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.