paranoia

[Tony Elias]

lucky me. I signed up yesterday to the P-list ("long time listener, first
time caller) and here I find myself in the grandstand watching a nasty
little flame war, and already a discussion of paranoia (a hobby.) 

In regard to Henry, Paul Craig's assertions that there exists some kind of
link between paranoia and intelligence, I'm not so sure. I'm writing a
thesis at the moment on paranoia and conspiracy theories as a cultual logic,
and literary-cultural form or genre which of course pynchon has had a lot to
do with. I'm looking at paranoia, in a psychiatric sense at the moment, and
a lot of the literature seems to be divided. the usual "portrait of your
average paranoid" is one of someone with relatively average intelligence,
usually displaced such as a migrant, which would make sense in that paranoia
seems to be the basic narrative drive I would argue of SF, throwing someone
in new environment and letting them work their world out.

It does seem though, that those who develop the grander, more complicated
paranoid systems are usually of a higher education level, such as Daniel
Paul Schreber "history's most famous paranoid", access to a braoder base of
knowledge, and bascially the development of what constiutes and conspiracy
theory (rather than a simple - my analyst or my neighbour wants to poison me
- people are laughing at me - paranoid suspicion). The merit of pynchon's
paranoid narratives is his formalization of we-systems and they-systems, the
I and the Other, replacing the question of what is a paranoid with the
epistemological imperative of what is knowledge and how do we acquire it;
concerns for more than just paranoids - of which, by the way, we all are.
Andrew Dinn's point that systems drive us shouldn't be neglected, as much as
we would like to think that isnt the way it works, that we are all a
rational citizens of 20th-becoming-21st century.

gotta gooooo

Tony Elias