Reworking Paranoia

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Paranoia and conspiracism have a bad reputation these days, and no wonder. Unfounded fears of persecution are a significant sentiment in the rhetoric of Trump, his MAGA "base," and the alt-right. In American politics, concerns about the dangers of paranoia are not new, of course, and were most famously articulated in Richard Hofstadter’s influential essay on the McCarthy era – The Paranoid Style in American politics (1964). Consumers of those fantasies are often viewed as intellectually lazy, mentally ill, or political desperate participants in a "cult," incapable of distinguishing fantasy and reality. To address such threats, political critics of paranoid politics on the right often propose fact-checking to debunk its phantasmatic claims and seductive appeal.

The papers on this panel take a different approach to paranoia. They ask: In this time of justified consternation about paranoid politics in the US and globally, do paranoia and conspiracism, now and in the past, have anything at all to offer to democratic theory and politics? Naveed Mansouri reads the circulation of conspiratorial fantasies on radio and cassette in revolutionary Iran as “the ferments of collective action.” George Shulman studies the “creative paranoia” underwriting radically democratic theory and practice in late 1950s and early 1960s. And Noga Rotem turns to Hobbes, arguing that we might read him as reworking--rather then merely seeking to destroy--English Civil War conspiracism.

These papers share certain questions: might "paranoid" views of organized and hostile power be harnessed to democratizing projects of world-building? Might some manifestations of paranoia express the justified rage about injustice and dispossession? Do critiques of paranoid politics end up pathologizing capacity of human imagination to conceive the world otherwise and project the possibilities of living on different terms? Is there anything to learn from the fantasy itself—its daring to question the given, its political creativity, the affective style of its articulation?
In sum, instead of succumbing to the binary terms that frame much of the contemporary debate about the paranoid style (good liberals vs. bad conspiracists, fact vs fiction) this panel “stays with the trouble” (Haraway) of paranoia, making a case for de-pathologizing, and pluralizing it, because, as Jack Halberstam puts it - “paranoia moves in many directions.”

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Creative Paranoia in the Idioms and Theorizing of Radically Democratic Politics - George M. Shulman, New York University

• The Conspiracy of Revolution: Popular Silence and Voice in Revolutionary Iran - Naveed Mansoori, Princeton University

• "No More Wonder”: Hobbes’s Reworking of Conspiracism - Noga Rotem, University of Washington

Chair

• Begüm Adalet Cornell University

Discussant

• Begüm Adalet Cornell University