The Paranoid Imperative: Affect, Emotion, and Neoliberal Academe

Are academics more paranoid than the rest of the population? It has been said that around 15 to 20 percent of the population frequently have paranoid thoughts and another 3 to 5 percent suffer from severe paranoia. While the latter group requires medical treatment for what psychologists call persecutory delusions, the others have lesser forms of paranoia (Freeman and Freeman 2008, 10-11). Thus, given that around a quarter of the population are said to be paranoid, it seems safe to say that paranoia is not uncommon today. Nevertheless, designating a large chunk of the population as paranoid is a fairly recent phenomena.

In 1980, if you asked the average psychiatrist what percentage of the population had the unfounded belief that someone or something is out to hurt them, that is, what percentage of the population is paranoid, most would have set this number at around 1 percent. It was not until the 1990s that more and more people came to be identified as having paranoid thoughts. The 1 percent though from the previous era was not a precise number. Rather, it was one that correlated with the perceived number of people with severe mental illness. Some of this one percent were those with severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorders, who suffered severe paranoia as a consequence. But most were people diagnosed with schizophrenia, wherein about half also had persecutory delusions (Freeman and Freeman 2008, 11).

So, if around a quarter of the population can be said to experience some level of paranoia, how do these numbers compare to those regarding the prevalence of paranoia in academe? While the figures above were largely drawn from surveys of select communities, the higher education community has not been among them. Part of the reason for this is that higher education has been largely uninterested in the emotional dimensions of academic life.¹ "The university world," comments Charlotte Bloch,

is generally associated with rationality, methodological principles, objectivity and logical argument. From the point of view of this organisational [sic] self-understanding, emotions appear to be alien, irrelevant and disruptive. However, this does not mean that Academia does not have a culture of emotions. The perception of emotions as being alien and irrelevant is in fact the expression of a particular culture of emotions. In this case, an academic culture in which feelings have no place.

(2012, 2)

This is all the more surprising when one considers that not only has the importance of emotions in organizational research been widely acknowledged, but also that organizations have been recognized as both rational and emotional structures.²

Moreover, organizations have also been associated with affectivity, which has been cited as one of their key dimensions (Albrow 1992, 326). Nevertheless, in spite of the claim that affectivity is a key dimension of organizations, studies of affect in higher education are still a neglected area of affect theory. And though one recent effort to fill this lacuna dubbed itself the "first" application of affect theory to comparative education themes (Epstein 2019), it focused more on how affect theory can help to form a more robust discussion of the policy-making process—and the popular reactions to it—than on the more general topic of paranoid affect in academe. This is in spite of the fact that interest in affect theory is now nearly twenty-five years old. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, co-editors of an authoritative anthology of work in this area, date the "watershed moment" for affect theory to be the 1995 publications of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank's "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold" and Brian Massumi's "The Autonomy of Affect" (2010, 5).

Nevertheless, both of the above areas of concern on paranoia—organizational psychology and affect theory—provide enough material to establish a couple of working theses about paranoia in academe. The first is that academics, particularly in the humanities, are trained to be paranoid. The second thesis now follows from the first: because learning how to be an academic involves learning how to be paranoid, to be an academic is to be paranoid...