In Defense of Paranoia, part 1

they ARE out to get me!

            The other day, the protagonist of this story was Carmen Maria Machado. On Twitter, she saw some anime avatar kids advocating for popular publishing to adopt a standardized trigger warning system. She tweeted a few thoughts on the MPAA—what its chilling effect on cinema in the USA might portend for a standardized content warning system in fiction—and was instantly beset by teens with anime avatars who excused her of deriding “trauma survivors.” There’s not much substance to the moment beyond the humiliating situation of being gay, perhaps a writer, and glued to Twitter, but there is a narrative twist to the knife, since Machado is perhaps most well-known for her memoir about exiting an abusive relationship. In another somewhat recent turn of events related to trigger warnings, the politics of safety, and the anime avatar people, Machado was also one of the most vocal (and few non-transsexual) defenders of the trans woman writer Isabel Fall. I am sorry to say that because you are probably gay and addicted to the internet, you have probably heard of Fall, who was, upon publishing her first story, immediately run out of SFF by a transphobic mob of safe space zealots.

            This mob’s account of Fall’s crimes was confusing and unstable, and I’ll say much more about that later, but for now I’ll only remark upon how curious it is that, even in the twilight of this moment of mob rule, much conversation on the matter still centers not on questions about the hatred of trans women, the stereotype of such women as dangerous, and the consequent suppression and regulation of trans women’s art. The mob has fallen out of favor, but the criticism of the hysteria generally names it as transphobic without discussing why or how. Instead, both sides of that conversation concerns themselves with questions about trigger warnings, sensitivity readers, and individual people’s emotional states, both now and at the height of the furor—mostly members of the mob’s emotional states, actually, although Fall herself did end up in a mental hospital after agreeing to take her ostensibly dangerous story down and leave writing as a trans woman behind forever. Even in the face of something that would seem a great deal more urgent, the safe space and the trigger warning are pieces of gristle no one cannot stop chewing—not the morality kiddies, not queer theorists with tenured positions, and certainly not me.

            For example, now, the other day, some kid goes around Twitter saying that people should stop recommending Stone Butch Blues to them without a trigger warning. A bunch of my friends are incensed; I am gay and addicted to the internet; I end up seeing it. Here again the knife twists beyond the usual infuriating questions (how does this person react when they’re confronted with suffering they’re directly complicit in?; doesn’t this person have any real problems?; who does this kid think they are?), because of course, Stone Butch Blues does come with a trigger warning, at least in the version currently most easily available. With Feinberg’s prose, you can never quite tell whether you’re receiving it as elegant or clunky, only true: “I want to let you know that Stone Butch Blues is an anti-oppression/s novel. As a result, it contains scenes of rape and other violence.”

            Now, I am someone who often finds himself saying, in what I hope is my nuanced voice, that I “am not a big fan of trigger warnings.” But in the face of one as pragmatic and concise as Feinberg’s—look how much work “as a result” is doing in that sentence!—I find it hard to remember how it is that the conversation about them remains this elliptical, this perennial, this much of a source of gay online dopamine. We actually know how to do this pretty well, without turning into censors or cops, and without making the dangerously securitization-prone demand that we must pave the world in leather instead of making sure everyone has a pair of shoes.

            Indeed, it always shocks me that so many ostensible good Marxists and New Historicists have been able to chew the cud of trigger warning discourse without ever historicizing the things, perhaps because such a historicization precludes many of the easier, more dopamine-inducing conclusions one might come to with regard to trigger warnings and what may be wrong with kids today. Trigger warnings began in online spaces where people, mostly younger women and queers, gather to discuss their mental illness online, eliciting social support and advice on coping in the absence of recourse to treatment for their post-traumatic symptoms. They are the product not only of neoliberal austerity depriving people of access to mental health care, but of transphobic and racist barriers to treatment within the mental health care system itself. It is no wonder that the trigger warning and the trans youth have adhered to one another so stickily, since for most trans youths, finding a therapist who is competent on the dual subjects of transphobia and trauma is simply impossible—good luck, say, finding strategies for how to keep your head and heart together when some nice old lady calls you “ma’am,” and your heart is in your mouth even though you know she means no harm.

            Mainstream media accounts of the state of health care for trans children focus instead on the question of whether perhaps these children are getting too much mental health care, and whether this excess of dangerous pro-trans medical care might be doing “irreversible damage” to the ovaries of millions of white American future mothers, etc., etc. It has become particularly interesting to me, as hateful homophobic paranoia about trans children reaches a fever pitch in the US and UK, that so many queer thinkers keep citing Eve Sedgwick as they complain about the youthful, queer paranoid reader, on whom so much bad thinking can be blamed. More on this interesting phantom in a moment, whom Sedgwick never actually intended to ontologize as a type of reader—first, I’d like to talk about the trigger warning as an essentially solved problem.

            In fact, not just Feinberg, but most young punks who run like, queer DIY events or whatever, have tacitly agreed upon a reparative use of the trigger warning: First, you assess your audience. You decide if it’s that kind of room. (This is a terribly complicated assessment, too complicated to go into much just now.) If it is, you have someone who’s good at projecting a warm affect stand up and say something about anything on the itinerary that involves say suicide, rape, or graphic violence, and you have that person also make clear that if anyone’s feeling fucked up, they should step outside and someone will be happy to bum them a cigarette or find them somewhere quiet to sit. I would probably say something like, “I promise to make sure no one bugs you about needing to do that.” Sometimes, giving or witnessing a warning in this way actually triggers me—I begin to have such poetic thoughts of my own terrible life, of how costly and painful my durability has been. Sometimes, a particular person or group of people decide that they have been triggered and must have redress, and insist upon ruining the night for everyone. With such people, who truly have fallen victim to an excess of paranoid reading, if their breaking point is not a trigger warning, it will usually be something else—trigger warnings are no more to blame for such people than are other things such people often desire (books by Maggie Nelson, galaxy leggings, hot but non-threatening transmasculine boyfriends, septum piercings with opals in them). But mostly, it is a social gesture—this is why so often, the phrase “trigger warning: sexual assault” is followed by nothing more graphic than the words “sexual assault” spoken once more.

            Sometimes, the trigger warning does have a pragmatic dimension as an access technology, but like any access technology born out of a systemic lack of resources, it has many other dimensions as well. Mentally ill people seeking support online did not conceive of the trigger warning in order to obscure the reality of structural violence all around us, as when the MPAA seeks to prevent children from seeing, say, rape or violence, as though children are protected from these things in everyday life by their child status. Instead, the contingent and highly imperfect promise of the trigger warning is that the space in which it is given it will offer the traumatized subjects the slight remove necessary in order to perform an analysis of the violence that traumatized them. This remove will allow them to stay in the here and now, rather than passing through that disorienting fold in time trauma creates. In certain lights, this appears to be a reparative practice, rather than a paranoid one—one designed to faciliate an engagement with a frightening and dis-integrated part-object, not to cut that possibility off.

            Still, Eve Sedgwick’s famous essay on paranoid and reparative modes of reading would seem the natural corrective to a youth who seems squeamish about the violence in Stone Butch Blues, or to a fully grown fucking adult who runs a trans woman off the internet for using the wrong internet meme in the title of her science fiction story. A recent piece by media critic Emily VanDerWerff heroically glossed this deceptively simple behemoth of an essay by saying “A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed”—if you’re unfamiliar with it, I can’t really do you much better than that without you reading Sedgwick yourself. And certainly, such people would benefit from spending more time considering nourishment, healing, and pragmatic ways of making life better, rather than hollering about how transphobic Pedro Almodovar and the Rocky Horror Picture Show are, or whatever these people do all day. But to chastise them people for paranoid reading, demand they do the other, good kind of reading, and then call it a day, has become increasingly popular, and it is a terrible misapprehension of Sedgwick’s essay and the opportunities it offers us. Sedgwick never says that paranoid reading is bad or wrong or that we all need to stop doing it. She never says that there are too many paranoid readers out there these days, and that our task is to stop them.

            Indeed, Sedgwick disavows such easy fixes several times, emphasizing “the instability and mutual inscription” of the respective positions from which paranoid and reparative reading proceed. Just as importantly, she repeats several times the fact that “the paranoid exigencies [...] are often necessary for nonparanoid knowing and utterance,” particularly knowledge about resistance to capitalism, heterosexism, and empire. After discussing a friend’s refusal of paranoid, conspiracy theory-type thinking about the origins of HIV, she points out that this seasoned AIDS activist/scholar’s “calm response drew on a lot of research, her own and other people’s, much of which required being paranoiacally structured.” (Emphasis mine.) Although she does explain that in psychologist Silvan Tomkins’s terms, reparative reading practices tend to produce “weak theories,” which, despite their great value, cannot be applied very broadly, and often resemble nothing so much as “nonce taxonomies.” Put a pin in that notion of the nonce taxonomy—after all, anyone who has listened to a group of truly safety-pilled queer youth use words like “skoliosexual” (attracted to non-binary people) or “allosexual” (experiencing sexual attraction—that is to say, not asexual) knows that these young zealots of the trigger warning have a deep affection for nonce taxonomy, if also a disturbingly strong urge to undo its nonce-ness by formalizing and enforcing them.

            Like a good paranoid reader, you must see where I’m going with this: I mean to suggest, in short, that the critical practices engaged in by these baby moralists are not always paranoid in their nature, but reparative, and that this does not make them any more useful to us, or any less inclined towards, say, homophobia or racism. It does, however, explain part of why they are so versatile and effective, and why it is so difficult to extract young people from these practices, despite the fact that these very kids often cry with gratitude if you give them Sedgwick’s essay on paranoia to read. In fact, it is often necessary now to do a paranoid reading of the baby moralists’ readings, that we may understand how, for example, so many ostensibly pro-trans science fiction fanatics found themselves, pitchfork in hand, driving a trans woman writer out of literature.

            Nonetheless, the popular taking up of Sedgwick’s theory against the morality kids is resolutely anti-paranoia, and often ontologizes the paranoid reader as a particular sort of person, as opposed to considering paranoid reading as a critical practice that easily overruns or begins seeking to prohibit other practices. After critic Emily VanDerWerff offered a quick gloss of the essay in an piece on the controversy surrounding Fall’s story, fiction writer and journalist Lincoln Michel reposted the piece on his twitter account, going on to ask rhetorically whether “the paranoid reading is often more a police reading. People with little art cops in their brains. [...] The power of art is opening up new spaces. Spaces for messiness, transgression, new modes of thinking. People who want to police this and shrink art are the ones who do harm imho.” I may certainly agree with Michel about these new spaces and their necessity, but I disagree with him that paranoia is simply what a baby anarchist might call “the cop in your head”—as a transsexual living under neoliberal homonationalism, I need my paranoid reading skills at hand when I encounter cops, doctors, and other types of imperial myrmidon. Michel may be forgiven for tweeting off the cuff, but when art critic Olivia Laing provides a gloss of Sedgwick in a recent popular book of essays, she too allows a description of a practice of “reading” to transform almost immediately into a characterization of a type of person, “the paranoid reader,”and what this person does (they “put their faith in unveiling hidden acts of violence”). Laing then discusses a moving play about coincidence and grief she has recently seen, calling it an example of reparative reading—which is here understood, of course, to be the “good” kind. She says of this play that it is “about these two ways of reading the world, about the pull towards paranoia, to building narratives of blame and punishment, and about what happens if you don’t.” If you don’t? Don’t ever?  But what about when you need to? How can she say this without explaining Sedgwick’s qualifications of her critique, in a book peppered with engagements with things like HIV/AIDS, police violence, the displacement of people by US imperialism? What about when something horrible has been done—perhaps in my name, even—and the people who have done it have names and addresses?

            No, it is as Sedgwick said: we must keep all of our tools to hand, both the paranoid and the reparative. Otherwise, we run the risk of simply saying to these safety-pilled kids, “Don’t worry. Language can’t hurt you. Calm down.” As Sedgwick points out in the introduction to Touching Feeling, the book in which her essay on paranoid and reparative reading appears, “the claim that language itself can be productive of reality is a primary ground of anti-essentialist inquiry.” These youths have grown up in a queer intellectual atmosphere where this claim about language’s performativity and productive nature often feels like settled law—no wonder they think we should make so many rules about how language works!

            One possible response to the frightening recognition about language that anti-essentialist consciousness-raising creates is certainly to decide that language ought to be heavily regulated, and to say alongside Isabel Fall’s bad faith critics that the real problem here is not so much the suppression of trans women’s art as something more Foucauldianly particular: a lack of trigger warnings, a lack of proper sensitivity reading, and clear establishment of the stable gendered and racialized identities and political positionalities of everyone involved. Certainly, such a response necessitates the use of paranoid reading, and is be motivated in part by an excess of it, by the primacy it has achieved in leftist and particularly queer inquiry. But it would be a mistake for us to say that a sharp turn away from the paranoid will alone allow us to turn away from this tyrannical fragility. Indeed, to do so prevents us from a close and careful analysis of such fragility’s relationship to homophobia and racism, two primary engines motivating it.

            In later segments of this series, I’ll take up a critique of the critique of the trigger warning, revisiting a moment in 2014 when the questions of trigger warnings in the classroom became a hot topic, the subject of discourse from people like poet CA Conrad and the late theorist, Lauren Berlant. At that time, I found myself on the opposite side of this debate—it’ll be interesting to reflect on that. Yes, I am going to talk about the time Jack Halberstam posted an image from Homestuck. In next week’s, I’ll continue my discussion of Sedgwick, and in particular, I’ll discuss Isabel Fall’s critics, and how they vacillate between paranoid and reparative reading—in very sophisticated ways!—to justify their harassment of a trans woman in the name of trans safety.

            Stick with me! And if you feel the impulse to suggest a topic for this newsletter, I’m very open to suggestions—one, because I am a real loudmouth with opinions about nearly everything, and two, because I want you to love me. Get in touch!