[D66] Paranoia and the coronavirus

[Antid Oto]

  Paranoia and the coronavirus: how Eve Sedgwick's affect theory
  persists through quarantine and self-isolation

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The spread of coronavirus, and the global political response to it, is 
provoking panic and paranoia across the world. But what tools do we have 
to turn paranoia into action, and how can we forge new relations out of 
the crisis? In this essay, Josh Gabert-Doyon turns to Eve Sedgwick's 
concepts of paranoid and reparative reading to make sense of the global 
reaction to the virus.


With mutual aid groups, bans on evictions, and a struggle over sick 
days, a new political horizon has emerged in the coronavirus panic. 
What’s surprising is how quickly things have shifted. Sometime between 
the US ban on EU travel and the mass graves identified by satellite 
footage in Iran, coronavirus paranoia was no longer an object of study 
or satire, but something mobilising. In the course of the last few days 
a new morality has developed around the coronavirus: an obligation to 
stay home, to stay socially distant, and to remain vigilant so as to 
protect those most affected by the outbreak.There is little faith in the 
UK government’s official numbers, and there’s been a strong critique 
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/13/why-is-the-government-relying-on-nudge-theory-to-tackle-coronavirus> 
of the government’s “Nudge Unit”-sanctioned strategy. In Italy, 
prisoners have been rioting 
<https://time.com/5801183/italian-inmates-escape-coronavirus-riots/>. In 
America, the parent company of Olive Garden has conceded 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/10/walmart-apple-olive-garden-are-among-major-employers-updating-sick-leave-policies-coronavirus-cases-spread/> 
sick days for its staff. And through that paranoia, there has been a 
political effort to read the crisis under the rubric of what the 
theorist Eve Kosofosky Sedgwick would describe as “reparative”.

With this new horizon our initial paranoia over coronavirus has not been 
abandoned, but instead has helped to coalesce a new set of demands. 
Medical paranoia has the added advantage of viral metaphors – in the 
early days of the outbreak we heard of coronavirus conspiracy theories 
“spreading faster than the disease itself.” This is exactly what Eve 
Sedgwick was interested in with her idea of paranoid and reparative 
reading, explored 
<https://www.sss.ias.edu/sites/sss.ias.edu/files/pdfs/Critique/sedgwick-paranoid-reading.pdf> 
in her final book /Touching Feeling/. For Sedgwick, the two modes of 
reading are not antithetical, instead the reparative mode of reading is 
something of a continuation of the paranoid. In the essay where most 
most clearly articulates this, Sedgwick attempts to grapple with 
memories of the AIDS crisis.. She opens the piece with an anecdote: a 
conversation between Sedgwick and AIDS activist Cindy Patton, where 
Sedgwick asks Patton about the “sinister rumours” of AIDS as a product 
of the American military intentionally designed to affect the gay 
population, to which Patton replies: “Supposing we were ever so sure of 
all those things – what would we know then that we don’t already know?”

What would a grand conspiracy tell us about the structural forces at 
play in America that we aren’t already aware of? Don’t we know that the 
state deprives those it sees as unfit citizens, acts with negligence and 
ignores public health concerns so long as Capitalism is able to continue 
functioning? When it comes to what knowledge is to be gained by this 
kind of conspiratorial reading, don’t we already know that the lives of 
disabled people are undervalued by our health system, that the tenants 
are unfairly evicted, the precariat locked out of the privileges once 
universally afforded?

I don’t mean for this comparison to AIDS to come lightly – there are, to 
be clear, completely different sets of political conditions, and a 
different kind of pain. Yet, it should be noted that Gilead, the 
pharmaceutical company at the forefront of developing 
<https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/26/newest-prep-pill-hiv-prevention-fuel-progress-or-profits/> 
a coronavirus vaccine, also owned the patent to Truvada, better known as 
PrEP, a preventative HIV drug only made available in the UK this week 
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51897856> after an incredibly 
hard-fought campaign by activists. Patents like these are exactly what 
groups like ActUp were fighting against when trying to secure widely 
accessible treatment for HIV/AIDS – and indeed, ActUp targeted 
<https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/05/act-up-is-challenging-gilead-to-make-truvada-more-accessible.html> 
Gilead for charging thousands of dollars for the medication. Once again 
we see the tragic consequences that the lack of universal healthcare and 
medication can produce, particularly if not dealt with a degree of 
anticipatory suspicion. In the present moment there is something to be 
learned from the struggle of the AIDS movement against Reganite 
inaction, by reading the structures and the extraneous connections, the 
lack of medicines and the prohibitions of hospital visits imposed on 
homosexual partners, all through a lense of defiant paranoia.

Sedgwick sought to explore paranoia as an affect and as a mode of 
analysis: an approach to understanding information that was after the 
key to unlock some supreme “real” information. Paranoia, as an effect 
and as a mode of reading, is “anticipatory”, it’s “reflexive and 
mimetic...plac[ing] its faith in exposure”. We hope that our paranoia 
can shed light on the plot against us: the more we spread that paranoia 
to others, the more it becomes true. However for Sedgwick there are 
reasons to practice non-paranoid readings /other/ than simply the idea 
that paranoia can lead you to conclusions that are “delusional or simply 
wrong”. And there are reasons to practice paranoid reading beyond just 
the fact that they may provide “true knowledge”. Suspicious reading can 
also build the grounds for shared opposition and resistance that emerges 
from the reparative affective mode, and a reparative mode of reading the 
crisis.

This is where her idea of reparative reading begins. Reparative reading 
requires a healthy degree of paranoia, but also non-paranoid methods: it 
offers a political strategy and productive way forward for our moment of 
paranoia fixation. Looking back on the legacy of AIDS activism Sedgwick 
writes: “what we can best learn from such [reparative] 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 to not sustain them.” Again: the important 
thing is not that we would learn any new knowledge if we did uncover a 
conspiracy about the origins of AIDS, but the process of drawing a 
suspicious eye to the unfolding of the crisis offers the basis for 
shared political action. As Sedgwick explains, that includes the “queer” 
forms of irony, humour and cynicism that may emerge when that sustenance 
is redeployed.

The paranoia inspired by coronavirus – of under-reported numbers, of 
both a state ready to exercise draconian measure and a state that may 
not be able to withstand a crisis of this measure – is helping to shift 
the conditions of political possibility. On the national scale that 
includes Italy’s decision to suspend mortgage payments and the Trump 
administration’s considerations to suspend student debt. These are part 
of a longer story of paranoid reading: since the 2008 crash, 
financialisation has conjured its own paranoid reading, where theorists 
seek to untangle the web of legal mechanisms and offshore accounts that 
allow the financial system to dominate all other modes of life. This 
sudden openness to forgiving large swathes of debt, at least 
temporarily, has exposed a new ideological frailty. In the UK, the 
Tory’s eagerness to inject emergency funding into the NHS should be 
viewed with deep suspicion, but that suspicion can be the basis of a 
radically transformed political conversation. We’re primed for this 
moment: from Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations to Adam Curtis’ soothing 
voice-over, we’re already well acquainted with the sort of reading 
necessary to make sense of our slow-moving dystopia.

To read coronavirus reparatively is to engage with the new forms of 
solidarity we develop through our periods of self-isolation and social 
distancing. A draft of this essay I wrote last week reads like a crass, 
out of touch investigation into the intellectual status of paranoia, 
through the surprisingly plausible claim that Jeffrey Epstein may have 
been assassinated, Trump’s election, and Pete Buttigieg as a CIA plant. 
We are at the tail end of an age of paranoia, but in the golden age of 
paranoia studies. Coronavirus fears manifested, at first, in tired 
conspiracy theories about military bioweapons and elaborate cover-ups. 
But as the suspicion has become more intense, there has been a new 
consideration of social care: health services around the world have 
become not just the object of conspiracy, but a place where new dynamics 
of power can be built.

Yet at the same time, we can’t discount the real loss that comes with 
these moments of paranoia and crisis. This relationship between the 
depressive and the paranoid was influential to Sedgwick’s thinking. 
According to the psychoanalytic schema developed by Melanie Klein, one 
of Sedgwick’s major influences, the paranoid “position”, is a response 
to the depressive position: the feelings of grief, mourning, and anxiety 
that crop up throughout life [2]. We act paranoid as a defence against 
loss. The loss and blocked mourning felt during the AIDS crisis led to 
paranoia and conspiratorial thinking. As a cultural phenomenon today, we 
may think about paranoia as a collective way of dealing with the 
feelings of depression and loss that accompany a despairing political 
situation. We’ve entered a break in time, where the old world before the 
disease becomes irretrievable. The event moves forward with such an 
intensity that it seems hard to believe we’ll be able to make it through 
without abandoning some of our old selves. For Klein, the 
paranoid-schizoid mode leads to a splitting or fragmenting of the self 
and the other (the object of the conspiracy, however broad that may be).

In the 1970s, a slew of films centered on paranoia and conspiracy 
attempted to investigate the way that we dealt with that fragmentation 
as political subjects. Francis Ford Coppola’s /The Conversation/ is 
among the best, as well as Alan J. Pakula “paranoia trilogy” (/All the 
President’s Men, Klute,/ and /The Parallax View),/ and Brian De Palma’s 
/Blow-Out/ . In the United States the political moment was dominated by 
Watergate, the Warren Commission and the aftermath of the Vietnam war, 
as Frederic Jameson (Sedgwick’s contemporary at Duke) recounts in /The 
Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System./ For 
Jameson, it’s the inability to represent the totality of capitalism 
which produces these pained articulations of conspiracy: this is 
“Totality as conspiracy” [3]. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle revived 
Jameson’s work of conspiracy through his concept of “cognitive mapping” 
in /Cartographies of the Absolute/ (2015), which sought to look at how 
the conspiracy pinboard of capitalism really operated, how we 
compulsively laid out red ribbon and tacks on cork to connect disparate 
forces and invisible architectures in art, writing, and theory.

The conspiratorial urge to understand and track the totality of 
capitalism plays out in how we consider the broken healthcare system, 
the vulnerability of those with underlying health conditions, and the 
way they’ve been deprived a sense of personhood. “The message that 
coronavirus is relatively safe for 98% of the population isn’t exactly 
reassuring if you fall into the other 2%” writes Frances Ryan in /The 
Guardian/ 
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/11/coronavirus-ill-disabled-people> 
[4]. The lack of adequate social care, of safety nets and sick days, are 
all paranoia peaking over to a more reparative reading: what does a more 
radical humanism; a politics centered on social reproduction and care, 
look like under the regime of the coronavirus?

Anne Boyer writes about coronavirus in a recent newsletter: “These are 
the same types who say the only thing to fear is fear, which of course 
is not true, because fear educates our care for each other -- we fear a 
sick person might be made sicker, or that a poor person's life might be 
made even more miserable, and we do whatever we can to protect them 
because we fear a version of human life in which everyone lives for 
themselves only.”

Reparative reading, as the name suggests, looks towards a different set 
of affects. In reparative reading, we “seek new environments of 
sensation for the objects they study by displacing critical attachments 
once forced by correction, rejection, and anger with those crafted by 
affection, gratitude, solidarity, and love.” Mutual aid groups print and 
distribute fliers and pool resources for neighbours. Amid calls to wash 
our hands and bleach surfaces, we’re asked to abandon work and take up a 
General Strike. There’s a feeling that somehow the state of emergency 
could be turned on its head, treated as an opportunity for a reset, 
rather than as an opportunity for new anti-Terror laws. Sedgwick writes 
of the “queer possibility” that we don’t repeat destructive patterns 
that we’ve come across in large-scale resets: don’t make the same 
mistakes paranoia has led us into before. By attending to the feeling of 
paranoia and reparation, we can forge new relations out of crisis.

--------

[1] Eve Kosofosky Sedgwick, (2003) “Paranoid Reading and Reparative 
Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About 
You 
<https://www.sss.ias.edu/sites/sss.ias.edu/files/pdfs/Critique/sedgwick-paranoid-reading.pdf>” 
in /Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity./ Duke University 
Press.

[2] Mélanie Klein (1946). "Notes on some schizoid mechanisms 
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3330415/pdf/160.pdf>".J 
Psychother Pract Res. 1996 Spring; 5(2): 160–179.

[3] Fredric Jameson, (1992) /The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and 
Space in the World System./ Indiana University Press.

[4] Frances Ryan (2020) “Coronavirus hits ill and disabled people 
hardest, so why is society writing us off? 
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/11/coronavirus-ill-disabled-people>” 
/The Guardian./ March 11, 2020.

/Josh Gabert-Doyon is a freelance writer and radio producer, with work 
in the/ BBC/,/ Vice/,/ Jacobin /and the/ TLS/. He tweets at @JoshGD 
<https://twitter.com/JoshGD>./


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