Empire of Conspiracy

The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America

Timothy Melley

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501713002
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Why, Timothy Melley asks, have paranoia and conspiracy theory become such prominent features of postwar American culture? In Empire of Conspiracy, Melley explores the recent growth of anxieties about thought-control, assassination, political indoctrination, stalking, surveillance, and corporate and government plots. At the heart of these developments, he believes, lies a widespread sense of crisis in the way Americans think about human autonomy and individuality. Nothing reveals this crisis more than the remarkably consistent form of expression that Melley calls "agency panic"—an intense fear that individuals can be shaped or controlled by powerful external forces. Drawing on a broad range of forms that manifest this fear—including fiction, film, television, sociology, political writing, self-help literature, and cultural theory—Melley provides a new understanding of the relation between postwar American literature, popular culture, and cultural theory. Empire of Conspiracy offers insightful new readings of texts ranging from Joseph Heller's Catch-22 to the Unabomber Manifesto, from Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders to recent addiction discourse, and from the "stalker" novels of Margaret Atwood and Diane Johnson to the conspiracy fictions of Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Don DeLillo, and Kathy Acker. Throughout, Melley finds recurrent anxieties about the power of large organizations to control human beings. These fears, he contends, indicate the continuing appeal of a form of individualism that is no longer wholly accurate or useful, but that still underpins a national fantasy of freedom from social control.

1 Bureaucracy and Its Discontents

The analogy between the process of civilization and the path of individual development may be extended in an important respect. It can he asserted that the community, too, evolves a super-ego under whose influence cultural development proceeds.

—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

Indeed, in the most highly developed areas of contemporary society, the transplantation of social into individual needs is so effective that the difference between them seems to he purely theoretical.

—Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964)

The New Line of Americans

In the years immediately following World War II, a handful of popular sociological studies suggested that a fundamental change was occurring in American society. This transformation, so the story went, was a response both to the rise of the information sciences, systems theory and cybernetics, and more fundamentally to an economy in which the production and distribution of information was taking unprecedented priority over the production and distribution of material goods. As David Riesman put it in the popular edition of his 1950 classic, The Lonely Crowd, a “revolution” was in progress, “a whole range of social developments associated with a shift from an age of production to an age of consumption” (Riesman, rev. ed. 6). Scores of subsequent studies described these developments as the rise of a new “post-industrial society,” a “global village,” an “information age,” a “second industrial revolution,” and, in cultural criticism, a “condition of postmodernity.”1

Among the more prominent anxieties animating early accounts of this condition was that new social arrangements had produced—or mass-produced—a new, and somewhat frightening type of American: a “lonely crowd” of “posthistoric men,” “one-dimensional men,” and “organization men.”2 For many observers, individuals had grown alarmingly generic and pliant as they became enmeshed in ever-larger bureaucratic and corporate structures. This pervasive concern about individual agency in turn gave rise to a second, more pressing worry about the “agency” of postindustrial systems. Because bureaucracies seemed to efface essential human attributes and distribute them across a system comprised of many human beings, they were often described as if they possessed human attributes. As a result, they were increasingly viewed as autonomous “social bodies” dangerously out of human control, even the control of those individuals nominally at their “head.”

Such worries were not wholly new. Several decades earlier, Max Weber had described the tendency of rational, bureaucratic structures to grow somewhat uncontrollably. But Weber maintained that “the mechanism” of bureaucracy could be put into motion “only from the very top” and that bureaucracy was “a power instrument of the first order for one who controls the bureaucratic apparatus” (987–88, emphasis added). In the postwar sociologies I have been describing, Weber’s claims seem outmoded. The postindustrial worry about bureaucracy is not that it may be misused “from the top” but that those at the top of a bureaucracy do not really run it. In the words of Bob Slocum, Joseph Heller’s consummate “organization man,” “Nobody is sure anymore who really runs the company (not even the people who are credited with running it), but the company does run” (Something Happened 13).3

In this chapter, I trace a widespread, anxious narrative response to this vision of “postindustrial” society. The type of narrative in which I am interested attempts to rally support for a supposedly threatened form of American individualism. Its primary cultural function is to defend the idea that individuals are inviolable, autonomous repositories of internal differences, ideas, and motivations—and to defend it specifically against the consequences of postindustrial economic developments, especially the incorporation of cybernetic ideas into the modeling and operation of large bureaucratic systems. The texts I consider in this chapter attempt to conserve this form of individualism by urging individuals to treat large systems as “enemies,” resisting their demands for corporate identity and collective behavior. The cultural work of these narratives, in other words, is not only to describe how postindustrial culture might diminish individual agency but also to offer an “antidote” to that problem. The antidote, interestingly enough, takes the form of a “paranoid” suspicion of social connections—and a commitment to the idea that persons are atomistic units threatened by various forms of social communication and collective identity.

In tracing the rise of this “reasonable paranoia,” I must leave the regions of lurid conspiracy theory for more familiar territory. My aim is to locate the early foundations of a popular postwar story about human agency, one that would usher the potentially marginal forms of conspiracy theory and paranoia toward the center of American life and would eventually provide a “legitimate,” mainstream basis for more dramatic expressions of agency panic. My central literary examples in this endeavor come from the fiction of Joseph Heller, whose novel of rationalization-gone-mad, Catch-22, is perhaps the best-known fictional embodiment of the cultural tendency I have been outlining. Before I turn to Catch-22, however, I want to examine in detail several of the nonfictional narratives I mentioned above.

Social Characters

One of the most influential such narratives came from sociologist David Riesman. Shortly after World War II, Riesman made an observation about individual autonomy that would become the basis of many other works, both fictional and nonfictional. “One kind of social character, which dominated America in the nineteenth century,” he declared, “is gradually being replaced by a social character of quite a different sort” (rev. ed. 3).4 The new, or “other-directed,” sort of character seemed to “find itself most at home in America” and was like other recently diagnosed products of “highly industrialized, and bureaucratic America: [Erich] Fromm’s ‘marketer,’ [C. Wright] Mills’s ‘fixer,’ Arnold Green’s ‘middle-class male child’” (orig. ed. 20). Like these figures, Riesman’s new Americans seemed far less admirable than the rugged, “inner-directed” individuals they seemed to be replacing. The difference between the two types, Riesman was quick to point out, lay not in whether they were socially conditioned but in how frequently and from whom they received guidance: “direction in both cases,” he noted, “comes from outside and is simply internalized at an early point in the life cycle of the inner-directed” (172). Yet the results of this difference were dramatic. Inner-directed children grew up to be unique and self-governing adults. Like the hard-working, driven individuals of Weber’s “Protestant ethic,” they possessed a “rigid though highly individualized character” (15) allowing them to “gain a feeling of control over their own lives” (18). Other-directed persons, by contrast, were easily influenced and controlled by social pressures. They were highly flexible and uncertain of themselves, continually adjusting their desires in response to “signals from others,” especially “the school and the peer-group” and “the mass media: movies, radio, comics, and popular culture media generally” (22). As a result, they seemed to be shallow “glad-handers” and manipulators, extremely needy of approval and guidance from others.5

The appearance of the “other-directed” type indicated a fundamental change in American society, and one that did not bode well for the nation. The bad news was not merely that America had become populated by shallow and insecure individuals. The situation was much graver, for while inner-directed persons had a rich internal life—the mark of personhood in the dominant tradition of liberal individualism—other-directed types were generic inside. Their most “individual” aspects, even their “inner experiences,” were regulated by external communications, which penetrated and inhabited them. This conclusion, as we shall see, raised the specter of a serious social dilemma. If one’s contemporaries were the source of one’s goals and desires, and if they too were other-directed, then who or what determined their goals and desires? If the answer was the “anonymous voices of the mass media” (23), then who or what controlled those influences? Even the nonconformist, Riesman noted, had to be aware that “his efforts at autonomy are taken as cues by the ‘others’” and might merely “degenerate into other-directed play-acting” (304). The theory of other-direction posited nothing short of a national crisis of agency—not only a severe decline in individual autonomy, but a new imperative to trace human behaviors to their diverse social origins.

Riesman was not alone in offering his dramatic and captivating thesis. Its basic tenets would be advanced in a staggering array of texts. In 1954, Jacques Ellul described a process called “involuntary psychological collectivization” and asserted that its “inevitable consequence is the creation of the mass man” (406–7). He added, “We can get a general impression of this new type by studying America, where human beings tend clearly to become identified with the ideal of advertising” (407). Two years later, William Whyte would trace the same problem to U.S. corporate culture. The result, he claimed, was not “‘Mass Man’—a person the author has never met” (10)—but rather “the organization man,” a social character whose desires and ideas seemed indistinguishable from corporate propaganda. For Whyte, this new corporate tool signaled “a major shift in American ideology” (4), a movement away from Weber’s “Protestant ethic” toward a new “social ethic.” This was a dangerous development, in Whyte’s view, because it made “morally legitimate the pressures of society against the individual” (7) and suggested that “society’s needs and the needs of the individual are one and the same” (7). Organization men were ideologically conditioned subjects–“not only other-directed, to borrow David Riesman’s concept,” but convinced that “it is right to be that way” (396).

It is important to emphasize that the central element of such accounts—a story of individual agency in crisis—was deployed not only by those who longed for a return to the Protestant ethic of market capitalism but by those favoring socialism as well. In his One-Dimensional Man (1964), the Marxist critic Herbert Marcuse argued that postindustrial Americans had been so “introjected” with “social controls” that “even individual protest [was] affected at its roots” (9).6 Like Whyte’s organization men, Marcuse’s conditioned subjects were unable to recognize their own conditioning. And like Riesman’s other-directed persons, they lacked an internal “gyroscope” or guidance system. In Marcuse’s version of the story, however, the internal aspects of the individual were no longer simply “adjusted” by social and economic pressures. Rather, the political economy wholly evacuated and occupied their private space, rendering them “one-dimensional.” For Marcuse, the problem was so severe that the term “introjection” no longer described the way individuals internalized social controls:

Introjection implies the existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to the external exigencies—an individual consciousness and an individual unconscious apart from public opinion and behavior. The idea of “inner freedom” here has its reality: it designates the private space in which man may become and remain “himself.”

Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory.... The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with the society as a whole. (10)

One-dimensional man, in other words, suffered from a terminal case of other-direction.

“Other-directed” subjects have become increasingly commonplace in postmodern representation and theory. The cultural landscape is now populated not only with the artifactual replicants, terminators, and “meat-puppets” of science fiction but also with theoretical subjects such as Jean Baudrillard’s “schizo,” a figure so open to mass communication that his politics can be nothing more than “a hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system” (“Masses” 219). Similarly pliant subjects wander through the fiction of Ralph Ellison, William S. Burroughs, Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, and Thomas Pynchon, whose Mucho Maas, for instance, increasingly becomes “less himself and more generic ... a walking assembly of man” (Crying 140).7

But we can perhaps get the most vivid sense of what life might be like for the “other-directed” by studying Bob Slocum, the protagonist of Heller’s 1974 novel Something Happened. Slocum’s most stable characteristic is his tendency to take on the characteristics of those around him. “I always have the disquieting sensation that I am copying somebody,” he confesses (73). When he spends the day with a man who limps, he comes home with a limp. Around a loud and assertive talker, he becomes loud and assertive. “It’s a weakness,” he admits, “a failure of character or morals, this subtle, sneaky, almost enslaving instinct to be like just about anyone I happen to find myself with” (72). Slocum is not just an impersonator, but a compulsive impersonator. His tendency toward other-direction “operates unconsciously ... with a determination of its own” (72). As he puts it, “I do not realize I have slipped into someone else’s personality until I am already there” (72). It quickly becomes apparent, in other words, that Slocum lacks what Riesman calls an “internal gyroscope,” His most individual qualities turn out to be simulacra. “Even my handwriting is not my own” he confesses (77). This is a significant admission because handwriting has long been not only the legal index of consent, agency, and will but also the conventional sign of individuality. The “science” of handwriting analysis is built on the assumption that one’s writing offers a snapshot of one’s psychological makeup. The fact, then, that Slocum has painstakingly internalized the writing of a coworker reveals that his most individuating traits have come from the outside.8 His problem is not that he wears a gray flannel suit to work but that he wears gray flannel on the inside, so to speak.

Like Whyte, Heller suggests that Slocum’s “inner surrender” (Whyte 10) makes him invaluable to his organization. Yet it also generates problems for Slocum himself. For one thing, he suffers from a permanent identity crisis. “I don’t know who or what I really am,” he confesses (74). Second, because the sources of his identity seem to lie outside himself, he feels unable to control his own actions. He worries perpetually about his ability to act autonomously, feels “enslaved” by his imitative tendencies, and fears that he might “break free and go permanently out of control” (73). Finally, as in most narratives of agency-in-crisis, Slocum suspects that his actions are being determined by some entity he cannot name or see, and he tries to find the causal forces that shaped him, the “something” that “decided to sort [him] into precisely this slot” (210). That the ensuing search turns up little is not surprising, because when one imagines persons as Heller does Slocum, the sources of their “own true nature” (73) are dispersed across an array of social connections and communicative networks.

What, then, are the basic elements of the story of agency-in-decline that became widely accepted in the early postwar years? The first concerns the nature of the newly-spawned individuals themselves, who are not only insufficiently individual but also lacking in agency, ideologically controlled, and too closely identified with advanced industrial society. Second, the controlling “system” in such accounts has an extraordinary uniformity and coherence, despite its obscure workings. It is not a complex array of competing interests, powers, and classes, but a monolithic totality whose mandates and goals seem utterly noncontradictory. Constructed this way, it seems to be dramatically opposed to the puny individual, as in the familiar but reductive formula “individual versus society.” Finally, the impact of this system on the individual is conceptualized through a rhetoric of interiority and exteriority, an imagined penetration, invasion, and occupation of the individual’s formerly private and protected interior, a process designed “to rob him of the intellectual armor he so badly needs” (Whyte 13). As I show later, the intimacy between this rhetoric and the values associated with masculinity helps to explain why the story of...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Bureaucracy and Its Disconlents
• Chapter 2: Bodies Incorporated
• Chapter 3: Stalked by Love
• Chapter 4: Secret Agents
• Chapter 5: The Logic of Addiction
• Epilogue: Corporate Futures
• Notes
• Works Cited