This article was downloaded by: [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities]

On: 29 May 2012, At: 10:27

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954
Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,
UK

Cultural Studies
Publication details, including instructions for authors
and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20

POPULAR SECRECY AND

OCCULTURAL STUDIES
Jack Bratich
Available online: 11 Dec 2006

To cite this article: Jack Bratich (2007): POPULAR SECRECY AND OCCULTURAL STUDIES ,
Cultural Studies, 21:1, 42-58
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502380601046956

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.
Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sublicensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly
forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any
representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to
date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be
independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable
for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages
whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection
with or arising out of the use of this material.

Jack Bratich
POPULAR SECRECY AND OCCULTURAL

Downloaded by [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities] at 10:27 29 May 2012

STUDIES1

Is cultural studies becoming-strategic in accordance with its context? In this era

where traditional conceptual tactics have not provided the desired results, perhaps
we can experiment with new techniques. This essay explores one such tactic and
commitment, namely the faith in publicity as a truth-telling strategy to expose,
and ultimately neutralize, powers machinations. We are witnessing a regime-oftruth change, one that requires us to rethink our own notions and attachments to
truth, insofar as it is tied to revealing and concealing, to secrecy and publicity.
Recent events compel us to revise our conceptions of publicity, secrecy, and activist
strategy. How can cultural studies recognize its own commitment to transparency
and publicity, and make it alterable? By turning an eye towards secrecy, justly,
cultural studies can become a strategic craft that enhances its capacities to remake
its context.
Keywords secrecy; public sphere; occult; strategy; activism;
spectacle; masks

In June 2005, one of American political historys grandest mysteries was solved.
Deep Throat (DT), that Watergate template for enigmatic revealers, himself
was finally revealed. Former FBI agent W. Mark Felt (via his lawyer, family,
and friends) publicly exposed himself in Vanity Fair as the shadowy source for
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernsteins mythic Washington Post series. Finally, all
speculation and sleuthing could be put to rest. But did this obscene revelation
end the enigma? Pundits wrote about their hopes that conspiracy theories would
finally be dispelled, but feared that this was not to be (Greenberg 2005).
Indeed, numerous bloggers and broadcast pundits were skeptical over the
revelation, including one Nixon researcher who noted the irony that we have a
Deep Throat who cant talk (Kincaid 2005, cf. Hoff 2005, Sandoval 2005,
Waas 2005). Even those who essentially believed that Felt was DT expressed
some reservations, including William Gaines, who taught courses at the
University of Illinois in which students researched DTs identity.
Regardless of whether Felt is DT, what is important about this event is the
fact that the moment of revelation did not end secrecy, but intensified and
redistributed it. The Deep Throat event is just a more visible example of a
Cultural Studies Vol. 21, No. 1 January 2007, pp. 42 ! 58
ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online 2007 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502380601046956

POPULAR SECRECY

Downloaded by [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities] at 10:27 29 May 2012

tendency that has taken center stage in post-9/11 information warfare. This
current media environment is rife with public secrecy or what I elsewhere
(2006a) call spectacular secrecy (where publicity of the covert is strategic). It
is this revelation-management that I explore here, but first let us contextualize
the argument within the current conjuncture, especially where cultural studies
is concerned.

Cultural studies and the polemological: strategy in neo-new

times
After the 2 November 2004 US election, a fog of mourning and depression
settled on many social justice activists and anti-Bush citizens. This miasma of
defeatism2 transformed into a revived will to resist, with a newfound sense of
experimentation. What does this mean for cultural studies own conceptual
strategies? What kind of transformation will cultural studies give itself: which
cherished figures will be discarded and which new tactics adopted? Strategy, at
least since the recognized importance of Gramscis notion of war of position,
has been constitutive of cultural studies. As a contextual practice, cultural
studies continually restrategizes according to changing conditions.
Cultural studies ought to be leading conceptual innovations in the post-9/
11 context. Why? Because the War on Terror is defined by its immersion in
everyday life, as the lines of terror/war travel along the most mundane spaces
and practices. The Revolution in Military Affairs has implemented full
spectrum dominance, a style of warfare that fuses together social, cultural,
ideological, political strategies, or as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue,
that operates directly on biopower (2004, pp. 51! 62). In other words, the
military has accomplished what cultural studies has tried to do for decades:
bring politics to everyday life.
How will cultural studies respond to this immanentization of war? How
will cultural studies reclaim its own terrain (everyday life), and deter its own
neutralization? I propose that cultural studies recognize the vital elements of
refusal already in circulation at a practical level. This would be one
component, to borrow the military language, of a full spectrum activism,
one that would transform the reactive components of cultural studies into a
project that actively creates and strategizes.
What are the analytic tools that can assist cultural studies in becomingstrategic? Elsewhere (2006b) I have elaborated how cultural studies can
enhance its capacitation by encouraging more strategic analyses (in the
sense articulated by Giorgio Agamben 20003) and becoming more polemological (De Certeau 1984). Polemological analysis is not limited to academic
theory. For instance, counterinsurgency manuals and studies are important
sources for understanding the games of power and resistance, as a number of

43

Downloaded by [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities] at 10:27 29 May 2012

44

C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

social theorists (Hardt and Negri, Armand Mattelart, Michael Taussig) have
argued.
As classic texts define it, strategy is not simply a reaction to an alreadygiven set of conditions; it is the active transformation of conflict-context and a
modification of the agents involved. In this era where traditional commitments
and conceptual tactics have not provided the desired results, is cultural studies
becoming-strategic in accordance with its context?
This essay explores one such tactic and commitment, namely the faith in
publicity as a truth-telling strategy to expose, and ultimately neutralize,
powers machinations. As cultural studies practitioners, it is crucial to
understand the changing conditions of truth-telling. We are witnessing a
regime-of-truth change, one that requires us to rethink our own notions and
attachments to truth, insofar as it is tied to concealing and revealing, to secrecy
and publicity.
For example, much effort was exerted in the 2004 election year to reveal
the grotesque corruption embodied by the Bush regime. Ultimately, all the
cultural strategies involved in speaking truth to power were not enough. The
books with Lies or Deception in the title, the expose documentaries, the
courageous writing in newsletters, journals, and magazines about Bush regime
abuses: all failed to achieve their objective of removing the corrupt figures
from office. And this was the case for a very limited objective: an electoral
change in a two-party system. What kind of fate awaits broader systemic
changes?
In this essay, I pose the issues of secrecy and publicity as strategic matters.
Rather than elaborate the theoretical grounds for understanding secrecy as
such, or explore its abstract inextricability from publicity (much better
explored elsewhere), the essay brings together various experiments in secrecy
(as conceptual practice and activist tactics). Less an exercise in critical analysis
than a conjunctive survey, the essay is committed to a polemological approach.
It synthesizes the offerings of secrecy-as-strategy in circulation to understand
the practices (actual and virtual) composing the current context. How can
cultural studies recognize its own commitment to transparency and publicity,
and alter it? Rather than simply seek exposure as a corrective to power, this
analysis entails giving to the skilled revelation of skilled concealment a density
and fluidity almost sufficient to dispel the craving for certainty that secrecy
inspires (Taussig 2003, p. 305).

Spectacular secrecy and pop occulture

The Gulf War of 1991 has often been called a media spectacle (Kellner 1992,
2003). Recent operations have seen a return of this spectacle but with an
unprecedented visibility of secrecy. Secrecy has become integrated into (no

Downloaded by [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities] at 10:27 29 May 2012

POPULAR SECRECY

longer expelled from) the spectacle; forming a spectacular secrecy. While the
current regime has been correctly identified as being obsessed with secrecy
(excessive document classification, widespread covert tribunals, inaccessible
detainees, rampant invoking of state secrets privilege) these descriptions rely
on a traditional notion of secrecy; one based on an image of a box or envelope
with hidden contents. With this image, the logical response is to call for
openness, where exposure destroys the secret by making manifest its
obscured being. But with spectacular secrecy the image of a box or envelope is
too narrow. Rather, secrecys new form is the public secret, out in the open
where it works its charms even more effectively.
The strategic proliferation of leaks, the announced use of covert and
special ops, the use of preventive revelations, the occulted origins of
evidence, and the mysterious appearance and disappearance of government
agencies (such as the Office of Strategic Influence and the Information
Awareness Office4) all point to a public version of secrecy (Bratich 2006a).
This spectacular form generalizes secrecy into public and private domains,
making revelation no longer the end to secrecy, but its new catalyst.
Spectacular secrecy is not just a propaganda effort of the current
administration ! it permeates popular culture. Take, for instance, the
meteoric success of Dan Browns books. His bestsellers all deal with public
secrecy, in many guises (architecture, astronomical maps, scientific trickery,
paintings, urban design, public decryption keys). The Da Vinci Code (2003) and
Angels & Demons (2001) especially convey public secrets, as cryptic messages
and ancient codes are inscribed on buildings, maps, museum displays, and
canonical paintings. These secret traditions are preserved by being out in the
open, hidden in plain sight while interpretable only by a select few (usually,
members of a secret society).
These ancient public secrets are only a first-order revelation: their
exposure through Browns novels constitutes a second order. Browns own
enigmatic public statements about his relationship to secret organizations only
add mystery to these disclosures. Popular culture becomes a venue for the
becoming-public of secrecy.5 Cryptographic writing, as a popular pursuit, can
be traced at least to Edgar Allen Poe, according to Shawn James Rosenheim
(1997). And lest we think these popular revelations are uniformly embraced by
truth-seekers and cryptologists, we need only look to Michael Hoffmans
(1995) work. He argues that popular and commercial unmaskings are a
pernicious element of Making Manifest All that is Hidden, a Freemasonic
principle that involves processing human consciousness via public symbolic
rituals and cryptic dramaturgy.
At the same time, it should be remembered that these public secret texts
(the ones narrativized within Browns books) did not just encode true secrets;
they were also designed to deceive. Occult historians like Manly P. Hall
(2003) and Eliphas Levi (2000) argue that occult communication is essentially

45

Downloaded by [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities] at 10:27 29 May 2012

46

C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

cryptographic. The delicate art of popularizing secrecy often involves

publication of devices to deter the unworthy. Alongside the messages for
the initiated are decoys and red herrings for investigators and general
audiences. From its traditional roots, then, disinformation has been endemic to
public secrecy. Within public occulture, revelations do not eliminate the
secret, but preserve and extend it. Disclosure might be part of secrecys game,
not an end to it. The phrase secrecy is everywhere6 best captures this
dynamic.
What happens when secrecy becomes visible: as spectacular media event,
as activist tactic, as popular cultural phenomenon, and as political question of
democracy? How do we theorize secrecy when theory is etymologically tied to
looking, privileging the visible and observable? We can take our cue from
Walter Benjamin, and say analysis means telling a truth that is not a matter of
exposure which destroys the secret, but a revelation which does justice to it
(Benjamin 1977, p. 31; quoted in Taussig 2002, p. 2). A number of theoretical
tools are available in this just revelation project, and it is worth briefly
summarizing them here.
Jodi Dean, in Publicitys Secret (2002), contextualizes the issue of secrecy
within modernity and US political history. She argues that democracy is
typically equated with publicity and with the elimination of secrecy (as a
domain of self-serving corruption, of elitist exclusivity, of special interest
power that blocks consensus). This version of publicity entails the following
values: a faith in exposure, a rational subject endowed with the right-to-know,
and a desire for revelatory truth at the heart of the ideal of public reason.
Secrecy is illegitimate and nonconsensual, while publicity is agreement and
consensus.
Dean argues, and I agree, that this conception has political value. It is
crucial, for instance, in redressing the concentration of state secrets. Deans
contribution to the study of secrecy is the following: she recognizes the
problem with anti-secrecy and with equating democracy with the public. She
does justice to the secret by firmly establishing it as publicitys internal limit
and convincingly argues that there can be no public without a disavowed
secrecy. In multiple senses, that is publicitys secret.
I want to add to this discussion by asking, is there a secret that is not
publicitys secret? Can we only think of secrecys activities within the
determination made by publicity? Is there a different route, a becomingpopular of secrecy that is not a public execution? 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 a sign of
pernicious hidden agendas. But this notion of a cryptocracy depends on
assuming publicitys secrecy: the form of an envelope/box, and disclosure as its

Downloaded by [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities] at 10:27 29 May 2012

POPULAR SECRECY

opposite and vanquisher. What if we began to think of cryptocracy in other

ways, like from the perspective of secrecy itself?
As publicitys other, secrecy is always in negation, never given the powers
of negation. Now we can view the secret not from the perspective of its
destruction (within revelation) but as a positivity with its own history and
effects. How can we make the covert productive? What can be learned from
the secret, not just about it? Deans deconstructive work on the limits of
publicity is a good start, but we also need to find analytic tools that can move
secrecy beyond publicitys shadow.
Guy Debord in his short, cryptic book Comments on the Society of the
Spectacle (1998) (originally titled Treatise on Secrets, and not to be confused with
the original Society of the Spectacle [1970]) introduces the concept of
generalized secrecy. Debords point is that our obsession with secrecy as a
box to be opened is 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.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) 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 secret influence (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 (shadowy revealers, like
Deep Throat). Michael Taussig elaborates their second point: To the extent
that the secret can be and is revealed, I would like to suggest that revelation is
precisely what the secret intends; in other words part of secrecy is secretion
(2003, p. 297).
Taussig, an anthropologist, examines shamanistic trickery and magickal
rites but not as a way of describing exotic Others. The techniques of deception
in his analysis have wider application: the public secret is a species of
knowledge no less political than it is mysterious, if not mystical (2003,
p. 306). The political public secret orbits around revelation-management. It is
not skilled concealment that characterizes the power of secrecy, but the
skilled revelation of skilled concealment (2003, p. 273): the success of such
ritual is not in concealing but in revealing trickery (2003, p. 272). Magick is
thus effective, not despite its exposure but on account of it, especially in
exposing the very techniques of concealment. The fact and mechanisms of
secrecy are exposed, but in ways that only enhance those mechanisms. For
example, preventive revelations appropriate the power of the challenge,
absorbing critique at the moment of publicity.7
Rather than surrender to a totalitarian state of secrecy, then, we can
pursue secrecy as a strategy. Making this argument entails a shift in focus,
unsettling a fundamental assumption among oppositional forces, namely the
belief that the publicity of secrets is inherently a progressive force. In the US
political imaginary, publicity may no longer be an effective political force

47

Downloaded by [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities] at 10:27 29 May 2012

48

C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

against a cryptocracy. When dissent primarily operates by seeking to expose

the States secrets, it may be playing into a larger logic of concealment and
revelation that is ultimately disempowering. Rather, we can explore the
generation of secrets and their exposure as a political force. The potential to
make these new arrangements belongs to the creative meaning-making powers
of the many. Why surrender the capacity to produce these to the State/private
sector networks of control?
In an age where secrecy is virtually everywhere as a strategy of
domination, can we begin to experiment with an insurgent secrecy, a minor
secrecy, or a popular secrecy? Secrecy, at best, has been associated with
circumstantial necessity. Publicity has been allowed to transcend its own
historical conditions (including its Enlightenment origins within secret
societies); in fact this detachment is the very condition of possibility for
public sphere theory (see Dean 2002). Secrecy may at least be afforded a
similar generosity. The oppositional political imaginary up until now has
focused on reactive secrecy, placing it in a lineage of nihilistic forces. Why not
accord it some affirmative powers? Popular or minor secrecy would be
immersed in what Negri (1999) calls constituent power, the capacities and
wills to create new worlds; in other words, an active secrecy. Secrecy as a
strategy is already the subject of experimentation in the activist milieu. So
what better way to explore active secrecy than by tracing a line through secret
activism?

Secret activism
In an influential little book called Temporary Autonomous Zone, Hakim Bey
(1985) argued that the Left needs insurgent secret societies. Borrowing the
idea from William Burroughs, Bey suggested they be modeled after the
Chinese Tong: mutual aid societies that kept their work hidden as a key to
preservation. For Bey, the will to disappearance is a logical radical option,
depending on historical circumstances. Rather than the full-frontal visible
attack that reveals a martyr-wish, insurgents need to use both visibility and
disappearance tactically. Bey cites the historical role of monasteries, which
became sites of refuge and knowledge-preservation during the plague, and
argues that we may be facing a political plague of sorts today. Beys calls were
written over twenty years ago. How do we address these untimely meditations
in a homeland security context, where secrecy, anonymity, and imperceptibility are increasingly demonized if not criminalized?
More recently, crypto-anarchists have turned the tables on a technoculture
that seeks to render society fully visible. These are techno-anarchists who put
their faith in cryptography as a political tool. Most famously enshrined in
Timothy Mays Crypto Anarchist Manifesto (2001), this type of activism

Downloaded by [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities] at 10:27 29 May 2012

POPULAR SECRECY

consists of constructing codes and ciphers to shroud messages in secrecy.

Programs such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) create untraceable interactions
(communication, financial transactions), and can thus ensure un-monitorable
activities.
Their practice is based on an atypical interpretation of the First
Amendment. For cryptoanarchists, free speech is not the right to be heard,
but the right to speak in a language that is occulted. While the cryptoanarchists
tend towards the libertarian and technophilic stream, their use of technology
creates strategic potential for secrecy under surveillance state operations.8 At
the very least, cryptoanarchism finds in technological developments not the
instruments of domination through surveillance and data mining, but toolsbecoming-weapons against that scopic regime.

The mask and the black bloc

Perhaps the most recent public face of secrecy in US activism is the black
bloc. During the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, black bloc became the media
face of anarchism, if not the whole counterglobalization movement (Albertani
2002). In tandem with the balaclava icon of Zapatismo, black bloc masking
imaged the burgeoning networks of global justice activism. The mask came to
function as a dominant representation ! of something to hide, of violence, of
cowardice. New activism, like its 1960s ancestors, appeared on the nightly
news, but this time as occulted, as imperceptible, and thus as a tactic of
disappearance not identity. And try as it might, the media spectacle cannot fix
the meaning of the mask. While the news media tries to fill in the abyss with
content and give the mask an interiority, it misses secrecy as form, as action, as
secretion.
We can return to Deleuze and Guattari here to elaborate. Secrecy is not
primarily defined by its interior ! it seeks its outside, it is a form of
exteriority. Becoming-secret is akin to what Deleuze and Guattari call
becoming-imperceptible. Not simply reducible to being invisible or disappearing,
becoming-imperceptible is primarily a relation with others (1987, pp. 279!
81). It entails a negation of rootedness in identity in favor of a more relational
network: merge as a collective, use camouflage, blend in to surroundings
(1987, p. 277! 79). For Deleuze, there are no longer secrets. You have
become like everyone, but in fact you have turned the everyone into a
becoming. You have become imperceptible, clandestine (1977, p. 127).
Imperceptibility provides a counter to a politics based on identity and
representability.
Becoming-imperceptible helps explain the black bloc tactic. Benefits for
participants include evasion of surveillance, mutual assistance and a general
sense of solidarity through anonymity. The mask de-individualizes actors and

49

Downloaded by [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities] at 10:27 29 May 2012

50

C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Author in mediated mirror mask, performing as part of Indigenous Immigrants, a workshop

from Pdero Laschs Naturalizations Series (2002 ! present). Continental Drift Seminar,
November 2006, 16Beaver, NY.

produces an immediate collectivity without personality. The experience of

having people you dont know at your back is often cited by black blocers as a
powerful moment of solidarity. I highlight black bloc not to debate the merits
of the tactic, but to acknowledge that it is the most visible example of secret
activism.
What would a different politics of masking look like? Becomingimperceptible constitutes what Giorgio Agamben calls the whatever singularity: a community without identity, one which wants to take possession of
belonging itself, which declines any identity and conditions of belonging
(2000, p. 89). This whatever subject is a type of belonging whose lack of
specificity opens up potentials not seduced by the security of faces behind the
mask.
As a tactic or gesture (Agamben 2000), the collective mask is nothing
new. Anonymity during public action goes back centuries. More recently, as a
direct action tactic, black bloc can be traced back at least to the Autonomen in
early 1980s Germany, where squatters took to masking themselves as a way of
preventing identification by the police (Katsiaficis 1997). The Zapatistas
trademark balaclava is a powerful signifier that allows anyone to becomeimperceptible collectively. This mask operates as a global image that anchors
their performative statement, You are no longer you, now you are one of us

Downloaded by [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities] at 10:27 29 May 2012

POPULAR SECRECY

(see EZLN 1998). A decade or so ago, the artist collective Guerilla Girls
donned ape masks to de-individualize authorship, emphasizing instead the
collaborative and anonymous production of textual meaning. They also worked
in direct response to the individualized mask of the superhero (whose selfinvolved brooding and existential crises are enhanced with the disguise).
Not all collective masks or popular secrecies are to be valorized. The Ku
Klux Klans hoods and robes, as well as secret organizational form, obviously
resulted in widespread atrocities. This is precisely the point, however.
Anonymity and secrecy in themselves have no necessary political allegiances or
effects. Masks are signs and practices to be struggled over, not just left to the
State and its surrogates. So while we cannot simply affirm masking, we can
unmoor it, reappropriating it strategically as a type of minor secrecy.

The state and its masks

Much like the infinite secretion of anonymity spurred on by black bloc, the
Zapatista balaclava is intolerable to the State. The State abhors masks that are
not its own. The Zapatistas remind us that the State is always masked, and not
just when its riot police wear armored disguises (Taussig 2002, p. 239). It
wishes to make itself imperceptible while eliminating other instances of
becoming-imperceptible. As Agamben argues, the threat the state is not
willing to come to terms with is precisely the fact that the unrepresentable
should exist and form a community without either presuppositions or
conditions of belonging (2000, p. 89). During the World Economic Forum
demonstrations in 2002 and again at the Republican National Convention in
2004, New York City police invoked a little-known state law dating back to
1900 that banned more than three masks at protests (from the days when
tenant farmer uprisings against landlords employed tactical masking).9
But just as the State wishes to keep all the masks and to unmask others,
Taussig alerts us to the mystery-making impact of any exposure done by the
State. He analyzes how the Mexican government unmasked Marcos (the
Zapatista subcomandante) at a news conference by revealing a photo of his
true face (2002, pp. 238! 46). But instead of disempowering him, this public
act proliferated a magical force (in the subsequent re-maskings performed by
the Zapatistas). While we might accept these practices as part of primitive
societies, this public secrecy infuses modern societies, where these revelationrituals are performed as a matter of public policy and media spectacle.
Taussig isolates a fascinating component of masking, namely the practice of
nahual (2002, pp. 239! 42). Originating from the Nahuatl language indigenous
to many parts of Latin America, including Chiapas, nahual refers to both
disguise and co-essence (or familiar). The mask donned as nahual is often one
of an animal, signifying not simply the negation of ones identity, but the

51

Downloaded by [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities] at 10:27 29 May 2012

52

C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

transformation into another being. Masking is an act of shape-shifting, of

becoming-animal (interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari also link becomingimperceptible to becoming-animal).
The nahual fuses the power of secrecy with the power of transformation.
Why is this important? Because, as Taussig argues, the State attempts to
appropriate nahual for itself. The State, in seeking to monopolize the power of
masking, desires to control transformation . . . and appropriate becomings
(2002, p. 248). Becoming itself is becoming the property of the State. As the
State appropriates secrecy, masking, and unmasking, it seeks to appropriate
becoming as such, to give it proper identities and interiorities. To
reappropriate this becoming through the preservation and proliferation of
masking is indispensable for the current conjuncture.10
Masking, becoming-imperceptible, and reappropriating secrecy are
affirmative gestures of disappearance, not simply utopic withdrawals. Beyond
the defensive tactic, a clandestine action group or affinity web operates in a
self-valorizing manner ! beyond naming, gazing, and the States ability to see.
As Bey puts it, the New Left never really believed in its own existence till it
saw itself on the Evening News (1985), p. 132). Perhaps today, existence
comes with the exodus from this spectacle. At least there is less need for
recognition, for a conferral of identity by the State and its vision. Why
bother to face a power that has operated through, and partially become,
simulation and spectacle? It would only provide the same spectacle with a
new object of representation and an easy target of inveigling. The coming
politics of secrecy might involve a confrontation that is not face-to-face, but
mask-to-mask.11

Secrecys gifts
Secrecy does not belong to the State, neither as publicitys negation nor as
spectacular domination. It has a positivity of its own, which as detailed above is
already part of collective experiments. This active secrecy is a preventive
resistance that prompts our concluding question, what does popular secrecy give
us?
.

At minimum secrecy tells us that we do not always need to seek visibility

and recognition to legitimize our politics. Publicity is not necessarily the
best strategy. To paraphrase Michel Foucault, it is not that publicity is
necessarily bad, but, like everything, it is dangerous (1997, p. 256).
Our task is to map those hazards and possibilities. Identity, perceptibility,
and exposure have their usefulness, but maybe not now or here.
In a surveillance/control society, where communicating and becomingperceptible are quickly turning into internalized commands, Deleuze

POPULAR SECRECY

Downloaded by [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities] at 10:27 29 May 2012

suggests we create vacuoles of noncommunication (1995a, p. 175,

1995b). Secrecy here, like Beys will to disappearance, means inserting
imperceptibility into circuits of control. Secrecy becomes a circuitbreaker; in the service of an exodus, safeguarding future forms of life on a
line of flight. One need only think here of how security culture is a term
not reserved for Homeland Security immersion into everyday life, but is
used by activist groups for their own survival.
As the black bloc and Zapatistas demonstrate, clandestinity is mutual-aid, a
tactic that promotes collectivity. Becoming-imperceptible creates the
whatever singularity: a community without identity, which wants to take
possession of belonging itself. This imperceptible collectivity is intolerable
to the State, which would like to appropriate becoming for itself.
Secrecy as strategy is not simply a provisional instrument for attaining
goals ! it offers a rethinking of secrecy for any future social arrangements.
As Jacques Derrida argues in A Taste for the Secret (2001) society that does
not respect secrecy is a totalitarian society (as the drive to illuminate all
social spaces renders those spaces vulnerable to the harshest forms of
ocular control). Any collective future will need to acknowledge secrecys
lineage so as not to lapse into the domination of pure visibility.

Currently, affirming the powers of secrecy is a defensive argument. It has

historically been a necessary component of dissident culture. Military strategic
analyses even acknowledge this. From guerrilla manuals to Edward Luttwaks
(1987) highly influential counterinsurgency work, secrecy has long been
recognized for its value to dissidents.12 The importance of secrecy as a
defensive stand is noted even within political theory indebted to publicity
and the public sphere (Squires 2002). We can thus tie this active secrecy
to the customary jus resistentiae, the right to resistance (cf. Virno 2004, pp.
42! 3).
A need, then, for a public affirmation of secrecy: a demand for its extension
to all sectors, not just concentrated in the hands and boxes of the privileged.
This public affirmation could take a liberal, juridical form, namely in a call for
the right to secrecy. Similar to the cryptoanarchist claim, this tactic would
parallel the publics right to know with a right to be unknown. This right
would be counterposed to the right to privacy, entwined as the latter is with
the western subject of self-possessed individuality and interiority. A right to
secrecy would change the tenor of freedom from privacys passive,
individualized zone to an interactive exteriority of relations.
We can articulate the current resurgence of the mask and secrecy as a
revival of popular traces relegated to the interstices of society: the custom of
secrecy, the right of resistance. A public affirmation of secrecy is not a
dialectical trick, nor a valorization of coping strategies. It is a reawakening of
ancestral customs whose trajectories in secret corners and cracks (Wilson
1998, p. 76) can now form a confluence. It is the task of what Michel De

53

54

C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Certeau (1986) calls heterological projects to articulate these scattered

practices of becoming imperceptible.

Downloaded by [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities] at 10:27 29 May 2012

Coda: occultural studies as gay science

Secrecy is thus not an absence, but an occulted presence, one whose potentials
we are just beginning to glimpse. Rather than counter secrecy with revelatory
truth, let us perform a just revelation, one that is worthy of the secret. For
Michael Taussig, the very idea of a secret behind a facade is not just plain silly
but sign of another sort of philosophic despair, even illness, that we have to
associate with the will to knowledge (2003, p. 304). We need to pay
attention, Taussig writes,
to the use of tricks to out-trick other tricks . . . not to further the
mystifying effects of unmasking that the Enlightenment, transparency,
project seems to assume, but to lay foundations for something along the
lines of that gay science Nietzsche proposed as its critical, masquerading
alternative.
(2003, p. 295)
What would it mean for cultural studies to take up this gay science as a
strategy? It would mean developing our political and cultural tricks of the
trade, including that most elusive trick of all, the magic of mimesis ! at
heart, a fraud, yet most necessary for that ceaseless surfacing of appearances
we defer to as truth (2003, p. 306).
This attentiveness to tricks, figures, and maneuvers is polemological and
entails a commitment to secrecy as strategy. These are experimental times,
and while the State is a dominant experimenter, it cannot monopolize strategy.
By turning an eye towards secrecy, justly, cultural studies can become a
strategic craft that enhances its capacities to remake its context.

Notes
1
2

Portions of this essay have been published in Bratich, J. (2006b). It can also
be read as a part 2 to my recent article in this journal (Bratich 2006a).
As the White House Cabinet was going through a shake-up so activists
rethought previous tactics and sought out new techniques of resistance.
Previously taboo topics like secession were regularly discussed both
humorously and as serious options (Flores-Williams 2005a, 2005b, Wilson
2005; for an analysis of this movement from an autonomist perspective see
my 2005.)

POPULAR SECRECY

Downloaded by [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities] at 10:27 29 May 2012

6
7

Strategic criticism, as Giorgio Agamben defines Guy Debords work,

involves positioning ones view precisely in another actors view (2000,
p. 74) (much like the perspectives taken by counterinsurgents when they
study and mimic guerrilla and network-centric warfare).
Perhaps the most blatant example of the secret becoming visible as strategy
is the short career of the Information Awareness Office logo (DARPA,
headed by Poindexter, goal of Total Information Awareness through
integration of technologies, civilian and military think-tanks and citizen
snoops). The logo was comprised of an eye-in-the-pyramid shining a diffuse
spotlight on the globe, with the phrase scientia est potentia (knowledge is
power) So here we have the public face of the will-to-publicize, the face of
desire for total openness and absolute observability. And in this visible face is
one of the most well-known occult symbols around (the Freemasonic,
Rosicrucian Eye-in-the-Pyramid). Regardless of the significance one wants to
attach to it, it is an occult symbol for those who practice this form of
symbology. The logo disappeared from the offices website, and the agency
shortly followed suit. Perhaps it was conjured away, perhaps it still haunts
other departments.
We can cite here the TV shows dealing with occult or supernatural themes
(Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Teen Witch Mad Mad House), and
with secret services (Alias, 24, The Agency). In addition, a number of films
have taken secrecy as their subject matter, from the secret agent (SpyGame,
The Recruit, XXX, SpyKids, Mr. And Mrs. Smith) to the secret society (The
Order, The Skulls, From Hell, National Treasure). Popular secrecy was even
embedded in the reality TV/game doc format (the first challenges of Amazing
Race: Family Edition and the series Treasure Hunters).
This enigmatic phrase, itself seemingly everywhere, was the title of a Spring
2004 special issue of the Massachusetts School of Law Journal.
We are reminded here of Donald Rumsfelds announcement of the Office of
Strategic Influences appearance and subsequent quick withdrawal: months
later Rumsfeld revealed that its disappearance was in name only, and that it
would continue its operations under different departments. Also, public
relations value of getting ahead of the story is an example.
This seemingly new problematization of secrecy and technology is bound up
with the history of cryptography, whose link between revealing and
concealing is embedded in a variety of codes and technologies (see Butler &
Keeney 2001; Davis 1998; Singh 1999). In addition, one could note how
early film was attributed with the power to break open a hidden world of the
mundane (as in Benjamins Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, 1968). Perhaps what we are witnessing is how the link
between secrecy and technology is moving from the shadows to becoming
public (such as the popular fascination with codebreaking).
This repressive law was later challenged but not overturned in court. It is
important to note that this legal action was carried out by the Klan, once
again demonstrating that reactionary forces (with their cellular operational

55

56

C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Downloaded by [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities] at 10:27 29 May 2012

10

11

12

networks, leaderless resistance strategies, and insurgent manuals like Invisible

Resistance to Tyranny, 2002) have been effectively and deliberately harnessing
the strategic power of secrecy, much to the dismay and detriment of
progressive forces.
State masking is cited as a reason to criticize black bloc, namely because the
tactic is vulnerable to infiltration and provocation. This flaw is certainly
there: enough is known about the events in Genoa 2001 to claim
authoritatively that the State infiltration of black bloc was deliberate and
provocative. However, black bloc has actually given more visibility to the
issue of provocateurs in the activist community And let us not forget that the
secret services have infiltrated plenty of non-anonymous groups and actions.
The black bloc has brought to light Debords assessment that in a society of
the spectacle and secrecy, secret agents become revolutionaries, and
revolutionaries become secret agents (1998 p. 11).
The spring 2006 film release of V for Vendetta turns this masked antagonism
into a spectacular epic. The lead character wears a Guy Fawkes mask, whose
role in the Gunpowder Plot has created significant speculation about his
identity (as agent, as instrument for a strategy of tension). From who is
behind the mask to who is behind the masking.
At stake here for strategists is the element of surprise. As Luttwak, Karl Von
Clausewitz, and other strategists have pointed out, secrecy is attached to the
element of surprise. Eliminating surprise seems to be the new grand goal of
State/counterinsurgency force. The Novel Intelligence Project provides one
example. After 9/11, the key objective in the intelligence community is to
prevent the strategic surprise. The NIP, via massive data analysis and
surveillance, is precisely geared towards predicting and controlling surprise.
This model writ large would be a matter of rooting out and eliminating
unpredictability as such.

References
Agamben, G. (2000) Means without End. Notes on Politics, Minneapolis, University
of Minnesota Press.
Albertani, C. (2002) Paint It Black. Black Blocs, Tute Bianche and Zapatistas in
the Anti-globalization Movement, New Political Science, vol. 24, no. 4, pp.
579! 596.
Benjamin, W. (1977) The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne,
London, New Left Books.
Benjamin, W. (1968) Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in
Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, ed. H. Arendt, New York, Harcourt,
Brace & World.
Bey, H. (1985) T.A.Z., Autonomedia, New York.
Bratich, J. (2005) Swarmcession!, Lumpen, no. 96, July, pp. 20! 25.
Bratich, J. (2006a) Public Secrecy and Immanent Security: A Strategic Analysis,
Cultural Studies, vol. 20, nos. 4! 5, pp. 493! 511.

Downloaded by [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities] at 10:27 29 May 2012

POPULAR SECRECY

Bratich, J. (2006b). Apocryphal Now Redux, in Contesting Empire/Globalizing

Dissent: Cultural Studies after 9/11. eds M. Giardina & N. Denzin,
Providence, RI, Paradigm Press, pp. 264! 279.
Brown, D. (2001) Angels and Demons, New York, Pocket Star.
Brown, D. (2003) The Da Vinci Code, New York, Doubleday.
Butler, W. S. & Keeney, L. D. (2001) Secret Messages. Concealment, Codes, and Other
Types of Ingenious Communication, New York, Simon & Schuster.
Davis, E. (1998) Techgnosis. Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information,
New York, Three Rivers Press.
De Certeau, M. (1986) Heterologies. Discourses on the Other, trans. B. Massumi,
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall, Berkeley,
University of California Press.
Dean, J. (2002) Publicitys Secret, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press.
Debord, G. (1970) Society of the Spectacle, Detroit, MI, Black & Red.
Debord, G. (1998) Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, London, Verso.
Deleuze, G. (1995a) Control and Becoming, in Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin,
New York, Columbia University Press, pp. 169! 176.
Deleuze, G. (1995b) Postscript on Societies of Control, in Negotiations, trans.
M. Joughin, New York, Columbia University Press, pp. 177! 182.
Deleuze, G. (1977) Many Politics, in Dialogues, trans. H. Tomlinson & B.
Habberjam, New York, Columbia University Press, pp. 124! 47.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi,
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, J. (2001) A Taste for the Secret, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press.
EZLN. (1998) Communiques 3, Berkeley, CA, Agit Press.
Foucault, M. (1997) On the Genealogy of Ethics, in Ethics. Subjectivity and Truth,
ed. P. Rabinow, New York, The New Press, pp. 253! 80.
Flores-Williams, J. (2005a) A Call to Secession [online] Available at: http.//
www.thebrooklynrail.org/express/feb05/secession.html
Flores-Williams, J. (2005b) Secession. A Five-Point Program [online] Available
at: http.//www.thebrooklynrail.org/express/march05/secession2.html
Greenberg, D. (2005) Throat Clearing Watergate conspiracy theories that still
wont die, Slate [online], 1 June, Available at: http.//slate.msn.com/id/
2119989/
Hall, M. P. (2003) The Secret Teachings of All Ages, New York, Tarcher/Penguin.
Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2004) Multitude, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University
Press.
Hoff, J. (2005). Here We Go Again. Deep Throat Revealed? [online] Available at:
http.//hnn.us/articles/12226.html
Hoffman, M. (1995) Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, Coeur d Alene, ID,
Independent History and Research.
Katsiaficas, G. (1997) The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Movements and
the Decolonization of Everyday Life, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press.
Kellner, D. (1992) The Persian Gulf TV War, Boulder, CO, Westview Press.

57

Downloaded by [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities] at 10:27 29 May 2012

58

C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Kellner, D. (2003) Media Spectacles, New York, Routledge.

Kincaid, C. (2005) Was Mark Felt Really Deep Throat? 3 June [online] Available
at:
http.//www.mensnewsdaily.com/archive/k/kincaid/2005/kincaid
060305.htm
Levi, E. (2000) The Great Secret, or Occultism Revealed, York Beach, ME, Wieser.
Luttwak, E. (1987) Strategy. The Logic of War and Peace, Cambridge, MA, Belknap
Press.
Mattelart, A. (1994) Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture, trans. S.
Emanuel & J. A. Cohen, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
May, T. (2001) The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, in Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates,
and Pirate Utopias, ed. Peter Ludlow, Cambridge, MIT Press.
Negri, A. (1999) Insurgencies: Constituent power and the modern state, Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press.
Rosenheim, S. J. (1997) The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar
Allen Poe to the Internet, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press.
Sandoval, G. (2005) Washington Post Confirms Deep Throat ID, MyWay News,
31 May [online] Available at: http.//apnews.myway.com/article/
20050531/D8AEDL0G1.html
Singh, S. (1999) The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Codebreaking, London,
Fourth Estate Press.
Squires, C. (2002) Rethinking the Black Public Sphere. An Alternative
Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres, Communication Theory, vol. 12,
no. 4, pp. 446! 468.
Taussig, M. (2002) Defacement, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press.
Taussig M. (2003) Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism. Another Theory of Magic,
in Magic and Modernity, eds B. Meyer & P. Pels, Stanford, CA, Stanford
University Press, pp. 272! 306.
Virno, P. (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude, Los Angeles, Semiotext(e).
Waas, M. (2005) New Evidence that Deep Throat couldnt have acted alone.
Village Voice, 10 June [online] Available at: http.//www.villagevoice.com/
news/0524,waas,64895,6.html
Wilson, P. L. (1998) Escape from the Nineteenth Century, New York, Autonomedia.
Wilson, P.L. (2005) New New Holland? [online] Available at: http.//
www.thebrooklynrail.org/express/march05/newholland.html