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?
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