Word: paranoid
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...that "most of the things that are new [in Webb's stories] aren't true, and most of the things that are true aren't new." Part of that effort entailed assigning black reporters to write stories implying that blacks believe the worst about government actions because they're paranoid. Obviously, the popularity of conspiracy theories in black America is a valid subject for journalistic inquiry; obviously, blacks have no monopoly on wacky ideas. (Remember those militia groups fantasizing about black helicopters?) But to many blacks, pushing the paranoia angle looked like a plot to write off their suspicions...
When I say "paranoid scenario," I have certainly participated and even formented various ways of attacking what Michel Foucault called the unities of an epistemological field that work in terms of a set of unified objects. I believe that some of those unified objects dissolve as you begin to look at them. So it's not as though I'm resisting new departures in art historical method, but I suppose I feel very strongly that that kind of critique is powerful and productive when it's conducted within a discipline, when a discipline renews itself. So what I have against...
...hear you say this, because when I think of your writing and the writing in October, it seems that your work may have fostered and supported many of these changes both in art history and even more broadly. This is why I was puzzled by your distaste for the "paranoid scenarios," which I had always thought you were instrumental in bringing to the discipline...
...volitional agent is a benighted idea. For me, the only way to think about Pollock is through the sort of force field that was warring over his interpretation. That's an example of a sort of "death of the author" theory, and that's not a "paranoid scenario...
...think that students are particularly bored by the "paranoid scenarios." I suppose Harvard students are really voracious for learning and the problem with "paranoid scenarios" is that once you've said it, it's very hard to develop very much. It just gets repetitive. I mean once you expose patriarchy then what? Any way, I know this is all very shocking stuff...