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.

The ideology of individual meritocracy

In my article on the Left Behind books, I argued that neoliberalism--a feverish dependence on markets across a variety of social and political contexts--shaped the books' worldview more than either hardcore fundamentalist Christianity or conspiracy theories. Part of neoliberalism, as I defined it using models from Wendy Brown and Lisa Duggan, means reiterating meritocracy as a overriding logic of social promotion; one of the shocking things about the Antichrist, I noted, is that he hires Christians, but only because such Christians are the best-qualified candidates for the position--a logic that the books naturalize. This logic is likely encoded into the cult of the expert, a sense that someone out there Knows, someone out there is amazingly qualified. Though of course, as Ulrich Beck observes in The Risk Society, the need for experts is less cultish and more a function of the complicated systems that surround late capitalist subjects. Moreover, the whole point of a meritocracy is that it supposedly judges people only on their qualifications, without regard to social connections, race, gender, age, region, ethnicity, and so on.

Arguably, a steadfast belief in meritocracy underscores all sorts of conservative talking points, but particularly the "colorblind" logic of anti-affirmative action. "I judge a man by what he shows me on the field of battle, Sargent," the lightly anti-Semitic Captain Barret tells the Jewish Nathan Marx in Philip Roth's 1959 "Defender of the Faith."Such sentiments (do they originate in the armed forces?) have dominated a certain "post"-racist discourse ever since. At this point in history, meritocracy seems so ingrained into the social that it's hard to remember that such discourses once competed with genuinely racist ideas--of biological superiority--for dominance. This is the exact breakdown that historian Matthew Lassiter identifies at work in the postwar New South (a region whose politics Lassiter views as emblematic for the country as whole). Throughout The Silent Majority, Lassiter demonstrates how fully blinding a belief in meritocracy can be. Lassiter argues that a Sunbelt moderation of segregation was accomplished “only by replacing the civil rights agenda of social justice with an ostensibly race-neutral discourse of regional progress and individual meritocracy liberated from history itself, the latest and most resilient version of the New South mythology” (30). It's not much of a stretch, then, to argue that, at least in Lassiter's view, meritocracy forms a pillar of the current dominant ideology.

When conspiracy theory is read juxtaposed with such meritocracy, a mixed set of ideas emerge: at first glance, conspiracy theory would seem to undercut meritocracy, because meritocracy must be apparent on the surface, and conspiracy theory's back-room dealing would seem obscene to the meritocratic order. In fact, it's arguable that this is one of the things that fires up Glenn Beck and his audience--that their meritocratic rights are being undermined by a stealthy liberal conspiracy. On the other hand, conspiracy theorists resolutely affirm a belief in hierarchy: the very fact that the conspirators are in place affirms the existence of hierarchical social relations; the Antichrist, after all, still follows good market logic, despite his overwhelming evil. It's more likely, though, that the world of meritocracy--a sunny world where no effort goes unrewarded--in fact forms the obverse of conspiracy theory, the bright, efficient world that's left once the conspiracy theorists win and the conspirators get their grubby hands off America. The conspiracy theorists are the ones "playing by the rules" in a meritocracy. Where, then, does the ressentiment, the conspiracy theorist's envy, desire to occupy the place of the conspirators, play in this framework? Well, first, conspiracy theories provide, of course, a way to account for one's failings in the meritocratic world; I would have been a contender, if not for those conspirators. Second, is it possible that what men want, in a homosocial, envious mode, is to take the shortcuts themselves, to transcend their frustrated lives into the uber-successful world of the conspiracy?

The Space of Conspiracy Theory

One of the issues I struggle with is how historically-rooted to make my project; in the last post, I questioned whether my model of gendered conspiracy theory is salient for only the past fifty years, or whether it applies to a range of historical periods. Sedgwick's Between Men, a text I finished today, does a nice job of splitting the difference--it's primarily theoretically-informed close readings (the richest close readings one could imagine) but still points regularly to the readings' historical context. But of course, that book emerged at a different time for the field, when, perhaps, both close readings and pure theory were more readily accepted.

Still, towards historicizing my conspiracy theorists, it may be possible to locate them in the suburban single family home, which, in his study of postwar Oakland and the politics of suburbia vs. the city, historian Robert Self calls "the preeminent site of political interest and commitment” (293), a judgment Matthew Lassiter echoes in his excellent re-evaluation of postwar anti-integration politics, The Silent Majority. Both Self and Lassiter find in the suburbs a celebration of individualism, and a resistance to a New Deal sense of the public good. Lassiter concludes,

“The suburban realignment of American politics ultimately helped to establish an underlying consensus in a postliberal order, a bipartisan defense of middle-class entitlement programs and residential boundaries combined with the futuristic ethos of color-blind moderation and full-throttled capitalism at the center of the Sunbelt synthesis” (227).

What about this, though, locates a conspiracy theory sense of "amongst men" in these suburbs? Certainly, they celebrate meritocracy, certainly, the foment anti-government feeling, undoubtedly, the sentiments that circulate on the Glenn Beck show have their origins in the rough alignments these historians describe. Beyond this, though, the defend-my-home trope that surfaces in Left Behind (the home as militia compound), coupled with the dissociation from community that Ulrich Beck, Giddens, and others observe of the postwar era, make the suburban home a detached (physically and psychologically) space that offers a premier site for the imagined "amongst men" of conspiracy theory.

The individualist suburban home joins with the globalized corporation to provide the general backdrop in which white male gender identity forms in the postwar era. Doubtless, the suburb is the space of the white male conceived as such (the famed "white flight," though both Lassiter and Self take pains to challenge the simple logic of this concept), and at the least, symbolizes the detachment--the erasure of physical proximity that Sedgwick finds producing homosociality--that evokes a yearn to be amongst men. (Ford's Richard Bascombe could well join the list of detached males of my study.)