Theoretical Delights

Madeleine Adams 

“I’m a reverse paranoid. I’m quite certain that the world is conspiring to make me happy.”

— Moondog, “The Beach Bum”

If you’ve come down with a case of apophenia, then you perceive erroneous connections between random objects. Picture a cork board bearing Burlington Coat Factory store locations plotted on a crumpled map of the US, the birth dates of all the starring cast in the original DeGrassi (the Canadian one, with Drake), and articles on child sex-trafficking rings uncovered in Vermont, connected by thumbtacked twine. That is, conspiracy. In her studies of UFO abductees, Susan Lepselter writes that conspiracists cultivate apophenia as an art, weaving together apparently disparate news headlines and stories to find the hidden, “connecting” narrative. And anybody who’s ever listened to Alex Jones talk about gay frogs, or done a deep dive into QAnon, or heard a friend expound on his theory about Panera’s iced tea machine, knows that there is something thrilling about making apophenic connections.

Indeed, many disturbing “conspiracy theories” turn out to be true: Smallpox blankets, Watergate, MK ULTRA, Epstein’s island, the cocaine trade in South America. Purdue Pharma and fentanyl, General Motors and jaywalking. “They” really are “out to get you.” At this point, your false consciousness is twitching uncontrollably. Your lapels are ripping because of how much I have shaken you by them.

“But,” you say, “at least we intellectuals can exercise our right to information and creative expression to combat all this money and power! We can uncover the truth, right?” Wrong! Creative Writing MFAs, the Kenyon Review, Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock, Iris Murdoch, Hannah Arendt⏤figures and institutions we associate with our creative, freedom-loving, moral-minded–dare I say liberal self-image as Americans⏤all financially backed by a Cold War branch of the CIA called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Ha! The scales have fallen from your eyes!

In his studies of the paranoid Judge Schreber, Freud admits that “the delusions of paranoiacs have an unpalatable external similarity and internal kinship to the systems of our philosophers.” Paul Ricoeur’s List of Hermeneutic Paranoiacs decries Freud, along with Neitzsche and Marx. Deleuze and Guattari skip over Freud to take a closer look at his patient, Judge Schreber (who thought that God was putting rainbows in his anus). Contra Freud, they develop schizoanalysis, which delights in the patterned, overdetermined style of apophenia. 

The schizophrenic’s “erroneous” connections, which the psychoanalyst tries to redirect down a more logical, socially ordained path, are, to Deleuze and Guattari, the most natural shapes that desire takes under capitalism. Capitalism, and (in my mind) all contemporary social systems, are the management and production of desire. The only way to combat these oppressive systems is through a redirection of that desire: a new definition of delight. The schizo, like the conspiracist, accomplishes this through the work of bricolage, cobbling together a reality from whatever materials are at hand. Delight is delirious. Delirium’s logic is the logic of theory.

But there is no doubt that there is something dangerous about the paranoid style of the 2020s. Indeed, there are a lot of things that are dangerous about the 2020s, and correspondingly many things to be paranoid about. There is a war being fought by drones whose targets are decided, with virtually no human oversight, by an Artificial Intelligence system called Lavender, drawing from a mass surveillance database, and resulting in more than 37,000 casualties, many of them women and children. Last year, a 6-year-old shot his homeroom teacher in Virginia. Chinese pharmaceutical companies are pumping the American black market with tranqs, a drug so addictive that, though users often contract a flesh-eating infection after one injection, they will resort to auto-amputation rather than sobriety. People sick with Covid sometimes choose swallowing sheep deworming medication over going to the hospital for antivirals. 

Invention of narrative is a form of creative play. Writers, philosophers, and kids playing fantasy games do this. Conspiracy theories are a form of creative play denied to us by the Enlightenment worship of the Real, because the threat posed by conspiracy theories is to the status quo. More than that⏤ it is also fundamentally a threat to the existence of any normative, historical truth at all. We need a better narrative than, “history will show that my actions were justified.” But this is the only story the Enlightenment provides us with: The truth always prevails!  The persecuted hero liberates the truth from the prison of the status quo, where it has been guarded by the cackling villains, whom he slays through KNOWLEDGE. We need to feed our imagination with new stories, rather than pour it into the mold of Enlightenment Manichaeism. 

It’s the worst, we are told, it’s ever been. And getting worse. Political parties provide no coherent plan to get us out. Our world is burning. Action movies boom that it is up to YOU to save us! Militant resistance is much more exciting than calling your congressman. Grand theorizing beats plodding research. Conspiring is more fun than complying. In 2024’s atmosphere, conspiracy theories burn a fuel easily ignited by our paranoid atmosphere. Explosive actions result: you cut out all friends and family who don’t believe what you believe, or you bring an AR-15 to Comet Ping Pong in search of the Clintons’ pedophilia ring, or you drop everything to await the return of JFK Jr. from the dead to his rightful place at the Capitol. If conspiracy theory is the fuel and worldwide violence the spark, then so much for our Enlightenment ideals!

We’re fucked.