Towards a Theory of Paranoia

This essay has a twofold aim: to outline a theory of paranoia, and to demonstrate the relevance of this theory to SF in general and to the work of Philip K. Dick in particular. Freud’s various remarks on paranoia—most notably in his reading of Schreber—suggest that paranoia operates by a ruthlessly hermeneutic logic. The paranoiac interprets all worldly phenomena as aspects of a symmetrical and expressive totality at the center of which stands the “I” of the paranoiac himself. Jacques Lacan accepts this model but adds two important revisions. First, he demonstrates that paranoia is not merely a disease but is in crucial ways paradigmatic of “normal” human psychic development. Second, he attempts to historicize the basic categories of psychoanalysis and to show that the Freudian subject and the subject of the capitalist epoch are inextricably related. If, then, paranoia is in a sense the normative subjectivity of capitalist society, it must be asked what there is in capitalism that demands constant hermeneutic. Two answers present themselves, especially in the context of 20th-century consumerist or monopoly capitalism: on the economic level, the commodity; on the political level, conspiracy. Marx himself, in the theory of commodity fetishism, identifies the commodity as a mystifying signifier that demands interpretation. Conspiracy has never been rigorously theorized, but it is at least provisionally plausible to regard it as a structural feature of political life under American monopoly capitalism. It is a commonplace that Dick is a paranoid writer in the sense that his protagonists are generally paranoiac anti-heroes. What has been less widely noted is the precision and consistency with which he represents the objects of paranoid worrying and hermeneutic as commodities and signs of conspiracy. Here I offer many examples drawn from a variety of Dick’s texts, especially emphasizing the degree to which he literalizes the kind of metaphoric structure that Marx employs in theorizing commodity fetishism. Though Dick may be pre-eminent in this regard, there is, however, a generally privileged relationship between SF and paranoiac ideology, both in the estranging assumptions of SF and in certain literary: tendencies of the genre toward totalization and logical coherence. I conclude with a reading Ubik, wherein the connection of paranoia with commodities and conspiracies is perhaps most fully worked out, but which also may suggest a critique of paranoia and a demonstration of its ideological limits. (CF)

Art · Art history · Paranoia · Psychoanalysis · Psychotherapist · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology