The cultural critic and controlled demolition

I don't think I've read anything quite like Michael Truscello's "The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism in American Popular Culture," recently published in Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies. In it, Truscello, by all accounts a prolific, serious cultural critic with an awe-inspiring publication record for an assistant professor, takes the remarkable step of validating not just skepticism of the 9/11 Commission Report, which, as Truscello well demonstrates, was flawed and limited from its inception, but of the controlled demolition theory, a lynchpin of the much-derided 9/11 Truth movement whereby the three World Trade Center buildings felled on 9/11 were all demolished with previously set explosives. Academics have long played the conspiracy theory game, from philosophy professor Josiah Thompson to Berkeley's Peter Dale Scott to retired Claremont theologian David Ray Griffin. But somehow, Truscello's account, in part because it engages the cultural criticism of conspiracy theory, comes across as more serious and engaged. As a result, it's all the more jarring when Truscello figures the dizzying controlled demolition as a desired site of Left analysis.

Much of Truscello's argument regarding the 9/11 Commission Report is entirely compelling. He makes an excellent case for the report's mischaracterization of Al Quaeda as a hierarchical, established organization as opposed to the (now more accepted) view of the group as decentered and rhizomatic. Indeed, even Truscello's critique of the Bush administration pinning fault on Bin Laden comes across as thought-provoking, as does his general description of the Commission as undercut by conflicts of interest, limited access to key witnesses, and the requirement that all members have high-level security clearance, a fact that, as Truscello compellingly argues, would inevitably bias the Commission towards the answers desired by a security state. Finally, the general thrust of his article--that 9/11 should be further scrutinized as a site where radical security state changes were produced--is both sensible and laudable.

As Truscello notes, and as Bratich and Fenster have both argued, the label "conspiracy theory" frequently has the effect of limiting what truths will be recognized by a larger public. Conspiracy theory frequently denotes the point where serious analysis ends and what Ginna Huston and Martin Orr call "the ‘freak show’ of American culture in the postmodern moment" begins (quoted in Truscello 33). Truscello is basically arguing that, in regards to 9/11 conspiracy theory, this line has been drawn too aggressively, and forms of analysis which should be legible--most compellingly, around the security state--have been obscured.

But this line exists, and while it may be drawn for ideological reasons, it can and should also be drawn for logical reasons. Certainly, if the World Trade Center towers were felled by explosives, such an act would be subject to the same drive to obscure that occurred around Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo; there is no doubt that the security state works to cover its mistakes, and, as Peter Knight argues, the postwar culture of national secrecy has encouraged the proliferation of conspiracy theories. But the scope of such a coverup--and the very luridness of rogue agents destroying prominent American buildings--makes the idea difficult, if not impossible, to imagine in the real world.

Such a coverup can, of course, happen in the world of V for Vendetta, and here lies the interesting core of Truscello's article: in pointing out that 9/11 skepticism has circulated in popular culture, but resisted by serious Left critics, he muddies the boundary between the forms of critique which emerge in popular culture and the forms of critique which function as effective critical analysis. Part of the appeal of V for Vendetta is the thrill of imagining the government being so transparently manipulative as to stage disasters. But such transparency, thrilling in fiction, breaks down when confronted by the messy, uneven way in which history proceeds--not as a plan, but as a cascading series of accidents, of which political players may certainly take advantage.

So I'm not sure what Truscello is doing by including controlled demolitions in his catalog of 9/11 skepticism. Part of me suspects that this is performative; that in the same way V for Vendetta gets people out on the streets protesting, his serious treatment of controlled demolition functions as a lever which can be used to pry open the cathected security state. He may be playing a complicated game with rich implications for the use of conspiracy theory, calling attention to the problematic limiting around extreme but popular skepticism, while simultaneously acknowledging, through mimicry, the powerful allure of such extreme skepticism. Its often been observed that the contemporary media environment has little patience for sustained analysis or historicizing; it does, though, readily engage lurid, straightforward accounts of history, and it may be that Truscello, like the members of Anonymous who don V for Vendetta masks, recognizes that complex historicizing simply doesn't cut it in the post-9/11, Web 2.0 atmosphere. Renting a billboard with the words "Where's the Birth Certificate," however, does, and if the Tea Party has demonstrated anything in the past two years, it's that seemingly wild accounts of government can exert effective, policy-altering influence. Truscello's analysis exists in the wildly fun territory of violent video games and 4chan: unignorable, likely to be marginalized, but perhaps indicative of an immanent, poorly-understood future.

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.