The conspiracy of literary criticism

As I continue to crawl through prep for the intro to theory course, I keep finding specters of conspiracy haunting [literary] theory. Latest: in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), Stephen Greenblatt writes of the fiction of the totalizing society, what he describes as "posit[ing] an occult network linking all human, natural, and cosmic powers and that claims on behalf of its ruling elite a privileged place in this network. Such a society generates vivid dreams of access to the linked powers and vests control of this access in a religious and state bureaucracy at whose pinnacle is the symbolic figure of the monarch" (Lodge 558). Thewriter here, in the conventional view of Great Literature, has privileged access to the "occult network" by virtue of representing the dreams and wishes of the ruling elite, and by extension granting access to the mysteriously inaccessible figure of the monarch. The desire of literature, then, is desire for access to a sense of totality, a sense of wholeness that one can associate, without too much critical wrangling, with the figure of the big Other, who guarantees order and meaning for the subject. This is a wildly wonderful way to account for the desire of conspiracy theory and its accompanying narratives.

Greenblatt continues: "The great attraction of [the author or text as authority] is that it appears to bind and fix the energies we prize, to identify a stable and permanent source of literary power, to offer an escape from shared contingency" (Lodge 559). Replace "text" with "conspiracy theory" and "literary power" with "political power" and we've got a nicely encapsulated description of CT.

Or, the play is a conspiracy:

"[O]ne of the ideological fictions of the theater was precisely to create in its audience the sense that what seemed spontaneous or accidental was in fact fully plotted ahead of time by a playwright carefully calculating his effects, taht behind experienced uncertainty there was design, whether the design of the human patriarchs--the fathers and rulers who unceasingly watched over the errant courses of their subjects--or the overarching design of the divine patriarch. the theater when would confirm the structure of human experiences as proclaimed by those on top and would urge us to reconfirm this structure in our pleasure" (Lodge 568).

Play, like conspiracy theory, confirms that all is (patriarchically) ordered with the world.

Another version of a They

Said:

Yet--and here we must be very clear--Orientalism overode the Orient. As a system of thought about the Orient, it always rose from the specifically human detail to the general transhuman one; an observation about a tenth-century Arab poet mutliplied itself into a policy towards (and about) the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq, or Arabia. Similarly a verse from the Koran woudl be considered the best evidence of an ineradicable Msulim sensuality. Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different (the reasons change from epoch to epoch)from the West. And Orientalism, in its post-eighteenth-century form, could never
revise itself (Lodge 370).

Here Said astutely figures a Western view of the Other, as, in particular, unchanging. It's only a short leap to figure this Other as unchanging in its desire: what Muslims want is Shariah law, because all Muslims are irrationally religious. The note about the specific human detail being abstracted to a transhuman one is also worth recalling re: CT, with its voracious habit of elevating minor details into a carefully orchestrated plan.

De Beauvoir: Women are "natural" conspiracy theorists

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir muses on woman's dependence and disempowerment, and how such powerlessness breeds resentment and confusion. Obliged to "regard the male universe"--the universe of power in which she does not share, because "she would feel in danger without a roof over her head," but because she is "passive [and] out of the game" she believes "the good should be realized, and if it is not, there must be some wrongdoing for which those to blame must be punished" (109). This leaves her open to what, in de Beauvoir's view are clearly unsophisticated positions: “[W]oman thinks that ‘it is all the Jews’ fault,’ or the Freemasons’ or the Bolsheviks’, or the government’s; she is always against someone or something. They do not always know just where the evil principle may lie, but what they expect of a ‘good government’ is to sweep it out as they sweep dust out of the house” (109).

De Beauvoir, deliberately provoking male stereotypes of women, argues that women are denied access to a privileged male realm, and so are prone to imagine this male realm in terms of their immediate experience: the black and white world of prewar housekeeping. The material circumstances of woman's position have, of course, changed, and yet the paradigms here likely persist. Moreover, the general structure of her formulation--that those denied power are apt to imagine it in polarized forms--is useful for conceptualizing one facet of my argument in regards to disempowered men and conspiracy theory.

Master of puppets

Jodi Dean's Icite blog alerted me to the fascinatingly scary phenom of automated "sockpuppeting," a process whereby a political operation or operatives use Web 2.0 technology to generate hundreds of "individuals" online with, apparently, their own Twitter accounts, blogs, websites, emails, and so on. This phenomenon, while visible for some time because of a publicly-revealed government bid for "persona management software," was recently reinforced because of the triumphant document-dump accomplished by hacktivists Anonymous on the security firm HB Gary, written about by the Daily Kos here.

In the words of an actual government bid for the software, summarized nicely by Alison Diana at Information Week:

Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries. Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms.

Such individuals would then be able to generate the appearance of consensus on a political issue without needing to mobilize supporters--as a Daily Kos poster put it, it would allow for "Brooks Brothers riots" online with ease.The idea of sockpuppeting--creating fake online personas to support, or in some cases oppose, one's own issues--is almost twenty years old, but the level of sophistication referred to in the HBGary leaks is terrifying in its ability to subvert public opinion. And in the current environment, where some largish portion of public opinion is formed across blogs, Twitter, comments sections, and the like, the ability to generate and manipulate a range of online personas could theoretically shift the perception (the Overton window?) of a wider public's stand on an issue. To put this in real terms, if a wide array of voices on the Web emerge in opposition to the 2010 health care act, participants in the pro-health-care struggle may lose energy--as did the Left throughout 2009 and 2010, in the wake of the Tea Party "uprising."

It's interesting, actually, that this issue surfaces in the context of Wikileaks, an organization that promotes a utopia of absolute informational transparency, a conspiracy theorist's paradise where all of the facts are available--where nothing is classified. There are opposing ideas about information online here, one located in the promise of absolute sharing proferred by Wikileaks and one located in the phenomenal level of distrust generated by the prospect of any given Twitter or Facebook user being faked, and consensus developing from such faked users. It's particularly frightening, perhaps, in an era of leveled authority, where journalists have begun to be eclipsed by bloggers, and the "real" location of authority is online (a state of affairs which Wikileaks promotes). Crowdsourcing doesn't work if the "crowd" is one person with an agenda. This promotes, and intersects with, the "Astroturf" label often slapped on the "grassroots" Tea Party. Where is the "people"? Who can know what "everyone" believes? How soon before they can fake polls, generating a host of faked cell phones? What I believe about, say, the tenor of union-bashing matters; the Tea Party was able to drive the Left into submission in part because they seized control of a narrative.

Finally, of course, sockpuppeting is also just a metaphor for the everyday generated consensus that occurs on the Right and Left, who both repeat talking points (if they're smart) until the talking points become truth. In this sense, sockpuppeting as a phenomenon is something like the statue of Stalin atop the factory, thereby crushing the workers, that Zizek analyzes in The Plague of Fantasies: a seemingly incontrovertible proof of the system's functioning that, by working too overtly, exposes the very logic of the system. Ergo, we want wide democratic participation, but we'd be happier with a monopoly on opinion. State-sponsored social media.

...

In The Crying of Lot 49, Jesus Arrabal describes Pierce Inverarity as the exact enemy his anarchist rebels need to keep hope: capitalist, money-hungry, American, Pierce represents everything against which the anarchists struggle, and so renews their cause. One might say the same for the Tea Party and the Left; but the recent King hearings on Muslim extremism point me to what Sarah Posner calls the "Shariah conspiracy industry," whose paranoid fears are manifested perfectly in the site www.shariah4america.com. Apparently--though not certainly--created by the Muslim opportunist Ahmed Choudary, the site depicts wild results of a "Shariah takeover," in particular draping a burkah over the Statue of Liberty. This exact enemy manifesting would seem to be another example of the "sock puppet" phenomenon, whereby my exact enemy appears, confirming all my worst fears.

Meet the new conspiracy, same as the old conspiracy

Generally, conspiracy theory is framed as an equal opportunity fallacy, propagated equally on the Left and Right. First comes Michael Moore and the 9/11 Truthers, soon after comes Glenn Beck and the Obama Birthers. And historically, JFK conspiracy theorists tend to be slightly left of center, while anti-New-Dealers are squarely right. All that said, there's something fascinatingly ironic, but also familiar, in terms of the CTs that circulated around Roosevelt and Clinton, in Glenn Beck's broad appeal. As with many conspiracy theorists, Beck constructs a wide-ranging conspiracy out of assorted truths and half-truths: the Cloward-Piven strategy, Van Jones' early Marxism, ACORN's community organizing, and so on. The irony here is that the Right represents the most powerful interests in the culture-interests who benefit most from the Right's relentless agenda of more tax cuts and less regulation. So it makes sense, in many ways, that Beck has to create an agenda against people like himself, because otherwise the equation doesn't work.

From The Handmaid's Tale

which sounds terrifyingly like now--guess it's just an 80s hangover:

"We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories" (57)

Sighs on Guantanamo

I'm trying to wrap up an article on Kathy Acker and the prisons at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Grayib. My rough argument is as follows: that while critics on left and right tend to offer sewn-up narratives with clear actors and motives (of the sort with a family resemblance to conspiracy theory), Acker's uneven, disturbing connections between power, torture, and the intimate world of the bourgeois subject offer a less easy, and so more ethically productive, way of identifying with the prisoners than do these other articulations.

The stand on the Right is more or less clear, and well summarized by David Luban in an article about the so-called "ticking time bomb" scenario, whereby the unbounded detention and even torture of a nation's others are justified by an impending mass death. I've had more trouble in finding a similarly straightforward narrative on the Left, thought the continually reiterated versions of Agamben's "state of exception" seem to offer one possibility. The problem, in part, is that there are plenty of people on the Left who are very concerned with identifying with the prisoners, perhaps too much so. When one digs into research on Guantanamo, one finds that the prisoners are indeed referenced as people with specific histories, and that the wide-ranging argument--that we're all prisoners of Guantanamo--is harder to find. That's mostly because it's a specious argument, and so not made very frequently. The stronger argument is one raised and scrutinized by Jinee Lokaneeta in a recent Theory and Event article: how do liberal states like the United States, who define themselves in part by their restraint from excessive violence (fighting "just wars," executing prisoners "humanely") justify their willingness to use forms of torture. In Lokaneeta's reading, the people of the United States and the prisoners and Guantanamo are connected not because, speciously, they too can be subject to torture under the auspices of some broad-ranging "state of exception," but because the visibility of Guantanamo and Abu Grayib violates a meaningful self-image for the United States, as a non-authoritarian, democratic state, who adheres to the rule of law and promotes individual rights. The latter point, of course, is controversial in relation to Guantanamo, since the detainees there were, by any measure, denied the same rights to speedy trial and so on accorded to Americans. Indeed, David Luban has argued that the "ticking time bomb" trope is developed in part to respond to this contradiction; the threat of immediate, mass, death represents the lengths to which the liberal state must go to justify its use of torture.

For Benjamin, history is hazily understood, and the multiple histories circulating around Guantanamo are never "accurate" but may still be meaningful. The haze of articulations that Acker offers in Empire of the Senseless, a half-understood sense of power exerting itself, coalescing and uncoalescing into authority figures, mapping and remapping onto new circumstances, new events. MK ULTRA is emblematic of a certain story about CIA information retrieval, a story that is never fully true and never fully false. Acker retains cognizance about this falsity, reminds her readers that all stories about power are in some sense myths, and so, it follows, are the stories about Guantanamo, left and right.

The ones on the right matter, I think. Listening to Arcade Fire tonight, it occurred to me just how much the reality of September 11th, and even the Obama administration, are obscured by the demonic caricatured Right (following, perhaps, in the footsteps of the disdain around Nixon's Checkers speech). The more the Left focuses on and amplifies the Right's shortcomings--even around something as obviously flawed as the practices in Guantanamo and Abu Grayib--the less the Left confronts its own political reality, in this case a rapidly shifting world from which it is all too easy to retreat from, into a tiny screen spitting back our own opinions to us.