o er gro th of whispers
DDD30013 Publication Design Design Emily Mahady Typeset in Futura PT Dunbar Tall Naskle (used as image) Text Krasmann, S., 2019. Secrecy and the force of truth: countering posttruth regimes. Cultural Studies, 33(4), pp.690-710. Imagery Emily Mahady Swinburne University of Technology School of Design Published and Printed in Melbourne, Australia for the School of Design 2022 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from Swinburne University of Technology. Declaration of Originality and Copyright Unless specifically, correctly and accurately referenced indicated above, the publication and all other material in this publication is the original creation of the designer submitting this assignment as part of their coursework for DDD30013 Publication Design. While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy, the publisher does not under any circumstance accept any responsibility for error or omission. Copyright Agreement I agree for Swinburne University to use my project in this book for non-commercial purposes, including: promoting the activities of the university or students; internal educational or administrative purposes; entry into appropriate awards, competitions and other related non-commercial activities to show my work in lectures and as an example for future students online and face to face and in lectures. In some situations, this may involve re-purposing the work to meet the requirement of Swinburne’s use. I agree to grant to Swinburne exclusive worldwide, non-commercial, irrevocable and free of fee license to use this project produced in DDD30013 Publication Design in any way for non-commercial purposes. Signed Emily Mahady
1
o er gro th of whispers
2
3
4
introduction - the parasite
part one - the secret surfacing
part two - secretiveness in post-truth regimes
part three - the force
conclusion - countering post-truth
notes
acknowledgements
references
6
1
2
introduction: h parasite the i h are parasitic r i on secrecy cy They The secret, we might think, is about the arcane, the unknown, the content it conceals, and therefore difficult to access. But the secret is also talkative, as nothing is taken by itself a secret. It needs to be designated as such. Think of the treasure chest in my garden: it is not the fact that I have buried it there that constitutes the secret, but my determination that this fact is my secret. We must conceive of something as a secret so as to be aware that we need to conceal it.1 The secret in this sense is always already shared: I tell myself that this is my secret, or I tell somebody else that this is our secret. Yet the secret that makes its appearance in the public sphere does not reveal its secret, it does not tell us what but rather that we do not know (see Gilbert 2007, p. 26) — ‘the secret of the secret’ is that it makes one of itself (Derrida et al. 1994, p. 246, Taussig 1999, p. 58). It is not only about concealing, but also enjoys entering the public as a secret (see Birchall 2014, Kearns 2017, p. 17). It surfaces, so to speak, and thus exposes itself.2 From the outset, the secret is vulnerable, but, as we will see, its vulnerability is also what makes for its strength. However, post-truth regimes undermine
3
secrecy, precisely because they echo its logic. They are parasitic on secrecy, as they imitate and pervert its habit: they let claims constantly surface thus
leaving us to guess what exactly their true content is — or whether there is any content at all. Post-truth claims might be false and misleading, even bullshit, but they may also very well be true. They are disconcerting to the extent that the distinction between true and false, form and content dissolves. But they may also remind us of the value of truth — and that our understanding of truth deserves some readjustment. Without unravelling general theories of truth, analysis of the logic of secrecy, it will be argued, helps us to revisit the established confidence in our culture in the force of truth. Rather than truth, or secrecy, being something to be revealed, Michel Foucault’s conception of avowal suggests that to mobilize truth requires both truthfulness and a moment of creation. Outlining the logic of secrecy as one that consists in concealing and surfacing will allow us, in a second step, to capture how post-truth regimes echo and convert this logic,
thus not only dismantling the secret but also obfuscating and obstructing political debate. To talk of post-truth here is not to say that we actually live in an era post truth (Corner 2017).3 The term rather denotes a particular mode of thinking and acting of which the 45th President of the US has already become an epigone, which is why his utterances will serve in the following as an example to delineate some characteristics of contemporary post-truth thinking. Inspecting, thirdly, the affective force of truth, perhaps nowhere made more explicit than in the literature on secrecy, will lead us in a final step to the political implications of our considerations. Drawing on the critical literature on secrecy allows us to further elaborate in what sense the secret might be conceived of as a precondition of thinking ‘otherwise’ — while the truth will always only emerge on the surface. This approach might also be understood as a response to the unpalatable literature that attributes the current crisis of truth to poststructuralism, or even more diffusely, to postmodernity — thereby confounding ‘suspicion reason’, a critique of rationality and sensitivity for the force of text with pure relativism.4
wh r is any content at all. — or whether there a
4
The early twentieth century sociologist Simmel (1906) famously made the distinction between the secret as a form, as that which surfaces as being secret or being the secret, and its content. Independent of its content, this was Simmel’s point, the secret takes on a social life of its own. It arouses our curiosity, and it makes a difference. It establishes distinctions and constitutes power (Weber 1946, Canetti 1962): some know, and some do not; these people want to know, and those think they are in the loop. Secrecy is quintessentially relational. It requires but it also produces complicity: those who are in the know are obliged to keep silent, and those who observe the secret and believe in its existence, like the spy or the voyeur, co-constitute and reinforce it (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 287–288). Even those who betray the secret contribute to its existence: concealing it or declining to pass it on are as much practices of secrecy as are divulging or insinuating a secret. To share a secret then does not mean to diminish it, but rather to have a share in it: to take part, and take a part, and to enrich and enlarge the secret. This is what Simmel (1906, p. 462) designated as the ‘charm’ of the secret: ‘Secrecy secures, so to speak, the possibility of a second world alongside of the obvious world, and the latter is most strenuously affected by the former.’ Indeed, in an imagined world without secrets, there would be no confidentiality or sincerity, no confidence or curiosity. It would be a totalitarian world where everything would be laid open, and the respect for the singular and ‘the right to the secret’ would be suspended (Derrida 2001, p. 59).
5
6
How then to make use of these observations of the secret that surfaces, and perhaps necessarily surfaces as part of its being shared, for political analysis and thinking the political? Two implications might be highlighted so far. Political secrecy affects the public sphere,5 but it does so, for one thing, not merely in a restrictive sense. It may aim at foreclosing public knowledge, but it may well also excite and guide public attention. It may obstruct our view, but also make us see; it conceals, but through its concealing and its appealing to us it can also render something visible. This, for another thing, is not the same as the secret ‘revealing’ its content. Rather, it sets conditions of seeing and it establishes surfaces of the visible, without letting us know what might be ‘behind’. The secret might even be empty, without content. It is in this sense like a folding that produces an inside by presupposing an outside (see Deleuze 1988, p. 99). Or, to put it another way: surfacing is the flipside of secrecy’s move of concealing.
They address us, guide our attention and arouse our curiosity, precisely because they point us to that which we are intended not to know. The sign might be empty, a fake, an overstatement, and nonetheless be significant to us. The secret thus, perhaps better than anything else, epitomizes the poststructuralist theory of signification (Derrida 2001): unlike the common linguistic sign that claims to re-present an absence, that is, a real thing out there, the secret seems to be self-referential – it designates first and foremost itself. Yet it also entails a promise, which is why it attracts us. It is the promise that it does indeed have something precious to conceal. ‘Saying the secret’, to allude to Jacques Derrida’s theory of the event (Derrida 2007; see Boothroyd 2011, p. 51), in this sense is impossible; it must therefore be said again and again, as it always misses its object, that is, its content — unless we assume that the secret that surfaces is itself what makes for its content.
Now, the secret that surfaces may be characterized by four features:
Second: continuity. The secret that is insinuated or divulged confidentially does not disappear. On the contrary, this is continuing to treat something as a secret, in its form, and thus to assert and reinforce it. Or as Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 287) nicely put it: ‘the secret has a way of spreading that is in turn shrouded in secrecy.’ Even the secret that is betrayed or revealed does not necessarily evaporate. It may continue to exist through the outrage produced by information about an illegitimate governmental practice, but also through suspicion and anticipation, now seemingly reasonable, that there might be more we do not yet know but think we should get to know.
First: fugitiveness. The secret is fugitive and elusive. It is fugitive in a temporal sense, as it only exists, as Gilbert (2007, p. 26) observes, in the very ‘moment of its disclosure’, when we get to know it, but then it has already disappeared or when we get to know that there is a secret, which leaves us to speculate about its content. The secret appears like a specter. It is present, but at the same time ungraspable and elusive in its meaning (Derrida 2006); and it affects us. Think of the ‘Top Secret’ stamp on the cover of classified documents, or of the black marks indicating redaction of official documents.
The secret that survives through memory and imagination, appearance and disappearance, changes its form and its meaning (González-Fuster et al. 2015). It may lose intensity and fall into oblivion, but it may also be revived by the leaking of – supposedly – new information. The secret that is becoming (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) takes on ever different forms, and thus stays elusive. Third: simultaneity. Albeit elusive, the secret establishes its own chain of references in that it is simultaneously absent and present. Think of the drone programme of the Obama administration, which was publicly known and unknown at the same time (Walters 2015). The public knew of, and was even discretionally informed about, the practice of targeted killing of terror suspects, though not, of course, about covert operations or the number of bystander casualties. The administration claimed compliance with pertinent laws but declined to make public the criteria according to which this had been assessed and achieved. Secrecy included selective release and even targeted leaking of information on the part of members of the administration, so as to guide public attention and shape public opinion (Jaffer 2016), but the public discovered its own ways of finding out relevant details. As Kearns (2016, p. 280) contends, ‘there is no a priori reason why the public existence of secrecy should align with the state’s political rationale for that secrecy.’
7
Obstruction, for one thing, did not prevent the practice from becoming a public concern. On the contrary, it incited diverse social forces, like journalists, artists and scientists, to find their own sources of information, that is, of getting to know and of producing public knowledge or imaginaries.6 For another thing, the secret that entered the public sphere as a secret – about covert drone strikes – made it possible to decipher the residues of these operations and shaped the meaning of these traces. It rendered them significant precisely because of ‘their arbitrariness, in having not been secreted by the state (without implying intentionality therein).’ (Kearns 2017, p. 17) As signs that appeared on the surface of public visibility, the traces could be identified as indicators of evidence of a practice that otherwise remained in the dark. Secrecy that is shrouded in knowability produces an absence, the invisibility of drone strikes, and a presence – the imagined or anticipated practice of drone strikes. Secrecy shaped and even encouraged the appearance of the drone programme in the public sphere. Fourth: enactment. Unveiling a secret, as a form of enactment and performance, gets to the heart of its logic. It is a symbolic act that creates its own meaning. A pertinent example is the appearance of Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003, with the intention of mobilizing the audience and the wider public in support of a military intervention in Iraq. Without any positive evidence of some activity indicating nuclear or chemical armament, the difficult task that needed to be managed was to prove ‘the absence of efforts of Iraq to disarm’ (Zarefsky 2007, p. 281),
and thus to conclude that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction that would warrant a concerted intervention. It was Powell’s general credibility as a cautious politician and the rhetoric of his speech, the authority of the Security Council as an unrivaled political venue, and, notably, the spectacular presentation of satellite images, allegedly showing decontamination vehicles or chemical munition bunkers, that contributed to convincing the public. For a long time, it was not quite clear whether Powell himself was aware that he was presenting false information or whether he was just misled by faulty intelligence. Either way, the enactment itself, playing out on the surface of the visible, produced a secret — in plain public sight: the secret could hide itself in the spotlight of the seemingly obvious. Or as Zarefsky (2007, p. 298) concludes: ‘Audiences do not probe evidence very deeply. The appearance of evidence often counts as evidence.’ As we will see, these four features of secrecy — its fugitiveness, continuity, simultaneity, and enactment — re-appear in amodulated form in a contemporary post-truth regime. While borrowing from Foucault (2000a), the present notion does not bear upon the idea of a consistent truth regime that coincides with a particular society or epoch like modernity.7 As Weir (2008) points out, truth regimes are characterized by multiple and irreducible principles and techniques of establishing truth that co-exist and may even compete with each other, comprising such different fields as scientific knowledge, religion, or governmental apparatuses.
Truth regimes determine what counts as a true and false statement, and how this is sanctioned; they accept particular modes of how things come to be presented and represented, and they encourage and constrain the subject to perform truthfully in accordance with particular rules (see Brion and Harcourt 2014, p. 297). From what we can extract from Donald Trump’s comportment and his entourage, this regime can be identified, indeed, as unraveling basic norms and beliefs of a liberal democratic political tradition. Speaking, nonetheless, of contemporary post-truth regimes, in the plural, suggests that the logic of disturbing and disrupting established democratic principles today may take on different shapes, depending on the particularities of political cultures across the West (from the historical topics they are sensitive to up to the established rules of public dispute and participation). For a first approach, a focus on temporality will help us decipher what exactly it is that triggers that modulation. According to Luhmann (1989, p. 106), any form of time management in communication, like precaution, hesitation, holding out on somebody, is a form of secrecy that gives leeway for negotiation: to be able to keep silent is to dispose of time. There is no need to keep the future secret, Luhmann (1989, p. 125) contends: the future is secret; it is, by definition, unknown.
8
n secretiveness in h t post-truth reg imes
9
Notification of an act of disclosure is also a mode of playing with time — and secrecy. It is to create a tension in anticipation of that particular moment in the future. During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump successfully acted this tactic out. He declared, for example, that he was in possession of important news about his opponent’s former information management — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private phone and e-mail server had raised concerns about whether she had endangered government secrets by disregarding the obligatory safety precautions. Trump’s announcements about hot information on that issue always got him the full attention of the media, who instantly assembled where he was supposed to make his public appearance — only to learn that there was no news at all. In modulation of our fourth feature of secrecy, we might say it was enactment that was purely self-referential.
trump not only made a secret where there was
n . none.
10
f
a post-truth demeanor is parasitic on secrecy,
11
Trump not only made a secret where there was none. A peculiarity of his speeches or sheer innumerable comments on Twitter, right from the outset of his presidency, was that he was obviously making false or misleading claims — from the number of people who had attended his inauguration compared to Obama’s, to the ‘mess’ his predecessor had left in his office, to the unaffordability of Obama’s health care, to intolerably rising immigration and crime rates.8 As a constant source of public incredulity, these claims were perceived as irritating if not disconcerting, as they gave the public an idea of the president’s unreliability; depending on the point of view, they did not fail, however, to also diffuse an ambience of exhilaration, if not admiration, as they conspicuously displayed a new political game of un-truthfulness.9 What was striking about this was the velocity of the sequence of declarations, provocations and infamies. There was literally no time to verify or rectify each claim, or those who tried to often found themselves in the position of only following suit. If a post-truth demeanor is parasitic on secrecy, it makes secrecy shrink into secretiveness:10 it is to purport to conceal a secret. The secret, to get back to our first feature, is no longer elusive and fugitive, but morphs into mere noise, thus obfuscating and obstructing political discourse (Eco 2012).11 Furthermore, if there is any continuity in post-truth regimes, it is one of uncertainty, as one can never be sure whether Trump’s claims are to be taken seriously or not. Let us take the example of the President’s stance towards NATO. During his entire candidacy and the early days of his presidency, Trump had disparaged NATO as a relic of past times that was ‘obsolete’ in its focus on long-gone adversaries instead of new-era threats, and as a financial burden for the United States
k it makes secrecy shrink into t secretiveness n paying a ‘disproportionate share’.12 At a town hall meeting in Wisconsin in 2016, he even went so far as to say: ‘Maybe Nato will dissolve and that’s OK, not the worst thing in the world.’13 Considerable attention was therefore paid to Trump’s turnaround when, nearly a year later, he conceded at a joint press conference with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in Europe: ‘I said [NATO] was obsolete. It’s no longer obsolete.’14 The alliance eventually had moved towards engaging in the combat of terrorism, the president now conceded — just to ventilate the expectation that NATO would play a greater role in supporting the fight against ISIS in Iraq in the future. The secret here is not to do with any governmental action, strategy or programme, but with the president’s stance itself. There is no secret becoming, but an ongoing irritation and disconcertedness about Trump’s reliability that is at best mysterious, and perhaps at worst arbitrary or just bizarre.15 Trump’s apparently not being committed to the reality of objectifiable facts cannot just be dismissed as bullshit. Whereas bullshit lacks any ‘concern with truth’ and is indifferent as to ‘how things really are’ (Frankfurt 2005, p. 34), the puzzle with Trump is that we cannot be sure whether he actually is uttering nonsense or intentionally lying, or even might be telling the truth. Unlike the bullshitter, the liar must know the truth. He must be able to tell and uphold his story in awareness of the truth he conceals.
12
Even conspiracy theorists, although simulating Trump’s post-truth demeanor when incessantly making crude claims as well, are committed to the truth, even though the truth they seek to reveal is the truth they already know. It is the truth about the intrigues of the powerful, which must be actualized through ever new revelations so as to refresh and confirm that conviction. Post-truth regimes, by contrast, embrace confusion. Although Trump might not care about his claim’s ‘connection with reality’ (Parmar 2012, p. 4), he constantly brings the reality of facts into play. The notion of ‘alternative facts’ senior advisor Kellyanne Conway infamously coined (in a discussion about White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who had made easily disproved claims about the size of the president’s inauguration crowd) is telling here.16 While calling objectifiable facts and attendant rules of verifying them pointblank into question, Conway purported to join in a serious debate with another aspect or a different point of view. As she later on commented on her own choice of words, echoing the discourse of truth: alternative facts are only ‘additional facts and alternative information’.17 Simultaneity, to allude to the third feature of secrecy, thus receives an entirely different meaning. If the secret is able to establish chains of reference through the modalities of form and content,
enclosure and disclosure, presence and absence, playing out on the surface of what is publicly noticeable, the posttruth demeanor presents us with the conundrum of the Moebius ribbon: there is no content but only the surface of allegations and claims, from whatever angle we look. This is neither the familiar pragmatic dealing with the truth in the pursuit of political interests, as so vividly described by Arendt (1967), nor is it the game of systematically misleading information, as in an ideology that builds up its own truth regime (Duncker 2006). It is, instead, one of possibly misleading information, and this is all the more perturbing as we cannot even discern a strategy behind it. Unpredictability thus becomes a political strategy. And there is a further feature of post-truth regimes that became strangely evident when Conway defended Trump’s so often rude way of degrading other people: ‘Why don’t you believe him? Why is everything taken at face value?’ she responded to a CNN journalist. ‘You always want to go by what’s come out of his mouth rather than look at what’s in his heart.’ Obviously, Conway was trying to absolve Trump of any responsibility for his preposterous tirades by alluding to his true — inner — self. Or, as The Atlantic writer Salena Zito put it pithily: ‘When [Trump] makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.’18 While purporting to dissociate itself from the surface of mere arguments or words, these comments play out a different game of secrecy, one that appeals to our feelings coming from the gut. This, again, is also a form of secretiveness, as there is no consistent attitude in the president’s behaviour, no true inner self, to be discerned. How then to make sense of the logic of secrecy and its relationship with truth?
13
14
15
h force the It goes without saying that political theory, in a fundamental assumption, insists on the commitment to facts as being essential to liberal democracies. Facts constitute the reality we are to agree upon, also and notably as a matter of dispute: the better argument is the one based on objectifiable facts and, something that should not be forgotten, on rational arguments or deliberation instead of merely ventilating opinions. This is why post-truth is considered to be so disconcerting and a threat to democracy,19 as the OED’s juxtaposition reveals when prominently defining post-truth as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’20 To be sure, political theory has also struggled with the juxtaposition of facts and opinion. In her essay on ‘Truth and Politics’, Arendt (1967) famously attributed a ‘despotic character’ to truth that would counter the richness of political debate and the possibility of dissent. However, assuming that nobody has a privileged access to truth, Arendt (1968, p. 86; see Strong 2012, p. 342) also conceded that truth is what binds people together and will ‘reveal itself’ through communication. Whereas political theory tends to rather normatively presuppose a will to truth, even if accepting ‘the virtues of mendacity’ (Jay 2010), it is in the literature on secrecy where the idea of an intrinsic force comes into view, as if to revitalize the venerable belief in our culture that ‘at the length truth will out.’21
16
Indeed, as Fenster (2014, p. 360) observes in a systematic analysis of governmental information control: secrecy is implausible, precisely because in liberal societies it ‘is paradoxically a very public issue’. ‘The more secrets, and the deeper they are kept’, the higher are the political costs of keeping them.22 But if we do not want to merely reduce secrecy’s force to a culture of transparency, why exactly is it, as Gibson (2014, p. 285) puts it, that ‘secret-holders suffer a keen temptation to share what they know’? 23 At stake, obviously, is more than the mere desire to talk to other people, to share information and to get together. One impellent for the force of truth, Gibson (2014, p. 285) assumes, is that ‘the truth has survival value’; deception is therefore at a disadvantage.
And indeed, without any Darwinian undercurrent, we may accept our general ability ‘to see through deceptions’ and to correctly identify threats and opportunities as being useful, if not indispensable in life. Otherwise, ‘reality’ strikes back: to let ourselves be deceived by others might in the long run turn out to be as dangerous as ignoring the cars when crossing a street. Yet, reasonable confidence in the force of truth does not explain the affective moment of ‘suffering a keen temptation to share’ what we keep away from others. Getting back to Simmel here provides us with two clues. One is that hiding a secret affects, even if unwittingly, ‘the whole relationship’ between the parties involved (Simmel 1906, p. 462): ‘Secrecy sets barriers between men, but at the same time offers the seductive temptation to break through the barriers by gossip or confession’ (1906, p. 466). If truthfulness, towards oneself as well as towards others, is the appropriate way to tear down these barriers, it is apparently also this move that establishes and intensifies a relationship. And there is a further affective moment Simmel (1906, p. 465) portrays as emerging as an effect of the game of appearance and disappearance, or enclosure and disclosure: ‘Secrecy involves a tension which, at the moment of revelation, finds its release. […] — just as the moment of the disappearance of an object brings out the feeling of its value in the most intense degree’.
i confession n s i or gossip... Affective forces are genuinely relational, they affect and are affected by other forces, and what they bring into being is what happens in-between – the confession or gossip that establishes a closer relationship between people, or the game of appearance and disappearance that, independent of its content, brings the value of an object into being.
17
If their preferable mode of operation is through tension and intensities (see Deleuze 1988, p. 71), affects are nonetheless tied to language and meaning (Knudson and Stage 2015). Hence, while the famous sociologist is mocking about ‘the logically fallacious, but typical, error, that everything secret is something essential and significant’ (Simmel 1906, p. 465), we might still wonder whether secrecy’s affective force ultimately only holds as long as there is substantial ground to believe in its actually carrying a particular truth — or, to put it another way, as long as we can expect that it conceals something worth sharing. How else could we accept how powerful the ‘secret as secretion’ can be, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 287) contend: ‘The secret must sneak, insert, or introduce itself into the arena of public forms; it must pressure them and prod known subjects into action.’
i binding oneselfl to the tr u th Focusing on the subject of ‘truth-telling’, Foucault (2014), especially in his later lectures, develops a sophisticated approach that binds the historically established value of truth together with a theory of its emergence. In his entire work on regimes of thought, or epistemes, Foucault never questioned the idea of truth as such, but was interested in how the different ‘games of truth’, and attendant modes of distinguishing truth from falsehood, ‘could appear in history and under what conditions’, and how particular modes of ‘veridiction’, or speaking the truth, are established (2014, p. 20).24
Truth, he argued in his studies on Christian practices of confession, on the subject in juridical systems, or the history of sexuality and the hermeneutics of the self, in our hemisphere is ‘effectuated through the subject’ (see Vogelmann 2014, p. 1073), and truth is what constitutes the modern subject.25 A critical moment of this constitution is the subject’s avowal of a particular truth, that is, through binding oneself to the truth one ‘verbalizes’ (Lorenzini and Tazzioli 2018, p. 74). As Foucault (2014, p. 16) points out: ‘It implies that he who speaks promises to be what he affirms himself to be, precisely because he is just that.’26 Avowal is not merely a statement that says the evident (like ‘I am like this’); nor is it just a promise (‘I will be truthful’) – whether sincere or not, the promise does not follow the logic of true or false (Foucault 2014, p. 16). An avowal is neither arbitrary nor voluntary. It entails truthfulness as well as a moment of creation. Although requiring a capacity and a willingness to empirically ‘recognize the truth’ (Foucault 2005, p. 17)27 — about oneself, about what one feels, what one did or experienced — sincerity and accuracy are not enough.28
18
Commitment, even passion, need to be involved. Avowal is a particular mode of affectation, of relating to oneself and to others, and it comes with ‘a certain cost of enunciation’ (Foucault 2014, p. 15). It means exposure, not only due to the risk of being rejected, or ignored, but also due to its capacity to modify relationships. Avowal is formation and self-formation: it modifies one’s relationship to others but first and foremost to oneself. It ‘ties the subject to what he affirms’ (2014, p. 17) in the double sense of affirming what one is (now), or has been and has done (in the past), and what or who one is supposed to be (in the future). There is, strictly speaking, no subject previous to the truth one ‘avows’. Yet, the avowal may also transform, in the very moment of enunciation, what has just been affirmed to be the case. Once I recognize the truth about myself, it changes the relationship to myself — and it changes that particular truth.29 If we want to assess the value of truth in our culture, how the truth asserted itself as an indispensable ground of our being and self-understanding, and in this sense as an appealing ‘force’ (Vogelmann 2014, p. 1073), we have to approach it historically. As Vogelmann (2014, pp. 1066–1067) has expounded recently, for Foucault this involved being careful not to relativize truth (in a succession of historical understandings of what counts as truth for particular people) and upholding the matter as a question of contestation. Foucault (2002) therefore distinguished between knowledge (savoir),
deeply l ing rained in our d conception of the world as the condition of possibility of true-apt statements, and cognition (connaissance), as that which counts as a true statement in a particular period. This move allows for historicizing truth as that which is accessible only within a particular regime of thought without rendering it just contingent. As something that is deeply ingrained in our (occidental) conception of the world, and political thinking, truth thus appears as a powerful ‘fiction’ that, not unlike crime, madness, sexuality, and society (Vogelmann 2014, p. 1075), is able to produce ‘effects in the real’ (Foucault 1991, p. 81). Yet, obviously, there is something more special to the truth that, as an affective force, ties the subject to itself in a double sense (see Foucault 2000b, p. 331): to the desire for the truth as that which is to be found and imagined, and to the affirmation towards a particular truth that in the moment of telling will also be invented. Foucault’s (2014, p. 20) main interest was in a ‘political history of veridictions’ in institutional contexts like the juridical or medical regimes where the subject is obliged to tell the truth about him — or herself and thus bound, and in a way restricted, to that truth. In short, the focus is on the power-effects of truthtelling as a technology of the subject. Yet, in the present context, we may use this figure of avowal as an analytical tool that allows us to capture the co-constitutive moment of establishing the truth: what is, or will count as being, true has to be brought into being. This perspective will also enable us to further unpack the relationship between secrecy and post-truth regimes and to figure out why the secret, or a particular understanding of it, is indispensable for thinking the political.
19
20
conclusion: countering
21
Deleuze (1994) rightly observes that philosophy (and, we could add, political theory) has for far too long conceived of the world as though it were in principle meaningful, identifiable and ultimately logically ordered (see Colebrook 2002, p. 5). These accounts never reckoned with systematic stupidity or malevolence (Deleuze 1994, p. 149), or with a casual attitude towards the truth and ignorance of its preciousness, as that which systematically undermines a will to truth, and not least democracy. Deleuze took those observations as an incentive to understand how ‘thought is not something fully owned or decided’ (Colebrook 2002, p. 5) but, by producing certain entities, ‘brings the ground to the surface without being able to give it form’ (Deleuze 1994, p. 152). Similarly, we might receive the emergence of post-truth regimes as what reminds us of a crucial feature of the production of truth that has been disregarded or neglected in the past. This is the moment of co-constitution through affective forces, which might inspire analyses in four respects: First of all, a focus on affective forces gives us a different idea of what constitutes the public sphere. As Adut has pointed out recently, to assign the public sphere to the officially designated spaces where the public assembles is to miss the relevance of a wider audience that includes, for example, the media. The public sphere must be accessible, though not necessarily physically. It is first and foremost a sensory space. Spectatorship is constitutive, and more often than not it is ‘willing spectators’ that are involved: ‘Events are public only to the extent that they are watched by an audience’ (Adut 2012, p. 241).
we are not able to n distinguish is between e true and false Such a perspective challenges the common opposition of the rational to the emotional, which fails to recognize that public opinion and truth also rely on sensual experience. It is to listen and to watch, it is to read and decipher signs, but also to sense and to grasp. Second, post-truth regimes are disconcerting, not so much because we are not, in principle, able to distinguish between true and false, or between fake news and reliable sources, but because we allow ourselves to be susceptible to it. If we followed Trump when he suddenly commended NATO, this was surely not because we initially trusted him or gave him credit. It is due to our will to the truth that again and again we accept subjecting his statements to sympathetic consideration; and that we detect a dis-alignment between saying and doing, which indeed we take seriously, to the extent that it shakes the security of our expectations. Trump’s turnaround in foreign policy entails a commitment for the administration and we expect, or hope, that the president will be bound by his statements. Yet this is what posttruth regimes completely lack: there is no avowal to political positions, but only enactment and performance of power.
22
Third, if the site of empirical investigation of the cultural value of truth is the concrete practices that invest in truth and articulate themselves in the name of truth (see Vogelmann 2014, p. 1076), this would also mean looking at the moments where commitment to truth is explicitly or implicitly dismissed, and looking at what happens to subjects who apparently no longer see themselves as bound to the truth. What Trump’s behaviour tells us, whether it be the endless sequence of false and misleading claims that amount to mere noise or the ostensibly break with the politically correct, is that it is the gesture, rather than the content, that counts. Just to make noise, instead of serious political claims, is usually attributed to the non-privileged, to those whose words do not count and who cannot be heard or understood as they do not speak the appropriate language. They are not allowed to participate in the legitimate discourse because they are supposed to be unable to do so (Rancière 1998). With Trump, this relationship is reversed. If we have to take him seriously, and indeed do so, this is not merely due to his position as president of the US, but because he puts himself in the position of supremacy and demonstrates that he has the power to do so.30 Allusions to American values that are said to have been long neglected (‘America First’, ‘Make America Great Again’) thereby serves as a vehicle. What is important is not so much their symbolic meaning (to get back to the old days) but rather the affective force they unleash: the enactment of superiority and the license to act superiority out, naturally at the cost of those who are thus put in the inferior position. If Trump’s politics are about creating identity,
this, again, happens through identification in an affective sense: it forges allegiances through gestures of supremacy. Ignorance of objectifiable facts or any commitment to truth thereby only speaks of the arrogance of a sovereign power that is ‘circular’ or self-referential: it presumes that there is no need to explain itself, as its commitment is the ‘exercise of sovereignty’ itself (Foucault 2007, p. 98). It thereby produces its own truth: of assenting voters and abiding members of the party who want to have a share in the feeling of strength and power. Post-truth politics is not totalitarian in the old-fashioned sense, as there is no tyranny of a will to know and nothing to be known, nor is it ideological as there is no coherent narration. It is despotic in that it erases the political. It undermines the political stage of articulating dissent (Rancière 1998) to the extent that there is only the stage left. Fourth, if avowal is what literally brings a particular truth into being, this means that truth is nothing we can keep or possess, but rather what we experience in a particular moment and under certain conditions of saying and recognizing, and in this sense of enacting the truth. In his critique of 702 S. KRASMANN representation, Deleuze (1994) extrapolates that beings are not just there, ‘passively outside our acts of thought’ (Colebrook 2002, p. xliv), lying in wait to be discovered and deciphered. Rather, they come into existence through connection, or affectation, as a form of power or force. Words, or concepts, therefore do not merely add on things or beings, but join in and contribute to this process of becoming.
In Foucault’s terms, they produce their own truth effects when, for example, ‘I can consider myself to be human or an individual only because there are concepts such as “woman”’ (Colebrook 2002, p. xiv).31 Focusing on the co-constitution of words and things through particular forces guides our attention towards the surface where truth and secrecy make their appearance. ‘I have a taste for the secret’, Derrida (2001) once famously contended, in appreciation of the singular that cannot be captured by language and that withdraws from a captivating will to know. The ‘absolute secret’ is not the unknown that remains to be discovered, but the unpalatable, ‘non-sharable’ (2001, p. 57). It designates ‘the structural limits upon the knowability of the present’: an event, an experience, a personal feeling will never be fully re-presented, there is always ‘a singular excess.’ If there will in this sense ‘always be something secret’ (Birchall 2011, p. 146), what then is the implication for political thinking? The invitation ‘to stay with the secret as secret’ (Birchall 2014) pushes this matter further. It encourages us to move away from the common idea that the secret is what can just be lifted so that truth reveals itself, and from a hermeneutics of suspicion that will always fail to grasp the secret of the secret.32 Focusing on the ‘aesthetics’ of the secret, instead, is to inquire, and challenge, how secrecy shapes the social ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière 2006).
23
24
25
If this, on the one hand, would mean asking how secrecy divides the world into what we see and, supposedly, cannot see — and how, consequently, we think about and act upon the world, this nonetheless means to approach the secret, in Simmel’s sense, from ‘the obvious world’ that secrecy somehow ‘strenuously’ affects. It is to follow the secret in its public appearance, where it surfaces, and to study the affective forces ensuing: how secrecy guides public attention, gives rise to curiosity and incites political intervention (Walters 2015); but also how it is met by public ignorance which goes as far as complicity in what is tolerated ‘as a necessary exceptionalism, so long as the public is not told the dirty details’ (Kearns 2016, p. 281). To stay with the secret as it surfaces could, on the other hand, mean to aesthetically invent counter-narratives and counter-imaginaries that are able to ‘redistribute’ official accounts and to dis-position political discourse so as to see things differently — as political activists, artists and journalists have done for years as a reaction to governmental practices they do not agree with. This is perhaps to literally take the secret at face value: the secret never suggested that we should be curious about its content, but rather that we appreciate how precious it is when making its appearance and telling us about itself. However, to the extent that they dissolve the distinction between true and false, post-truth regimes, unfortunately, also leave us with a move towards staying with the secret. There is no secret but only secretiveness while political debate is being wiped out, as is the quest for truth overwhelmed by noise. It is in this situation that a Foucauldian perspective might be instructive. Conceiving of truth as a matter of avowal, and hence of affectation, is indeed to presume the existence of the secret, or ‘mystère’ (Rancière 1998, p. 36),
secrecy divides the d into what we see world and, sup po sedly, cannot see e though not as the one and only hidden truth that is to be discovered. Transgressing the hermeneutic dichotomy of surface and depth, the secret, rather, should be conceived of as the yet un-thought that, virtually, is already there, to be actualized and created.33 This allows us to cherish the political while countering post-truth regimes. In Foucault’s terms, this would mean continuing to be bound to our present, and to particular truths that always measure up to our knowledge, but to nonetheless be able to transgress these regimes: ‘One “fictionalizes” history starting froma political reality that makes it true, one “fictionalizes”a political outlook that does not yet exist starting from an historical truth’ (Foucault 1996, p. 213). As the virtual, the secret is the prerequisite to ‘imagine’ the real ‘otherwise’ (Foucault 1997, p. 311). To believe in its existence is to affirm its existence, and it is to believe that there is a truth thatmight cometo light. Itmight. To counter post-truth regimes, truth needs to be enforced; and the truth assumes its force by situating itself within a particular regime of truth. This might also involve readjusting our belief in the truth as something to be taken for granted. Truth is always only accessible on the surface, where it becomes palpable and takes on a particular form.
26
27
28
notes n 1. The ‘consciously willed concealment’ (Simmel 1906, p. 449) is what distinguishes secrecy from privacy, which allows us just to keep something to ourselves. 2. We may, of course, think of ‘deep secrets’ (Pozen 2010) where the public is not even aware of not knowing and that will, at least for a very long time, remain unknown. Yet, as Taussig (1999, p. 58) in his groundbreaking work on secrecy observes: ‘“true secrecy” is a virtual impossibility outside of the considerable powers of fantasy’. We may rather historically distinguish between two notions and practices: The ‘early modern doctrines of “arcana imperii”’ (Horn 2011, p. 104) remind us of the idea that state secrets were not only considered a legitimate element of government but also, in principle, as something that can successfully be ‘caged’ or ‘contained’ and thus kept unnoticed from the public. Today’s prevalent notion of the ‘secret as secretion’, or secretum, refers to that which is segregated, set apart, but also concedes that it may ‘ooze’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 287; see Seigworth and Tiessen 2012). 3. Or, as others contend, it designates the widespread sense that we ‘have entered an age of post-truth politics’ (Davies 2016) – which is still to be subjected to empirical investigation. 4. See, prominently, Andersen (2017); for a riposte: DerDerian (2017). 5. The more common notion of state secrecy falls short of what is also at issue here: the question of the political and the public sphere is affected by state secrecy as well as, for example, by illegal secretive practices of companies. 6. See, for example, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Available from: http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/ category/projects/drones/; James Bridle’s ‘Drone Shadow 006’. Available from: http:// jamesbridle.com/works/droneshadow-006; or the initiative of Forensic Architecture based
at Goldsmtihs, University of London. Available from: http://www.forensic-architecture.org/ case/drone-strikes/ [Accessed 15 December 2017]. 7. As Foucault (2000a, p. 131) contends: Each society has its regime of truth, and its “general politics of truth” – that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with say what counts as true. […] Truth is centered on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions that produce it. 8. According to the Washington Post’s ‘Fact Checker’, among Trump’s most repeated claims is the one that ‘Obamacare is a disaster’; and in February 2017 the president declared: ‘To be honest, I inherited a mess. It’s a mess. At home and abroad, a mess.’ Available from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/ politics/trump-claims-database/ [Accessed 9 October 2017]. 9. Or as Frum (2016) contends, ‘Donald Trump’s dishonesty, however, is qualitatively different than anything before seen from a major-party nominee. The stack of lies teeters so tall that one obscures another’. 10. On the figure of the parasite as the one who disrupts the host system that it feeds by deploying its own complexity, see Serres (1982). Noise is crucial here: it interrupts a process and introduces a new order. 11. I owe this observation of the velocity of false and misleading claims amounting to mere noise to Carolin Emcke: ‘Lärm’, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, 17 February 2017. 12. Cited in Gore (2016). 13. Cited in Dejevsky (2016). 14. Cited in Baker (2017).
29
15. ‘Mysterious’ in this context cannot but be of exclusively secular meaning. ‘The religious mystery, by contrast, is thought to be principally impenetrable, inaccessible and unsayable, but subject to “revelation”’ (Assmann and Assmann 1997, p. 10). 16. Cited by Blake (2017b). 17. Cited by Nuzzi (2017). 18. Zito (2016). cited by: Blake (2017a). 19. As Beem (2017) contends: ‘The destruction of our ability to tell truth from lies, and thereby to take our bearings in the real world, and the disparagement and denigration of our common commitment to tell the truth, makes democracy far more difficult. Its complete destruction makes democracy impossible. With the ascendency of Donald Trump, that distinction has become operative.’ 20. See http://www.oed.com/view/Entr y/58609044?redirectedFrom=post-truth#eid [Accessed 27 October 2017]. 21. Among the many historical political claims made in the name of the truth prevailing, Shakespeare’s Launcelot in The Merchant of Venice (1596) saying ‘Truth will come to light, murder will not be hid long; a man’s son may, but at the length truth will out’, figures as one of the most famous quotes. 22. Examining formal as well as informal techniques and procedures of bureaucratic information control, Fenster (2014) concludes that it is the very same mechanisms that ‘keep open government laws from creating a transparent state’ that prevent the executive branch from perfect information control. 23. Against this background, the institutional organization of secrecy constitutes an insightful subject of sociological research. If truth will not out, this seems to be first and foremost a question of social conformity that prevents people from realizing what they see but are not deemed to see and from telling what they are
not to tell (Gibson 2014). 24. As Zachary Simpson (2012, pp. 101–102) points out, even Foucault’s later move towards the Greek-Hellenistic concept of parrhesia – emphatically designating the will to speak the truth and ‘to enact truth’ in the face of power – does not mean that this happens outside of any discourse. On the contrary, it addresses and can only operate ‘within discourse’ (Foucault 2005). 25. See, for example, Foucault (1978). 26. As Brion and Harcourt (2014, pp. 302–303) note, both avowal and parrhesia share the moment of commitment; yet, while avowal is ‘a ritual of discourse’ where the subject who speaks is supposed to be the subject that is addressed – from this moment onwards – parrhesia is to speak out the truth, the opinion or belief one already has. 27. ‘I think the modern age of the history of truth begins when knowledge itself and knowledge alone gives access to the truth. That is to say, it is when the philosopher (or the scientist, or simply someone who seeks the truth) can recognize the truth and have access to it in himself and solely through his activity of knowing, without anything else being demanded of him and without him having to change or alter his being as subject.’ (Foucault 2005, p. 17) 28. Williams (2010, p. 11) defines truthfulness as what ‘implies a respect for the truth’ and relies on the two aspects of sincerity and accuracy. 29. One of the prevalent historical topoi of truth-telling, Foucault (2014, pp. 13–14) observes, is that it ‘purifies’, and ‘that to speak the truth about something annuls, erases, or wards off this very truth (my soul is cleansed or whitened if it avows its darkness)’. 30. That Trump during the campaign dared to say things that were otherwise unacceptable, and put himself at the centre of his messages
(see Fish 2016, pp. 42–43), actually made for his success in becoming the 45th president of the United States. 31. Throughout his work Foucault insisted that things, or beings, do not precede power, nor do they exist merely in relation to power but come into existence through power, ‘or the forces of life’ (Colebrook 2002, p. xiv). And whereas Foucault, roughly speaking, was interested in power/knowledge effects and related modes of resistance, Deleuze (1997) was more focused on the forces of desire that produce and subvert power. 32. As Josselson (2004, p. 3) points out, the binary spatial differentiation between ‘surface and depth’ is not what distinguishes the two strands of critical hermeneutics: the ‘hermeneutics of restoration’, where ‘symbols are understood as manifestations of the depth’, and the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ where the symbol is seen ‘as a dissimulation of the real’ that has to be demystified. 33. The virtual, in Deleuze’s (1994) sense, is not opposed to the real but is rather to be understood as an unfulfilled potentiality, and multiplicity, to be actualized (Colebrook 2002, p. xxx, xlii, 1). For a recent debate on an understanding of ‘the social as in process or becoming’ that transgresses the binary thinking of surface and depth and the division between epistemology and ontology, see Coleman and OakleyBrown (2017, p. 8). 33. The virtual, in Deleuze’s (1994) sense, is not opposed to the real but is rather to be understood as an unfulfilled potentiality, and multiplicity, to be actualized (Colebrook 2002, p. xxx, xlii, 1). For a recent debate on an understanding of ‘the social as in process or becoming’ that transgresses the binary thinking of surface and depth and the division between epistemology and ontology, see Coleman and Oakley-Brown (2017, p. 8)
30
acknowle dgements
Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the Center for the Study of Law and Society, UC Berkeley, for generously hosting me in fall 2017. Special thanks are to Jonathan Simon, Tony Platt, Smadar Ben-Natan and Christine Hentschel. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes on contributor Susanne Krasmann is Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Criminological Research, University of Hamburg. Her main research areas are on Law and Its Knowledge; Sociology of Security; Epistemologies of Control; Vulnerability & Political Theory. She is co-editor of Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges (Routledge, 2010) and has published in international journals such as Foucault Studies, Leiden Journal of International Law, Punishment & Society, Surveillance & Society, Theoretical Criminology.
31
32
references
33
Adut, A., 2012. A theory of the public sphere. Sociological theory, 30 (4), 238–262. Andersen, K., 2017. How America lost its mind. The nation’s current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression ofmind-sets that havemade America exceptional throughout its history. The Atlantic, September issue. Available from: https://www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/archive/2017/09/how-americalost-its-mind/534231/ [Accessed 16 October 2017]. Arendt, H., 1967. Truth and Politics. The New Yorker, February 25. Available from: https://idanlandau.files.wordpress. com/2014/12/arendt-truth-and-politics.pdf [Accessed 16 October 2017]. Arendt, H., 1968. Karl Jaspers: citizen of the world? In: Men in dark times. New York: Harvest, 81–94. Assmann, A. and Assmann, J., 1997. Grundbegriffe. In: Schleier und Schwelle, Bd.1, Geheimnis und Öffentlichkeit (Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation). München: Fink, 7–16. Baker, P., 2017. Trump’s Previous View of NATO Is Now Obsolete. New York Times. 13 April. Available from: https://www. nytimes.com/2017/04/13/world/europe/ natotrump.html?_r=0 [Accessed 13 August 2017]. Beem, C., 2017. The burden of truth. Hannah Arendt, democracy, & Donald Trump’s lies. The Critique, January/February. Available from: http://www.thecritique.com/articles/ the-burden-of-truth/ [Accessed 16 October 2017]. Blake, A., 2017a. Kellyanne Conway’s laughable ‘look at what’s in his heart’ defense of Donald Trump. Washington Post, 9 January. Available from: https://www.washingtonpost. com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/09/ kellyanne-conways-laughablelook-atwhats-in-his-heart-defense-of-trump/?utm_ term=.97b1b498fd12 [Accessed 18 October 2017].
Blake, A., 2017b. Kellyanne Conway says Donald Trump’s team has ‘alternative facts.’ Which pretty much says it all. The Washington Post, 22 January. Available from: https:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/ wp/2017/01/22/kellyanne-conwaysaysdonald-trumps-team-has-alternate-factswhich-pretty-much-says-it-all/?utm_ term=.00920a890b79 [Accessed 11 October 2017]. Birchall, C., 2011. ‘There’s been too much secrecy in this city’: the false choice between secrecy and transparency in US politics. Cultural Politics: an international journal, 7 (1), 133–156. Birchall, C., 2014. Aesthetics of the secret. New formations, 83, 25–46. Boothroyd, D., 2011. Off the record. Theory, culture & society, 28 (7–8), 41–59. Brion, F. and Harcourt, B.E., 2014. The Louvain lectures in context. In: M. Foucault, ed. Wrong-doing, truth-telling: the function of avowal in justice. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 292–321. Canetti, E., 1962. Crowds and power. New York: The Viking Press. Colebrook, C., 2002. Understanding Deleuze. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. Coleman, R. and Oakley-Brown, L., 2017. Visualizing surfaces, surfacing vision: introduction. Theory, culture & society, 34 (7–8), 5–27. Corner, J., 2017. Fake news, post-truth and media-political change. Media, culture & society, 39 (7), 1100–1107. Davies, W. 2016. The age of posttruth politics. New York Times, 24 August. Available from: https://www.nytimes. com/2016/08/24/opinion/campaignstops/the-age-ofpost-truth-politics.html?_r=0 [Accessed 6 December 2017]. Dejevsky, M., 2016. Donald Trump is right about one thing: Nato is obsolete. The Independent 7 April Available from: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/ donaldtrump-is-right-about-one-thing-nato-isobsolete-a6973231.html [Accessed 13 August 2017]. Deleuze, G., 1988. Foucault. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., 1994. Difference and repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G., 1997. Desire and pleasure. In: A.I. Davidson, ed. Foucault and his
interlocutors. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 183–195. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1987. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. DerDerian, J., 2017. Why Trump demands a post-post-truth response. The Conversation, 30 May. Available from https://theconversation. com/trump-demands-a-post-posttruthresponse-77563 [Accessed 26 September 2017]. Derrida, J., 2001. I have a taste for the secret. In: Jacques Derrida & Maurizio Ferraris: A taste for the secret. Cambridge: Polity, 1–92. Derrida, J., 2006. Specters of Marx. The state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international. New York, London: Routledge. Derrida, J., 2007. A certain impossible possibility of saying the event. Critical inquiry 33 (Winter): 441–461. Derrida, J., Brault, P.-A., and Naas, M., 1994. “To do justice to Freud”: the history of madness in the age of psychoanalysis. Critical inquiry, 20 (2), 227–266. Duncker, C., 2006. Kritische Reflexionen des Ideologiebegriffes. Zur Bedeutung der Ideologien für den Menschen. London: Turnshare. Eco, U., 2012. Censorship and silence. In: Inventing the enemy and other occasional writings, Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 126–133. Fenster, M., 2014. The implausibility of secrecy. Hastings law journal, 65, 309–363. Fish, S., 2016. Winning arguments. What works and doesn’t work in politics, the bedroom, the courtroom, and the classroom. New York: Harper Collins. Foucault, M., 1978. The history of sexuality. Vol. I: an introduction. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M., 1991. Questions of method. In: Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds. The Foucault effect. Studies in governmentality. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 73–86. Foucault, M., 1996. Power affects the body. In: S. Lotringer, ed. Foucault live. Collected interviews, 1961–1984. New York: Semiotext(e), 207–213.
34
Foucault, M., 1997. What is enlightenment? In: P. Rabinow, ed. Ethics, subjectivity and truth. The essential works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. I. New York: The New Press, 303–319. Foucault, M., 2000a. Truth and power. In: J.D. Faubion, ed. Power (essential works of Foucault 1954–1984). New York: The New Press, 111–133. Foucault, M., 2000b. The subject and power. In: J.D. Faubion, ed. Power (essential works of Foucault 1954–1984). New York: The New Press, 326–348. Foucault, M., 2002. The archaeology of knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M., 2005. Hermeneutics of the subject: lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–82. New York: Picador. Foucault, M., 2007. Security, territory, population: lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, trans. G. Burchell. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M., 2014. Wrong-doing, truthtelling: the function of avowal in justice. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. Frankfurt, H.G., 2005. On bullshit. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Frum, D., 2016. The seven broken guardrails of democracy. The Atlantic, 31 May 2016. Available from: https://www.theatlantic.com/ politics/archive/2016/05/the-sevenbrokenguardrails-of-democracy/484829/ [Accessed 20 October 2017]. Gibson, D.R., 2014. Enduring illusions: the social organization of secrecy and deception. Sociological theory, 32 (4), 283–306. Gilbert, J., 2007. Public secrets. Cultural studies, 21 (1), 22–41. González Fuster, G., Bellanova, R., and Gellert, R., 2015. Nurturing ob-scene politics: surveillance between in/visibility and disappearance. Surveillance & society, 13 (3/4), 512–527. Gore, D., 2016. What’s Trump’s position on NATO? 11 May. Available from: http:// www.factcheck.org/2016/05/whats-trumpsposition-on-nato/ [Accessed 13 August 2017]. Horn, E., 2011. Logics of political secrecy. Theory, culture & society, 28 (7–8), 103–122. Jaffer, J., 2016. The drone memos: targeted killing, secrecy, and the law. New York: The New Press. Jay, M., 2010. The virtues of mendacity. On lying in politics. Charlottesville, London:
University of Virginia Press. Josselson, R., 2004. The hermeneutics of faith and the hermeneutics of suspicion. Narrative inquiry, 14 (1), 1–28. Kearns, O., 2016. State secrecy, public assent, and representational practices of U.S. covert action. Critical studies on security, 4 (3), 276–290. Kearns, O., 2017. Secrecy and absence in the residue of covert drone strikes. Political geography, 57, 13–23. Knudson, B.T. and Stage, C., 2015. Introduction. Politicizing bodily vulnerability. In: Global media, biopolitics and affect. Politicizing bodily vulnerability. New York: Routledge, 1–27. Lorenzini, D. and Tazzioli, M., 2018. Confessional subjects and conducts of nontruth: Foucault, Fanon, and the making of the subject. Theory, culture & society, 35 (1), 71–90. Luhmann, N., 1989. Geheimnis, Zeit und Ewigkeit. In: N. Luhmann and P. Fuchs, eds. Reden und Schweigen. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 101–138. Nuzzi, O., 2017. Kellyanne Conway Is a Star. Not your star, perhaps. But that’s the point. Daily Intelligencer, 18 March. Available from: http://nymag.com/daily/ intelligencer/2017/03/kellyanne-conwaytrumps-first-lady.html [Accessed 11 October 2017]. Parmar, I., 2012. US presidential election 2012: post-truth politics. Political insight. September, 4–7. Pozen, D.E., 2010. Deep secrecy. Stanford law review, 62, 257–340. Rancière, J., 1998. Disagreement. Politics and philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, J., 2006. The politics of aesthetics. The distribution of the sensible. London, New York: Continuum. Seigworth, G.J. and Tiessen, M., 2012. Mobile affects, open secrets, and global illiquidity: pockets, pools, and plasma. Theory, culture & society, 29 (6), 47–77. Serres, M., 1982. The parasite. Baltimore, London: John Hopkins University Press. Simmel, G., 1906. The sociology of secrecy and of secret societies. American journal of sociology, 11 (4), 441–498. Simpson, Z., 2012. The truths we tell ourselves: Foucault on parrhesia. Foucault studies, 13, 99–115.
Strong, T.B., 2012. Politics without vision: thinking without a banister in the twentieth century. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. Taussig, M., 1999. Defacement: public secrecy and the labor of the negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Vogelmann, F., 2014. Kraft, Widerständigkeit, Historizität. Überlegungen zu einer Genealogie der Wahrheit. Deutsche Zeitschrift fuer Philosophie, 62 (6), 1062– 1086. Walters, W., 2015. Secrecy, publicity and the milieu of security. Dialogues in human geography, 5 (3), 287–290. Weber, M., 1946. The power position of bureaucracy. In: H. Gerth and C.W. Mills, eds. From max weber: essays in sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 232–235. Weir, L., 2008. The concept of truth regime. The Canadian journal of sociology, 33 (2), 367–389. Williams, B., 2010. Truth and truthfulness an essay in genealogy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zarefsky, D., 2007. Making the case for war: Colin Powell at the United Nations. Rhetoric & public affairs, 10 (2), 275–302. Zito, S., 2016. Taking Trump seriously, not literally. The Republican candidate took his case to a shale-industry gathering, and found a welcoming crowd. The Atlantic, 23 September.
35
36
by Susanne Krasmann