure efficiency, and their capacity to be such). It's fascinating that this occurs, too, in the context of the book's crisscrossing logics of secret brands, antibrands. Gibson repeatedly reminds us that brands matter intensely to their possessors. The intense layers of desire figured through otaku haunt everything here. This works well with the Birchall/Fenster point about conspiratorial cultures and the market, how a political orientation can be consumed like everything else. And doubtless there's more here, too, because we're all the way back to the mad subcultures of The Crying of Lot 49, the collector of Nazi parapheniala. All these things give their owners a sense of presence in the world, a rootedness in history.

Not sure whether Gibson is critiquing or reinforcing consumer cultures, or doing something else altogether. Certainly, collecting is different, in some sense, than consuming. But the question of Cayce, revealed as the Hounds designer, is tangled. On the one hand, she serves as a counter to the increasingly disposable, temporary, flighty manifestations of consumer culture: antibranding, and the historical quality fetish that Cayce embodies, certainly resists the complicated marketing logics of instafashion. On the other hand, the anti-label, should be quality idea has long been a staple of the upper class, and works with the cosmopolitan elite class that Cayce/Hollis occupies.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Redeployment house

At the end of "Critically Queer," her account of the often unsubversive possibilities of drag as a result of their being framed within the limiting citationality of gender norms, Butler asks whether the drag documentary Paris is Burning might have a role to play in redeploying or reforming gender norms. In doing so, Butler veers (as is her habit) from the film's central topic--drag shows--and instead focuses on the alternate forms of domesticity depicted in the film "it is in the reformulation of  kinship, in particular, the redefining of the 'house' and its forms of collectivity, mothering, mopping, reading, and becoming of legendary, that the appropriation and redeployment of the categories of dominant culture enable the formation of kinship relations that function quite supportively as oppositional discourse" (622). In so doing, she imagines that the house might genuinely rework gender and sexual norms by acknowledging its "[implication] in the very relations of power it seeks to rival" while remaining "[irreducible] to those dominant forms" (623). I'm intrigued by the way Butler here imagines a refigured domesticity as a site of resistance, but also by the implication that domesticity operates itself by citing norms. This has implications, for the refigured domesticity of the small room and its alternates, as depicted by Lee in Native Speaker; the small room in the father's house is, in some sense, queered, and as such denatures the authorized small room of power.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Thackeray amongst men

Amongst men:

"Thackeray's bachelors created or resinscribed as a personality type one possible path of response to teh strangulation of homosexual panic, their basic strategy is easy enough to trace: a preference of atomized male individualism to the nuclear family (and a corresponding demonization of women, especially mothers); a garrulous and visible refusal of anything that could be interpreted as genital sexuality, toward objects male or female; a corresponding emphasis on the other senses; and a well-defended social facility that freights with a good deal of magnetism its proneness to parody and to unpredictable sadism" (Sedgwick 525).

Sunday, May 6, 2012

An open sky of one's own

Rereading Woolf's A Room of One's Own for my theory seminar. First, it's a delightful essay: Woolf neatly mirrors abstract argument and embodied journey, walking her readers through the British Museum, where her quixotic distance from male influence takes shape in her caricatured doodle of Professor Von X and her catty disdain for the researcher next to her, even as she recognizes their unwarranted superiority over her and other women. But the lively part, for my purposes, lies with her discussion of money, and how it frees her to see an open sky instead of a statue. Male knowledge, here and elsewhere, is figured as ordered, organized by looming statues that warp and bend the space around them, creating their own aura of authority. It's facile, perhaps, but that's just what conspiracy theory makes visible: the urgent desire to be meaningful, to represent one's knowledge as essential firmament, when it is, in truth, as arbitrary as the strained logic of conspiracy. Woolf sets the statue in contrast to the unstriated open sky, a space without division or hierarchy. For all her urging about private room, this essay revels in open spaces, spaces where movement is unimpeded.

Monday, April 30, 2012

Boxwood grove as small room

In my chapter on Don DeLillo and Chang Rae Lee, I emphasize the small room as a site of masculine reinforcement, a site where gender hierarchies are ordered against the perceived disorder of postmodernity. I've written here, in the context of Roth's American Pastoral how the small room can be imbued with feminine energy as well; in Roth's work, Merry's terrorist cell becomes not, as it is for Oswald, a locus of masculine affirmation, but of a threatening, semiotic femininity, a femininity that utterly refuses patriarchy, within the designified realm of the counterculture's excesses.

Toni Morrison's Beloved contains yet another type of small room, one that indeed reinforces identity, but does so in the context of both the natural and the feminine. Lonely and isolated, pummeled by the "hurt of the world," Morrison's Denver takes refuges in a boxwood grove that functions as a room:
First a playroom (where the silence was softer), then a refuge (from her brothers' fright), soon the place became the point. In that bower, closed off from the hurt of the hurt world, Denver's imagination produced its own hunger and its own food, which she badly needed because loneliness wore her out. Wore her out. Veiled and protected by the live green walls, she felt ripe and clear, and salvation was as easy as a wish (35).
Morrison emphasizes the way the grove becomes a kind of Bachelardian anchor for Denver, keeping her identity intact in the face of the multiple forces that would destroy it, which would include the violent legacy of enslavement (which takes shape as her mother murdering her sister), as well as the rejection heaped on Denver and family by the community. So the grove, like the small room, serves to reinforce Denver against the storms raging around her. And yet, this room bears no connection to wider networks of power; Denver does not identify with imaginary women or men elsewhere.

Still, though, Morrison positions the grove as part of a wider state of dysfunction at work in post-murder, pre-reconciliation 124. In this sense, the grove serves both as a figure for isolation and an artificial differentiation from the enveloping domestic energies of the house. Moreover, Denver frames her subjectivity in terms of mystical forces, which offer something of the same kind of false-transcendence/connection proffered by conspiracy theory:

None of them knew the downright pleasure of enchantment, of not suspecting but knowing the things behind things. Her brothers had known, but it scared them. Grandma Baby knew, but it saddened her. None could appreciate the safety of ghost company. Even Sethe didn't love it. She just took it for granted--like a sudden change in the weather (45).
As it does for Oswald and others, "knowing the things behind things" offers a compensatory affirmation for Denver's character. Denver fills the void left by the loss of community and mother by both fleeing to small room and figuring herself as occupying a separate social realm from the rest of the community. Of course, Morrison is working in a much different tradition than DeLillo, Lee, or Roth, and yet I wonder what she's pointing toward with grove and ghost. What response to terror and paralysis is figured here? Might Morrison be pointing to a tendency toward mysticism and/or isolation in an African American context? This does beg the question of whether such rooms are too common to serve as tropes. And yet, they're each invested with a very particular energy which concerns individual and self.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

The Psychologization of Everday Life

In a recent Critical Inquiry article, clinical psychologist Jan De Vos makes the case that "the pscyhologization of everyday life"--the widespread dissemination of psychology as a framework for interpreting--structures the understanding, critique, and solutions posed for Guantanamo and Abu Grahib. Rereading the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment and Milligram experiments, De Vos demonstrates how psychology itself served as the ultimate rationalizing fantasy for everyone involved in these experiments (Zimbardo explicitly recruited volunteers for a "psychological experiment"). If he's right that psychology itself is a widely applied function of biopolitics--that the belief that we are psychological creatures structures our submission to psychological discipline--then there's an uncanny reflexion between critics of Guantanamo and the torturers themselves; both see their efforts through a psychological framework, and both fantasize about their ability to view the Real of torture or human existence (Zimbardo claimed to have "laid bare" the human impulse to torture), even as what they really view is a product of psychology's own narrative fantasies. It's possible that this, too, is part of the disruptive work that Acker does in Empire of the Senseless and elsewhere: to lay bare the commonly circulating jouissances at work around torture and torture's observers.

Friday, March 23, 2012

Surveillance/social media/hiring

Reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickled and Dimed this week, in which she does a grittier version of Undercover Boss, albeit with some middle-class trappings of slumming intact. Ehrenreich is good at charting the psychological conditions of low-wage labor, in particular the real sense that, as she puts it, more and more Americans spend most of their day in a place that allows very little individual expression, and very little privacy. Ehrenreich describes, to give one glaring example, the indignities and inconveniences associated with mandatory drug testing, a procedure which, at least in her reading, seems designed to assert discipline over the employee more than it is to weed out actual substance abuse (though she does posit, at some point, that drug users might also be more likely to rebel against company cultures). So to be a low-wage worker, employed at, say, Wal-Mart, is to live in a kind half-Orwellian world, and the limitations around low income housing take care of the rest. What Ehrenreich describes is roughly biopower: the fruitless, relentless measuring of populations, with the net effect of keeping these populations managed. The data-intensification of recent years is something weirder, where the consuming self, the extension of the subject into the world, becomes immanently public and inextricable from the networks it engages, if it was ever otherwise.

Ehrenreich's book, published early last decade, of course has very little Internet in it; in fact, one wonders if any aspects of the Internet--say, the ability to apply for jobs online at the library--might actually alter the low-wage landscape, at least incrementally. But the potential for surveillance, of course, has only been amplified by the Internet era. From the start, I suppose, those Internet sites wanted a piece of us, and now they have it, handed over willingly. In one of those weird cultural synergies between private reading and public news, this week the AP reported that some employers--scattered prisons, some sheriff's departments, Sears, at least on some level--are requesting, and implicitly requiring, potential employees to give up their Facebook passwords. It strikes me that, like drug tests, this is going to hit low-wage workers the hardest, mostly because they're least equipped--financially, intellectually, and culturally--to resist. It's impossible, of course, to extend the current moment out into the future, and yet the contours of the coming society have begun to clarify: Something like Facebook may well become near-mandatory as a source of personal information, the way credit scores are beginning to operate: not just as a measure of ability to pay back, but of humanity cast more generally, something akin to "potential productivity"--a measure of the estimated future output of that most perfect of machines, the human body. I'm convinced, I suppose, by Shteyngart's imaginary in Super Sad True Love Story, in which smartphone, FBI file, social media profile, and shopping history converge.

The smart people are telling us, over and over: Facebook is what we were always warned about, but always imagined would be imposed--a permanent record. Of course, though, it's an idealized, performative self, but a self with real connections to real people, whose own backgrounds will likely enable more and more sophisticated profiling. How will anyone unionize when Wal-Mart essentially owns your data? I'm guessing that the data tracked by smartphones, DVRs, social media, rewards cards has only begun to be tapped, and most, all of us, are only dimly, faintly aware of the potential consequences, particularly as the world grows increasingly stratified, and therefore increasingly violent and crime-ridden.

Monday, January 16, 2012

Uneasily, conspiracy theory, subjectivity, social media

Last night, I switched my Facebook account over to their Timeline format. Suddenly, it all flashed before my eyes: my idealized life, the person I imagined myself to be, laid out in pictures and text. (Studies have been done about Facebook's notable ability to decrease happiness among its users, because users seldom post anything self-damning, and so it appears as though the whole world is problem-free. " Shteyngart in an interview: "I don’t think I’m any happier than I was before the iPhone and immersion in the Internet. I think I’m much more anxious and much more stressed out.") And I wanted more, I wanted to see more of who I was, what I'd done, what I'd consumed, what I'd liked, who I'd been with. I don't know how this will go away: the pleasure of seeing one's virtual self (and I do think "self" is appropriate, given its imaginary associations of wholeness) laid out before one, relieved, momentarily, of answering that terrible, tyrannical question: who am I, and why am I here? All of this resonates strongly with both old theories of postmodern subjectivity (a little of this, a little of that, all combined into a flat intertextual surface, per Jameson), and recent work on the culture of the Network Society, a society in which information constantly flows, and which morphs subjectivity into an anxious, do-I-rate self, as perfectly described by Gary Shteyngart, whose young Media workers commit suicide rather than live without their apparats and their attendant Facebook-amplified ratings. Both Jodi Dean (Blog Theory) and Tiziana Terranova (Network Culture) write about how the continual chatter of information produces selves that are, to some extent, functions of the network. Indeed, for Terranova, who is ambivalent about the political potential of Network Culture, individuals themselves are a regulatory function which reduces the potential for a multitude or mass:
The new place of the individual in the mode of immanent control is not as a model for the organization of the multitude, but as a tool that allows the overcoding and the ultimate containment of the productive power of flows. To the decoding of the mass into a network culture, to the dissolution of the individual into the productive powers of a multitude, corresponds an overcoding of the multitude onto the individual element understood as a unit of code modeled on the biological notion of gene (123)
The individual is here reduced to an Oedipal virus in the potentially productive code of flows. Why I care about this: I'm struck by the way Facebook has amplified a set of media and consumer cultures that make manifest the degree to which postmodern subjectivity is an amalgamation of consumer desires, recycled texts, quotations, and other dispersed texts that have little to do with an anachronistic individuality, and yet, the appeal of such individuality is exactly the filter through which the subjectivizing discourses of media and marketing work. Facebook is a physical manifestation of the set of flows that comprise the postmodern subject, the multiple and shifting discourses that uneasily course through the individual. That such a reflected, virtual self is subject to colonization by the corporations which feed Facebook's advertising revenue, that such flows are continually assembled and reassembled into marketing profiles, credit scores, fans, voters, consumers, and so on, that the very notion of a private, autonomous self which exist previous to the consumer energies that work upon it, doesn't really matter: if I believe it is me, if I believe that They act on my inmost desires, then my subjectivity is nevertheless activated, and my agency in the Network Society is effective.

In this framework, conspiracy theory serves as a set of particularly sticky subjectivizing discourses, discourses that promise, with a grim smile, all the imagined masculine agency of Yesteryear, as well as access to Their small rooms, Their sites of effectiveness, agency, solidity. Conspiracy discourses are different in degree, angularity, reach than sports, fan, fashion discourses, but not in kind. They just promise more. In this, they are not exclusively masculine, and yet their reactionary energy, their reliance on old models of self, functions as such.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Postmodernism and the limitations of the conspiratorial imaginary

An accumulating set of arguments--articulated, for example, by Rachel Adams and Sean McCann/Michael Szalay--links postmodernism with the Sixties, and more specifically with the Movement and/or New Left. In their much-discussed article, McCann and Szalay articulate intersections between postmodern literature, the more feverish dreams of the Movement (levitating the Pentagon) and postmodern theory (rehearsing, in part, the old argument about the New Left moving into the academy and abandoning class struggle for identity politics. In their account of postmodernism's wish for magic change--the billboard transformation that ends Underworld, Oedipa's desire for the crying of lot 49 (a mystery from elsewhere) and, presumably, the rocket-mysticism--McCann and Szalay make the case that such extra-political wishes enable, and may indeed foster the neoliberal version of "liberation" promulgated on the Right. Their analysis is compelling and interesting, and fits with much work that seeks to historicize writers like Acker, Pynchon, and DeLillo in terms of the particular cultural terrain of the Cold War (I'm not sure, actually, why they don't raise the role of McCarthyism's legacy of counter "class warfare" rhetoric, but no matter.) On the one hand, the distrust of bureaucracy and its intersection with gender is exactly what I describe as the cultural logic of the small room, and surely, then, the continued return to conspiracies as fodder for postmodern literature reflects the kind of distrust of the bureaucratic that the article identifies. Simultaneously, the wish for magic embodied in the secret society, and the kind of self-aggrandizing function of such, would seem to point to the self-reifying logic of this wish for magic. Nevertheless, I'm not convinced that the dispersed, highly reflexive forms of postwar culture and economics do not warrant a literary response in kind. This is part of the argument that John McClure makes counter McCann, that DeLillo, Morrison, and so on work to reproduce the limitations and pitfalls of the current cultural moment. Along these lines, when DeLillo examines the logic of the small room, he's identifying a real set of desires and forfeitures that are at work in postwar culture, demonstrating the available forms of identification for people like Oswald (whose experience DeLillo works to generalize) and the implication of these forms in a gendered form of nostalgia which, if it doesn't quite dominate what McClure calls the "lifeworld" of Libra, still clearly exerts a powerful shaping influence in the way gendered identities are formed, and the kinds of domination that such forms produce. I see these novels as better at critique (perhaps art's best function) than they are at proposing a coherent political program.

Still, in the common replication of conspiracy theory logic amongst commercial, political, and literary cultures (the Tea Party meets DeLillo), there is likely a set of commonly articulated frustration with the limits of governmental bureaucracy, and a common post-Watergate loss of faith in the possibilities of the welfare state.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

The immaterial labor of conspiracy theory

In Network Culture, Tiziana Terranova makes the case, drawing on Italian theories of autonomist labor, that the kind of labor that infuses the Internet--the reviews, chats, blogs, YouTube videos, open source software, and so on--is a new kind of labor, but one that draws on a history of immaterial labor, that which people like Dick Hebdige studied in the seventies as part of subcultural studies. Subcultures, Terranova notes, have long fed multinational corporations, contributing ideas about fashion, film, video games, software, and so on, as part of processes (creative, unpaid endeavors) that are not immediately recognizable as labor in the classic sense. This puts labor in a strange category, as a virtuality that, because it is not "purely functional" to capitalism, but flows in and out of profit-taking structures, has the potential to become "an opening and a potentiality" that takes the Fordist worker's "struggle against work" in new directions. Coolhunting, to use Gibson's terms from Pattern Recognition, may take, but may not take, but the economy of street/commodified is flowing, and New Left/punk notions of "sell out" are flimsy, artificial lines that seldom hold. That said, Terranova continues, the character of such new labor as a "diffuse collective quality" "does not deny the existence of hierarchies of knowledge (both technical and cultural) which prestructure (but do not determine) the nature of such activities" (84). Such hierarchical structures inevitably affect how the "potentiality" of such labor becomes actualized: as, one might imagine, either an underground album which sells directly to consumers by independent artists (Radiohead's OK Rainbows), or a major label product that is marketed, distributed, and sold by capitalist enterprises (Radiohead, in other cases).
So, conspiracy theory, in its subcultural, homegrown form, is part of this immaterial labor. Conspiracy theorists work at home alone, writing manifestos, making connections, developing web sites, researching new details. And yet, as Claire Birchall and Mark Fenster have each demonstrated in different contexts, conspiracy theory is readily commodified, whether as an Illuminatus board game, a Mel Gibson film, or a Glenn Beck television program. The virtual potential of the small room can be an opening up, a disruptive set of energies that challenge and undo capitalist flows (as in the conspiratorial elements of Occupy Wall Street, or the conspiratorial energies that nurtured the early Burning Man, or the conspiratorial tinge of anti-corporate hacking qua Anonymous). But it can also take shape within existing structures of hierarchical knowledge, which is what both Bratich and Fenster argue in different ways, that conspiracy theory, as a negative site of unknowledge, serves to legitimate existing truths already cast into existing hierarchies.

Terranova continues her analysis of the multitudinous, productive space of networks by invoking the neural network/biological account of network productivity. She explains the process by which the open/potential becomes hierarchized as one of "subjectifying" through the introduction of a "selfish gene" which forms, in Deleuze and Guattari's terms, a cut, creating "dividuals" who no longer flow with the terrible power of the multitude, but instead become inscribed within a narrow economy of cooperation or competition:

The existential condition of living as a stripped down selfish gene, endowed with the intoxicating capacity to form a multitude, but recoded within the claustrophobic black hole of the selfishness structure. The threat of these swerves (fileswapping, terrorism, street movements) is that by rejecting the micromoulding of dividualism, they might push it out of control, towards a new plateau, whose outcome not only cannot be predetermined but might also veer the system violently toward catastrophic transformations” (128).
In order to forestall such swerves, the powers interested in extracting value from such systems necessarily introduce a form of "soft control." This is different than top-down control, and even different than the control of the panopticon; it is more akin, she notes, to the deployment of the family as a policing structure or mechanism. Or, she might have added, the counterproductive power of the Oedipus virus. For the multitude--as a mob with rising power, to "swerve" the system violently toward transformation--becomes transformed here into the limited subject of the reality television show, set loose within a seemingly open field, but infected with the virus of competition and the need for audience approval. Something of the same game is played on Facebook and Twitter, whose carefully constructed modes of expression doubtlessly foster their own viral infections: the Like button, the length of status/tweet, the automatic telegraphing of statuses, all propel the user away from multitude and toward dividual competition.

Form, Terranova implies, matters: the iterative form which circulates throughout a networked system serves to shape, and potentially hierarchize, the multitudinous productivity of the network. It is here that the dizzy glee of "everything is connected," the joy of surfing the network's flows, ceases in the dividual cut. The possibility for swerve is foreclosed when the body without organs become territorialized by Oedipus.

This, then, is a way to explain the potential productivity of conspiracy theory, its giddy generation of flows away from capitalized hierarchized, while simultaneously observing the restrictive limits introduced by a gender-bound manifestation of conspiracy theory. This is the place where Everything is Connected reverts to the limiting hierarchy of the paralleled small rooms and self-affirmation of the lone gunman.