Postmodern Perspective: The Paranoid Eye

Abstract

Postmodern Perspective: The Paranoid Eye Jerry Aline Flieger (bio) This paper deals with the relation between paranoia and postmodernism, in both fiction and theory, in at least three registers: thematic, structural, and transferential (referring to the transactional nature of the reading process). This continuum in turn opens to a fourth realm—the domain of the social, widely construed, which is the context most germane to the discussion on East/West cultural studies in which we are engaged here. The transparency of our information-saturated global monad, in the age of instantaneous “contact” and access, doubtless confers a paranoid modality to “postmodern” life, giving us the feeling that we are watched everywhere, monitored and transcribed by a ubiquitous information bank. Much postmodern writing reflects this feeling of being under the gaze of an anonymous surveillance—the sense that the ever growing database which catalogues us all has its eye on us, tracking our social and economic history, sometimes for political reasons, sometimes to facilitate the new economic or cultural order (as in the credit rating system in the West). Given the concerns of this age, which Teresa Brennan has termed “the age of paranoia,” a raging debate continues to take place concerning the ramifications of this postmodern condition. 1 Is it a bleak or even psychotic moment, leading to the effacement of the individual and the diminution of social contact? Or is it rather an expansion and recasting of the definition and the possibilities of the social in the global information age? Does it increase contact with otherness—in the spirit of the East/West encounter fostered by the exchange of essays in this volume—or does it efface otherness in a culture of the virtual and the instantaneous, leading to a diminution of productive difference (the meeting, as Terry Eagleton puts it, of Mao with McDonald’s)? In other words, what is the status of the global—to use a familiar postmodern marker—and is it conducive to cultural cross-pollination which would go beyond mere commercial exoticism (Thai restaurants in Tucson) or does it disseminate an epidemic of sameness, a culture free of ethics, obedient only to the demands of performance? I would like to suggest that part of the answer depends on how we define the concept “paranoid,” as a clinical psychosis, in Freud’s sense, or as an episteme, a (postmodern) mode of knowledge. I focus here on [End Page 87] a particular aspect of paranoid modality, its relation to the specular and the visible, and hence its relation to the Lacanian Imaginary mode, as adumbrated in his concept of the mirror stage in human development. For paranoia may be considered an imaginary construct, in Lacan’s sense of the term, because of its etiology: it stems from a fixation, as Freud tells us, in the narcissistic state, and is characterized by the overtones of specular identification implied in narcissistic imaginary constructs like projection. In fact, postmodern paranoia may be considered a special case of the specular imaginary—which Jean Baudrillard has called “hypervisibility”—the preeminence of the virtual in the millennial era, accompanied by an increasing blindness to the real material conditions that ground us. 2 But I want to ask here—expanding on Lacan’s topography of the human psyche—if this postmodern hyperimaginary of the virtual might not be countered by something like a postmodern hypersymbolic, a symbolic of the sublime (as Lyotard, among others, suggests), depending, in Lyotard’s words “on the presentation that the unpresentable exists,” and on the persistence of matter itself, in a face-off with the virtual and the technological. 3 (Even in our cyber-lives, the computer “goes down” for maintenance, the disk fails, the real cables are disrupted.) This obdurate quality of the object and of matter reminds us of the ineluctability of the real, its intrusion even into the ether of cyberspace. Against the naysayers of postmodernism and “post-culture,” I would like to ask what an engaged postmodern subject might be, if not a soporific video consumer, mesmerized in front of a monitor? Engaged in anticipatory thinking and projection vis-à-vis the Other, the world and its objects, this subject would not merely be reduced...