Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading: Pages 21-35

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Masterlist, links, and glossary

I got all the way to the end, yay me! It was pretty interesting, too.

Content note: Cancer, death.

The problem with paranoia p21-22

So. These paranoid 'protocols of unveiling' have become ubiquitous in cultural and historical studies.

The trouble with a narrow gene pool, of course, is its diminished ability to respond to environmental (for instance, political) change.

(My nerdy ass is loving all these science metaphors)

But the paranoid consensus hasn't entirely displaced other ways of knowing. People just don't admit to using them, even to themselves. Any obvious reparative motives are dismissed as about pleasure ('merely aesthetic') and ameleriorative ('merely reformist')

[I agree but would have liked some more worked examples of this specific dynamic]

What makes pleasure and amelioration so "mere"? Only the exclusiveness of paranoia's faith in demystifying exposure: only its cruel and contemptuous assumption that the one thing lacking for global revolution, explosion of gender roles, or whatever, is people's (that is, other people's) having the painful effects of their oppression, poverty, or deludedness sufficiently exacerbated to make the pain conscious (as if otherwise it wouldn't have been) and intolerable (as if intolerable situations were famous for generating excellent solutions).

Most paranoid theories wouldn't overtly say anything that nasty, but it's a consequence of their structure.

And a lot of criticism, includes some of Sedgwick's, contains the same seeming contradiction as 'The Novel and the Police': the overall effect is a strong theory fuelled by, and fuelling paranoia. But the reason the reader actually reads it is all the little fun moments fuelled by pleasure and love. She's not saying it's duplicitous, exactly, but it seems like a bad idea to have such a strong difference between what one is doing and the reasons for doing it, both for our theory and for our mental state.

And if you change your understanding of why you do things, will this change what you do?

Beyond paranoia p22-25

It is graceless to expect every essay to end with an explanation of what the essay is 'calling for', like the essay writer is a doctor providing a prescription while the reader is the customer expecting a fix. And the proposition of this essay is very modest:

our work grows more interesting, more responsive, more truthful, and more useful as we try to account for its motives in a less stylized fashion than we have been. Perhaps the unpacking, above, of several different elements of paranoid thought can suggest several specific, divergent dimensions in which alternative approaches may also be available

Instead of a single, strong theory monopolising us with paranoia, we can explore the varied, dynamic, and historically dependant ways that strong theoretical constructs interact with weak ones in the ecology of knowing.

This begins with a respect for weak and strong theories, and can take inspiration not only from Tomkins but the whole history of literary criticism. Specifically, the essays in 'Navel Gazing', the book this is an introduction to, contain an 'unhurried, undefensive, theoretically galvanized practice of close reading'.

Wikipedia says:

In literary criticism, close reading is the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text. A close reading emphasizes the single and the particular over the general, effected by close attention to individual words, the syntax, the order in which the sentences unfold ideas, as well as formal structures. A truly attentive close reading of a two-hundred-word poem might be thousands of words long without exhausting the possibilities for observation and insight.

All the stuff I saw about close reading online implies it has remained a cornerstone of literary analysis since it's invention in the early 20th century, but in 1997 Sedgwick described it as 'devalued and near-obsolescent', which just goes to show how disconnected my understanding of things via google can be from Sedgwick's experience in the thick of academia.

Anyway. Her point is that some philosophical tasks can only be achieved by focussing on the here and now. Relating these local, weak theories to stronger, more all-encompassing theories is left as an exercise for the reader the work of art and speculative thought.

Paranoia is not only a strong theory, but one specifically built around avoiding humiliation. Any strong, wide ranging theory will have some similarities, even those based around positive emotions/affect, but there will be differences, too. A theory can be strong, affecting, even upsetting, but still openly encourage the reader to observe and connect to positive affects.

All the affects are important, including paranoia and all the other negative affects. We should not try to replace the monopoly of paranoia with a monopoly of any other effect, even a positive one.

A disturbingly large amount of theory, even that which isn't specifically paranoid, tries to make everyone stick to only one or maybe two affects- whether ecstasy, sublimity, self-shattering, jouissance, suspicion, abjection, knowingness, horror, grim satisfaction, or righteous indignation.

It's like the old joke:
"Comes the revolution, Comrade, everyone gets to eat roast beef every day."
"But Comrade, I don't like roast beef."
"Comes the revolution, Comrade, you'll like roast beef."

Comes the revolution, Comrade, you'll be tickled pink by those deconstructive jokes; you'll faint from ennui every minute that you're not smashing the state apparatus; you'll definitely want hot sex twenty to thirty times a day. You'll be mournful and militant. You'll never want to tell Deleuze and Guattari, "Not tonight, dears, I have a headache."

Once you recognise that paranoia is all about avoiding surprise, you get some idea of what the alternatives might be.

To read from a reparative position, a la Klein, is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new. Instead, we accept surprise as inevitable, and approach the world with the fracturing, sometimes traumatic energy of hope.

Instead of accepting that the past, present and future are all mired in a uniform, inevitable awfulness, the reader accepts that the future may be different from the present, and can entertain the the painful, relieving, ethically crucial possibility that the past could have happened differently from the way it actually did.

Where to for queer readings? p25-27

Paranoid, Freudian understandings of queerness focus on same-sex vs different-sex and on homophobia. Sedgwick argues that paranoia, and gay/lesbian issues, don't have to be as automatically centered as they have been, including in her own work. She doesn't say there should be more space for sorts of queerness Freud wasn't even aware of, like being non-binary, but it seems like a natural consequence of her argument to me.

There is a wealth of practices, many of which can be called reparative, that are invisible or illegible through paranoid eyes. She quotes Joseph Litvak on the importance of mistakes, and loosening the inevitable-seeming connection between mistakes and humiliation.

a lot of queer energy, say around adolescence, goes into what Barthes calls "Ie vouloir-etre-intelligent" (as in "If I have to be miserable, at least let me be brainier than everybody else"), accounting in large part for paranoia's enormous prestige as the very signature of smartness (a smartness that smarts), a lot of queer energy, later on, goes into . . . practices aimed at taking the terror out of error, at making the making of mistakes sexy, creative, even cognitively powerful. Doesn't reading queer mean learning, among other things, that mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises?

This is a specific experience, reliant, as many queer readings are, on a specific time and set of circumstances. A paranoid reading is tied to the notion of the inevitable and universal, to things being the same sort of terrible across all times and places: it happened to my father's father, it is happening to me, and will happen to my son. But isn't it a feature of queer possibility that our generational relations don't always proceed in this lockstep?

Sedgwick talks about Proust for a bit and it mostly went over my head since I haven't read any Proust.

Think of the epiphanic, extravagantly reparative final volume of Proust, in which the narrator, after a long withdrawal from society, goes to a party where he at first thinks everyone is sporting elaborate costumes pretending to be ancient-then realizes that they are old, and so is he-and is then assailed, in half a dozen distinct mnemonic shocks, by a climactic series of joy-inducing "truths" about the relation of writing to time.

Sedgwick argues that this epiphany relies on Proust not being a typical family man, since such a man always inhabits a specific temporal point on the path of son to father to grandfather.

Proust:

And now I began to understand what old age was-old age, which perhaps of all the realities is the one of which we preserve for longest in our life a purely abstract conception, looking at calendars, dating our letters, seeing our friends marry and then in their turn the children of our friends, and yet, either from fear or from sloth, not understanding what all this means, until the day when we behold an unknown silhouette ... which teaches us that we are living in a new world; until the day when a grandson of a woman we once knew, a young man whom instinctively we treat as a contemporary of ours, smiles as though we were making fun of him because it seems that we are old enough to be his grandfather-and I began to understand too what death meant and love and the joys of the spiritual life, the usefulness of suffering, a vocation, etc.

The brutal foreshortening of so many queer lives has made us even more out of step with the usual flow of time.

In a 'normal' generational narrative a 45 year old like Sedgwick would look at a thirty year old and see herself 15 years ago, and look at a 60 year old and see herself in 15 years more.

But she had breast cancer that she (rightly) predicted would kill her before she reached 60, and her younger queer friends have AIDS or cancer from growing up around toxic waste. Like those at risk from racist violence, or dangerous jobs, or lack of healthcare, the 'normal' future and it's perspective on relationships does not apply. The sixty year old friend is the likeliest to still be alive in fifteen years, the only one to have experienced being 60, let alone 75.

It's hard to say, hard even to know, how these relationships are different from those shared by people of different ages on a landscape whose perspectival lines converge on a common disappearing-point. I'm sure ours are more intensely motivated: whatever else we know, we know there isn't time to bullshit. But what it means to identify with each other must also be very different.

On the one hand, there isn't the connection that comes from thinking "they are the same as I was, or will be". But there is an immediacy and intimacy that comes from knowing you only have the now.

Sedgwick thinks reparative knowing may already lay, unrecognised and ignored, at the heart of many queer histories. For example, Butler etc view camp through a paranoid lens as a way to mock and unmask heteronormativity, while being motivated by love is seen as self-hating complicity with the oppressive status quo. The x-ray gaze of the paranoid impulse claims to see through to the minimalist, efficient skeleton of 'truth'.

Meanwhile a reparative impulse is additive. Weak and unformed, it fears that the surrounding culture is inadequate or unfriendly, and seeks to protect itself by conferring plenty on an object that will then have the resources to protect it.

[Not sure what 'the object' is here. The subject of the reading? Also interesting that she describes the reparative impulse here as being motivated by fear, a negative affect. I mean this is using Klein's taxonomy here, not Tomkins', but fear is fear. I think.]

To view camp as, among other things, the communal, historically dense exploration of a variety of reparative practices is to be able to do better justice to many of the defining elements of classic camp performance: the startling, juicy displays of excess erudition, for example; the passionate, often hilarious antiquarianism, the prodigal production of alternate historiographies; the "over"-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste, or leftover products; the rich, highly interruptive affective variety; the irrepressible fascination with ventriloquistic experimentation; the disorienting juxtapositions of present with past, and popular with high culture.

We see a similar glue of surplus beauty in the writing of D. A. Miller and other "paranoid" personalities. It is not people, but positions and practices that can be divided between paranoid and reparative.

it is sometimes the most paranoid-tending people who are able to, and need to, develop and disseminate the richest reparative practices. And if the paranoid or the depressive positions operate on a smaller scale than the level of individual typology, they operate also on a larger, that of shared histories, emergent communities, and the weaving of intertextual discourse.

Description of the individual essays p28-35

I skimmed these, they were interesting but not really relevant to this post.

Conclusion (Sedgwick) p35

The vocabulary for articulating any reader's reparative motive toward a text or a culture has long been so sappy, aestheticizing, defensive, anti-intellectual, or reactionary that it's no wonder few critics are willing to describe their acquaintance with such motives. The prohibitive problem, however, has been in the limitations of present theoretical vocabularies rather than in the reparative motive itself.

No less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic, the reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture-even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.

Conclusion (me)

So I went into this hoping for a single clear approach to 'reparative reading', which I was conceptualising as a new and better alternative to paranoid reading.

But it turns out that's missing the point: there is no single 'best' approach. Thinking there is a single best approach is half the problem with any discourse where paranoid readings have become the norm. Sometimes it's useful to be paranoid- after all, they really are out to get us. But it's just one way of understanding the world, no better or worse than any other. And so is reparative reading.

I would still have personally preferred some more practical examples of how to do readings that are, if not wholly reparative, then at least not wholly paranoid. But her essay is aimed at people who already have a formal education in ways of reading.

The idea of the positive feedback loop created by a 'strong affect theory' reminds me of game theory or the original definition of a meme. These sorts of theories model people as simple AIs, with consistent behaviour based on objective measures. Which is not how people actually work but it can still have useful insights.

You may be familiar with the prisoner's dilemma where two people are separately given the choice to help the other person or betray them. The best outcome is when both cooperate, the worst personal outcome is if you try to help the other person but they betray you. And even though it benefits both if both cooperate, since you can't trust the other person, the maths says the most rational choice is to betray them, just in case they betray you.

But then there's the iterated prisoner's dilemma, where a bunch of people repeatedly face the same choice against each other, and can remember what someone chose before. There are a bunch of strategies you could take here, from the simplistic "always betray" and "always help" to more complicated strategising. But it turns out the most effective generally have the following four properties:

Optimistic/nice: Never be the first person to choose betray. Help strangers, and those who have helped you.
Retaliating: be willing to betray someone once they have betrayed you.
Forgiving: If someone is helping you now, help back, no matter how much they have betrayed you in the past.
Non-envious: The aim is to maximise your own experience, not to bring other people down.

But it depends on context. If enough people take the selfish 'betray every time' approach, you're better off never giving anyone the benefit of the doubt, and so you start betraying everyone too, which just encourages more people to switch to this strategy, until everyone is just betraying everyone else all the time.

Which isn't quite what Sedgwick was talking about with the contagiousness of paranoia, but it feels broadly related.

I'm left with a number of other questions. Off the top of my head:

- Is this sort of blurring between psychoanalysis and literary analysis common? It worked for what Sedgwick was doing but makes me feel a little uncomfortable, both as someone with mental illness and as someone from a science background who feels like any discussion of something like how brains work should take into account the most up to date research. I mean stuff like game theory is also often speculation without any basis in current psychology/sociolology etc, but that can also be an issue.

- If we do accept her framing in terms of affect theory, what would it look like to do criticism through the lens of some of the other affects? Are there existing formal critical theories that are fuelled by interest-excitement? Those that seek to avoid anger-rage?

- If this was cutting edge queer studies in 1997, what is cutting edge now? How have her ideas been expanded upon, critiqued, and remixed? Sedgwick's wiki page led me to postcritique, which sounds promising.

- And finally, how can I use these ideas in practice? In what ways could they benefit others, and how could that use be encouraged? The relevance to the dynamics on twitter is certainly pretty obvious, I can see why the article that sent me down this rabbit hole brought it up.

I'm going to have to think about it all some more. But for now, this is what I got.

Since you got this far, thanks for reading! I hope you found it interesting, and I would be curious to hear your thoughts.