“But I just have trouble getting interested in that….what would we know then that we don’t already know?”
-Hmm, this kind of feels counterproductive. Just because we already know how awful something is (i.e., the prevailing influence of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy in this country), does not devalue learning or examining situations which further provide support for evidence of such theories. There is value in these experiences and learning and documenting. Especially since these foundational systems actively work to silence and invalidate all information which purports such depravity (e.g., how the public is responding to CRT), so it’s necessary to uncover history and evidence of such that cannot be disproven.
“I think what I’ve found enabling about it is that it suggests the possibility of unpacking, of disentangling from their impacted and overdetermined historical relation to each other some of the separate elements of the intellectual baggage that many of us carry around under a label such as “the hermeneutics of suspicion.”
-suggesting that “for someone to have an un mystified, angry view of large and genuinely systemic oppressions does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin that person to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences.” – exactly, the knowledge provides something even if it validates what is already known and even if such information may not do something at this exact moment in time.
“Though ethically very fraught, the choice is not self-evident; whether or not to undertake this highly compelling tracing-and-exposure project represents a strategic and logical decision, not necessarily a categorical imperative.”
-but why is that? Is that because the assumption is that gaining such knowledge may not actively change things?
“What does knowledge do – the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows? How, in short, is knowledge performative, and how best does one move among its causes and effects?”
“the imperative framing will do funny things to a hermeneutics of suspicion”
“the man of suspicion double-bluffing the man of guile: in the hands of thinkers after Freud, paranoia has by now candidly become less a diagnosis than a prescription. In a world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systemic oppression, to theorize out of anything but a critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious, or complaisant.” -THIS.
“what is illuminated by an understanding of paranoia is not how homosexuality works, but how homophobia and heterosexism work – in short, if one understands these oppressions to be systemic, how the world works”
-what does the construct tell us if not about what factors are related and involved in said construct, à becoming a methodology
“paranoia tends to be contagious; more specifically, paranoia is drawn toward and tends to construct symmetrical relations, in particular symmetrical epistemologies”
“Paranoia is an inescapable interpretive doubling of presence” -exactly, at what point does one cross the threshold of paranoia, can one walk it back? Paranoia = awareness, critical awareness, but often only viewed that way when there’s “significant evidence”-something that can only be feasibly determined by the very people who determine one is paranoid; evoking more paranoia
“to practice other than paranoid forms of knowing does not, in itself, entail a denial of the reality or gravity of enmity or oppression” -not all people are able to have such a disinterested stance though, how is that reconciled then?
“Klein wanted to convey, with the idea of position, a much more flexible to-and-fro process between one and the other than is normally meant by regression to fixation points in the developmental phase” – reminds me of the theory of equifinality and multifinality
“They represent a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge. Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly” –
“surprise is precisely what the paranoid seeks to eliminate, but it is also what, in the event, he survives by reading as a frightening incentive: he can never be paranoid enough” -exactly, it’s a tension that can never be solved
“Paranoia seems to require being imitated to be understood, and it, in turn, seems to understand only by imitation” -like calls to like
“paranoid imperative that: if the violence of such gender reification cannot be definitively halted in advance, it must at least never arrive on any conceptual scene as a surprise.” -more dangerous for something to occur than to be unanticipated
“the paranoid trust in exposure seemingly depends, in addition, on an infinite reservoir of naivete in those who make up the audience for these unveiling.”
“because there can be terrible surprises but also good ones” – being able to recognize the hope is important but it can be obscured by the paranoia
“doesn’t reading queer mean learning, among other things, that mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises?”
