In December 2010 the U.S. Embassy in Kabul acknowledged that it
was providing major funding for thirteen episodes of Eagle Four a
new Afghani television melodrama based loosely on the blockbuster
U.S. series 24. According to an embassy spokesperson, Eagle Four
was part of a strategy aimed at transforming public suspicion of
security forces into something like awed respect. Why would a
wartime government spend valuable resources on a melodrama of
covert operations? The answer, according to Timothy Melley, is not
simply that fiction has real political effects but that, since the
Cold War, fiction has become integral to the growth of national
security as a concept and a transformation of democracy.
In The Covert Sphere, Melley links this cultural shift to the
birth of the national security state in 1947. As the United States
developed a vast infrastructure of clandestine organizations, it
shielded policy from the public sphere and gave rise to a new
cultural imaginary, "the covert sphere." One of the surprising
consequences of state secrecy is that citizens must rely
substantially on fiction to "know," or imagine, their nation's
foreign policy. The potent combination of institutional secrecy and
public fascination with the secret work of the state was
instrumental in fostering the culture of suspicion and uncertainty
that has plagued American society ever since and, Melley argues,
that would eventually find its fullest expression in
postmodernism.
The Covert Sphere traces these consequences from the Korean War
through the War on Terror, examining how a regime of psychological
operations and covert action has made the conflation of reality and
fiction a central feature of both U.S. foreign policy and American
culture. Melley interweaves Cold War history with political theory
and original readings of films, television dramas, and popular
entertainments from The Manchurian Candidate through 24 as well as
influential writing by Margaret Atwood, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo,
Joan Didion, E. L. Doctorow, Michael Herr, Denis Johnson, Norman
Mailer, Tim O'Brien, and many others. "
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