Melley, Empire of Conspiracy

[Adam H. Swinson]

... very interesting, will have to search that one out ... recalls the old
cold-war population-control cliche that, while you could not voice your
opinion in the streets or in public in the old Soviet Union, they didn't
really give a damn what you discussed in your own house ... the state spent
their energy contolling discourse in the Exterior.

...and in America, while you (purportedly) can discuss everything and
anything you want in the streets, Their game is to control the Interior.

peace,
Adam



>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
>...