60 PINS (Psychology in society), 1999, 25, 60-62 THE GUTS TO FIGHT BACK Martin Terre Blanche* Department of Psychology University of South Africa Box 392 Pretoria 0003 Brandon Hamber Centre for the Study of Violence & Reconciliation Johannesburg * To whom correspondence should be addressed. 1. The baggage retrieval system at Heathrow. Anita Craig is worried about many things: The over-use of unstructured interviews, misconceptions regarding the sex-lives of homosexuals, people who say "in my experience the importance of this cannot be underestimated" (sic), the hairstyles of black female TV continuity announcers, and so forth. We all have similar gripe lists, and labour to convince others of the importance and deep coherence of what to them may seem arbitrary and bizarre. Craig uses a well-worn strategy to achieve this. First, she invokes the master signifier of a future-directed rationality set off against all the various forms of soppy emotionality, subjective gut feelings and unthought-through prejudices that supposedly characterise "life in general in South Africa nowadays". Second, she declares herself exempt from the injunction against subjectivity, speaking in the register of authoritative but highly subjective self-disclosure. Thus we are told again and again what Craig believes, finds attractive, agrees with, is enticed by, worries about, feels unsure about, thinks, considers to be a "fine analysis", intuits, and so on; and paradoxically these intuitions all centre around a conviction that such subjective assertions do not constitute proper grounds for knowledge. This contradiction is by no means unique to Craig's text, but is central to the dynamic constituting modernity itself. The grand narratives of modernity speak of progress through a strict adherence to standards of objective, rational enquiry, while at the same time appealing to the sovereign, subjective individual as the ultimate guarantor of what is meaningful and important (Parker, 1989). The tension between rational (objective evidence; future-directedness; standards; universal principles) and irrational (subjective feelings; the present; arbitrary preferences; particular experiences) cannot be resolved from within modernity, and Craig's text would have functioned equally effectively in re-inscribing modernist truths had she chosen to champion irrationality instead. Seen from a modernist universe where everything has to be positioned between the two poles of rationality or irrationality, objectivity or subjectivity, reason or schmaltz,