Melley, Empire of Conspiracy

[Dave Monroe]

Just picked up Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of
Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2000).  On Vance
Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and J. Edgar Hoover's Masters of
Deceit (1958) ...

Despite the rhetoric of conspiracy, the real threat is not so much a
specific agent as a system of communications, an organized array of
ideas, discourses, and techniques. (2)

... to suggest that conspiracies are perpetrated through the mass media
is to rethink the very nature of conspiracy, which would no longer
depend wholly upon private messages, but rather upon mass
communications, mesages to which anyone might be privy.  This new model
of "conspiracy" no longer simply suggests that dangerous agents are
secretly plotting against us from some remote location.  On the
contrary, it imples, rather dramaticaly, that whole populations are
being openly manipulated  without their knowledge.  For mass ccontrol to
be exercised in this manner, persons must be significantly less
autonomous than popular American notions of individualism would
suggest.  The postwar model of conspiracy, in other words, is dependent
upon a notion of diminished human agency. (2-3)

... surprisingly, not much on The Crying of Lot 49 (p. 85), but Chapter
2, "Bodies Incorporated" (pp. 81-106), is largely on Gravity's Rainbow
...