Great Delirium: Culture, Technology, and Paranoia in the New Age of Catastrophe

Abstract

This thesis offers an understanding into the origination of paranoia in our new age of catastrophe, with a focus on its technological and ecological conditions. In doing so, we propose the concept of Great Delirium, which also returns paranoia to its original roots in Hippocrates: the delirious visions of a sick body whose temperature is critically rising. Most of the work on cultural paranoia, especially during its cultural turn at the cusp of the millennium, examined its appearances as deposits within the collective cultural imaginary. In doing so, the worldly process behind its psychogenesis, especially as it relates to the question of gratification, remained underwhelmed. To address this gap, this thesis first develops a process view of culture, or culturation, in close dialogue with Bernard Stiegler’s work, naming the tending of reciprocal care between our psychogenic and sociogenic domains. Under the capitalist social formation, we find that this process was historically replaced by a system of organized neglect, causing a proliferation of pathogenesis in both domains. Great Delirium, developed through a re-reading of the theory of commodity fetishism, names one such pathogenic outcome of organized neglect in our new age of catastrophe. We explore how generalized commodity fetishism, with the routing of our drives unto the Great commodity, inverts the hostilities of our world with the hospitalities of the commodity-form, leading to a series of further inversions. We argue that, during catastrophic moments, the Great commodity is no longer gratifying, forcing a refiguration of the drive onto a different fetish, giving rise to a Great cultural paranoia. Today, this condition is reflected within Great national-civilizational imaginations, whether it be a Great America or the Great Hindu civilization, but also within the ‘Great’ ideologies of Replacement and Reset. We conclude by outlining the prospects of returning culturation from neglect to care, or deculturing ourselves.