<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<div id="root">
<div class="css-wp58sy">
<div class="css-fmnleb">
<div class="css-ov1ktg">
<div width="718" class="css-1jllois">
<header class="css-d92687">
<h1 class="css-19v093x">Paranoia and the coronavirus:
how Eve Sedgwick's affect theory persists through
quarantine and self-isolation</h1>
<div class="css-1x1jxeu">
<div class="css-7kp13n">By</div>
<div class="css-7ol5x1"><span class="css-1q5ec3n">Authors</span></div>
<div class="css-8rl9b7">versobooks.com</div>
<div class="css-zskk6u">10 min</div>
</div>
<div class="css-1890bmp"><a
href="https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.versobooks.com%2Fblogs%2F4597-paranoia-and-the-coronavirus-how-eve-sedgwick-s-affect-theory-persists-through-quarantine-and-self-isolation"
target="_blank" class="css-1neb7j1">View Original</a></div>
</header>
<div class="css-429vn2">
<div role="main" class="css-yt2q7e">
<div id="RIL_container">
<div id="RIL_body">
<div id="RIL_less">
<div lang="en">
<div>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div class="RIL_IMG" id="RIL_IMG_1">
<figure> <br>
</figure>
</div>
<div>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/13/why-is-the-government-relying-on-nudge-theory-to-tackle-coronavirus">critique</a>
of the government’s “Nudge
Unit”-sanctioned strategy. In Italy,
prisoners have been <a
href="https://time.com/5801183/italian-inmates-escape-coronavirus-riots/">rioting</a>.
In America, the parent company of Olive
Garden has <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/10/walmart-apple-olive-garden-are-among-major-employers-updating-sick-leave-policies-coronavirus-cases-spread/">conceded</a>
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”.</p>
<p>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, <a
href="https://www.sss.ias.edu/sites/sss.ias.edu/files/pdfs/Critique/sedgwick-paranoid-reading.pdf">explored</a>
in her final book <i>Touching Feeling</i>.
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?”</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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
<a
href="https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/26/newest-prep-pill-hiv-prevention-fuel-progress-or-profits/">developing</a>
a coronavirus vaccine, also owned the
patent to Truvada, better known as PrEP, a
preventative HIV drug only made available
in the UK <a
href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51897856">this
week</a> 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 <a
href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/05/act-up-is-challenging-gilead-to-make-truvada-more-accessible.html">targeted</a>
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.</p>
<p>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 <i>other</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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 <i>The
Conversation</i> is among the best, as
well as Alan J. Pakula “paranoia trilogy”
(<i>All the President’s Men, Klute,</i>
and <i>The Parallax View),</i> and Brian
De Palma’s <i>Blow-Out</i> . 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 <i>The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema
and Space in the World System.</i> 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 <i>Cartographies
of the Absolute</i> (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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/11/coronavirus-ill-disabled-people"><i>The
Guardian</i></a> [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?</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>--------</p>
<p>[1] Eve Kosofosky Sedgwick, (2003) “<a
href="https://www.sss.ias.edu/sites/sss.ias.edu/files/pdfs/Critique/sedgwick-paranoid-reading.pdf">Paranoid
Reading and Reparative Reading, or,
You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think
This Essay Is About You</a>” in <i>Touching
Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy,
Performativity.</i> Duke University
Press.</p>
<p>[2] Mélanie Klein (1946). "<a
href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3330415/pdf/160.pdf">Notes
on some schizoid mechanisms</a>".J
Psychother Pract Res. 1996 Spring; 5(2):
160–179.</p>
<p>[3] Fredric Jameson, (1992) <i>The
Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space
in the World System.</i> Indiana
University Press.</p>
<p>[4] Frances Ryan (2020) “<a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/11/coronavirus-ill-disabled-people">Coronavirus
hits ill and disabled people hardest, so
why is society writing us off?</a>” <i>The
Guardian.</i> March 11, 2020.</p>
<p><em>Josh Gabert-Doyon is a freelance
writer and radio producer, with work in
the</em> BBC<em>,</em> Vice<em>,</em>
Jacobin <em>and the</em> TLS<em>. He
tweets at <a
href="https://twitter.com/JoshGD">@JoshGD</a>.</em></p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="css-10y0cgg"><br>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>