In modern liberal thought, movement is intimately associated with freedom and freedom with movement. In a modern literary-philosophical tradition, walking in particular has been aligned not only with freedom but also with writing. But neither the liberal ideals of freedom and/as movement, nor the practices of walking as a key to contemplation and writing, have been axiomatic for African Americans. The recurring thematization of walking and writing in John Edgar Wideman’s novels provides a notable angle on how this relation may be thought in an African American context. His Philadelphia Fire (1990) provides a concrete example, not only of how the relation between freedom and movement may be thought in a context of constant physical constraint, but also of how this relation may be negotiated by actively claiming the interconnecting practices of movement and writing. It thereby assists in reclaiming metafiction from its associations with (white) postmodern and postcritical discourses.

This chapter explores the tension between how we are governed and how we think we are governed. The diffusion and multiplication of centers, practices, and techniques of power in a polycentric world challenges philosophical and political traditions which assume that we are liberal subjects, and that political power can be located in the state. Adopting a Foucauldian perspective, the chapter maps such increasingly dispersed and diverse techniques of power as they develop to create a neoliberal society of control. Whereas older forms of disciplinary control relied on more centralized and therefore more readily identifiable forms of power, neoliberal control thrives on continuous modulations and variations of power, which thereby becomes more elusive. The dispersion and invisibility of neoliberal power encourages a spread of uncertainty and paranoia in the contemporary West. Uncertainty extends to everything including knowledge (e.g. what news is ‘true’ and what is ‘fake’) and identity (e.g. what can replace the liberal subject). The (increasingly desperate) will for certainty brings an intensification of extremist and nationalist identitarian forces. Through it all runs a legitimacy crisis that emerges from the clash between deep-rooted conceptions of the liberal subject and neoliberal modes that no longer operate on the basis of such conceptions.

In the twenty-first century, Theory is increasingly identified as having its foundations in a certain form of paranoia. From Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick through Bruno Latour to Rita Felski and the field of “postcritique,” critique, the hermeneutics of suspicion as well as poststructural theories of power such as Foucault’s are identified as paranoid and insufficient if not detrimental in dealing with the present. But why and how have these theories been identified as paranoid? From what implicit postulations about the Subject does postcritique take off? This chapter explores the deeper continuities and discontinuities between critique, paranoia, and conspiracy. It does so first by revisiting Sedgwick’s seminal article about paranoid and reparative reading and second by engaging Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope. In a recent study, I developed the concept of a paranoid chronotope as a way to get at the complexities of how to interpret and critique contemporary society and culture. In essence, the paranoid chronotope is a doubled one. In it, an everyday space-time is “exposed” as fake by a paranoid subject or group who complements this space-time with an additional space-time, one that is seen as true reality. Here, I will flip my own conception of a paranoid chronotope, marry it to Sedgwick, and approach critique rather from the perspective of a reparative chronotope. It is not at all self-evident, I will argue, that critique relies on paranoia. On the contrary, there are many ways in which we can see it rather as reparative.

This essay interrogates interrelations between the novel form and disciplinary power. Investigating debates regarding shifts between discipline and control as they have been delineated by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, it explores how such shifts might affect the novel but also how literary portrayals of these changing dispositifs, such as those in Dave Eggers's novels The Circle and Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? may assist in the theoretical labor of grasping changing modes of power.