For Chris Jenks, the “city” has “re-emerged as a fecund image and metaphor within the most contemporary of social theory” (Jenks, 19), though not as the “site of modernity”, as it is in the writings of Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel and the Chicago School. For contemporary theorists, such as Marshal Berman, Richard Sennet, Janet Wolff, Michel de Certeau and Kevin Robins, the city is a site of conflict between the characteristically modern discourse of urbanism and the experiences of those who inhabitant the urban . As is evident in the efforts of Baron Houssman and Le Corbusier, the discourse of urbanism tries to render city space and population governable by imposing homogeneous and totalising urban theories and blueprints that misrepresent the heterogeneous experiences of inhabitants who “see . . . [the city] through a prism of memory, desire and fantasy” (19). Because we can identify more than one experience of modernity and the city, the notion of “the city” as the “site of modernity” is a misrepresentation, and the same can be said of Simmel's argument that there was a city personality, or “type”, characterised by cautious intellectuality, calculation, a blase attitude, and a protective screen of reserve (Savage and Warde, 111). But a general type is posited by contemporary theorists, for the continually guarding of “our” individual experiences against “their” inappropriate representations implies that paranoia is a typical experience of the city. Of course, as Olalquiga argues, “[w]hether . . . [psychological terms like “paranoia” and “schizophrenia”] help articulate a totalitarian politics of surveillance and control or its opposite, a subversive dynamic that trespasses boundaries and hierarchies, remains the foremost problem in the post-modern debate” (1). That is, there has been no final closure on the use of terms like “paranoia”. To clarify some of the implications of this apparent contradiction in contemporary theory, I will consider how “the city” produces a “paranoid” type.

Paranoia can be defined as

a form of psychosis based on a logical structure of relationships that interprets reality in terms of evidence of persecution. The paranoid believes that someone or some group is out to get him and sustains this belief with evidence that to his mind is irrefutable . . . [Paranoia] depends on a careful ordering of unconnected evidence to prove the existence of persecution [and is] a highly rigorous, integrative, self-preserving mode of behaviour amid assumed or real cultural chaos (Plater, 188)

Swanson, Bonhert and Smith argue that paranoia is not considered a symptom or disease, but a syndrome, and they list seven characteristics that typify it: projective thinking, hostility, suspiciousness, centrality, delusions, fear and loss of autonomy, and grandiosity 1 . These characteristics are self-explanatory, at least at the level with which I will be dealing with them, but I would draw attention to projective thinking, which most psychiatrists consider the main characteristic of paranoids. Swanson, Bonhert and Smith define projection as: “the natural process by which one's impulses, fantasies or other tensions that are unacceptable or intolerable in oneself are attributed to others” (9). I would add that this is accompanied by an inability to distinguish between inner state and external states of being, whereby someone who experiences inner tension, say an anxiety of powerlessness and dependence, may feel they are subject to an external danger (of being trapped or controlled) and will project these feelings onto objects and situations. Since paranoids feel they are continually exposed to danger, they are often in a hyper-vigilant state and meticulously differentiate their perceptions to find pieces of the “plot” responsible for their persecution. Paranoia thus involves a creative way of making meaning; in a semiotic sense, paranoids are aware that each sign can refer to something other than its referent. But once paranoids have incorporated a sign into a delusion, they tend to rigorously impose closure upon it's meaning. That is, while paranoids are subject to external stimuli, with a plenitude of potential meanings at their disposal, they interpret it as having specific , personal significance, and project a world-view that does not welcome the interpretations of others.

While paranoia thus has some coherence in individuals, it is not singular 2 . The present official designation in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is schizophrenia, paranoid type ; paranoid states: paranoia, involutional paranoid state, and other paranoid states ; and paranoid personality 3 (though there is still debate as to whether or not these official categories, and subcategories, designate discrete syndromes of paranoia). Fortunately, there is a general consensus among psychiatrists that different forms of paranoia are on a (non-linear) continuum with clinically “normal” forms of behaviour. That is, paranoid behaviour can be seen as existing in stages, but these stages do not follow one another in a fixed sequence. A patient does not have to move from a “normal” state, to a “paranoid personality” and then to a “paranoid state”, before experiencing “paranoid schizophrenia”. An individual may experience a paranoid schizophrenic episode without a prior paranoid personality, depending upon the aetiology of his or her specific condition. The clinical continuity of paranoia has its parallel in common parlance, which variously refers to paranoia as a cultural phenomenon (evident in Hitler's megalomaniac genocide of the Jews), a professional phenomenon (given the paranoid behaviour of lawyers who anticipate persecutory statements by an adversary in the courtroom), or as a “normal” individual phenomenon. In the last case, any person under stress can feel that whatever unfortunate coincidences they find themselves experiencing are part of some deliberate “plot”. Given the general applicability of the term paranoia, Swanson, Bonhert and Smith argue that performance of paranoid characteristics does not in itself indicate paranoia. Their common presence is, however, a useful indicator of a paranoid outlook or mode of thinking , which can be identified with one of paranoia's clinical categories if it develops to certain extremes.

How does paranoia relate to the city? To begin with, for Simmel,

the essence of modernity . . . is psychologism, the experience and interpretation of the world in terms of the reactions of our inner life and indeed as an inner world, the dissolution of fixed contents in the fluid elements of the soul, from which all that is substantive is filtered and whose forms are merely forms of motion (Savage and Warde, 113).

That is, psychological terms such as “paranoia” can be seen as foregrounding a parallel between the dynamic nature of human psychology, or perception, and the dynamic changes caused by modernisation 4 . Psychological terms here do not explain these changes as being equivalent to the psyche; they describe, metaphorically, how these experiences are mediated by the psyche. Of course modernisation is an effect of the consolidation of capitalism, and, as Savage and Warde argue in “Perspective's on Urban Culture”, the sociological trend to study the urban (as opposed to the rural) has largely been superseded by the study of the effects of capital . The city is thus merely one of the most obvious sites of the causes and effects of capital, not a cause of change in itself, and the correspondences I offer below can be considered a comparison between “paranoia” and a historically significant site of capitalism's forces. The different kinds of cities (the royal/political city, the merchant city, the industrial city, the suburban camp, and the polyblock/metropolis) certainly indicate that the consolidation of capital is a fundamental determinant in the development of cities. This is the context in which I will use the city as an organising device, suggesting that fixed populations, density, crime and professional specialisation (common characteristics of most cities) can create the effects ascribed to “paranoia”.

Swanson, Bonhert and Smith argue that “paranoid thinking has its roots in fear, and fear, particularly of death, has always been man's (sic) companion” (23). Our nomadic human ancestors certainly lived at a time when untimely deaths were the norm; for while they were better adapted than we to surviving a nomadic existence, they were usually immersed in “wild” geographical areas which limited their ability to perceive danger until it was upon them. Early, walled cites, on the other hand, provided a privileged locus where humans could isolate themselves from a dangerous environment. But the experience of living in a city did not so much reduce fear as mediate it, which can consider by reference to Hobbes' theory in Leviathan of a shift from a “state of Nature” to a “commonwealth”. The former is a condition of continual war between possessive, unregulated individuals, who live in continual fear and danger of violent death by each other's hands; the latter comes into existence when individuals give up some of their individual rights to a “sovereign” to gain mutual security, liberty and freedom. The sovereign thus monopolises murder by denying individuals the right to murder each other, while retaining the personal right to execute those who commit murder.

In contemporary terms, individuals adhere to the laws of the commonwealth they are born into out of fear they would lose some degree of security, liberty or freedom if they did not. Also, Hobbes' sovereign has been superseded by complex networks of legislation, a State's laws, and while the commonwealth is an abstraction, a promise between individuals, the State is the space with which a commonwealth identifies itself. Since some city forms predate the State, and a State generally requires a (capital) city to legitimate the power of that State (in a military, mercantile, or political sense), we must consider that a “commonwealth” can identify its “State” as extending only to the walls of its city or one hundred miles beyond the walls of its city. The city is, consequently, metonymic of, or continuous with the State as the site of a “commonwealth”. It is the principal site where a commonwealth's identity is articulated, the site from which State power emanates as a hegemonic force, and the site at which the social contract is at its most binding. The further we are from it, the less immediate fear we have of the sovereign, or the State, and while two individuals may carry their “commonwealth” beyond their (capital) city and the State, if one of them then breaks the commonwealth by some act of violence against the other, they may reject the rightness of their being punished because they are beyond the (spatial) jurisdiction of the State. This idea of being outside the city or State begs the question of borders, but though the borders of contemporary cities are not so visibly defined as they were for walled cities, the idea of the city performs a similar function as the walls of early cities. The city gains clarity as an ideological force each time we are subjected to the Laws of the commonwealth, so the co-existence of fear and the idea of the city helps to maintain the coherence of contemporary cities in the same way fear can stimulate a paranoid to construct and isolate a defensible, coherent “plot”.

Historically, fear in, or of , the city, was augmented because during the Industrial Revolution cities such as London and Paris possessed a defiant impenetrability. Criminals could find asylum in in winding streets, illicit districts, slums and fogs, or the anonymity of the population. In most contemporary cities, physical density has generally given way to a density of information (to use Simmel's term, the excessive “stimuli” is visual and temporal rather than spatial). But anxiety arises in contemporary cities as well as older ones because in the face of the city's density, crimes often become faceless. That is, at an everyday level, the density of the city hides the latent possibility of crime in general more than it hides specific, individual criminals. As a consequence, the city itself can be seen as a threat to law-abiding people, and there have been countless moves to try to satisfy the desire for new means of knowledge and control of the city. Constabulary, administration, city planning and sociological statistics are a part of this impulse, as were the efforts of Sherlock Holmes and other detectives who “subject[ed] the city to a controlling and individualising gaze … in which there [was] no hiding place for the criminal” (Bennet, 214). But not only fictional detectives subject the city to such a gaze; individuals “scan passers-by in order to assess their risk or value” (Savage and Warde, 119), and this personal aspect of crime is important. Crime occurs in many forms all around us, but when we identify a particular act of crime we can assume that the crime is caused by individuals who break the social contract, and continue to see the city as a site of Reason, security, liberty and freedom.

The issue here is projective thinking , for in a broader social context, crime arises not so much from individuals but the institutions in which individuals find themselves embedded. However most of these systems do not possess any specific malevolent intention, and are not systematically out to get us in a paranoid sense. Most merely pursue their motives of profit and performativity, and what we perceive to be a crime (imposing stricter working schedules, cutting budgets, and so forth) may be perfectly legal. Indeed our anxiety comes partly from the sheer indifference these systems have for us; each discourse is too busy with its own language game to play the game of paranoia with individuals, whereupon paranoia is a perceived side-effect. So crime and the experience of the city are conflated in the “density” of the city, and we identify anxieties by viewing innominate institutions and other systems as malevolent individuals, a “They”. The implicit assumption that by locating criminal individuals we can suspend the threat of crime is simplistic and reactionary, for it often rests on assumptions about criminal “types”. In Victorian England and France, “physiognomies” were published that offered typologies enabling individuals to recognise groups of people by sight, and similar physiognomies exist today under the label of “stereotypes”. Racism is a two stereotype that assume certain “types” (for example Aboriginals or Asians) are “bad”, or inferior, and so misrepresents the complexities of race relations in the city. In other words, it, and types in general, are delusions , albeit unsophisticated ones. Generally, the more sophisticated a delusion, the more contrary evidence it has incorporated, and the more characteristically paranoid it becomes.

It can be argued here that the more types there are, the more restrictive public behaviour becomes, for to be associated with a negative type is to be marked as a potential criminal, and susceptible to punishment by the Law of the city. People thus act more conservative among strangers than friends, performing a “type” of personality to maintain a public perception. The experience of anomie thus produces mutual distrust and a paranoid outlook of suspiciousness . Since everyone is a potential criminal, we should act as if everyone was a criminal, and guard our reputations to minimise the possibility of other people conceiving us as criminal. Lefebvre's argument is especially relevant here:

terror cannot be imputed to the social ‘body' . . . it is diffuse, violence is always latent, pressure is exerted from all sides on its members who can only avoid and shift its weight by super-human effort; each member is a terrorist because he wants to be in power (if only briefly); thus there is no need for a dictator; each member betrays and chastises himself; terror cannot be located, for it comes from everywhere and from every specific thing; the system … has a hold on every member separately and submits every member to the whole (Lefebvre 147).

Terror remains displaced and diffused through the population with everyone a potential conspirator against everyone else, and everyone desires to be beyond suspicion, to gain power and access to the panopticon. Holding onto professional knowledge and being part of a profession is the most common way of achieving this; belonging to a profession is seen as an ostensible mark of one's contract with the city, and a declaration that we are not doing something criminal even it we are capable of it. Unfortunately, the effects of this are counterproductive, for the professional specialisation characteristic of labour in cities tends to create distinctions in our own personalities.

Not merely did the walled city give a permanent collective structure to the paranoid claims and delusions . . . augmenting suspicion, hostility and non-cooperation, but the division of labour . . . pushed to the extreme, normalised schizophrenia; while the compulsive repetitions labour imposed on a large part of the urban population under slavery, reproduced the structure of a compulsion neurosis . . . [This] is still visible in our own day (Mumford, 59-60).

All cultures and social forms impose multiple ideological positions for individuals as subjects, but contemporary cities complicate this. First, individuals are subject to many more roles in the course of a normal day (mother, wife, neighbour, student, worker, co-worker, patient, client, and so on), and often more than one at a time; second, the possible roles have multiplied (architect, clerk, janitor, administrator, store person, car park attendant and so on); and, third, roles have become increasingly regimented in time and space by institutions (as evident in timetables and “overtime”). When institutions impose roles on us, there is often a reactionary tendency to consider these roles artificial and consider other roles as more natural to us, but how sure are we that underneath the types we perform for others are not other, less flattering, types?

The spread of Darwinism was, historically, of great significance here, for in linking “humans” to “animals” it devalued the notion of Man (sic) as a civilised, moral entity, and suggested that anyone could regress into a “primitive” or “savage” type. The same can be said for Freud's theory of the unconscious, which was popularised in texts like Docter Jekyll and Mr Hyde and meant our unconscious minds might be manipulating our conscious minds in mysterious ways. There is thus always a potential for “us” law-abiding individuals to be perceived as criminals because, potentially, we are . In short, we may experience a loss of autonomy in the city not only because we recognise that we are being controlled by external agencies, but because we feel divided in ourselves, and incapable of making choices as rational individuals. Kevin Robins draws on a psychoanalytic notion of desire-as-lack to describe the sensation of having “lost” a “whole self” in cities, and we can relate this to the paranoid characteristics of centrality and grandiosity . Someone who imagines they are at the centre of some plot will find it more probable to assume they are someone of importance; and someone who valorises him or herself is less inclined to be suspicious of their sense of self, for to valorise oneself is to give oneself coherence and to alleviate feelings of irrelevance and anonymity. This makes sense of paranoid delusions of centrality and grandiosity as well as everyday expressions of selfishness and egotism.

Now while the above correspondences imply a “paranoid type” can be related to the “city”, I have been discussing common characteristics of cities, not cities per se , and not all individual cities may exhibit all the characteristics I have mentioned. In most cities there are tendencies to emphasise non-public personal relationships (normalising friends and family as loci of individuality), and institutions such as youth clubs, neighbourhood watch, charity groups, lobby and protest groups help people cope with the alienating effects of city life. Not everyone has a stable family, nor access to these institutions, of course, so while some people may live a life almost completely devoid of paranoid effects, others may be subject to excessive paranoid effects because of their relation to the institutions there. For example, the city was, and still is to some extent, a largely male domain, so should we say, then, that “paranoid effects” in the city are exclusive, or more common to, males? A contention to this is that females have more reasons to be paranoid than males because of the way their access to the city has been controlled or manipulated by traditional gender roles; this is also the case with certain racial and religious groups, or for minority groups in general. So we should not be saying that the city produces a “paranoid type”, but that cities have a tendency to create common effects in personalities and that these can result in a paranoid outlook or a paranoid mode of thinking. I would point out here that an individual who suffers all the paranoid effects of the city and so may show all the outward characteristics, need not be a clinical paranoid. The literal (clinical) paranoid only emerges from the metaphorical paranoid of the city when (at least) two conditions are met. First, an individual must have internalised and (re-)projected outwards most of the characteristics of “paranoia” in an identifiably rigid and mode of thinking (that is, they must not be a body of unrelated behaviours created by external forces, rather a coherent, paranoid mode of thinking). Second, an individual must be incapable of functioning at an everyday level (in either a professional or personal capacity).

Given these conclusions, I would like to briefly consider Deleuze and Guattari's use of the term “paranoia” in Anti-Oedipus , which Best and Kellner summarise as follows,

[t]o whatever extent possible . . . revolutionary politics must avoid the ‘molar pole' of investment, with its paranoid, structured lines of movement, stratified flows of desire, and reactionary or fascist character, and stay within the ‘molecular pole' with its schizophrenic intensities, decoded flows, and revolutionary social investments (Best and Kellner, 96, my italics).

Deleuze and Guattari here favour schizophrenia over paranoia as a metaphor because, for them, “schizophrenic desire” implies fragments that are not bound together by a totalising form of knowledge, and “paranoid desire” implies the imposition of one totalising form (because paranoid delusions, in their clinical form, manipulate data to prove a hypothesis that has already been decided, that one is being persecuted). They thus focus on paranoid delusions as being totalising forms, not on the fact that talking about paranoia foregrounds the way that systems of knowledge are constructed . By referring to the individual psychological condition in general, they efface the possibility that we can consider a group of individuals with different or identical paranoid delusions, one individual's paranoid delusion, or paranoia as a signifier of the dynamics of the mind (a psychologism). Also, by opposing two psychological terms, Deleuze and Guattari suppress the way that all psychological terms simultaneously represent the experience of the individual and objectify and totalise that experience under the discourse of psychiatry (which parallels the way the discourse of urbanism imposes misrepresentations of individual experiences in the city). To say that “desire” can be identified according to two psychiatric diseases is to foreground abnormality, or transgression, as the norm, and so to imply that there is no absolute norm from which desires deviates. But the ideal endpoint of psychiatric treatment is a “normal”, healthy subject, and by locating “abnormality” in the development of an individual (finding out where their “normal” development “went wrong”), psychiatry implies that there is nothing wrong with the society “beyond” the individual, and naturalises ideologically defined “normal” subjects, such as the “good housewife”, “good husband” or “good worker”. When a “normal”, healthy person is opposed to a clinical paranoid, the implication is that “normal” people deal with their fear in such a way that it does not unduly effect the way they live, and this is misleading. Even though many people like to consider “good workers” as methodical, well-balanced individuals, and “good husbands” as fearless, everyone projects fear in ways that effects their actions at a day to day level, and the “normal” state of the human is on a continuity with clinical paranoia. As Kevin Robins argues,

[f]ear . . . may, in fact, be associated with the emotional stimulus and provocation necessary for us if we are to avoid, both individually and socially, stagnation and stasis . . . Where it becomes dysfunctional and damaging is when it is implicated in paranoid mechanisms of projection and defence. Paul Hogget (346) describes a psychical process through which “a fear which cannot be contained is visited upon the external world where is fuses and blends with the real violence and poison of our social environment.” (60)

So when the term “paranoia” is used in a political context we should be circumspect. Not only are the psychiatric connotations inconsistent with Deleuze and Guattari's rhetoric, the scientific “gloss” of the term masks the consequent contradictions (for example by implying that their political categories are really biological categories). Nonetheless, the term “paranoia” retains descriptive value, just as the idea of the “city”, while it has a suspect ideological bias, helps articulate the experience of contemporary culture. The relativism implicit when we use the term “paranoia” (because it foregrounds how individuals construct their own world-view) foregrounds the opposition between dominant representations of experience and individual representations of that experience - an issue that has persisted throughout the history of what has been identified as “paranoia” and the “city”.

Notes

1. While these characteristics change form slightly depending upon the journal, anthology or textbook, their content remains fairly stable.

2. Plato used the term to refer to a kind of religious madness, and Hippocratic physicians used it to describe delirious thinking or mental deterioration along with terms like epilepsy, mania, and melancholia (Greek: para = beside, deranged; nous = mind, reason). The term was absent from classifications of mental disorders from then till the mid-18th century, when Vogel used the term in a manner similar to the modern use, but categories now associated with paranoia, such as religiosity, grandiosity, suspicion and agitation, were being developed. Emil Kraepelin, Adolf Meyer and Eugun Beuler were the major theorists who gave the term its modern connotations, through their efforts to classify paranoia's various forms (as related to dementia praecox, as distinct from schizophrenia, or as composed of two or three distinct types).

3. Although it is easy to consider a clinical use of the term paranoia to be literal, the categories of paranoia do not represent objective entities. Swanson, Bonhert and Smith argue the categories of paranoia “facilitate communication and clarify [between therapists], even if in an imperfect manner, the nature of the patients being investigated” (34). In other words, “paranoia” has no independent ontological status.

4. Modernity and postmodernity are both usually theorised on the basis of the effects of capitalism, so in the sense of “movement”, psychologism is apt to both modernity and postmodernity, despite Simmel's use of the term “modernisation”.

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