Melley, Empire of Conspiracy

[Dave Monroe]

More from Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia
in Postwar America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2000).  Recapping the stuff
I posted previously for continuity's sake.  Again, 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)

... there is a striking political difference bwteen thw two texts, and
this difference makes their structural resemblance all the more odd:
Packard's book exposes a dangerous facet of corporate capitalism, while
Hoover's hopes to foil communist activity.  The question, then, is why
these accounts of national crisis look so similar when they seem to be
at ideological cross-purposes.  One possible answer, a familiar one, is
that they are part of a "paranoid" tradition transcending particular
ideologies and historical conditions.  But the notion of a
transhistorical, paranoid style does not by itelf explain why such
politically different projects might find a strategic advantage in the
notion of conspiracy.  Nor does it account for the specific histtorical
conditions that might have shaped these postwar accounts.  Even
Hofstadter ... (2)

[here see, of course, Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American
Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965)]

More important, changes in postwar "paranoid politics" indicate a shift
in popular conceptions of political power.  After all, 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.   And it
is this concept that makes The Hidden persuaders and Masters of Deceit
so much alike, despite their distinct ideological underpinnings.  Like
so many other postwar narratives, both are deeply invested in a
traditional concept of individual autonomy and uniqueness, and both
reveal this investment through expressions of nervousness about their
viability.  (2-3)

... each posit a secret effort whose real goal is the mass reengineering
of persons.  (3)

My intention here, however, is not to critique the familiar illogic of
cold war anticommunism.  It is rather to show how that illogic governs
the impulse towards conspiracy theory.  Hoover's unwillingness to
consider anything like capita;ist "thought control"--that is, his
failure to portray both communism and capitalism as
ideologies--is central to his conspiratorial view ... (3)

What allows Hoover to present this little tale of education is his
assumption that eduaction in a capitalist society, by contrast, is not
ideologically shaped and does not construct individuals by its own
mechanisms of "thought control."  The ironic corollary to this this view
is not simply that it borrows (and hugely simplifies) an account of
ideology from Marxism, but that it undercutt its own premises.  If
Americans are defined by their extraordinary individual autnomy, then
why do they need powerful government protections from communism?  The
answer can only be that autonomy is precisely what they lack ... (4)

The same problem of agency haunts The Hidden Persuaders, which asserts
that scientists have discovered new ways to manipulat human desire.
According to Packard, these motivational researchers ... exploit a model
of personhood derived from psychoanalysis ....  They use packaging and
display techniques .... "subthreshold effects" .... he speculates taht
tehir work may lead to practices like "biocontrol" in which "a surgeon
would equip each child with a socket mounted under the scalp" so that
"subjects would never be permitted to think as individuals." (4)

[and if you think you're gonna find William Gibson in the index here as
well, you're of course absolutely correct ...]

For Packard, this lurid fantasy--in which "electronics could take over
the control of unruly humans"--reveals the real threat of motivational
research: it is a technology for the radical reconstruction of persons.
Even motivational reserachers themselves, in Packard's view, are
"custom-built men," barely separable from the "sample humans" on whom
they perform manipulation experiments ....  Such assumptions generate a
problem of control much like the one implicit in Hoover's argument.  If
even the agents of persuasion have been constructed, then who governs
the system of depth manipulation?  Indeed, if we carry Packard's view to
its logical extreme, the very idea of manipulation, in the sense of a
willful attempt to contro others, becomes obsolete, because attempts at
manipulation are themselves only products of previous amnipulation.  In
Packard's world, the system of depth manipulation is self-regulating.
Control has been transferred from human agents to larger agencies,
institutions, or corporate structures. (5)

In other words, Packard and Hoover both attempt to describe a structural
form of causality while simultaneously retaining the idea of a
malevolent, centralized, and intentional program of mass control. (5)

Another couple of intertexts to those Pynchonian texts, then.  And I've
been sitting on a copy of the Hidden Persuader's ever since reading
Thomas Frank's the Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture,
and the Rise of Hip          Consumerism (Chicago: U of C P, 1997,
q.v.), but ... but, again, 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.   For a different take on "ideology," as,
perhaps, "a grand Gothic pile of inferences," see also Mark Edmundson,
Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of
Gothic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997).  Forgot to deploy that one
there ...