Knight, Conspiracy Culture

[Dave Monroe]

>From Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to
The X-Files (New York: Routledge, 2000), Ch. 1,
"Conspiracy/Culture," pp. 23-75 ...

"Everything is some kind of plot, man." (Pynchon,
Gravity's Rainbow) (epigraph, p. 23)

"The 1960s, I have been arguing, witnessed a broad
shift from conspiracy theories leveled against already
victimized people on the charge of countersubversion
of the status quo, to conspiracy theories proposed by
the people about abuses of power by those in
authority.  Pynchon's second novel, The Crying of Lot
49 (1966), marks the midpoint of this transition.  It
reads as a journalistic survey of the LA scene in the
summer of 1964, and portions of the novel were in fact
published in Esquire magazine in 1965.  The book is a
sharply humorous sampling of the rapidly changing
zeitgeist, and one of the new fashions it identifies
is the emergence of paranoia as a popular, but zany,
cultural language.  The novel is full of
self-conscious references to paranoia ....  At the
same time, there are still some quick satires of the
kind of political fanatic studied by Hofstadter and
his coleagues.  The Peter Pinguid Society ....  In the
time of flux the novel depicts, it is comically
unclear whether 'We' or 'They' are the more prone to
paranoia....

   "You one of those right-wing nut outfits?" inquired
the diplomatic Metzger.
   Fallopian twinkled.  "The accuse US of being
paranoids."
   "They?" inquired Metzger, twinkling also.
   "Us?" asked Oedipa. (CL, 32)

"With its wry commentary on the translation of
paranoia  as a 1950s political style into the affected
anxieties of a 1960s Californian housewife, The Crying
of Lot 49 as times speaks in the same idion as 'Wake
up America! It Can Happen Here!,' the article from
Esquire magazine of the same year ....  Included in
the list and garish cartoon illustration of the
twenty-three 'enemies within' there are several that
are familar from the world of The Crying of Lot 49. 
There is for example the ZIP-Code Plot, in which the
Jewsih-controlled 'Post office or the Commissar ...
will know exactly where you are, what you are doing
and who you are doing it with because you ahve been
branded on ... the right hand' (note in Lot 49 the old
sailor with a tattooed sign of WASTE, the alternative
postal system [CL 87]).  Then there is the Flag-Stamp
Intrigue, which finds extremely suspicious a 1963 US
stamp that omits the words 'U.S. Postage' (think of
the discovery by Oedipa and Genghis Cohen the
philatelist of anomalous US stamps [CL, 66-68]).  The
Esquire article even lists the threat of
Hypno-Subversive music from groups like the Beatles
(compare Pynchon's British Invasion-style combo, The
Paranoids).
   "For all its satire on the paranoid style,
Pynchon's novella does begin to consider, hwoever, the
possibility that Oedipa's quest for some transcendent
but aracne revelation is an enormous red herring, such
that she fails to notice the obvious social ills
around her which need no conpsiracy theories to
explain them.... the novel floats the possibility that
paranoia might provide a model for plotting together
as an alternative counterconspiracy all thsoe left out
of moainstream American society.  As much as Oedipa's
paranoia sidetracks her from the obvious, it also
leads her to de=iscover the existence--even if still
imaginary--of a counter-conspiracy, a 'calculated
withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its
machinery' (CL, 86)." (pp. 58-9)

"By the time Gravity's Rainbow was published in 1973
the real identity of the Tristero had become
irrelevant, since the adventure of the counterculture
was nearly over....  'Creative paranoia,' Prentice
explains, 'means developing at least as thorough a
We-system as a They-system.'" (p. 59)

On the one hand, the sort of solidarity (?) called for
in that Slow Learner "Introduction," on the other, the
dangers inherent in the reification thereof?  Anyway,
see here ...

Hofstadter, Richard.  "The Paranoid Style in
   American Politics."  Harper’s (Nov. 1964): 77-86.

__________.  The Paranoid Style in American
   Politics and Other Essays. NY: Knopf, 1965.

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/Conspiracy_theory/The_paranoid_mentality/The_paranoid_style.html

"Wake up, America!  It Can Happen Here!  A
Post-McCarthy Guide to Twenty-three Conspiracies by
Assorted Enemies Within," Esquire (May 1966) 165-  .

And Knight notes that "in The Minimal Self: Psychic
Survival in Troubled Times (1984 ...), Christopher
Lasch accuses Pynchon's novels of 'hiding the obvious
bhind a veil of obscurity' (159)."  My point, I think,
has been, roughly, that the "obvious" has not been all
too particularly "hidden," and that any so-called
"veil of obscurity" might well be a point of/under
critique ...








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