Conspiracy theory and late capitalism

In her smart Publicity's Secret, political theorist Jodi Dean posits that contemporary, media-saturated political cultures legitimize the notion of an intact "public" through the mechanism of publicity, a widely-telegraphed sense that all information is always available, whether about celebrities or politicians. She implies that the "exposure" culture of the nineties and aughts, and the technology that perpetuates this culture, allows the notion of a democratic public sphere to be propagated, in the face of real social antagonisms and rifts that would otherwise render the "public" unrecognizable. It's a sensible argument, and quite persuasive in the context of the political cultures of the past twenty years, which have thrived on scandal as substitute for participation. By implication, she describes the larger (middle-class, Western) conditions of contemporary citizenship (a term I don't invoke often): mediated through consumerist and market models, and accessed through a range of some distancing, some integrating forms--cable television, user-produced content, niche Web sites, and so on. (These give the citizen/political subject a simultaneous sense of greater intimacy with the political proper/political celebrity and greater distance from fellow citizens). Dean goes on to argue that the very (fictional) notion of a "public" is sustained by a belief that there is always something the public doesn't know, and that once such secrets are unveiled, democratic participation will be perfect. To some degree, then, Dean extends the motive of the conspiracy theorist--if only they knew--to the entire public. (Negating, then, the self-aggrandizing of the conspiracy theorist--though perhaps the conspiracy theorist is the One Who Knows Even More.)

Within this context, Dean argues that conspiracy theory functions as the trace of democracy, and the representation of freedom:

More powerful, more persuasive, than market or consumerist conceptions of freedom, freedom as information gathering confirms a conception of democratic engagement long part of the ideal of the public sphere: the public has a right to know. Citizens are free, so long as nothing is hidden from them. They must watch, surveil, expose, and reveal (54).

Dean examines the conditions of political existence in the late capitalist political. She argues that the contemporary citizen not only believes she knows, but that there is always something she can't know. The "freedom" Dean describes, then, lies in a form of democratic engagement well suited to the paradoxical connection and disconnection of the Information Age: gathering and organizing information (a trait, of course, that is easily attributed to the conspiracy theorist, and which has been a hallmark of conspiracy theory since at least the Kennedy assassination). Dean, then, identifies the form of participation taken by the conspiracy theorist, but does not acknowledge the potential unevenness with which different subjects will participate in such practices. (Still, though, if she's right, and these are the state of affairs--why does Glenn Beck's whiteness and maleness matter, because surely it does matter?) I like, though, how she points to the practice of information organization/gathering as a form of freedom, though, one might add, the form of freedom here is both imaginary and circumscribed (Dean implies this elsewhere in Publicity's Secret.)

Dean figures these practices as more or less universalized in contemporary political cultures. She questions the idea of publics or counterpublics as limited by or manifested by the ideology of consumer choice, but does that mean that there are not power differences among subjects' perceptions? And do these matter? Isn't the barest of progressive achievement--the appointment of consumer rights' advocate Elizabeth Warren, say--undercut by the masculine dismissals of conspiracy theory? And doesn't gender continue to matter (it's quite easy to conclude reading Dean--or Zizek--that little matters, that a widespread cynicism, or acceptance of ideological saturation, is one's only logical conclusion from the circumstances at hand)?

Ultimately, Dean is quite utopian--or at least optimistic--about the democratic potential of the conspiracy theorist, or at least the potential for the conspiracy theorist to unveil the lack of unity promoted by the publicity-logic (she offers examples from the Revolutionary War, in which conspiracy theory was apparently widespread--ref: Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood). While I appreciate that Dean (and Bratich, and Fenster) demonstrates that conspiracy theory is part of a wider logic of citizenship, and that it need not be relegated to the margins, I sense that she's a bit too sunny about its potential. Part of my project, then, will be to examine the lively, democratizing spirit that these critics assign conspiracy theory and to set such optimism against the stark logic of gender inequality, to examine how gender serves to delimit where conspiracy theory's democratic possibilities cease.