Conspiracy Culture in America After World War II Valerie Rose Holliday Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected]
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2005 Conspiracy culture in America after World War II Valerie Rose Holliday Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Holliday, Valerie Rose, "Conspiracy culture in America after World War II" (2005). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2676. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2676 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. CONSPIRACY CULTURE IN AMERICA AFTER WORLD WAR II A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Valerie Rose Holliday B.A., Louisiana State University, 1990 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1992 May 2005 Dedication For my mother, Rose Joycelyn Buffet Holliday 1929-2000 ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Joseph Kronick for his tireless attention to my readmission, after a brief hiatus, to the English doctoral program at Louisiana State University. Without his efforts, the work that follows would not have materialized. I would like to thank Professor Kevin Mulcahy for serving on my committee as the Graduate School’s representative. I owe many thanks to Professor Katherine Powell and Professor Patricia Suchy for enthusiasm for this project early on. Their support and their willingness to serve on my committee was absolutely invaluable in my search for the courage to persevere. Kristin Ross in a spirit of great cheer and collegiality read drafts of Chapter 4 and commented extensively. I thank her warmly for the many long late-night phone conversations and her page-by-page attention to detail. I would like to thank Professor Ed White both for sitting on my committee and for his dogged commitment to reading early drafts of chapter three. After four single spaced pages of comments, several conversations, and a book recommendation or two, the final draft is in every way influenced by his sharp sense of texts. His gentle and straightforward candor and his temperate attitude toward graduate students have been most significant. I am also very appreciative of Professor White’s tutelage in the Marxist Reading Group, the influence of which may be felt in the present manuscript. As well, Professor Pat McGee has offered his guidance in the Marxist Reading Group, and under his auspices I have learned a great deal. Many years ago, Professor McGee ignited in me a profound interest in literary theory with his passionate fervor, an iii ember that has never died out. I shall always be grateful to him for showing me the possibilities for change and the merit of an articulate political expression. I would like to thank Professor Elsie Michie for encouraging me years ago to embark on the journey that ends with this document. While on the journey, she taught me her unique and keen method of critical discourse, of which the following dissertation is a pale but earnest instance. Professor Michie read patiently drafts of every chapter and gave invaluable and insightful comments, all of which have contributed significantly to the following piece of writing. She gave generously special time and attention to the final draft, for which I am especially appreciative. I would like to my express deepest gratitude to my teacher and director, Professor Carl Freedman. He has been ever present throughout this entire process, available to me at a moment’s notice, and has persistently ensured that I did not drift away into ABD oblivion. He has nurtured both the production of the present work and my professional development in ways that surely must be above and beyond the call of the office. In cultivating my advancement he has invited me to join him as a peer, while never forgetting that I was a student with all the burdens incumbent upon that position. And he has reminded me endlessly in word and deed that scholarship should be fun. Scholars should have a sense of humor, the absence of which is indeed an occupational hazard, and one for which there is no known OSHA regulation. For all of these things, none more important than the other, I thank him most warmly. Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Delicia Justice. Perhaps not behind every good woman is there a good woman, but behind me there is. The dissertation that follows here is only in existence because she gave me the love, life, and time to write it. iv For all the tears, uncertainty, and days on end staring at the back of my head, I only hope that I may step behind her now. Needless to say, all mentioned here have had a profound impact on the text that follows. What is good is the result of their influence; what leaves something to be desired must be attributed entirely to me. v Preface This dissertation assumes that Marxist categories have been woefully insufficient in accounting for gender. I contend that this failure to account for gender has as much to do with the reification of gender as a theoretical category as with any intentional or unintentional misogyny. Gender analysis should not be figured exclusively as a specialized area of study. Major theoretical paradigms, such as the ones I’ve privileged here—Marxism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction—should all as a matter of form include gender as they articulate human structures. Jean Paul Sartre’s methodological work in Marxism and existentialism serves as an instructive example. In Search for a Method (and subsequently in the Critique of Dialectical Reason) Sartre argues that Marxism and psychoanalysis fail to account for human freedom, which signifies a paucity of ontological categories in these two methods. Accordingly, Sartre concludes from his search for a method that we must understand Marxism together with existentialism in order to envision a revolutionary world. While Sartre does not articulate gender as a significant category, and in fact overlooks it himself, his method allows an accounting of gender. Whether we have taken seriously Sartre’s call for a synthesis of Marxist and existentialist methods, the present work marks an attempt to dereify gender and integrate it more seamlessly into the workings of Marxist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructionist analysis. Conspiracy culture serves as a useful aperture for envisioning a theoretical paradigm that assimilates gender into the forms of Marxist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructionist investigation. Conspiracy narratives have come to amplify the postmodern condition of the masculine subject in crisis in America since World War II. vi The masculine subject in crisis is an historical figure, emerging in concert with the developing post-World War II American security infrastructure. Marxist analysis has focused on this period in history as the third wave of capitalism, and this analysis has done much to elucidate the economic conditions and their concomitant ideological structures. However, Marxist inquiries have all too often failed to account for the way gender shapes these ideological contours. Conspiracy culture demonstrates the way in which this economic analysis must include a study of gender in order to understand the economic, ontological, epistemological, and political categories that are at work in the postmodern period. Psychoanalysis articulates the human structures that explain the post- war phenomenon of conspiracy culture, specifically with a few to the way gender shapes human psychosexual development. Using psychoanalytic categories we can see that the conspiracy theorist is indeed a gendered subject; once we have done so, we have refined the aperture through which we view history to include the important category of gender. The post-World-War II conspiracy theorist typically takes as his object of interest the workings of large historical institutions such as the American government, political system, and corporate infrastructure. By analyzing him and his psychosexual formation, we then have a better understanding of the relationship between human structures and the political, social, and economic terrain out of which he emerges and in which we dwell. Above all, the conspiracy theorist is characterized as paranoid, both in lay and academic circles, but a study of Freud’s categories will show that ordinarily the conspiracy theorist is not paranoid but rather hysterical. Freud, in his analysis of the case history of Dr. Daniel Schreber, tells us the paranoiac progresses through three phases of repression that more adequately express the pathology of paranoia. The first phase is vii fixation, where some libidinal investment or instinct does not develop normally along with other instincts. The second phase is repression itself, where the paranoiac has a strong aversion to some libidinal investment that he finds in himself. These first two phases, however, are not abnormal. These occur in normal psychosexual development. The pathology of the paranoiac lies principally in the “failure of repression, of irruption, of return of the repressed. This irruption takes its start from the point of fixation [the failure of some libidinal investment to develop], and it implies a regression of the libidinal development to that point” (Complete Works v 12 67-68 Freud’s italics). The paranoiac ceases to focus his libido on a love object. Symptoms of paranoia appear when the paranoiac negates his love object. The paradigmatic statement in this case would be “’I do not love at all—I do not love anyone’” (CW12 65 Freud’s italics). But, as Freud points out, “since, after all, one’s libido must go somewhere, this proposition seems to be the psychological equivalent of the proposition: ‘I love only myself’”(CW12 65).