This sentence speaks volumes: "for someone to have an unmystified view of systemic oppression does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin that person to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences" (127).
In other words, if the injustice you face does not anger you, it does not mobilize you, but you have critical consciousness anyway--how do you explain that? How is that some people (academics, activists, philosophers, politicians, educators) get motivated onto a specific train of epistemological or narrative consequence? The answer is pretty straightforward for Sedgewick: "Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly" (128). Or following Kleinian analysis, it is a position, not a diagnosis. And because it is a position, there is possibility.
Sedgwick’s (2003) writing on paranoia and reparative reading utilizes paranoia as a lens for developing critical theory. Like most of the readings from this week, Sedgwick uses Klein’s theories to develop critical theory beyond the psychoanalytic field. “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?” (124). Sedgwick uses Klein’s work on positions, and parallels the “depressive position,” with the “paranoid position.” Below are helpful quotes that demonstrate these parallels and Sedwick’s ultimate conclusions:
“The very mention of these names, some of them attaching to almost legendarily ‘paranoid’ personalities, confirms, too, Klein’s insistence that it is not people but mutable positions—or, I would want to say, practices— that can be divided between the paranoid and the reparative; it is sometimes the most paranoid-tending people who are able to, and need to, develop and disseminate the richest reparative practices” (150).
“And if the paranoid or the depressive positions operate on a smaller scale than the level of individual typology, they operate also on a larger: that of shared histories, emergent communities, and the weaving of intertextual discourse” (150).
“No less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic, the reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (150-151).
What does reparative reading entail? Why did Sedgwick use the depressive position to expand to another category, the “paranoid position” ? Why does homosexuality and queerness play such a recurring and vital role in psychoanalytic theories?
“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?”
"to apply a "hermeneutic of suspicion" is, I believe, widely understood as a mandatory injunction rather than a possibility among other possibilities" (4)
I love how Sedgwick's writing opens the field for alternative ways of reading!
"An affect theory is, among other things, a mode of selective scanning and amplification; for this reason, any affect theory risks being somewhat tautological, but because of its wide reach and rigorous exclusiveness, a strong theory risks being strongly tautological" (12)
"What marks the paranoid impulse in these pages is, I would say, less the stress on reflexive mimesis than the seeming faith in exposure" (16)
This reminds me of Latour's critique of critique.
"Furthermore, the force of any interpretive project of unveiling hidden violence would seem to depend on a cultural context, like the one assumed in Foucault's early works, in which violence would be deprecated and hence hidden in the first place. Why bother exposing the ruses of power in a country where, at any given moment, 40 percent of young black men are enrolled in the penal system? In the United states and internationally, while there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure, there is also, and increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hyper-visible from the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle, rather than remaining to be unveiled as a scandalous secret. Human rights controversy around, for example, torture and disappearances in Argentina, or the use of mass rape as part of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, marks - not an unveiling of practices that had not been hidden or naturalized - but a wrestle of different frameworks of visibility" (17)
We are back to the language of visibility and seeing as a form of knowing. I'm wondering how to think outside/beyond/underneath/a preposition that doesn't rely on a spatial metaphor of this locked metaphor of seeing/knowing, and I'm still in the process of identifying Blind and critical disability scholars who are doing this work. Any suggestions would be great!
"Here, perhaps, Klein is of more help than Tomkins: to read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new: to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones. Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates" (22)
I like this argument for surprise in reading. Too often I think that gets typed as "naivete."
"The desire of a reparative impulse, on the other hand, is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self. To view camp as, among other things, the communal, historically dense exploration of a variety of reparative practices is to be able to do better justice to many of the defining elements of classic camp performance: the startling, juicy displays of excess erudition, for example; the passionate, often hilarious antiquarianism, the prodigal production of alternative historiographies; the "over"-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste, or leftover products; the rich, highly interruptive affective variety; the irrepressible fascination with ventriloquistic experimentation; the disorienting juxtapositions of present with past, and popular with high culture" (25)
"That pedagogy can be a very sexy matter was no more news to Rousseau than to Plato or Dante" (27)
Love this shoutout from Sedgwick. Nerd moment: this is a really important part of how Dante understands sodomy in Inferno -- I think it's cool that the poetic structure of Dante's dialogue with his former teacher, Brunetto Latini, challenges contemporary readings of Dante's (and whatever broader category Dante's work indexes -- Catholic/Christian/Italian/European etc.) understanding of sodomy, sin, and teaching.
I would add bell hooks' writing on the eroticism within pedagogy which I don't think gets discussed and engaged with enough. This isn't a complaint that Sedgwick does not cite hooks but rather a general statement about how the erotics of pedagogy is not discussed in most circles. My assumption for why this is: desire is scary, and the erotics of pedagogy opens up the problematic of power, teaching/learning, and desire in ways that are uncomfortable for or considered dangerous by most American educators. Too many people interpret-to-dismiss-or-reveal this (i.e. a stereotypical paranoid reading) as "sleeping with students" rather than addressing desire (defined broadly and narrowly, similar yet distinct from Freud's "sex") as an emergent and complicated part of the teaching process.
"The prohibitive problem, however, has been in the limitations of present theoretical vocabularies rather than in the reparative motive itself. No less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic, the reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture - even a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them" (31, my emphasis)
Queer folks love to read (and clock) each other all the time. I especially like reading folks for queerness -- a paranoid reading that takes pleasure in uncovering hidden desires and unclaimed identifications. I appreciate Sedgwick's appeal to consider an alternative form of reading with different affects -- reparative reading -- that adds rather than reveals. How might reparative reading add to queer reading?