Abstract. The Paranoia of Popular Culture: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Music Videos

Beginning from the earliest part of his psychoanalytic scholarship, a doctoral dissertation on the case of Aimée, Jacques Lacan has had an intimate relationship with two topics that, perhaps, have never ceased holding a special place within his theory: paranoia and celebrity. In fact, Lacan goes on to ground human knowledge as such as fundamentally paranoiac in nature precisely because of the social dialectic that gives it form. It follows that the two go hand-in-hand, the degree of popularity of the signifier and the paranoiac ego that tries to comprehend it. To pose this as a question, how do the most highly circulated signifiers, those found in popular culture, help demonstrate the essentially paranoiac nature of knowledge? I want to tackle this problem in two ways: first, as a matter of precision, I will focus on the medium of popular music videos and the symbols that seem to appear consistently from one video to another and, indeed, even from one musical artist to another. Second, I will set this analysis against the backdrop of so-called conspiracy theories found on the internet, via sites like YouTube or discussion boards, which can be read as producing a precisely paranoid discourse of knowledge. Far from discounting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, the dialectical move from the originarity of the symbol, in the video, toward the conspiracy theory actually represents a self-reinforcing and paranoiac sedimentation of the ‘knowledge’ itself therein reinforcing its popularity and shared epistemology. In other words, the distinction between what is real and what is not, as if there were a signified, gets lost in the hyper-text that constitutes popular culture. As a way to arbitrate the relativity of these truth claims, it becomes apparent that even sociological consistency vis-à-vis an initiatory language community becomes inadequate and, therefore, requires the phantasy of teleological progression.