PUBLIC SECRECY AND IMMANENT SECURITY
2006; Routledge; Volume: 20; Issue: 4-5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09502380600708937
ISSN1466-4348
Autores Tópico(s)Intelligence, Security, War Strategy
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. This essay was originally presented orally at Version04: Invisible Networks. Portions of this essay appeared in ‘Regime of Truth Change’ and ‘Apocryphal Now’, in Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 4:2 and 4:3, 2004 (Sage Publications). 2. One need only think about the widespread use of unnamed sources here. The Leak of former Iraqi Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife's name to the public (she was a CIA agent) is a particularly dense example of the mystery surrounding secret perception. 3. The Act came about in 1998, but one wonders what public secret was being revealed in Rumsfeld's slip. 4. Essentially, the narratives were organized around 2 poles: (1) Chalabi was useful, but had outlived his use as a tool. This version included such subnarratives as Chalabi was double agent for Iran; that he continuously provided cooked information, favored by only Neocon Pentagon leadership; and that he was in danger of turning against the US, calling for real independence. (2) That Chalabi was/is still working for the US, but now under the ‘independence’ label. For many Iraqis, Chalabi is known as US's lackey, so he had to create a spectacle of separation in order to regain credibility. 5. Were they intended to circulate among the guards in Abu Ghraib, among soldiers elsewhere, or perhaps to be shown to the prisoners themselves? Is there an underground traffic ring in cruelty-images, complete with trading cards and scrapbooks? We could even think of the event as part of Homeland Security's soldier-citizen subject (discussed in a number of articles in this collection, and elaborated in this essay later). Instead of deploying militarized citizens with mobile digital technology to act as monitors, this case reverses the flow, turning soldiers into ‘tourists of duty’ sending snapshots of their travails (complete with exaggerated smiles and artificial poses) back home. 6. Timisoara refers to the event where, during the 1991 overthrow of Ceaucescu in Romania, secret services amassed bodies into piles to be photographed as ‘evidence’ of the bloodthirsty mass murdering impulses of the former regime. See Agamben (2000 Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Means without End: Notes on Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar], pp. 80–82) for the implications of this event for politics and media. 7. As I argue elsewhere (Bratich, forthcoming Bratich , Jack (forthcoming) ‘Spies Like Us’ , in Secrecy's Agencies , eds . Jeremy Packer and Ted Bailey , Peter Lang , New York . [Google Scholar]), the becoming-immanent of spies is a process pre-existing 9/11. The mid 1990s were marked by a political rationality that employed an official antiextremism (primarily directed at the Patriot movement and militia upsurge) that mobilized a skepticism towards the ‘domestic terrorist’. This subject was marked by its proclivity for irrational thought (primarily conspiracy theories) and dangerous action (weapons training). More significant was the fact that this extremist subject could be disguised as a normal citizen, as one's neighbor or co-worker. Good citizens, then, were encouraged to keep a watchful eye out for suspicious behavior and thought-patterns among their own (best narrativized by a film like Arlington Road). Now, ‘monitoring Hate’ has been absorbed by the Right, for example in the Ward Churchill case, where the articulation of national media outlets (like Fox News’ Bill O'Reilly) with reactionary campus student groups sought to remove the tenured professor for hate speech against America. 8. This trajectory can be partially reconstructed by examining the anthropological literature on secret societies and magical practices in primitive societies, even societies against the state (Clastres 1987 Clastres, Pierre. 1987. Societies Against the State, New York: Zone Books. [Google Scholar]). Another lineage could be constructed out of the underground history of occult orders/secret societies and revolutionary movements (the larger project from which this essay is drawn). 9. This article was forged in these practices. Two events in the Spring of 2004 instigated this article. First was Version 04: Invisible Networks, a two-week long convergence/conference/festival in Chicago that brought together artists, activists, technicians, and academics around the topic of invisibility. I presented an early version of this essay there. Second was a talk titled Art and Anarchism in New York City, which featured Ben Morea, founder of 1960s direct action groups Black Mask and Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker! Morea, who had himself gone underground in 1969, was making his first public appearance in almost 35 years. His resurfacing was brought on by his friends who thought the times were right again to be discussing a diversity of tactics, especially direct action and aesthetic intervention. 10. Eliminating surprise seems to be the new grand goal of State/counterinsurgency force (see for example the ‘Novel Intelligence Project’ from the ARPA). Homeland Insecurity, as the management of uncertainty, itself does not want to be shocked. 11. For a critical assessment of this secret tradition from an African Nationalist perspective, see http://www.stevecokely.com/. There is an interesting clash of secrecies here, as during this period the Black nationalist hero Marcus Garvey was also flirting with a secret society, namely the KKK. 12. For more on the immanentizing of Terror/War, see my ‘Cultural Studies, Immanent War, Everyday Life’ and ‘Drawing a Line in the Fog’ 13. Enclaves have an ambiguous history. In the War against Vietnam, enclaves were employed by the US as an anti-guerilla strategy. Counterinsurgent forces created fortified settlements impervious to external influence, whose goal was to eventually emit rays of persuasion and influence outwards (onto the guerillas). 14. In thinking through the distinction between physical and virtual secrecy, we can refer to the war strategies that the term ‘enclave’ is drawn from. What, for instance, is an enclave in network-centric warfare? Instead of the image of the fort or settlement, we can turn to the strategies of creating, maintaining, and securing networks for images of virtual enclaves. These virtual enclaves certainly depend at different moments on spatial sites for relay, translation, and condensation. However, the virtual emphasizes the capacity to forge links, to circulate information, skills, and people, and to increase the density, complexity, and scale of interconnections. 15. His analysis of ‘opportunism’ and ‘cynicism’ as potential antidotes to their own poison is exemplary (pp. 84–88). 16. One could locate the cultural practices of retro/nostalgia here, as well as the phenomenon of adult game playing in city streets and parks among flex workers (see Callahan 2004 Callahan , Maureen (2004) ‘Killer Instinct: Grown-up Twist on Tag is new “It” game’ , New York Post , 29 July , p. 45 . [Google Scholar]).
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