Tuesday Night — 03.15.11 — Secrecy & Politics — Jack Bratich — Event 6
Comments Off on Tuesday Night — 03.15.11 — Secrecy & Politics — Jack Bratich — Event 6Tuesday Night — 03.15.11 — Secrecy & Politics — Jack Bratich — Event 6
CONTENTS:
1. About this Tuesday
2. Note for Event 6 (Truth & Politics Series)
3. Useful links
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1. About this Tuesday
When: 7.00 pm, Tuesday 03.15.11
Who: Free and open to all
Where: 16 Beaver Street 4th floor
What: Discussion/Presentation
This Tuesday night, on the Ides of March, we will be welcoming thinker, writer, and frequent contributor to the space, Jack Bratich, to introduce and lead a discussion on Guy Debord’s seminal yet relatively overlooked ‘Comments on the Society of the Spectacle.’
Written prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, Guy Debord’s short, cryptic book ‘Comments …’ (originally titled Treatise on Secrets, and not to be confused with the original Society of the Spectacle) presciently speaks of terrorism, pre-emption, organized insecurity, unspecified enemies, infiltration of opposition, and ever pervasive covert operations.
The untimely seer Debord develops the concept of “generalized secrecy.” As a Treatise on Secrets, the work argues that “generalized secrecy stands behind the Spectacle, as the decisive complement to all it displays and, in the last analysis, as its most vital operation” (p. 12). The spectacle has brought secrecy to victory, in great measure by creating “specialists in secrecy.” Debord goes on to document a variety of instances of secrecy in action, including the historic predominance of the role of secret services, of popular conspirators, of professional accusers, of fake revealers, in sum a whole host of agents trained in promoting spectacular secrecy. He calls these the “networks of influence” and “promotion/control”, which include State secret services, the PR industry, as well as public spectators (p. 69, 74).
Where to locate secrecy in considerations given to Truth and Politics today? What does it mean to reveal, expose or leak a ‘secret’? What is the status of a ‘state secret,’ that once revealed, definitively proves that the state has lied to or misled ‘its people’?
And what is our understanding of secrets in a world drowned in overinformation, misinformation, spin, deception and lies?
Is our obsession with secrecy as a box to be opened itself part of the spectacle, a distraction from the myriad ways generalized secrecy permeates the political body?
Debord compels us to think secrecy outside of its commonsensical status as opposite of a public.
The Ides of March reminds us of the recurring and inescapable politics of secrecy. Traditionally a Roman festival dedicated to the god of war, we now know this event as a type of warning. A highly public assassination of a sovereign, enacted through a collective secrecy, returns to us as an occasion for awareness.
What would be an understanding of Truth and Politics be without the central yet proliferating operation of secrecy?
This Tuesday, on the Ides of March, let’s revisit the entanglement of secrecy, warfare and politics by discussing this strategic manual and guide to becoming aware of the hidden.
We hope the discussion will also touch on our recent conversations in the Truth & Politics Series and recent events – under the light of this occulted text.
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2. Two Notes for Event 6 (Truth & Politics Series)
by Jack Bratich
a.
From Public Secrecy and Immanent Security: A Strategic Analysis
Cultural Studies (20:4-5, 2006)
The Spring 2004 issue of the Mass School of Law Journal was a special issue titled, “Secrecy is Everywhere.” This enigmatic phrase, which itself seems to be everywhere, poses a riddle for us to decipher. For it is not the case that secrets are everywhere, but that secrecy itself has become omnipresent, even public, in ways that do not destroy secrecy. Secrecy proliferates everywhere, but is not negated in revelation.
How can we communicate this secrecy proliferating? How does one render the secret into an object of discussion and strategy?
In addition to Debord’s Treatise, the beginnings of cryptoanalysis can be found in these resources:
In A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) discuss secrecy in a section titled “Memories of the Secret” (pp.286-290). They break secrecy down into three components: 1) as the contents in a box or envelope (the common sense of secrecy); 2) as an action, both in terms of secret influence (e.g. the way secret societies affect social changes) and the propagation of the secret (its spread and leakage, or secretion); 3) as the secret perception of the secret.
As Michael Taussig (2002) argues, when the State seeks to put an end to secrecy via revelation, it only increases the power of secrecy: it is “the skilled revelation of skilled concealment” (p. 305). Following Walter Benjamin, Taussig suggests we bring secrecy out in the open by telling a “truth that is not a matter of exposure which destroys the secret, but a revelation which does justice to it” (in Taussig, 2002).
What emerges from these resources is an understanding that the State’s proliferation of secrecy (both as its own spectacularization and its popularization) is only one way of becoming-immanent. Rather than surrender to a totalitarian state of secrecy, we can begin thinking of secrecy as a strategy.
In political activism, for instance, the typical assumption is that secrecy is a tool for power, in the service of domination, and kept by elites or the State as a means of maintaining hierarchical exclusions. From the CIA to the KKK, secrecy is sign of hidden agendas. But this notion of a cryptocracy depends on an assumption of publicity’s secrecy: secrecy in the form of an envelope or box, and disclosure as its opposite and vanquisher. What if we began to think of cryptocracy in other ways, i.e. from the perspective of secrecy itself? In an age where secrecy is virtually everywhere as a strategy of domination, can we begin to experiment with a becoming-secret that could be defined as an insurgent secrecy, a minor secrecy, or a popular secrecy?
Making this argument entails unsettling a fundamental assumption among oppositional forces, namely the belief that the revelation of secrets is inherently a progressive force. Returning to Jodi Dean’s argument that publicity and secrecy have been intertwined in the US political imaginary, we can shift perspective by no longer relying on publicity to be an effective political force against a cryptocracy. In other words, when dissent primarily operates by seeking to expose the State’s secrets, it may be playing into a larger logic of concealment and revelation that is ultimately disempowering. Instead, we can explore the very ability to produce both secrets and their exposure as a political force.
b.
Short note on Egypt, Warfare, and Secret Sovereign Networks
The public focus on social media and the Egyptian insurrection has, like the spectacular display of branded protest graffiti, occluded the forces and processes that produced it.
Each day new leaks emerge—e.g. Facebook admins gave certain Egyptian social mediators “virtual shelter” for their identities. Unlike 2009 Iran, the social mediators in Egypt have unmasked themselves, publicizing their strategic use of secrecy and revelation. Google exec Wael Ghonim, hailed by CNN as Egypt’s spiritual leader, an apparently convincing parrhesiastes in the events leading to Mubarak’s exit, is represented by the New York Times, just days later as a publicist, strategist, if not outright trickster.
A purported decentralized resistance effort, what Google exec Jared Cohen called “a basically leaderless movement”, is within weeks touted to have had hidden conditions of emergence. The public discussion replicates the meme “Facebook Revolution” while ignoring the play of faces and masks. What might these kinds of ‘revelations’ do or attempt to do to our notions of enthusiasm, identification, and solidarity?
As Guy Debord advises, how do we make effective use of that which is hidden?
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3. Useful links
Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord, 1988
http://www.notbored.org/commentaires.html
Bratich texts:
“Becoming-Seattle: the State of Activism and the (Re)activity of the State”
Fifth Estate (#374, Winter 2007, pp. 17-20)
http://sduk.us/16beaver/jb_becoming_seattle.pdf
“Popular Secrecy and Occultural Studies”
Cultural Studies (21:1, 2007, pp. 42-58)
http://sduk.us/16beaver/jb_popular_secrecy_and_occultural_studies.pdf
“Public Secrecy and Immanent Security: A Strategic Analysis”
Cultural Studies (20:4-5, 2006, pp. 493-511)
http://sduk.us/16beaver/jb_pub_secrecy_immanent_security.pdf
“Fingerprints of Power”
http://www.counterpunch.org/bratich07302005.html
“The Fog Machine: Iran, Social Media and the Rise of Genetically Modified Grassroots Organizations”
Counterpunch newsletter (7/22/09)
http://www.counterpunch.org/bratich06222009.html
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16 Beaver Group
16 Beaver Street, 4th fl.
New York, NY 10004
for directions/subscriptions/info visit:
http://www.16beavergroup.org
TRAINS:
4,5 Bowling Green
R,W Whitehall
2,3 Wall Street
J,M Broad Street
1,9 South Ferry
__________________________________________________
16 Beaver Group
16 Beaver Street, 4th fl.
New York, NY 10004
for directions/subscriptions/info visit:
http://www.16beavergroup.org
TRAINS:
4,5 Bowling Green
R,W Whitehall
2,3 Wall Street
J,M Broad Street
1,9 South Ferry