Mapping Coils of Paranoia in a Neocolonial Security State

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2016 Becoming Serpent: Mapping Coils of Paranoia in a Neocolonial Security State Rachel J. Liebert Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1286 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] BECOMING SERPENT: MAPPING COILS OF PARANOIA IN A NEOCOLONIAL SECURITY STATE By RACHEL JANE LIEBERT A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Psychology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2016 © 2016 RACHEL JANE LIEBERT All Rights Reserved ii BECOMING SERPENT: MAPPING COILS OF PARANOIA IN A NEOCOLONIAL SECURITY STATE By RACHEL JANE LIEBERT This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Psychology to satisfy the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Michelle Fine Date Chair of Examining Committee Maureen O’Connor Date Executive Officer Michelle Fine Sunil Bhatia Cindi Katz Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Becoming Serpent: Mapping Coils of Paranoia in a Neocolonial Security State By Rachel Jane Liebert Advisor: Michelle Fine What follows is a feminist, decolonial experiment to map the un/settling circulation of paranoia – how it is done, what it does, what it could do – within contemporary conditions of US white supremacy. Drawing on participant observation, interviewing, scientific artifacts, reflexive journaling, and a public art project, I enter white supremacy through a burgeoning form of pre- emptive psy to capture ‘the prodrome’ – a stage-cum-population-cum-figure at the center of a transnational program of research to identify and intervene on ‘pre-psychosis’. I argue that this nascent, contested, and accelerating movement is enacting a contemporary transition from societies of ‘discipline’ to those of ‘control’, from the ‘molehill’ to the ‘serpent’. I describe how nets are cast to capture potential prodromes who are then assembled by borderguards as perhaps psychotic, held in prodromal custody through the threat of psychosis, and searched for indicators of their impending illness. All protected by a common sense that is stuck together with trust and compassion, these four cogs allow the prodromal movement to feed itself with its own risk factors. Further, they outline the workings of a ‘molar assemblage’ driven by paranoia – a dis-ease of white supremacy emerging from a colonial desire-to-know entangled with a fear of ‘regressing’. I thus suggest that the prodromal movement can be thought of as a ‘state machine of capture’ that works as a checkpoint of psycurity – an ‘abstract machine’ that directs paranoia to hide as reasonable suspicion, predict the future, brand threatening bodies, and grow through fear. Paranoia, then, makes up the undulating coils of a neocolonial security state. Recognizing that this itself is a ‘paranoid reading’ of contemporary conditions, I then undertake a ‘reparative reading’ of psycurity by staging an encounter between the prodrome and Coatlicue – the earliest of the Mesoamerican Earth goddesses, also known as The Lady of the Serpent Skirt. Reclaiming the etymological roots of paranoia as a sense of something beside-the-mind, iv this encounter directs attention to the colonial milieu in which these roots – that is, paranoia’s more-than-human potential – was and is darkened and divided by a Science that claims an unadulterated access to the Truth. In response, I place a psychometric ancestor of the prodrome (Magical Ideation) into an artistic adventure (Missed Connections) to experiment with ‘re- turning’ its radical potential. Asking what might happen if we treated the prodrome as more- than-human and therefore with practices of participation, listening, and mystery, Missed Connections decomposes the prodrome, shape-shifting pre-emptive psy into a craft of space- making. Overall doing a method that can best be described as a magical ideation that witnesses our participatory relation with the world, welcomes otherworldly encounters, and experiments with imagination, this project sheds the skin of Psychology – in the singular and with a capital ‘P’ – finding soulful studies of ‘psykhe’ underneath. I end with an Epilogue that considers how the preceding chapters have changed the shape of white supremacy, widening our response/ability for the present political moment. No longer a problem of aberrant individuals (whether fascist leaders or the mentally ill) so much as a collective paranoia that works as a war on imagination, I suggest that white supremacy might be interrupted by a protest of participation, listening, and mystery. By orienting us to immanence, such space-making would foretell not predict, mobilizing a struggle of yearning not paranoia. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Its 4.30am on Thursday, March 17th, 2016. It feels appropriate to be writing my acknowledgments at the witching hour, albeit four and a half hours after this dissertation was due. So many forces, human and more-than-human, have supported this project over the past three years. To my advisor, Michelle Fine, and my committee members and external readers, Sunil Bhatia, Cindi Katz, Linda Alcoff, and Patricia Clough, for your questions, guidance, and creativity. To Colin Ashley, Michelle Billies, Ali Lara, Wen Liu, and Akemi Nishida for the readings, the writing, the critiques, the radicality, the wine, and the laughter. To Holli McEntegart, my collaborator, for the magical ideations. To Priya Chandrasekaran, Deshonay Dozier, Amber Hui, Dominique Nisperos, Fernando Quigua, Whitney Richards-Calathes, Sonia Sanchez, Kate Sheese, and Jen Tang for pointing at the moon. To Maria Elena Torre for the public science, Leonore Tiefer for the scholar-activist spirit, and Nicola Gavey for the ground from which this project came. To my family, Mum, Ben, Jenny, Frankie, Sam, Jordan, Paul, and Fir, for inspiring me so much more than I think you realize. To the whales (and their riders). And to Tehseen Noorani, as you sit there formatting my references, for the intellectual enchantment. Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takimano. vi PREFACE Rock Hill, South Carolina (CNN) – A Muslim woman wearing a hijab was escorted out of Donald Trump's campaign event on Friday by police after she stood up in silent protest during Trump's speech. Rose Hamid, a 56-year-old flight attendant sitting in the stands directly behind Trump, stood up Friday during Trump's speech when the Republican front-runner suggested that Syrian refugees fleeing war in Syria were affiliated with ISIS. Trump has previously called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S. Despite her silence, Trump supporters around her began chanting Trump's name -- as instructed by Trump campaign staff before the event in case of protests -- and pointed at Hamid and Marty Rosenbluth, the man alongside her who stood up as well. As they were escorted out, Trump supporters roared -- booing the pair and shouting at them to "get out." One person shouted, "You have a bomb, you have a bomb," according to Hamid. "The ugliness really came out fast and that's really scary," Hamid told CNN in a phone interview after she was ejected. Major Steven Thompson of the Rock Hill Police Department told CNN Hamid was kicked out of the event because the campaign told him beforehand that "anybody who made any kind of disturbance" should be escorted out. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment asking why Hamid was escorted out of the venue. It’s 9.50am EST on January 9th, 2016. The above was posted thirty minutes ago by CNN Politics (Diamond, 2016). It was the first link to come up on my Internet search for “trump muslims” as I was looking for an image to open this dissertation. Rose Hamid’s protest was a response to a recent call by Donald Trump – currently being represented as the leading Republican candidate (RealClearPolitics, 2016) and the 405th richest main in the world (Forbes, 2016) – for increased surveillance, if not registration, deportation, and/or national refusal of Muslim peoples following radical Islamic attacks in Paris on November 11th, 2015. With mainstream and even conservative commentators (such as CNN) noticing the overlaps between Trump’s rhetoric and rallies and those of Adolph Hitler prior to the Holocaust, his politics are being increasingly associated with fascism. Jamelle Bouie (2015), for example, outlined on November 25th in Slate Magazine how they meet at least seven of Umberto Eco’s hallmarks of fascism: a cult of action, a celebration of aggressive masculinity, an intolerance of criticism, a fear of difference and outsiders, a pitch to the frustrations of the lower middle class, an intense nationalism and resentment at national humiliation, and a “popular elitism” that vii promises every citizen that they’re part of “the best people of the world” (n.p.) In the first half of the twentieth century, just after the Holocaust, a strong body of black intellectuals, including W.E.B. DuBois (1947), were understanding fascism “not as some aberration from the march of progress, an unexpected right-wing turn, but a logical development of Western Civilization itself”, a “blood relative of slavery and imperialism” (Kelley, 2000, p. 20). Aime Cesaire (1955), for example, wrote that the ultimate crime of Nazism was that it was “a crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘niggers’ of Africa” (p.

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