April 20, 1999

Paranoia

The following was published April 20, 1999 (the day of the Columbine school shooting) for CTheory.net, and is still available in their archives.

1.

Paranoia is the overstrain of the mind in its synthetic capacity, the unifying function.

2.

Synthesis has been convicted of untrustworthiness in the court of the dominant natural science, precisely because that science is dominated; synthesis is shaky when pressed into what is accused of being speculation.

3.

What paranoia as the most common symptom of contemporary everyday life expresses is the tendency of the nervous and quivering apperceptive apparatus to cause the consciousness to leap too quickly into “intelligible worlds”; that numinous indeterminacy wherein nothing even can be what it seems because the object is always hiding within itself.

4.

Synthesis is out of practice. It doesn’t get enough exercise and, in its function as a part of the autonomous transcendental machinery of the human consciousness—our within itself, now called the unconscious—is always running, always searching for the chance to work out its atrophic kinks: some stray bit of unprocessed material, any nonhomogenized datum will do.

5.

In The Arrival, an ordinary movie wherein the main character is alleged to have been paranoid before he discovered the State’s coverup of alien activity, i.e., before the State itself was taken over by aliens, the main character gives in to paranoia a bit too easily, has too-refined a skill at determining the real when on his own in the world of appearance, especially considering that he is a natural scientist, a person required, on the contrary, to have an overdeveloped analytic capacity.(Synthesis is required of us today by ideology alone, which processes the raw data of experience before we line-assemble the Taylorized parts, some of which data escape unmutilated into the intellectual combines of individual theorists and paranoiacs, the infrequency of this through-the-crack-slipping being what has left both types of mind starvin’ like marvin for the slightest bit of independent production: The monopoly power of the ideological manufacture is what produces this fly-by-night entrepreneurship and is the overlooked object of the false consciousness resulting.) But this character’s uncanny independence could just be an accident. Given that he tends toward paranoia already, the suspicion that there is more going on than is apparent, which lurks to a greater or lesser degree in all of us, both consciously and un-, does not take much to excite; the confirmation of this suspicion is quite uncomfortable. Human beings are social animals. We live in families, we intend to make ourselves happy with other members of our species. One ancient name for the other, homo, the most faithful descendant being l’homme, is far from serendipitous. The film’s too-easy metaphor allows it to gloss over the real source of the paranoia of the protagonist (the movie puts lost jobs and greenhouse-gas emissions off on aliens, for instance) and does itself injustice by allowing Charlie Sheen’s main character to “see for himself” too quickly: We are not comfortable with members of our own species. They may as well be aliens. Homo is hetero.

6.

The protocynical thought that we hurt one another in looking for love is painful enough. The amplification of this into the hyperesthetic notion that people will try to hurt us even when we choose to remain alone is almost too much to bear. The repeated confirmation that some are out to destroy us for no good reason at all is always too much to bear. This could, by itself, suffice to explain the pathetic death of Huey Newton and the death wishes of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, who was also pathologically stoic. The suspicious intuition strengthens us for the opposition, but it also destroys us. It crushes us spiritually, emotionally, and most often, in the largest numbers, physically, in the form of drug addiction and bodily neglect, to know that we will be targeted, attacked, and killed. It is almost as if the individual human organism, when faced with a genuine paranoiac condition, a real conspiracy, is wired to malfunction. Whether the malfunction comes in the form of psychosis, outward-lashing violence, inability to believe it, or simple stock-still standing of a deer-in-the-headlights quality, it will come.

7.

It is one thing to resist homogenization. It is another to be accosted by the full weight of heterogeneity.

8.

But this tidal wave is molecular; the motion of atomic individuals is Brownian, the zenith of difference, the apex of identity, the microscale at which they are the same; unique flotsam bubbles equally indifferently cast about.

9.

The synthetic faculty which goes haywire in paranoia has gone under other names before, the most infamous being transcendental apperception, that bourgeois machine which unconsciously preparses the sense-data of individual perception, readying those data for their organization into knowledge.

10.

Kant discovered this transcendental machine in the Enlightenment effort to account for scientific knowledge, itself necessary to ensure the thorough exploitation of nature. How am I to know my perceptions of the world and my representations of them in language are true? Kant gave up in a sense: “The I think must be capable of accompanying all my representations [in language], for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought.... All the manifold of intuition [sense-perception], has, therefore, a necessary relation to the I think, in the subject in which this manifold is found.” The world in itself is dismissed—there is no longer nature, but second, human nature, the world for us, the world we create under bourgeois management—and the necessary relationship is no longer conformity of knowledge to the world, but conformity of knowledge to the intuitions issuing from the black box of unconscious transcendental apperception.There may indeed be a unity perceived in the sense-data manifold, but this a private matter, a property of the species—as a collection of individuals. The unconscious apperatus shapes what we know before we know it, in accordance with the universal schemata of pure reason. The world appears—for us, individually. Anything more would be uncivilized.

11.

This individualistic solution accounts for the possibility of scientific agreement among humans—and has the class-specific benefit of not really accounting for it. (AngloAmerican analytic philosophy, taking up this tack, eventually found itself capable of asking whether I wasn’t just a brain in a vat, am-ming ’cause I think I can—a moment of truth.) The universal frame remains unnamed, unconscious.

12.

And yet the task succeeded: bourgeois science is the formal while bourgeois technology is the real subsumption of nature under capital.

13.

Language, the coin of conscious exchange, means more than one says with it. Whatever words used, some interlocutor is capable of understanding: this sentence, bearer of my individual thoughts and intuitions, is universal. Even sonically. The sound of words travels through an invisible substance, deducible from the fact of sound. Precisely the most personal and individual intuitions issuing from apperception are the most universal and social; under alienation, this appears to mean the most abstract: “The ‘I’ is merely universal like ‘Now’, ‘Here’, or ‘This’ in general; I do indeed mean a single ‘I’, but can no more say what I mean in the case of ‘I’ than I can in the case of ‘Now’ and ‘Here’.... Similarly, when I say ‘I’, this singular ‘I’, I say in general all ‘Is’; everyone is what I say, everyone is ‘I’, this singular ‘I’.” An abstract universe of individuals—as opposed to a collective universal—deduced from the presence of the apperatus within each member of it. Of course I am not a placeholder, but the question remains why I might not understand my universality without appearing to myself as a cipher.

14.

Hegel did not have a good idea about how it was to be gotten from here to there: from that abstract universality of the “I,” the universal individual, to the universal collective of the “I,” a society for itself embodied in each member of it, “to a man.” Kant hadn’t, in the early-bourgeois era, come up with anything even so crude as an invisible hand, a supraindividual transcendence, forcing the harmonization of the universe of individuals into a collectivity; Hegel, reading Adam Smith, finally admitted the poverty of the individual’s possible relations with society under bourgeois alienation: yet another abstract universal, the ultimate abstract universal, God, now secularized as the unconscious movement of Spirit, i.e., Reason, as History. Assuring law and order, Spirit is a Supercop. Not a bone, but a thug. This was, to give him more credit than he deserves, Hegel’s discovery of society—in itself, i.e., as it is, not for itself.

15.

The apperatus does for individual perception what the value-form does for society: it creates universal equivalence, that uniform substance in which difference can be quantified to ensure fair trade in commodities or intuitions.

16.

The value-form is imposed within and throughout the social labor process. Money is the embodiment of value, alienated labor. And even value, that ether of which money is the ray, is measured in terms of money. The only variable in this constricted equation is duration. There is the potential flux, or flux, which is the same anyway, because potential—the irreducible core of unpredictability of the future course of events, no matter how bounded—still allows present interests to hedge their bets, discount future options. This open acknowledgment—veritable flaunting—of its nonselfidentity is simultaneously money’s most magnificently arrogant gesture of sovereignty over the future: money’s realm of perpetual becoming. Because money cannot come to self-identity, its becoming is also its essence. Because money is constituted as the universal equivalent only in the flux of valuations of goods and services, and money cannot come to rest or it would cease to be money, its essence is also its being. Money is to circulate. Money is to change in value. Money by its very structure cannot but provide the value gap which allows profit.

17.

Whereas money is the medium of commodity exchange, entailing some value money measures, bourgeois objectivity, theoretically assured by the apperatus and expressed in the universal character of language, is the medium of rational exchange, entailing also a universal frame: that object-commodity world created by alienated social labor.

18.

The apperatus participates in the social labor process by imposing a convenient set of epistemological problemata upon sense-perceptions: essence/appearance, real/ideal, space/time, quality/quantity, subject/object, etc., although unconscious apperception itself is the result of the imposition of these ideal forms on the world in primitive accumulation—separation of the producer from the means of production—and the alienated social labor which primitive accumulation founds. This fundamental separation also happens to be the source of the subject/object problematic, probably the oldest ideal schema.

19.

The homology between unconscious social processes and unconscious individual processes is imposed within and throughout class domination; only in the bourgeois era are the problemata arrived at over the course of millennia put to full use; they are the means whereby the superannuated separation of humans from the means of production created the unconscious at all.

20.

With the further development of the economy, this imposition becomes a conscious management strategy: personality engineering, psychometrics, demographics: Soultech. We are also products. In such a situation, identity with oneself can become a matter of bad faith: the identity movements express this truth at every step: if one has to “strengthen one’s ties to the community” or “improve relations within the community,” whatever community there is, one is not a part of that community or there is no community. But spectacular mass mind production—not mind control, not brainwashing, but mind production, “when living people have become walking bits of ideology” (Theodor Adorno)—remains contradictory, born of antagonism. It is a better method of social control than discipline, although the latter remains necessary. The society of production which required discipline over control now requires production over discipline. It is not particularizing, picking out each individual and tailoring methods to it—although that is not inconceivably inefficient in such contexts as egostrengthening psychoanalysis—but conformizing, like the value-form or apperception itself: it is the intersection of these two processes in the individual. It takes place in such enclaves of putative group, i.e., ostensibly self, identity as group therapy, volunteer work, reformist activism, “community” and “people of color” organizations, church, etc. The gap between the group content and the cipher character of the individual who is pushed into it by spectacular coercion actually powers the group (after the fashion of money’s nonselfidentity), which profits while the individual receives trickledown benefits of identification after the institution invests its members with status-group distinction.

21.

The discovery/imposition of the bourgeois machine/schema transcendental apperception is the formal while Soultech is the real subsumption of intellectual labor—i.e., all thinking, not merely that of those paid to do so—under capital.

22.

The origin and nature of this apperatus are obviously not unconscious to all individuals but to the world as world, to society as society, to the universal collective. Meanwhile, this macroindividual model of world society, with layers of consciousness and unconsciousness, is also derived from idealism, the fundamental ideology/strategy by which alienation is enforced—in religion, philosophy, psychology, etc. So we return to the lonely crowd of individuals, each of whom may be conscious or not.

23.

How can one get nothing from something? How can an individual be conscious of its universal character and therefore the unity of the social world when the world is not? Why this gap between the mass quantities of individual experience of the universal, which can have a conscious quality, and the quality of the collective experience of the universal, which is definitively unconscious as of yet? Because the social world is constantly retreating from while advancing toward selfconsciousness, while that retreat grows more dependent upon the ever-more powerful forces of production, i.e., ever-greater potential for world-social selfconsciousness: the fulfillment of the perpetually broken promise of absolute idealism.

24.

The social world’s unselfconsciousness is not the anxious and naïve Kierkegaardian unconsciousness, the slightly troubled sleep of a god, but Sartre’s bad faith, the vampire’s nightmare.

25.

The individual’s potential to come to conscious perception of the unity of the social world is embodied in the individual’s unconscious transcendental apperception, whose successful mediation of sense-perception (however preprocessed the object-commodities sensed) proves a priori the possibility of the real unity of the social world—a world humanity makes while making itself—not only the perception of its unity, which is, however, still more than the social world possesses. And obviously, the world is already united as a collection of alien object-commodities that we make while making our masters. The only reason we know that each individual possesses this potential is because the social world the bourgeoisie has created approaches selfconsciousness at every step, with every completion of the circuit of capital, at the end of which alienation is reinforced by the growth of the State and the refinement of Soultech. But this cycle is in essence—ideally—an attempt.

26.

The actual practice of absolute idealism—mankind making the world, albeit under the authority of an alien power, a separate class—powers both the approach and the retreat, while remaining the only practice. Nothing other than this attempt is the task of the bourgeoisie. We remain alive in the midst of this attempt. We caught a glimpse of the possibility, and gained an extensive knowledge of the reality, with Freud and Marx: enough of both to know that the unconsciousness of the social world must be expressed in each member of it. The attempt is and must be maintained as a failure if the bourgeoisie is not to dissolve its own principle of alienation. Hegel, for instance, jumped right into the State upon reaching the point of the dialectic beyond which the bourgeoisie could not survive: the supersession of poverty. But the bourgeoisie’s conscious principle of self-preservation is not to be confused with the actual movement of the social world the bourgeoisie has initiated. The aliens are also unconscious.

27.

Nietzsche was not simply being gratuitously insulting when he claimed that Kant pretended to venture out beyond common sense only to reinforce it. “The culture provides patterns which enable [individuals] to live with a defect without becoming ill....” (Erich Fromm) Kant’s common sense, in the face of his discovery of the autonomous motion of the apperatus was to let sleeping dogs lie, to count the universal-individual apperatus a blessing, and think about something else. Preferably bourgeois natural science. He was of the age of independent production, nonhomogenized sense-perception. Investment opportunities were not so constrained by centuries of competition, concentration, and accumulation, which progressively limit the sphere of profitable production to the ideal, to the intellectual and affective. He attempted to ward off both universal-collective perception of the unity of the social world and yet to maintain a healthy competition among perceptions, within, of course, the bounds of Reason alone. The former would destroy not only the bourgeoisie but also its principle: alienation. The latter has in the intervening years required a strenuous corporatist reorganization of the social world around individual enterprises capable of protecting Reason—i.e., monopoly knowledge safeguarded by the technical division of labor—but has not destroyed the bourgeoisie or collapsed its epistemological framework.

28.

Contemporary paranoia becomes so with this monopolization, which not only introduces the element of pathology (by nonintegration) into otherwise-benign protoparanoiac rituals such as the decipherment of bones, tea leaves, and palmlines, belief in gods left over from previous alienations, etc., but which also which constricts individual intellectual activity to what is at the very least already partially processed by alienated social labor. Irrational “raw” material. The segregation of the domain of irrationality from rationality came about only with the alien rationalization of life; it sets up the invisible barrier which is constitutive of its other, irrationality, i.e., any nonintegrated individual rationality.

29.

Not only is to enlist a dynamic in its own suppression ridiculous, but it is also perverse. To do so is to take upon oneself the power of God in the Garden of Eden—the same one in which Kant said it was low animality to remain, the one in which he would have encouraged the primeval pair to eat the fruit sooner, the better to escape their self-administered tutelage, their voluntary servitude—hubris of a kind no man had ever dared. Hegel must be credited with recognizing that to set up a problematic of opposition between the perception of a thing and the thing in and for itself is already to supersede it—the thing is already a commodity, processed by the apperatus if not actually manmade, preprocessed by alienated social labor—whereas to rest in it is nothing less than what it sounds like: regression; socially, repression, as the existence of the State and Soultech reveals.

30.

When the repressed returns, it is angry, hungry like the Chinese ghost, needy and clinging, Marx’s specter haunting the social phenomena of conspiracy-theorizing, widespread frenetic grasping at mass-manufactured “spirituality,” and secret Gnostic literature.

31.

Unanswerable lies inspire unfalsifiable hypotheses.

32.

The paltriness of what slips through the net of the ideological manufacture accounts for the poverty of most paranoiac intuitions; the fact that the manufacture is standardized and efficient means that there are only certain points in the process—weak links in the productive chain, perhaps even built into the machine to account for certain self-destructive popular tastes—at which loose ends can remain untied, through which unfinished products can fall; it is not accidental that rogue synthesis results in standardized delusions anyway: government/corporate surveillance/corruption—which is hardly bizarre, more like a run-of-the-mill inductive intuition than a wildeyed hyperdeduction—and alien machinations, the meaning of which has already been explained. These unfinished bits have already been through part of the process. We have similar end-products even in paranoid processes, themselves a byproduct. Mental-illness products are bizarre only because they are not sold. Perhaps Soultech will begin to sell them directly, as it has sold certain other psychopathological products indirectly through art over the years. Perhaps a new commodity-fetish? “You so craaaazy!” But the marketing strategy will probably be no more innovative than that of an Oliver Stone/Chris Carter production.




































1. The technical division of labor concentrates synthetic knowledge and operations in the hands of capitalist management. See Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, Monthly Review Press, 1974, passim.

2. At this late date, it is safe to assert that all objects are commodities. The object hides because it is a commodity; the hiddenness of the essence of the object-commodity is the very source of the well-known essence/appearance problematic.

3. See supra note 1.

4. The now-unconscious independent transcendental apparatus is outsourced to the ideological manufacture. But only after an intense primitive-accumulation process, whereby the individual enterprises are either integrated by psychology (or some other mode of schema-imposition) or marginalized by its diagnosis of irrationality.

5. Certain members of our own species. The film’s metaphor dissolves the class-determination of alienation in its universal appearance, allows the bourgeoisie to escape unnoticed, because as long as there is no conscious revolutionary movement everyone participates in the production of alienation.

6. The long and terrible history of revolutionaries falling victim to this trap is matched only by that of near-revolutionaries, which also exceeds the former.

7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Everyman’s Library, 1993, p. 99 (1781).

8. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford, 1977, p. 62 (1807).

9. All means of production, including intellectual/affective. In precapitalist times, priests and shamans performed this primitive accumulation of the ideal.

10. See supra note 9.

11. Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari engaged in a wideranging discussion of the characteristics of the society of discipline versus the society of control.

12. See supra note 1.

13. See Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, para. V, 1988:

The simple fact of being unanswerable has given what is false an entirely new quality. At a stroke it is truth which has almost everywhere ceased to exist or, at best, has been reduced to the status of pure hypothesis. Unanswerable lies have succeeded in eliminating public opinion, which first lost the ability to make itself heard and then very quickly dissolved altogether. This evidently has significant consequences for politics, the applied sciences, the legal system and the arts.




































psychology paranoia deleuze.guattari metaphor imagination soultech conspiracy.theory