Reaganism in Literary Theory. Jeremiah Bowen
have not described flawlessly executed plots by farsighted masterminds, as even intelligent, competent and experienced political actors like Presidents Johnson and Nixon were drawn deeper into secrecy and illegality by unforeseen circumstances and unintended consequences.
In short, the fantasy of conspiracy as explanation is also a fantasy of the whole agency of historical actors, an agency unimpeded by any objectifying determinations or conditions. Patton’s answer bypasses this fantasy to indicate pragmatic attempts to respond to apparent problems, rather than suspiciously leaping to a more “real” cause of the problem beneath or beyond its appearance as a situated set of conditions. Sedgwick frames this difference in terms of the relation between view and practice, or knowledge and action:
Patton’s comment suggests that for someone to have an unmystified, angry view of large and genuinely systemic oppressions does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin that person to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences. To know that the origin or spread of HIV realistically might have resulted from a state-assisted conspiracy—such knowledge is, it turns out, separable from the question of whether the energies of a given AIDS activist intellectual or group might best be used in the tracing and exposure of such a possible plot.54
One’s answer to that question “represents a strategic and local decision.” In efforts to mitigate or terminate harms, exposing a plot is only necessary to the extent that the conspirators are taken to be the cause of those harms, or else continue to be a condition pertinent to the production of those harms. Patton’s activist efforts may or may not call for a “paranoid project of exposure,” because the harms they address may or may not be consequent upon state conspiracy: This is the matter to be determined by inquiry, rather than imposed according to a formalism that predetermines the inquiry.
Thus Sedgwick demonstrates the wisdom of reflecting on the historical and positional conditioning of the most reliably familiar abductions, which one has been led to expect by life experience or the bounds of one’s knowledge. Her willingness to contemplate Patton’s different view allows her to relativize the default premises determined by historical conditions in which she was constructed as a subject—conditions that include the Cold War era of opaque and far-reaching government conspiracies. One such documented conspiracy is COINTELPRO, under the auspices of which the FBI undertook vast operations to discredit, attack and assassinate leaders of left movements.55 Beginning with communists and socialists, the program soon expanded to target activism by feminists and people of color. As in the cases of the Pentagon Papers or Watergate, it made sense to investigate and expose these secret and illegal activities of US government officials in order to prosecute or end their crimes, or to ameliorate the reputational damage done. But as a result of the publicity around these conspiracies, an informed and engaged US person who lived through the seventies might be expected to perceive any harm directed at or limited to left activists or marginalized communities as the likely product of a government plot. Given the political history of the United States since Eisenhower, that conclusion is reasonable—in the literal sense that there are valid reasons to conclude thusly. But in spite of the Reagan administration’s deceit, plots and cover-ups, including most notably Iran-Contra, those of us who came of age during or after his administration might presume conspiracy theory instead to be the province of right-wing extremists—as it seemed often to be under Clinton, Bush and Obama. It might even seem unlikely to us that a government plot could be effective or long remain secret, an assumption informed by the Bush-era bungling that Best and Marcus highlight. If Sedgwick manages to innovatively work through these conditioning forces, this is because she remains curious about methodological approaches outside those supported by her own conditioning, and attends to those like Patton who dispute or question her assumptions, as well as those like her students whose experience and frame of reference differ from her own.
By relativizing her premises, and by opposing the theoretical monoculture in which the paranoid position is identified in an exclusionary way with theory as such, Sedgwick exemplifies the utility of theoretical reflection defined as examination of one’s own presumptions and premises. As she demonstrates in describing her students’ anachronistic emulation of Miller’s emulation of Foucault, methodologies are tied to thematics and problematics, and all of those are conditioned by one’s life experience. While the Eisenhower–Kennedy–Johnson–Nixon America that conditioned Sedgwick’s premises might lead her to think first about state intervention as a cause of the HIV epidemic, the Reagan–Bush–Clinton–Bush America that was just emerging as she conversed with Patton would lead us to think first about the likelihood that state neglect would enable and exacerbate the epidemic. For those shaped by whatever era is now still emerging, the first thoughts will no doubt be different again.
But this relativity is not total: We can establish logically that defaulting to conspiracy is at odds with what Sedgwick calls “an unmystified, angry view of large and genuinely systemic oppressions,” because it substitutes personal, agential cause for social, systemic conditions. That oppressions are systemic entails that the normal functioning of the system itself is an elaborate conspiracy against the populations it oppresses—though not one that is comprehended, much less directed or caused, by a single individual, agency or institution. A systemically oppressed or exploited population is subject to so many vectors of state neglect and state attack that it is unnecessary, in principle, for those in power to introduce additional, elaborate conspiratorial plots to cause them harm. Of course, such plots are sometimes undertaken, as in COINTELPRO, but exposing or explaining those plots is neither necessary nor sufficient to comprehend systemic oppressions.
I do not mean to say secrecy, fraud, collusion and conspiracy are not involved in the workings of oppressive power, but rather that these are the workings of power, and thus one need not look beyond, behind or beneath the apparent abuses of power that characterize our systemic oppressions to find a “true” or “real” cause of the cause. This is even the case in actual conspiracies: Why would we not believe Black Panthers who claimed that the FBI was attacking them? Why would we not believe that Reagan sold weapons to Iran to fund anticommunist death squads in South America and lied to cover it up, or that Bush lied to get us into the Iraq War, or that Clinton lied to cover for his affairs, or that Trump obstructed justice to prevent explanation of his campaign’s collusion with Putin? A responsible inquiry need not fear beginning from an abduction about what appears to be the case, because responsible inquiry subjects that starting point to examination, research, revision and tests of logic and evidence before a conclusion is reached. In the same way, we need not fear to acknowledge that history or politics condition our own views, preferences and expectations—we need only commit ourselves to examining our own sources and premises, and attending to those who differ from us.
So an “unmystified” view is compatible with an “angry” one, in Sedgwick’s terms, because an inquirer need not pretend to be disinterested from the start: Indeed, without anger or passion to fuel the process, what would be the motor of all the work necessary to change one’s mind? This means that conspiracy theories, which confirm rather than change one’s assumptions, are at best a useless supplement to the kind of social analysis that incentivizes transformative activism, and at worst a disempowering replacement for such analysis. The paranoia of conspiracy theorizing tends to overvalue the power of those who occupy the hegemonic position, representing them as masterminds manipulating the oppressed like objects, able to shape the world while hiding their involvement completely. Paranoia and conspiracy therefore construct a view of the world that flatters the powerful and demeans the oppressed.
Because it identifies powerful enemies, the paranoid reading can appear radical, only to later reveal its complicity with the narcissism of the oppressor. Kanye West provides us with a contemporary example, in the form of his unexpected recent displays of affection for President Trump. The affinity was unexpected, in part, because West famously responded to the mismanagement of Katrina relief by announcing that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” at a charity concert in 2005. In the same year, West drew an analogy between the AIDS and crack epidemics, scourges of the queer community and the black community in the eighties, calling AIDS a “man-made disease […] placed in Africa just like crack was placed