Conspiracy Theorizing Surveillance: considering modalities of paranoia and conspiracy in surveillance studies

Abstract

In this paper I argue that the notion of paranoia can inform a post-panoptic theory of surveillance, without simply functioning as a pre-emptive dismissal of a critical engagement with technologies and regimes of surveillance as just paranoid. Rather, I seek to address how paranoia can be rearticulated to serve a productive, non-pathological function in an analysis of logics of surveillance. To this end, I consider the manner in which paranoia is characterised in popular cultural narratives and how the advent of cultural paranoia can be understood in the context of the expansion of state and corporate surveillance, especially in the UK and post-9/11 North America. Drawing on this notion of cultural paranoia, I then argue for three modalities of paranoia-as-surveillance theory. The first modality, the paranoia of the subject of surveillance, addresses the divergent panoptic subject who rejects the disciplinary logic of the panopticon; the second modality considers how the paranoid as the suspicious subject could be used to characterise the expansion of surveillance regimes through an ever-present need to observe; and the third modality of conspiracy theory proposes that a paranoid logic, akin to that of the conspiracy theory, sutures over epistemic gaps in the interpretation of information in instances of analytic deficit.