Surrealpolitik: Paranoia Within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation

Indeed, we believe that there are at least two broad contexts or conditions of contemporary life that make the paranoid style and conspiracy theories an eminently reasonable tendency of thought for social actors to embrace. The first derives from the fact that the cold-war era itself was defined throughout by a massive project of paranoid social thought and action that reached into every dimension of mainstream culture, politics, and policy. Furthermore, client states and most regions were shaped by the interventions, subversions, and intimidations pursued in the interests of a global conspiratorial politics of the superpowers. The legacies and structuring residues of that era make the persistence, and even increasing intensity, of its signature paranoid style now more than plausible, but indeed, an expectable response to certain social facts. That is, the effects of decades of paranoid policies of statecraft and governing habits of thought define a present reality for social actors in some places and situations that is far from extremist, or disturbingly fundamentalist, but is quite reasonable and commonsensical...

The other important and perhaps more subtle way to take note of the present paranoid style as a kind of pervasive cold-war legacy is to indicate the extent to which highly influential frameworks of social theory have this potential within their conceptual rhetorics. Frameworks that have at their core notions of game, self-interested motivation, fields of contest and struggle, and generally a valuation of cynical reason as the most reliable posture from which to interpret human action are ones in which the reality of conspiratorial activity is well within reach of their common sense. (page 2-3)

[From chapter: Introduction]
Tags: [Conspiracy, Paranoia]

[I]n this version of the crisis of representation the plausibility of the paranoid style is not so much in its reasonable ness, but rather in its revitalization of the romantic, the ability to tell an appealing, wondrous story found in the real. (page 5)

[From chapter: Introduction]
Tags: [Conspiracy, Paranoia]

"It could be argued that conspiracy itself revolves around a contestation over the presence and/or verifiability of an explanatory, or causal point of origin. Paranoia, to use one obvious example, becomes a relative category of description based in part upon the question of whether in fact there is something 'out there,' or whether the paranoiac is simply delusional." In the domain of paranoia within reason that we are probing here, there is no question that there is something "out there." The paranoia arises from expert desire or duty toward knowledge in the absence of compass. With just enough of the facts missing, what is speculative in every project of reason, as Hunt's essay argues, becomes distorted, even playful, and stays this side of delusion. In paranoia within reason, more play is given to what is finally constrained in every reasoning process. (page 5)

[From chapter: Introduction]
Tags: [Conspiracy, Paranoia]

The Paranoid-Critical Method [of Salvador Dali] reasserts an often lost continuity between the delusional and rational -- retying the knot of their mutual genesis. (page 21)

[From chapter: Jamer Hunt, Paranoid, Critical, Methodical, Dali, Koolhaas, and...]
Tags: [Surrealism, Paranoia]

Why trust instruments anyway? A telling detail in Kim Fortun's essay on the Gulf War syndrome asks as much. The Department of Defense admits that their sensors for chemical warfare agents have a high rate of "false positives." This is a peculiar and murky observation. It seems to be an admission that instruments are as inventive in their identification of empirical certitude as humans. The sensor detects the invisible agents; however, we know that the sensor is mistaken. If indeed these agents are undetectable by human actors, how precisely do we justify that conclusion? It is difficult not to conclude that a "false positive" is the aporia that marks the limits of instrumental certitude. For what could be more conspiratorial than a scientific instrument that deceives?

The conceptual black hole of the "false positive" is radically unthinkable; indeed, it is incommensurable with scientific reality. It is, I would argue, the aporia that produces the willies. Its incommensurability suggests an alternate reality, a different explanatory model. It is this radical doubt that fuels conspiracy and feeds the willies. (page 27)

[From chapter: Jamer Hunt, Paranoid, Critical, Methodical, Dali, Koolhaas, and...]
Tags: [Conspiracy, Paranoia]

Lacan suggests in "Aggressively in Psychoanalysis," "What I have called paranoiac knowledge is shown, therefore, to correspond in its more or less archaic forms to certain critical moments that mark the history of man's mental genesis, each representing a stage in objectifying identification" (1977, 17). In other words, we are all, to varying degrees, paranoiacs; we are all occasionally haunted by the sense that we do not necessarily know the reality that we claim as the anchor of our subjectivity. That reality is buzzing with the currents of desire and danger that recapitulate the subject's originary relationship to its other...Paranoia is...a radical uncertainty that compels the subject to search for the "objectifying souvenirs" that will verify experience as real or delusional. (page 28)

[From chapter: Jamer Hunt, Paranoid, Critical, Methodical, Dali, Koolhaas, and...]
Tags: [Paranoia]

After detours in many different directions, we are right back to Dali's notion of paranoia as a (delusional) style of interpretation. And so we alight one final time on the twin themes of proof and existence, delusion and reality. A shiver -- the willies -- is predicated on the suspension of certainty, or more accurately, the possibility of the existence of the uncanny as real. It is a rational interpretation of random occurrences ("objectifying facts") based on a delusional hypothesis. It is strangely reminiscent of the Paranoid-Critical Method. It is the possibility of a real, built by the rational, anchored by the delusional. (page 29)

[From chapter: Jamer Hunt, Paranoid, Critical, Methodical, Dali, Koolhaas, and...]
Tags: [Surrealism, Paranoia]