What is conspiracy theory?

This is a question that people have asked me at all stages of my project: what do you mean by conspiracy theory? For many years, the answer seemed obvious: it's what they talk about on the X-Files, it's a belief that the Kennedy assassination was rigged, it's a belief that a secret society is running the government. Recently, though, I've begun giving thought to a narrower, more useful definition: conspiracy theory is the belief that some clandestine group--whether governmental, corporate, upper-class--have rigged some segment of history. Often--though of course not always--this group is composed of men. In part, this implication rests with the historical power accorded men--and the R.W. Connell argument that powerful institutions continue to have a masculine character. In a theoretical sense, this group is imagined as masculine actors, people who act upon history and are not acted upon by history, people who make themselves and their world, and who are not made by the world.

Take, then, the recent study that showed 40% of Republican voters have doubts about Barack Obama's citizenship. Well, is that a conspiracy theory? On the surface, no--it's an expression of doubt that "he's one of us," the xenophobia of the immigration debate grafted onto the figure of the first African-American president, it's the longstanding mistrust between American whites and American blacks. But if one considers the implications of this belief--that Obama somehow ran around a key provision of the Constitution, that he was aided in such by presumably powerful people, and that his election was manipulated by such forces--then we're in the realm of conspiracy theory. Moreover, the the only people who know about this pseudo-coup are a select few right-wing analysts--so we also have a powerful identification, or self-aggrandizement occurring around this conspiracy theory. Asserting that Obama is not a US citizen, and that I have the evidence, is a rhetorically powerful move, even if such rhetoric is not always persuasive to all audiences. (Something similar happened with the 2004 election and Diebold, where a few left-wing analysts believed they had found evidence of a coup.)

Why, though, would such a group be comprised of men? Certainly, the names that come up on Glenn Beck's chalkboard are frequently men, and the names that appear in the video promoted by WND. But my argument rests upon a more general proposition (one that may unfortunately fall into the realm of "common sense"): that when "one" imagined a small room of conspirators, the occupants of that room are wearing ties, not dresses, and that the color of their skin is white, not brown. Certainly, some conspiracy theorists--Texe Marrs, for example--explicitly name the conspirators as male. But I'd argue that even when the designation is not explicit, the implication is that the conspirators are men, because, to paraphrase Connell in a rough approximation of the way the world works (itself a weak argument), powerful actors are men. There's also the argument, I suppose, that the conspirators' room is a markedly non-domestic place, and that part of the imaginary around it derives from historically male-only spaces: secret societies, smoke-filled back rooms, the Presidential "war room." Conspiracy theory validates the logic of such spaces, even as it questions the need for their existence.

While, as Connell observes, the history of masculinity, like the history of any social category, is fraught with "dominant, subordinated, and marginalized masculinities are in constant interaction, changing the conditions for each others' existence and transforming themselves as they do" (198), nevertheless, the association between masculinity and financial, social, and political power persists. Even if "patriarchy" is a too-narrow and too-simple way to understand the gender order, the uneven distribution of power between men and women, and between white men and men of color is an inarguable reality. Indeed, as Connell argues, while feminist, gay, and other activists have worked to disrupt the notion of a naturalized masculine power, the upper-class men of metropolitan countries now possess a greater percentage of wealth and power than at any point in history. The question for my study is what role conspiracy theories--theories that affirm and reinforce the notion that powerful men control the world (is this news?) play in negotiating the stark facts of power imbalances between powerful men and everyone else.

Another question for my study is this: what does the knowledge of that coup mean to the people that "uncover it." Even if, in many cases, the people doing so are women (Orly Taitz), what gendered version of the world is promoted by the assertion of such knowledge? I'm going to argue that it means several things: first, that the world is populated by Oliver Norths and Jack Bauers, men willing to commit clandestine acts for some higher cause; ironically, of course, North and Bauer are working for the other team in this case, but still, this is how the world works. It also means that the world is somewhat fixed and limited, that in place of all the complexities of late-capitalist politics, we have the immediate, graspable problem of men behaving like men. Finally, it means that I have a place in the world, that I can participate in politics and power in a direct, meaningful way: by exposing the actions of North and Bauer. In this way, the distanced, fragmented, shifting world of late capitalism, post-Fordism and post-civil rights is distilled into coherent, recognizable structures--structures bound up in a reactionary view of gender.

The rhetoric of masculinity and conspiracy theory

In Ragged Dicks, his study of the self-made man and the steel industry, James Catano does great work with a rhetorical construction of masculinity, a process that Catano describes as operating between the individual subject and what Catano, drawing on Bourdieu, calls doxa, the “desires, needs, rituals, beliefs, and practices” which are absorbed and internalized by the individual subject, and later experienced as if they were eternal truths that the subject discovers. Within this framework--a version of the classic ideological determinism puzzle about individual freedom that Zizek explores in The Sublime Object of Ideology--Catano finds the self-made man idea playing a paradoxical role:

The deep irony of masculine self-making lies in its claim to offer the ultimate in freely formed, self-created individualism, while it actually serves to establish a social subject, a set of behavioral patterns that are already prescripted (3)

He then quotes Butler from Bodies That Matter to the effect that such masculine subjectivity “draws on and covers over the constitutive conventions by which it is organized” (227), which is, again, a classic case of the ideologically-formed subject who believes himself to have sprung fully-formed from Zeus's head. (Actually, it's more the subject's belief in his own originality that seems at issue here.) Throughout my work, I'm trying to make the case that believing, articulating, studying a conspiracy theory has, while in a bit more of a roundabout manner, the same effect as autobiographizing oneself as "self-made." In announcing a conspiracy theory, the conspiracy theorist declares himself to be, in relations to the powers that rule his world, a subject in the know--a subject not, perhaps, self made in the conventional sense, but free from influence, free from implication in the forces that shape him. To put it in more broad terms, the conspiracy theorist, in his purest form (his theoretical form, I suppose, since that's what we're doing here), asserts himself as free from history itself, just as the conspiracies that form his fantasy are themselves--in the sense of influencing, not being influenced by, history.

Of course, then, conspiracy theory offers a similar set of ironies to those Catano identifies around the self-made men. The conspiracy theorist describes other selves utterly in thrall to the powers that control it, even while he claims a wide set of freedoms for himself to articulate and identify such powers; he claims to uncover wild new material, even while he reuses tropes familiar from other conspiracy theories: secret societies, men in small rooms, lone gunmen, and mind control. The conspiracy theorist decries the individual subject's loss of autonomy, even as he fervently celebrates the individual possibility that would flourish were the conspiracies to be defeated; the conspiracy theorist claims his every discovery is original, even as he tells the same stories over and over.

As Jodi Dean has pointed out, the conspiracy theorist that I describe here hardly fits the disjointed list of questions that form the basis for conspiracy theorists' works from Mark Lane's Kennedy assassination Rush to Judgment to Robert Epperson's wide critique of power in American society New World Order. Each work does not offer the kind of narrative throughline that my use of terms like "articulation" and "tropes" implies. One must look instead at the presumptions at work in such texts: the presumption that history always has a Real Story, and that the conspiracy theorist, even while at times offering little in the way of narrative coherence, nevertheless conveys the psychic landscape--the libidinal investments, the sheer force of desire--at work in conspiracy theory. Indeed, this is how Mark Fenster has described conspiracy theories, as rushing forward from conclusion to conclusion. This is also the role that writers like Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Denis Johnson assign the conspiracy theorist: the plot of The Crying of Lot 49 and Oedipa's desire to be relevant, to "put something of herself" in the dissembled landscape of Pierce Inverarity's will, are one and the same. Like Lane and Epperson, Oedipa becomes seduced by the desire to evade history, to become part of a force beyond the entrapping tower of Kinneret. This is the desire of the conspiracy theorist, to knit together a world; such knitting begins with questions.

The ideology of individual meritocracy

In my article on the Left Behind books, I argued that neoliberalism--a feverish dependence on markets across a variety of social and political contexts--shaped the books' worldview more than either hardcore fundamentalist Christianity or conspiracy theories. Part of neoliberalism, as I defined it using models from Wendy Brown and Lisa Duggan, means reiterating meritocracy as a overriding logic of social promotion; one of the shocking things about the Antichrist, I noted, is that he hires Christians, but only because such Christians are the best-qualified candidates for the position--a logic that the books naturalize. This logic is likely encoded into the cult of the expert, a sense that someone out there Knows, someone out there is amazingly qualified. Though of course, as Ulrich Beck observes in The Risk Society, the need for experts is less cultish and more a function of the complicated systems that surround late capitalist subjects. Moreover, the whole point of a meritocracy is that it supposedly judges people only on their qualifications, without regard to social connections, race, gender, age, region, ethnicity, and so on.

Arguably, a steadfast belief in meritocracy underscores all sorts of conservative talking points, but particularly the "colorblind" logic of anti-affirmative action. "I judge a man by what he shows me on the field of battle, Sargent," the lightly anti-Semitic Captain Barret tells the Jewish Nathan Marx in Philip Roth's 1959 "Defender of the Faith."Such sentiments (do they originate in the armed forces?) have dominated a certain "post"-racist discourse ever since. At this point in history, meritocracy seems so ingrained into the social that it's hard to remember that such discourses once competed with genuinely racist ideas--of biological superiority--for dominance. This is the exact breakdown that historian Matthew Lassiter identifies at work in the postwar New South (a region whose politics Lassiter views as emblematic for the country as whole). Throughout The Silent Majority, Lassiter demonstrates how fully blinding a belief in meritocracy can be. Lassiter argues that a Sunbelt moderation of segregation was accomplished “only by replacing the civil rights agenda of social justice with an ostensibly race-neutral discourse of regional progress and individual meritocracy liberated from history itself, the latest and most resilient version of the New South mythology” (30). It's not much of a stretch, then, to argue that, at least in Lassiter's view, meritocracy forms a pillar of the current dominant ideology.

When conspiracy theory is read juxtaposed with such meritocracy, a mixed set of ideas emerge: at first glance, conspiracy theory would seem to undercut meritocracy, because meritocracy must be apparent on the surface, and conspiracy theory's back-room dealing would seem obscene to the meritocratic order. In fact, it's arguable that this is one of the things that fires up Glenn Beck and his audience--that their meritocratic rights are being undermined by a stealthy liberal conspiracy. On the other hand, conspiracy theorists resolutely affirm a belief in hierarchy: the very fact that the conspirators are in place affirms the existence of hierarchical social relations; the Antichrist, after all, still follows good market logic, despite his overwhelming evil. It's more likely, though, that the world of meritocracy--a sunny world where no effort goes unrewarded--in fact forms the obverse of conspiracy theory, the bright, efficient world that's left once the conspiracy theorists win and the conspirators get their grubby hands off America. The conspiracy theorists are the ones "playing by the rules" in a meritocracy. Where, then, does the ressentiment, the conspiracy theorist's envy, desire to occupy the place of the conspirators, play in this framework? Well, first, conspiracy theories provide, of course, a way to account for one's failings in the meritocratic world; I would have been a contender, if not for those conspirators. Second, is it possible that what men want, in a homosocial, envious mode, is to take the shortcuts themselves, to transcend their frustrated lives into the uber-successful world of the conspiracy?

The Space of Conspiracy Theory

One of the issues I struggle with is how historically-rooted to make my project; in the last post, I questioned whether my model of gendered conspiracy theory is salient for only the past fifty years, or whether it applies to a range of historical periods. Sedgwick's Between Men, a text I finished today, does a nice job of splitting the difference--it's primarily theoretically-informed close readings (the richest close readings one could imagine) but still points regularly to the readings' historical context. But of course, that book emerged at a different time for the field, when, perhaps, both close readings and pure theory were more readily accepted.

Still, towards historicizing my conspiracy theorists, it may be possible to locate them in the suburban single family home, which, in his study of postwar Oakland and the politics of suburbia vs. the city, historian Robert Self calls "the preeminent site of political interest and commitment” (293), a judgment Matthew Lassiter echoes in his excellent re-evaluation of postwar anti-integration politics, The Silent Majority. Both Self and Lassiter find in the suburbs a celebration of individualism, and a resistance to a New Deal sense of the public good. Lassiter concludes,

“The suburban realignment of American politics ultimately helped to establish an underlying consensus in a postliberal order, a bipartisan defense of middle-class entitlement programs and residential boundaries combined with the futuristic ethos of color-blind moderation and full-throttled capitalism at the center of the Sunbelt synthesis” (227).

What about this, though, locates a conspiracy theory sense of "amongst men" in these suburbs? Certainly, they celebrate meritocracy, certainly, the foment anti-government feeling, undoubtedly, the sentiments that circulate on the Glenn Beck show have their origins in the rough alignments these historians describe. Beyond this, though, the defend-my-home trope that surfaces in Left Behind (the home as militia compound), coupled with the dissociation from community that Ulrich Beck, Giddens, and others observe of the postwar era, make the suburban home a detached (physically and psychologically) space that offers a premier site for the imagined "amongst men" of conspiracy theory.

The individualist suburban home joins with the globalized corporation to provide the general backdrop in which white male gender identity forms in the postwar era. Doubtless, the suburb is the space of the white male conceived as such (the famed "white flight," though both Lassiter and Self take pains to challenge the simple logic of this concept), and at the least, symbolizes the detachment--the erasure of physical proximity that Sedgwick finds producing homosociality--that evokes a yearn to be amongst men. (Ford's Richard Bascombe could well join the list of detached males of my study.)

The homosociality of conspiracy theory--starting thoughts

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?

Is "nation" a woman?

After reading Between Men more thoroughly, I am not sure if "woman" is assimilable to "nation" or "country," simply because both need saving. Sedgwick is making a very specific argument about the role of women in homosocial relations, and I don't think this specific argument is readily graftable onto the more abstracted exchanges that occur around conspiracy theory. Still, Sedgwick's argument as a whole, concerning the great chains of male being that are continually recreated across cultures and historical periods, well suits the homosocial relations I see narrated in conspiracy theory.

I'm still sure that there's something retrograde about the "saving the nation" trope, but it simply can't be narrowly grafted onto Sedgwick's formulation.

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.