Paranoid Politics: An Introduction

Abstract

Paranoid Politics:An Introduction Frida Beckman (bio) and Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) Is there a paranoid style of the 21st century? Or should we talk about the "paranoid styles" of the 21st century? Or is the term "paranoia" a distraction in the context, one that obscures the formidable force and passionate proliferation of conspiracy theories in our contemporaneity? One thing is certain—much has changed since Richard Hofstadter held his lecture at Oxford in 1963 and subsequently published what would become a seminal essay: "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" in Harper's Magazine in 1964. Across the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st, we have seen the supposed end of history and of grand narratives, the triumphs of neoliberalism, and the fragmentation, or, some would even say disintegration, of the public sphere. We have also seen the gradual dispersion and decline of a disciplinary society, with identifiable and more national sources of power, and the intensification of societies of control and security that have included not only more intricate modes of surveillance, but also the multiplication and dissemination of sources and features of power. This makes where we are now rather different from the time at which Hofstadter wrote his essay. Then it was easier, supposedly, not just to discern sources and organizations of power, but also to distinguish the perceived enemy, whether it bided its time in the big country in the east or the smaller island nation down south or infiltrated the cultural, academic, and entertainment industries or hid under your bed within the U.S. borders. The developments over the past half a century or so have confounded perceptions of identity and agency both of ourselves and of our supposed enemies. Who has power? Where is power? How can we resist it? Can we even claim to be able to position ourselves as separate from it? And who or what is threatening that autonomy, if we still have it? Who is the enemy? Because enemies Americans must have, at least if we accede to Hofstadter's historicization of the U.S. as haunted, from its very conception, by various conspiracies against the American way of life (2008, 19). Like control and security, enemies seem to proliferate, effectively invented and/or reinforced by conspiracy theories spinning ever expanding nets and constructing ostensibly concrete threats around attitudes to Muslims, [End Page 9] Mexicans, Jews, elites, leftists and so on and so forth. It is as if conspiracy theories have taken the place of grand narratives, salvaging disoriented subjects with die-hard conceptions of autonomous selves by giving them purpose and direction, an antagonistic form and shape consolidated via that which it pushes against. Although both phenomena have been around for a very long time, both "paranoia" and "conspiracy theory" are concepts that have been used abundantly in our ongoing diagnosis of the present. The two are clearly interlinked, a paranoid approach to how "everything is connected" frequently, and quite logically, leading to a more or less intricate weaving of conspiracy theories. But they are not the same. Paranoia as a term has a long history emerging initially in Greek literature and beginning to receive its more medical connotations in the 17th century. It thus gradually becomes a clinical term and although the definitions, and more remarkably, the perceived causes, for paranoia have varied over time (there are probably not many today who believe, as did Freud, that the trigger is a repressed homosexuality, perhaps because there are not that many who, like the famous Judge Schreber, believe that their dreams of being penetrated "as a woman" is caused by experiments on them by doctors and that they have been especially chosen by God), it has continued to center around an understanding of the paranoid subject as having delusions of personal persecution and grandeur. Where paranoia as a term stems etymologically from Greek "para" and "nous"—being "beside" the "mind,"—"conspiracy" harks back to the Latin "conspīrāre"—"to breathe together." In its extended conception, this breathing together is "to accord, harmonize, agree, combine or unite in purpose, plot mischief together secretly" (OED 1989), and...