The ideology of individual meritocracy

In my article on the Left Behind books, I argued that neoliberalism--a feverish dependence on markets across a variety of social and political contexts--shaped the books' worldview more than either hardcore fundamentalist Christianity or conspiracy theories. Part of neoliberalism, as I defined it using models from Wendy Brown and Lisa Duggan, means reiterating meritocracy as a overriding logic of social promotion; one of the shocking things about the Antichrist, I noted, is that he hires Christians, but only because such Christians are the best-qualified candidates for the position--a logic that the books naturalize. This logic is likely encoded into the cult of the expert, a sense that someone out there Knows, someone out there is amazingly qualified. Though of course, as Ulrich Beck observes in The Risk Society, the need for experts is less cultish and more a function of the complicated systems that surround late capitalist subjects. Moreover, the whole point of a meritocracy is that it supposedly judges people only on their qualifications, without regard to social connections, race, gender, age, region, ethnicity, and so on.

Arguably, a steadfast belief in meritocracy underscores all sorts of conservative talking points, but particularly the "colorblind" logic of anti-affirmative action. "I judge a man by what he shows me on the field of battle, Sargent," the lightly anti-Semitic Captain Barret tells the Jewish Nathan Marx in Philip Roth's 1959 "Defender of the Faith."Such sentiments (do they originate in the armed forces?) have dominated a certain "post"-racist discourse ever since. At this point in history, meritocracy seems so ingrained into the social that it's hard to remember that such discourses once competed with genuinely racist ideas--of biological superiority--for dominance. This is the exact breakdown that historian Matthew Lassiter identifies at work in the postwar New South (a region whose politics Lassiter views as emblematic for the country as whole). Throughout The Silent Majority, Lassiter demonstrates how fully blinding a belief in meritocracy can be. Lassiter argues that a Sunbelt moderation of segregation was accomplished “only by replacing the civil rights agenda of social justice with an ostensibly race-neutral discourse of regional progress and individual meritocracy liberated from history itself, the latest and most resilient version of the New South mythology” (30). It's not much of a stretch, then, to argue that, at least in Lassiter's view, meritocracy forms a pillar of the current dominant ideology.

When conspiracy theory is read juxtaposed with such meritocracy, a mixed set of ideas emerge: at first glance, conspiracy theory would seem to undercut meritocracy, because meritocracy must be apparent on the surface, and conspiracy theory's back-room dealing would seem obscene to the meritocratic order. In fact, it's arguable that this is one of the things that fires up Glenn Beck and his audience--that their meritocratic rights are being undermined by a stealthy liberal conspiracy. On the other hand, conspiracy theorists resolutely affirm a belief in hierarchy: the very fact that the conspirators are in place affirms the existence of hierarchical social relations; the Antichrist, after all, still follows good market logic, despite his overwhelming evil. It's more likely, though, that the world of meritocracy--a sunny world where no effort goes unrewarded--in fact forms the obverse of conspiracy theory, the bright, efficient world that's left once the conspiracy theorists win and the conspirators get their grubby hands off America. The conspiracy theorists are the ones "playing by the rules" in a meritocracy. Where, then, does the ressentiment, the conspiracy theorist's envy, desire to occupy the place of the conspirators, play in this framework? Well, first, conspiracy theories provide, of course, a way to account for one's failings in the meritocratic world; I would have been a contender, if not for those conspirators. Second, is it possible that what men want, in a homosocial, envious mode, is to take the shortcuts themselves, to transcend their frustrated lives into the uber-successful world of the conspiracy?

The Space of Conspiracy Theory

One of the issues I struggle with is how historically-rooted to make my project; in the last post, I questioned whether my model of gendered conspiracy theory is salient for only the past fifty years, or whether it applies to a range of historical periods. Sedgwick's Between Men, a text I finished today, does a nice job of splitting the difference--it's primarily theoretically-informed close readings (the richest close readings one could imagine) but still points regularly to the readings' historical context. But of course, that book emerged at a different time for the field, when, perhaps, both close readings and pure theory were more readily accepted.

Still, towards historicizing my conspiracy theorists, it may be possible to locate them in the suburban single family home, which, in his study of postwar Oakland and the politics of suburbia vs. the city, historian Robert Self calls "the preeminent site of political interest and commitment” (293), a judgment Matthew Lassiter echoes in his excellent re-evaluation of postwar anti-integration politics, The Silent Majority. Both Self and Lassiter find in the suburbs a celebration of individualism, and a resistance to a New Deal sense of the public good. Lassiter concludes,

“The suburban realignment of American politics ultimately helped to establish an underlying consensus in a postliberal order, a bipartisan defense of middle-class entitlement programs and residential boundaries combined with the futuristic ethos of color-blind moderation and full-throttled capitalism at the center of the Sunbelt synthesis” (227).

What about this, though, locates a conspiracy theory sense of "amongst men" in these suburbs? Certainly, they celebrate meritocracy, certainly, the foment anti-government feeling, undoubtedly, the sentiments that circulate on the Glenn Beck show have their origins in the rough alignments these historians describe. Beyond this, though, the defend-my-home trope that surfaces in Left Behind (the home as militia compound), coupled with the dissociation from community that Ulrich Beck, Giddens, and others observe of the postwar era, make the suburban home a detached (physically and psychologically) space that offers a premier site for the imagined "amongst men" of conspiracy theory.

The individualist suburban home joins with the globalized corporation to provide the general backdrop in which white male gender identity forms in the postwar era. Doubtless, the suburb is the space of the white male conceived as such (the famed "white flight," though both Lassiter and Self take pains to challenge the simple logic of this concept), and at the least, symbolizes the detachment--the erasure of physical proximity that Sedgwick finds producing homosociality--that evokes a yearn to be amongst men. (Ford's Richard Bascombe could well join the list of detached males of my study.)

The homosociality of conspiracy theory--starting thoughts

While published over twenty-five years ago, Eve Sedgwick's Between Men remains a touchstone for a wide range of queer and masculinity studies. (footnote here on works that cite Sedgwick). Her reading, primarily theoretical but grounded in a Marxist sense of historical change, suggestively articulates structures of male homosocial affiliation, as these structures relate to, famously, women and homosexuals, but also of intraclass relations amongst different kinds of men. She offers a powerful set of theoretical paradigms for understanding not just how men relate to one another, but for how they imagine they relate to one another, women, homosexuals, racial others. My title deliberately invokes Sedgwick's, in part because I view this project as extending her notions of homosociality into a late capitalist and post-Fordist time frame. If Sedgwick in part charts the decline of a local, artesinal masculinity and its replacement with an industrial (wage-driven) middle class masculinity, my project seeks to scrutinize male bonds as they exist in a globalized, shifting late capitalist world--a world in which, as critics from Fredric Jameson to Peter Knight observe, conspiracy theory becomes a necessary figure for imagining how political and economic power is organized. Writing of The Pickwick Papers, Sedgwick writes:

In these male homosocial bonds are concentrated the fantasy energies of compulsion, prohibition, and explosive violence; all are full structured by the logic of paranoia. At the same time, however, these fantasy energies are mapped along the axes of social and political power; so that the revelation of intrapsychic structures is inextricable from the revelation of the mechanisms of class domination (162).

As she does throughout her book, Sedgwick offers so much rich material here that I'm amazed she packed it into two sentences. First, bonds between men--amongst men, in my formulation--serve as concentrations of fantasy energies: the things that men are compelled to feel, are prohibited from feeling, and the violence that proliferates when compulsion or prohibition is challenged. Moreover, of course, the primacy of gender--the gravity it exerts in the social sphere--means that such fantasies will tend to concentrate around issues of gender identity--and that gender identity shapes and organizes even those fantasies that seem only loosely connected to gender. Gender is the magnet beneath the surface of the iron shavings of raw fantasy (raw narrative imagination?), forming it into shapes that only appear to take shape on their own terms. Second, these energies--because men are the ones who run things, who manage the social, political, and economic realms--become mapped onto "axes of social and political power"--the power relations writ large into the culture, particularly those of class, but likely those of race as well. That is--and this is Sedgwick's take through and through, following as she does Foucault--gender issues shoot through the social, providing the base desires around which "social and political power" take shape and/or are perceived as. (Need to add here: examples of work that continues in Sedgwick's trajectory, among whom might be Savran, Catano, Robinson)

I argue that, within the context of the post-1960 United States, conspiracy theories maintain and concentrate what Sedgwick calls “the fantasy energies of compulsion, prohibition, and […] violence" that demarcate the lines of adhesion and resistance amongst men. Such theories create a sense of "amongst men" in multiple sites: first, the site of the conspiracy, where powerful men gather and affirm one another; second, the site of the conspiracy theorist, who feels connection with--but repulsion from--the conspirators, as well as similarly-minded conspiracy theorists. But beyond this, conspiracy theories serve as an allegory for how masculine power is organized--an argument made, without a sense of gender, by a range of critics, most prominently Fredric Jameson and Mark Fenster. In my reading, conspiracy theories offer men a way to imagine how they relate to other men Out There, in the terrifying, vertiginous world of late capitalist power, power that is, as Jameson and others have argued, always remote from one's immediate subject position. I argue, then, that conspiracy theories map the "amongst men" of the present moment, an "amongst men" that is always receding into some dimly-lit room. Recent names for these rooms include: global capitalists, neoconservatives, Wall Street, Al Quaeda, Islamofascism, the Bilderburg Group, George Soros, and ACORN. All of these names, while of course pointing to genuine axes of critique, also indicate the distant power organized amongst men. Conspiracy theory articulates contemporary structures of male-male affiliation, as located in a mass-media/culture/imaginary/fantasy realm—a social beyond the social of everyday life, reproducing the sense of distance that Jameson finds operating in the films of The Geopolitical Aesthetic, but finding there men, talking to other men, affirming each other, managing the world, affirming the logic of alterity, affirming the centrality of male management, resuscitating the reassuring structures of male-male relations into a space paradoxically distant from (in the sense that the conspirators can never be found) and accessible to (in the sense that one's imaginary can operate anywhere, and one need "achieve" nothing to "encounter"--have knowledge of--the conspiracy) every man.

In scrutinizing the homosociality proffered by conspiracy theory, I bear in mind RW Connell's dictum that “masculinity must be understood as an aspect of large-scale social structures and processes” (Masculinities 39). The difficulty, of course, will lie with getting enough social/historical evidence to frame this "late 20C imagined homosocial" argument, but a journey of a thousand miles and all that, and the force of a good (or at least augmented/tightened of existing good) argument is certainly the start of acquiring such evidence. One area that seems potentially productive is the status of domesticity in the previous 40 yrs--what is it, in other words, that these men seek to escape. But is this part of my introduction or just more brainstorming? And do the past 40 yrs serve as a particularly acute example of a transhistorical phenomenon (has conspiracy theory always operated in just this way), or do the historical circumstances of the past 40 yrs make the kind of homosocial bonds narrated by conspiracy theory salient? Might it be, along these lines, that conspiracy theory manifests a mode of male identity which is widespread in the current moment? Still need the history, the research, the support for all this but the idea itself feels right and exciting and innovative, potentially offering a new way to account for the Glenn Beck fans and the Left Behind readers of the world, but also, of course, the convinced-its-all-rigged 9/11 truthers of the world.

Is it pushing it to say that Fordism offered a tactile, immediate world, a world where the "amongst men" was "management," "the Hoover administration," "city hall," at worst "the Jews," "the Reds"--all more localizable, less dispersed into ether than the high-tech machine of management under Empire? Of course, though, what I've argued is that, in part, conspiracy theory offers nostalgia for this immediate world, even while pointing to a far less immediate, far less manageable world. But conspiracy theory, as it functions under post-fordist, late capitalist regimes, allows men to navigate and identify a world gone vertiginously complex.

While she takes care to acknowledge the unevenness of masculine authority, noting that lower-class men are frequently feminized in relation to middle-class men, Sedgwick's work is primarily about middle-class men. As men's studies authority R.W. Connell has famously argued, any give historical time and place features a "hegeomonic" form of masculinity, against which other men need measure themselves. In the globalized world, Connell has recently noted, the hegemonic man is the man best able to navigate global networks, the petit bourgeois who circumambulates the globe with ease. My study will identify a tension between this hegemonic masculinity and the inevitable position of men who can't quite achieve such dominance. While I will focus on men who envy such hegemonic men--the men who, in my reading, function as conspirators--all men are subject to the anxieties of believing themselves the conspiracy theorist and not the conspirator.

In identifying these tensions, I draw on a recent work that has become paradigmatic in its own right: Dana Nelson's pathbreaking reading of antebellum masculinity, National Manhood. Throughout her work, Nelson argues that masculine authority is rooted in the management of masculinity's others: natives, African-Americans, women, criminals, but also that such management never provides a secure identity, that it must be, following Judith Butler's theories of gender, reconstituted again and again. The position of men, then, is both tenuous and powerful, both conspiracy theorist and conspirator. The hegemonic men--the men who run the world, then men whose behavior is to be envied by all other men--are no more secure then those that envy them.

Connell describes masculinity's relationship to late capitalism as follows:

“[T]he world in which neo-liberalism is ascendant is still a gendered world, and neo-liberalism has an implicit gender politics. De-regulation of the economy places strategic power into the hands of particular groups of men—managers and entrepreneurs. I have suggested (Connell 1998) that these groups are the bearers of an emerging hegemonic form of masculinity in the contemporary global economy, which I call ‘transnational business masculinity’” (Masculinities xxiii)

I will argue that conspiracy theory offers a powerful set of metaphors for the way contemporary men imagine themselves in relation to the global systems that pervade their lives. Powerless in the face of increasingly complex global systems, and of shifting authority accruing to white men, men turn to conspiracy theories in order to rhetorically construct their identities, to resuscitate a version of themselves that is, by virtue of its proximity to raw power, authoritative, active, and bonded to the actions of other likeminded men.

Still, while the homosociality promoted by conspiracy theory--the sense of real or imagined managers at work running the world--is widespread, it, like other hegemonic formulations, is subject to resistances and retrenchments, and so an additional question this book poses is a favorite of conspiracy theorists: who benefits? In his landmark study Masculinities, RW Connell describes masculinity as a complex configuration of political imperatives, social institutions, and individual identities, concluding that the “ production of particularly exemplary masculinity require(s) political struggle [and] the defeat of historical alternatives (30). Using the example of Jock Phillips’s study of New Zealander identity, and the role played by public articulations of football, politics, and native identity, Connell demonstrates that masculine identity—far from being inherent in any particular social order—is continually asserted and promoted to the exclusion of other masculine identities.

In the following chapters, then, I will repeatedly ask: how do such narratives of suspicion, about the operation of secret power, reflect, refract, and enhance these men’s sense of themselves and the world? What imaginary relationships—fraternity with like-minded men—do these narratives conjure?

Is "nation" a woman?

After reading Between Men more thoroughly, I am not sure if "woman" is assimilable to "nation" or "country," simply because both need saving. Sedgwick is making a very specific argument about the role of women in homosocial relations, and I don't think this specific argument is readily graftable onto the more abstracted exchanges that occur around conspiracy theory. Still, Sedgwick's argument as a whole, concerning the great chains of male being that are continually recreated across cultures and historical periods, well suits the homosocial relations I see narrated in conspiracy theory.

I'm still sure that there's something retrograde about the "saving the nation" trope, but it simply can't be narrowly grafted onto Sedgwick's formulation.

Why literature?

Sedgwick outlines a universe of male-male relations, as manifested in literature: she demonstrates how men differentiate from, adhere to, seek to defeat, and struggle for status with one another. A matrix of male-male relations dominates the social (or at least the social as seen from the relatively elite standpoint of literature, and the relatively limited time/space frame of her study), and is more or less synonymous with power. Such relations use women and "homosexuals" as a symbols through which to accrue meaning and hierarchical status, and the particular shape of such relations at a given historical moment is encoded into the culture. She holds up literature as a more or less direct site for the scrutiny of such ideas, presuming that literature reflects, or at worst refracts, the social relations that shape its emergence. (She implicitly shares ground with Jameson here, and I'm surprised, actually, at just how much she makes use of Marx.)

Of course, in the current historical moment, literature has nowhere near the privileged and central cultural position that it occupies in the time frame of Sedgwick's study (roughly, 1550-1870). But literature, or at least the novel, by its very project of attempting to recreate the social, necessarily carries some vestige of its historical moment's conflicts and struggles, and the texts of my study engage with the present moment on simultaneously a micro and macro level, attempting to imagine simultaneously the grand systems that determine subjectivity and the subjects who imagine these systems. The fact that conspiracy theories are culturally significant over the past thirty years is nearly inarguable, and has been cogently articulated by critics like Peter Knight, Mark Fenster, Jodi Dean, and others. So to some degree, the literature I study assumes cultural significance merely because of the material it takes up. (I say all this to make the likely unnecessary point that literature retains some privilege among texts that scrutinize conspiracy theory; by virtue of its project, literature seeks to understand how conspiracy theory integrates into the social.)

I argue that the literary texts of my study offer particularly rich critiques of conspiracy theory's identity-forming role. In wrapping a social realm around a conspiracy theory--say, that expressed by Oswald or by Oscar Wao--literature examines conspiracy theory's integration with other texts, its position amongst other social actors, and the role it plays for an individual subject in integrating them into--or alienating them from--a social realm. Indeed, literature is particularly good at bridging (often violently) social spaces otherwise distinct in terms of power, class, gender, and region. In Libra, Don DeLillo articulate a relationship amongst men that is essentially impossible in actual social space: a tie between the disempowered Lee Harvey Oswald and high-powered operatives in the CIA. Literature itself, by virtue of its insistent intertextuality, studies and critiques the circulation of conspiracy theory in a social realm. Like the texts of Sedgwick's study, it manifests a matrix of male-male relations, though such relations are less inscribed in the social as in an adjacent imaginary realm that floats above the social--what Zizek and others call fantasy. Fantasy interweaves into the social, determining the relations of social actors, but in particular, how such actors imagine themselves in relation to real and imagined others. Fantasy, of course, intertwines with the constructedness of the subject, the forces that (to use Sedgwick's words) antedate the subject, often described in terms of class, gender, and race, though these are categories to which power, status, money, work, and institutions adhere meaning. Conspiracy theory likely works on the interface of ideology and fantasy, offering a means for the subject to resist (or presume to resist) the forces constructing him, but simultaneously replicating and reinforcing the heft of such forces.

Gender is the conspiracy

Sedgwick: “As in Sentimental Journey, too, it is the ideological imposition of the imaginary patriarchal Family on real, miscellaneous, shifting states of solitude, gregariousness, and various forms of material dependence, that rationalizes, reforms, and perpetuates, in the face of every kind of change, the unswerving exploitations of sex and of class” (117). As everywhere in BM, S uses a very Foucauldian framework here to show how the seemingly inevitable form of the patriarchal family obscures the uneven, messy forms of shared human life, connected a thousand different lines of kinship and friendship, but limited and constrained by the stark symmetry of man-woman-child. And as Sedgwick implies, it's the patriarchal family that intensifies and sharpens gender differences, and reinforces the homosocial authority bound into patriarchal culture.

“It is the very minimalness, the arbitrariness, of the differentiation between male heterosexuality and its ‘opposite’ that has lent this distinction its power to organize complicated, historical transactions of power, including power of or over women” (118).

The stability of homosocial bonds

Returning to Between Men, finding it a more brilliant and useful book than last time, particularly in its articulation of how male/male bonds work to uphold the social. Reading Shakespeare's sonnets, Sedgwick observes in the sonnets a volatile difference between male/male and male/female relationships: “Differently put, for a man to undergo even a humiliating change in the course of a relationship with a man still feels like preserving or participating in a sum of male power, while for a man to undergo any change in the course of a relationship with a woman feels like a radical degeneration of substance” (45). Call me crazy, call me Ishmael, but this dynamic is at work in conspiracy-themed texts, from Libra (Oswald and Everett flee domesticity), to Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (English flees Leanora), to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Oscar feels dissipated by women, but renewed by the life-struggle against the fúku; okay, there’s difference there, since Oscar frequently imagines saving the woman), to The Crying of Lot 49, where Oedipa sows dissolution and chaos everywhere she goes. Larger point: male-male relationships in the conspiracy paradigm are (relatively) stable; in these texts, when women enter them, things quickly become less stable.

Questions, then: what historical circumstances make domesticity fraught with peril during the postwar period? The charged state of gender relations, the destabilizing force of shifting economic conditions, the establishment of the suburban nuclear family as paradigmatic, the decreasing dislocation of said family from community and government.

No democracy, no freedom

In the latest issue of Theory and Event, Wendy Brown, one of my favorite political theorists, restates a Foucauldian truism to critique the idea of democratic freedom:

The simple idea that we and the social world are relentlessly constructed by powers beyond our ken and control immolates the liberal notion of self-legislation achieved through voting and consent.

She explicitly invokes the corporatization of government in the forms of slickly-managed elections, the "informed populace" farce of infotainment, and the many tendrils of privatization (prisons, schools, voting machines, universities, symbolized richly by the "Western" form of corruption--bidless contractors--that competes with old-school bribe taking in current Afghanistan), arguing, essentially, that democracy is a sheen for its opposite--the almost total control of public governance by private capital and its representatives/narratives/frameworks. What's worth remembering here, in terms of my project, is the degree to which conspiracy theory operates within the framework of fictional democracy, yet simultaneously struggles against the "relentless construction" decried by Brown. As Mark Fenster, Jodi Dean, and Jack Bratich have argued, there is a kernel of democratic utopianism in conspiracy theory. But perhaps it is the contradiction that Brown indicates--between the fiction of democratic freedom and the reality of external self-construction--that forces conspiracy theory into the relatively narrow narrative frameworks in which it operates, all of which, I argue, tend to reinforce masculine ways of being, and by extension, masculine limits to the social world. Perhaps, too, that masculine forms tend to emerge in concert with the nostalgia for democracy Brown theorizes. There's a limit to what anyone can imagine in terms of democracy, Brown implies, and it's not surprising that conspiracy theory operates within these (hegemonic) limits.

Private, individual resistance

Writing of the political potential of queer S/M practices, which, he argues, were valorized in the 80s and 90s, alongside poststructuralism, as premier sites of political resistance, critic David Savran theorizes that such practices hold appeal in part because of their limited scale. Teaching, bondage, criticism, theorizing the decline of the subject, all operate on an individualist and private scale, in direct contrast to the large-scale strikes and protests of the 1930s (or, to go back further, of the anticapitalist actions of the late 19th century). For Savran, it's telling that the privatization and individualization of resistance take place within a historical moment when anticapitalist struggle has all but died out (I note that Savran's book was published in 1998, a year before the Seattle protests brought antiglobalization to public view.) He's talking about the Left, of course, and particularly the Left under Reagan/Clinton; it's entirely possible that something different, if not precisely anticapitalist radical, has emerged in the recent confluence of MoveOn.org, antiglobalization, the recharged SEIU, and other Leftist organizations posing genuine questions about capitalism and capitalized war. Savran writes:

“Obsessed with locating and valorizing sites of transgression and resistance, both poststructuralism and the discourses of sexual dissidence tend to imagine resistant political practices not in the collectivist terms of the 1960s (or the 1930s, for that matter) but in strictly individualistic terms. For both, resistance has become a purely privatized affair, restricted to one’s scholarship, one’s teaching, one’s bedroom, one’s dungeon” (239) .

I bring this up because this is one of the points I've long sought to make about conspiracy theory, that it offers the appeal of a privatized and individual resistance, at least in the post-Kennedy forms I critique (the widely-telegraphed conspiracy theories of a Hitler or Ahmadinedjad pose a different case). The researcher, alone in his bedroom with his facts, practices a resistance that is purely private. Here, I would differentiate 9/11 Truthers or Beck fans from anticapitalists (though obviously, Tea Partiers are not limited to private, individual acts). Savran provides, in this aside, a fine way to think about why this conspiracy theory model of masculinity fits this time frame, and also, how it carries forward to now. (progress, progress, progress).

Re-encountering David Savran

Savran’s argument in Taking it Like a Man is wide, but deep, and he employs the “reflexive masochism” idea to a diverse, but linked, set of ideas and examples. On the one hand, the self-injurious, rising-above-it, got-the-Right-Stuff-despite-the-sixties straight white man quite simply imagines himself as a victim, but sees in that victimhood a chance for transcendence. But beyond this, the straight white man, in a range of contexts that Savran originates with Mailer’s “White Negro,” frequently places himself in the position of one or more minorities themselves, as, variously, Native American spirit guide, White Aryan Resistance “new nigger,” mythopoetic African folk hero, Rambo native tracker, and so on—an extension of, but not a precise repetition of, the “man who lives with Indians” and/or the Modernist fetishization of the primitive as a source of power and renewal for a dead culture. The “desire to be the other,” though, quickly emerges as a “terror of the other,” as it does for the man who lives with Indians. This is a sometimes-muddled, but ambitious and largely-successful book.

From this: the conspiracy theorist obviously imagines himself (and his nation) as victimized, usually by a big Other of powerful, colluding men. This idea generates danger and terror—a fear of oblivion—but simultaneously, the possibility for transcending the danger, by linking oneself to and identifying with the conspirators (as, most clearly, does Oswald, Texe Marrs, Leonard English), reflexively, but in the manner of Patrick O’Donnell’s postmodern version of reflexivity. I’m not entirely sure this pushes past my original argument, but through Savran’s lens, it’s likely that some portion of the big Other is bound up in conceptions of dark-skinned, gay, or female Others who themselves are alleged to possess overwhelming powers (Red Chinese massing in the national parks, minorities overbreeding, the homosexual agenda, feminazis).

Starting thoughts on Glenn Beck

Limiting the scope

"Glenn Beck," of course, is an amalgam of texts: Beck's television and radio shows, his nonfiction books, his fictional work, the guests he has on his show (among them fiction writers): it is nearly impossible to limit or delineate the range of places where his ideas--and those of his audience--circulate. Of course, as literary theorists have argued for years, Diaz's text is similarly hard to limit, as it incorporates not just the some 400 pages of his novel, but also the interviews Diaz has given about the novel, the reviews published on the novel, Diaz's other work, the work of other Latin American writers, the documented lives of people like Oscar (whom Diaz has cited in interviews), the works influencing Diaz, and so on. "Glenn Beck" and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, then, exist as texts with which to identify in complex, multifaceted ways. And if the identifications around Beck at first seem stronger than those around Diaz's novel, such an assumption likely underestimates the powerful role fiction--particularly Pulitzer-Prize winning fiction, and particularly ethnic fiction--plays in the lives of its readers, and shapes how these readers view themselves and their world.

Racism in the era of post-whiteness

It's difficult, in some ways, to frame Beck in the language of race and racism, since these charges have been endlessly circulated and defended against around the Tea Party movement. It's likely true that racism is simply too overdetermined in the case of an African American president, or that the present context is one of, in Mike Hill's words, after whiteness, where even the most regressive organizations must play lip service to egalitarianism, or, in an even more extended sense, where every organization, and every American, imagines themselves beyond racism by virtue of Obama's election. It's likely, too, that something similar has occurred with gender, that, like the Promise Keepers, Beck and his crew (hardly anti-woman, given the prominence of Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin) present themselves as beyond gender relations as well. Though hopefully my analysis here goes beyond simple questions of Beck's misogyny, any question of gender identity is complicated by the disavowals--and easy targets--presented by Beck and followers.

Glenn Beck and Oscar Wao

How does one account for how grand narratives--like conspiracy theories--become part of one's identity? In particular, how does one account for how such narratives intersect with one's gendered identity--one's sense of oneself as a woman or man in real or imagined social space? (One way, perhaps, to define gender, though "woman" or "man" are of course limiting.) To start, one must examine how narratives--self-created, amalgamated from others', reworked--becomes part of one's identity. Literature, because it is always borrowing narratives and often concerns its own intertextuality, provides an excellent realm in which to interrogate these questions. Frequently, literature foregrounds how characters borrow from existing narratives, drawn from popular culture, literature (famously, Emma Bovary), spy movies (Oswald in DeLillo's Libra). In each of these cases, the text establishes an uneasy continuum between exterior narratives--those outside one's identity--and the narrative that the character tells herself. Such narratives frequently supplement, or even replace, the limited narrative that a character draws from her immediate circumstances.

To take one example, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the title character struggles with his masculinity: living in a heavily gendered Dominican-American context, Oscar is nearly unrecognizable as a man to himself, his family, his friends, or--most desparately--the women who Oscar desires. In the real, everyday world of the novel, Oscar's identity is badly limited. But in the imagined world of fantasy, which Diaz wraps around his characters, Oscar is a hero, an avenger, the family's last bulwark against the mystical, all-encompassing fuku--a global-grade curse with the same heft as a conspiracy. Oscar's masculinity, then, functions more effectively in this imagined realm than in the real world. But beyond this, Diaz continually demands that readers view the "fantasy" narrative and "real" narrative as inextricable from one another, because of the language his narrator uses to describe Oscar: at one point, Oscar is kidnapped by two police thugs that Yunior names Gorilla Grod and Solomon Grundy, both names drawn from comic books. Because Yunior never calls the two anything but, the reader can't help but picture, at least momentarily, supervillains from the DC universe dragging Oscar into a cane field.

In the following post, I'm going to hazard that Oscar isn't alone, by comparing his case to the vastly different case of Glenn Beck and his followers--a set of texts that also rely heavily on an imagined realm to solidify their subjects' gender identities, though admittedly such gender identifications are more dispersed and less overt than that of Oscar. This comparison is rich with possibilities in its contrasts: both texts emerge in the same timeframe (Oscar Wao is published in 2007; Beck rises as a national figure in 2008 in connection with Obama's election), both texts traffic in conspiracy material; both feature protagonists who fuse their figures to the grand sweep of History, imagining such history in terms of great narrative arcs--the end of days, a curse, the Great Threat to Our Way of Life. Both figure themselves as beset minorities, both attempt to work out some grand wrong, first a wrong in History, in the grand sweep of government and mystic organizing forces, second a wrong in the personal, the self as it navigates the world, the latter struggle manifested, at least in part, in terms of gender. For Beck and crew, the masculine lack starkly visible in Oscar is less overt, since, of course, Beck doesn't focus on what he and his followers lack. Of course, Beck continually claim a position of loss--of some America slipping away (implicitly bound up, as countless commentators have shown, in both gender and race).

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is Diaz's postethnic, postpostmodern, pop-culture situated, Dominican-framed tale of Oscar and his family, their immigration and relationship dramas as they take shape under the long shadow of the Trujillo dictatorship. Real history, real struggle--but an imaginary curse. In contrast, Glenn Beck offers an imaginary history, an imaginary struggle--and, perhaps, a real curse, in the form of the cascading political and cultural fallout from the radical ideas expressed on his television and radio shows, books, blog, and speeches. Formally, Beck offers a diverse amalgam of infotainment, right-wing conspiracy theory, new male emotionalism. It emerges under the Obama administration, but is shaped by the conspiratorial tone of the Bush years, the widely-telegraphed sense of a country under siege, a rhetorical stance repeated throughout conservative history, but intensified by the events of 9/11. In many ways, of course, these two texts couldn't be different: one text is a literary novel, written by a Dominican-American author who teaches at MIT, and which concerns a poor Dominican family. As a novel, the text occupies a relatively "elite" space, and yet its subject matter is anything but elite. Beck's show, in contrast, is utterly populist (and regularly described as much) and yet its subject matter--the plight of rich white men--is implicitly elite. He works the same contradiction as circulates elsewhere on the Right: we're mainstream, the real America, and yet we're also the minority, those threatened with extinction.

It's Oscar, though, who's really threatened with extinction--or at least his species is threatened. Oscar is failed, obscure, unsuccessful by his chosen measure--getting laid, which is what is appears to be, but also, as Diaz explains in an interview, about much more--a sense of rootedness and home which is the diasporic subject's continual desire. Oscar is cast in obscurity, meaningless, alone in his room with his role-playing games and fantasy novels--pop culture profferences of meaning, a place to locate himself as beseiged postapocalyptic survivor, the only one who can save Maria (she with the coke dealer boyfriend) from the Grand Forces threatening her. Oscar fails in the everyday world; he is unable to achieve mastery over the forces shaping his life; he is unable to be legible as a man in his cultural context. How much Trujillo, or immigration-shaped poverty--has to do with Oscar's plight is never quite clear. But what is clear is that his life is not wondrous without a layer of the imagination, without framing his experience in terms of the fuku.

And here's where he has something in common with Beck's presumed viewers, who also grasp hold of an imagined grand narrative to make sense of themselves in the world, to see themselves as successful--though threatened--in their cultural context, as white men after whiteness, who perceive that the culture no longer automatically grants them phallic power, that phallic power is something granted to others (perhaps others with darker skin, perhaps others who embrace the contemporary world).

Fantasy saturates both worlds. Both texts draw, it seems, on pop cultural forms for heft and shape: Diaz on fantasy, comic books, scifi, hiphop, Beck on political thrillers. Beck has not only repeatedly interviewed thriller authors, he's authored one himself (a thriller he refers to--as if to drive home the point--as "faction," a mix between fiction and fact). The thrillers tend to share a theme: a small, dangerous group seeks to take over the United States, and only a few, brave, patriotic souls have the wherewithal to stop them. This story, fictional, repeatedly crosses over into Beck's nonfiction political analysis, which itself often sounds like a political thriller, wherein Obama and Acorn, Obama and Marxists, Obama and the Left are plotting to take over the country and impose fascist rule. I'm less interested in what Beck is saying, though, then the way he's saying it--the thriller, conspiracy-tinged narratives on which he draws, narratives which assert a particular identity, or at least frame a set of stakes for identity, in gendered terms. Arguably, Beck uses thrillers in the same way Oscar uses scifi and comic books, as a way to organize, condense, and rearrange his world, so that people like him are validated, and people not like him (for Oscar, brutally masculine men; for Beck women, minorities, leftists) are invalidated.

In Oscar Wao, it doesn't seem a stretch to say that gender is the conspiracy. The book is rooted in Oscar's life, of course, and Oscar's main problem is that he can't get laid--though as Diaz emphasizes, getting laid is a synecdoche for having a home, for feeling secure, for feeling rooted despite one's diasporic existence. So for Oscar, to get laid is to have a legible self. Moreover, nearly all of the family's tragic trajectory results from the choices of violent, domineering, patriarchal men, from Trujillo himself, who imprisons and destroys Oscar's grandfather, to The Gangster, who causes Beli to be nearly killed and then exiled, to the police captain who ultimately kills Oscar. In each case, too, the brutality stems from these males' violent sexual conquests, their imperial gaze suffused over the women of the book (The Gangster's brutality is augmented by his wife; still, one could argue that she herself engages in an imperially masculine brutality). Evil, in Oscar Wao, stems from the brutal carelessness of male desire (arguably, this is the lesson that Yunior needs to learn by the book's close). There is no de Leon family tragedy without the possessive desire of men for unlimited sexual conquest. It's not power, not greed, not unexamined privilege that forms the root of the problem here (as it does in other conspiracy novels): it's a destructive form of masculinity run rampant. Incidentally, this nicely intersects with Sedgwick's argument in Between Men: that power accrues to men, who use people like Oscar and the female de Leons as symbolic trophies of conquest.

Back to Beck, then, and the next question for my research: is it possible that some form of gender identity shapes his paranoia--his sense of how power operates in the world? One thing that I've begun to track re: Beck--and Rachel Maddow tore up the Right on this topic recently--is that much of Beck's Obama-paranoia seems to take shape around racial issues: Van Jones is black and worked on behalf of poor blacks, Acorn is nearly all minority and works on behalf of poor minorities, and, of course, the Shirley Sherrod NCAAP dustup. More widely, the underlying tone of "they're taking it from me" is frequently manifested as "minorities are getting my money," a statement that likely translates into "minorities are supplanting me," in an echo of the struggles over Alan Bakke, busing, and welfare that occurred in the late seventies and early eighties. There's an interesting symmetry, then, between Oscar Wao and Beck: one is a minority who re-imagines himself as significant via conspiracy, the other who uses conspiracy to imagine himself as insignificant, as somehow detached from the multiplying privileges of whiteness.