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Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth Telling
When Chelsea Manning was arrested in May 2010 for leaking massive amounts of classified Army and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks, she was almost immediately profiled by the mainstream press as a troubled person: someone who had experienced harassment due to her sexual orientation and gender non-conformity, and who leaked documents not on behalf of the public good, but out of motives of personal revenge or, as suggested in the New York Times, "delusions of grandeur." Compared implicitly to Daniel Ellsberg's apparently selfless devotion to the truth and the public good, Manning comes up short in these profiles--a failed whistleblower who deserves pity rather than political solidarity.
The first book-length theoretical treatment of Manning's actions, Insurgent Truth argues for seeing Manning's example differently: as an act of what the book terms "outsider truth-telling." Bringing Manning's truth-telling into conversation with democratic, feminist, and queer theory, the book argues that outsider truth-tellers such as Manning tell or enact unsettling truths from a position of social illegibility. Challenging the social alignment of credibility with gendered, classed, and raced traits, outsider truth-tellers reveal oppression and violence that the dominant class would otherwise not see, and disclose the possibility of a more egalitarian form of life. Read as outsider truth-telling, the book argues that Manning's acts were not aimed at curbing corporate or governmental bad acts, but instead at transforming public discourse and agency, and inciting a solidaristic public. The book suggests that Manning's actions offer a productive example of democratic truth-telling for all of us.
Lida Maxwell develops this argument through an examination of Manning's prison writings, the lengthy chat logs between Manning and the hacker who eventually turned her in, various journalistic, artistic, and academic responses to Manning, and by comparing Manning's example and writings with the work and actions of other outsider truth-tellers, including Cassandra, Virginia Woolf, Bayard Rustin, and Audre Lorde. Showing the shortcomings of existing approaches to truth and politics, Maxwell advances a new theoretical framework through which to understand truth-telling in politics: not only as a practice of offering a pre-political common ground of "facts" to politics, but also as the practice of unsettling public discourse by revealing the oppression and domination that it often masks.
The first book-length theoretical treatment of Manning's actions, Insurgent Truth argues for seeing Manning's example differently: as an act of what the book terms "outsider truth-telling." Bringing Manning's truth-telling into conversation with democratic, feminist, and queer theory, the book argues that outsider truth-tellers such as Manning tell or enact unsettling truths from a position of social illegibility. Challenging the social alignment of credibility with gendered, classed, and raced traits, outsider truth-tellers reveal oppression and violence that the dominant class would otherwise not see, and disclose the possibility of a more egalitarian form of life. Read as outsider truth-telling, the book argues that Manning's acts were not aimed at curbing corporate or governmental bad acts, but instead at transforming public discourse and agency, and inciting a solidaristic public. The book suggests that Manning's actions offer a productive example of democratic truth-telling for all of us.
Lida Maxwell develops this argument through an examination of Manning's prison writings, the lengthy chat logs between Manning and the hacker who eventually turned her in, various journalistic, artistic, and academic responses to Manning, and by comparing Manning's example and writings with the work and actions of other outsider truth-tellers, including Cassandra, Virginia Woolf, Bayard Rustin, and Audre Lorde. Showing the shortcomings of existing approaches to truth and politics, Maxwell advances a new theoretical framework through which to understand truth-telling in politics: not only as a practice of offering a pre-political common ground of "facts" to politics, but also as the practice of unsettling public discourse by revealing the oppression and domination that it often masks.
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Published December 3, 2019
About the author
Lida Maxwell
5 books1 followerLida Maxwell is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Trinity College. She is the author of Public Trials: Burke, Zola, Arendt and the Politics of Lost Causes and the co-editor of Second Nature: Rethinking the Natural through Politics.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 12, 2024
If you read the blurb, you've gotten all that this book has to offer. It's more an extended college essay than a well-developed profile of Manning or her actions.
The basic thesis that people outside of the establishment power structure can provide valuable insight from a removed perspective is hardly earth-shaking or even mildly controversial. To hide this, the author spends a good amount of time developing unnecessary layers of fancy-sounding nomenclature to make it sound more academic. I suppose that all humanities scholarship is written like this, but as someone more used to science and technology writing, it feels incredibly pretentious and fake.
Here's a relatively mild example from the blurb: "Challenging the social alignment of credibility with gendered, classed, and raced traits, outsider truth-tellers reveal oppression and violence that the dominant class would otherwise not see."
This argument holds less water than the more general one regarding the "outsider truth tellers." The much bigger problem is that the people in power don't care, not that they don't know. A witness doesn't need to be poor or gay or black to recognize that a helicopter gunship mowing down civilians is wrong. So do the military commanders and politicians, which is why they try to cover up their activities.
But the author is hoping that the argument will sound more convincing with amorphous phrases like "the social alignment of credibility" and gratuitous references to sociopolitical theories like "solidarism". I get that every field has its jargon, and have no issues with looking up terms that I don't know, but the terminology should always be used to clarify and disambiguate, never to obfuscate.
The basic thesis that people outside of the establishment power structure can provide valuable insight from a removed perspective is hardly earth-shaking or even mildly controversial. To hide this, the author spends a good amount of time developing unnecessary layers of fancy-sounding nomenclature to make it sound more academic. I suppose that all humanities scholarship is written like this, but as someone more used to science and technology writing, it feels incredibly pretentious and fake.
Here's a relatively mild example from the blurb: "Challenging the social alignment of credibility with gendered, classed, and raced traits, outsider truth-tellers reveal oppression and violence that the dominant class would otherwise not see."
This argument holds less water than the more general one regarding the "outsider truth tellers." The much bigger problem is that the people in power don't care, not that they don't know. A witness doesn't need to be poor or gay or black to recognize that a helicopter gunship mowing down civilians is wrong. So do the military commanders and politicians, which is why they try to cover up their activities.
But the author is hoping that the argument will sound more convincing with amorphous phrases like "the social alignment of credibility" and gratuitous references to sociopolitical theories like "solidarism". I get that every field has its jargon, and have no issues with looking up terms that I don't know, but the terminology should always be used to clarify and disambiguate, never to obfuscate.
October 28, 2023
A dry political philosophy book that was work for me to get through, but I’m glad I did. It really made me think about truth, who is a reliable truth-teller, and how outsider truths can form connections and create community. More about Virginia Woolf than Chelsea Manning, and quite ironically very academic in tone, considering how Maxwell notes that academia-speak is one way of oppressing outsiders, legitimizing the military-security patriarchy. A book I’ll read again someday, in hopes I understand more of it.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews