Author: Ophelia Benson

Here it is, another day. Well, I must admit, we were all quite surprised. None of us expected it. For quite a while now all the old certainties have been collapsing – as you well know. After all, none of us is ever likely to forget that day when it was realised that gravity was merely a part of that Social Construct of the Western Male Patriarchy called ‘Science’.

Now, things no longer fall to Earth as they used to in the bad old unreformed days and everything floats as freely as possible. We are no longer bound to the Earth by the patriarchal dictates of the White Male Industrial-Military-Scientific Hegemony and all float free in perfect equality, whatever our gender, race, creed or political beliefs. True equality is ours at last.

However, I have heard malicious rumours that there are still some aeroplanes up in the sky, caught out on that day. Their crews and passengers – of course – all long dead as they circle the endless skies. Of course, they claim, no-one dares go up there to get them down, in case they too suffer the same fate. But, I think we can quite easily dismiss such talk as counter-revolutionary, and – equally – dismiss such notions of so-called ‘proof’ that ‘they are clearly visible up there’ as an unfortunate hang-over from pre-enlightened days. After all, what is ‘proof’, but yet another manifestation of the pervasive way that the old ‘scientific’ hegemony corrupted our natural – and therefore – pure and good right to see things the way we want to see them? Just yet another manifestation of that whole corrupting notion of alleged evidence, which is – as we all now know – little more than so-called science’s ideologically corrupt propaganda.

It – of course – also has become a fair bit colder since the Earth began to wander off its orbit, and – as I said – days these days do tend to be a bit of a hit and miss affair. But there is no way any of us would go back – want, or need, to go back – to those bad old unenlightened days of The Dominant White Male Hieratically Imposed Semi-Fascist Ideology Of Science that so corrupted us all back in now what seems like another Dark Ages.

Now – at last – we are truly free, as free as the Earth is to wander the solar system and beyond, free to make up our own equally valid personal realities, and to never again suffer the indignity of occasionally falling over that once so distorted our self-esteem and growth potential as full, free and equal human beings.

This article was first published at Stuff and Nonsense and is published here by permission.

Bottom in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ playing Pyramus says, more shrewdly than he or Shakespeare had any idea of, ‘O wicked wall, through whom I see no bliss,/ Curs’d be thy stones for thus deceiving me!’ Shakespeare surprisingly often anticipated the insights of postmodernism in this way; it is quite poignant and heart-rending to realize he wasn’t in a position to know he was doing so. We are more fortunate.

We are in a position to understand the insidious sublimated power of the wall in all its forms and manifestations, we can problematize its taken for granted status in our culture, we can interrogate the way it does its work, and thus come to an understanding of the regimes of separation, blockage, interference, interposition, interruption, and frustration in Western hegemonic structures.

Walls are everywhere. A wall is a barrier, and barriers are everywhere we look. In fact, it is difficult not to conclude that Eurocentric Western hegemonists are so terrified of nature and the real world (if there is a ‘real world,’ but that is a question for another essay) that they can’t bear to confront any part of it without a barrier. Poor frightened paranoid rational bureaucratic neoliberals, cowering away from trees and flies and snow, constructing an artificial antiseptic world to live in and never smelling the flowers or the decaying corpses.

Many of the walls and barriers are obvious enough: they’re the ones we already call walls and barriers: the walls of houses and prisons and asylums; fences and border crossings, and the like. Also roofs and floors. But there are other barriers, or walls – other solid objects that come between the Self and some piece or aspect of the outside world. Between Self and Other. These walls define the other as Other – that is the cultural work they do. There are more walls of that kind than a theorist can enumerate. Shoes. Hats. Socks. Clothes. Plates. Tablecloths. Chairs. Cushions. Beds, mattresses, sheets.

All furniture is a barrier. Chairs and tables are barriers between us and the floor, which is a barrier between us and the ground. Plates and glasses are barriers between food and the table or floor or ground – and so on. Barrier upon barrier everywhere you look.

All of our lives are infiltrated and saturated with barriers. Everything is blocked, interrupted, partitioned, channelled, frustrated. Our energies are clogged, our desires and impulses and hemmed in and corralled, our inspirations are siphoned and piped, our creativity is boxed up and fenced in. We are allowed free interaction and intercourse with nothing. (It is no accident that prostitutes can charge more for ‘bareback.’) Mosquitoes, flies, worms, bacteria, leopards, vultures, polar bears – we are forcibly separated from all of them.

Band-aids. Umbrellas. Boats. Cars. Park benches. Bridges. All, manufactured artificial objects interposed between our breathing natural bodies and the earth. It is as if ‘civilization’ has done nothing but teach us a kind of hypertrophied paranoia in which we can’t stand to confront anything skin to skin. O wicked wall indeed.