New Media and Interactivity from Margin to Center: The Obama Joker as Populist Monster Signifier Introduction: Assembling

the Monstrous Other On November 13th, 2010, airline passenger John Tyner grabbed-ahem- national headlines for an incident that occurred at the San Diego airport. Tyner, a 31 year old white male computer programmer from Oceanside California, became outraged after being asked to submit to a pat-down and body scan by the Transportation Security Administration. Tyner refused to undergo the security procedures, declaring to security personnel if you touch my junk, I will have you arrested. Tyner recorded the entire incident on an iPhone camera, and two days later uploaded the video, along with a lengthy explanation, onto his personal blog.i That same day, November 15th, CNN announced that the video had gone viral,ii and on November 17th, 2010, they interviewed Tyner. The video is titled Are TSA Pat Downs a Privacy Invasion?.iii In a segment of the video featured by CNN, Tyner spars with an airport security officer, arguing that the pat down would constitute a sexual assault, if [the TSA] werent the government. Tyner concludes his protest by asserting that he would prefer to have only his wife and doctor touch him there. When asked if accepting security protocols are necessary for ensuring national security, Tyner, outraged, asserts that the underwear bomber, Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who in 2009 was apprehended after attempting to detonate plastic explosives on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, successfully cleared security. Tyner uses this example as evidence that body scanners useless and irrelevant for screening the general population. The interview ends with Tyner proclaiming that it is time to stop treating the passengers like criminals, and start 1

treating them like heroes, trying to fend for themselves. The Tyner incident has remained on the cultural radar. On December 30th, 2010, CNN dubbed 2010 the Year on the Angry Traveler, discussing Tyners confrontation at length, and dubbing dont touch my junk a new catchphrase and declaring airport body scanners infamous.iv Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer, a conservative columnist, published an opinion piece in both The Washington Post and The National Reviewv naming Dont Touch My Junk as the anthem of the modern man. The anthem reads, in part: Don't touch my junk is the anthem of the modern man, the Tea Party patriot, the late-life libertarian, the midterm election voter. Don't touch my junk, Obamacare get out of my doctor's examining room, I'm wearing a paper-thin gown slit down the back. Don't touch my junk, you airport security goondo you really think I'm a Nigerian nut job preparing for my 72-virgin orgy by blowing my johnson to kingdom come? Krauthammer defines the battle cry as having not quite the 18th-century elegance of Don't Tread on Me, but the age of Twitter has a different cadence from the age of the musket. Krauthammers articulation of the Dont Touch My Junk manifesto warrants comment for its treatment of race, citizenship, surveillance and technology, gender and sexuality. The second sentence of the manifesto is productive of anxieties of government surveillance, sexual violation and the construction of an obscene, powerful, and racially othered enemy. The modern man espousing the manifesto orders Obamacare, out of his doctors waiting room, personifying the Obama

administrations health care overhaul into a single, anthropomorphized figure, evoking the presence of Obama himself in the waiting room. The violation of privacy-Obama is presumptuously present in his waiting room-is also characterized by (homo)sexualized violation, as the locus of the victims outrage is the manner of vulnerability connoted by his attire, as he is clothed in only a hospital gown slit down the back, suggesting the threat of forced sodomy. This example exemplifies a set of discourses in popular news media that are productive of Barack Obama as a racialized and sexually deviant menace to U.S. culture and sovereignty. By evoking Obama in the manifesto, Krauthammer articulates him, as a synecdoche of Big Government to the outrage surrounding the Tyner incident. In this essay, I argue that an assemblage of discourses, facilitated by a climate of new media interactivity and speed, works to build and popularize a contemporary narrative of marginalized difference and outrage. This sense of outrage, I demonstrate, is targeted variously at Obama, the government, and racial and sexual minorities/others. These assemblages, I argue, are also evocative of sentiments of white male victimization and indignation that are productive of notions of proper citizenship and excessive difference. This essay examines the ways in which these narratives exist in a network that connects fringe viewpoints and conspiracy theories with mainstream permutations, facilitated by media convergence and the structural architecture of the Internet. As an assemblage of various discourses, images and symbols, linked and connected, I argue that the Internet supplies fertile ground for allowing the terrorist assemblage of the monstrous Obama assemblage to take root, circulate, and powerfully resonate in the cultural imagination. Jasbir Puars analysis of the assemblage of discourses that converge to produce 3

the figure of the terrorist in U.S. nationalist, ideological discourse supplies a framework addressing some of these issues. At once a pervert and sexual deviant, a homosexual, a racial other and a figure without a legitimate sense of national belonging, the discursive construction of the terrorist is indicative of how notions of proper citizenship, sexuality, race, and national belonging are produced. Puar contends that this construction of the terrorist is productive of a character that is forever queer, improperly sexual, and embedded in an always already homosexualized population.vi Puars discussion of the terrorist assemblage supplies insight into the processes by which narratives of racial otherness, sexual deviance, and national citizenship collude in the discursive production of enemies, outsiders, and ultimately images of monstrosity and evil. This conceptual framework will prove useful to this analysis, insofar as it addresses the Internet as assemblage. The Dont Touch My Junk manifesto is indicative of one mainstream permutation of this assemblage that implicitly places Obama himself as the central figure embodying the sort of monstrous excess described by Puar. Democratized Media at the Borders of Citizenship and Identity A media milieu of increasing speed, interactivity, user-friendly technology, and media convergence increasingly facilitates the interaction between so-called fringe viewpoints and mainstream culture. These fringe viewpoints, sometimes termed conspiracy theories frequently intersect with constructions of white, masculine victimization and outrage made popular by the Tyner incident and visible in other forms, such as the activities of the Tea Party movement. I examine the online presence of Right-

Wing radio personality/documentary filmmaker Alex Jones, who gained notoriety as a conspiracy theorist and advocate of the 9/11 truth movement. This essay examines Jones website, an online contest he sponsored, and the online, interactive, new-media environment that these artifacts inhabit, to argue that an ostensibly democratized milieu of Internet participation and activity can facilitate unprecedented interfacing between fringe viewpoints and mainstream culture, aided by certain features of the Internet, such as speed, hyperlinking, and convergence with devices such as consumer editing software, as well as an ethos of participation, democratization, and openness of user access. In part, this analysis pushes both previous discussions in critical media studies by scholars such as Henry Jenkins, who is optimistic about the possibilities of participatory culture to inculcate democratic sensibilities, and Mark Andrejevic, who argues that such a climate facilitates practices such as peer-to-peer surveillance diffused regimes of governing.vii A climate of increased and enhanced participation and democratic media need not indicate that such practices are challenging capitalism, engaging in counterhegemonic practices, or otherwise exemplifying the cultivation of progressive politics and sensibilities. Such an argument was begun by Jodi Dean.viii Pushing this line of thought, I contend that some permutations of user interactivity are indicative not just of capitalisms success in co-opting communication and participation, but can function in the service of reactionary politics and ideologies. This analysis shows, through case studies in networked populism, examples of how empowered user behavior and cultural production can be at once radically democratic and fundamentally hegemonic. Populist movements, I demonstrate, access the language and ethos of democratized media and interactivity to advance reactionary views, showing how technologies of participation can

easily support them. Shifting the focus to networks and assemblages, away from the political possibilities of user participation and activity, allows for this intervention into the stakes and politics of democratized media. Focus, then, centers on the possibilities and limitations of new media technology platforms as opposed to specific user practices, behaviors, and patterns of consumption. In this sense, a meaning-making system may be built that exceeds the limits of any one permutation of user activity. JUST FOCUS ON ASSEMBLAGES AS INSTRUMENTAL IN BUILDING OF POPULISM-ONLINE ETHOS LENDS ITSELF TO POPULIST ETHOS. DONT POLITICALLY EDITORIALIZE My analysis COMBINES elements of hermeneutic psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and network theory. A psychoanalytic approach to media imagery, inspired by recent work in media studies, supplies the framework for analyzing how particular images function in a symbolic economy that enables and encourages certain interpretive and affective responses. As Todd McGowan has argued, analyzing texts from a psychoanalytic perspective is productive when it supplies a language to discuss how images are arranged, produced, and placed in visual media in ways that encourage extreme and profound affective response.ix Network theory is based on the notion that a network is comprised of a constellation of nodes, articulated to one another but lacking a center. Nodes intersect and link up with each other, but are diffuse, and have varied degrees of importance for the network. This approach has been used productively to analyze the linked and webbed character of the Internet, with its system of hyperlinks, embedded websites, and convergence with digital video and audio segments.x As Lev Manovich argues, new 6

media culture is characterized by its abilities to connect and wire discrete components together, creating a map or network whos meaning extends beyond the semiotic possibilities of each of its components. Because in new media, he explains, individual media elements always retain their individual identity (the principle of modularity) they can be wired together into more than one object. Hyperlinking is a particular way of achieving this wiring.xi Through hyperlinking, individual media components do not lose their meaning as discrete bits of information, but their meanings becomes defined through and against what they are linked to. This process is similar to the concept of differance as coined by Jacques Derrida to define meaning in a linguistic system.xii Like individual words, bits of new media in a hyperlinked web become defined not in and of themselves, but by and against other words/nodes in the network. Because of this system, it is important to analyze not just discrete texts, but the greater network that individual media artifacts inhabit. Although psychoanalytic approaches to media have historically privileged texts, and approaches based in network theory have rejected them, a productive encounter between the two, which I hope to arrange here, shows how a multitude of textual meanings with powerful symbolic connotations can be yoked together by the assemblage of the Internet. In this sense, a psychoanalytic approach to network theory is meta-textual as opposed to post or anti-textual. Finally, a political-economic cultural studies approach is especially helpful in analyzing new media and the production of political-cultural citizenship. As Toby Miller discusses, such an approach is useful to shed light on who owns the knowledge that animates society.xiii Early approaches to cultural studiesxiv emphasized that culture is not limited to the products produced by the culture industries, but includes that which is

made by everyday people. More recent work in cultural studies has extended this line of argument to discuss the ways in which computer users also make culture in the form of media such as blogs.xv There is a current of optimism that runs through these analyses, suggesting that the democratization of culture in this manner, facilitated by user-friendly digital technologies and new media inventions such as cellular phones cameras and software such as Final Cut Pro, has the potential to allow for the dissemination of more diverse or oppositional views into the cultural space, disrupting the hegemony of the culture industry.xvi Miller suggests that the user-based approach to cultural studies essentially obviates important economic considerations. A global world defined by neoliberal economic philosophyxvii, Miller argues, seeks to manage subjectivity through culture, and privileges modes of citizenship and belonging defined by the consumption and use of commodities, including mass culture. The producer/consumer divide is not disrupted when capital continues to profit from the labor, activities, and agency of hyperparticipatory cultural citizens.xviii A blend of cultural studies and political economy, thus, sheds light on the ways in which the making of culture, even so-called democratized culture, is tied up in the perpetuation of hegemonic power arrangements, such as patriarchy, racism, and global capitalism. These ideological currents are integral in shaping the character of the new media network discussed here. When combined with intertextual narrative approach, neo-Lacanian approach to symbolic media imagery, and network theory, I hope to demonstrate how one network, that which unites Alex Jones, the Tea Party movement, and coverage of the Tyner incident mobilize narratives of cultural citizen-agency in ways 8

that reinforce existing power arrangements of masculinity, racism, heteronormativity, and capitalism. Analysis of the texts appearing across this particular network demonstrates one phenomenon indicative of how culture can manifest as simultaneously democratized and hegemonic. Democracy has been over-determined to the point of futility, and also annexed by capital, as Jodi Dean has pointed out.xix Moreover, the phenomenon of the fringe/hegemonic/mainstream Tea Party movement indicates that it is not only the circulation of capital that benefits from the neoliberalization of democracy, but power arrangements and notions of identity and citizenship that bundle masculine privilege and racism. Pushing Deans analysis further, I argue that neoliberal capitals grabbing of democracy and re-coding it as citizen agency has also enabled it to redefine white masculinity as second-class citizenship, thereby using the cultural studies language of cultural democratization and reclamation to, paradoxically, shore up existing contours of hegemonic power by recoding the dominant as the oppressed. In the following sections, I analyze Jones website and an interactive contest, paying close attention to the ways in which Jones constructs a network defined by democratization of culture in the service of hegemony which links up with popular, more mainstream permutations of Right-wing populism such as the activities of the Tea Party Patriot movement and the anti-TSA backlash popularized by CNN. Tracking how these narratives gain traction and build momentum across various platforms, aided by an environment of new media participation and interactivity, supplies insight into some of the political stakes of networked, democratized media. Alex Jones: A Case Study in Networked Populism 9

Alex Jones is an extremely prolific documentary filmmaker and radio talk show host who manages a large and expanding media empire, including two websites, a streaming talk radio show available as both audio and video feeds, and numerous documentary films available online and for purchase on DVD. Jones also engages in high-profile civil disobedience activities such as donning clown makeup in the spirit of Heath Ledgers Joker character in the 2008 film The Dark Knight and heckling police officers about excessive police powers. Jones recorded these altercations on a digital video camera and posted them on his website. They are also on You Tube.xx He has also worn this makeup on his radio show while delivering tirades against the alleged tyranny of the Obama administration.xxi Jones has also garnered visibility and notoriety over the past few years. A recent Huffington Post blog entry on Right-Wing extremism and talk radio, for example, compares Jones to Glenn Beck, suggesting that both possess an appeal and charm reminiscent of the televangelist.xxii Jones has also captured the attention of British documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson, author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, a seminonfictional account of government mind control and psychic warfare operations, which has since been made into a popular film. Jones has appeared frequently on the late-night radio talk program Coast to Coast A.M., and his films are often at the top of You Tubes related video playlists that appear when perusing 9/11 truth related material. In the summer of 2009, A group that is now known as the Tea Party Patriotsxxiii made headlines for carrying signs depicting President Obama in the Joker makeup, sometimes accompanied by the label socialist or fascist, terms which are famously confounded in their arguments.xxiv The Tea Party movement is known for its use of 10

incendiary rhetoric, has directed homophobic and racial slurs at U.S. Senators, and directly and indirectly called for the Assassination of President Barack Obama.xxv They frequently make reference to the American Revolution and suggest using so-called revolutionary violence to fight tyranny.xxvi The image of Obama in the Joker makeup has become a visible and popular staple of the Tea Party movement, appearing on their protest signs. Both CNN and Fox news have reported on the Obama Joker image, and videos available on You Tube not only popularize the phenomenon and increase its notoriety, but also link it to Jones through the playlist feature. The Tea Party has gone as far as to question Obamas citizenship and the legitimacy of his presidency.xxvii Similar tropes and arguments can be found in Jones film, and the online environment in which it inhabits rhetorically links 9/11 truth discourse to those of the Tea Party Movement, Glenn Becks program, and other outposts of Right-Wing extremism. These connections become apparent when analyzing not just Fall of the Republic in isolation, but the new media environment which it inhabits. As Manuel Castelles has stated, a network is a set of interconnected nodes. A network has no center, just nodes. Nodes may be of varying relevance for the network.xxviii The nodal point that I will examine in depth is Jones website. Infowars.com and You Tube as populist nodal points Slavoj Zizek defines populism as an ideological belief system fundamentally predicated upon the fetishization and maligning of some external enemy, a positive ontological entity whose annihilation would restore balance and justicexxix whereas class struggle forwards a structural critique which posits this injustice and imbalance as

11

systemic. A fatal misstep in the populist cause involves the movements alchemy of some traumatic negativity into a fetish. The populist attempts to solidify the gap left by trauma (especially national trauma) into some corporeal entity to be managed and dealt with accordingly. This problem with populism stems, Zizek argues, from a flawed desire to apprehend the gaze. The gaze, according to Lacan, is the fetish object par exellance, the object a, the Thing in itself that is fantasized to supply a plentitude of absolute meaning. However, Lacan contends that this plentitude does not exist, it is constituted by a void or lack, and, consequently, apprehensions of the gaze result in profound shock or terror-trauma-not the satisfaction of finally accessing some supreme fetish object. Populism fails to grasp this absence or gap, and clings to the fantasy of The Thing, projecting it onto some externalized enemy/other thought to embody social antagonism. The Thing, the nonobject of fantasy and desire, stands as the quilting point of the entire symbolic, ideological order, and functions as its master signifier. Beginning with a search for Jones most recent film Fall of the Republic supplies an indication into how Jones network itself takes shape, and how this network interfaces with a larger one that moves away from the conspiratorial fringe and links up with more mainstream (or at least highly visible) political discourses and events such as the activities of the Tea Party Patriots and the Tyner incident. On a Google search, the first two locations offered for the film are Jones website Infowars.com and You Tube. Searching these platforms supplies insight into the symbolic system that this film inhabits, and the ways in which its presence in a networked, convergent new media environment link it to material that constrains possible interpretations to those following 12

a particular ideological bent. Jones website gives some indication into the contours of the meaning-making system that this film inhabits. The front page of the website consists of a large number of banner advertisements for products and services. One of the most notable graphics is a circulating list of headlines on the site, accompanied by a graphic. One of these is an advertisement for a book, described as the one that woke Jones up. The book is titled None Dare Call it Conspiracy and features three symbols, a peace sign, the Communist hammer and sickle, and a Communist star placed under the title. The only symbols placed on the lauded books cover are those associated with left-wing activism and political movements. The use of symbols in this sense is indicative of the role that powerfully overdetermined imagery plays in the conspiracy-Right Wing backlash network. Examining Tea Party protest signs reveals a spate of this sort of imagery, particularly the hammer and sickle, the swastika, and Communist Star. These images are used interchangeably, and rarely, if ever, are accompanied by an accurate understanding of the history behind them. As McGowan has discussed, this sort of symbol-based visual economy threatens to elevate the affective charge of the symbols at the expense of a critical or interpretive framework necessary to make sense of or understand them.xxx Within this system, the meaning of symbols, similar to brand logos, is used to incite powerful emotions and signal group affiliation or exclusion, not to facilitate thorough understanding of history or culture. It has been suggested that this mode of visual symbol circulation and meaning-making is conducive to anti-intellectualism and even neo-Fascist cultural politics.xxxi Other advertisements on the site include those placed by companies offering to 13

buy and sell gold, selling products instructing consumers how to protect your guns from criminals, self-defense lessons, in-home electricity generators, and tips for declaring water independence and resisting fluoridation in water. Several of these ads feature white men, women and children consuming the products and services advertised. As numerous scholars of media have pointed out, advertisements constitute an important part of a media texts universe, in both commercial and narrative senses.xxxii Websites and other Internet content, as others have discussed,xxxiii have perhaps an even more intimate relationship with advertising, as they are implicated in processes of data mining, surveillance, and fan/user-generated content that effectively functions as advertising. Jones website is indicative of this close relationship between content and ads, as advertisements physically dominate large portions of his webpage. The products and services offered prominently feature security and individualist-based language, such as protect, secure, prepare prevent, and crisis. The language used in these advertisements is indicative of what Richard Hofstader has called the paranoid style of political thought. Essential to this rhetorical approach is a sense of persecution, a conspiracy that is vast, apocalyptic, willfully sinister and personal (directed at specific persons or groups) in nature. Enemies in this system are also clearly defined, essentially evil and cruel, and possess power of transcendental proportions.xxxiv The antagonists and agenda constructed by paranoid rhetoric have fairly obvious demonic undertones. Analyses of the advertisement on Jones website supply insight into how this paranoid style manifests in this network. Use of this paranoid style is crucial in producing the assemblage of the populist monster signifier as the powerful demonic presence, and the notions of citizenship and identity that inform it.

14

Clicking on the shop tab on Jones website gives an even greater sense of who is implicated in Jones enemy making system, and the larger discursive network that this system of meaning links up with. Inside the store, one can purchase bumper stickers, DVDs, T-Shirts, and other assorted merchandise advertised with the tagline defend freedom, support infowars. In the T-Shirt section, visitors are presented with an array of material featuring the visage of Barack Obama. One shirt features his face on a agitpropstyle poster with the word obey underneath, while another depicts Obamas face spliced with George W. Bushs, with dont be a sucker written across the back. Other shirts and merchandise feature the dont tread on me logo, and variants of the Gadsden Flag. Both this slogan and image have become popular amongst the Tea Party Patriots, and the slogan made an appearance in the Dont Touch My Junk manifesto. Another features black and white pictures of Hitler, Stalin, and Chaiman Mao next to each other, above the text mass murderers agree: gun control works. The confound among various, disparate systems of governance embodied in this shirt can also be found in Tea Party protest signs, which frequently mix and match communism, fascism, and socialism into a catch-all criticism of systems supposedly hostile to patriotism and intent on quashing national sovereignty. All of these products, to varying degrees, link the symbolic universe of infowars to the Tea Party Patriot movement. One of the most striking examples, moreover, gives a clear indication of how this network is implicated in assembling an enemy through racist and nationalist discourses. In the shop, one of the shirts that can be purchased displays a black-and white photograph of Obama, with the name Barry Soetoro in large typeface above Obamas head. Underneath Obamas image the question, where is the birth

15

certificate? demands an answer. A Google search of the name Barry Soetoro leads to numerous blogs and websites associated with the so-called birther movement, a coalition that maintains that Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States, and is thereby unqualified to hold the office of the Presidency. The birther contingency exemplifies precisely the sort of terrorist assemblage discussed by Puar. Birther websites portray Obama as a hostile foreign national or rootles cosmopolitan intent on the treasonous destruction of U.S. national sovereignty. An overt political agenda is rarely discussed, and instead Obama is constructed as lacking allegiances and harboring deep hostility towards any and all forms of patriotism. Such constructions are highly racialized. Obama is sometimes a radical Muslim and stranger to Western values, and sometimes an anti-white racist whose agenda involves the redistribution of white wealth to undeserving minorities and immigrants through universal health care. One image from a birther site features a picture of Obama with the words undocumented worker printed beneath his picture, evocative of American anti-Latino immigration sentiments.xxxv The strand of fringe belief discussed links to the more popular network of the Tea Party and libertarian patriot movements, where it picks up sexualized dimensions as well. Recall from the Tyner discourse that Obama(care) was a suggested as a sexual sadist and (homo)sexual rapist. Anti-Obamacare Tea Party protest signs have also depicted him as an African witch doctor (who is also a communist; the hammer and sickle resides at the bottom of the picture), a voodoo practitioner, and the Joker masquerading as a doctor, an image directly derived from a scene in the Dark Knight film, where the Joker character (cross)dresses as a female nurse to harass a hospitalized patient, a white male elected official. After invading the victimized patients hospital room and professing his desire

16

to upset the established order, the Joker nurse detonates the building. The popular culture inspiration for the Obama Joker character, to paraphrase Puar, is fundamentally inflected with queerness. In the summer of 2009, Jones held a contest offering a $1000 cash prize to his listeners/viewers. Fans were invited to make homemade videos where they plastered signs of Obama in the joker makeup (sometimes with the label fascist or socialist below the photo) onto various buildings, such as courthouses, police stations, and, of course, hospitals. Entrants also prompted passersby to answer questions such as whats worse, smoking ten vials of crack per day or Obamas healthcare plan? (posed to a black man). All of the contest entries are available on You Tube, as well as Jones website. Getting here exposes the user to a range of Obama joker material, including a CNN story on the phenomenon, Jones broadcast, and viewer videos using the Obama Joker trope. The CNN story features the Dark Knight clip discussed above, effectively uniting Jones projects with the Tea Party and the Hollywood film, and thus enabling an assemblage of Obama to form that borrows elements from all three nodes. Local news, and Fox News stories on Jones contest, and the Obama Joker phenomenon in general, appear on some of the lists as well. There is also a clip form Glenn Becks program that mentions another recent Jones film, The Obama Deception, in the title, although Beck does not mention this film. Its presence does, however, bring Beck into the Jones orbit through the playlist feature. The Obama Deception film, moreover, appears at the top of many of these playlists as a featured video. The presence of other material on You Tube, including mainstream news coverage of the Obama Joker containing references to The Dark Knight film, indicates 17

how network-building can create meaning making systems that extend in scope and reach beyond any single text or author without implicating intention in the practice of meaning making. You Tube playlists are compiled by an algorithm that bundles related videos based on matching keywords and popularity.xxxvi In this sense, the technology of the platform has created the semiotic universe that connects CNN and Fox coverage, Alex Jones and other conspiracy material, and The Dark Knight film. The building of this networked assemblage, in turn, allows for the assemblage of Obama Joker as abject other to be built; for the range of interpretive possibilities that connects and links these various artifacts to be circumscribed according to their ideological parameters. The various pieces of this semiotic network variously position Obama as sinister other. In this network, Obama is the ultimate terrorist: at once threatening cultural stability, sexual mores, national fidelity, and legitimate citizenship. Networking Populism: From Margin to Center? The extent to which interactive platforms and network assemblages allow fringe views to connect with more mainstream discourses challenges the notion that conspiracy cultures lie on the margins of culture as oppositional or counter-hegemonic narratives. Jack Bratich has argued that conspiracy theories inspire backlash and anxiety from mainstream political thought insofar as they constitute not only outsider forms of knowledge and thought, but utilize a technology-the Internet-that draws suspicion for being unwieldy, unregulated, and unbound by professional journalistic standards.xxxvii The circulation of symbols and discourse within the Jones/Tea Party/Tyner, network, however, challenges this assertion. No longer relegated to the radical fringe and maligned as a threat or menace to legitimate political or journalistic discourse, conspiracy 18

theories now freely interface with them, supplying content that inspires stories on CNN.com. This assimilation of the fringe into the center does not simply bring the alienated back into the fold of as a way of reinvigorating the center,xxxviii thus allowing it to be more effectively policed and regulated. In this case, manifestations of conspiratorial extremism are able to retain their extreme views by virtue of the fact that they are not deliberately pulled into the center with the intent of managing, policing, or otherwise taming them. Conversely, they are able to link to the center through network platforms such as You Tube. Through the power of network, fringe and center can coexist in similar spaces, evoking, referencing, and connecting to each other, with neither having to adapt or assimilate. In fact, if modification does occur, it appears that mainstream discourse is adapting to fit the inevitable, unshakeable presence of the conspiracy other. In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Zizek discusses the 9/11 moment and resulting war on terror discourses, which serves as a disruptive intrusion into the stasis of ideological complacency. U.S. sovereignty enjoyed a revival post-9/11, and along with that, new rhetorical forms of othering and enemy-making. For Zizek, the terrorist has become the new face of monstrosity. Islamic Fundamentalists are now the symbolic orders radically evil outside. This new enemy, the quilting point of our ideological space fuels reactionary community formation and nationalist revivalism.xxxix Post-9/11, Zizek contends, these boundaries are defined by neo-U.S. nationalism against the stealthy, amorphous terrorist. Zizek positions the externalized enemy-other as the remainder of totalitarian system building, which necessitates a threatening rogue element to be identified and expunged. This construct, he argues, shifts its shape to

19

conform to different nationalistic programs. Zizeks thoughts on populism, nationalism, and trauma are pertinent to discussion of the discursive network inhabited by Alex Jones content, Tea Party symbols, birther rhetoric, and coverage and response to the Tyner incident. The signifier of the quilting point benefits from ambiguity and symbolic overdetermination, as symbols and words denoting fascism, communism, Muslim extremism, homosexuality, national and racial difference become simultaneously emotionally loaded, devoid of context, and interchangeable. This process is productive of abjection. The Jones network supplies insight into the ways in which these signifiers collapse into the image of Obama, who becomes at once a racialized other, a sexual threat, and an enemy of the nation. The symbolic universe that supports this process is assisted by the new media climate that it inhabits, which is predicated upon speed, links and connections, and quick access. In the Alex Jones network, this figure has become condensed into the image of President Barack Obama in Joker makeup. No one text in this network fully encapsulates the point at which the abject other quilts as the Obama-monster, rather the lines connecting the nodes must be followed with an eye towards how a particular bundle of texts, and hence a symbolic, meaning making system, is built. Conclusion: Populism, Propaganda, and the New Media Network As a discursive style, Jones conspiracy narrative enacts the totalitarian fears and fantasies (of complete social harmony, abjection and exclusion) that Zizek identifies as components of populism. In identifying the object-cause of their antagonism in some group, populists fantasize that they have apprehended the gaze. Conspiracy participation

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is aligned with a populist process that attempts to suture an entire field by designating an abject remainder. In the Jones universe, the trauma manifests as a post-9/11 anxiety over loss of national power, and loss of national sovereignty in the wake of globalization. The election of Obama also indicates a sense of loss of white male hegemonic power, which manifests in Tea Party and birther rhetoric. Within this economy of loss, senses of traumatic lack are transferred onto the sign of Obama as the abject, monstrous master signifier that quilts this new ideological space. Technologies of production and interactivity are implicated in this process, as they enable the paranoid/conspiracy network to link to a larger one yoking the Tea Party, birthers, and Tyner-type patriots, thereby increasing the scope, visibility, and hence stakes of this ideological universe. A media climate predicated on interactivity, convergence and networked connectivity contribute to the construction of not only the conspiracy orbit, but its increasing interfaces with larger networks, united by signs and bits of discourse. The interaction and interplay between these aspects supplies key insights into understanding conspiracy cultures relationship with populism, technology, and popular culture. Images of the Obama Joker and other signs and symbols can be created relatively quickly and easily, uploaded onto websites, screen printed onto T-Shirts, and linked to other sites as digital images. The platforms that support these bits of data are predicated on speed and simplicity, also principles that define the ideological function of propaganda itself. Interpretation, critical analysis, and informed debate require time, whereas the impact of emotional messages is best felt in a climate of speed, where reaction time is limited and time to process the impact of images is literally crowded out by bombardment of rapid-fire content. Network culture supplies precisely such a milieu

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and, crucially, build super-texts. For this reason, there is nothing post-textual about networks and assemblages. Rather, these systems allow for multiplicities of texts that might not otherwise cluster through standard channels of convergence (those motivated by commercial directives, for example) to cluster together. Bound by the links that connect them, nodes in the populist-conspiracy-patriot network mutually enhance each others meaning, building a multi-platform narrative that is at once powerful, visible, and devoid of richness or nuance. In this sense, network culture easily supports a symbolic universe that lends itself to fetishism, abjection, and symbolic overdetermination.

Notes

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http://johnnyedge.blogspot.com/2010/11/these-events-took-place-roughlybetween.html
i ii iii

http://newsroom.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/15/dont-touch-my-junk/?iref=allsearch

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2010/11/15/exp.nr.tsa.protest.john.ty ner.cnn?iref=allsearch http://www.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/12/30/yir.angry.travelers/index.html? iref=allsearch

iv

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2010/11/18/AR2010111804494.html, http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/253550/don-t-touch-my-junk-charleskrauthammer
v

Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 14.
vi

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2006). Mark Andrejevic, iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007).
vii

Jodi Dean, Democracy and other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham: Duke UP, 2009).
viii ix x

Todd McGowan, The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (SUNY UP, 2007).

Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001). Ned Rossiter, Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2007). Manuel Castells, The Network Society: A CrossCultural Perspective Ed. Manuel Castells. (Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004).
xi xii

Manovich, 41

Jacques Derrida, Difference, Margins of Philosophy, trans Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3-27. Toby Miller, Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2007), 23.
xiii

Stuart Hall, Encoding/Decoding, Culture, Media, Language, Eds. Stuart Hall et al. (New York: Routledge, 1980), 128-138. Raymond Williams, Culture is Ordinary, The Everyday Life Reader, Ed. Ben Highmore (New York: Routledge, 2002), 91-101. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1979). John Fiske, Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life, Cultural Studies, Eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 154-165.
xiv xv

Kembrew McCleod, Freedom of Expression : Overzealous Copyright Bozos and

other Enemies of Creativity (New York: Doubleday, 2005). Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (New York: Penguin, 2004).
xvi xvii

Ibid

See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, (New York: Oxford UP, 2005), for useful definitions of neoliberal economic philosophy and its global implications.
xviii xix xx xxi xxii

Miller, 2. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnIWSI2tkDM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGFw3hY20lM&feature=related

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/exposing-glenn-beck-asa_b_528966.html
xxiii xxiv xxv

http://www.teapartypatriots.org/ http://www.slate.com/id/2251669

http://www.examiner.com/x-15870-Populist-Examiner~y2010m3d21-Tea-Partyprotesters-shout-nigger-and-spit-on-lawmaker,
xxvi xxvii

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/20/code-red-gun/

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/01/26/83026/tea-party-birthersmovements-somewhat.html
xxviii

Manuel Castells, Networks, Society, and Communication Technology, The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective Ed. Manuel Castells (Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc., 2004), 3.

xxix xxx

Ibid, 278.

Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (SUNY UP, 2004). Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, Harvard UP, 2000).
xxxi

Dana Cloud, The Irony Bribe and Reality Television: Investment and Detachment in The Bachelor, Critical Studies in Media Communication 27(5), 413-437. Shawn Shimpach, Working Watching: The Creative and Cultural Labor of the Media Audience, Social Semiotics 15(3): 343-360. Dallas Smythe, On the Audience Commodity and its Work, Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works. Eds. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner (Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2001), 230-257.
xxxii

xxxiii xxxiv

Mark Andrejevic, iSpy. Jenkins, Convergence Culture.

Michael William Pfau, The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln. (East Lansing, MSU Press, 2005) 3-5.
xxxv xxxvi

See http://www.birthers.org/, http://obamareleaseyourrecords.blogspot.com/,.

Baluja, et al. Video Suggestion and Discovery for You Tube: Taking Random Walks through the View Graph, International World Wide Web Conference. Beijing, China. International World Wide Web Conference Committee, 2008.

Jack Bratich, Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008).
xxxvii xxxviii xxxix

Ibid, 45. Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (New York: Verso, 2002), 111.