Knight, Conspiracy Culture

[Dave Monroe]

Okay, much to catch up on here, but, in the meantime,
from Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to
the X-Files (New York: Routledge, 2000), Chapter 1,
"Conspiracy/Culture," Section II, "Vineland and
Visibility," pp. 57-75 ...

"The hidden depths and concelaed realms which might
encourage countercultural fantasies of a
conspiratorial 'We-system' (as Gravity's Rainbow
termed it) have thus all but disappeared in the world
of Vineland.  Everything has become exposed (to use a
film metaphor to which the novel itself is highly
attuned) ....  On this reading, then, teh final
failure of the 1960s underground culture comes about
not through any of the conspiratorial fanstasies of
apocalypse which the counterculture predicted, but
because there is nowhere left to hide.  Everything is
visible, and everything is connected, producing a
situation in which a routine sense of paranoia is
paradoxically both no longer necessary, and more vital
than ever." (p. 73)

Further: "Paranoia has become passe, however, not
merely beacuse it is part of a now outdated drug
scene, but becasue everything turns out to be true"
(p. 68);   "This is not to say, however, that the need
for paranoia has entirely disappeared.  On the
contrary, the endless confirmation of teh clandestine
ruses of state power merely reconfirms the need for a
resigned vigilance ..." (p. 69);  "In this novel, the
paranoid suspicions held by the counterculture have
all been confirmed, and conspiracies theories about
the government conspiring against its citizens are
taken for granted" (ibid.).  Also takes up V., The
Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow along the way
...


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