Surreal Paranoiac Critical Dreams or Schizophrenic Deleuzian Schizoid Dreams? Which would YOU Prefer?

 "On Late Capitalism" by the Beautiful Ones of John B. Calhoun's Mouse Utopia

Psychotic's guide to memes, "Paranoia as a social disease: some notes on proliferation of contemporary conspiracy theories"

Why are there so many paranoid people today? Why are conspiracy theories blossoming all around? What is the status of paranoia in today’s world from a lacanian perspective? In seminar 10 Lacan tells of an italian patient, that has the feeling of “io sono siempre visto”, “I am always watched”, a slogan taken up in this years conference of NLS. The feeling of being watched, of encountering the gaze is prevalent in psychosis. In contrast to the neurotic’s doubt, the psychotic has certainty. The Other does not exist, but in the gaze, it is as though the Other really exists (the psychotic is sure of it). One of the repeated sayings by the later Lacan is that “there is no Other of the Other”. But in paranoia there is definitely an Other, an Other that is behind the scenes, pulling the strings, persecuting the subject.

To give an example from my own life: a female friend is convinced, that the white trails, that are formed after jet planes are not byproducts of fuel combustion due to the cold air, but instead the government or some agency behind the government, that are spreading some poison, that is supposed to ‘dupe’ the populace. We are all turned to sheep. Slavoj Zizek once made the provocative remark, that conspiracy theories are “critique of ideology for the poor, or rather for the stupid”. My friend, in this sense, is stupid, in that she takes ideology critique, the critique of social systems and turn it into conscious manipulation, by a small elite. If we for example are acting against our own interest, it is because there are certain ‘signals’, that directly intervene in the body. The famous judge Paul Schreber talked of God’s nerve-language. That is a language that is more foundational, than our everyday language, that can never say what we mean and so on. Instead, it is language that directly, like a material virus enters and controls the body. SImilarly, with the white trails. It directly ‘seeps’ in the body, although you cannot see it. There is in my friend’s conspiracy theory such a primitive hermeneutics of suspicion. Most people, including myself would on some primitive level not know, in the first person, what exactly what causes the white trails after the jet planes. We however believe in the subject supposed to know it (that if a natural explanation can be given): The first hit on a google search says:

“These clouds are contrails, short for condensation trails. Water vapor is one of the byproducts of jet fuel combustion and will turn into ice crystals in the cold air at the high elevations where jet airplanes fly.” (https://azdeq.gov/contrails#:~:text=These%20clouds%20are%20contrails%2C%20short,elevations%20where%20jet%20airplanes%20fly.).

They trust however, that there is a natural scientific explanation. They trust that they can look it up on wikipedia, and even if they do not get it themselves (I also do not ‘get’ the natural scientific explanation), they believe that the authorities, like scientist accept the explanation, and if not, that they would correct it. Max Weber, the sociologist, defines modernity as the ‘disenchantment’ with the world, that we all tacitly accept a scientific explanations, like the laws of physics behind every phenomena. Even if we do not know how a car works exactly, we believe that someone knows, an expert. And that if we pursued this path sufficiently, we would also understand the natural scientific explanation. When I look on wikipedia of why there are white trails after the jet planes, I might not understand the explanation, that this is due to condensed ice crystals etc. but I believe if I studied it enough, the explanation would be based in natural-physical causality, not say ‘terrestial spirit’ or something that was not ‘rational’ (the iron cage of rationality as Weber calls it).

Even, if we do not know on some first person perspective, we believe that something else knows. And we simply trust the Other on this level. The psychotic-paranoid view of my friend is not that she knows exactly what it is that they are ‘leaking’. But she is ‘certain’ that, they are leaking something, and that it is malevolent. What my friend, as all conspiracy theorists have a problem explaining is why the government would give them this ‘sign’, that allows for the symptomatic reading. Why shouldn’t the government just make some invisible trail, so that we would not even hit upon the idea, that there is something in the air that ‘poisons’ us. That is to say, if we really had a malevolent government, totally in control of everything, it would make no sense, that they would make ‘hints’ to us here and there, so that people could find symptoms and thereby raise critical agency and possible rebellion. But let that be, that is not the most essential point. When we talk about ‘certitude’ of the paranoid psychotic it is important again to emphasize, that this does not mean a knowledge about precisely what is going on, but a certitude about that SOMETHING is going on. A neurotic would rather constantly doubt his own suspicions. He would probably say, what if the goverment is actually poisoning us from the jet-planes turning us all into sheep. My God, am I crazy to think this… is it normal?”, that is they would doubt precisely the readabality of the signs, question if they could be taken for signs to begin with, whereas my friend as paranoid never questions that part. Her boyfriend once did a kind of test on her. Some people from the muncipality were treating the park trees for a tree disease. Ok, nothing out of the ordinary, even if we normal-neurotics do not really know what this tree disease is, we simply believe that someone else knows. My friend’s boyfriend, however said to her, (this was in autumn). “have you seen the trees, they are turned yellow and shed their leaves quite suddenly after the park workers sprayed them with that stuff don’t you think… and why did they put up a temporary fence around it, as though there is something poisonous about it…? My friend of course linked the park workers treatment of the trees to some malevolent agency, that would ‘install’ something in the trees, something that would ‘watch us’, perhaps. Again, there is no certitude about what the goverment precisely wants, or precisely how it is all connected. Only that there is ‘something suspicious’. She would not simply take the explanation, that they were treating the trees and as part of a natural cycle the tree lose their leaves in autumn and that the temporary fence, was simply to protect the trees from park-visitors. We can say, that one aspect of “we are being watched” is precisely that we always include ourselves, if we psychotic-paranoid. The normal neurotic response is that the trees simply do not give a damn about me, they simply follow their natural cycle, so if they lose their leaves it has nothing to do with me. It is precisely only this disenchanted universe that can then enable poetic metaphorization or personificaiton, as in the famous address and personification of to the wind by the poet Pierce Bysche Shelley: “o wild west wind, thou breath of autumn’s being… “. The first four verse goes which is precisely about the leaves: “O wild west wind/though breath of Autumn’s being/thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead/like from an enchanter fleeing”, or another famous example, Byron’s line, on his 36 year old birthday, where he was fighting in Greece (“my days are in their yellow leaf”). If it makes sense to us, to make a metaphor, so that “a life” is like a tree (where days are like leafs that can go yellow), this is because we on some fundamental level, what Freud calls Bejahung, have accepted the division of word and things. I remember, when I was a child and I would eat the seed of apples, I would imagine apples trees growing in my body. Now, as long as you can seperate that from ‘reality-testing’ you are not psychotic. It is precisely this fundamental alienation in language, that breaks down in psychosis. Shelley can precisely address the wind, and we recognize this as poetic device, precisely because we accept the fundamental alienation in language, that the word is not the wind, that we, the readers are really the addressees, and that the west wind, do not sit down and read the poem, that the west wind is a natural phenomena. The fellow romantic poet, of the second generation of lake poets, John Keats coined this through his notion of ‘negative capablity’. That is in fiction we are allowed to pursue explanations that go against rationality and logic, but under the condition, that we have already accepted it as “fiction”. A man on the street exclaiming o wild west wind would be taken as a mentally ill person today, unless we saw it framed, say if someone filmed it, we would take it as a ‘performance theater’, that is re-inscribe it into fiction, and thereby allow it to be ‘capable’ (the same if we met a man who said “my days are in their yellow leaf” or a if he in all earnesty asked us to look at his hands and say “look at my leafs how yellow they are..”, again we would think he belonged in the psychiatric ward.

Now, why mention all this? Because paranoia is on the rise as a general social critique. We even get it from all kinds of anti-establishment figures, even if they are themselves in power. We need only mention Donald Trump with his theory of the ‘deep state’, (even when Trump is president he is ‘opposed to those in power’, as though there is still some secret elite), or Elon Musk who presents his social networks as the ‘voice of the people’ against cancel culture from main stream media. From a lacanian point we can say, that the “normalization” of psychosis, what Miller calls “generalized foreclosure” is a result of our common social frame and belief system have been rendered more fragile. There is no longer a general oedipal frame, with the name-of-the-father, that secures that conflicts take place in the same shared system. We are not even sure, we have the ‘same system’. This is in popular language rendered as ‘echo chambers’, people are each in their own ‘echo chamber’, supported by the algorithms. You know this from facebook. If you happen to one day click on a reel, a small video of football or a pigeon attacking a man, you know the next day you log on, you are gonna get bombarded with videos with similar materials. Of course, as they say, “if it’s free, you’re the product”. That is tech-companies are mining your data, so you are working for them, simply by going on facebook. Of course this leads to social criticism, like the sociologist Shoshana Zoboff, saying that companies mine user’s behaviour to predict future behaviour. Now, from a Lacanian perspective, I think that this is not sufficient, or that while this is part of the story, it is not the full picture. First, we can interpret the very fascination with ‘surveillance capitalism’, as itself the form of a certain paranoia (you are watched all the time…they get your data). This is certaintly true. and we should of course be ruthlessly critical about how what Marx called the “general intellect” our ways of communication are being privatized. This is a new problem, that Marx could not have foreseen. Someone like Bill Gates doesn’t exploit his workers in the traditionalist marxist sense. His surplus profit is simply made not by exploiting workers, but by monopolizing the field. So, we should critique this as a privatization and profit from people’s behaviour online. But this is still ‘just data’. An algorithm is everything. The very term surveillance capitalism can give us the sense of paranoia, as though ‘capitalism’ really knows that it is doing behind the scenes. These algorithms often misfire. Maybe you know ZIzek’s humorous remark in lecture, where an interviewer asks him “what do you think about tech-companies watching you” and ZIzek says, “not a problem”. They can watch all my emails, it would be like giving Hegel’s logic of science to a cow. and he is right. Even if a tech-company can watch everything, they still need to interpret it. It only works with some items, say maybe the kind of gucci-bags you buy online, but that’s it. The very notion of “total conformism” because they can predict our behaviour itself is a fantasy. You can imagine if they hack or have access to Zizek’s emails on Hegel. What is there to ‘mine’ there? Furthermore, the very notion of “surveillance capitalism” presumes the liberal subject as sacred, that is vulnerable, threatened by the Other, a precious self, that is watched. Perhaps, as is the case with Bill Gates and Elon Musk, the problem is not that our most private interactions are mined by companies, but much more that the very space of “general intellect”, our highways of communications online are already privatized. The problem with surveillance capitalism is not that it works too perfectly, without gaps, but much more that it is itself is not surveilled, but follows an unpredicable rhythm of capital (this is why Zizek suggests what he calls ‘war communism’). In the language of the early Lacan, I think, it is it means that in the question of algorithm, we should still remember the difference between information (that precludes a subject), computational language, and the signifier proper, which involves a subject.

Now, a common motif, is that as Freud says, the madness of the psychotic, is already an attempt to heal oneself. Believing an Other for the Other is horrible of course, someone always persecuting you. But it is also a ‘relief’, a ‘cognitive mapping’ to use Fredric Jameson’s phrase on conspiracy theory. Of course you are watched all the time, but at least you are ‘something’ (since they want to watch you) and someone is in charge, consciously manipulating events. This is why paranoia is ultimately a defense, against the lack in the Other. To take a concrete example. When we had covid 19, many anti-vaxers did not believe the government, but believed it was a grand style political coup, trying to take away freedoms and turn the population into sheep they could control. Even the philosopher Giorgio Agamben went in this direction. Now, the problem is not that they were all in on it, from corporations to government, but rather the opposite. What if really those in power, were themselves in panic, not really knowing what to do. Take the question of mask: a big point from anti-vaxers were, that first we were told to wear mask and then not, and then again. They take this as though government doesn’t know what they are doing, but they cannot accept, that the government WAS really experimenting, but not in the sense of using people as guinea pigs for their scientific experiments, but because they really did not know. That it was precisely true, that we have to do the best we can. This includes therefore an exposition, of the Other doesn’t exist. Here we see unprecedented territory, and this also then entails what universalism really is, or ‘war communism’, that is a kind of social system that is not based on surplus profit, for example. But for the paranoiac, this means that the goverment is testing out different systems on us, ‘how much will we accept’ and so on. Now, it is of course, true, that you can make links between big pharma and goverments, because governments rely on big pharma to develop vaccine. It also is true, that the for example, the way big pharma try to control distribution (for example witholding the vacinne from countries in global south) points towards conscious manipulation (and not the kind of ‘war communism’ that zizek pleads for). But this precisely show that the situation is relatively open, that antagonisms between the social systems, government, the state and capitalism are obvious here, not that they seamless fit into each other as the biopolitical paradigm from especially Giorgio Agamben suggests. In this way the conspiracy theory is precisely a paranoid defense against the lack in the Other. if crisis occur it is not really due to the Other that doesn’t know (the goverment trying to solve the situation), but because someone is in control. Much more difficult than a malevolent Other in control is that there is “no one in control”.

Now, this is not everything. I recently met a phd student, that was studying paranoia and said something along the lines of “we need the paranoids to think”. Now, this was a psychoanalytically inspired theory, but this surprised me. I would say, the problem with the paranoiac or the psychotic is certainly not failure to think. They think all the time. What he meant was clearly the popular opinion about “living in their own world”. But we need perhaps not so much to ask them to think, but to make us, mainstream ‘liberals’ and so on think. What I mean by this is, what I think is a highly suggestive theory proposed by the slovenian lacanian alenka zupancic in relation to conspiracy theory. He formulates this critic in relation to the the movie “don’t look up”, which some of you may have seen. Her main point is the following: we should not make distinction between ‘us’ normal and those psychotic-paranoid, as though they are living in a world of their own. in her theory, they are precisely a manifestation of our own unconscious behaviour. A paranoid-psychotic is a manifestation of our own disavowed belief. What she means, is that the predominant mode of ideology today is ‘fetichism’. Fetichism not so much in the clinical sense, as in the sense of accepting knowledge, on the condition that we can also disawov it. Both Zizek and Zupancic often oppose a symptomatic and fetichistic use of ideology. the symptomatic one is the one that traditional critique of ideology uses. A given social system represses its own dysfunctions and this return as symptoms. Once we expose the symptom as a symptom, once we make it conscious (for example unemployment linked to capitalism) the symptom itself should disappear. now, fetichistic use of ideology is different. it openly, as in sloterdijks cynical reason confesses its own symptoms. It does not repress them, but even declares them. But at the same time, it fails to act on it. To take a common example. we know about the effects of climate change and that this is caused by humans. this is not repressed as in the beginning, where there were still discussions about the human impact. We do not discuss this anymore. Yet, we also do not really act on it. Why? here comes the fetich. as in Freud’s classical account a fetich is what allows us to sustain belief (in this case of the maternal phallus). We accept a certain knowledge. We do not repress it. But at the same time, we disawov it. The psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni, fellow-traveller of the early Lacan (often a respondent in Lacan’s early seminars) coined the phrase “je sais bien mais quand meme”. I know very well, but neverthless I act as if I don’t believe it. To take the example of climate change. We know that the climate change is happening, rapidly. Yet, we walk outside and see the birds and the trees and they seem fine. A tree in this sense can function as a fetich, that makes us both accept a knowledge AND also disavow it. Now Zupancic suggest a redoubled function of the fetich. It is not that the fetich embodies non-knowledge, but that knowledge itself functions as its own fetich. In the movie Don’t Look up, a meteor is about to hit the earth. Everyone talks about this all the time, including the “progressives”. The movie also doesn’t depict the president as a Trump-character, but rather like Hillary Clinton (she embraces Bill Clinton in an image in her office, suggesting she is rather a democract, if not simply Hillary Clinton herself). In this way, the movie refuses to locate the problem in Trump-figures, who are themselves rather like symptoms. But, a famous line in the movie is: “a meteor is hitting the earth — will there be a Super Bowl?”. This is a great line, because it illustrates how knowledge itself can function as a fetich. We acknowledge that a meteor is hitting the earth, but then go on to talk about whether or not there will be a superbowl or some similar event. Isn’t this generally how we ‘act’? We talk about climate change all the time, but it is as though, now that we have talked about it, and concluded we live in urgent times, that the clock is ticking and so on we can in a way watch superbowl with a clean conscience. We conduct seminars or conference, do campaigns, precisely so that we can declare this knowledge over and over. And this is where Zupancic sees conspiracy theories. The ‘obvious craziness’ of the conspiracist is like our formation of our unconscious, because we in our practical activity, act like a meteor, or climate change is not really happening. The logic of the unconscious of the conspiracy theorist is therefore the following: they say, that a meteor or climate change is hitting the earth, but nonetheless they go ON as though nothing is really happening, therefore nothing CAN be really happening. In other words it MUST be a scam, because if it was not, it would be really crazy. But the sad fact is that this IS really crazy. Zupancic gives the example of a meteor hitting the earth tomorrow, but that we still try to make a million dollar today:

Take the following extreme situation: suppose I can make a million dollars today on the fact that the world will end tomorrow. The common-sense question is, of course: and what am I going to do with that million dollars tomorrow, when the world ends? From the perspective of the End of the World, it makes absolutely no difference whether I make that million or not. Unless — and here’s the trick — earning that million is my way of efficiently disavowing the reality of the end (for myself). The effort to make a fortune off the end does not take place in spite of the fact that the world will end tomorrow, but rather constitutes a kind of (socio-economic) fetishistic ritual of derealization, of disavowing the reality of the end.

It would be crazy to try to make a million dollar today, when the world is tumbling down. Yet, if this activity itself, more than my conscious belief (I know very well the earth will end), that sustains my unconscious belief that the world is not really coming to an end. A conspiracy theorist is someone who sees this millionaire and says: if the world was really coming to an end, he wouldn’t try to make another million, but try to save himself. But he doesn’t — ergo it is a scham. The problem is that the conspiracy theorist, in this way actually doesn’t see how crazy we ‘normal’ people are behaving, and that he therefore in a way brings out our own craziness in broad daylight. The only thing we should add is that the millionaire is not simply trying to make a million in opposition to climate change, but probably through various ‘green’ projects. The point is not that he is oblivious to the seriousness of the act, but that his very activity can sustain his belief, can derealize its impact. Slavoj Zizek has noted this logic in contemporary capitalism and especially the fancy art-scene in a recent book:

“ in a cynical mode, the fetishist disavowal ‘I know very well, but … (I don’t really believe it)’ is raised to a higher reflexive level: fetish is not the element to which I hold so that I can act while ignoring what I know — fetish is this knowledge itself. The cynical reasoning is: ‘I know very well what I’m doing, so you cannot reproach me that I don’t know what I am doing.’ This is how, in today’s capitalism, hegemonic ideology includes (and thereby neutralizes the efficiency of) critical knowledge: critical distance towards the social order is the very medium through which this order reproduces itself. Just think about today’s explosion of art biennales (Venice, Kassel …): although they usually present themselves as a form of resistance towards global capitalism and its commodification of everything, they are in their mode of organization the ultimate form of art as a moment of capitalist self-reproduction.” (Too late to awaken, Slavoj Zizek, 257).

We see all these festivals, that precisely can go on, because they wear their criticism on their own sleeve. The logic is that of a conference, where we state with a big banner in the beginning: the world is ending, and now that we have shown that we are ‘in the know’, that we are certainly not one of those conspiracy theorist madmen, we can go on with the party or the conference as usual. I imagine that such a conference would at the same time have a big video playing in the background, where we see probably in some avant-garde lightning the ice melting in the north pole. The paradox again is that we consciously know this and we declare this all the time, but that this declaration itself functions as a mode of derealization. And as Zupancic writes, this is why the conspiracy theorist is a ‘materialization’ of our own unconscious. As she says about Mckay’s film (which I by the way do not like that much, but I think the argument she makes is itself correct:)

the important point that McKay’s film makes very palpable is that — contrary to what we like to think — disavowal does not simply take place on the side of conspiracy theorists and the “blind masses,” but perhaps primarily on the side of the “elites,” the (supposedly) “rational” mainstream, the wielders of economic and political power. Conspiracy theories are rather a symptom or, I would argue, an embodiment of the grotesque unconscious of the elites. And the elites need conspiracy theorists precisely in order to point their finger at them, to contrast the conspiracists’ craziness with their own supposed rationality, and thus make us blind to their madness. Which is why, albeit usually abhorring each other, elites and conspiracy theorists often function in a strange complicity. (https://www.e-flux.com/notes/509069/conspiracy-theory-without-theory-on-don-t-look-up).

So, to sum up. We the ‘rational’ people need the conspiracist as our ‘crazy’ otherness. But we refuse to see, how complicit we are with them (not only that we need them against our own rationality), but even more so, that they come from out own ‘madness’, or to paraphrase Lacan we are so horrified/fascinated by them, because what has been foreclosed from the symbolic returns in the real, of these crazy figures. To, go back to my friend, that said, that paranoids are a result of “sad” people that need to think, first, they are are already thinking, in fact too much, and second, they are symptom of our unconscious thinking (that no catastrophe is happening), a belief we can sustain through our practical activity. The key mistake by conspiracy theories is to think that since we act as if no catastrophe is happening, it is all a master plan to dupe us. To which we would have to say, no it’s even worse. The elites and the mainstream really do not know what we are doing. That is much worse than paranoia.

bibliography:

Alenka Zupancic: https://www.e-flux.com/notes/509069/conspiracy-theory-without-theory-on-don-t-look-up

Slavoj Zizek: Too Late to Awaken. 2023. Penguin Books.