46 Paranoid readings.
History is a series of stories haunted by what it means to be human, when being human is a lesson in saying things incompletely. We can speak of the surveillance file as an inventory created for the purpose of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called “the paranoid reading,” which occurs when one approaches a work from a position of bad faith, seeking clues to maliciousness and evil intentions in ordinary acts. Paranoia anticipates. Paranoia is reflexive and mimetic. Paranoia is strong, not weak like those who allow themselves to be wounded by naive surprise. Paranoia told you so—and it has been telling you so for decades.
Coming from an epistemological “aversion to surprise,” the paranoid reading determines the future by exposing the dangers of the present. It is prophetic yet cynical, assuming nothing can be changed. Ultimately, the paranoid reading leans on exposure as a means of self-defense: “There must be no bad surprises […] paranoia requires that bad news be always already known,” Sedgwick wrote.
The goal of the paranoid reading is exposure and punishment for the purpose of protection. In many ways, this maps onto what Cristina Vatulescu has called “police aesthetics” in the literature genre of the surveillance file. Paranoid reading is critical infrastructure for the police state. All regimes built on terror rely on the file as a means of first inventing and then destroying the enemy within.
Reading the file through the dictatorship’s language of threat is as surreal as dropping acid. The surreality lends itself easily to paranoia.
“Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself,” Hegel warned. In a different translation, one could take Hegel as saying, “Wickedness also resides in the gaze that perceives itself as innocent and surrounded by wickedness.” Either way, the eye is implicated in its seeing.
In The Noise of Time, poet Osip Mandelstam used the phrase “police aesthetics” to describe the Russian empire of his childhood. Although his later aesthetic gravitated towards the broken, the miniscule, the shipwrecked, and the elliptical, Mandelstam looked back on his fondness for military regalia with a sort of horrified fascination. Cristina Vatulescu borrows Mandelstam’s “police aesthetics” to underscore the “insidiousness” of policing which isn’t limited to army parades but which also enters the minds of children and families through pop culture, media, news. In reading the surveillance files as a literary genre rather than documentary truth speaks to the complexity of Bugan’s efforts.
