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Relationality in a time of surveillance: Narcissism, melancholia, paranoia

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Abstract

This article explores apparent shifts in the cultural use of psychoanalytic concepts, from narcissism, through melancholia, to paranoia. It tries to track these shifts, very loosely, in relation to changes in sociocultural and political atmospheres, noting that none of the shifts are complete, that each one leaves previous states of being and of mind at least partially in place. Narcissism was perhaps the term of choice for examining the problem of forging relationships that feel meaningful in a context of rapid change and neo-liberal expansion; then melancholia was (and is) drawn on to conceptualise the challenge of confronting loss and colonial ‘theft’; and now the annexation of the polity – and of everyday life – by massively insidious surveillance produces a culture and subjecthood that is fundamentally, and understandably, paranoid.

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Notes

  1. Data from the British Security Industry Authority in 2013 showed that the United Kingdom had up to 5.9 million CCTV cameras, one for every 11 (or 14 at a more conservative estimate) people in the country (www.surveillance-magazine.com/2013/07/12/uk-has-up-to-5-9-million-cctv-cameras/).

  2. The famous business-card scene in the film can be taken as a paradigmatic vision of narcissistic rage. A group of more or less identical business executives compare their new cards. Patrick, the lead character, becomes increasingly disturbed as the others’ cards (all of them white and embossed, indistinguishable in reality from each other) seem smarter than his own. By the end of the two-minute sequence, he is engulfed in rage, and almost in tears.

  3. An example comes from orthodox Judaism, which holds that the entire Torah was revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai and then passed down through subsequent generations in written form but also as an oral elaboration, and that without the oral commentary the written narrative could not be made sense of. The problem is that the further away one gets from the source, the more confused the oral Torah might be, leading to all the loose and dead ends in Talmudic commentary, for example, when it was finally written down in the second to sixth centuries CE. This means that the task of true rabbinic scholarship – exemplified in Maimonides’ twelfth century work Mishneh Torah – was often seen as to get rid of the modern speculations, to return to the true origin. The older the better; it is in the past that truth resides, and we decline from there. One of the most emotional prayers, which resonates with a good deal of post-colonial fantasy even though it actually dates from a thousand years ago or more, is ‘return our days as of old’.

  4. The correct way to resolve this question at the time of the coming of the Messiah is to greet him, when he appears in Jerusalem, with the words,‘Welcome Sir; have you been here before?’

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Frosh, S. Relationality in a time of surveillance: Narcissism, melancholia, paranoia. Subjectivity 9, 1–16 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2015.19

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