Many notable writers of this [post-Kennedy] era embraced what Thomas Pynchon [Gravity’s rainbow (1973) New York: Viking, pp. 25, 638] called ‘creative paranoia’ and ‘operational paranoia’ as a reasonable form of social engagement in the post-war regime of Cold War state secrecy and consumerist public relations. Suspicion, even potentially paranoid suspicion, the imagination of connections and plots without solid proof, was increasingly seen as an enabling, even necessary, way of understanding a mass-mediated world. As William S. Burroughs [The algebra of need (1977) London: Calder, p. 159], the high priest of post-war American paranoia, put it, ‘A paranoid is a person in possession of all of the facts’. The ‘best minds of [this new literary] generation’, to borrow the phrase of the Beat Generation poet Allan Ginsberg [Howl (1956)], mounted social critiques that they knew would be perceived as ‘madness’, ‘paranoia’ and radical claptrap. In so doing, they popularised confessions of ‘paranoia’ as a way of expressing suspicion about official narratives and corporate propaganda. Over the next 60 years, the stigma of mental illness fell away from the term paranoia’, and Americans became increasingly comfortable labelling their own suspicions ‘paranoid’ without any sense of self-criticism or pathology. So powerful was this trend that it eventually led to what Peter Knight [Conspiracy culture: from Kennedy to the X-files (2000) London: Routledge, p. 75] terms ‘the routinization of paranoia’ — a postmodern normalisation of ‘paranoid scepticism in which the conspiratorial netherworld has become hyper-visible, its secrets just one more commodity’.
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Notable American fiction began to register this idea beginning in the late 1950s in ways that exceeded the general Western literary investment in paranoid reason. This new literature of paranoia was marked by several major propositions: First, a sense that conspiracy is not merely complot but an essential way of theorising the power of institutions (such as corporations, cartels, state agencies, knowledge systems and social networks) to influence historical events, public perceptions and individual behaviour; second, that such institutions had radically depleted individual human agency through new techniques of mass communication and social control; third, that extreme suspicion or ‘paranoia’ might be well-suited to discerning the nature of this power structure and therefore should not be shunned as a pathological condition; and finally, that fiction had a major social role in the exploration of possible hidden plots, connections and systems of meaning. This final proposition entailed the creation of sophisticated narratives that simulated, for readers, the difficulty of discerning actual conspiracies and plots. This fiction was distinctly different from the form of narrative [Richard] Hofstadter described as the ‘paranoid style’. It was endlessly suggestive but often refused to assert definite plots, which often seemed to elude human comprehension, ultimately out of reach, difficult to see, know or prove.
Post-war paranoid literature was deeply interested in conspiracy as an organising principle and a theme, but it rarely conceived of conspiracy in the traditional sense of a small group of subversives or plotters who literally ‘breathe together’ (conspirare). Rather, like academic social theory, it tended to understand ‘conspiracies’ as the work of large organisations, technologies or systems — powerful and obscure agencies that in many senses are the very antithesis of the traditional conspiracy. This conception entailed the imagination of social systems as if they were superhuman agents – coherent, wilful actors with the capacity to execute vast plans with godlike efficiency. This view of conspiracy was rooted in a burgeoning sociological imagination, and it required the form of thinking that Karl Popper dismissed in 1945 as ‘the conspiracy theory of society’ the view that major social and economic events are planned by the ‘direct design … of powerful individuals and groups’. The major problem with this form of interpretation, Popper argued, is that it misunderstands the complexity of social events [Open society and its enemies, vol. 2: the high tide of prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and aftermath (1971) New Jersey: Princeton University Press, pp. 94-5]. Hofstadter’s examples, moreover, rarely allege traditional conspiracies (e.g. the plot to kill Caesar or the plot of the 9/11 bombers) but rather point to a giant machinery of influence. This quality is particularly evident in Hofstadter’s Cold War examples, which assert not secret plots but widespread ideological controls. Like Popper, Hofstadter notes that the paranoid style often attributes quasi-divine powers to the enemy and that it often fears that an entire ‘apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans’ […].
Such claims are rooted in an all-or-nothing form of thinking I call ‘agency panic’ – the anxious view that one has fallen under the influence of an external agency — that one has been ‘programmed’, ‘brain-washed’, or converted into an automaton by some organisation, system or mysterious agency. They also tend to imagine the erosion of their own self-control but also to project autonomy and personhood onto social systems. In moments of agency panic, individuals imagine that social systems possess the will and self-control that seems depleted from themselves. The system is personified as ‘them’. It appears to ‘think’, to have motives, to act with ruthless precision.
It is important to recognise two thing about this notion. First, it reaffirms the tenets of an Enlightenment liberal individualism that individuals are autonomous agents in control of their own thoughts and action but it imagines these capacities at the level of the social order rather than the human individual. Second, it is a reaction to the sense that Enlightenment individualism cannot adequately explain the power of social institutions on human behaviour, thinking or social efficacy. The idea that ‘society’ (or some large subset of it) is ‘conspiring’ to govern social events is, paradoxically, a defence of the idea that individuals should be independent agents, free from social regulation. When faced with evidence that they are in fact influenced by social structures, corporate messages or state regulations, the paranoid subject clings to an embattled individualism, shocked at the apparent depletion of individual agency. Rather than adopting a more compelling, structural theory of social control (such as one finds in Marxism or sociology more broadly), the conspiratorial model projects the ideal qualities of the individual rationality, intentionality and self-control onto the social order itself, eventually seeing it as a wilful and malevolent being: A ‘them’. Ironically, then, it is the frantic desire to theorise social regulation that pushes the conspiracy theorist to defend a set of concepts that cannot account for social regulation — except as a form of total and magical control [Melley, T. (2000) Empire of conspiracy: the culture of paranoia in post-war America, Ithaca: Cornell University Press].
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This paranoid logic reverses what Max Weber calle the modern ‘disenchantment of the world’. If a street sign can complete one’s thoughts, then the agent who ‘thinks’ such thoughts is not a human being but a supra-human communication system that includes individuals and social structures. It is this view of eroded human agency that induces Burroughs’s perpetual sense of paranoia and panic.
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In sharp contradistinction to the quasi-religious conviction of the Cold War ‘paranoid style’, the post-war ‘literature of paranoia’ is self-aware, tolerant of unknowing and morally complex.
– ‘Conspiracy in American narrative’, in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (2020), pp. 429-35
One of the great ironies of Hofstadter’s essay [‘The paranoid style in American politics’] is that all of his major examples of the paranoid style concern external threats to the nation – the Masons, the Illuminati, communists – and yet, almost the moment the essay was published, the emphasis of American conspiracy theories shifted to internal enemies and plots. […]
It is important to note that this fundamental change in the nature of American conspiracy discourse coincided precisely with the discursive ‘invention’ of conspiracy theory – that is, the claim that ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘the paranoid style’ are a recognisable, aberrant and pathological form of political discourse.
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During this period [beginning in the 1960s], the public grew increasingly concerned about a massive and growing national security apparatus charged with the conduct of covert operations, propaganda and psychological operations around the world. What had begun as a small exception to democratic oversight in 1947, when the C.I.A. received its charter, would grow by 2010 to a vast clandestine apparatus: 17 intelligence agencies, 28 other federal agencies, 1271 sub-bureaus, costing $75 billion per year. A primary function of this apparatus was what might be called ‘conspiracy theory’: The security state was expected to suspect, describe and stop plots against the state. However, its growing capacity for official suspicion also stimulated public suspicion about its activities. Ironically, then, just as Hofstadter succeeded in delegitimising conspiratorial explanation, the American public began to grow anxious about an ‘invisible government’, the critique of which would require the form of suspicion cast into doubt by Hofstadter’s critique of the paranoid style. It is no accident that U.S. cultural narratives of suspicion changed character radically around the time Hofstadter published his essay. The dominant post – war American conspiracy theories express anxiety about the deceptions and powers of the U.S. security state.
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The post-war literature of paranoia addressed two crucial intellectual problems of the Cold War era. The first was an epistemological problem, a sense that it had become difficult to know what is real and true in the world. The other was a problem of agency, a sense that complex institutions and forces might manipulate and control individual action and thought. In facing both of these challenges, the literature of paranoia resisted the melodrama of the ‘paranoid style’. It used paranoid suspicion not a demonological tool but as a way of imagining individual resistance to corporate and collective pressures.
– Ibid., pp. 436-7