Notes on Paranoia

We're a full three weeks beyond the storming of the Capitol building by a pro-Trump mob, and already (and predictably), the event itself has melted out of sharp focus and into a blurry half-recollection, absent from news coverage and the popular imagination. That's largely to be expected - short of COVID-19, almost nothing is capable of grabbing the spotlight for more than a handful of media cycles - and I'm not interested in the mechanism of trending events or belaboring any point about screen-eroded attention span.

The velcro and red hat spectacle, and really, the the stream of clicky think-pieces deep-diving QAnon, does have me thinking about George Hansen's look at the intersection of trickster and paranoia. It helps that I was working through the book (which, I'd like to take apart and think through wholesale at some point) as the Trump regime culminated with the Capitol riot, subsequent impeachment, and thousands of Q adherents finding their faith challenged as Joe Biden was inaugurated. Hansen provided one of those rare but energizing confluences of interest - the right bit of thinking at the right time, as it were. There's a lot to unpack with this idea, and turning it over for the first time has presented a handful of interesting tangents that I hope to develop, but consider this some preliminary thinking through of the interface between trickster and paranoia.

Hansen's focus generally is how we can map ideas of trickster onto ideas of the paranormal writ large, with specific attention to the community of scientific researchers probing supernatural experiences and claims. This lends a particular flavor to his argument about trickster (he'll go to great length to defend paranormal researchers and debunk the debunkers, but often plunks "trickster" into the same bucket for each example) that tilts more toward the spooky than the anthropological. Following this, his chapter on paranoia is both short and shoved near the end of the book. For Hansen, we can use trickster to think through just about anything that is roughly anti-structural, destabilizing, or otherwise liminal in some capacity.

If we take Hansen's trip on paranoia, I think we land on the conclusion that paranoid thinking presents a corrosive feedback loop: paranoia is itself destabilizing and anti-structural, while also being provoked in situations where structures are already destabilized. For instance, UFO and conspiracy theories tend to flourish in times of growing distrust of government. QAnon, like any conspiracy culture worth its salt, is rooted in disaffection and perceived threats against the masses - here, a largely conservative, white, petite bourgeoisie mass, but a mass nonetheless. What's different here, perhaps, is that the paranoid don't often actually challenge the stability of the structure in question. You could argue pretty convincingly that nothing was actually threatened, and emphasize the spectacle-ness of the event which, I hear you, even if I don't here want to dive too deeply in to the idea that the whole scene was an op in and of itself. The fact that this is even a line of thinking worth mentioning is good evidence of trickster being at play.

The point that Hansen hammers repeatedly is that paranoia, like the paranormal more generally (some interesting etymology to unpack here, natch) is anti-structural, and therefore a domain of trickster, but I'm more and more persuaded by the argument that paranoia is in fact superstructural, in that it is not a mindset that breaks down or seeks to wobble the structure, but is the result of a hyper-awareness of the structure and its many tentacles. Paranoia is provoked specifically when you glimpse (or, think you glimpse) behind the two-way glass and see the depth of institution and structure that is nominally hidden. At least in the sense of Mulder-and-Skully-dark-internet-forum conspiracy culture, you attain paranoia when you start putting pieces together, not the other way around. The consequence of trying to square this saucer-shaped circle is that paranoia appears at both poles, as residue of colossal and oppressive structures more generally, regardless of its relative stability in the tweaking eyes of the individual. Hansen points out that intelligence agencies use paranoia as a destabilizing tool, and are very much on the front lines of using tricksterisms to preserve and grow their power by destabilizing progressive and radical threats, as well as being about the only appendages of the superstructure to take interest in the paranormal and high weirdness. I'd like to unpack this more specifically in the future, but suffice it to say we have trickster appearing on both sides of the divide - as an agent of the structure and as a strategy for the individual - as trickster is wont to do.

Maybe, then, it's more cogent to say that paranoia is destabilizing to the ego, to the person itself - when you start questioning the structures around you, that critique and dissection can often unmoor you from reality.

I'm interested in reading this through Caillois - Hansen suggests that the boundaries of self and environment are abolished during and after a paranoid phase, and this very much lines up with Callois's thoughts on legendary psychasthenia. Is camouflage paranoid? It's certainly defensive. Is paranoia in some sense camouflaging? We can point to some larger questions: is paranoia a by-product of self-awareness? Is paranoia evidence of realizing the ego and an opposition to the external? Are we being forced to deal with it now, because we're encountering a reckoning with the fact of American culture, and identifying ourselves as objects in opposition? Or are we camouflaged within it, melting away into the toxic miasma of Q flags and tactical dorkery?