Eye Exercise

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1950-2009)

Sedgwick was an American literary critic and queer theorist.

She questioned the paranoid style of reading¹ that has become “nearly synonymous with criticism itself” (Sedgwick 2003, 124). This practice of “[s]ubversive and demystifying parody, suspicious archaeologies of the present, [and] the detection of hidden patterns of violence and their exposure” is a “wised-up popular cynicism”, so by no means limited to academia and theoreticians (p. 143). Nor is it limited to individuals: it also operates on the scale of “shared histories, emergent communities, and the weaving of intertextual discourse” (p. 150). In our world of endemic systematic oppression it has come to seem naïve not to read in this way, but Sedgwick warned of the dangers of it being our default strategy (pp. 125–6).

Paranoid reading is averse to surprise so seeks to eliminate it: requiring that “bad news be always already known” (p. 130). It has a “distinctively rigid relation to temporality, at once anticipatory and retroactive” (p. 146). The perpetually suspicious reader is bereft of hope.

A critic in the paranoid mould stresses “the efficacy of knowledge per se—knowledge in the form of exposure”, acting as if the criticism’s “work would be accomplished if only it could finally, this time, somehow get its story truly known. That a fully initiated listener could still remain indifferent or inimical, or might have no help to offer, is hardly treated as a possibility” (p. 138). The implicit claim that “things are bad and getting worse” can’t be refuted, and paranoia lacks the ability to predict or formulate oppositional strategies (p. 142). Therefore, in its almost totalising sweep of methodological assumptions, it risks impoverishing our literary-critical toolkit, diminishing our ability to anticipate or respond to political change (pp. 143–4).

“Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly” (p. 130). Its strategies are one way of understanding among others, however it tends to blot out the alternatives (pp. 130–1). It is monopolistic (p. 126). Its exclusive faith in demystifying exposure forecloses explicit recourse to motives for reading such as pleasure and amelioration (p. 144). These “reparative” motives are seen as “merely aesthetic” and “merely reformist”, and are described in such “sappy, aestheticizing, defensive, anti-intellectual, or reactionary” terms that it’s unsurprising few critics adopt them (pp. 144, 150).

Sedgwick differed. Reparative reading is “[n]o less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic” (p. 150). In undertaking “a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks” it “will leave us in a vastly better position to do justice to a wealth of characteristic, culturally central practices, many of which can well be called reparative, that emerge from queer experience but become invisible or illegible under a paranoid optic” (pp. 150, 147). “At a textual level”, it seemed to Sedgwick, “related practices of reparative knowing may lie, barely recognized and little explored, at the heart of many histories of gay, lesbian, and queer intertextuality” (p. 149). To read in this reparative fashion is to (p. 146):

surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new; to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones. Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates. Because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.