Leanna O'Brien's Blog Post

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.