Boxwood grove as small room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Psychologization of Everday Life

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

Surveillance/social media/hiring

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

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

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

Uneasily, conspiracy theory, subjectivity, social media

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

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

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

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

Postmodernism and the limitations of the conspiratorial imaginary

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

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

The immaterial labor of conspiracy theory

In Network Culture, Tiziana Terranova makes the case, drawing on Italian theories of autonomist labor, that the kind of labor that infuses the Internet--the reviews, chats, blogs, YouTube videos, open source software, and so on--is a new kind of labor, but one that draws on a history of immaterial labor, that which people like Dick Hebdige studied in the seventies as part of subcultural studies. Subcultures, Terranova notes, have long fed multinational corporations, contributing ideas about fashion, film, video games, software, and so on, as part of processes (creative, unpaid endeavors) that are not immediately recognizable as labor in the classic sense. This puts labor in a strange category, as a virtuality that, because it is not "purely functional" to capitalism, but flows in and out of profit-taking structures, has the potential to become "an opening and a potentiality" that takes the Fordist worker's "struggle against work" in new directions. Coolhunting, to use Gibson's terms from Pattern Recognition, may take, but may not take, but the economy of street/commodified is flowing, and New Left/punk notions of "sell out" are flimsy, artificial lines that seldom hold. That said, Terranova continues, the character of such new labor as a "diffuse collective quality" "does not deny the existence of hierarchies of knowledge (both technical and cultural) which prestructure (but do not determine) the nature of such activities" (84). Such hierarchical structures inevitably affect how the "potentiality" of such labor becomes actualized: as, one might imagine, either an underground album which sells directly to consumers by independent artists (Radiohead's OK Rainbows), or a major label product that is marketed, distributed, and sold by capitalist enterprises (Radiohead, in other cases).
So, conspiracy theory, in its subcultural, homegrown form, is part of this immaterial labor. Conspiracy theorists work at home alone, writing manifestos, making connections, developing web sites, researching new details. And yet, as Claire Birchall and Mark Fenster have each demonstrated in different contexts, conspiracy theory is readily commodified, whether as an Illuminatus board game, a Mel Gibson film, or a Glenn Beck television program. The virtual potential of the small room can be an opening up, a disruptive set of energies that challenge and undo capitalist flows (as in the conspiratorial elements of Occupy Wall Street, or the conspiratorial energies that nurtured the early Burning Man, or the conspiratorial tinge of anti-corporate hacking qua Anonymous). But it can also take shape within existing structures of hierarchical knowledge, which is what both Bratich and Fenster argue in different ways, that conspiracy theory, as a negative site of unknowledge, serves to legitimate existing truths already cast into existing hierarchies.

Terranova continues her analysis of the multitudinous, productive space of networks by invoking the neural network/biological account of network productivity. She explains the process by which the open/potential becomes hierarchized as one of "subjectifying" through the introduction of a "selfish gene" which forms, in Deleuze and Guattari's terms, a cut, creating "dividuals" who no longer flow with the terrible power of the multitude, but instead become inscribed within a narrow economy of cooperation or competition:

The existential condition of living as a stripped down selfish gene, endowed with the intoxicating capacity to form a multitude, but recoded within the claustrophobic black hole of the selfishness structure. The threat of these swerves (fileswapping, terrorism, street movements) is that by rejecting the micromoulding of dividualism, they might push it out of control, towards a new plateau, whose outcome not only cannot be predetermined but might also veer the system violently toward catastrophic transformations” (128).

In order to forestall such swerves, the powers interested in extracting value from such systems necessarily introduce a form of "soft control." This is different than top-down control, and even different than the control of the panopticon; it is more akin, she notes, to the deployment of the family as a policing structure or mechanism. Or, she might have added, the counterproductive power of the Oedipus virus. For the multitude--as a mob with rising power, to "swerve" the system violently toward transformation--becomes transformed here into the limited subject of the reality television show, set loose within a seemingly open field, but infected with the virus of competition and the need for audience approval. Something of the same game is played on Facebook and Twitter, whose carefully constructed modes of expression doubtlessly foster their own viral infections: the Like button, the length of status/tweet, the automatic telegraphing of statuses, all propel the user away from multitude and toward dividual competition.

Form, Terranova implies, matters: the iterative form which circulates throughout a networked system serves to shape, and potentially hierarchize, the multitudinous productivity of the network. It is here that the dizzy glee of "everything is connected," the joy of surfing the network's flows, ceases in the dividual cut. The possibility for swerve is foreclosed when the body without organs become territorialized by Oedipus.

This, then, is a way to explain the potential productivity of conspiracy theory, its giddy generation of flows away from capitalized hierarchized, while simultaneously observing the restrictive limits introduced by a gender-bound manifestation of conspiracy theory. This is the place where Everything is Connected reverts to the limiting hierarchy of the paralleled small rooms and self-affirmation of the lone gunman.

Circulation of drive

Reading Jodi Dean's Blog Theory, though just finished the first chapter. Struck by how she nails the repetition-compulsion facet of social media: the way in the Twitterbook environment, it's actually really difficult, 2011 revolutions notwithstanding, to make visible the crucial connections (between the security state and the University of California, for example) which transform consciousness into radical consciousness:

the circulation of drive is functional for the prevention of [coherent enchainments of meaning] enchainments that might well enable radical political opposition. The contemporary challenge, then, is producing the conditions of possibility for breaking out of or redirecting the loop of drive (31)

I think here of how rapidly the UCD pepper spray incident has faded from public consciousness, a fading that would seem to have something to do with the "memeing" of the incident, the obsessive replication of John Pike's image. Here, a potentially transformational moment dissolved into a repeated image, a too-many times repeated idea that goes nowhere because it goes everywhere.