Insecure vs. secure paranoia

Peter Knight concludes his seminal Conspiracy Culture with a meditation on the post-Cold-War paradoxes which circulate around the idea that "everything is connected." Hardly an affirmation of the latter, Knight's account lists the multiple, seemingly hidden ways in which the globe really does seem to be interconnected--risk theory, ecology, systems theory, globalization--only to acknowledge that such interconnectedness exists only at a "deeper" level which cannot be narrated by Cold-War-era accounts of secret cabals, but towards which such accounts nevertheless point. While embedded in a range of 90s popular and theoretical cultures, Knight's argument nevertheless points to a compelling feature of contemporary conspiracy theories: that these express current amalgams of power in only allegorical or partial ways. I really like the way Knight frames cabal-type conspiracies as products of the Cold War; this fuels, certainly, my argument that the small room of conspiracy functions nostalgically. He characterizes the age as one of "insecure," or posthumanist paranoia, but points to the powerful pull that "secure" paranoia has in the present.

Secure paranoias, insecure paranoias, space of places, space of flows. Surely it's not much of stretch to say that the cabals of the Cold War are tightly bound to the civic institutions that Castells figures as failed in the Network Society. The unsettling distances that Knight finds at work in DeLillo's Underworld are also characteristic of the distances between elites and people which lie at the core of Castells' account of the social organization of the Network Society: elites are cosmopolitan, people are local.

Still, though, something about gender and identity cuts through all this. On the one hand, the conspiracy theorist's nostalgia is akin to the militia and fundamentalist nostalgia that Castells figures in The Power of Identity; on the other, the gender imaginaries circulate more widely than the local.

CIA-like anthropology in Native Speaker

How is one "known" to the Theys who operate in the small room? In Native Speaker, Henry Park thinks of "conspirator" Dennis Hoagland's perspective:

John Kwang, I can hear [Hoagland] saying with a pop in his voice, is not so important a man. At least not individually, as a single human possibility. No one is. If a client is interested at all it is because the man exercises an influence or maybe even grace on some greater slice of humanity. Or most simply, he is representative, easily drawn and iconic, the idea being if you knew him you could know a whole people (334).

Postmodernity and the evacuation of racial difference

In his wonderful, incredibly nuanced Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, literary critic David Palumbo-Liu, after first observing the extended meaning modernist marginality has for the ethnic/racial subject's double-consciousness, posits (in a faintly familiar move) that postmodernity functions as such in part because the denarrativizing logic of late capitalism serves to "flatten out" identity as much as it flattens out culture. He rereads Jameson’s postmodernity as dizzying in part because it is ethnically and racially undifferentiated:

“Postmodern schizophrenic meaningless is directly correlated with the fact that racial others are now too much like us in this (flat)line space of postmodernity—there are no hills and valleys to secure our geographies, no way to ‘map’ a position. ‘We’ are just as randomly postmodern subjects as ‘they.’ In other words, ‘white’ is no longer distinct” (325).

I find in this a sharply improved way of describing the post-sixties shifts in identity which, I argue, fuel the repeated turn to conspiracy theory during this era. Indeed, one might argue that the "birther" conspiracy theory has as its clear cultural motivation the reinstallation of such difference in the context of a dizzying sameness (which is why I've described this conspiracy theory as "exhausting" a particular logic of conspiracy theory). This also provides a way of rereading Patrick O'Donnell's theorization of postmodern paranoia as gendered and raced--the paranoid positions are best characterized as Euroamerican (white male) nostalgia for the moment of modernity, a moment when, as Liu argues, "the neither-or formula of marginality was not as pernicious for the Euroamerican subject, since it was still placed at the center of a modern teleology. Whichever way modernity was moving, that subjectivity was carried along in its flow" (321). Same argument, different valence.

Musing on the small room as a discursive formation

In conceiving of conspiracy theory as a gendered discourse, I argue that conspiracy theory continually reinforces idea that power originates in, replicates itself in, and dominates from concentrated small groups located in inaccessible places, a kind of panoptic centralization of effort which determines life behind the State, church, corporations, or other institutions. While this power may exert influence in an almost capillary way, shaping, for example, school curricula or local elections, it is ultimately organized and limited by the walls of the small room in which it operates. The kind of power imagined by conspiracy theorists, then, is identifiable and limited; it is not subject to the kind of diffusion and dispersal described by Foucault and his philosophical descendants, but remains whole and unified.

The small room of power is figured in multiple ways that feed its imaginary: it is the war room, the situation room, the smoke-filled back room, the remote gathering, the board room meeting. Historically, this room has been occupied by men, and it would seem to remain representative of masculine action and exclusion. Critics made much of the gender and race switching of the recently released photo of Barack Obama and advisors watching the Bin Laden operation. But while Obama's race and Hilary Clinton's gender do indicate shifts in the bodies allowed into the room, the form of the room, as inhabited by intact, powerful citizens, remains the same.

Within the shifting subjectivity of the postmodern moment, the famous death of the subject accomplished by everything from decolonization to niche marketing to postwar social revolutions to poststructural theory, the small room provides a stable site of identification, particularly for those with nostalgia for more stable days. The small room exposes the reassurance of disciplinary power in a biopolitical age, unveils a widespread longing for the relative fixity of the panopticon and imperialism.

If the small room operates primarily "for" white men, who perhaps experience the "loss" of subjectivity most acutely, it is nevertheless a mobile formation, shaping the imaginaries of all those interpellated by the desiring logic of white masculinity. This is what Chang Rae Lee shows in Native Speaker and Junot Diaz in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: the discourse of white male power, its nostalgic imaginaries of fixed subjects, shapes the subjectivity of nonwhite men and women, bending and warping their sense of the various Theys who occupy the small room. In tracking the trope of the small room, then, I hope to show how such nostalgic views of power continue to exert influence, everywhere from Glenn Beck's monologues to The Watchmen.

Ethnic pol

In a great article on Native Speaker, Betsy Huang concludes:

But, the problem faced by Lowe, et al. is still the tenacious inextricability of racial inheritance from the discourse of citizenship and measurements of “national competence,” whether it be for the purpose of changing the terms of citizenship from within (as Li and many Asian American political scientists would have it), or constructing an alternative and oppositional citizenship from without (as Lowe, Chuh, and San Juan would have it). We return to what is becoming a reductio ad absurdum time and again: is racial and/or ethnic “inheritance” a constitutive or an oppositional aspect of citizenship? Lee’s John Kwang, who fails spectacularly despite his ability to be “effortlessly Korean” and “effortlessly American,” suggests that the real problem is our inability to imagine a solution somewhere in between. (264)

Huang returns to a problem common in ethnic studies, familiar to readers of Ellison and Wright: is the fight for the ethnic citizen to be recognized as fully American (Ellison, to some degree) or to preserve an oppositional, critical identity. Huang argues that Kwang fails because there exists no space between these two poles, that "ethnic pols" are inevitably figured as either Other or defanged of their critique (the problem Obama faces currently--if he's simply "one of us," has he discarded the powerful historical figurations around his African-American identity?).

Musing on the small room as a discursive formation

In conceiving of conspiracy theory as a gendered discourse, I argue that conspiracy theory reinforces, and rehearses, the idea that power originates in, replicates itself in, and dominates from concentrated small groups located in inaccessible places, a kind of panoptic centralization of effort which determines life behind the State, church, corporations, or other institutions. Real power always lies behind a veil, and is always limited. While this power may exert influence in an almost capillary way, shaping, for example, school curricula or local elections, it is ultimately organized and limited by the walls of the small room in which it operates. The kind of power imagined by conspiracy theorists, then, is identifiable and limited; it is not subject to the kind of diffusion and dispersal described by Foucault and his philosophical descendants, but remains whole and unified.

The small room imaginary is figured in multiple way : it is the war room, the situation room, the smoke-filled back room, the remote gathering, the board room meeting. Historically, this room has been occupied by men, and, at least in conspiracy theory but arguably more widely, remains representative of masculine action and exclusion. Critics made much of the gender and race switching of the recently released photo of Barack Obama and advisors watching the Bin Laden operation. But while Obama's race and Hilary Clinton's gender do indicate shifts in the bodies allowed into the room, the form of the room, as inhabited by intact, powerful citizens, remains the same.

Within the shifting subjectivity of the postmodern moment, the famous death of the subject accomplished by everything from decolonization to niche marketing to postwar social revolutions to poststructural theory, the small room provides a stable site of identification, particularly for those with nostalgia for stability. The small room exposes the reassurance of disciplinary power in a biopolitical age, unveils a widespread longing for the relative fixity of the panopticon and imperialism. In an age of nomadic subjects, the small room arrests slippages around identity via the mechanism of gender.

If the small room operates primarily "for" white men, who perhaps experience the "loss" of subjectivity most acutely, it is nevertheless a mobile formation, shaping the imaginaries of all those interpellated by the desiring logic of white masculinity. This is what Chang Rae Lee shows in Native Speaker and Junot Diaz in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: the discourse of white male power, its nostalgic imaginaries of fixed subjects, shapes the subjectivity of nonwhite men and women, bending and warping their sense of the various Theys who occupy the small room. In tracking the trope of the small room, then, I hope to show how such nostalgic views of power continue to exert influence, everywhere from Glenn Beck's monologues to The Watchmen.

Conspiracy theory and the logic of the sovereign

In Michel Foucault's series of lectures published in Society Must Be Defended, he spends a long time articulating a split in seventeenth century thought which still haunts the present day: the obfuscation of what he terms the "race war" memory of the Norman Conquest by the sovereignty theory of Hobbes. At core, Foucault argues, Hobbes's Leviathan is a justification of State power, whether such power is granted by contract, acquisition, or natural rights. While political philosophers might critique the sovereign, they would rather, in Foucault's words, "give the State too much power than not enough power" (98) in order to "[ward] off a certain insidious and barbarous enemy" (99). Hobbes formed his idea of Leviathan, Foucault continues, to ward off the discourse of race war, "[the] discourse of struggle and permanent civil war" in which ultimately, it becomes clear that "we are not talking about sovereignty; we are talking about domination, about an infinitely dense and multiple domination that never comes to an end" (111). This, Foucault maintains, is the knowledge that operated amongst political struggles in the seventeenth century, visible in the writings of such groups as the Diggers and Levelers: you have conquered us by force, and all your laws, and by extension all our laws that justify your laws, are rooted in this domination, and no amount of rationalizing such conquering force in terms of sovereignty will make this reality disappear. Here is the end-logic of the Nietzschean and Foucauldian ideas that have exerted wide influence on recent accounts of colonialism, racism, gender, queerness, and the like: domination is rooted in the whole of the social, and it is no good looking for utopias in the next revolution. By extension, power is a complex, multivalent beast that operates in a host of tricky, ultimately capillary ways. Shoot the king and you get nothing, for the king's institutions persist.

So, where does conspiracy theory, as a general, popular, analysis of history with multiple strands but some general shared characteristics, stand in relation to Foucault's formulation? Well, many commentators, Mark Fenster and Peter Knight among them, seem to hold that conspiracy theory serves to unveil the continual war that writhes beneath the veneer of the social, that while conspiracy theory appears to be a fringe phenomenon with faulty analytic tools, it in fact operates as a populist instrument for detecting the widespread operation of power, for demonstrating, that is, that "the social order is a war [...] War is both the web and the secret of institutions and systems of power" (110). In identifying a war raging beneath the surface of the social order, conspiracy theory, seen through this light, functions as what Foucault calls "political historicism."

But what if it's the opposite? What if conspiracy theory, while not a fringe phenomenon, actually accrues to the logic of the sovereign, in part because it operates on one of society's fundamental binaries, that of gender. The discourse of conspiracy theory, I argue, is the discourse of the sovereign, because it focuses not on a hidden continuous war, but on the ruthless efficiency of a political order, however hidden. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow chides his aunt for believing in womanish makebelieve world of virtuous imperialism; but in dismissing the feminized version of imperialism, a move he'll continue in his denunciation of the feminized "pilgrims" floundering through the Congo, he affirms the existence of right, efficient action--what he calls "hard work." Something like the same thing occurs with the conspiracy theorist. In affirming the supernatural efficiency of conspirators' action, the conspiracy theorist denies, or at least obscures, the kind of mutable, continuous struggle that Foucault discusses, a struggle where even Marlow's aunt, by attributing to him an agenda foreign to Marlow, seeks to impose, and may succeed in imposing, her own will on Marlow. The discourse of efficiency is not simultaneous with the Hobbesian discourse of contract; and yet it would seem to form part of justifying the ways of power to men that is the target of Foucault's entire enterprise.

Not panopticism, but the plotting cell.