Sedgwick opens her
article with a brief anecdote about the AIDs epidemic, and the possibility that
it was a conspiracy. When she asks Cindy Patton (another critic) for an
opinion, Patton does not dismiss the conspiracy theories themselves so much as
the value of speculation. Her response breaks open the idea that paranoia does
not always yield new or useful information with the question “What would we
know then that we don’t already know?” (123)
Having planted this
idea early in the essay, Sedgewick examines and ultimately begins to
deconstruct the usefulness of paranoia. As someone who often engages texts with
some degree of suspicion, I was particularly struck by the notion that
confirming my suspicions—locating evidence of inequity, capitalist undertones,
and so forth—may not actually tell me anything that I hadn’t known going into
the text. As such, I’d like to walk through a few parts of her argument and to
look at a few of the ways in which she claims that paranoid readings can dredge
up the darker undertones of a text while failing to illuminate deeper insight.
Early in the essay,
Sedgewick claims that paranoia is anticipatory. Generally speaking, close
reading is a tool that critics use to gather information from the text, which
can then be synthesized into theories and interpretations. The paranoid reader,
according to Sedgewick, works backwards. The goal of paranoia is to ward off
surprise, and so paranoid readers operate under the assumption that their
paranoia is justified. In other words, the paranoid reader enters the text with
something to prove. Rather than taking in what’s there, they come in searching
for evidence that can be used to support something that they already know.
This creates an
epistemological problem in that the reader’s knowledge is not coming from the
text. Since the reader knows what they will find (and according to Sedgwick,
has always known it), their knowledge necessarily derives from somewhere
outside of the text.
As such, the argument
can be made that if the paranoid reader already knows what they’re going to
find in the text, they don’t gain anything useful. Since, as Sedgewick puts it, “paranoia
requires that bad news be always already known,” it follows that the paranoid
reader searching for bad news learns nothing that had not been presupposed
(130). Rather than actively engaging with the text, it’s reduced to a passive,
pliable object that can be used to prop up preformed notions. In this case, the
answer to Patton’s question is that we know nothing coming out of the text that
we didn’t know going in. We may learn that a particular text has racist or
misogynistic overtones, but if we are already well aware of the racism and misogyny
in the culture that produced the text, these findings in and of themselves aren’t
much of a revelation.
This implies that even
when paranoia isn’t unfounded, it isn’t necessarily productive. Oftentimes it
shines light on a problem that the reader was already more or less aware of
and, more to the point, doesn’t actually present a way of resolving the
problem. It may fuel further paranoia but in some cases it doesn’t result in a
better understanding of society, the issues at hand, or even the text (in fact,
part of why Sedgewick problematizes paranoid readings is because too much focus
on paranoid theories can get in the way of other observations).
Another way that the
usefulness of paranoia notably begins to break down is bound up in narrative
and epistemological entailment. Narrative and epistemological entailment is, to
my understanding, best described as the consequences of information, or the set
of things that follow from knowing something. By Sedgewick’s analysis, at the
crux of the paranoid reading is the belief that if critics expose the truth
about social ills, society at large will be moved to address them. The
imagining of this sort of epistemological entailment is referred to as faith in
exposure. It serves as a rational and for paranoid readings and operates on the
idea that ignorance is the main road block to social justice. Under this
mindset, the critic’s main job is to inform the public about the truth of the
text. However, under closer consideration, the article points out that it falls
apart.
First, underlying
faith in exposure is the idea of a universally agreed upon moral code. To
believe that exposing a wrong will cause society to rise up and fix it is for
the reader to naively assume that others share their values and consider the truth
that they have exposed relevant, interesting, and worthy of fixing. It also
implies that there is a single correct reading of the text that exposes an
absolute and uncontested truth, which can block further attempts at analysis.
Second is the fact that,
as described above, paranoid readings do not always produce meaningful truths.
They shed light on things that the critic—and sometimes the readership at
large—are already aware of. This means that the paranoid reading does not
necessarily expose anything, and so even if faith in exposure were to prove
correct, there would still be little to be gained from revealing a truth that
is already known. That said, the fact that the truth could be widely known but
remain unaddressed sharply undercuts the notion that exposure is an adequate
means of addressing the problem, and presents the interesting if uncomfortable
idea that the act of revealing the truth may not be inherently useful in and of
itself.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteLeanna-
ReplyDeleteI really like the way you broke down Sedgwick's arguments against paranoid reading in condensed and accessible terms. Specifically, you highlight the issues with anticipatory reading, which is a key component to paranoid reading. I also found the idea that as readers, we should not be reading to anticipate and expose racism, misogyny, etc in a text a hard pill to swallow. It seems that without knowing it, those practices have become quite ingrained in my reading practice, probably due to the fact that I feel usually certain that texts coming from a racist/sexist culture that are not actively and openly challenging that culture ARE actually racist or sexist. But it makes much more pragmatic sense, if one is actually interested in changing the state of things, to focus on different and more proactive forms of criticism and challenge. As you say, believing in the master code which implies that once we expose injustice, suddenly all of society will come together to dismantle that in justice, simply is naive. It also makes sense that, when anticipating something and looking for it, we aren't actually gaining or learning anything by finding it.