Brainwashing

David Seed

Description

An examination of the literary and cinematic representations of brainwashing during the Cold War era"Brainwashing: A method for systematically changing attitudes or altering beliefs, originated in totalitarian countries, especially through the use of torture, drugs, or psychological-stress techniques" -Random House DictionaryThe term "brainwashing," coined during the Korean War, was popularized by a CIA operative who was a tireless campaigner against communism. It took hold quickly and became a means to articulate fears of totalitarian tendencies in American life. David Seed traces the assimilation of the notion of brainwashing into science fiction, political commentary, and conspiracy narratives of the Cold War era. He demonstrates how these works grew out of a context of political and social events and how they express the anxieties of the time.This study reviews 1950s science fiction, Korean War fiction, and the film The Manchurian Candidate. Seed provides new interpret-ations of writers such as Orwell and Burroughs within the history of psychological manipulation for political purposes, using declassified and other documents to contextualize the material. He explores the shifting viewpoints of how brainwashing is represented, changing from an external threat to American values to an internal threat against individual American liberties by the U.S. government.Anyone with an interest in science fiction, popular culture, or the Cold War will welcome this study.

Sujets

• Idioma inglés
• USA
• Popular culture
• English
• États-Unis
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 13 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612774060
• Langue: English

Extrait

brainwashing
brain washing
The Fictions of Mind Control
A Study of Novels and Films Since World War II
David Seed
The Kent State University Press
Kent and London
2004 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2004010977
ISBN 0-87338-813-5
Manufactured in the United States of America
08 07 06 05 04 5 4 3 2 1
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Seed, David.
Brainwashing : the fictions of mind control:
a study of novels and films since World War II / David Seed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-87338-813-5 (alk. paper)
1. English fiction-20th century-History and criticism.
2. Brainwashing in literature.
3. American fiction-20th century-History and criticism.
4. Literature and science-English-speaking countries.
5. World War, 1939-1945-Literature and the war.
6. World War, 1939-1945-Influence.
7. Brainwashing in motion pictures.
8. Alien abduction in literature.
9. Conspiracies in literature.
I. Title.
PR 888.B72S44 2004
823 .91409353-dc22
2004010977
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.
To Joanna with love
contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Precursors: Nineteen Eighty-Four in Context
2 Brainwashing Defined and Applied
3 Dystopias, Invasions, and Takeovers
4 The Impact of Korea
5 The Manchurian Candidate
6 William Burroughs: Control Technologies, Viruses, and Psychotronics
7 Psychotherapy and Social Enforcement
8 The Control of Violence
9 The Guinea Pigs
10 Cyberpunk and Other Revisions
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I would like to record thanks to the following who gave assistance to this project: Elliot Atkins, Mark Bould, Pat Cadigan, Susan Carruthers, John Clute, Robert Crossley, Thomas M. Disch, Martin Durham, Alan C. Elms, Pat Gehrke, Bennett Huffman, David Karp, Ken Kesey, Alastair Spark, Brian Stableford, Wil Verhoeven, Jenny Wolmark; to Liverpool University for a semester s leave to complete this study; and to my wife, Joanna, for her support throughout and for her help in producing the final manuscript.
Introduction
Brainwashing:
A method for systematically changing attitudes or altering beliefs, originated in totalitarian countries, especially through the use of torture, drugs, or psychological-stress techniques.
-Random House Dictionary
The systematic and often forcible elimination from a person s mind of all established ideas, esp. political ones, so that another set of ideas may take their place.
-Oxford English Dictionary
There has been no critical account published of representations of brainwashing in prose fiction and film. This continues to be a visible absence, particularly in view of the reassessment of Cold War culture that has produced a number of important studies of nuclear war fiction, one analysis of Korean War fiction by Arne Axellson, and monographs on containment (Alan Nadel) and surveillance (Timothy Melley and Patrick O Donnell). 1 Brainwashing as a subject cuts across genres as varied as dystopias, war fiction, and invasion fantasies, even extending into contemporary dramatizations of the interface between mind and machines. Its postwar cultural representations bring the concept of the singular discrete self under increasing pressure.
Since its assimilation into discussions of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, the term brainwashing and its associated images have tended to suffer critical neglect from their very familiarity although they express the deep-seated fear that the mind-the traditional seat of individual selfhood-can be reshaped by technical means. The word cannot help but trigger the image of Laurence Harvey s wooden stare as he acts out the role of the trained assassin in The Manchurian Candidate. And yet it is a word with a complex, if brief, history, first denoting the workings of an alien system of mind control beyond the United States and then becoming relocated within American culture to suggest similar processes that seemed even more unnerving by being so near home. It will be the basic argument of this study that the notion of brainwashing triggered and sustained an extended crisis of cultural self-examination throughout the early Cold War period and has continued to inform narratives that examine the relation of technology to consciousness long after its initial political meaning had lapsed. The historian Walter Bowart has described brainwashing as a domestic issue, largely a campaign waged in the United States home press. It served as a sharp-edged propaganda weapon and was aimed at the American people to add to the already considerable fear of the Communists. 2 For Bowart, the U.S. government had a vested interest in promoting the fear of brainwashing because it diverted public attention from embarrassing defections and helped to justify covert experiments that it sponsored during the period of the Korean War and beyond.
The roots of the notion of brainwashing lie in the experiments carried out between the two world wars by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov and his American equivalent John B. Watson. Both researchers were hostile to introspection as a mode of investigation, and both were determined to establish a scientific study of the mind based on measurable physical phenomena. Both exploited the stimulus-and-response pattern in their experiments, and Watson made no bones about applying his discoveries to social planning. He conducted notorious experiments at inducing fear responses by introducing a rat into the crib of an infant named Albert, experiments that were subsequently alluded to in Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and later novels. Watson was one of the earliest to make the argument that induced conditioning was simply repeating in a more structured and directed way the process of socialization undergone by every individual. Then in his 1924 monograph Behaviorism Watson made his notorious claim that, if he was given twelve healthy infants and his own specified world to bring them up in, he could train them to fulfill any role, regardless of the children s talents. Watson later admitted that he had gone beyond the facts in making this claim, but it only exaggerates his stance as a social technician. His writings were full of terms like implanting, building in, and unlearning, which collectively suggest that, in suitably skilled hands, the behavior of any individual can be shaped at will. And, although Watson concentrates on externals, his writings further suggest that the individual s mind can be altered too.
While there are early signs in pre-1945 fiction of practices that resembled brainwashing, the concept and the term were Cold War phenomena, both promoting the grand narrative of Communist conspiracy. When Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA , admitted that brainwashing was of great psychological interest to the West but was never practised there, he was making at once an understatement and a disingenuous claim that it belonged exclusively within the Communist bloc. 3 The shocks to the administration of the trial of Cardinal Mindszenty and of reports that American POW s in Korea were being manipulated into turning against their own country triggered a massive covert wave of psychological experimentation funded by the CIA and other agencies throughout the 1950s. These programs, the most notorious of which was the CIA s MK-ULTRA project, included pharmacological trials of LSD and other substances, the use of hypnosis, sensory deprivation, electroshocks, the application of radioactive elements, and even ESP . In short, every conceivable means of mind control was investigated during the 1950s and 1960s. In his survey The Making of the Cold War Enemy , Ron Robin has shown that this government-sponsored research usually applied behavioristic methods heavily colored by domestic ideological assumptions in order to construct models of alien practice. Most of these projects have been well documented in such pioneering studies as Peter Watson s War on the Mind, Walter Bowart s Operation Mind Control, and many other studies that will be cited in later chapters.
The analysis of brainwashing or mind control self-evidently involves an examination of how power relations are represented, and I have repeatedly drawn on Michel Foucault s argument in Discipline and Punish that the subjects of surveillance internalize the official gaze. In Panopticism Foucault describes the way in which Jeremy Bentham s circular model prison dissociates seeing from the seen, so that the inmates cannot see their observers but are sure that they themselves can be observed at any time. Thus the inmate inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles. 4 Independently, R. D. Laing arrived at a similar position when he stated in his introduction to the 1965 edition of The Divided Self that psychiatry can so easily be a technique of brainwashing, of inducing behaviour that is adjusted, by (preferably) non-injurious torture. In the best places, where straitjackets are abolished, doors unlocked, leucotomies largely forgone, these can be replaced by more subtle lobotomies and tranquillizers that place the bars of Bedlam and the locked doors inside the patient. 5 Whether the context is political, psychiatric, or social, we shall see this internalization of processes of monitoring and surveillance occurring again and again in fictional texts from Nineteen Eighty-Four onward.
Two recent monographs on cultural paranoia have helped to focus the analysis of narrative structures in this study, both published in 2000. Timothy Melley s Empire of Conspiracy pursues the notion of what he calls agency panic to extrapolate a theme of crisis over selfhood that he finds running through postwar American writing. Melley helpfully links fiction to contemporary social commentary by David Riesman, Vance Packard, and others