On the Politics of Paranoid Style

Entre tous les problèmes de la création artistique, celui du style requiert le plus impérieusement, et pour l'artiste lui-même, croyons-nous, une solution théorique.

—Jacques Lacan (1933a)¹

Richard Hofstadter's notion of "paranoid style" from 1964 remains a suggestive way to read paranoia politically in contemporary culture, but not quite in the way that Hofstadter thinks.² If paranoia is a politics of relation about socialization as such, would the manifestation of style not implicate the critic in that very proposition? How, for instance, does paranoia present for the critic? Today, the best way to dress a cultural theorist (chronically victimized and prone to madcap moments) is in the paranoid style. It is difficult to think of Hofstadter in this garb, not just because it was still possible at the time to assume he was unaffected by the phenomenon he describes (although he was not, and with very good reason), and not just because he is a much better intellectual historian than he is a cultural theorist (which is demonstrable), but because the meaning of style also means there is something so intellectually reassuring in his jacket, bow tie, glasses, and stare that all thoughts of the overheated and bombastic can only be recalling a different tailor.

Of course, style here is not simply dress, and especially not the clichéd image of masculinist professorial prowess from a half century ago, but smash together cutting unlike modes of representational discourse around the intellectual content of delusion and corresponding yet discrepant cultural expressions foregrounds the troubled space of paranoia in political discourse.³ Paranoid style combines the critical position with its putative object which is only a "theoretical solution" to the extent that it highlights the politics at stake in the materialization of societal fear. Hofstadter himself is clear that his use of "paranoia" borders on the catechresistic, and it does not represent an albeit alluring attempt to identify "certifiable lunatics" as he puts it, in American political life (actually, a party game particularly amenable to contemporary social media). For Hofstadter, paranoia is a Weltanschauung, one mediated by a sense of persecution not about the personal but the national, the cultural, America as a whole way of life. Building from this perspective, paranoia is just this intermingling of adjacent yet disjunct codes, such that we might think of its analysis both as an opening onto political unconscious and as a system or logic of conceptual circulation today. I am compelled to narrow such sense further on this occasion, which may be deemed paranoiac in spite of myself (legitimately), so that the difficulties of political positionality in cultural theory remain a subtext before the related impress of cultural events in such practice, a field of symptomatic limits in production and exchange that find paranoia if not predictable then resolutely and maddeningly overdetermined. Class, for example, and its allegories, remains a substantial ground of paranoid critique, with the place of the intellectual nervously situated in that regard when it is clearly articulated by much more than self-identification (identitarianism and individualism are hardly exempt from ideological formation). Indeed, the opening to Hofstadter's essay notes how paranoia might channel class difference in this way: "Although American political life has rarely been touched by the most acute varieties of class conflict, it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds." What if the paranoia of and in class affiliation informs the critical act, a guilty pleasure primed by parasitical predilections that ill-fit those of class relations themselves?

Here, I will leave aside an extended exploration of Hofstadter's cultural and political diagnoses of "the American manner of responding to crises" in favor of thinking style as the provocation on the subjects/objects of critique. If this is a less capacious approach than that favored in Susan Sontag's reading of style that appeared at the same time as Hofstadter's, it will nevertheless cleave to her sensibility of style between high and low (also evident in her assessment of "camp" and objecthood). Even if paranoia is primary to being...