What Is the Matter with Politics? Paranoia, Precarity, Climate Change

One of the deep mysteries of the twenty-first century is why there is such a denial about climate change and a lack of the political will to confront it, even in the face of all-but-certain eco-system collapse, or why people are generally unconvinced that they can relate their deep concerns about climate change to political solutions. Considering this political impasse as a crisis in the imagination incited by a delegitimization of the Humanities, this chapter contrasts a climate change critical theory perspective with a dystopic 2015 novel about apocalyptic drought in the U.S. west, Claire Vaye Watkins' Gold Fame Citrus. The novel starts in post-apocalyptic Laurel Canyon, after the great exodus, when a prairie dog invades a dead starlet's library, endangering a set of biographies of westward-bound eco-pioneers and American heroes—Sacajawea, John Muir, Lewis and Clark, Mulholland, and John Wesley Powell. "Putting the prairie dog into the library was a mistake," the main character Luz ruminates as she tromps around in the starlet's rhinestone dress (Watkins 2015, 3). Luz and Ray, the two human squatters in the starlet's mansion—their names themselves trumpeting an Enlightenment on the move as well as a sun excessive and yet split apart—, soon find a baby and take it home. They suspect they are chased down by real or imaginary gangsters who might or might not be the baby's relatives or caretakers, led by a shadowy, possibly predatory character whom Luz refers to as The Nut—"She saw the Nut trailing them in circles around the yard… 'They're going to come for us'" (56). They flee into the desert, soon unwarily encountering a dystopian community of hippies, magnetists, and weird scientists led by Levi, a self-proclaimed dowser, who might or might not be an agent of some shady enterprise or might or might not be a savior of the planet.

Calling this novel a "paranoid text," I address paranoia as a social illness parading as the mental illness par excellence of neoliberal precarity in an era of climate change. I treat paranoia as a general belief that political institutions, organization, theory, and practices cannot accommodate to our new realities. That is, paranoia is the condition where political subjects—or citizens—feel they are put in danger by the limits to politics, not predominantly because the systems of governing are overly powerful but more fundamentally because there are matters beyond what political subjects can understand in the political terms of the past.¹ The entry of the prairie dog signals the end of the project of domesticating the wilderness to make California livable, the end of the Hollywood dream and its star-system, ushering in insecurities and anxieties over survival and reproduction, the disappearance of knowable borders and the fragmenting of identities. Called "Ig" because of an incomprehensible sound she makes, the baby—found, unattached, without language or story, without lineage, name, country, or known origin, alien, unrooted, unpredictable—introduces the question of politics in an age of precarity: can politics accommodate accidental occurrences it cannot predict like Ig's appearance? Or does the accidental occurrence represent the very definition of the political in a democracy and the possibility that the future might offer unforeseen political responses to unforeseen events? In this paper, I show that the rift between climate and politics—a posthumanist claim, for example, that the climate's temporalities are incommensurable to the temporalities of our epistemologies—underlies a more general precarity tied to our loss of possible connections and identifications within the institutions, methods, forms, and discourses through which citizens in a democracy have traditionally exercised their rights, made demands, requested redress, or re-envisioned the social. The ceding of these connections and identifications incites the text's "paranoia," but I also argue that "paranoia" must be thought as coterminous with democracy itself—a political relationship with the yet-unknowable.

As a "paranoid text," Gold Fame Citrus operates differently than the paranoia discussed by recent critics as a modern or postmodern symptom. Watkins' novel identifies paranoia as a political...