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.