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.