Conspiracy (Theories)
Catherine Liu

(From The South Atlantic Quarterly, 97:2, pp. 457-462, Spring 1998.)
(Reproduced with permission of the author.)

    Psycho-Marxism is a new name for a necessary madness, a madness that has to do with thinking psychoanalysis and Marxism at the same time. If there is a particular urgency in the call for a reconciliation of these two theoretic systems, it might have to do with the resurgence of historicism in literary and cultural studies. This new form of historical criticism would like to leverage hostile takeovers of other enterprises still in operation within the sectors of literary and cultural criticism. What it promises is no less than a return to and a consolidation of Enlightenment values which the institutions of Greater Academia find unquestionably more reassuring and definitely more profitable. It embraces a kind of interdisciplinary approach that, while appearing intellectually innovative, is most responsive to the changes taking place in the economic reorganization of the University itself. Its regime, for we already live and work under it, does not tolerate dissension or discussion; dismissing theoretic terms as “jargon,” it seeks nothing less than a monopoly on academic production. What has become increasingly evident is that, while theoretic discourses can accept and even incorporate historicizing methodologies and approaches, historicism remains completely resistant to theoretic interventions.
    Historical criticism sees its compatibility with journalism as a sign of its superiority.[1] Under such circumstances, it would be highly advisable to contemplate a merger—psycho-Marxism—that might stave off external attempts at hostile takeover. The new consolidated body would have to reorganize and redistribute its assets in order to produce and reproduce more effectively, in the name of theory, a libidinization of thinking and a critique of simpleminded historicism at the same time—not an easy thing to accomplish. We should not underestimate the differences between psychoanalysis and Marxism. Assessing their incompatibilities is the only way we can engineer a successful and lasting merger. What is at stake here is the survival of resistant strains of independent and critical thinking. One recent attempt to merge psychoanalysis with Marxism along Lacanian lines was visible in the titling of a conference organized by the newly established Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society “Psychoanalysis and Social Change.”[2] This title marks one way of joining psychoanalysis and Marxism—by a conjunction. Here, psychoanalysis is supplemented by the Marxist slogan of changing the social. In the case of “psycho-Marxism,” the hyphen offers another interesting joint, or patch. While the name of Freud disappears into the prefix psycho-, historical materialism and leftist political economy are still designated by the name of Marx. The psychoanalytic theory to which most thinkers of psychoanalysis-with-Marxism have recourse, however, is firmly based on the work of Lacan, in which a return to Freud via a reading of the Saussurean signifier at once acts out and defers group-psychological formations by presenting itself as the ultimate “update.” Those four words, “Psychoanalysis and Social Change,” also partake of an attempt to stay tuned to the changing times, which could explain why this title begs to be read as a kind of epistle posted to a superegoic addressee who calls for a strategic merging of psychoanalysis and the social. Such a title implies that psychoanalysis is on the side of change for the better, that it is already hailed as a promulgator of a teleological force behind change, theorizing change and perhaps even enacting it. This is, unfortunately, very difficult to justify, given the way in which psychoanalytic theory since Freud has conceived of both the “social” and “change.” It is not at all clear that psychoanalysis would allow for a conception of progressive social change at all. Freud does not seem to have described the possibility of collective progress or cure, but in his later writings he does seem very concerned with certain stubborn, unchanging group-psychological structures that shape the formation of the social entity.
    In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud offers a very complicated and ironic view of the efficacy of psychoanalytic intervention in the realm of the social. If civilization is the process by which human beings learned to coexist more or less peaceably with one another despite a constitutive aggression, Freud never ceases to remind us of the ruinous price paid for such a renunciation of aggression. His own skepticism about mastering aggression, exploitation, and violence by means of a equitable distribution of property is nowhere more evident than in his allusion to the Communist revolution in Russia:

The communists believe that they have found the path to deliverance from our evils. According to them, man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his neighbor, but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature…. I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments…but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature.[3]

    For Freud, the constitutive aggressive instincts of the human subject make for the most ambivalent sorts of relations in social or intersubjective life, but in psychoanalytic terms intrapsychic life is also conditioned by the aggressive and destructive impulses that one part of the psychic apparatus directs at another. Psychoanalytic theory, then, is about the thinking through of intersubjective aggressiveness in terms of or alongside intrapsychic aggressiveness. What this forces is a reevaluation of social history altogether, which Marxists might indeed find quietist, complicitous, and even reactionary. In another sense, however, class struggle can be understood in terms of this constitutive aggression: the gap between the classes is formed by resentment, on the one hand, and will to power, on the other. It is possible that Ernesto Laclau had this kind of analysis in mind when he discussed the Marxist break with the Enlightenment in terms of these two points: “(a) the affirmation of the central character of negativity—struggle and antagonism—in the structure of any collective identity; and (b) the affirmation of the opaqueness of the social—the ideological nature of collective representations—which established a permanent gap between the real and the manifest senses of individual and social group actions.”[4] This class struggle and antagonism understood in terms of a constitutive aggression can then allow for an analysis of the regressive aspect of all “social group actions.” The tenacity of various forms of totalitarian rule can be understood in terms of group-psychological identifications founded on the love of a strong leader and the suppression of all intragroup dissension. The regressive aspects of revolution and revolutionary action would have to be analyzed from such a point of view in a way that orthodox Marxism could not tolerate. Laclau’s analysis of the “revolution of our time” is founded on an optimistic analogy that he constructs between the “hegemonic subject” and the “subject of the signifier.” This take on the relationship between “revolution” and “our time” is more pessimistic. My time is different from Laclau’s time: the problem is perhaps the impossibility of sharing this first-person plural possessive pronoun.
    Psychoanalysis has been accused of being out of time, of ignoring time, but Freud’s most important insights disrupted any linear conception of the time line of individual experience. There is no reason to think that social time—“our” time as opposed to “my” time—is safe from such disruption. Civilization and Its Discontents offers two major theoretic insights into the nature of changes in social formations. The first has to do with the relationship of the group to the primal horde structure,[5] and the second with the tensions created by the impossible Christian imperative to love one’s neighbor as oneself. It is also in this work, however that Freud refuses the role of prophet, thereby depriving us of the comforts offered by religious injunctions. His refusal is scandalous and produces a kind of transferential discontent that continues to bear the fruit of a tenacious resistance because he offers nothing that might make us feel good about doing good or being virtuous. “Thus I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation: for at bottom that is what they are all demanding—the wildest revolutionaries no less passionately than the most virtuous believers.”[6] What Freud implies is that psychoanalysis has in a certain sense renounced the idea of history as the history of progress and (home- as well as self-) improvement(s),[7] while at the same time it has given up on the moral superiority of preserving traditional virtues. Doing good by agitating for revolution and being good by preserving religious virtues are activities that aim at procuring the kind of comfort Freud refused to offer.
      In the intellectual climate of the academy today, our eating-disoriented reception of psychoanalysis manifests as a large appetite for different forms of consolation, for feeling good (about ourselves). Any discourse that refuses to satisfy this desire for good feeling has to bear the full weight of violent repudiation and passive forgetting. The incorporation of psychoanalytic terms such as subject, identification, narcissism, regression, repression, and so on, by politically driven disciplines allows for a kind of terminal forgetting or strategic nonreading of, and reflexive gagging on, psychoanalysis itself. This forgetful nonreading is most often justified on the grounds of “high” theory’s alleged political irresponsibility and ineffectiveness. But let us not throw too much blame on the Anglo-American Marxists running cultural studies with organs like Social Text. Psychoanalytic theory seems to contain its own self-destruct mechanism, or, we could say, theory is that which effectively produces the most tenacious forms of resistance to itself. For instance, “Psychoanalysis and Social Change,” as a title or proper name, indicates how eager psychoanalytically engaged theorists are to defuse the most scandalous aspects of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic theory, once swallowed too quickly, thereafter becomes resistance to theory. There are carnivorous, all-devouring apprenticeships the very zealousness of which leads to the indigestion of amnesia, a condition brought on us by a man who had not the courage to be a prophet, but who predicted with uncanny insight the fate of his own teachings.[8] There may be a conspiracy against psychoanalytic theory, but then again there may not be; what psychoanalysis permits, however, is a theorization of the structure of conspiracies themselves.

****************

    Conspiracy theories in general and the particular conspiracy theories that have arisen around John F. Kennedy’s assassination can be read as popular attempts at theoretic production which are nevertheless uncannily remote-controlled by Frankfurt-school imperatives to forge a critique that would include psychoanalytic theory and ideological critique at the same time. This notion of simultaneity, of being faithful or accountable at once to Marxism and to psychoanalysis, is perhaps an impossible one, but the impossibility produces some fascinating symptoms. Conspiracy theory can be considered a popular, if not populist, effort to produce theory in an extra-academic setting; insofar as their production is symptomatic and notoriously obsess ional, such theories point toward a failed and unconscious attempt to resolve contradictions, namely, those contradictions that continue to nag an unhappy marriage of convenience—one that is always on the rocks—between psychoanalysis and Marxism.
    The conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination cover the ground between Marxism and psychoanalysis because they include (1) vulgar Marxist interpretation: JFK was the victim of a conspiracy between the Mafia and anti-Castro paramilitary forces, with the Cubans representing an antirevolutionary formation and the Mafia an extreme case of capitalist hegemony with respect to Cuba; and (2) vulgar Freudian analysis: JFK was the victim of intense Oedipal jealousy on the part of Lyndon B. Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, who, representing the complicity of sexual and class resentment, had to engineer the president’s death in order to accede to power. It seems that the trauma of the JFK assassination can only be “understood” or assimilated in an affectively satisfying way by producing conspiracy theories that actually take account of both Marxist and psychoanalytic structures of analysis.
    The paranoia of conspiracy theorists can be understood in terms of a symptomatic overinterpretation. That is, if interpretation always already falls into overinterpretation, so that one can always be accused of “reading too much into” anything, then the theorist, as a mutation of the philosopher, might take a kind of perverse pleasure in the Freudian claim that “the delusions of paranoiacs have an unpalatable external similarity and internal kinship to the systems of our philosophers.[9] Every text is a conspiracy. The primal conspiracy by which we are haunted, according to Freud, is the one that brought down the father of the primal horde.[10] Conspiracy theory, then, does not need to be based on empirical facts. Its power is drawn from its relationship to a structure of rumormongering and hearsay, from the indelible and unpredictable dissemination of the mark of the conspiratorial and the theoretical.

***********************