us directly to a principle of difference between conspiracy theory and theory as reasoned inquiry: A conspiracy identifies the root with an overvalued ego as a fantasy of whole agency, while inquiry defines the root in terms of a principle by which one system can be reliably distinguished from others. In the latter definition, West’s account is not an indicator of radical consciousness, but of wish-fulfilling megalomania. West’s diagnosis turns systemic oppression into a battle between proper nouns, depicting the overdetermined consequences of a centuries-long white supremacist program, in the context of which the FBI carried on a decades-long program to target “subversives,” as the plot of a single all-powerful politician to destroy a single organization. In these ostensibly knowing pronouncements, West’s inversion of the problem also distorts its solutions, representing systemic class struggles in the manner of a “Great Man” historiography, as struggles to the death among powerful individuals. This model of politics, in which superhuman heroes and villains fight to decide the fate of faceless masses, reproduces the most conservative and dehumanizing pseudo-historical melodramas.
This personalization of systemic conditions and class struggles indicates the connection between West’s paranoid style of reading systemic oppressions and his narcissism, as it creates foes whose unrealistic omnipotence reinforces his own aggrandized heroic self-image. It therefore should not surprise anyone that West is so attracted to the narcissistic and racist melodrama of conspiracy theorist Donald Trump. Visiting Trump in the Oval Office, West described with characteristic artistry and ambiguous self-awareness the difference between an activist empowerment arising from systemic explanations of oppression, and the narcissistic self-aggrandizing potency entailed by identification with “Great Men.” Comparing Trump’s signature red hat to the Clinton campaign slogan, West explained that
this hat, it gives me—it gives me power, in a way […] The [Hilary Clinton] campaign “I’m with her” just didn’t make me feel, as a guy, that didn’t get to see my dad all the time—like a guy that could play catch with his son. It was something about when I put this hat on, it made me feel like Superman. You made a Superman. That was my—that’s my favorite superhero. And you made a Superman cape.59
There is unmistakable genius in this analogy and its convincing presentation as an improvisation, in which the simple and effective branding of the red hat is psychologically linked to the red cape. And there is unmistakable symptomatic significance in West’s dismissiveness toward the value of solidarity with a professional woman, like his own single mother, an English professor who divorced his former Black Panther father when West was 3 years old. But just as unmistakable is the significance of his “favorite superhero”: Superman is often called a boring character60 precisely because he is too close to the narcissist’s fantasy of perfection, omnipotence and indestructibility. Like the Christian God of Paradise Lost, the character of Superman poses his writers the problem of dramatizing flawlessness. This provides little opportunity for the conflict and change that conventionally shape a plot, and that allow us to invest in a character’s inconsistency or incompleteness, its reality effect.
Narratives in which omnipotent evil faces perfect good are the domain of melodrama, moralism, popular mythologies and exoteric religiosity. Successful activist strategies, in contrast, have historically proceeded by strategically targeting the mechanisms of oppression at their contingently weakest points, on the basis of some reasoned and historically grounded analysis of the systemic structures and functions of power. While superheroes usually make war, settling zero-sum conflicts by means of definitive violence, activists and community organizers like the Black Panthers are distinguished from terrorists and rebel armies by their cultivation of long-term commitments to the hard and slow work of addressing the needs of their communities. The Panthers’ school breakfast programs, funded by Johnson’s Great Society, as well as their programmatic supervision of police to deter violence demonstrate their support for governance in accord with the democratic principle of “all power to all the people.”61
Sedgwick acknowledges this strategic approach to systemic change in describing Patton’s response, which seeks to shift focus from an unproductive concern with sensationalism and spectacle, to a more productive concern with the historical mechanisms of political power and state neglect. The paranoid orientation that seeks the “true cause” of oppression in a transcendental agent or essence, in contrast, cultivates the fear and aggression entailed by systemic oppression. This encourages intelligent young people, like Late Registration-era Kanye West and we who listened to him, to embrace the false empowerment of consumerist narcissism and competitive supremacy, supported and rationalized by conspiracy-theoretical melodramas and mythologies.
For Sedgwick, Patton’s reply to her query about an AIDS conspiracy confirms it is not enough to ask what is true; we must ask what that truth accomplishes, what it does and what one does with it. Sedgwick calls this “an unremarkable epiphany,” part of the “habitual practices” of academic critical theory and the hegemony of the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” However common this pragmatic insight may be in literary studies, it has certainly been linked, from Said through Sedgwick and beyond, to Foucault’s concern with the active social power of knowledge. But while both Foucault and Ricoeur treat of the hermeneutics of suspicion, Sedgwick shows deference to Ricoeur’s construction here, claiming that he defines “very productive critical habits,” which she calls “perhaps by now nearly synonymous with criticism itself.” However, she also suggests that these habits “may have had an unintentionally stultifying side effect”: “They may have made it less rather than more possible to unpack the local, contingent relations between any given piece of knowledge and its narrative/epistemological entailments for the seeker, knower, or teller.”62 In short, she suggests that the hermeneutics of suspicion may have introduced the pragmatics of truth by way of a definition too narrow in its affective range, conflating the paranoid attitude with consideration of truth’s pragmatic aspect as such. This default to paranoia, which I would correlate with a default to disqualification ad hominem, can get in the way of knowing what to do with the knowledge we produce, and obstruct our view of what others do with that knowledge.
Sedgwick makes this point in the context of opposing her own suspicious response to the AIDS epidemic to Patton’s pragmatic, caretaking response. While Sedgwick describes herself as wondering first about the agent of the harm, Patton seemed to have already moved on to a concern with addressing and ameliorating those harms. Patton makes it clear that she had already concluded the Reagan administration was to blame, at least insofar as they did not care about queer lives, and were all too happy to neglect the situation. But Sedgwick seems to have been concerned to demonstrate a culpable agency, while Patton seems content to acknowledge a pattern of action, and to act on the basis of that knowledge—by working to ameliorate the crisis, since Reagan and US government agencies could not be trusted to do so. The “paranoid” position that Sedgwick describes is not only characterized by identification and overvaluation of a “higher” agency, as exemplified by West’s praise for Trump, but is therefore also invested in treating that agency as the arbiter of truth and significance, entreating it to recognize truth and warrant action, to confer legitimacy on one’s assignation of blame by admitting guilt. But when their power is predicated on harm, and is likely to be compromised by exposure, those in power have every reason to persist in bad faith and maintain disavowals indefinitely.
The overvaluation of the higher or central agency is the narcissistic premise that authoritarian permissiveness relies on to construct the dramatic scenarios of its social fantasy. Its obverse is the narcissistic invincibility of youthful rebellion, familiar to anyone who has consumed the popular culture produced by the American Century. As in so much popular music, both self-deification and rebellious invincibility have been consistent themes in West’s output, manifest since his 2001 breakout success as producer of four songs on Jay-Z’s classic album The Blueprint. West’s tracks are characterized by selectively sampled, often sped-up loops of the sort of self-aggrandizing choruses that are customary in hip-hop, like his edit of The Doors’
