Rancière's version of surface reading

Rancière's running theme in The Emancipated Spectator is this: people aren't stupid. They're not "dupes" of some system of control; they can very well read into their circumstances, and the human capacity for knowledge of such circumstances should not be limited by finger-wagging (and self-serving) intellectuals who, having once scoffed at a society of the spectacle overrunning the populace, now scoff at the belief in the society of the spectacle (as residing, now in a range of popular-culture and business management segments of society). Rather than being content, as are Boltanski and Chiapello, to demonstrate how "the artistic critique" took root in business cultures (admittedly, a line of argument, in congruence with Virno, that I continue to find compelling), Rancière argues that such unveiling merely repeats a cycle in critical thought, and, worse, a pernicious tradition of treating spectators, and students, as ignoramuses (a favorite word of Rancière's).

I'm not sure that Rancière is not participating in one more version of "after critical theory," but I appreciate the radically democratic impulse of his writing. He calls for an end to the always-new, but his thought nevertheless folds into the same cycles of novelty that power academic, artistic, and consumer discourses. It's all fine and good to declare that we should stop assuming positions of critical authority (and admittedly, such positions are tedious), but how might this look? And why wouldn't it fold into these cycles of novelty?

This is worth thinking about in terms of the post-sixties avant-garde that took shape in the early moments of Reagan and Thatcher, and it's a good reminder to resist the temptation to see the artists and writers of this era as benighted, fooled by their love of Barthes and Baudrillard into believing in false outsides.

Rage, and order

It's strange, in some ways, to abandon conspiracy theory at the moment of its triumph (though one could argue that it's simply telegraphed and amplified further than in previous decades). I was reading over some of my old notes, and found this, which seems entirely applicable to the Tea Party/Gun God era of public discourse:

Conspiracy theory is the code at work in the text, that which works to overcome the text, to overwrite it with structure, latticework, trunk and branches. In Deleuze and Guattari's terms, conspiracy theory seems to “reterritorialize” instead of “deterritorialize.” Paradoxically, the notion of “managerialism” is the imaginary regime summoned by conspiracy theory. These are the hierarchical connections—arborescent, even—amongst men that haunt—overwrite--even a seemingly progressive, forward-looking text like Neuromancer. On some level, conspiracy theory might seem to resist coded space, but in fact it reinforces it. Moreover, it desires it. Conspiracy theory expresses a longing for structure, for discipline. It's the guard in the tower.

Violence as a non-out in Cosmopolis

I am reading an old (1990) Katherine Hayles article, one of her thrilling romps through genetics, information theory, and literature, focused on what she calls "the parataxic mode of being ... the physicality of creatures who can interact in unanticipated ways with their environment ...juxtaposed with their status as arti-
facts that express the information coded within them" (408). She uses White Noise as an example of a text that navigates such parataxis, beginning in the overcoded information of the supermarket, proceeding through Jack as "the sum of his data" and ending with the seemingly weightlessness-evading violence of Jack shooting Willie Mink. Hayles notes a long-observed idea in DeLillo studies, that in one view of his fiction "Only violence, preferably as random and brutal as possible, can crack the slick surfaces of fetishized commodification and restore the connection and immediacy that embodiment entails" (411). I wonder, then, what the twist is on the violence in Cosmopolis: it is unplanned? It is mediated more heavily by the gun itself? (I'm tempted to say yes, but that feels too easy in terms of the rest of my article; on the other hand, Packer is fascinated by the gun's technology, the necessity of saying "Nancy Babbitt" to it to get it to unlock. But is the violence here the same as Oswald's violence or Jack's violence or the violence in Mao II? I suspect it is not, but I need to think about it more.

Derivitive as creating ontologies

I'm reading the fascinating account of derivatives by Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk, in which the authors describe derivatives as a particularly powerful form of fiction, one that allows financial analysts to abstract risk and value from the sociohistorical events that make them up, and so to create the very measurements of risk that they allege to be accurate accounts of the underlying world:

“[F]inancial derivatives also shape a new means of grasping historical events, in that they presuppose that the market can reimagine and reduce sociohistorical processes, no matter how seemingly incommensurable or complex, to terms of abstract, quantifiable, and hence manageable risk.[…] The financial derivative thus has an underlying categorical structure based on its ability to ontologize real-time event structures. The social fiction made real is that aculturally derived technologies of understanding—especially the development of particular differential equations for modeling time-bracketing transactions—permit (post)moderns to parse any event structure into its naturally occurring components, to abstract these components from the event structure and from their temporal flows, and to assign a calculable and quantified value to these components, thereby allowing agents to entertain the expectation that they can predict and manage future events (135).

Derivatives thus act as a kind of critical theory, asserting abstract, disconnected versions of the social world which are nevertheless interconnected in the financial sphere. Like certain kinds of postmodern fiction, they assert misidentified truths about the world that become their own predictions of the future, substituting socially constructed versions of connectedness for actual connections.

I'm not sure how accurate this analogy is. But it certainly seems at work in Cosmopolis.

Of neoliberalism and subjectivity

On the first page of their influential volume, Do Economists Make Markets, the sociologists Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Munesa and Lucia Siu describe the eminent economist Jeffrey Sachs, who served as an advisor to Bolivia in the 1980s, famously implementing "shock therapy," in which the Bolivian government spent much of its remaining reserves of foreign cash to remove pesos from circulation. He also eliminated government subsidies, removed import tariffs, and linked the Bolivian economy to the U.S. dollar, all in the name of enabling Bolivia to pay back its debt to the IMF. In short, Sachs implemented what has come to be called a neoliberal agenda. As MacKenzie et. al. observe, though, Sachs himself later questioned his application of purely academic theories to the specific case of Bolivia:

Later, Sachs was to muse on his meager understanding of the country to whose leaders he gave his crucial advice. It was only in a conversation a couple of years after his 1986 visit that he realized that Bolivia's physical geography was a fundamental feature of its economic situation, not merely an incidental fact. "Of course I knew that Bolivia was landlocked and mountainous.... Yet I had not reflected on how these conditions were key geographical factors, perhaps the overriding factors, in Bolivia's chronic poverty.... Almost all the international commentary and academic economic writing about Bolivia neglected this very basic point. It bothered me greatly that the most basic and central features of economic reality could be overlooked by academic economists spinning their theories from thousands of miles away" (Sachs 2005, p. 105) (1).

It strikes me that this conflict--between a universally-applicable solution for Bolivia, despite its mountains, and an "on the ground" solution in tune with Bolivia's specific situation--is also the conflict at work in Cosmopolis. In wanting to believe himself a universal subject, in desiring to transcend the earth, Eric Packer is acting just like Sachs. The very notion of a one-size-fits-all solution seems bound to Packer's singular identity. It is thus that the problem of subjectivity--the anti-Cartesian assertion about partial selves, and identifiable in Butler, Lacan, and Foucault--returns to haunt the Latourian/Callonian notion that all actors act in relation to a series of actants. Partial subjectivity, ill-fitting universal solutions--these are cut from the same philosophical cloth. It's quite possible, actually, that neoliberalism and old liberalism have something in common this way.

(Their point, of course, is about economics as a science intervening in the objects it observes: "economics is at work within economies in a way that is at odds with the widespread conception of science as an activity whose sole purpose is to observe and study, that is to 'know' the world" (2).

The inevitability of Sandy Hook conspiracy theories

In reading the surprisingly vibrant conspiracy theories circulating around the Sandy Hook tragedy, I'm struck not by the narrative form of these theories--they are typical in their way, finding "inconsistencies," alleging the participation of "crisis actors" who stood in as parents and other spokespeople, asserting the inconsistent release of film, and so on. Instead, I see this episode as indicative of a new inevitability around conspiracy theorizing: not that anything can be turned into a conspiracy, but that every issue must become a conspiracy. I'm not sure, really, if the Internet simply makes visible the same subset of the population who have always made such assertions. Subcultures of conspiracy theorists have existed for many years, but before the Internet, these scubcultures would have faced difficulty getting media attention; but now, researchers at CNN or MSNBC looking for a story need only log onto Facebook or Infowars to find people willing to make wild allegations. Similarly, likeminded ideas flourish in the unchecked comment boards of these sites.

It also seems that the zero-compromise climate that has arisen in recent years, a toxic product of right-wing radio, FOX news, gerrymandering, and the "blogosphere," has made such theories far more palatable. It's frightening, really, the lengths to which these voices go. They're driven by a increasingly impending sense of social breakdown, and likely the perceived sense that whiteness is on the decline. Guns become, in this context, a symbol of retaining agency. That may be a generous reading, though, one that assigns more rationality to these voices then they likely deserve. What likely happens is that the possibility of gun regulation becomes amplified, resignified every time it is deployed, so that even the specter of regulating some particularly militaristic guns, or requiring more universal background checks becomes the specter of a totalitarian government taking over rights. It's not so much that guns symbolize anything, as that the fight itself is enjoyable, and the persecution fantasy powerful.

The impossibility of the present in Cosmopolis

Famously, Cosmopolis concerns digital capital, with Eric Packer serving, in many accounts, as an extension of digitalized trading. But there's a problem with digital capital, of course: it's fundamentally an unrepresentable force. Is it computer code? Algorithms? Feedback loops? Flows of data? Concatenated trades, assimilable only as system? Partly as a result of this representational impossibility, Cosmopolis has an extremely tortured relationship with the present, functioning as a novel obsessed with the future but continually defending the future from an encroaching past. This tendency occurs most prosaically in Packer's irritated mutterings about how words like "skyscraper" and "automatic teller machine" and even "office" are offensively outdated, pointing their users back toward a twentieth century of more immediate dreams and out of the highly theorized, self-consciously now world of information flows, rapidly changing numbers, and infinitesimally measured units of time. Packer asserts himself to be simultaneous with these flows, a function of rapid market calculations, a kind of visionary who expresses his sublime (in the Kantian sense) digital world using the language of critical theory. I assert that DeLillo asks, in this novel, whether it is possible to grasp the present at all, and questions whether it is at all possible to comprehend the world we are to believe Packer is from. Of what electric sheep do androids like Packer dream, DeLillo asks, and it turns out that they dream of a world not terribly different than midcentury America--the era, say, of the Kennedy assassination.

For Packer may not believe in "office" as a term, but he certainly believes in it as a concept. His ostensibly high-tech limousine functions no differently than Kennedy's limo: as a cognitively convenient shorthand for power's expression in the industrialized twentieth century. (Oddly, Packer never examines the word "limousine" in his etymological critiques.) I believe this is intentional on DeLillo's part, and that Cosmopolis constitutes, in part, an extended meditation on either the passing of or persistence of a certain midcentury representation of power, or, alternately, the ways in which technological power has evaded its own conditions of representation. The limousine, in other words, is hopelessly nostalgic, as is the assassination Packer imagines. The networked disasters of climate change, cyberwar, and genetic modification are all unrepresentable through the neatly compelling narrative of assassination. Eric's dreams of assassination herald from the same era as the limo, and  the misplaced sense that individual bodies achieve meaning outside of the networks in which they are embedded. As much as Packer claims to be a creature of a hyper-networked present, then, he continually imagines a nostalgic past that likely, as Jameson asserts of Kennedy's war room, never existed as physical space with intact set of meanings.

What sorts of cognitive mappings are possible for digital capital? Cosmopolis doesn't answer this question, but poses instead an elaborate series of interesting failures. The novel installs itself in the same position as the anti-globalization protesters in one of its central scene: doomed to repeat dated versions of radical critique that never reaches its target.
...
It also strikes me that DeLillo, a writer who has spent his career trying to use the tools of critical theory to represent postmodern power, represents an idea figure to scrutinize the transition from identifiable, mappable versions of (masculine) power and the impossible representation of digital flows pantomimed by Packer.

The small room of the Fordist limousine

The more I read Cosmopolis, the more I see it as a DeLilloian reflection on his own body of work, a corpus that began, by his own admission, with the shots aimed at the 1961 Lincoln Continental 4-door convertible, built in Wixom, Michigan and customized by Hess &  Eisenhardt of Cincinnati, Ohio. I mention the car's origins because I'm seeking to inquire whether the car's conditions of production, within the Fordist framework (it is literally a Ford product) shape the different models of masculinity at work around the Kennedy assassination--specifically, the Zapruder film--and the resituated, exaggerated, but contiguous set of tropes at work in DeLillo's properly post-Fordist limousine. Cosmopolis repeatedly invokes a world of globalized labor, temporary work, and capitalist flows, situating itself within a world far from the Fordist compact and relatively local labor struggles of the factory floor. DeLillo deploys Packer's limousine as a symbol of capitalist flows: it is outfitted in terminals that feed Packer the streams of data on which he ruminates throughout the book; DeLillo deliberately contrasts the slowness of the limousine's movement across New York with the speed of capital; the limousine makes Packer faceless: it looks like every person of power's vehicle, such that the anti-globalization protesters, who would target Packer if they knew he was inside, can only treat the limo as part of the landscape in Times Square.

And yet, this being a DeLillo novel perhaps, the limo also serves as a physical meeting place for Packer and his associates. As one of my students  pointed out, this move feels odd in a novel devoted to networked communication. Cosmopolis, then, simultaneously installs Packer as a function of flows and a product of an older, bureaucratic form of power. The limousine gestures back to Kennedy, with his War Room, his Cold-War-reified position as a leader meeting with men to Decide Things, a surely nostalgic, impossible version of power as Fredric Jameson would have it. At the same time, it gestures toward a kind of power represented only imperfectly by people like Jamie Diamond, but more widely understood as anonymous flows: markets, investment vehicles, computerized trades, systems that have no true Masters. There is no small room in Packer's world; there never was, but even the semblance of such shifts in the neoliberal moment. Within this moment of digitalized flows, the limousine itself, and the meetings within it, function as a nostalgic moment of knowable order.

There's something deeper going on with the way DeLillo puts his best crit theory lines in Kinski's mouth, and has Packer confirm these. While DeLillo is, I believe, reflecting on his own past use of such lines, he's also commenting on the reader's need to believe these--an extension of the reader's need to believe that neoliberal, digital power can be figured by the conversations in the limousine. Cosmopolis becomes, in this way, a meditation on the exhaustion of critical thought itself in the face of digitalized capital. Kinski's statements are deliberately facile in the face of the data's sublime; to even call the data sublime is to gesture to a means of understanding it that belies its inaccessibility. Of course, DeLillo has long wrestled with the idea of a system beyond the individual, or at least beyond the individual's understanding, and yet his novels nevertheless often purport, alongside the critical theory they espouse, to present at least an allegorical version of such systems. Cosmopolis arguably foregrounds the failure of allegory itself, even as it continues to recognize the appeal of such allegory.

Cosmopolis is a highly cynical novel. The spaces outside the system--the protesters in particular--fail. There is no transcendent spectacular meaning (Libra), nor de-alienating immediacy (White Noise), in Packer's death, and no billboard with visions of angels (Underworld), not even the aesthetic pleasures of art, a long DeLillo standby. There is only software talking to itself, quietly destroying worlds, elsewhere, away from the multiple nostalgias of the novel itself.

...
I should also observe that the limousine is a particularly complicated cultural object: a symbol of power, but product of American working-class manufacturing; mass produced, but customized in an almost artisinal context; the site of traditional Fordist labor disputes as well as the site of neoliberal, service industry labor struggles; an automobile designed for slowness; an armored vehicle long associated with violence; a representation of global power with roots in the early twentieth century.

Gibson on deluge of information/paranoia

With overtones of the Sandy  Hook conspiracy theory insanity, whereby any media event is turned into a faked moon landing because there is simply so much data to examine and rewrite:

We’ve all got infinitely more soil for paranoia than we previously had before. But I don’t think it necessarily means we are more prone to grow it. But if we are prone to grow it, we could grow it more quickly and lavishly than we could when we only had a few newspapers and monthly magazines to act as fertilizer.

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/09/william-gibson-interview/2/

Cosmopolis/DeLillo/Filmic Violence

First take on Cronenberg's Cosmopolis. Heard a lot about this film at the DeLillo conference back in April.
A lot of the commentary predictably and compellingly focused on the film/novel's invocation of global technocapitalism and its discontents, focusing with particular urgency on the protest scene at the film/novel's center, as well as the protagonist's self-destructive drive to self-immolate through a radically risky bet on the Japanese yen (the third most traded currency in the foreign exchange market, per wikipedia). Many of the film's reviews, such as this excellent one in Salon, emphasize the same themes. While I see these themes undeniably active in the film, and also well in keeping with the themes circulating around post-08 capitalism, I also think the film version does a good deal to emphasize the novel's violence, beginning with the grisly public assassination of an IMF official live on television. The blood gushing out of that official's eye prefigures the abrupt gunshot that Pattinson's Packer uses to kill his bodyguard and ultimately the tense, violent exchange between Packer and Benito Levin.

What difference, then, does putting Cosmopolis to film make? Many of Cronenberg's reviewers spend a lot of time talking about how faithful he is to DeLillo's text: he makes few significant changes, aside from rerouting some dialog from Packer's head into conversation. For the most part, the film is meticulously adherent to the novel, radically unlike Cronenberg's take on Naked Lunch. But in transfer to film, of course, the narrative changes, and I would argue that one of the most startling areas of change lies with the novel's violence.

Because this is the first filmed version of a DeLillo novel, it foregrounds the long association in DeLillo's work between violence and film, most centrally with the Zapruder film in Libra, Underworld, and the American Blood essay (as well as with the Frank Volterra character in The Names and David Bell in Americana). DeLillo has written and spoken about the influence of assassination and Zapruder film on his work, and in the following I want to call attention to the way this original piece of filmic violence emerges in Cosmopolis's own filmic violence. The physical representation of this violence, juxtaposed with the self-conscious conversation that Levin and Packer have at the end, serves to disrupt the uneasy association between abstraction and violence, the continual, difficult question that DeLillo explores: how and why does violence become a useful way to overcome the anxieties of postmodernity, to assert a meaningful identity in the context of forces that would erase such identity? But when the violence appears onscreen, particularly in a Cronenberg movie, it can no longer serve as an abstraction: the film enters into the very media world that DeLillo has long critiqued, by virtue of the very visual imagery deployed by Cronenberg. I raise these issues not to criticize Cronenberg's use of violence, since his oeuvre has repeatedly queried the filmic deployment of violence, and often seems in self-conscious dialog with filmmakers who use violence more instrumentally. Rather, I assert that DeLillo's violence become something different onscreen, and that experiencing its physicality alters, at least in part, DeLillo's long fascination with the irruption of violence through the medium of film. Cosmopolis self-consciously engages the troubling confusion of filmic violence with transcendence (an argument the book itself seemingly takes up as well). Moreover, the filmed version of Cosmopolis represents, in some ways, a return to the scene of violence that DeLillo claims created him as a writer: the Kennedy assassination and its famous filming.

Cosmopolis has multiple parallels with the Zapruder film: Both films focus on a limousine. The limo's slow crawl across the city mimics the way the Zapruder film is often seen, in slow motion.The film contains within itself a filmed assassination, of the IMF officialPacker expects his own assassination, to the point that when Torval points out a "threat level," Packer presumes it applies to him, not to the real U.S. president visiting New York.  The film's climatic moment concerns an encounter between a deranged loner and a powerful man. Even Packer's destination, to get a "haircut," recalls Kennedy's decapitation, given the long history of linguistic jokes about haircuts and decapitations. In a larger sense, the scenes of Packer intact in his limo as an anti-capitalist riot occurs outside invites questions of Kennedy's opposite vulnerability, and the rigid barriers between power and people that are a legacy of the assassination. . Even the "faux assassination," involving a pie-thrower, echoes the roughing up of Adlai Stevenson in the months before the Kennedy assassination.

Of course, describing the up-to-the-minute Cosmopolis in terms of the half-century-old Kennedy assassination seems a bit anachronistic; the former has its protagonist complaining about the "old-fashioned" terms "skyscraper" "ATM machine" and "office," while reveling in the hyperfast exchanges of capital on dozens of tiny screens, while the latter, while framed justifiably as the "first postmodern event" (Jameson), is nevertheless recorded on Kodachrome II 8 mm safety film and takes place not in a start of the art "Prousted" stretch limousine, but in a 1961 Lincoln Continental, admittedly upgraded to serve as a "presidential limousine." The Zapruder film seems to have reached a kind of apotheosis in Oliver Stone's JFK, though continuing to circulate through both art and conspiracy theory cultures.

But there's no doubt at all that the Zapruder film is central to DeLillo's work. DeLillo not only uses the film throughout Libra, he also talks about it extensively in one interview and features it prominently in Underworld. If Cosmopolis overtly concerns global capital and its discontenteds, it is, like Libra, intricately concerned with the assassination of powerful men; threats to Packer keep recurring, and if DeLillo firmly establishes the assassination as a form of meaning-making in Libra, this idea also courses through the latter text.

The Zapruder film is more or less synonymous with filmic violence: Zapruder himself claims to have had a nightmare in which he saw a billboard in Times Square reading "See the President's head explode." In reading Cosmopolis as a kind of extended meditation on the Zapruder film, multiple vectors around the film emerge: its focus on mediation, privilege, and distance; the intersection between the what Slavoj Zizek calls "structural violence" of capitalism itself and the more immediate, subjective violence of assassination. As Mark Osteen has demonstrated, the idea of the rat as currency comes from Zbigniew Herbert, who frames it as "expos[ing] the vanity of wealth and asserting against it the fact of mortality." The Zapruder film was almost immediately commodified, sold to Time/Life, before becoming the most expensive piece of film ever sold. Violence and commodification are intricately bound up in Cosmopolis, then.

DeLillo has never been a bloody writer; he is no Cormac McCarthy or Burroughs. Even when DeLillo describes overt violence, as he does in Cosmopolis, his work seldom functions as visceral; the famously detached language, his focus on sociological and philosophical abstraction, the very themes of his work (The Names isn't about murder, nor is Libra about an assassination) divert readers' eyes from any actual violence. The same cannot be said for Cronenberg, of course, most of whose opus has concerned violence in one way or another, and who has worked the theme with particular intensity in a pair of films from the mid-aughts, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Whereas another filmmaker, then, might choose to cut away from either the stabbing death of the IMF official or the gunshot to Torval, Cronenberg gives these scenes a visual intensity that sharply contrasts the film's otherwise deadness (much has been made of the intersection between Cosmopolis and Pattinson's more famous role).

Within the register of DeLillo's work, violence serves a role that is not quite redemptive, but nevertheless is set in opposition to the banality of mass culture. In her wide-ranging meditation on the depiction of cruelty, Maggie Nelson observe a distinction between "benumbing banality" and "unthinkable, rupturing calamity," with the representation of the latter serving as a kind of truth (42). Throughout her work, Nelson seeks to complicate such easy oppositions, and certainly DeLillo does not draw such easy oppositions. Nevertheless, the showdown between Jack Gladney and Mr. Gray in White Noise features some sense of Gladney cutting through the "white noise" of consumer culture to something real, and Nick Shay's nostalgic memories of the Bronx, set in opposition to the overriding "waste" of present-day Underworld, are also connected with an act of violence. One could continue: Libra seems to privilege the "man on the slab" over the false representations of Oswald. It is no surprise, then, that in Cosmopolis, the immediate, or real, has similar associations with violence: Packer, hungry all day for sex and food, identifies his immediate scene with the barbershop of his youth, a barbershop in which Packer is handed a gun by the barber (and, one might add, shaved with the same kind of razor that kills several characters in Eastern Promises).

Great piece on rise New Right, postmodernism, Lot 49

Nicely historicizes Lot 49, rightly figures New Right as postmodern phenomenon by reading traces of Southern California rise NR in Pynchon's novel:

http://journals.ohiolink.edu.ezproxy.libraries.wright.edu:2048/ejc/pdf.cgi/Shoop_Casey.pdf?issn=15489949&issue=v53i0001&article=51_tppatrotnric

Zero history, antibranding, effective masculinity

Reading Gibson's Zero History, the third in his "Blue Ant" trilogy, which have as their topics international intrigue, but of the postgovernment marketing variety.The landscape here is effectively meaningless in that no governments will be overthrown, no peoples oppressed or unoppressed, no secret technologies will be revealed or hidden. Instead, nearly all of the novel's energies concern branding and trademarks: the wild schemes put in place here, making use of private drones, camera-fooling t-shirts, and "darknets" ("Deep. Very deep.") all have at their root a struggle between warring designers, though one of those designers happens to also be a military supplier/glorified gunrunner.

The plot concerns two quests initiated by Hubertus Bigend: first, the identification of the "Gabriel Hounds" designer (who turns out to be Cayce Pollard) and second, finding a design for military uniforms, what Bigend describes as "the only stable market in this economy," and which the book positions as intricately linked with conventional fashion, the idea being that midcentury men's fashion was heavily influenced, and continues to be influenced, by American military styles, but that now such styles have become part of a feedback loop, whereby fashion also influences the military.

I'm most fascinated by the cultural thread Gibson applies to "mall ninjas," whom Bigend describes as:

Young men who dress to feel they'll be mistaken for having special capability. A species of cosplay, really. Endemic. Lots of boys are playing soldier now. The men who run the world aren't, and neither are the boys most effectively bent on running it next. Or the ones who're actually having to be soldiers, of course. But many of the rest have gone gear-queer, to one extent or another. [...] It's an obsession with the idea not just of the right stuff, but of the special stuff. The costume and semiotics of achingly elite police and military units. Intense desire to possess same, of course, and in turn to be associated with that world. With its competence, its cocksure exclusivity" (213).

Bigend's comments bind tightly to the object-fetishization coursing through Gibson's recent work, which serves for his characters as the full locus of agency: these are characters whose actions are subsumed beneath their clothing, who are, in some fundamental way, their Hounds denim jacket or Buzz Rickson MA-1 indistinguishable from their effectiveness in the world. Part of Gibson's point seems to be that consumer goods, in the Network Society, substitute for identity, or serve as some overdetermined site of meaning, connection to larger systems (the military, in this case), and occupation: all the truths of the old order.

My interest here lies with thee men, who adopt some sense of not just who they are, but of how the world works (the men with cocksure efficiency, and their capacity to be such). It's fascinating that this occurs, too, in the context of the book's crisscrossing logics of secret brands, antibrands. Gibson repeatedly reminds us that brands matter intensely to their possessors. The intense layers of desire figured through otaku haunt everything here. This works well with the Birchall/Fenster point about conspiratorial cultures and the market, how a political orientation can be consumed like everything else. And doubtless there's more here, too, because we're all the way back to the mad subcultures of The Crying of Lot 49, the collector of Nazi parapheniala. All these things give their owners a sense of presence in the world, a rootedness in history.

Not sure whether Gibson is critiquing or reinforcing consumer cultures, or doing something else altogether. Certainly, collecting is different, in some sense, than consuming. But the question of Cayce, revealed as the Hounds designer, is tangled. On the one hand, she serves as a counter to the increasingly disposable, temporary, flighty manifestations of consumer culture: antibranding, and the historical quality fetish that Cayce embodies, certainly resists the complicated marketing logics of instafashion. On the other hand, the anti-label, should be quality idea has long been a staple of the upper class, and works with the cosmopolitan elite class that Cayce/Hollis occupies.

Redeployment house

At the end of "Critically Queer," her account of the often unsubversive possibilities of drag as a result of their being framed within the limiting citationality of gender norms, Butler asks whether the drag documentary Paris is Burning might have a role to play in redeploying or reforming gender norms. In doing so, Butler veers (as is her habit) from the film's central topic--drag shows--and instead focuses on the alternate forms of domesticity depicted in the film "it is in the reformulation of  kinship, in particular, the redefining of the 'house' and its forms of collectivity, mothering, mopping, reading, and becoming of legendary, that the appropriation and redeployment of the categories of dominant culture enable the formation of kinship relations that function quite supportively as oppositional discourse" (622). In so doing, she imagines that the house might genuinely rework gender and sexual norms by acknowledging its "[implication] in the very relations of power it seeks to rival" while remaining "[irreducible] to those dominant forms" (623). I'm intrigued by the way Butler here imagines a refigured domesticity as a site of resistance, but also by the implication that domesticity operates itself by citing norms. This has implications, for the refigured domesticity of the small room and its alternates, as depicted by Lee in Native Speaker; the small room in the father's house is, in some sense, queered, and as such denatures the authorized small room of power.

Thackeray amongst men

Amongst men:

"Thackeray's bachelors created or resinscribed as a personality type one possible path of response to teh strangulation of homosexual panic, their basic strategy is easy enough to trace: a preference of atomized male individualism to the nuclear family (and a corresponding demonization of women, especially mothers); a garrulous and visible refusal of anything that could be interpreted as genital sexuality, toward objects male or female; a corresponding emphasis on the other senses; and a well-defended social facility that freights with a good deal of magnetism its proneness to parody and to unpredictable sadism" (Sedgwick 525).

An open sky of one's own

Rereading Woolf's A Room of One's Own for my theory seminar. First, it's a delightful essay: Woolf neatly mirrors abstract argument and embodied journey, walking her readers through the British Museum, where her quixotic distance from male influence takes shape in her caricatured doodle of Professor Von X and her catty disdain for the researcher next to her, even as she recognizes their unwarranted superiority over her and other women. But the lively part, for my purposes, lies with her discussion of money, and how it frees her to see an open sky instead of a statue. Male knowledge, here and elsewhere, is figured as ordered, organized by looming statues that warp and bend the space around them, creating their own aura of authority. It's facile, perhaps, but that's just what conspiracy theory makes visible: the urgent desire to be meaningful, to represent one's knowledge as essential firmament, when it is, in truth, as arbitrary as the strained logic of conspiracy. Woolf sets the statue in contrast to the unstriated open sky, a space without division or hierarchy. For all her urging about private room, this essay revels in open spaces, spaces where movement is unimpeded.

Boxwood grove as small room

In my chapter on Don DeLillo and Chang Rae Lee, I emphasize the small room as a site of masculine reinforcement, a site where gender hierarchies are ordered against the perceived disorder of postmodernity. I've written here, in the context of Roth's American Pastoral how the small room can be imbued with feminine energy as well; in Roth's work, Merry's terrorist cell becomes not, as it is for Oswald, a locus of masculine affirmation, but of a threatening, semiotic femininity, a femininity that utterly refuses patriarchy, within the designified realm of the counterculture's excesses.

Toni Morrison's Beloved contains yet another type of small room, one that indeed reinforces identity, but does so in the context of both the natural and the feminine. Lonely and isolated, pummeled by the "hurt of the world," Morrison's Denver takes refuges in a boxwood grove that functions as a room:

First a playroom (where the silence was softer), then a refuge (from her brothers' fright), soon the place became the point. In that bower, closed off from the hurt of the hurt world, Denver's imagination produced its own hunger and its own food, which she badly needed because loneliness wore her out. Wore her out. Veiled and protected by the live green walls, she felt ripe and clear, and salvation was as easy as a wish (35).

Morrison emphasizes the way the grove becomes a kind of Bachelardian anchor for Denver, keeping her identity intact in the face of the multiple forces that would destroy it, which would include the violent legacy of enslavement (which takes shape as her mother murdering her sister), as well as the rejection heaped on Denver and family by the community. So the grove, like the small room, serves to reinforce Denver against the storms raging around her. And yet, this room bears no connection to wider networks of power; Denver does not identify with imaginary women or men elsewhere.

Still, though, Morrison positions the grove as part of a wider state of dysfunction at work in post-murder, pre-reconciliation 124. In this sense, the grove serves both as a figure for isolation and an artificial differentiation from the enveloping domestic energies of the house. Moreover, Denver frames her subjectivity in terms of mystical forces, which offer something of the same kind of false-transcendence/connection proffered by conspiracy theory:

None of them knew the downright pleasure of enchantment, of not suspecting but knowing the things behind things. Her brothers had known, but it scared them. Grandma Baby knew, but it saddened her. None could appreciate the safety of ghost company. Even Sethe didn't love it. She just took it for granted--like a sudden change in the weather (45).

As it does for Oswald and others, "knowing the things behind things" offers a compensatory affirmation for Denver's character. Denver fills the void left by the loss of community and mother by both fleeing to small room and figuring herself as occupying a separate social realm from the rest of the community. Of course, Morrison is working in a much different tradition than DeLillo, Lee, or Roth, and yet I wonder what she's pointing toward with grove and ghost. What response to terror and paralysis is figured here? Might Morrison be pointing to a tendency toward mysticism and/or isolation in an African American context? This does beg the question of whether such rooms are too common to serve as tropes. And yet, they're each invested with a very particular energy which concerns individual and self.

The Psychologization of Everday Life

In a recent Critical Inquiry article, clinical psychologist Jan De Vos makes the case that "the pscyhologization of everyday life"--the widespread dissemination of psychology as a framework for interpreting--structures the understanding, critique, and solutions posed for Guantanamo and Abu Grahib. Rereading the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment and Milligram experiments, De Vos demonstrates how psychology itself served as the ultimate rationalizing fantasy for everyone involved in these experiments (Zimbardo explicitly recruited volunteers for a "psychological experiment"). If he's right that psychology itself is a widely applied function of biopolitics--that the belief that we are psychological creatures structures our submission to psychological discipline--then there's an uncanny reflexion between critics of Guantanamo and the torturers themselves; both see their efforts through a psychological framework, and both fantasize about their ability to view the Real of torture or human existence (Zimbardo claimed to have "laid bare" the human impulse to torture), even as what they really view is a product of psychology's own narrative fantasies. It's possible that this, too, is part of the disruptive work that Acker does in Empire of the Senseless and elsewhere: to lay bare the commonly circulating jouissances at work around torture and torture's observers.

Surveillance/social media/hiring

Reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickled and Dimed this week, in which she does a grittier version of Undercover Boss, albeit with some middle-class trappings of slumming intact. Ehrenreich is good at charting the psychological conditions of low-wage labor, in particular the real sense that, as she puts it, more and more Americans spend most of their day in a place that allows very little individual expression, and very little privacy. Ehrenreich describes, to give one glaring example, the indignities and inconveniences associated with mandatory drug testing, a procedure which, at least in her reading, seems designed to assert discipline over the employee more than it is to weed out actual substance abuse (though she does posit, at some point, that drug users might also be more likely to rebel against company cultures). So to be a low-wage worker, employed at, say, Wal-Mart, is to live in a kind half-Orwellian world, and the limitations around low income housing take care of the rest. What Ehrenreich describes is roughly biopower: the fruitless, relentless measuring of populations, with the net effect of keeping these populations managed. The data-intensification of recent years is something weirder, where the consuming self, the extension of the subject into the world, becomes immanently public and inextricable from the networks it engages, if it was ever otherwise.

Ehrenreich's book, published early last decade, of course has very little Internet in it; in fact, one wonders if any aspects of the Internet--say, the ability to apply for jobs online at the library--might actually alter the low-wage landscape, at least incrementally. But the potential for surveillance, of course, has only been amplified by the Internet era. From the start, I suppose, those Internet sites wanted a piece of us, and now they have it, handed over willingly. In one of those weird cultural synergies between private reading and public news, this week the AP reported that some employers--scattered prisons, some sheriff's departments, Sears, at least on some level--are requesting, and implicitly requiring, potential employees to give up their Facebook passwords. It strikes me that, like drug tests, this is going to hit low-wage workers the hardest, mostly because they're least equipped--financially, intellectually, and culturally--to resist. It's impossible, of course, to extend the current moment out into the future, and yet the contours of the coming society have begun to clarify: Something like Facebook may well become near-mandatory as a source of personal information, the way credit scores are beginning to operate: not just as a measure of ability to pay back, but of humanity cast more generally, something akin to "potential productivity"--a measure of the estimated future output of that most perfect of machines, the human body. I'm convinced, I suppose, by Shteyngart's imaginary in Super Sad True Love Story, in which smartphone, FBI file, social media profile, and shopping history converge.

The smart people are telling us, over and over: Facebook is what we were always warned about, but always imagined would be imposed--a permanent record. Of course, though, it's an idealized, performative self, but a self with real connections to real people, whose own backgrounds will likely enable more and more sophisticated profiling. How will anyone unionize when Wal-Mart essentially owns your data? I'm guessing that the data tracked by smartphones, DVRs, social media, rewards cards has only begun to be tapped, and most, all of us, are only dimly, faintly aware of the potential consequences, particularly as the world grows increasingly stratified, and therefore increasingly violent and crime-ridden.

Uneasily, conspiracy theory, subjectivity, social media

Last night, I switched my Facebook account over to their Timeline format. Suddenly, it all flashed before my eyes: my idealized life, the person I imagined myself to be, laid out in pictures and text. (Studies have been done about Facebook's notable ability to decrease happiness among its users, because users seldom post anything self-damning, and so it appears as though the whole world is problem-free. " Shteyngart in an interview: "I don’t think I’m any happier than I was before the iPhone and immersion in the Internet. I think I’m much more anxious and much more stressed out.") And I wanted more, I wanted to see more of who I was, what I'd done, what I'd consumed, what I'd liked, who I'd been with. I don't know how this will go away: the pleasure of seeing one's virtual self (and I do think "self" is appropriate, given its imaginary associations of wholeness) laid out before one, relieved, momentarily, of answering that terrible, tyrannical question: who am I, and why am I here? All of this resonates strongly with both old theories of postmodern subjectivity (a little of this, a little of that, all combined into a flat intertextual surface, per Jameson), and recent work on the culture of the Network Society, a society in which information constantly flows, and which morphs subjectivity into an anxious, do-I-rate self, as perfectly described by Gary Shteyngart, whose young Media workers commit suicide rather than live without their apparats and their attendant Facebook-amplified ratings. Both Jodi Dean (Blog Theory) and Tiziana Terranova (Network Culture) write about how the continual chatter of information produces selves that are, to some extent, functions of the network. Indeed, for Terranova, who is ambivalent about the political potential of Network Culture, individuals themselves are a regulatory function which reduces the potential for a multitude or mass:

The new place of the individual in the mode of immanent control is not as a model for the organization of the multitude, but as a tool that allows the overcoding and the ultimate containment of the productive power of flows. To the decoding of the mass into a network culture, to the dissolution of the individual into the productive powers of a multitude, corresponds an overcoding of the multitude onto the individual element understood as a unit of code modeled on the biological notion of gene (123)

The individual is here reduced to an Oedipal virus in the potentially productive code of flows. Why I care about this: I'm struck by the way Facebook has amplified a set of media and consumer cultures that make manifest the degree to which postmodern subjectivity is an amalgamation of consumer desires, recycled texts, quotations, and other dispersed texts that have little to do with an anachronistic individuality, and yet, the appeal of such individuality is exactly the filter through which the subjectivizing discourses of media and marketing work. Facebook is a physical manifestation of the set of flows that comprise the postmodern subject, the multiple and shifting discourses that uneasily course through the individual. That such a reflected, virtual self is subject to colonization by the corporations which feed Facebook's advertising revenue, that such flows are continually assembled and reassembled into marketing profiles, credit scores, fans, voters, consumers, and so on, that the very notion of a private, autonomous self which exist previous to the consumer energies that work upon it, doesn't really matter: if I believe it is me, if I believe that They act on my inmost desires, then my subjectivity is nevertheless activated, and my agency in the Network Society is effective.

In this framework, conspiracy theory serves as a set of particularly sticky subjectivizing discourses, discourses that promise, with a grim smile, all the imagined masculine agency of Yesteryear, as well as access to Their small rooms, Their sites of effectiveness, agency, solidity. Conspiracy discourses are different in degree, angularity, reach than sports, fan, fashion discourses, but not in kind. They just promise more. In this, they are not exclusively masculine, and yet their reactionary energy, their reliance on old models of self, functions as such.

Postmodernism and the limitations of the conspiratorial imaginary

An accumulating set of arguments--articulated, for example, by Rachel Adams and Sean McCann/Michael Szalay--links postmodernism with the Sixties, and more specifically with the Movement and/or New Left. In their much-discussed article, McCann and Szalay articulate intersections between postmodern literature, the more feverish dreams of the Movement (levitating the Pentagon) and postmodern theory (rehearsing, in part, the old argument about the New Left moving into the academy and abandoning class struggle for identity politics. In their account of postmodernism's wish for magic change--the billboard transformation that ends Underworld, Oedipa's desire for the crying of lot 49 (a mystery from elsewhere) and, presumably, the rocket-mysticism--McCann and Szalay make the case that such extra-political wishes enable, and may indeed foster the neoliberal version of "liberation" promulgated on the Right. Their analysis is compelling and interesting, and fits with much work that seeks to historicize writers like Acker, Pynchon, and DeLillo in terms of the particular cultural terrain of the Cold War (I'm not sure, actually, why they don't raise the role of McCarthyism's legacy of counter "class warfare" rhetoric, but no matter.) On the one hand, the distrust of bureaucracy and its intersection with gender is exactly what I describe as the cultural logic of the small room, and surely, then, the continued return to conspiracies as fodder for postmodern literature reflects the kind of distrust of the bureaucratic that the article identifies. Simultaneously, the wish for magic embodied in the secret society, and the kind of self-aggrandizing function of such, would seem to point to the self-reifying logic of this wish for magic. Nevertheless, I'm not convinced that the dispersed, highly reflexive forms of postwar culture and economics do not warrant a literary response in kind. This is part of the argument that John McClure makes counter McCann, that DeLillo, Morrison, and so on work to reproduce the limitations and pitfalls of the current cultural moment. Along these lines, when DeLillo examines the logic of the small room, he's identifying a real set of desires and forfeitures that are at work in postwar culture, demonstrating the available forms of identification for people like Oswald (whose experience DeLillo works to generalize) and the implication of these forms in a gendered form of nostalgia which, if it doesn't quite dominate what McClure calls the "lifeworld" of Libra, still clearly exerts a powerful shaping influence in the way gendered identities are formed, and the kinds of domination that such forms produce. I see these novels as better at critique (perhaps art's best function) than they are at proposing a coherent political program.

Still, in the common replication of conspiracy theory logic amongst commercial, political, and literary cultures (the Tea Party meets DeLillo), there is likely a set of commonly articulated frustration with the limits of governmental bureaucracy, and a common post-Watergate loss of faith in the possibilities of the welfare state.