Great piece on rise New Right, postmodernism, Lot 49

Nicely historicizes Lot 49, rightly figures New Right as postmodern phenomenon by reading traces of Southern California rise NR in Pynchon's novel:

http://journals.ohiolink.edu.ezproxy.libraries.wright.edu:2048/ejc/pdf.cgi/Shoop_Casey.pdf?issn=15489949&issue=v53i0001&article=51_tppatrotnric

Zero history, antibranding, effective masculinity

Reading Gibson's Zero History, the third in his "Blue Ant" trilogy, which have as their topics international intrigue, but of the postgovernment marketing variety.The landscape here is effectively meaningless in that no governments will be overthrown, no peoples oppressed or unoppressed, no secret technologies will be revealed or hidden. Instead, nearly all of the novel's energies concern branding and trademarks: the wild schemes put in place here, making use of private drones, camera-fooling t-shirts, and "darknets" ("Deep. Very deep.") all have at their root a struggle between warring designers, though one of those designers happens to also be a military supplier/glorified gunrunner.

The plot concerns two quests initiated by Hubertus Bigend: first, the identification of the "Gabriel Hounds" designer (who turns out to be Cayce Pollard) and second, finding a design for military uniforms, what Bigend describes as "the only stable market in this economy," and which the book positions as intricately linked with conventional fashion, the idea being that midcentury men's fashion was heavily influenced, and continues to be influenced, by American military styles, but that now such styles have become part of a feedback loop, whereby fashion also influences the military.

I'm most fascinated by the cultural thread Gibson applies to "mall ninjas," whom Bigend describes as:

Young men who dress to feel they'll be mistaken for having special capability. A species of cosplay, really. Endemic. Lots of boys are playing soldier now. The men who run the world aren't, and neither are the boys most effectively bent on running it next. Or the ones who're actually having to be soldiers, of course. But many of the rest have gone gear-queer, to one extent or another. [...] It's an obsession with the idea not just of the right stuff, but of the special stuff. The costume and semiotics of achingly elite police and military units. Intense desire to possess same, of course, and in turn to be associated with that world. With its competence, its cocksure exclusivity" (213).

Bigend's comments bind tightly to the object-fetishization coursing through Gibson's recent work, which serves for his characters as the full locus of agency: these are characters whose actions are subsumed beneath their clothing, who are, in some fundamental way, their Hounds denim jacket or Buzz Rickson MA-1 indistinguishable from their effectiveness in the world. Part of Gibson's point seems to be that consumer goods, in the Network Society, substitute for identity, or serve as some overdetermined site of meaning, connection to larger systems (the military, in this case), and occupation: all the truths of the old order.

My interest here lies with thee men, who adopt some sense of not just who they are, but of how the world works (the men with cocksure efficiency, and their capacity to be such). It's fascinating that this occurs, too, in the context of the book's crisscrossing logics of secret brands, antibrands. Gibson repeatedly reminds us that brands matter intensely to their possessors. The intense layers of desire figured through otaku haunt everything here. This works well with the Birchall/Fenster point about conspiratorial cultures and the market, how a political orientation can be consumed like everything else. And doubtless there's more here, too, because we're all the way back to the mad subcultures of The Crying of Lot 49, the collector of Nazi parapheniala. All these things give their owners a sense of presence in the world, a rootedness in history.

Not sure whether Gibson is critiquing or reinforcing consumer cultures, or doing something else altogether. Certainly, collecting is different, in some sense, than consuming. But the question of Cayce, revealed as the Hounds designer, is tangled. On the one hand, she serves as a counter to the increasingly disposable, temporary, flighty manifestations of consumer culture: antibranding, and the historical quality fetish that Cayce embodies, certainly resists the complicated marketing logics of instafashion. On the other hand, the anti-label, should be quality idea has long been a staple of the upper class, and works with the cosmopolitan elite class that Cayce/Hollis occupies.

Redeployment house

At the end of "Critically Queer," her account of the often unsubversive possibilities of drag as a result of their being framed within the limiting citationality of gender norms, Butler asks whether the drag documentary Paris is Burning might have a role to play in redeploying or reforming gender norms. In doing so, Butler veers (as is her habit) from the film's central topic--drag shows--and instead focuses on the alternate forms of domesticity depicted in the film "it is in the reformulation of  kinship, in particular, the redefining of the 'house' and its forms of collectivity, mothering, mopping, reading, and becoming of legendary, that the appropriation and redeployment of the categories of dominant culture enable the formation of kinship relations that function quite supportively as oppositional discourse" (622). In so doing, she imagines that the house might genuinely rework gender and sexual norms by acknowledging its "[implication] in the very relations of power it seeks to rival" while remaining "[irreducible] to those dominant forms" (623). I'm intrigued by the way Butler here imagines a refigured domesticity as a site of resistance, but also by the implication that domesticity operates itself by citing norms. This has implications, for the refigured domesticity of the small room and its alternates, as depicted by Lee in Native Speaker; the small room in the father's house is, in some sense, queered, and as such denatures the authorized small room of power.

Thackeray amongst men

Amongst men:

"Thackeray's bachelors created or resinscribed as a personality type one possible path of response to teh strangulation of homosexual panic, their basic strategy is easy enough to trace: a preference of atomized male individualism to the nuclear family (and a corresponding demonization of women, especially mothers); a garrulous and visible refusal of anything that could be interpreted as genital sexuality, toward objects male or female; a corresponding emphasis on the other senses; and a well-defended social facility that freights with a good deal of magnetism its proneness to parody and to unpredictable sadism" (Sedgwick 525).

An open sky of one's own

Rereading Woolf's A Room of One's Own for my theory seminar. First, it's a delightful essay: Woolf neatly mirrors abstract argument and embodied journey, walking her readers through the British Museum, where her quixotic distance from male influence takes shape in her caricatured doodle of Professor Von X and her catty disdain for the researcher next to her, even as she recognizes their unwarranted superiority over her and other women. But the lively part, for my purposes, lies with her discussion of money, and how it frees her to see an open sky instead of a statue. Male knowledge, here and elsewhere, is figured as ordered, organized by looming statues that warp and bend the space around them, creating their own aura of authority. It's facile, perhaps, but that's just what conspiracy theory makes visible: the urgent desire to be meaningful, to represent one's knowledge as essential firmament, when it is, in truth, as arbitrary as the strained logic of conspiracy. Woolf sets the statue in contrast to the unstriated open sky, a space without division or hierarchy. For all her urging about private room, this essay revels in open spaces, spaces where movement is unimpeded.

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.