Empire of Conspiracy

252 Pages·2016·26.756 MB·English

by  Timothy Melley

Empire of Conspiracy

Empire
of Conspiracy
The Culture o[ Paranoia in
Postwar America
Timothy Melley
Cornell University Press Ithaca and London
Exeerpts from the following tides appear by permission of their publishers and authors: Bodily
Harm by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 1981 by o.w. Toad, Ltd. Reprinted with the permission
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Contents
PREFACE, vii
INTRODUCTION: THE CULTURE OF PARANOIA, 1
The Depth Boys,
1
Agency Panic, 7
Crises of Interpretation, 16
Bodily Symptoms, Cultural Pathologies, 26
Influencing Machines, 32
Postmodern Transference, 37
The Representation ofS ocial Control, 42
CHAPTER 1: BUREAUCRACY AND ITs DISCONTENTS, 47
The New Line ofA mericans, 47
Social Characters, 49
Paranoid Prescriptions, 56
The Shadow of the Firm, 58
Anti-Socialism, 63
Bureaucratic Individuals, 68
Syndicate-Nation, 75
CHAPTER 2: BODIES INCORPORATED, 81
Incoming Mail, 81
The Body We Can Measure, 87
Pornographies ofD eduction, 94
Statistical Oddities, 99
Personalities Replaced by Abstractions ofP ower, 102
CHAPTER 3: STALKED BY LOVE, 107
Alien Invaders, 107
Female Paranoia, 110
A Distrust of Surfaces, 117
Abnormally Normal, 126
Anonymous Effects, 130
CHAPTER 4: SECRET AGENTS, 133
Lone Gunman and Social Body, 133
Archaeological Details, 137
A Cardboard Cutout, 146
The Secrets oft he Masses, 151
Centrallntelligence, 155
,
CHAPTER 5: THE LOGIC OF ADDICTION, 161
Bad Habits, 161
Control Addicts, 165
The Junk Virus, 169
Cellular Panic, 173
Reconditioning Centers, 178
EPILOGUE: CORPORATE FUTURES, 185
Postmodern Constructs, 185
Artificial Intelligence, 189
In Memoriam to Memory, 195
Conclusion, 201
NOTES, 203
WORKS CITED, 219
INDEX, 233
vi Contents
Preface
Conspiracy theory has a long history in the United States. It has ani-
mated our political culture from the early Republican period to the present,
at times powerfully swaying popular opinion. But its influence has never
been greater than now. Since 1950, an extraordinary number of writers have
used expressions of paranoia and conspiracy theory to represent the
influence of postwar technologies, social organizations, and communica-
tion systems on human beings. Writers as different as William S. Burroughs
and Margaret Atwood, Thomas Pynchon and Joan Didion, and Kathy Acker
and Don DeLillo have depicted individuals nervous about the ways large
organizations might be controlling their lives, influencing their actions, or
even constructing their desires. The same concerns are reflected in postwar
films, television shows, and other media, which routinely posit conspiracies
of astonishing size and complexity. And as sociological studies have shown,
many Americans now assume that such plots are not only possible, but
operative and determining forces in their own lives.
Why, then, has conspiracy theory become such a fundamental form of
American political discourse? And why is this way of thinking about politi-
cal power common to both marginalized and relatively privileged groups?
While paranoia and conspiracy theory are often seen as marginal forms-
the implausible visions of a lunatic fringe--their ubiquity in contemporary
American culture suggests that they are symptoms of a more pervasive anx-
iety about social control. Indeed, their popularity can only be explained by
examining what they have in common with mainstream narratives and
ideas. It is no accident that so many cultural expressions-from Vanee
Packard's Hidden Persuaders to postwar addiction discourse, and from
David Riesman's Lonely Crowd to the Unabomber "Manifesto"- have
lamented the "decline" of individual self-control and the increasing "auton-
omy" of social structures, especially government and corporate bureaucra-
cies, control technologies, and mass media. Despite the diverse contexts in
which these anxieties appear, they take a remarkably consistent form, which
1 call agency panic. Agency panic is intense anxiety about an apparent loss of
autonomy, the conviction that one's actions are being controlled by some-
one else or that one has been "constructed" by powerful, external agents.
Empire 01 Conspiracy traces this fear through postwar American culture,
concentrating on its often melodramatic expression in fiction and film and
revealing its importance to nonfiction genres, including cybernetics and
systems theory, popular sociology, medical discourse, business and self-
"'
help literature, politieal writing, and cultural and social theory. The impor-
tance of agency panie, this book argues, lies in its troubled defense of an old
but increasingly beleaguered concept of personhood-the idea that the in-
dividual is a rational, motivated agent with a protected interior core of be-
liefs, desires, and memories.
As 1 have worked on this project, 1 have discovered a form of agency
panie to whieh scholars seem particularly susceptible. It is most often expe-
rienced at the library, in the dark spaces of the stacks or the quiet maze of
the periodieals room. One is especially vulnerable to it while gazing at an
on-line catalogue, an article index, or a list of new books. It is precipitated
by the discovery of a text that appears, on first glance, uncannily similar to
one's own work. The feeling that follows such a discovery may vary in in-
tensity, but it is rarely good. It may be a sense of lost opportunity, a disap-
pointment at having failed to be the first to bring a thesis to the publie eye,
but at times it amounts to nothing less than paranoia-a suspicion that
one's ideas have somehow been accessed, duplicated, preempted, perhaps
even stolen (but hoW?).
Such discoveries, and the feelings they provoke, usually fade away on
reflection. But like the more dramatie instances at the center of this study,
they arise in the first place beca use of tenacious, romantie assumptions
about the autonomy and uniqueness of individuals (especiallywriters), as-
sumptions reinforced by the atomistie lifestyle of the scholar. What such
discoveries remind us is that our ideas are never wholly our own. They are
influenced by the larger communicative systems in which we exist and to
whieh we contribute. If such reminders come in the form of panic, no mat-
ter how momentary, they do so because it is sometimes difficult for us to
discard the idea that we are unique and autonomous authorial agents. At
least it has sometimes been difficult for me. Yet, the library, especiallY the
contemporary, globally networked library, has repeatedly made me aware
of the debt 1 owe to other thinkers, not only those cited in the pages to fol-
low, but those whose insights 1 now take for granted.
There are also many institutions and individuals who helped me directly
on this project. 1 would not have been able to devote myself to it without
generous grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Comell Univer-
sity, and Miami University. 1 am also grateful to the following organizations
for allowing me to present portions of it to an audience: the Midwest MLA,
the Westem Humanities Conference, the University ofWashington Ameri-
canist Colloquium, the University of Louisville's twentieth-century litera-
ture conference, the Claremont Graduate School's conference on addietion
and culture, Rethinking Marxism's conference on contemporary Marxism at
viii Preface
the University of Massachusetts, and the Miami University English Depart-
mento Portions of this book have appeared elsewhere in slightly different
formo Much of Chapter 2 appeared as "Bodies Incorporated: Scenes of
Agency Panic in Gravity's Rainbow" in Contemporary Literature 35.4 (1994):
709-38. A version of Chapter 3 appeared as «'Stalked by Love': 'Female
Paranoia' and the Stalker Novel" in differences 8.2 (1996): 68-100. 1 am grate-
ful to The University of Wisconsin Press and Indiana University Press,
respectively, for permission to reprint this material.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the immense debt I owe to Molly Hite,
whose generosity, incisive criticism, and continuing support have been vital
to this project. I owe great thanks as well to Mark Seltzer, whose brilliant ap-
proach to American cultural phenomena first helped me to conceptualize
this project, and who provided much guidance along the way. My editors,
Bemhard Kendler and Candace Akins, and the readers for Comell
University Press, Joseph Tabbi and Kathryn Hume, have been helpful and
attentive. Many other colleagues and teachers have offered invaluable re-
sponses to this book. I am especially grateful to Barry Chabot, Mary Jean
Corbett, Fran Dolan, Paul Downes, Malcolm Griffith, Susan Morgan,
Naomi Morgenstem, Joel Porte, and Scott Shershow for their friendship
and advice over the past several years. Finally, there are those personal debts
too large to describe here. These are to my parents, Ellen and Dan Melley,
and to Katie Johnson, who has been both a willing listener and my most
faithful reader. This book, and a great many other things, would not have
been possible without their love and support.
TIMOTHY MELLEY
Preface Ix