Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading: Pages 7-21

[sqbr]

Masterlist, links, and glossary

I found a online version of the 2003 version of the essay, from a brief skim it's basically identical, minus the parts about the book of essays it used to be an introduction to.


Some thoughts now I'm partway through

Sedgwick draws a bunch on psychoanalysis and I feel like there end up being some unfortunate implications about mental illness. But the resulting philosophical theories themselves seem ok so far, and I don't know how much of this is me being too literal or misunderstanding the intersections of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and critical theory. Plus, 1997, it was a different time, etc. So I won't derail the post by grumbling too much. But I am thinking grumbly thoughts!

Also I keep noticing myself wanting to make sentences punchier by removing all the equivocating language like "seems to be", "could be possible" etc. Which makes Sedgwick's points clearer but also implies more certainty than she is claiming. Maths writing is all about seeking certainty but requiring iron-clad proof before claiming it, while the sorts of social media based meta that has formed most of my pop culture education on critical theory tends to blithely claim certainty with no proof at all. Meanwhile I have personally struggled to learn the difference between careful nuance and wishy-washy vagueness, and between punchy clarity and unsupported overstatement. I don't know how typical Sedgwick's writing is amongst queer theorists in the balance she strikes but it's been interesting to work with it. And if you want a totally accurate understanding of her argument, read her directly!

Alternatives to the hermeneutic of suspicion p7-8

So, the aim is to find a framework where paranoia as just one kind of practice among many instead of the One True Method.

Her two examples are Melanie Klein and Silvan Tomkins.

The 1940s psychoanalyst Melanie Klein used Object relations theory: Childhood experiences cause us to create mental 'objects' based on our mother etc we unconsciously use to model and predict other people's behaviour in the future. We take up various positions in relation to these objects, like 'the depressive position'.

Sedgwick finds 'positions' more flexible than 'personality type', 'developmental stage' etc. People move back and forth between different positions depending on context.

Specifically, the paranoid position and depressive position form a pair of connected states that people oscillate between.

Wikipedia's description of Klein's opinions on these positions doesn't resemble my understanding of depression or Sedgwick's description. But here's how Sedgwick describes these two states:

The paranoid position is marked by hatred, envy, and anxiety. It is a position of alertness to the dangers posed by the hateful and envious part-objects that one defensively projects into, carves out of, and ingests from the world around one.

The depressive position is anxiety-mitigating but difficult to attain or maintain

[One uses] one's own resources to assemble or "repair" the murderous part-objects into something like a whole-though not, and may I emphasize this, not necessarily like any preexisting whole. Once assembled to one's own specifications, the more satisfying object is available both to be identified with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in turn. Among Klein's names for the reparative process is love.

(I AM MAKING SUCH A FACE. Depression MITIGATES anxiety? In what UNIVERSE? Anyway)

Sedgwick's description here valorises the depressive position, but afaict Klein sees the two as more equivalent (since, you know, too much depression is bad), with good mental health requiring a balance. And Sedgwick argues that good criticism requires a mixture of paranoid and reparative aspects, even if the critic themself doesn't conceptualise it that way.

The nature of paranoia p8-21

She acknowledges that the examples of paranoid criticism she's going to draw on are limited and old, but they're ones she's personally found interesting and exemplary.

Sedgwick draws a line between paranoia and delusion/psychosis/dementia in a way which made me a bit uncomfortable. But her point is that the reason for questioning paranoid practices is not just that their suspicions can be delusional. In the other direction, paranoid strategies do not offer unique access to true knowledge.

Paranoid strategies represent one way among others of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge. Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly.

Specifically, as explained the sections to follow:

Paranoia is anticipatory.
Paranoia is reflexive and mimetic.
Paranoia is a strong theory.
Paranoia is a theory of negative affects.
Paranoia places its faith in exposure.

Paranoia is anticipatory p9-10:

The first imperative of paranoia is "There must be no bad surprises", and so paranoia is all about knowledge. Bad news must always be already known, and known as inevitable, and and no loss can be too far in the future to need to be preemptively discounted. She gives the example of Judith Butler's vigilance for traces in other theorists' writing of nostalgia for any 'impossible' past where The Gender Rules did not apply.

Paranoia is reflexive and mimetic p10-12:

Reflexive has multiple meanings, mostly involving an object acting on itself or being about itself etc. Mimetic means 'representing or imitating something'.

What she's saying is that paranoia must be imitated to be understood and understands only by imitation: "Anything you can do to me I can do first" - to myself.

In The Novel and the Police, D. A. Miller is much more explicit than Freud in embracing the twin propositions that one understands paranoia only by oneself practicing paranoid knowing, and that the way paranoia has of understanding anything is by imitating and embodying it. That paranoia refuses to be only either a way of knowing or a thing known

Paranoia grows like a crystal in a hypersaturated solution, blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand. Worse, it limits the ability of understanding to lead to political or cultural struggle. Paranoia is a form of love, but the love that demands least from its object.

I think what she's saying is that paranoia creates a sort of passive despair: if everything is a uniform mass of terribleness, always has been, and always will be, then there's nothing we can or should do about it.

She gives the example of how recent feminist and queer discussions of psychoanalysis act like it is all inexorably obsessed with sex difference and 'the phallus', when from Freud onward there is a richly divergent variety of approaches which, while relevant to the experience of gender, are often not especially related to sex differences at all.

Sedgwick's theory is that feminists and queers have gone from an awareness that no topic of psychoanalytic thought is immune to gender reification/essentialism to a paranoid anticipation that violent sexual differentiation must be assumed, or even imposed. The idea of ever not interpreting all psychoanlaysis this way is sacrificed to the imperative to never be surprised. In a paranoid view, it is more dangerous for something to be unanticipated than to be unchallenged.

Paranoia is a strong theory p12-15

This is shorthand for 'paranoia is a strong affect theory', specifically 'a strong humiliation or humiliation-fear theory', drawing on Silvan Tomkins' Affect Theory:

There are nine discrete, biologically wired 'affects' (emotions that promote a response). The first six, divided into mild and more severe manifestations, are interest-excitement, enjoyment-joy, surprise-startle, distress-anguish, anger-rage, and fear-terror. Then comes shame-humiliation, "dissmell" (avoidance?), and disgust.

A 'strong affect theory' is a broad, compelling way of viewing and interacting with the world which relies upon and encourages a specific affect/emotion. A weak affect theory is one which only describes/offers guidance on a small range of things, and has less effect on decision making and worldview.

In Tomkins, there is no distance at all between affect theory in the sense of the important explicit theorizing some scientists and philosophers do around affects, and affect theory in the sense of the largely tacit theorizing all people do in experiencing and trying to deal with their own and others' affects.

So I think 'paranoia is a strong theory' means 'a paranoid approach to life offers explanations and approaches for a wide variety of situations, through a lens of humiliation and fear."

Quoting Tomkins:

A humiliation theory is strong to the extent to which it enables more and more experiences to be accounted for as instances of humiliating experiences on the one hand, or to the extent to which it enables more and more anticipation of such contingencies before they actually happen

A strong theory is 'strong' in the sense that a strong poet is strong, it is elegant and effective, but not inherently better.

What characterizes strong theory in Tomkins is not, after all, how well it avoids negative affect or finds positive affect, but the size and topology of the domain that it organizes

And there is a positive feedback loop: if a theory is fueled by the desire to avoid humiliation, but actually causes feelings of humiliation, this just makes it stronger by providing more fuel.

Any theory/behaviour pattern fueled by a desire to avoid a given affect/emotional experience that actually works will remain weak, because it is undercutting the very motivation to keep using it.

And strong theories risk becoming all-devouring tautologies: the mind is so consumed by looking for what it feels is ever-present danger, it dismisses any input which doesn't seem dangerous as irrelevant, and so the belief in ever-present danger is magnified. A circular, tautological worldview is experienced by the practitioner as a triumphant advance toward truth and vindication.

the main argument or "strong theory" of The Novel and the Police is entirely circular: everything can be understood as an aspect of the carceral, therefore the carceral is everywhere. But who reads The Novel and the Police to find out whether its main argument is true?

Within the strong theory of The Novel and the Police there is space for a wealth of tonal nuance, worldly observation, clever asides etc. These local rewards are like weak theories sheltered within the strong theory: an insistence that everything means one thing somehow permits a sharpened sense of all the ways there are of meaning it.

But students and other critics' derivative rephrasings of the book's grimly strong theory prove that paranoia is teachable, and that the compelling force of a strong theory can make it hard to recognize whether and where real conceptual work is getting done.

Paranoia is a theory of negative affects. p15-17

Tomkins describes some affects as negative, including humiliation/fear. So paranoia is a strong theory of a negative affect.

Tomkins thinks people have three goals:
1) minimize negative affect
2) maximize positive affect
2) minimise affect inhibition (not sure what this means)

A strong theory of a negative affect, specifically a paranoid fear of humiliation, may make someone so obsessed with the goal of avoiding the negative they neglect the other two goals, eg they're so focussed on avoiding feeling bad they never try to feel good.

Klein says something similar about the importance of growing past the paranoid position's focus on avoiding pain into the ability to seek pleasure.

Meanwhile Freud conflates Tomkins first two goals into a single 'pleasure principle' and then focusses on the effect of pain avoidance, on the assumption that pleasure seeking is so natural everyone does it automatically. Freud thinks we need an anxiety-fueled 'reality
principle' to keep us from mindlessly seeking immediate hedostic pleasure. In the paranoid Freudian worldview, 'reality' is the impossible yet vital necessity of forestalling pain and surprise, and the only and inevitable mode, motive, content, and proof of true knowledge.

There is no room for Proust's "jostling each other within me a whole host of truths concerning human passions and character and con-duct", known to be true because they bring joy.

Obviously "truth is that which makes me happy to know it" is also unreliably tautological, but no more than "truth is that which takes the most negative view of things". If anything a pleasure seeking approach is more likely to lead to truth, since positive affect theories tend to be weaker and thus less inclined to spiral into rigidly biased self-fulfilling prophecies. [citation needed, if you ask me, but anyway]

In a world full of loss, pain, and oppression, both epistemologies are likely to be based on deep pessimism-the reparative motive of seeking pleasure, after all, arrives, by Klein's account, only with the achievement of a depressive position

I feel like fully understanding this would require reading more about Klein's opinions about depression than would be good for me so let's move on.

Of the two, however, it is only paranoid knowledge that has so thorough a practice of disavowing its affective motive and force, and masquerading as the very stuff of truth.

I don't think this is true! I have definitely noticed cynics (and for that matter people with depression but ANYWAY) acting like they're sooo much more rational and connected to truth while everyone else is self indulgently deluded. And I'll provisionally accept that pleasure seeking philosophies may usually be more honest about their approach/bias, but not that they always are.

Paranoia places its faith in exposure p17-21

Whatever it's actual motivations, paranoia says it is all about knowledge: if people just understood the way the World Really Works they'd be paranoid too.

Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud all have a paradoxical faith in the effectiveness of demystification. Similarly, Butler's emphasis on how drag etc 'reveal' the truth of gender has an unstated assumption that seeing these 'revelations' will automatically be enough to convince the viewer of her argument.

New Historicists like the author of The Novel and the Police focus on exposing and problematizing hidden violences in the genealogy of 'the modern liberal subject', assuming that making a problem visible is an automatic step in the direction of solving it.

The principles of New Historicism: every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices:

• that every act of unmasking, critique and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes;
• that literary and non-literary "texts" circulate inseparably;that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths, nor expresses inalterable human nature;
• ... that a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe.

Classic hermeneutic of suspicion, amirite?

Sedgwick watched grad students 'unveiling the hidden historical violences that underlie a secular, universalist liberal humanism' and wondered where they were seeing any 'secular, universalist liberal humanism' in a xenophobic Reagan-Bush-Clinton America where "liberal" is, if anything, a taboo category, and where "secular humanism" is routinely treated as a marginal religious sect.

[Ok I get her point but am a little iffy on the idea that there was no issue in 1997 with liberals who seemed fine on the surface but engaged in hidden bigotry and violence, like...I'm pretty sure that was a thing, if not to the extent these grad students acted like it was. But next section is great, I'm just going to cut and paste pretty much all of it.]

Why focus so much on hidden violence when so much of it is not out in the open? Most violence is, and always has been, specifically intended to be highly visible, as a public warning or act of intimidation. What does a hermeneutic of suspicion and exposure have to say to social formations in which visibility itself constitutes much of the violence?

Here is one remarkable index of historical change: it used to be opponents of capital punishment who argued that, if practiced at all, executions should be done in public so as to shame state and spectators by airing of the previously hidden judicial violence. Today it is no longer opponents but death-penalty cheerleaders, flushed with triumphal ambitions, who consider that the proper place for executions is on television. What price now the cultural critics' hard-won skill at making visible, behind permissive appearances, the hidden traces of oppression and persecution?

The paranoid trust in exposure seemingly depends, in addition, on an infinite reservoir of naivete in those who make up the audience for these unveilings. What is the basis for assuming that it will surprise or disturb-never mind motivate-anyone to learn that a given social manifestation is artificial, self-contradictory, imitative, phantasmatic, or even violent?

As Peter Sloterdijk points out, cynicism or "enlightened false consciousness"- false consciousness that knows itself to be false, "its falseness already reflexively buffered"- already represents the universally widespread way in which enlightened people see to it that they are "not taken for suckers." (later Sedgwick describes this as what paranoia looks like when it operates as a weak theory)

How television-starved would someone have to be to find it shocking that ideologies contradict themselves, that simulacra don't have originals, or that gender representations are artifical? My own guess would be that such popular cynicism, while undoubtedly widespread, is only one among the heterogeneous, competing theories that constitute the mental ecology of most people. Some exposes, some demystifications, some bearings of witness do have great effectual force (though often of an unanticipated kind). Many that are just as true and convincing have none at all, however; and as long as that is so, we must admit that the efficacy and directionality of such acts reside somewhere else than in their relation to knowledge per se.

[RIGHT?? GOD. I've been thinking about this a LOT lately, wasn't expecting it to come up in this essay. But well put, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.]

And the while the New Historicists were generally right with their general tone of "things are bad and getting worse", they completely failed to predict the way things would get worse, eg they focussed on the flaws of the secular welfare state but never suggested that it would be undermined to the point of collapse.

Yet this failure of paranoid perspectives to predict the way things actually went wrong just makes them more powerful, with the logic that clearly, we weren't paranoid enough.

Looking back, the New Historicists are an understandable reaction against 1960s liberalism. For example, Richard Hofstadter's immensely influential 1963 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" does that obnoxious thing of contrasting the assumed majority of sensible centrists who calmly understand 'both sides', versus the 'paranoid bias' of the 'minority' of people with strong political opinions of any sort.

He gives the example of the 'paranoid arguments' of an anti-gun-control lobbyist who insisted gun control was "a further attempt by a subversive power to make us part of one world socialistic government".

the spectacular datedness of Hofstadter's example isn't only an index of how far the American political center has shifted toward the right since 1963. It's also a sign of how normative such paranoid thinking has become at every point in the political spectrum. In a funny way, I feel closer today to that paranoid Arizonan than I do to Hofstadter

This is interesting to me: like Sedgwick, my parents are a leftist baby boomers, while my maternal grandparents were leftists a generation older. And in 1997 they were if anything more paranoid than my parents, as a result of living and being activists through the 40s, 50s and 60s as communists/labour organisers/a Jew etc. Then again I don't know what they were like in 1963, and my parents are pretty paranoid now. Also, in the late 90s I encountered plenty of people with very similarly smug centrist views to the impression she gives of Hofstadter, including Americans, but would say they are rarer these days. HMM. I mean if nothing else she seems to be accurately predicting the way things would go.

Anyway. As she points out: it might have been useful to expose the "news" of a hermeneutic of suspicion to the Hofstadters of the 1960s. But it's something else to keep breathlessly exposing this "news" to a hyper-demystified, paranoid modern scene and expecting it to make any difference.

Comments

[winterbird]

2) minimise affect inhibition (not sure what this means)

I *think* this is referring to the idea that we avoid lessening or inhibiting our emotional responses - like we don't seek out *less* happiness, and *less* positive affect. We don't (generally) engage in things we like in order to inhibit our engagement, or inhibit our experience of that engagement (unless you were specifically trying to desensitise to something).

An example might be - we don't watch a comedy that we know makes us laugh, specifically to inhibit our laughter and joy affect in response. So it might be that a goal is to engage in a way that creates more engagement, and more emotional affect (affect = emotional response in psychology). But ultimately I don't know, and it could mean anything at all once it's been in the hands of very specific theorists in very specific arenas - literary queer theory uses different jargon to media studies queer theory. x.x

I don't think this is true! I have definitely noticed cynics (and for that matter people with depression but ANYWAY) acting like they're sooo much more rational and connected to truth while everyone else is self indulgently deluded.

SAME. I actually notice I'm way more likely to slip into those mindsets specifically *when* I'm feeling cynical or depressed.

*

I feel very stupid saying this, but is another way of looking at paranoid reading vs. reparative reading a bit like 'bad faith reading' and 'benefit of the doubt reading' where one seeks to expose like, the worst of something and goes in with bad faith vs. I'm going to give this the benefit of the doubt and try and see what's nourishing in it alongside its flaws. Like is that sort of where we're headed here? (It's cool if you don't know or if I'm totally wrong, lol).

Every time I see the word hermeneutic I swear my entire body is like 'oh no. I'm going to get graded for this' lmao. I've been enjoying reading these though!

[muccamukk]

*seconds minimising inhibition = trying to feel nothing*

I feel very stupid saying this, but is another way of looking at paranoid reading vs. reparative reading a bit like 'bad faith reading' and 'benefit of the doubt reading' where one seeks to expose like, the worst of something and goes in with bad faith vs. I'm going to give this the benefit of the doubt and try and see what's nourishing in it alongside its flaws.

I've been wondering this as well.

I think the difference from what I understand of this is that there's is an implied difference between bad faith and paranoid in terms of the motive of the reader. Like if you call someone bad faith, it implies that they have bad motives, more or less, whereas the description of paranoid here people seem to have good motives (as useful as good and bad motives is as a theory), like they're trying to Expose The Truth, they just assume the truth is awful and everyone's out to get them.

But from rhetorical stand point, saying someone is doing something in "bad faith" is more or less useless because it immediately turns into a rousing round of "am not!" "are too!" "am not!" etc, since it's basically a petty insult at this point. I think the description of paranoid here is a lot more gentle? It's a valid way to read some things, and there's a good reason to use it, but just not... reading everything like that all the time.

Is my take anyway, because I had been wondering the same thing until I read this explication.

[sqbr]

Huh! That was not my understanding of a bad faith reading, I always thought of it as similar to how you're describing a paranoid reading, but looking the meaning up there does definitely seem to be more sense of duplicitousness or malice to it.

[sqbr]

I think this is referring to the idea that we avoid lessening or inhibiting our emotional responses - like we don't seek out less happiness, and less positive affect.

Ah, thank you!

Nothing you could say on this subject could seem stupid to me!

is another way of looking at paranoid reading vs. reparative reading a bit like 'bad faith reading' and 'benefit of the doubt reading

You know, I've finished the essay now, and I'm still not sure. Sort...of? Maybe?

my entire body is like 'oh no. I'm going to get graded for this' lmao

Meanwhile every time I used the word (having to cut and paste it in every time) I felt like a fraud who had no idea what they're talking about. It's a scary word!