Sighs on Guantanamo

I'm trying to wrap up an article on Kathy Acker and the prisons at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Grayib. My rough argument is as follows: that while critics on left and right tend to offer sewn-up narratives with clear actors and motives (of the sort with a family resemblance to conspiracy theory), Acker's uneven, disturbing connections between power, torture, and the intimate world of the bourgeois subject offer a less easy, and so more ethically productive, way of identifying with the prisoners than do these other articulations.

The stand on the Right is more or less clear, and well summarized by David Luban in an article about the so-called "ticking time bomb" scenario, whereby the unbounded detention and even torture of a nation's others are justified by an impending mass death. I've had more trouble in finding a similarly straightforward narrative on the Left, thought the continually reiterated versions of Agamben's "state of exception" seem to offer one possibility. The problem, in part, is that there are plenty of people on the Left who are very concerned with identifying with the prisoners, perhaps too much so. When one digs into research on Guantanamo, one finds that the prisoners are indeed referenced as people with specific histories, and that the wide-ranging argument--that we're all prisoners of Guantanamo--is harder to find. That's mostly because it's a specious argument, and so not made very frequently. The stronger argument is one raised and scrutinized by Jinee Lokaneeta in a recent Theory and Event article: how do liberal states like the United States, who define themselves in part by their restraint from excessive violence (fighting "just wars," executing prisoners "humanely") justify their willingness to use forms of torture. In Lokaneeta's reading, the people of the United States and the prisoners and Guantanamo are connected not because, speciously, they too can be subject to torture under the auspices of some broad-ranging "state of exception," but because the visibility of Guantanamo and Abu Grayib violates a meaningful self-image for the United States, as a non-authoritarian, democratic state, who adheres to the rule of law and promotes individual rights. The latter point, of course, is controversial in relation to Guantanamo, since the detainees there were, by any measure, denied the same rights to speedy trial and so on accorded to Americans. Indeed, David Luban has argued that the "ticking time bomb" trope is developed in part to respond to this contradiction; the threat of immediate, mass, death represents the lengths to which the liberal state must go to justify its use of torture.

For Benjamin, history is hazily understood, and the multiple histories circulating around Guantanamo are never "accurate" but may still be meaningful. The haze of articulations that Acker offers in Empire of the Senseless, a half-understood sense of power exerting itself, coalescing and uncoalescing into authority figures, mapping and remapping onto new circumstances, new events. MK ULTRA is emblematic of a certain story about CIA information retrieval, a story that is never fully true and never fully false. Acker retains cognizance about this falsity, reminds her readers that all stories about power are in some sense myths, and so, it follows, are the stories about Guantanamo, left and right.

The ones on the right matter, I think. Listening to Arcade Fire tonight, it occurred to me just how much the reality of September 11th, and even the Obama administration, are obscured by the demonic caricatured Right (following, perhaps, in the footsteps of the disdain around Nixon's Checkers speech). The more the Left focuses on and amplifies the Right's shortcomings--even around something as obviously flawed as the practices in Guantanamo and Abu Grayib--the less the Left confronts its own political reality, in this case a rapidly shifting world from which it is all too easy to retreat from, into a tiny screen spitting back our own opinions to us.

Paranoia as a hinge

Following in the footsteps of Patrick O'Donnell and others, Anne McClintock defines paranoia, in the context of the war on terror, as a particular way of seeing the world as articulated by government officials, the media, and others who create linkages from ordinary life to national life:

Paranoia is in this sense what I call a hinge phenomenon, articulated between the ordinary person and society, between psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that sense dialectical rather than binary, for its violence erupts from the force of its multiple, cascading contradictions: the intimate memories of wounds, defeats, and humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and revenge, in such a way as to be productive at times of unspeakable violence. For how else can we understand such debauches of cruelty?

Not incidentally, this is an argument that one sees in literature over and over again, from Don DeLillo's Libra to Toni Morrison's "Recitatif": the great arcs of culture (respectively, class struggle and post-sixties racial struggles) occur in tension with the private, painful struggles of the individual, the "wounds, defeats, and humiliations" that give cultural fantasies purchase on the individual psyche. McClintock, in struggling to understand how Abu Grayib could take place, widens paranoia into an interpellative, yet generative, force, one that simultaneously welcomes the wounded individual into a cultural order and absorbs the force of individual pain to push torment and power out into the culture.

Everybody's Family Romance

This is one of the smartest, most lively books I've seen this year: I really love how Harkins takes an issue traditionally framed in terms of gender studies (incest--and "framed" is likely too weak a term for the polarizing, energizing role that sexual abuse plays in feminist studies), maintains the force of the gender studies account of incest, but shows its limitations, then proceeds to expand, contextualize, and rework this account within the broad historical arc of the economic and cultural changes usefully grafted together as neoliberalism. She builds on the groundwork laid by Wendy Brown and Lisa Duggan in demonstrating the critical usefulness of the neoliberal idea for a range of cultural studies, showing that neoliberalism is far from a liberal catchword.

The Neoliberal Conspiracy

In his touchstone Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey offers a succinct, but detailed, account of how neoliberal ideas about markets and governance came to be hegemonic in much of the world. With some verve, he describes neoliberal policies as an exended effort to regain class power on the part of the top 10% of wealth-holders, a group that had lost some ground under the progressive taxation and union-corporate cooperation of the period Harvey reterms as "embedded liberalism." (I say "reterms" because he seems to be describing the same historical period that he earlier called "Fordism," for reasons that he doesn't really spell out, except that presumably "Fordism" has too narrow a focus.) During the time period 1973-2004 (Harvey's book is published in 2005), elite interests began to act as a class to dismantle much of the gains made by working-class organizations, municipal governments, and other institutions resistant to the relentless accumulation of wealth under late capitalism. Not much there that doesn't appear in the NY Times regularly: privatization, urban renewal, the Right's focus on markets, and the new gilded age have all received much press in recent years. Nevertheless, the will Harvey attributes to moneyed interests--the deliberate power-grab at work in, for example, Citibank's chair's forced restructuring of NYC debt in the seventies in order to cripple municipal unions and disable social programs--is shocking, and leaves one rushing to check the publication press to make sure Harvey hasn't lost it (it's Oxford, and hell no, he hasn't). Harvey asserts that the high rate of returns historically enjoyed by such elites weren't enough, and that the restructuring of the tax code, deregulation of financial markets, and defeat of unions all form part of a class war in which elites work to grab more money (and man, has it worked, with the share accorded the top 1% growing with no apparent end in sight). All of this means, really, that some amount of conspiracy theory is exactly right, at least if one trusts Harvey and his sources: there are moneyed interests working to manipulate the public to further their narrow ends. And yet while I see many strands of Left thought participating in conspiracy theory, I'm unwilling to brand Harvey as such, because his evidence is too compelling. The concentration of power and capital at the top during the past forty years--the time period of my study--means that conspiracy theorists, even those as wacky as Glenn Beck, are on to something when they figure themselves as little pawns among great chess masters. But just because they're right in some ways doesn't mean they're not paranoid, I suppose.

In scrutinizing conspiracy theories, I seek new models for the articulation of gender identities under neoliberal governance, or, at least, a way to examine how nostalgic versions of the relation masculinity/state are deployed in the context of destabilized flows of labor and capital. If neoliberalism presents a social landscape in which the "stabilities" of state/workplace/father" have been shakily disrupted, some conspiracy theories offer a way to restore, in the space of the imagination, such gender stability. Jameson and others have described conspiracy theory as a means for the subject to grapple with the vastness of global networks; I'd add that the central tropes of conspiracy theory, while they emerge out of a Cold War context of relative state stability, are refigured as a consolidating movement around gender in the post-Cold War moment.

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.

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.