O'Donnell, "Postmodernity and the Symptom of Paranoia"

[Dave Monroe]

... from Patrick O'Donnell, Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and 
Contemporary U.S. Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000), Chapter 1, 
"Postmodernity and the Symptom of Paranoia," pp. 11-43 ...

It [paranoia] is a symptom, precisely, in the sense that paranoia is an 
alibi, a form of accomodation for the loss of those grand narratives 
[Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition] along with th temporal 
depth and sequential ordering that founds a putative historical belonging. 
(16)

Cultural paranoia is a compensatory fiction that minds individual subjects 
to identificatory collective bodies such as those of teh nation, class, 
gender (when articulated according to the logic of compulsory 
heterosexuality), and the "human."  It operates under the rubric of a 
postmodern cynicism that, in Peter Sloterdijk's analysis [Critique of 
Cynical Reason], wavers unevenly between skepticism about Enlightenment 
values and rationality (even as revised by Jurgen Habrmas in "the unfinished 
project of modernity") and full investiture in the Deleuzian "postsignifying 
regime" of bodies without organs and deterritorialized subjectivities.  For 
the paranoid, identity, knowledge, and history are validated by what is out 
there, and only hidden to the eyes of those who cannot see the formal 
relation between dispersed signs and objects.  To employ the kind of 
tautology that typifies paranoia in the works to follow: the signs and 
objects of the world are dispersed because this, supposedly, is the ruling 
condition of a decentered and detemmporalized postmodern reality.  And to 
indulge in the kind of paradox that is equally typical of paranoia: for the 
paranoid, the relation between between the dispersed manifestations of the 
real to be woven into narratives of cultural identity is hidden to others 
becaue they either have not come to terms with the explosion of the subject 
under this regime (they are not scizophrenic enough), or they do not retain 
a belief in the capacity of the now-exploded subject to remap itself onto 
the real by uncovering the hidden relation between things that have always 
been there for us to see (they are not paranoid enough).  Who is paranoia 
for?  It is for us, national, corporate, historical subjects in a time when 
these formations are beset by questions about their cohesion and 
continuance. (16)

... qusetion is, who is the paranoid "here"?  Pynchon?  Oedipa (or Stencil, 
or Slothrop, or ...)?  "The" Reader?  All of the above, to varying degrees, 
with various effects?  Anyway, see also ...

Bersani, Leo.  "Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature."
   Representations 25 (1989): 9-118

... which I do not have at hand.  And, for anyone interested (kai?), 
O'Donnell notes that Andreas Huyssen remarks on, among other things, a 
certain Enlightenment nostalgia nonetheless on Sloterdijk's part, as well as 
some fundamental differences betwixt PS and GD/FG.  See ...

Huyssen, Andreas.  "Postenlightened Cynicism: Diogenes
   as Postmodern Intellectual."  Twilight Memories: Marking
   Time in a Culture of Amnesia.  New York: Routledge, 1995.
   157-74.

Anyway, any of that sound applicable, jody, et al.?
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