Russ Castronovo

Since the 1950s, critics have made a case for the contemporary relevance of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, connecting it to the events and crises in their present moments. This critical gesture raises the specter of anachronism, but rather than a failing or misstep, anachronism becomes essential to the project of critique itself. Melville’s novel thus provides an opportunity for reexamining the temporality of critique with particular attention to its claims and objectives.

This essay examines how the project of national security was beset by the affective intensities of "Jeffersonian trembling." While white nationalists today see themselves as threatened with dispossession and the loss of historical entitlement, mainstream supporters of the movement to colonize US blacks leveraged their fear to export insecurity and precarity onto African Americans. The claim of "white genocide" dates back to biopolitical anxieties that drove the colonization movement to control and manage the chimera of black population excess. Such efforts required the conversion of blacks into data so that they could be brought under a regime of "algorithmic governmentality." Instead of targeting individual black bodies, white nationalism read the latest data about black people in toto as a threat. Different in scale from the surveillance techniques that overseers, patrollers, and other agents of slaveholding society employed, colonization represented a security algorithm for tackling a data problem that was the size of the African American population itself. In this history, we can detect how the logic of security is always a racialized formation that is intimately connected to feelings of insecurity.

By treating conservatism as a style of thought, this essay examines how a flair for abjuring the social contract, social welfare, socialism, indeed, society itself provides pleasure from the pain of violation and lost autonomy.  The innovation of Ayn Rand’s writing is to make this victimization sexy.  For the Randian conservative who feels abused by the social welfare schemes of the liberal state, masochism restores autonomy by making the individual the sole author of his or her pain. Masochism allows Rand’s readers to wring intense satisfaction from feelings of vulnerability that notions of consent force upon individuals.  Rand’s penchant for imagining a literally libidinal economy hardly defines the tastes of conservatism tout court.  Nevertheless, the masochistic erotic formations in her novels constitute a defining feature of an ideology that views government as a pain.

The wager of this essay is that consideration of an antiquarian media environment— the American colonies in the era of Revolutionary ferment—can help identify tactics for slowing the communications juggernaut that threatens to overwhelm public political discussion. In contrast to accounts that emphasize the speed of propaganda, political operatives in America loyal to the Crown deliberately sought to slow the flow of information, including the stream of satire, rumor, and diatribe that inevitably accompanied it. Broadsides, pamphlets, and poems written in reaction to what Loyalists called the " American rebellion " provide an occasion for assessing what can be done, specifically at the level of discourse, to offset flows of radical publicity.

This essay examines how classic liberalism developed in the context of the American frontier made it possible to conceive culture as a state of security. In fictions about the state of nature, like those appearing in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government or James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, the securitization of property and persons emerges as a particular point of anxiety. The worry that property is always capable of being seized, alienated, or left to rot, that it is essentially never secure, provides justification enough for surveillance and other measures to operate continuously. The Pioneers provides an architectonic perspective that discloses how privacy and property combine to establish security and surveillance as settled notions, which, after all, seems only appropriate for a novel all about the settlement of the wilderness. Private property on the frontier undergirds the right to privacy, which is often seen as a bulwark to encroachments of government surveillance. However, this essay concludes by arguing that the defense of privacy will only be robust if it can be distinguished the liberal idea to private property and articulated in terms of public life.

By considering Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel, Babbitt, this essay examines the continuum between the paranormal and the normal, the supernatural and the natural. The lesson of Babbitt reveals how the occult is absorbed under the aegis of the normal, the regular, the conventional. By reading the novel in conjunction with other texts about spiritualism written in the early twentieth century, we can see how the potentially alternate reality glimpsed in trances, séances, or other spiritualist practice is readily brought into alignment with the singular reality of conventional middle-class existence. The middle-class home is decidedly un-haunted, resistant to notions that the “hidden self,” to borrow a phrase from William James, has any gothic recesses. The result is that the utopian longings associated with spiritualism are reconciled with the biography of the “solid citizen,” which, incidentally, was the working title for Babbitt.