Metamodernism and Paranoia

Abstract

The aim of ‘Metamodernism and Paranoia’ is to theorize a double as-if logic as it relates specifically to the metamodern subject: the diminished Romantic figure who finds themselves between planetary catastrophe and post-Historical projection. In order to do this, we draw on the critical notion of ‘paranoia’, which in philosophy and psychoanalysis has long been the word for such a doubly delusional structure of experience. To be sure, we do not mobilise the category of paranoia – or indeed the paranoid and the paranoiac – in any clinical or diagnostic sense. Nor do we necessarily intend it pejoratively, as is common in most non-clinical uses, even if we do think its outcomes are often decidedly unfavorable, even disastrous. Engaging the work of Jacques Lacan, Fredric Jameson, and Eric Voegelin, we rather use the notion of paranoia in a descriptive manner to grasp and put into words the 21st century subject’s dominant structure of experience.