Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth-Telling
LIDA MAXWELL
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress
ISBN 978–0–19–092003–6 (pbk.)
ISBN 978–0–19–092002–9 (hbk.)
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
For Japonica
2. Public, Private, Insurgent: What Is Outsider Truth-Telling?
3. Chelsea Manning as Transformative Truth-Teller
4. Anonymity as Outsider Tactic: Woolf’s “Anon” and Rustin’s Quiet Persistence
5. Telling the Truth, Changing the World: Woolf’s War Photographs and Manning’s Collateral Murder Video
6. “I used to only know how to write memos”: The
PREFACE: CASSANDRA AND SOCRATES
What does a truth-teller look like? An image of a man immediately leaps into view. It is a man who puts aside his own economic and social interests in favor of the truth and who sees his devotion to truth as serving his city or country. It is a man who believes he can tell the truth only by living truthfully, who is willing to sacrifice his life and well-being on behalf of truth. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, many citizens, writers, and thinkers have called this man Socrates. In the writings of Martin Luther King Jr., Henry David Thoreau, and Mohandas Gandhi, Socrates appears as a heroic figure, whose commitment to the truth in the face of injustice stands as a model for contemporary gadflies advocating on behalf of racial or anti-colonial justice.1 In the writings of Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and others, Socrates’s example appears similarly heroic and virtuosic: an example of an individual willing to sacrifice himself in ways large and small
on behalf of the truthfulness of himself and his city.2 In these narratives of Socrates’s life and death, his words and actions compose a monument to his practice and conception of philosophical truth-telling: the pursuit of non-contradiction.3
Yet if Socrates inhabits the heroic foreground of our truth-telling imaginary, there is another image that persists alongside it, even if its contours are more difficult to ascertain, its features slightly out of focus. In post-Homeric mythology, Cassandra appears as a visionary who knew and proclaimed the truth of the destruction to come for Troy and for herself during the Trojan War, but was not believed by her fellow Trojans. A daughter of King Priam sent to be a priestess in Apollo’s temple, Cassandra refused Apollo’s demand for sex and was cursed to know the truth but never be believed: “He [Apollo] came like a wrestler,/magnificent, took me down and breathed his fire/through me and— . . . I yielded, then at the climax I recoiled—I deceived Apollo!/ . . . Even then I told my people all the grief to come . . . /Once I betrayed him I could never be believed.”4 In speaking to the Trojan people, Cassandra proclaimed the earthly truth of the Trojan War: it was to bring destruction, slavery, and death to her people and city. Cassandra did not see the truth because she had chosen (as Socrates did) to live as a philosopher; rather, she saw the destructive force of violence and war because she was vulnerable to those violences herself. Cassandra’s truth-telling was thus not (as it was for Socrates) a practice of risking her private interests on behalf of the public good; rather, she told the truth from a position of public and private marginalization, where everything had already been risked. Yet as a woman who refused to acquiesce to male and divine sexual desire, Cassandra was cursed to never look like a truth teller; rather, she appeared untrustworthy, suspect, mad.
In some respects, Socrates and Cassandra appear similar characters. Both truth-tellers in times of war and unrest, both feared by some parts of their society, both rendered outcasts, they told the truth and were not believed. They both also ultimately lost their lives because of the social disturbance they and their truth-telling caused. Yet I have begun by drawing out differences between their examples because I am interested in asking how our understanding of truth-telling in politics might shift if we took Cassandra rather than Socrates as our archetypical truth-teller. Invoked as a model for what we now call civil disobedience, Socrates appears as an exemplar of seeking absolute truth and justice over and above unjust, biased state and local laws and edicts.5 Through reference to his example, political theorists have been able to raise important questions about truth-tellers (philosophers, activists, experts, movement leaders) confronting an intransigent demos—that is, questions about why a people whose passions, or love of sophistry, or desire for wealth makes them unable to recognize truth.
Yet Socrates’s example does not raise—or raises less obviously than Cassandra’s—the question of how someone appears legible as a truth-teller in the first place. Put differently, Socrates’s example tends to suggest that conflicts over truth in politics are due either to popular passions or ignorance of truth,6 rather than asking how various forms of power function to keep different kinds of individuals (women, people of color, queer, trans*, and gender nonconforming people) outside the circle of the hearable. Hierarchies of citizenship, class, and gender set the boundaries of Socrates’s political conflict about truth with his fellow Athenians; figures like Cassandra were always already illegible, and their reality appears always already insignificant to their society.
If Socrates’s predicament helps to illuminate the predicament of Thoreau and Gandhi, Cassandra’s predicament gestures toward a different set of experiences: of ordinary women who tell the truth about sexual assault, and are not believed;7 of people of color who tell the truth about police violence, brutality, and killing and are not believed; of queer, trans*, and gender nonconforming people who tell the truth about violence, bullying, and the social invisibility of wrongs done to them, and are not believed; of those trying to tell the truth about war’s violence and oppression, and are not believed; and of others, excluded from the circle of the hearable, who are trying to create a meaningful place in the world by telling the truth about their exclusion from it.8 Cassandra’s predicament is not the predicament of heroes and great men; rather, her predicament helps attune us to the significance of experiences of women, trans* people, queers, and people of color trying to tell the truth so that they might survive, demand a society in which their reality matters, and create the possibility of living differently.9
To be clear, Cassandra and contemporary marginalized individuals are not cast as suspect, un-believable, and mad only because of their identity. Rather, they also tell truths that are unsettling to power and privilege. In different ways, they offer their societies what I call insurgent truth: a kind of truth that does not stabilize society by offering prepolitical facts but instead unsettles society by showing that the social ground is already rough, exclusive, and often lopsided. Cassandra told the Trojans that they would lose the war and be totally destroyed. Black Lives Matter activists tell Americans that their society is premised on White supremacy and the presumed worthlessness of Black lives.10 Women in the #MeToo movement tell their fellow citizens
that their governments and workplaces are saturated and constituted by misogyny and sexual harassment. In other words, if Cassandra and contemporary marginalized truthtellers are cast as suspect in part because of who they are, they are also portrayed as un-believable because of the truths they tell. This is no accident: the sustenance of political and social hierarchies in an ostensibly just society depends on portraying the marginalized as unreliable observers of their own marginalization and portraying the oppressed as untrustworthy witnesses to their own oppression.
If we focus our attention on the hierarchies of credibility and truth foregrounded by Cassandra’s example, then the question with which I began, “What does a truth-teller look like?,” no longer seems appropriate. This question suggests that social credibility is inextricably linked to a certain identity or self-presentation, whereas Cassandra’s example suggests that social norms, institutions, violence, and ideology produce certain identities and comportments as more credible. If social credibility is a product of social and political organization, then it seems better to put the question this way: “How does the institutional, legal, affective, and discursive staging of political scenes make some people look like truth-tellers, and others not?”
While the rest of this book will not focus on Cassandra, I open with her example because it offers an alternative, critical horizon of possibility in which to examine the significance of the different kinds of truth-telling that Cassandra and contemporary marginalized individuals enact. For the remainder of the book, I will call these forms of truth-telling— where individuals illegible to their societies as truth-tellers tell insurgent truths—“outsider truth-telling.” Contrasting outsider truth-telling with Socrates’s example may seem to
set him up (along with the Western philosophical tradition that he inaugurated) as representatives of “insiders,” hierarchy, and the dominant class. Indeed, almost everyone who read drafts of this book worried that I did not render Socrates a complex enough figure and that I did not underline sufficiently that he, too, was an outsider. If I have given short shrift to Socrates here, it is not because I think he is not complex, interesting, and important. Indeed, many people have written excellent books about Socrates’s truth-telling, his example for democratic politics, and his critical sensibility (among other things)—and I have been compelled by many of them.11 Yet the very depth and size of this body of work on Socrates testifies, in my view, to the need to expend some energy on those examples of truth-telling that may be obscured by focusing on someone who was, after all, a male citizen and member of the Athenian elite, even though his fellow elites eventually turned on him. If his example offers a recognizable model for telling unpopular truths, I want to ask: What forms of truth-telling may appear unrecognizable in terms of Socrates’s example? I am thus less interested in doing full justice to Socrates’s example in this preface (there are many books that pursue this project) and instead more interested in asking another question: What forms of truth-telling become more fully legible, and what kinds of worlds appear more fully illuminated, by thinking through the example of Cassandra and others who tell unsettling truths, even when their societies tell them they are incapable of telling the truth? The primary contemporary example of Cassandra’s predicament that I engage in this book is Chelsea Manning’s leaking of government documents. Like Cassandra, Manning told the truth about war and a social order sustained by it. Her truth-telling, also like Cassandra’s, revealed her illegibility
in both public and private realms: in both, she, as a gender nonconforming individual, appeared an improper truthteller. And Manning’s truth-telling, like Cassandra’s, unsettled hierarchies of truth-telling that prop up a discriminatory and often oppressive social order. I read Manning not as an isolated political actor, but instead as an outsider truth-teller within a cohort of outsider truth-tellers (such as Virginia Woolf, Bayard Rustin, Audre Lorde), whose practices are distinct yet connected, and whose significance becomes more apparent when read in conjunction with each other.
In her novelistic re-telling of Cassandra’s story,12 the German writer Christa Wolf portrays Cassandra’s truthtelling not as the result of a divine curse but instead as a capacity nurtured by Cassandra’s enmeshment in what Virginia Woolf would call an “Outsiders’ Society”: a group of female outcasts (slaves, Amazons, midwives, some “elite” women like Cassandra) who gather in a cave outside the bounds of the city of Troy. Through practices of story-telling, ritual, and practically sustaining a way of life outside the strictures of war, these women create an atmosphere where, in contrast to Trojan men’s bewitchment into the mythology of war, Cassandra is able to see reality: the oppression of women, generated and sustained in large part by her brothers’ and father’s commitment to a violent, endless war that results in their death. In Wolf’s novel, the outsider capacity for truthtelling is thus nurtured not through the abstract dialectic and interrogation favored by Socrates, but rather through staging a new political scene, and creating a new outsider space, that refuses the terms of the war society. Through co-existing with other outsiders in a space that is not organized by war and status-seeking, Cassandra learns to trust and speak her own perceptions of reality.
If literally leaving the bounds of the war society and helping to create (even if only fleetingly) a space outside war was an option for Cassandra, that seems an impossibility now. Yet might outsider spaces and solidarities—that exceed and resist the terms of public and private—still come into being, even in the midst of technology, military and prison systems, and economic imperatives that interpolate us all into war societies? My argument, which will unfold in the following chapters, is that they are already there. From Manning’s internet chats and prison friendships, to Woolf’s outsiders standing on bridges and telling unsettling truths in dining rooms, to Anna Julia Cooper whispering truth from a “coigne of vantage” in the public realm, to Rustin’s persistent queerness in Left, pacifist spaces in the 1940s and 1950s, I will suggest that outsider truth-tellers change spaces by telling or enacting the truth with others and that their truthtelling depends on collectively transformed spaces. In a time when the value and meaning of truth-telling and politics is very much up for debate, Insurgent Truth develops a defense of the value of outsider truth-telling as a practice that generates reality, facts, and evidence about our world not to sustain a prepolitical common ground but instead on behalf of unsettling a supposedly common ground and creating, through its practice, new models of what it means to live collectively, stably, and truthfully.
CHELSEA MANNING AND THE POLITICS
OF TRUTH-TELLING
IN MAY 2010, CHELSEA MANNING1 was arrested for allegedly leaking troves of US top-secret information to Wikileaks.2 The leaked information came to be known as the Iraq war logs, the Afghan war logs, and Cablegate. Manning also leaked raw video and audio footage of US soldiers in a helicopter shooting down an unarmed Reuters employee, along with others—footage that Julian Assange of Wikileaks edited and released in more polished form as Collateral Murder. In contrast to Edward Snowden’s leaking of National Security Agency documents, which happened two years later, Manning was not primarily interested in revealing governmental intrusions on privacy. Rather, Manning’s focus was on US abuses abroad: unreported killing of civilians; the failure to adequately investigate accusations of torture; increased use of drones; and the use of special units to track down and kill individuals without trial, among other things. Manning’s leaks, in other words, were anti-war leaks.
Manning also believed that the diplomatic cables she leaked revealed how the “first world oppressed the third.”3
In an early profile of Manning in the New York Times that presaged broader media coverage, Ginger Thompson suggested that Manning leaked the documents out of “private” interests—out of revenge for being bullied in the military or for her struggles under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, or out of “delusions of grandeur.”4 Thompson was right to connect Manning’s personal struggles with her political struggles (as I discuss in chapter 3, Manning herself frames these struggles as connected), but Thompson’s narrative paints this connection as politically problematic, portraying Manning’s “private” motives as undermining any concern with the public good and undercutting the possible political promise of her act. When Manning’s allies, such as Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, and Chase Madar, attempted to defend her, they did so by claiming that she was not motivated by private interest but instead by an interest in serving the public good.5 Greenwald and Madar claimed she was following in the footsteps of Ellsberg, the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower. These defenses were certainly politically important and valuable but they also assumed (like Thompson) that Manning’s interest in drawing connections between public and private wrongs would be politically dangerous. Manning’s defenders and her many critics were, perhaps without realizing it, judging her actions in terms of a particular, historically situated, and politically produced conception of what a truth-teller looks like: someone who (like Socrates or Ellsberg) sets aside his private interest, publicly identifies himself as acting on behalf of the public good, and takes the consequences of telling an unpopular truth. While appealing to this heroic Socratic imaginary enables
important defenses of truth-tellers, might it also narrow the kind of defenses of truth-telling we are able to make? If those who see something promising in Chelsea Manning’s truthtelling stopped trying to make her into Daniel Ellsberg, how would she appear? What kind of example would she offer?
This book explores this question by positioning Manning’s act differently, as following not in the footsteps of Socrates or Ellsberg but in the footsteps of Cassandra and her outsider collective. Like Cassandra, Manning’s refusal to capitulate to the separation of public and private that her society sees as necessary to truthfulness is itself part of her truth-telling, even as it renders her untrustworthy in the eyes of her listeners. If Cassandra connected the violence of men over women to the violence of war and claimed that both would lead to Troy’s ruin, I will suggest in chapter 3 that Manning connected the secrecy demanded by Don’t Ask Don’t Tell to the military secrecy of information about war.
As the book unfolds, I will put Manning into conversation not only with Cassandra, but also with Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde, Bayard Rustin, and others. I will argue (especially in chapter 3) for reading her as an outsider truth-teller whose refusal to comply with norms of publicity and privacy render her illegible to her society as a truth-teller, while also putting her in a position to tell us important and unsettling truths about the public and private realms. While we tend to look to truth and truth-tellers to re-stabilize our political world and its public/private distinctions—by checking governmental corruption, or revealing the need for accountability—I will argue (especially in chapter 2) that outsider truth-tellers offer an important, insurgent truth to their societies. In contrast to the objective facts or moral absolutes that we tend to associate with truth-telling in politics, outsider truth-tellers
suggest that our dominant understanding of “truth” as singular and absolute is itself complicit in oppression, and they offer a messier and more complex picture of what the world is like. Outsider truth-tellers do not seek to re-stabilize the world as it is, but instead to change it by creating spaces and connections where marginalized individuals can say what the world is like for them and begin to imagine how to make it otherwise.
In the remainder of this chapter, however, I aim to show why reading Manning as an outsider truth-teller, and developing a defense of outsider truth-telling, is important to our understanding of the relationship between democracy and truth more generally. I will suggest that outsider truth-telling reveals problems with, and offers an important alternative to, the dominant understanding of truth and democracy in political theory and public life, namely, the view that democracy is dependent on truth because it offers a prepolitical stability for a society of diverse viewpoints. While this understanding of truth seems so commonsensical as to be banal, I argue, through recourse to scholarship in the history of science, that it actually grew out of particular historical circumstances and is tied to a raced, classed, and gendered conception of what a truth-teller looks like. In this context, I will suggest that outsider truth-tellers should be understood as performing a distinct, important role for democracy: telling their fellow citizens that their sense of reality, and their sense of which problems call for political redress, is actually partial, overly simplified, and often reinforcing oppression. Revealing reality that their societies need to see from a position of social illegibility, outsider truth-tellers are crucial yet vulnerable figures for democracy who are often (as Chelsea Manning was and is) violently disciplined, punished, and ostracized
HELSEA M ANNING
rather than acknowledged and considered worthy of response. This chapter makes an argument for the importance of their role and suggests that the predicaments and problems surrounding outsider truth-telling are crucial ones for democratic theory to raise, thematize, and address.
TRUTH AND DEMOCRACY
In modern and contemporary political theory, theorists tend to portray truth as important to politics because it offers stability and a common ground for diverse opinions. For example, in her germinal essay, “Truth and Politics,” Hannah Arendt argues that factual (as distinct from philosophical or religious) truth is an important source of stability for a diverse, free, contingent democratic politics.6 Whereas religious and philosophical truths presume to reveal an essential human trait that ties us together—and hence may license the exercise of violence on those who do not appear to have that essential trait, or who believe in different truths—factual truth appears to have a validity distinct from how facts might be used or seen within broader theories or ideologies. As Arendt puts it, “Conceptually, we may call [factual] truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.”7 Similarly, in Truth and Truthfulness, Bernard Williams argues that “everyday truths” and norms of truthfulness serve the important social function of stability.8 Factual truth appears to offer a pre-political common ground upon which people of diverse views can stand and have a reasonable debate. This intuitive connection between stable factual truths and democratic freedom is also evident in contemporary
worries about our supposed descent into a “post-truth” age. Now almost two years (at the time of this writing) into the presidency of Donald Trump, whose administration has been marked by ongoing and brazen lying, popular political culture is filled with books and articles worrying about whether a loss of truthfulness in politics may herald an anti-democratic politics or even incipient authoritarianism or fascism. In the Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, Michiko Kakutani writes, for example, that “[t]ruth is a cornerstone of our democracy” and “[t]he assault on truth and reason” has “reached fever pitch in America during the first year of the Trump presidency.”9 Writing in the New York Times a few days before the election, Jason Stanley noted that “Trump . . . is an authoritarian using his speech to define a simple reality that legitimates his value system, leading voters to adopt it.”10 In a similar vein, the Economist writes that Trump’s post-truth politics—which casts truth as of “secondary importance”—undermines the stability and commonality provided by factual truth: they “reinforce prejudices” and the disbelief of Trump’s opponents “validates the us-versus-them mindset that outsider candidates thrive on.”11 Indeed, George Orwell’s 1984, which portrays factual truth as crucial to freedom, jumped onto the bestseller list after Trump’s election. Orwell’s depiction of a dystopian authoritarianism that defines its own “truth” suggests that without an available independent reality, about which citizens might form judgments and opinions, citizens’ thoughts—like their bodies—are rendered deferent to their authoritarian rulers. They lose the capacity to critically depict a reality independent of what their rulers say it is. These recent popular analyses of the threat lying poses to democracy are seductive because they imply that truth,
HELSEA
if properly respected, confers commonality without political work: that if we could only rid politics of liars, we would restore the common ground (truth) that assures unity amongst people of diverse viewpoints and, hence, democratic flourishing. Yet truth only appears in society and politics by virtue of a system of representation; and modern systems of representing truth have been deeply hierarchical, engendering an apparent commonality and unity for some, and oppression and division for others.
As Mary Poovey, Steven Shapin, and other historians of science show, the idea of “facts” as self-evident and transparent itself arose in modernity out of hierarchy: through systems of representation that excluded certain kinds of experience, testimony, and speakers. For example, as Shapin argues in A Social History of Truth, while the early moderns claimed that “[t]he legitimate springs of empirical knowledge were located in the individual’s sensory confrontation with the world,”12 they also saw certain representations of credibility as more convincing than others. In particular, Shapin argues that the question of which representations of facts were credible was answered by the early moderns through reference to the existing status of “gentlemen”: “[p]articipants ‘just knew’ who a credible person was. They belonged to a culture that pointed to gentlemen as among their society’s most reliable truth-tellers, a culture that associated gentility, integrity, and credibility.”13 As Shapin puts it, “[i]n certain sorts of people credibility was embodied.”14
If Shapin argues that early modern scientists encoded credibility as a set of gentlemanly virtues, Poovey suggests that the idea of a nugget of experience as credible (as a “fact”) was first produced through a particular form of early modern merchants’ writing practices: double-entry bookkeeping.15
While this “formal system of writing numbers” transformed risky transactions “into usable facts”16 by recording them in a rule-bound way (mathematically) that appears to “guarantee accuracy,”17 this “formal precision” took the place of, and literally rewrote, the initial recordings of transactions that were often by a “woman or a young person.” These individuals’ representations of the transactions were not credible because they wrote, in the words of a manual on double-entry bookkeeping, “after the capacities of their minds.”18 Hiding and transcribing this first recording, the conventions of doubleentry bookkeeping not only obscured conditions of risk in business but also produced particular ways of thinking as risky and not credible: women and young people were portrayed as incapable of the rule-governed writing necessary to generate the self-evident particular.19
The “fact” is not, then, the nugget of raw experience we often take it to be, but a form of representing reality governed by strict rules (of writing) that produce its supposed selfevidence. And this form of representing reality is itself premised on a hierarchy of credibility: the formal precision of male merchants is privileged over the direct experience of women and young people.20
Poovey and Shapin’s work thus suggests that modern conceptions of credibility depend on a system of representation that casts certain “nuggets of individual experience” (precise, ordered, stripped of “excess”) as hearable as facts, and certain kinds of speakers (male merchants and gentlemen) and speech (civil, decorous) as offering hearable testimony about those facts. Further, Poovey emphasizes that this account of truth filled a social and political need for stability and objectivity, in the new context of reason-of-state theories, which portrayed society as composed of warring
interests.21 Yet Poovey’s and Shapin’s accounts also reveal that these early modern practices of truth generate a particular idea of what stability and objectivity are, and how they are represented: for example, objectivity becomes identifiable through rule-governed practices of representing reality, and stability appears as a situation of acquiescence to gendered, raced, and economic hierarchy. Here, as Leigh Gilmore writes in a different context, we see “objectivity’s alignment against the dispossessed.”22
Contemporary critics of a “post-truth era” appear to be operating from within the parameters of this early modern model: where truth-telling is supposed to create unity by serving as a site of rule-governed objectivity and disinterestedness, produced by expertly curated information deemed publicly significant by elites. In this model, the person who can speak this truth and offer it to society must himself appear capable of objectivity, disinterestedness, and maintaining distance from the private sphere (all features that align with gendered, raced, and elite traits).
While this early modern model of the relationship between truth and politics might appear to offer stability (an appearance I will later put into question), I am suggesting that it may also be anti-democratic: rendering marginalized speakers and unsettling truths about oppression and inequality always already insignificant to the public realm. This anti-democratic character persists. We can see it, for example, in the divergent public, journalistic, and legislative responses to Chelsea Manning’s and Edward Snowden’s leaking of documents. Both Manning and Snowden leaked what we would call evidence or “facts,” consisting in official governmental records that include documents and video. No one has disputed the authenticity or veracity of what either
