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.

Conspiracy theory and the logic of the sovereign

In Michel Foucault's series of lectures published in Society Must Be Defended, he spends a long time articulating a split in seventeenth century thought which still haunts the present day: the obfuscation of what he terms the "race war" memory of the Norman Conquest by the sovereignty theory of Hobbes. At core, Foucault argues, Hobbes's Leviathan is a justification of State power, whether such power is granted by contract, acquisition, or natural rights. While political philosophers might critique the sovereign, they would rather, in Foucault's words, "give the State too much power than not enough power" (98) in order to "[ward] off a certain insidious and barbarous enemy" (99). Hobbes formed his idea of Leviathan, Foucault continues, to ward off the discourse of race war, "[the] discourse of struggle and permanent civil war" in which ultimately, it becomes clear that "we are not talking about sovereignty; we are talking about domination, about an infinitely dense and multiple domination that never comes to an end" (111). This, Foucault maintains, is the knowledge that operated amongst political struggles in the seventeenth century, visible in the writings of such groups as the Diggers and Levelers: you have conquered us by force, and all your laws, and by extension all our laws that justify your laws, are rooted in this domination, and no amount of rationalizing such conquering force in terms of sovereignty will make this reality disappear. Here is the end-logic of the Nietzschean and Foucauldian ideas that have exerted wide influence on recent accounts of colonialism, racism, gender, queerness, and the like: domination is rooted in the whole of the social, and it is no good looking for utopias in the next revolution. By extension, power is a complex, multivalent beast that operates in a host of tricky, ultimately capillary ways. Shoot the king and you get nothing, for the king's institutions persist.

So, where does conspiracy theory, as a general, popular, analysis of history with multiple strands but some general shared characteristics, stand in relation to Foucault's formulation? Well, many commentators, Mark Fenster and Peter Knight among them, seem to hold that conspiracy theory serves to unveil the continual war that writhes beneath the veneer of the social, that while conspiracy theory appears to be a fringe phenomenon with faulty analytic tools, it in fact operates as a populist instrument for detecting the widespread operation of power, for demonstrating, that is, that "the social order is a war [...] War is both the web and the secret of institutions and systems of power" (110). In identifying a war raging beneath the surface of the social order, conspiracy theory, seen through this light, functions as what Foucault calls "political historicism."

But what if it's the opposite? What if conspiracy theory, while not a fringe phenomenon, actually accrues to the logic of the sovereign, in part because it operates on one of society's fundamental binaries, that of gender. The discourse of conspiracy theory, I argue, is the discourse of the sovereign, because it focuses not on a hidden continuous war, but on the ruthless efficiency of a political order, however hidden. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow chides his aunt for believing in womanish makebelieve world of virtuous imperialism; but in dismissing the feminized version of imperialism, a move he'll continue in his denunciation of the feminized "pilgrims" floundering through the Congo, he affirms the existence of right, efficient action--what he calls "hard work." Something like the same thing occurs with the conspiracy theorist. In affirming the supernatural efficiency of conspirators' action, the conspiracy theorist denies, or at least obscures, the kind of mutable, continuous struggle that Foucault discusses, a struggle where even Marlow's aunt, by attributing to him an agenda foreign to Marlow, seeks to impose, and may succeed in imposing, her own will on Marlow. The discourse of efficiency is not simultaneous with the Hobbesian discourse of contract; and yet it would seem to form part of justifying the ways of power to men that is the target of Foucault's entire enterprise.

Not panopticism, but the plotting cell.

American Pastoral and the Logic of the Small Room

I've written about how both DeLillo's Libra and Chang Rae Lee's Native Speaker establish and reinforce the cultural logic of the conspirator's "small room," as site where masculine identity is solidified against masculinity's others and sutured to a national (paranoid) identity. The men in these rooms take refuge from a continually destabilizing world; the room delimits boundaries for male identity, and offers a reassuring meaning and structure. The room at home maps onto a hidden room of power located in a national site. Both DeLillo's Lee Harvey Oswald and Lee's Henry Park feel outside of America, primarily for reasons of class and ethnicity. Both feel, somehow, that they are less than fully men, and both turn to conspiratorial small rooms as a means of both connecting themselves to a national imaginary and reinforcing their sense of what it means to be a man. With no women or real other men in the room, the room serves as a blank space onto which ideas of connectedness and meaning can be imposed.

I'll now turn to a text by another well-known postwar writer often compared to DeLillo, whose concerns, in some ways, bridge those of DeLillo and Lee. Philip Roth's American Pastoral, similarly engages issues of masculine identity in relation to national imaginaries, but essentially effects a reversal. Like many of Roth's works, American Pastoral focuses on his native Newark, but, as its title indicates, invokes a wider American historical experience, spanning the mid-forties to the mid-90s. Narrated by novelist (and recurring Roth character) Nathan Zuckerman, the novel focuses on the life of Zuckerman's boyhood hero, the star athlete Seymour "Swede" Levov, who shines brightly in the Jewish neighborhood in which both Zuckerman and Levov grow up, and who becomes head of the successful Newark Maid glove company.

Levov's story takes place against a national history that serves to shape--though not determine--his family's relationships. Roth pegs Levov's identity to a national imaginary almost immediately: Levov emerges as a sports star amidst the end of World War II, and victory in the war is bound to Levov's victory on the field. Newark Glove experiences a familiar trajectory in American manufacturing, becoming implicated in the uprisings of the late 60s (with Amiri Baraka at its helm, Newark was at the forefront of the Black Power and Black Arts movements, and experienced six days of riots in July of 1967), outsourcing (Newark Maid moves its manufacturing to Puerto Rico once labor becomes too expensive) and white flight (Newark Maid is one of the last productive companies in Newark).

As his nickname indicates, Levov enjoys, at least initially, the full privileges of being white and male in the United States. Indeed, Levov is the American male ideal: successful at sports, wealthy, well liked--he is even married to Miss New Jersey. The "pastoral" of Roth's title refers to the good life that Levov aquires for himself and his wife, the big farmhouse in an WASP enclave called Old Rimrock to which the Levovs move from Newark (located in historically affluent Morris County. In many ways, then, Levov is the opposite of Oswald and Park: his identity, at the beginning of the book, is secure and connected. So Levov has no need for the supplement provided by the small room: his identity is complete unto itself. Nevertheless, Roth finds another set of small rooms operating, these by his politically active daughter Merry, who seeks her own connection with a national imaginary by the (admittedly unlikely) act of blowing up the local post office. Roth depicts Merry's political life as a search for meaning; she is forced into a series of small rooms when she becomes a fugitive from the FBI. Roth describes Merry's friends, from Levov's point of view, as uncontrollable and feminine, "girls who become just as militant as the boys," and whose logic Levov (and perhaps Roth) finds inscrutable.

In place of the network of male-occupied small rooms that appears in Libra and Native Son, then, we see in American Pastoral the small room functioning as a site of unknowable femininity, something both more and less than feminism. Merry's actions are tied to the anti-Oedipal impulses of the late 60s. While to be sure, the counterculture contained its own masculinity-reinforcing structures, the movement nevertheless served for many Americans as a site of strange semiotic energies, where gender identities and national coherence broke down. Merry, and the Vietnam War itself, function as anti-Oedipal forces--what Roth calls the American berserk--to the Oedipal identifications that circulate around Swede Levov.