Up Against the Wall Motherf**er

by Osha Neumann

  In the word of the exploited, all the promises of rights turn into their opposites: freedom entails enslavement; democracy, exploitation; inalienable rights, alienation of all rights. The rage against the false promises of those who claim they come to spread freedom and democracy is easily exploited by those who speak for God and wish to reestablish His—and their—authority. Rationality itself is a false god. The entire project of reason is discredited. All its fruits are lumped together—its science, its secular democratic values, its talk of inalienable rights and freedom, the vast globe swallowing institutions it has created, the entertainments in purveys. And all are turning rotten. We are urged to veil our women and our minds.

  So should we defend reason, abandon it, or attempt to reclaim it? Has our faith in reason been misplaced? Should we leave unchallenged the System’s claim to represent reason or should we challenge it in the name of a reason whose critical content is unimpaired? Is it possible to sever the link between the rationality of the System and its irrationality? Is there an inextricable link between the virtues associated with rationality, and the vices that accompany it like camp followers?

  The eighteenth century is called the Age of Reason (no one would say the same for the twentieth or what we’ve seen so far of the twenty-first). Back then, the project of reason was revolution. Reason was the source of values. The emerging middle class used it as a weapon against the feudal nobility that blocked the bourgeoisie’s access to power. The reason of the Enlightenment had a critical agenda: to challenge all authority not founded in reason itself. It worked against the given. It led to the beheading of a king and a queen, and the storming of the Bastille. It fed the kerchunking blade of the guillotine.

  The critique of the old order was based on the belief that the equal rights of man had their foundation in nature. Locke, Paine, and Jefferson derived the right to life, liberty, and property from natural law. Reason was the law of nature, and it was also the mental faculty that enabled us to know that law. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” wrote Jefferson in our Declaration of Independence. By virtue of reason, nature’s law became “self-evident.” The principles of a democratic society were founded in nature as surely as the laws of physics and astronomy. Access to truth was equally available to all. Since reason was not the exclusive property of a privileged class it was a fitting and necessary foundation for a democratic, secular, and egalitarian society.

  The reason of merchants and accountants was, in this period, wielded by the bourgeois against those classes and institutions that stood in their way. Reason was a sword, bright and clean to cut through ignorance, replacing the patriarchal authority of kings and princes with the free will of a brood of fatherless sons who chose to form an egalitarian fraternity of those who buy and sell. And if, in practice, there were those who were excluded from this fraternity—the propertyless rabble, women, paupers, slaves—the principles discovered by reason were at least, in theory, universal and capable of being used by those excluded to argue for their admission.

  But that was then. What now? Feudalism has been overthrown. A social order designed for the benefit of merchants and shopkeepers is firmly entrenched. And the palace of the Sun King has been replaced by the gleaming skyscrapers of the new masters of the universe. Science has been their faithful servant, their fawning acolyte. Reason leveled the playing field only to provide the foundation for a new and more comprehensive hierarchy.

  Reason has lost its bite. It has become a watchdog for the status quo, ferreting out inefficiency and disciplining the reprobate who does not directly contribute to the profit of its masters.

  The failure of reason to rise to its critical task may help explain a curious phenomenon: One might have thought that by now, after many centuries of triumphs, reason would have cleared the world of gods, goblins, and spirits of the glen. Free at last, we should no longer be haunted by our fathers and mothers projected into the sky. “No Gods! No Masters!” cried Margaret Sanger and the Wobblies. Good riddance to the realm beyond appearances, where meaning and purpose is given to our meandering lives by invisible beings who create and intend the world. We should no longer require the services of priests, rabbis and mullahs, the anointed gatekeepers to the beyond, except occasionally for funerals and other special events.

  But the opposite is the case. Secularism is on shaky ground these days.j Our elected officials may still occasionally claim that the values of democracy are founded in reason, but more often than not they forego the appeal to reason and head straight for God, appealing to Him at every opportunity as if the Constitution had been handed down on Mt. Sinai, and Christ, crucified on the cross, wrote the Bill of Rights “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East,” George Bush is reported to have told Palesatinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas.36

  The gods are having a resurgence. As reason erodes the foundation of belief, belief grows stronger. Rationality may have undermined the prestige and power of the gods, but they have not gone gently into that good night. “You still need us,” they say through their spokespeople on earth, who take every opportunity to warn us against the poison fruits of reason: licentiousness, the loosening of restraints, and the destruction of the moral order. Religion is still the heart of a heartless world: a loving heart, an angry heart, a consoling heart.

  Religions teach that there is a consciousness that created and governs the world, an “objective” consciousness, independent of our individual human subjectivity. Science has replaced a world haunted by invisible spirits, with a world of hard facts from which consciousness is excluded. Mind is locked in the skull, like a prisoner in her cell, peering through the bars at a world beyond her reach. She’s let out only for the specific task of prying open, breaking apart, reassembling, and ordering things according to rules.

  Scientists may be the freest of prisoners. They’re released on furlough, like poets and artists. Their minds are allowed to wonder at will over the universe. The best are lovers of the beauty of nature. They appreciate an elegant theory. The earth viewed from space is an opalescent jewel. Peer through a telescope and spiraling nebulae invisible to the naked eye swim into view. Beauty inspires their curiosity. Their hypotheses may come to them in dreams and reverie. But when the real work of science begins, the dreaming stops. The mind withdraws from the world, returns to its cell, and operates on the world from a distance. Just as the worker trudging to her job must leave her personal life behind, so the scientist must set aside what is essentially inaccessible to others—her personal experience of the world—when she enters the laboratory. The objectivity of science is obtained by peeling away what is unique and individual in experience, in order to get at what can be repeatedly verified. Scientists search in the bounty of nature for rules and regularities.

  When all there is of reason is the objectivity of science and the neat bookkeeping of accountants, when science becomes the sum total, the pinnacle, and final expression of reason, then reason ceases to be, as it was in the eighteenth century, a source of values. It has nothing more to say about what matters most: about what ought to be, about justice, about loss, and pain, and love—the important things. It exhausts itself in facts and figures. Even though the world screams that something has gone terribly wrong, reason does not hear its cry. It turns a deaf ear.

  The definitive separation of the world of objective fact from the world of subjectivity makes it difficult to discover a rational basis for value. Science, the golden child of reason, is very good at telling us what is, but abstains from comment on what ought to be. “Oughts” are not its business. Nor are they the business of the CEO, who is charged with maximizing the profits of his corporation’s shareholders and pays lip service, as needed, to everything else. So who’s in charge of values? If all there is of reason is science and accounting, and an empty logic, sterile as a hen without a rooster, where do values come from? Are w
e back to pointing to the sky? Do they float down from some transcendental realm like manna from heaven? Do they originate in an alternate universe? Do we make them up as we go along? Do they have a foundation that guarantees their universality or are they as individual and evanescent as snowflakes? If science rules only in the realm of what is, is the realm of ought-to-be, ruled by the irrational?

  The System is a labyrinth large as the world, containing at its center a devouring monster. The monster is hideous and beautiful; it has the face of death and a body made for love. It has an enormous appetite. It is human and inhuman. It has many names—greed, profit, lust for power—but its secret name is unknown. The monster breaks our bones to get at the marrow, gobbles our hopes, sucks us dry of possibilities, reams out our imagination. It is insatiable. Brilliant minds hunched over their drawing boards, computers, and spreadsheets helped to create and continue to maintain the dwelling for this monster. The labyrinth is designed to confuse those who wish to slay the monster and lead them down false paths and blind alleys.

  Even when most deeply immersed in Motherfuckerism, I thought of reason as Ariadne’s thread that we must follow if we are to emerge alive from the journey to the heart of the labyrinth. Without it, we would become lost and confused, imagining that we were heading out of the maze towards freedom, when in actual fact we were heading into the maw of the devouring beast.

  But now I wonder: Is the reason that built the labyrinth, the same reason that we use as a thread to guide us out of it?

  TRUTH WITH A CAPITAL T

  SPEAKER FROM THE AUDIENCE: “There is after all something which is the truth which we can at least approach. . . . After all . . . Elvis Presley is either dead or he isn’t.” . . . I agree with you we can’t get truth with a capital T back, but it seems to me there has to be some alternative short of a collapse into nihilism . . .”

  WENDY BROWN: “I don’t know how recognizing that Elvis Presley is probably more alive dead than he was when he was alive is nihilism . . . and I actually think to collapse those is again to resuscitate the accusation, that there is this thing called post-modernism which rejects all truth, it’s all relativist, . . . it doesn’t know its sitting on a chair, and it has no values . . . It’s not the case that Elvis Presley is either dead or not dead. . . . I think it’s a mistake . . . to make that move, to say that that is nihilism, and to rest your case on facticity.”

  —Exchange between member of the audience and Wendy Brown at forum on Left Conservatism, March 1998

  The attack on reason’s claim to universality and its right to have a say in determining what ought to be comes, not only from the proponents of revealed truth, but also from secular movements that claim there is no such thing as a single, unitary universal truth. Those movements all agree that reason, as primarily exemplified in the thinking of white men, is not Ariadne’s thread. It’s just a bit of yarn. She has many threads and they lead in many directions.

  In 1992, Vaclav Havel, playwright and then president of Czechoslovakia, addressed a gathering of the world’s most powerful politicians and CEO’s at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland, and pronounced the end of the reign “arrogant absolutist reason”:The fall of Communism can be regarded as a sign that modern thought—based on the premise that the world is objectively knowable, and that the knowledge so obtained can be absolutely generalized—has come to a final crisis. This era has created the first global, or planetary, technical civilization, but it has reached the limit of its potential, the point beyond which the abyss begins. The end of Communism is a serious warning to all mankind. It is a signal that the era of arrogant, absolutist reason is drawing to a close and that it is high time to draw conclusions from that fact.37

  Six years later, at the height of the academic fad for post-modernism and deconstruction, I attended a panel discussion at the University of California at Santa Cruz on “Left Conservativism.” According to the organizers of the conference, left conservatives were believers in precisely the overarching, all-explaining theory founded in Marxism that Vaclav Havel condemned as the product of “arrogant, absolutist reason” and that I, growing up, thought of as the antidote to fascism.

  The critics of Left Conservstivism said they did so in the name of “anti-foundationalism.” What foundation were they against? No one bothered to explain. Was it substance as “foundation” to which attributes attach; the “self” as the “foundation” to which consciousness attaches; “the real” as the “foundation” of appearances; reality as the “foundation” for true statements about the world; reason as a “foundation” for argument; a material base as the “foundation” for a superstructure of ideas; all of these, or none? I had no idea.

  Wendy Brown, one of the panelists and a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, leveled a series of accusations against the left-conservatives. They had difficulty with anti-foundationalism’s relentless questioning. They wanted their old “real” and “true” back. They wanted “truth with a capital “T.” They mourned the loss of materiality. They were wedded to a belief in “the revolution,” and “Marcuse’s ‘Great Refusal.’” They could not accept the “decentering of capitalism.” They missed their old working class heroes, muscular and sweaty. She accused them of having nostalgia for Pete Seeger concerts. They needed someone to blame for the collapse of the left and anti-foundationalists were handy targets.

  In the rather rancorous debate that followed the panel discussion, the so-called left conservatives in the audience denied that they still believed in the orthodoxies of Marxism—a strict economic determinism and a rigid division between material base and ideological superstructure. Somewhat to my surprise, they joined their anti-foundationalist opponents in disavowing a belief in “Truth with a capital T.” What did that capital letter signify? Did it mean a truth that is universally true? If so why was everyone pledging allegiance to the lower case?

  I rose to my feet, and walked over to where the microphone had been placed in an aisle on the opposite side of the lecture hall. I was trembling, my nervousness amplified by disability. I tried to stabilize myself by sitting on the arm of a chair, but my voice shook. When the microphone was lowered to accommodate me I managed to say that I am a believer in Truth with a capital T, all upper case, bold, and in neon lights. I went on to say, that there have been moments in political struggle, such as, for example, during the civil rights movement in the Sixties, when young Black men and women sat down in protest and were beaten, but refused to move. Those were the moments in which what is truly true and real is revealed and what passes for truth and reality is exposed as a lie and unreal. It is important, I continued, to expand those moments, and for theory to preserve and incorporate them into itself. And I am not sure that either anti-foundationalism or materialism could do that.

  My speech was mercifully short, and largely drowned in the static of my quivering rebellious body. I felt thoroughly humiliated. I alone quivered and shook and betrayed my fear. I was a rank amateur among professionals. I was insufficiently familiar with the literature. So much to read. So much to remember. I experienced in full force the fear I experience in the philosophy sections of book stores, the fear of being wiped out by a gigantic wave of words, of drowning in an ocean of ideas. Truth be told, I have lived all my life without a foundation, quite certain that I could not justify with facts and figures and cogent argument, a fraction of my beliefs. I take them more or less on faith, glad that there are others, more competent than I to engage in debates and public controversy. Though I long for theory, I have done quite well without it, surviving on the remains of inherited coherence. And yet I believe firmly in a foundation, in the possibility, nay the necessity of universals, of the pursuit of coherence, and a version of reason and rationality that anti-foundationalism appears to question. I need truth with a capital T, a truth born in the promiscuous commingling of “is” and “ought.”

  I don’t believe the world is changed by truths without capitals. (Of co
urse, one can always be wrong. Truth with a capital “T” can turn out to be a mistake with a capital “M.” It’s a risk one takes—betting on the wrong horse.) How can we demand universal condemnation of injustice without at the same time demanding universal acknowledgement of the facts that constitute that injustice? We are certain that the African slave trade was an abomination because we can imagine what that trade meant for its victims. We want to hurl the facts of that trade in the face of anyone who would defend it. Feast your mind, we demand, on the middle passage: piss and vomit; darkness and iron shackles; branded skin; Black corpses thrown overboard, the sharks feasting, flesh rotting at the bottom of the ocean.

  Raphael painted, Luther preached, Corneille wrote, Milton sang; and through it all, for 400 year the sharks followed the scurrying ships; for 400 years America was strewn with the living and dying millions of a transplanted race; for 400 years Ethiopia stretched forth her hands unto God.38

  Is this truth with a capital T? I think so.

  In the lecture halls of universities, anti-foundationalists skirmish with left conservatives who still talk about the real, the true, the just, and persist in spinning a frayed Ariadne’s thread of universals. Meanwhile, in the narrow streets of refugee camps and the plazas before mosques, synagogues and churches, fundamentalists mull their response to “arrogant absolutist reason” and catalogue the abominations of its camp followers. On the one side are those who deny the possibility of “truth with a capital T.” On the other are those who believe they’ve got a franchise on it. Both fundamentalism and post-modernism are iatrogenic diseases that result from the radical separation of “ought” from “is.” After surgery, a raging infection.