>Date: Mon, 22 May 1995 22:48:34 -0400
>From: Greg Ulmer
>Perhaps you saw in your newspaper recently the article headlined "Doctors fight belief that curse is killer," dateline Kinshasa, Zaire. The story circulating in Zaire is that there is no Ebola virus, but that the doctors and nurses who died were killed by magic for stealing diamonds from a patient. " "There is no epidemic. This is a fetish, Madam," said Jean Papa, maneuvering his taxi through Kinshasa's filthy, crowded streets, where an outbreak of the highly contagious Ebola virus would be a medical nightmare."

> >This article was placed next to a report on the O.J. trial: "defense presses conspiracy idea." Both stories reflect the logic of fetishism: "I know very well (knowledge), but nevertheless (I believe something else)." The knowledge is medical (Ebola, DNA) the belief is magic or conspiracy. The logic allows thought to unfold on both scenes simultaneously. What interests me is the way this logic is appropriated in poststructuralism (e.g., Derrida's Glas) and extended: when used deliberately, the double session or double scene of writing takes into account the third, hybrid signification that is the pattern evoked in the juxtaposition (not a dialectical Aufhebung).

Let me suggest that the "logic" which allows thought to unfold on both scenes simultaneously is a form of logic that is called schizomimetic. My thinking here has been influenced by Louis A. Sass's brilliant Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (See especially the riveting material on pp. 124­129 and on p. 459, note 39, in particular the stunning observation by Polyakov). By "schizomimetic" I mean the deliberate imitation of schizophrenic thought, in particular the schizophrenic's propensity­perhaps I might say talent­for making any two randomly selected objects seem to resemble each other, which, following U. F. Polyakov, would seem to be characterized by a flattening of the probabilities implicit in competing perceptual/cognitive explanatory hypotheses. This flattening of probabilities, what Polyakov calls a difficulty with "probability prognosis" (qtd. in Sass 127), is intimately bound to the mysterious relationship between paranoia and the semantic thought-disorders of schizophrenia. A crucial question is, To what extent do ambiguities of meaning, as opposed to ambiguities of truth (delusionality) contribute to the experience of paranoia? It is likely that ambiguities of meaning are a factor in paranoid schizophrenia in the sense of generating a "hermeneutic of suspicion" (Ricoeur) about how it is that other people using language, hence about the concealed nature of their intentions. Thus one can be primarily concerned about paranoia in the sense of delusionality, rather than in the sense of these more extreme, linguistically based thought disorders. Yet the two domains would seem to be related.

The key to understanding the connection could lie in the phenomenon of threat inflation, which leads to the domination of (negative) utilities over probabilities. The point is a comparative one: when every interpretation of a given experiential set looks "worst case," then one begins to ignore the differences in likelihood between different interpretations. Instead of converging upon the "minimax" solution (see von Neumann and Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior) within the product space of hypotheses (utilities x probabilities) and basing his behavior upon it, the schizophrenic will instead be driven from one hypothesis to the next (a continual ad hoc precession of internal simulations; see conspiracy thinking in a futile search for a way out of the whole space. This idea at least has the merit of offering a coherent explanation of the ad hocness of paranoid delusions.v But what of the aspect of paranoiac fixed-belief, which seems to be anything but a case of drift? One has to be careful defining terms. What is fixed in paranoid psychosis is the sensed level of threat to the self. This sense of threat may or may not become translated into a fixed story framework, but the point is that any set of events experienced by such a self will come to possess the same interpretive status within such a framework, the characteristic feature of which is the flattening of all probabilities. The crucial factor here seems to be that the paranoid imagination suffers not only from threat inflation but from an exaggerated sense of intentionality. The question remaining concerns the order of the relationship between these two factors. (Which comes first? Are they even separable?)

The crucial point is that if we should posit a hidden intention (that is, a deliberate plan) behind the events we perceive, then otherwise grossly improbable events can seem perfectly likely. After all, a hidden hand might sort a randomly shuffled deck of cards into ordered suits in seconds, while continued random shuffling could not obtain the same result in millions of years. Moreover, the hidden hand­what Karl Wessel has called "the Leibnizian film-editor" ("Worlds of Chance and Counterfeit 51­54)­is competent to produce any order it pleases with equal facility, but the random shuffle produces diverse arrangements possessing very different orders of probability. Yet as Wessel argues, the "Leibnizian film-editor" offers an almost perfect metaphor for total paranoia.

What, if anything, is the relationship of inflated threat and projected intention to the drift and flattening that characterize the semantic thought-disorder of schizophrenic? I can offer the thesis that unstable category perceptions drive the exaggerated senses of threat and intentionality in paranoid schizophrenia, though it is possible it is the other way around. In any case, one can imagine reasons for the pattern of unstable categorization in schizophrenic thought disorders that have no obvious connection to the paranoiac themes of threat and exaggerated intentionality. The sort of cognitive myopia that is described as overly "concrete" thinking (Sass, Madness and Modernism 124­25) in the schizophrenic literature is a good candidate for an explanation.

Schizophrenics are presumed to be unable to synthesize effectively different stimuli in gestalt (Sass, Madness 129­131): they tend only to respond to isolated features of objects/events/situations, not to whole entities. When is a Rorschach Test not a Rorschach Test? When its pattern is sufficiently improbable. Probabilities are always dependent upon some prior assessment of meanings, yet in what would appear to be the impaired memory function of schizophrenics, prior assessments of meanings are absent (Sass, Madness 164­170). Unstable category formation follows as a corollary of this fact, since the simultaneous perception of many features in gestalt (ordinarily) constrains the interpretation that would be given to any single feature taken in abstraction. In this paradigm the schizophrenic only comprehends such features in relative abstraction, which allows him to form heterodox categories of entities that other people would be unlikely to form. Moreover, because of the reduction of the constraining role of copresent features, such categories would tend to proliferate (disseminate) and their assessed probabilities to equilibrate. If one further postulates a reduction of the size of working memory in schizophrenia, one can see how chain- categories or family resemblances might get started more easily in the schizophrenic mind than in the non-schizophrenic mind, an effect of the serial loss of feature-based constraints over processing time.

At this point, we must underscore the logical distinction between the cognitive and epistemological senses of paranoia; the two are related in that the second sense reveals the first. Probabilities enter into the theory of paranoia in two different ways (to reiterate): in the way in which the individual mind selectively edits and biases the information it receives, and in the way in which the beliefs of persons can be shown to match­or not match­those arrived at by other persons independently of themselves (the lack of recurrent, reciprocal relationships). The loss of these reciprocal relationships in the postmodern world induces paranoia because of the latter sense­ the epistemological; this in turn aggravates the first sense, the effects on individual cognition. In the absence of any negative feedback in the selection and ordering of information, the isolated individual is free to construct any beliefs he wishes, flattening the degree of probabilities among the beliefs, which in turn only aggravates his growing paranoia. Coincidences which must otherwise seem wildly improbable all seem to make sense when some malignant intention is injected into the mix. The negative utility of the worst-case scenario simply overwhelms and flattens out all of the attendant probabilities: this is the (il)logic of the Cold War, in the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. The negative utility of the worst-case scenario, "mutually assured destruction" or MAD, is the grim reminder of the power of collective paranoia.

Paranoia is a term that is often used rather indiscriminately in that it would suggest that it names a particular, clearly-defined condition; in fact, paranoia denotes a concept which, more precisely, refers to a cluster of symptoms which can include threat inflation, chronic ad hoc reasoning, the attribution of an effect to a plurality of (occult) hidden causes, many effects to one cause, and so on. I wish to address two connected but essentially different aspects of the idea of "iteration" that are relevant to the problem of postmodern paranoia. The first aspect is logically prior to the other, which can be named the problem of the "infinite predicability of all objects" (this phrase is taken from Wessel's "Worlds of Chance and Counterfeit" 54). What this means is that, for ordinary communication to be possible at all (i.e., for meanings to be learnable), signified/signifier pairs must be iterable as between speakers and contexts, that is, that one-one correspondences between signifiers and signifieds be maintainable. Schizophrenic speech, for example, would seem to indicate an inability to converge effectively from the heard use of signifiers in parole to their significations in langue, a problem intimately bound up with Wittgenstein's ideas about the problem of rule learning in his Philosophical Investigations.

The other sense of iteration that is relevant to a discussion of paranoia is, of course, the sense in which intersubjective agreements can be said to occur in the absence of various kinds of influence, thereby allowing us to distinguish between the delusional and the real. This is the ontic (as opposed to semantic) sense of the iterate. In this case, paranoia amounts to the ad hoc accretion of beliefs rather than to the unchecked drift of meanings (as in the Lacanian signifying chain). There's a deep analogy to this aspect of paranoia in the philosophy of science (rather than the philosophy of language) called the Duhem-Quine thesis (see Sandra G. Harding, Can Theories Be Refuted?). What this thesis entails is that scientific propositions are not (in general) falsifiable in any final or Popperian sense, because in the light of new, seemingly contradictory data one can always add new propositions to the system to which any proposition of the kind belongs, that will make it come out true after all. Illustration: Inexplicable perturbations in the solar orbit of the planet Uranus presented astronomers the option of either giving up Newtonian mechanics or positing the existence of an unseen eighth planet. The latter course was taken, which in fact led to the discovery of Neptune. When the precession of the orbit of Mercury was later discovered, however, the former course was taken. By then a rival theory existed, general relativity, which did not require any ad hoc additions in the instance.

In principle there need be no end to this ad hoc process of protection by addition. The question then becomes one of the cost of maintaining such elaborate structures of belief in the light of its recurrent breakdowns, the burdens it places on memory, and so on. The cost of maintaining such beliefs is related to utility, that is, the question of how important it is to the believer that his core beliefs be maintained. In the case of the paranoid mind, the answer seems to be "at any cost." This suggests the connection of the core belief to mortal dread; for example, most religious systems are paranoid in this sense, with theology providing the ad hoc accretions that rectify the relationship between reality and the inviolate core.

These preliminary remarks thus allow us to make some more precise statements about the nature of paranoia: Paranoia is about the invalid inference to intentionality under the influence of an overvalent idea. In every paranoid delusion a war in the psyche is being fought between likelihoods and values (utilities), between the question of the probability of X happening and that of the consequences to self if X should happen. Thus, one must possess in consciousness some token self-object (if not necessarily a self-image) in order to experience paranoia; otherwise all one can suffer is an animal's instinctual fear of some present threat, and an animal's fear is not paranoia. Paranoia binds time in memory. It entails the ability to play the "What if?" game, to perform an internal simulation, that is, to entertain thoughts about threats which are not present, employing scripts that refer to a self-object that stands for the intentional subject in some world which may come to pass but is not yet (imagined future). Of course, the need to perform simulations is not in itself paranoid behavior. Rather, they are needed because of situations of "bounded rationality," the meaning of rationality "in situations where the complexity of the environment is immensely greater than the computational powers of the adaptive system" (190). The solutions to problems of immense complexity, Simon observes, have been found in game theory, in particular the ground-breaking work of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, 1944. William Poundstone, in Prisoner's Dilemma, calls this book "one of most influential and least-read books of the twentieth century" [41]). One method of game playing is to simulate randomness (mimicry). The saccadic movements of a fly, for instance, are unpredictable (as would be the predictable movement of a spiral); thus, the fly moves in such an unpredictable pattern in order to avoid predators. The Unabomber's choice of victims was not random, of course, but he randomized the locations of his attacks in order to confound detection. Similarly, the purpose of encryption is to disguise real intentions under the guise of apparent gibberish. (Of course, in the case of the paranoid schizophrenic, there seems to be very little "gibberish" given the flattening of probabilities in the cognitive processing of the schizophrenic mind.)

In general, the extent to which the idea of X happening obsesses consciousness is the product of its probability by some polynomial function (linear? quadratic?) of its utility to the obsessed person. People tend to organize their energies and resources to combat threats perceived to be severe, even if their objective likelihood is low. (The resources individuals expend paying for insurance, for example. See Herbert Simon's discussion of the relation between the utility function and pleasure or happiness, Sciences 58­60; see also p. 58, note 18 on the text Disaster Insurance Protection). Paranoid thinking is therefore a difference from the norm in degree rather than kind; it only seems a difference in kind because the non-paranoid person assesses to be either far less likely or far less damaging to the person who holds it than he himself believes. Paranoia is connected to survival (physical and/or ego), since it is better to overestimate than underestimate the quantity and nature of the perceived threat (the utility of overinterpretation exceeds that of underinterpretation). In another way, the utility of the belief of conspiracy thinking is necessarily connected to survival.

The peculiar, historically unique nature of postmodern paranoia is that it has shown up earliest and most profoundly in the (mostly) empty spaces of the American West. (I refer to the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the Unabomber suspect living alone in the wilds of Montana; but to this list one can add rightist militia groups such as the Freemen (also in Montana), the Posse Comitatus, and so on) There may be a process of self-selection operating here, with persons most inclined to isolate themselves from the chimeric, alienating socioeconomic system trekking off into what they imagine to be a simpler world, into the past of agrarian and small town American life. (The American version of the Heideggerian nostalgia.) This drive signifies the victims of a complexity catastrophe, for whom the unassimilable flood of sensory and conceptual data implicit in contemporary urban life has led inevitably to a paranoiac response, to the need to impost a simplifying pattern upon the unmanageable chaos. One especially grim aspect of this problem is the incapacity of such persons to model effectively the actual intentions of strangers within their own minds, which causes them to produce systems of incredible beliefs: thus the conspiracy thinking swirling about events like the O. J. Simpson trial.

The loss of recurring, reciprocal relationships in the boundary-less postmodern socioeconomic system constitutes an alienating and paranoia-inducing toxin nonpareil. In general, the perception of lack of any direct feedback relationship between Self and Other at the micro level induces paranoia, as does its converse, the lack of perception of any such feedback. As Professor Ulmer illustrates through the juxtaposed examples of the Ebola virus scare and alleged police conspiracy in the O. J. Simpson trial, the problem of the postmodern complexity catastrophe is not uniquely American. The Japanese have suffered from their own version of it, as shown by the nerve gas attack in the Toyko subway in 1995 by a group seeking retreat into a cultist (i.e. tribal) identity. When the Oklahoma City bombing occurred, it was first blamed on Islamic fundamentalists, which then resulted in a rather muffled apology that missed the point: Islamic fundamentalists, American militiamen, Japanese cultists are all the same people, all of them mortified by the ambiguities and complexities of the postmodern world, all driven by the same primitive communitarian desires that would result in the fragmentation of any "New World Order". (This fragmented state is the Lyotardian postmodern, the splitting of the modernist "whole" into a multiplicity of incommensurable parts.)

Of course, one must acknowledge that the motives of the Unabomber and the rightist militiamen involved in the Oklahoma city bombing were not identical, given that in each case the nature of the perceived threat was different: the Unabomber is an eco-terrorist, targeting the Malignant Enemy named the industrial system, while the Malignant Enemy of the militiamen is the United States government and its attendant metonymies like the Internal Revenue Service. All of them, however, are paranoid as a result of the loss of recurrent reciprocal relationships that have always acted to reinforce moral behavior within traditional democratic institutions. (See the conclusions of Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation, for example, based on multi-player experiments using the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. The conclusions confirm the centrality of principles like the the Golden Rule, the Lex Talionis, and a host of other notions of moral reciprocity found in history.)

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