In Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth Zahid Chaudhary offers a finely honed and powerfully illuminating account of the psychosocial operations animating contemporary political culture. As Chaudhary rightly notes, much political commentary on the left has tended towards an analysis of right-wing populisms, and the post-truth politics in which they traffic, in relatively reductive political economic terms, emphasizing spiraling inequality and the retreat of the neoliberal state from any responsibility to the public good. In this situation, the argument goes, and in the apparent absence of real political alternatives, large segments of the population, confronting various forms of abandonment and insecurity, gravitate towards less and more dissociated theories of power and elite powerbrokers, and to authoritarian demagogues posing as anti-elitists. This line of analysis is, of course, not wrong, but tends to devolve into the familiar complaint that the masses are desiring against their interests, while bracketing the thorny questions about how desire is constituted and how it operates at the level of public life. Cutting an analytic path through a set of case studies (e.g., QAnon, public health resistance, Havana Syndrome) Paranoid Publics constructs a heuristic for discerning and understanding that elusive thing – the psychic dispositions that (dis)order contemporary political culture.
Focused as it is on the psychic dimensions of collective political life, Paranoid Publics is nevertheless grounded in two keen observations about political economy. In the first, Chaudhary returns to Foucault’s distinction between “games of truth” and “regimes of truth” to suggest that our present is marked by a proliferation of truth games in the absence of truth regimes. At the level of the game, the truth generated by the rules of veridiction is self-contained (independent of other truths produced according to other rules). In Foucault’s account, it is the regime of truth that orders the games into an apparatus for producing governable subjects, according to the formula “X is true, therefore I submit” (qtd in Chaudhary, 13). Paranoid Publics analyzes “what happens to truth when… it is no longer regulated by a regime such that the manifestation of truth can be counted on to enforce what Foucault called the ‘therefore,’ or the necessary enactment of conduct in line with truth,” Chaudhary writes (15). What happens when power no longer aspires to norm civic conduct, but maintains itself instead by seeding the promiscuous mobilizations of the population, in other words?
The second observation builds out the first by aligning two forms of exposure normally taken up as discrete to generate a map of the terrain on which these truth games are played. The first form of biopolitical exposure is produced by escalating systemic breakdown (e.g., climate change, pandemics, “market rule” and its immiserating effects) and describes the differential but generalized exposure of human life to risk. This form of exposure (feeling exposed) interfaces with exposure in the sense of revelation – the practice of disclosing a concealed truth. Chaudhary’s alignment of these two registers of exposure, risk and veridiction, is one of those quietly brilliant analytic moves that, once encountered, one can’t believe that one didn’t see all along. Life lived in conditions of deepening and amplified risk, lived in a “mood” of exposure “when political economic processes remake life itself into a kind of lottery,” is negotiated through proliferating practices of revelation (“truthing,” in the QAnon idiom) (50). Revelation becomes a serial pursuit precisely for the reason that power is uncoupled from truth regimes (the scandal has no political traction any longer), so that the extension of the game becomes its own psycho-political end, an iterative negotiation of political-economic forces grown largely indifferent to our conduct. For platform capitalism, as Chaudhary points out, all forms of conduct reduce to “the data indices of life extracted through mechanisms of increased ‘engagement’ (gathering clicks, focalizing attention, activating ludic loops) and then converted into a pure value-form” (43). Stated less elegantly, all forms of conduct can be monetized.
The feeling of risky exposure to forces outside one’s control is, of course, the central affective axis of a paranoid orientation that both symptomizes and defends against this vulnerability. “Paranoia attracts by naming the unnameable,” Chaudhary writes, “indicating the threat or the malevolence whose existence and unique powers it designates as ‘truth.’ Running across political divides, paranoia articulates with resentment and anger, the public feelings that dominate the contemporary moment” (2). I will return to the topic of political divides shortly, but not before remarking on a few of the striking insights threaded through Chaudhary’s absorbing case studies.
The first is that the manifest irrationality of so many contemporary truth games, including QAnon, anti-vax activism, or anti-trans rhetoric is animated not just by the virulent repudiation of liberal norms and institutions but by a “positive desire for authoritarian politics” (17, my emphasis). In the absence of a truth regime, the paranoid truth sayer longs for a discriminating authority that would secure the consequences attendant to their truth. “Authoritarian politics promises a stable regime of truth, one in which a powerful authority (usually masculine and paternal) enforces the ‘therefore’ to which one might submit,” Chaudhary writes (17). Where power operates through practices of social atomization — through managed dissociation, in both senses of that term – the desire for the social surfaces in its most retrograde form, as the desire for repressive power, which is to say, as the desire for the repression of the other.
This insight into authoritarian longing thus converges on another pertaining to the psychodynamics of group object relations, the sorting of the world into good and bad objects central to a paranoid disposition. Here Chaudhary revisits Melanie Klein’s account of infantile anxiety as it traces how the infant’s existential anxiety (a fear of annihilation) is projected onto an external object (for Klein, the mother’s breast, insofar as it does not always materialize in response to the infant’s need) and there held at bay – or, conversely, transmuted into the good object (the breast that gratifies). The goodness or badness of the object is thus entirely a function of its relation to the vulnerable and imperiled ego, and indeed, the bad object is also susceptible to introjection, in such a way that the hated parts of oneself become identified with the external menace. At issue in this account – for Klein and for Chaudhary – is the susceptibility of the ego to iterated forms of splitting, experienced as an attenuation of the self, a falling apart – the very threat of destruction that paranoia seeks to mitigate. Chaudhary takes this analytic to a consideration of QAnon’s “Manichean world in which an immediate fight/flight response is necessary” and, relatedly to the interplay of sadistic and masochistic release in the storming of the Capital on January 6th (77). An aggressive posture against the bad objects with which a paranoid public populates its world functions psychically to secure “the innocence and goodness” of the self, “and nothing makes the expression of aggression feel more righteous than the feeling of persecution, whether imagined or real” (77, my emphasis). By framing the phenomenon to which we generally refer as “political polarization” in terms of group object relations, then, Chaudhary allows us to discern where (objectively) divergent political interests are overdetermined by the psychic operations of vulnerable selves. From this vantage, a political discourse that seeks to adjudicate whether a particular public has correctly identified the force(s) arrayed against it will invariably fail to interrupt or redirect the paranoid project of self-securitization by which the exposed subject at once mitigates and redoubles its risks.
At the same time, these psychic dynamics are further complicated by the media ecology in which they transpire and particularly by the “ludic grounds” on which paranoid ideation currently unfolds. “My wager,” Chaudhary writes, “is that we are witnessing the gamification of paranoia” – or perhaps the dimension of play is always engaged in the constitution of political collectives (62). In any case, the “[play] instincts are now solicited from users of contemporary digital platforms, which are not mere tools that preexisting paranoid publics deploy; rather these media now solidify paranoid publics” inasmuch as “the algorithms favor more extreme content” (62). Chaudhary goes on to characterize this media terrain as driving a (new) form of “LARPolitics,” in which the investment of the player in the role-playing game may or may not be matched by political conviction. As he observes of QAnon, “the game solicits paranoia from its participants, whether as performance or as ‘true belief’ […] Even if one might believe, such belief is not necessary to the operations of the game, which makes available psychosocial satisfactions and enjoyments in which belief may or may not play a part.” (63) Thus, a third pivotal insight is that the stakes in political action are increasingly unmoored from real (realist) political aims. I would venture that the decommissioning of democratic institutions in the U.S., such as they were, and the real political incapacity (certainly at the national level) of all but the donor class, has amplified the situation Chaudhary so acutely describes, where the rewards of political activity are increasingly and narrowly egocentric.
Earlier, I characterized Paranoid Publics as developing a heuristic for thinking contemporary political culture, a phrase intended to underscore that the analytic compass of the book well exceeds the specific phenomena it explores. I want to end this appreciation of Chaudhary’s remarkable study by suggesting something of how I think its analytic travels from right populisms to left politics. Chaudhary himself is somewhat equivocal on the matter of political reach. He remarks on the one hand that psychic processes do not have any given political content: “[P]sychoanalysis does not align neatly with a particular political outlook, but it makes it possible to discern identical psychodynamics across partisan divides and identify the unnamed satisfactions that forms of political discourse and practice offer” (17). At the same time, he posits that “paranoid publics… are largely – but not wholly – aligned to the right” (28). This is the one point on which I’m not sure I agree. Why would we imagine that the left is exempt from the “mood” of exposure or the negotiation of this condition through paranoid ideation? The circumstance that the left’s grasp of our antagonists is grounded in historicist and materialist accounts of capital, nation, and coloniality – the fact that our bad objects are in reality destructive agents levied against us – does not mean that our relation to those objects isn’t governed by the same conditions of life in the society of control (political abandonment, biopolitical risk, hyper-mediation, and surveillance) and the paranoid disposition that they seed.
To venture the suggestion that the left is also disposed to the “psychosocial satisfactions” of paranoia is obviously not to propose any sort of political symmetry or equivalence. But I find that Paranoid Publics impels me to reflect on the psychopolitics of the left political contexts I inhabit. The work of auto-analysis is invariably harder, and never more so than in this moment of existential danger, where the neoliberal machine for the upward transfer of wealth coheres with white nationalist control of the state. But how should we understand, for example, the current impassioned left defense for the rule of law – that artifact of liberal order — if not as (a version of) the desire for an authority to which “we,” that is to say, our antagonists, would be compelled to submit? What is the practice of discerning and exposing harm if not a modality of paranoid vigilance against a condition of intolerable exposure – which explains why the concept of “harm” is indifferent to scale, encompassing everything from microaggression to forced disappearance? (In the university context, I note, the exposure of harm is routinely paired with calls for the heightened administrative oversight of conduct – a demand historically associated with the conservative right.) And is left political culture not also gamified, via forms of app-based aggregation and amplification that attach specific political idioms and performances to a particular structure of affective reward?
This is not to say anything at all, much less to condemn, recourse to the law or to the rhetoric of harm as tactics for organizing and survival in dire times. But it is to suggest that paranoia structures the political field right to left – and that its dominance is fundamentally an index to a situation of systemic crisis and political incapacity from below. To imagine oneself apart, self-defined, untouched by the culture of one’s enemies is, let’s not forget, the surest mark of paranoia.
Eva Cherniavsky is the Andrew R. Hilen Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Washington.
