A
Secrecy of the Left
Secrecy and its productive possibilities have been
obscured both by the fear that secrecy is always a gateway to micro-fascism and
a moral attachment to disclosure. Recognizing this could open up a new way of
understanding the political and moral alignments of concealment and disclosure.
Should the radical Left jump on the bandwagon of Liberal (and neoliberal)
transparency as a way to instigate change, or should it experiment with a
politics of the secret?
When referring to a secrecy of the Left, I am
thinking of different spaces, subjectivities and relations opened up by
critical theories of, and aesthetic experiments with secrecy. For instance, Jacques Derrida has a
‘taste for the secret’ (2001), but not the common, contextual secret that
hides somewhere waiting to be revealed. He is interested, rather, in the
unconditional secret: ‘an experience that does not make itself available to
information’ (1992: 201). Eschewing the hermeneutic drive and circumventing
attempts to anticipate revelation, the unconditional secret within a text
should be thought of as an encounter with the Other through which a
responsibility of reading is made possible (and impossible). The secret, here, is
fashioned in a productive capacity, in the service of ethics. In terms of
democracy, Derrida defends the secret qua
singularity, seeing it as an alternative to ‘the demand that everything be
paraded in the public square’ (2001: 59). ‘If a right to the secret is not
maintained,’ he writes, ‘we are in a totalitarian space’ (2001: 59). In light
of such a formulation, we should be concerned for those who do not want to
adhere to the dominant doctrines of democracy, including the doctrine of
transparency. The subject of democracy is not simply one who is asked to be
transparent to the state and act on transparency but also, in the guise of
Derrida’s non self-present subject, one that is constituted by a singularity
that prevents full capitulation to the demands of transparency.
For further inspiration, we can draw on the
politico-aesthetic imagination of two collectives that span both ends of the
twentieth century: Acéphale (1936-9) and Tiqqun (1999-2001). Georges
Bataille wanted to ‘use secrecy as a weapon rather
than a retreat’ (Lütticken, 2006: 32) and imagined how a secret society named Acéphale
(which translates as ‘Headless’) could regenerate or revolutionise society at
large by instigating the kind of unorthodox values he championed throughout his
oeuvre including expenditure, risk, and loss. In their ‘Cybernetic Hypothesis’,
the collective, Tiqqun, who were highly influenced by Bataille among others,
call for ‘interference’, haze’ or ‘fog’ as the ‘prime vector of revolt’
(2001/9). They see opacity as a means to challenge the political project of cybernetics and ‘the
tyranny of transparency which control imposes’ (2001/9).
We can also look to certain technological
practices that question the promise and probe the political economy of
openness. Take, for example, Freedom
Box and TOR, which both, in
different ways, try to facilitate secure networks and online anonymity; TrackMeNot, a browser extension that aims to
derail surveillance and data-profiling by flooding engines with random
search terms; the (now defunct) Web 2.0 Suicide
Machine that scrambled one’s online identity by erasing individual data and
friendship links on social media sites; or the decentralised hacktivist culture
that connects under the title Anonymous.
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