Adventures in the Public Secret Sphere

Public Secret Sphere in the 21st Century

During the first decade of the 21st century, the Bush regime was repeatedly identified as being “obsessed” with secrecy. These accusations 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 as I have argued elsewhere (2006), it was more accurate to understand that time period as rife with spectacular secrecy, in which secrets were revealed, but in a way that increased rather than put an end to secrecy.

Michael Taussig (2003) calls this phenomenon a public secret, “a species of knowledge no less political than it is mysterious, if not mystical” (p. 306). The political public secret orbits around revelation-management, involving techniques of deception normally reserved for shamans and sorcerers, now applied to Western politics. It is not skilled concealment that characterizes the power of secrecy, but the “skilled revelation of skilled concealment” (p. 273): The “success of such ritual is not in concealing but in revealing trickery” (p. 272). An act is thus effective, not despite its exposure but on account of it, especially in making transparent the very techniques of concealment. For example, preventive revelations appropriate the power of the challenge, absorbing critique at the moment of publicity. ²

But there is another side to the public secret, one that emphasizes its widespread knowledge (or ability to be known) while still remaining obscure. Perhaps the best way to understand this facet of the public secret sphere is to listen carefully to one of its most conspicuous specialists, Donald Rumsfeld. In one of the most famous Teachings of Rummy, the Bush-era Secretary of State laid out a mystical rationale for the Iraq invasion. He described three types of knowledge with regard to threats: the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. ³ For our purposes, however, we need to pay attention to what he communicated by not saying. In the 2 × 2 monohybrid square containing the variables “known” and “unknown,” the fourth cell (“unknown knowns”) was omitted in the Public Teachings. The omission itself is part of his Secret Teachings, as the act of hiding it enacts what it hides. The unknown known, I argue, is this aspect of the public secret: that which exists in awareness but is routinely banished via disavowal, denial, and delusion. For example, Abu Ghraib was a pivotal event in the public secret sphere, as it spectacularly reminded us of what we already know but hide—that war continues to involve humiliation, dehumanization, and atrocities.

Secrecy belongs not just to the State, embodied in eminent war(lock) figures like Rumsfeld, but also to the governmentalization of power (here defined as decentralized spread—secretion—through the socius). Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality, in which the conduct of conduct is no longer housed in conventional institutions but permeates everyday life, can be updated with the claim that it involves not only the dispersion of positive mechanisms but also secret techniques (Bratich, Packer, McCarthy, 2003; Foucault, 1991; Rose, 1999). We can add to this Guy Debord’s work on secrecy. In his untimely book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Debord remarked that the proliferation of “networks of promotion and control” (state and nonstate) would eventually create such overlap that it would be hard to disentangle the competing projects. Debord called this state of affairs “generalized secrecy.” One example would be the history of information warfare as the present but hidden influence on the shape of any public sphere, but now with the added effect that these long-standing covert operations have become widely publicized.

Another example of the secretion of governmental secrecy would be something like Michel De Certeau’s (1984) notion of the “occult postulate of popular culture”—the persistent but clandestine strategies and ruses embedded in various elements of everyday entertainment and amusements (games, magic tricks, divination devices). Recently, popular culture has taken on an increased role in militainment, especially when it comes to spycraft (Bratich, 2009; Stahl, 2010). Governing through secrecy (the becoming-spy of citizens) thus pervades culture, specifically via popular occulture. Here the occult arts of spycraft as well as magic diffuse through entertainment media like films, TV dramas, reality television, games, and kid culture (e.g., spy museums and the National Security Agency online game Crypto-Kids). This popular occulture was ostensibly a sphere for recruitment, an extension of the public secret sphere. However, it can also be seen as a site for reversals and antagonism (e.g., Anonymous’ use of the Guy Fawkes masks, to which I’ll return).

Rise of the Futurepublics: Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM) and Network Sovereigns

The formation of publics via secret means has a rich history—not only the Freemasonic models of publicity but also the early foundations of communications research (the public of public relations and public opinion). Early 20th century imagineers of the mass mind (Walter Lippman, Harold Lasswell, George Creel, Edward Bernays, among others) sought to understand and harness the power of crowds to form publics via communications technologies. At times, these involved a sleight of hand: Top–down directives from mechanisms such as the World War One (WWI) Committee on Public Information had to appear as persuasion immanent to crowds, even coming from them. ⁴ Stealth, peer-to-peer influence in organizing publics was to become a fixture from then on, part of what we could call “communications warfare.” ⁵

More recently, we’ve seen attempts to form State-friendly transnational publics through the public secret sphere. Tiziana Terranova (2007) coins the term futurepublic to make sense of these recent collectivity-inducing apparatuses. The futurepublic involves news media, state institutions, and social tele-technologies assembled into temporary alliances for a particular objective, primarily war. She calls them dispositifs and highlights their methods of affective capture (which, given the Bush era in which her essay was written, primarily operates via fear). ⁶

The futurepublic dispositifs have been in overdrive recently with the proliferation of global social movements and their attending social media. The Alliance of Youth Movements is an acute example of such transnational public-making dispositifs. Launched in 2008 with a summit in New York City, the AYM gathered together an ensemble of media corporations, Obama consultants, social network entrepreneurs, and youth organizations, under the auspices of the State Department. Representatives came from Old Media (MTV, NBC, CNN) and New (Google and Facebook—with Twitter and YouTube joining in subsequent years). The AYM created an online Howcast Hub, which “brings together youth leaders from around the world to learn, share and discuss how to change the world by building powerful grassroots movements” (Alliance of Youth Movements). Among the series of how-to videos produced for the site: How to Create a Grassroots Movement Using Social-Networking Sites, How to Smart Mob, and How to Circumvent an Internet Proxy. Undersecretary James Glassman described the event as “Public Diplomacy 2.0.”

What we see here already is a mix of networked entities and sovereign concentration: an alliance of corporate bodies, government agencies, and NGOs producing training videos to seed emergent movements around the world. While public/private alliances have been part of governance for some time, the network form of making publics (emerging alongside of decentralized governance and network-centric warfare) is the singular development. This involves not only distributed technologies (e.g., social media) but also a series of relatively autonomous local nodes that can communicate with each other without necessarily having to pass through a U.S. state institution (e.g., youth movement horizontal transfers of skills and know-how).

Elsewhere (2011), I have called these types of groups “Genetically Modified Grassroots Organizations” (GMGO). Neither wholly emerging from below (grassroots) nor purely invented by external forces (astroturfing), emergent forces are seeded, and their genetic code altered, to control the vector of the movement. Initial conditions are set to shape future pathways of expression. In AYM’s case this code included “nonviolence” and alignment with U.S. foreign policy (not just any youth groups could participate). The GMGO is a hybrid of groups, wills, technologies and values that do not spring from authentic populist or spontaneous community aspirations (the ideological mystification). But neither can they be said to be purely a result of top–down manipulation (the cynical reduction). The GMGO requires specific analysis of each case’s composition to determine its limits and potentials.

One spore of the AYM reaches into a defining global event of 2011, namely the Egyptian revolt that overthrew Hosni Mubarak. AYM’s pollination of the uprising’s flora (via the April 6 movement and other AYM summit attendees) is important to note, but it is not germane here. Rather, the AYM as dispositif should be viewed as a component (a public secret one) of network sovereignty.

Is it not a contradiction to say that network power now finds sovereign concentrations within it? If we listen to the “liberation rhetoric” of technoboosters, we should believe that the distributed network is tantamount to democracy. Indeed, news accounts framed the Tahrir Square event along a major divide: the sovereign power of Mubarak (depicted in the repetition of his face on street signs) versus networked “people-power” (crowds mobilized via social media and “Internet Freedom”). However, the network form is as much about control as about freedom, as a number of scholars have argued (Chun, 2006; Galloway, 2003). As Galloway and Thacker (2007) argue, “networks, by their mere existence, are not liberating; they exercise novel forms of control” (p. 5).

We’re witnessing a recomposition of network power—new distributed asymmetries beyond the molar cut between network (freedom) and state/institutional (power). To investigate this reconfiguration, Galloway and Thacker (2007) examine the topology of network power. As they note, networks are internally heterogeneous, containing within them “antagonistic clusterings, divergent subtopologies, rogue nodes,” even “incompatible political structures” (p. 34). Network forms can incorporate all types of authority and organization, including sovereignty (pp. 17-18). For Galloway and Thacker, “networks and sovereignty are not incompatible. In fact, quite the opposite: Networks create the conditions of existence for a new mode of sovereignty. America is merely the contemporary figurehead of sovereignty-in-networks” (p. 20). Networks, in this formulation, do not oppose sovereign power but merge with it to expand sovereignty.

Sovereignty here is a power source whose domain is space and subjects, territory, and relationships. In recent political theory, sovereignty names the authority to declare emergency and thus suspend the law (Agamben, 2005). Sovereignty is a concentration of the Schmittian political decision; namely the ability to determine a state of exception. Beyond the juridical sphere, we could say that it involves the broad capacity to make distinctions, anchored by the authority to determine the topology of the political.

In addition to the capacity to suspend the norm, sovereign power also entails the capacity to determine the target of deterrence and intervention. Which subjects are inside and which are excluded? To put it simply, sovereignty differentiates friends from enemies. ⁷ The ability to draw the distinction and make it stick via institutional power is key to sovereignty. Determining friend from enemy is a sovereign power that is publicly received but secretly formed.

The network/sovereignty convergence specifically operates as polemological protocols seek to preempt some forms of connectivity. Within the logic of netwar, networks don’t just expand; they strive to eliminate potentially incompatible nodes, the ones that cannot be absorbed. To wit, netwar analysts Ronfeldt and Arquilla: “Simply put, the West must build its own networks and learn to swarm the enemy network until it can be destroyed” (in Galloway & Thacker, 2007, p. 17). Some forms of connectivity are not resources for freedom—They are positioned as a threat. Connectivity, despite the technoboosterist thesis, is not reducible to a participation that equalizes nodes and actions—It produces another asymmetry. Sovereignty here is the capacity to defuse capacities.

AYM is one example of a network sovereign, one that is designed to foster youth-based social movements via State-sponsored dispositifs. In the cases of social movement media and GMGOs, sovereign power entails the ability to make distinctions, a “selective articulation” that determines friend (those AYM groups that were aligned with U.S. foreign policy interests) and enemy (as we’ll see in examples below; p. 19).

We can make an analytic cut here. In residual Cold-War logic, the sovereign adversaries (Ahmadinejad in Iran, Mubarak in Egypt, Lukashenko in Belarus, Ben Ali in Tunisia) are said to operate State-run mass media. The United States, I would argue, has State-friended social media. The Twitter-usage in the Iranian case and the AYM how-to videos (along with the tech companies in the alliance) are examples of a State-friended type, in which sovereign power selects some subjects (youth movements, corporations, technologies) to be included in their networked power.

Noopoliticians and the Dispositif

The Egyptian uprising of 2011 is an historic turning point for many reasons, not least of which is the newfound visibility of network sovereignty. We need to train our eyes to see these public secret mutations. At times these impersonal futurepublic dispositifs can be glimpsed when a figure momentarily comes out of the shadows into the spotlight. Two are worth mentioning here. Jared Cohen, one of the cofounders of AYM, made the news briefly in the summer of 2009. During peak moments of the Iranian demonstrations, Cohen, who was then working for the State Department, emailed a Twitter cofounder to delay a scheduled maintenance downtime. His public secret work continued when, in a classic example of the “revolving door” model of power, Cohen went on to become the head of Google’s Ideas department. During the Arab Spring, Cohen tweeted that the Egyptian uprising was a “basically leaderless” movement. However, it became apparent that it was an “emergent leader” movement, at least if we examine another Google exec, this one closer to the Egyptian scene.

Wael Ghonim, after vanishing in Cairo for almost 2 weeks during the height of the protests, reemerged with a widely seen interview on Egypt’s DreamTV on February 7, followed quickly by a western media blitz. On Tuesday, February 8th, Time already promoted him as potentially “the leader of the faceless group of young revolutionaries,” Foreign Policy claimed Mubarak’s despotism “may have just created an undisputed leader for a movement,” the Wall Street Journal called him a key figure who was “adopted as symbolic leader” by protest organizers, while CNN posed the question “Is he not inevitably the spiritual leader?” This noopolitician ⁸ skillfully used anonymity and revelation throughout the process. When he told Wolf Blitzer that “This revolution started online,” specifically “on Facebook,” he might have been referring to his own “My Name Is Khalid Said” Facebook page (in which he shrouded himself in the identity of the actual martyr). A lesser-known reason for Ghonim’s praise for social media revolution was his access to Facebook security administrators during crisis times. ⁹ As the face of the faceless, leader of the leaderless, technocratic executive cum man of the people, masked in the name of the dead, disappearing and then getting revealed, working in the shadows with secret hotlines and then in the limelight with media glare, Ghonim embodies the public secret.

Cohen and Ghonim are both public figures, whose news appearances are on record. Ghonim, for instance, topped Time’s mid-2011 top 100 people list. But like the AYM (which can also be found rather easily), these noopoliticians fleetingly appear and disappear, and their sudden stage entrances occult the regularity of backstage dispositifs. The dispositifs are a (public) secret influence on the induction of transnational mediated multitudes into publics. They form what I call flashpublics—a quick mobilization of attention and transmission toward a predefined political objective. ¹⁰ The flash of the flashpublic is also akin to the flashbulb or the flash grenade whose purpose is temporary blinding and stunning. The flashpublic is itself an emergent type of public secret: a public-making mechanism whose roots are, if not in covert institutions, in practices normally reserved for stage magicians.

The Egypt case is a transnational flashpublic (not the people assembled in Cairo, but the U.S. social media spectators) whose predetermined objective is shrouded, but we have been given glimpses. The early 20th century consent managers understood a public to be a result of techniques to assemble mass support behind executive action (Ewen, 1996, p. 147). What would it mean to say a public is needed to align with hidden objectives?

Let’s go back to the AYM and its State Department overseer, James Glassman. Glassman draws a distinction between official and public diplomacy. The former, he says, involves the stated policies and speeches of administration agents (e.g., Obama’s finger-wagging 2009 speech to Egypt and Mubarak). The latter involves a series of less visible, even covert, operations that seek the same objective (economic and political transformation). Here we can point to the global network of civil society building mechanisms created and supported by U.S. institutions. The U.S. National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the Republican-affiliated International Republican Institute (IRI) are key nodes in the “democratic assistance” web. They funnel grants from the State Department’s Agency for International Development (USAID) and from the National Endowment for Democracy, a private organization subsidized by the U.S. Congress, to on-the-ground organizations in nations that need destabilizing. Often this involves funding tech ventures like the Tor Project. ¹¹ The sovereign network involves direct but less visible State support of civil society, including the public secret dispositifs that assemble publics. ¹²

Dispositifs and Dissuasion

Thus far, however, I have only focused on one dimension of the dispositif: the production of a public via an assemblage of funding agents, state institutions, social technologies, youth groups, and media companies. It involves creation, formation, and cultivation. It is the enabling of consent, operating via persuasion. But there is another, complementary, dimension. This one entails different processes: neutralization, deformation, and elimination. It is the disabling of dissent, operating via dissuasion (Virilio, 2000). This dimension is often ignored when discussing the construction of publics, even though it was endemic to them in the early 20th century. ¹³ While a population was organized around an alignment with state objectives (like WWI consent) it was also dissuaded from certain kinds of dissent and action.

For instance, the Espionage Act, and later its amended version as the Sedition Act, restricted the types of communication for subjects. The Sedition Act criminalized “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States . . . or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy.” Arrests were made for speeches, films, newsletters, antidraft pamphlets, and other media forms. Along with the Palmer Raids, which resulted in mass arrests, these Red Scare, antidissent mechanisms all worked to ensure that only particular opinions and actions could be included in the public. Similar practices comprised 20th century domestic enemy production, from immigrant radicals in the 1920s and 1930s to the Red Scare over fifth-column communists in the 1950s to domestic extremists in the 1960s and 1990s (Bratich, 2008; Rogin, 1987). In other words, a public, a “We” at the center of U.S. political life, arrives on the scene only via the management and demonization of dissent (domestic threats that end up functioning as a Them among Us). Futurepublics and flashpublics emerge out of this history of communications warfare.

We return again to the friend/enemy distinction defined by sovereign power. Paired with the State friended media (e.g., those in the AYM) are the user-generated usages that are treated as enemies. Some examples include the arrest of Eliot Madison of the Tin Can Comms Collective at the 2009 G20 protests in Pittsburgh, PA (for “criminal use of communications”—essentially relaying info from police scanners to protestors via txt and twitter), the suspension of cell phone service in Bay Area Rapid Transit stations during protests in 2011, and the destruction of communications equipment during various Occupy Wall Street actions. In other words, some GMGOs are distinguished by their criminalization.

In the cases above, a sovereign state of exception could be enacted partially because of a Terror-War discursive context wherein domestic dissent can be called “low-level terrorist activity,” as Pentagon personnel did. According to the FBI, domestic terrorists fall into one of four categories: (a) lone offender, (b) sovereign citizen, (c) eco-terrorist/animal rights extremist, and (d) anarchist. These are increasingly being used to recategorize protests as “security events.” In other words, the public secret of public-making dispositifs is not just that they depend on secrecy to be effective, but also that they require a discursive environment that can neutralize unwanted counterpublics.

We should also note here the existence of hybrids of persuasion/dissuasion, such as counterradicalization. Counterradicalization is a Terror-War initiative hatched in the sovereign body of, for example, the Presidential Task Force as well as the more dispersed network of experts forming the International Centre for Study of Radicalization and Political Violence. The stated goal is to deter religious fanaticism (Islam, not other monotheisms), while tactically it involves the dissuasion of “extremist” uses of digital technologies. Counterradicalization programs aim to rehabilitate former radicals and, ultimately, prevent undesirable dissent through a combination of outreach, engagement, and after-care. ¹⁴

Once again, we need not see the practice of counterradicalization only where it is named. We could cite here the KONY 2012 phenomenon, which mimicked and tapped into elements of Occupy Wall Street (organizing youth around outrage, mobilizing people into the streets, acting as a meme). However, the counterradicalizing moment occurs when it reshapes the forms of action around particular ends. The open-ended dimension of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was ignored, while all public KONY 2012 operations were deferred to proper authorities (its NGO Invisible Children, the governments of the United States and Uganda). In the KONY case, we saw an attempt at dissuasion of some forms of contagion in favor of others. Whether intentional or not, the desired result is to prevent some types of action by simulating action via other means. ¹⁵

Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) and Sovereign Networks

What contemporary “antidote to willfulness” (to use Harold Lasswell’s term) must be invented to ensure that oppositional assemblies are prevented or rerouted into preferred publics (Ewen, 1996, p. 175)? What immobilization and dissuasion is needed to prevent some networks from individuating? For this we need to turn to the emergent police networks in a contemporary security context.

More than simply thinking here of law enforcement, police are part of an overhaul of governance into an ecology, a security environment. Central to this transformation is how police now operate spatially as a sovereign network as well as temporally via preemptive dissuasion (Elmer & Opel, 2008). In a context defined by the capacity to determine something to be an “extraordinary event,” every assembly is a disturbance, every gathering is a nascent crowd (which by definition needs control). Network sovereign police interrupt the assembly of other actors; they aim to disrupt convergence and dissuade emergence. Not crowd control, but precrowd control.

Three dimensions of police as sovereign network are salient here: (a) the militarization of local police departments, (b) the public/private securitization partnerships, and (c) the translocal transmission of knowledge and power via alliance-making mechanisms. First, we can point to the ways civilian police have converged with the military (weapons, training, structure/communications). Since 9/11/01, local law enforcement agencies have used US$34 billion in federal grants to acquire military equipment. This includes police departments in such alleged terror-rich targets as North Dakota requesting the border patrol’s stealth drones for local surveillance. This militarization might seem like an obvious outcome of external attacks on the United States, but, as mentioned above, the terrorist label has already been applied to domestic dissent. In other words the federal/local sovereign police network is predicated on a series of nationally recognized (though hardly publicized) classifications of enemies. Public assemblies are now treated as virtual terror zones, signaled via official statements and displays of militarized force.

Second, the police network involves public/private partnerships. After what appeared to be a century-long hibernation, the Pinkertons have returned to semivisibility. Once mercenaries for industrial robber barons, Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations now works for banks to “identify, map and track” protesters across social media and at their assemblies, according to their Director of Global Risk (Abelson, 2012). They coordinate information from monitors, both human and machinic, and share that data with police. Banks also request a highly visible police presence in front of their buildings. ¹⁶ At times these partnerships are formalized and regularized, as in the case of the Toronto Association of Police and Private Security (TAPPS), the 2006 “London Olympic Games Act,” or the “fusion centers” in some cities with Occupy actions

The third characteristic of police network sovereignty can be found in the convergence of locals into nodes of skill-sharing and knowledge transfer. Here we can look to such mechanisms as the PERF, a think tank that organizes annual conferences involving dozens of U.S. police chiefs, security heads from private organizations (like the National Football League), U.K. law enforcement officers, and U.S. Federal agents. PERF, especially the published proceedings (e.g. 2006, 2011), is supported by Motorola Corporation. Two of these recent convergences (Police Management of Mass Demonstrations in 2006 and Managing Major Events: Best Practices From the Field in 2011) brought together scores of mini-sovereigns to transfer their experiences and practices horizontally. In addition to this research forum, software systems like the National Incident Management System (NIMS) allow police personnel to experience a “real time” training venue.

Is PERF an institution in a network, a network institution, or a networked dimension of the institution of policing? More work is needed to understand this peculiar hybrid. Its assembly of actors concentrates local chiefs into a node that then can return to their locales. But this is not just a gathering of peers. As Galloway and Thacker (2007) argue, a network articulates and contains hierarchies. In the case of PERF, the local and federal, the governmental and nongovernmental, the domestic and the foreign are assembled with all of their power differentials. The connection of asymmetrical entities is done in part to establish protocols that assist “mutual aid” among the units (Narr, Toliver, Murphy, McFarland, & Ederheimer, 2006, p. 15). PERF is thus not designed for bureaucratic centralization, but a regular temporary assemblage that sets up affordances for future communication across nodes. Not only is knowledge key here to network formations: The social networking component to PERF adds a subjective dimension—the collective individuation of police sovereigns as agential force. PERF is the tactical assemblage pivotal to the ecological overhaul of the State around dissent.

There is also a secret side to PERF. While the conference proceedings are publicly available, the technological affordances (such as NIMS and other systems) are not. In addition, PERF’s crowd management documents do not mention “unknown known” police tactics such as infiltration, entrapment, provocation, communications disruption, and extralegal detentions. Finally, PERF is easily found, but hardly discussed. Its existence is not hidden, but is occulted (overshadowed by other spectacular images of police and law). Police network sovereignty is not a secret. It has proper names, operations, and units. It has been mentioned in news stories. But no matter: This is a public secret, an unknown known whose existence is matched by a fleeting perception by the populace. Or, to put it another way, heroic police TV dramas draw the attention of a public while PERF exerts occulting effects.

Naming these characteristics of secrecy in the police sovereign network only describes its composition. What is its relation to the public secret sphere, especially in its effects and objectives? More than dissuading some convergences and assemblies, police sovereign networks seek to usurp conditions of secrecy and transparency. As police researchers and critics note, dissuading convergence requires a serious investment in surveillance. Threat-assessment pivots on rendering potential elements visible. In other words, preempting secrecy is the precondition to preempting assembly. ¹⁷

In addition to covert tactics like infiltrators, police prevent collective imperceptibility by criminalizing others who seek to organize via secrecy or to turn the transparency tables. For instance, amidst Quebec’s massive casserole demonstrations the Canadian Parliament passed a bill that doubled the jail time for mask-wearing during a protest (Payton, 2012). Taking pictures of the police during political assemblies as well as during ordinary acts of police brutality have been met with extralegal force (arresting documenters, confiscating or disabling equipment). Or take this assessment from a Department of Homeland Security analyst: “What is most disturbing is that members from Occupy Oakland have photographed OPD officers, and compiled enough information on the officers to cause cyberattacks targeting the officers.” The response? “The creative use of intelligence officers, either developed internally or borrowed from the private sector, can afford police agencies the speed, knowledge and agility needed to counter these emerging threats and the chaos that they promote” (Oxnevad, 2012; italics added).

What we see here is a fundamental asymmetry: One network strives to monopolize not just violence, but the authority to determine proper deployments of secrecy and transparency. This unevenness is a subset of the sovereign power of declaring a “state of exception.” State of exception is invoked when police define bank shareholder meetings as “extraordinary events,” activating the sovereign networks (militarized local police, private/public surveillance alliances, operations learned during PERF) to preempt assembly. These sovereign acts are increasingly opaque in terms of access while transparent in terms of results.

The asymmetrical control of secrecy and revelation symbiotically results in and draws from an overaccumulation of the capacity to invoke emergency scenarios. Sovereign modes of individuation promote certain kinds of mutations while dissuading emergent others. But can they contain those mutations? What could new antagonism against networks be? Galloway and Thacker (2007) argue that it cannot be symmetrical, that it cannot be another network. Instead, they argue that new network sovereigns will breed an antiweb politics:

This type of asymmetric intervention, a political form bred into existence as the negative likeness of its antagonist, is the inspiration for the concept of ‘the exploit,’ a resonant flaw designed to resist, threaten, and ultimately desert the dominant political paradigm. (Galloway & Thacker, 2007, p. 21)

No wonder, then, that in this increasing polarization of networks around secrecy, the most popular figure of antagonism is Anonymous. The masked image of Guy Fawkes, the distributed raids, the network of projects and agents—all of these are drawn to the “improper collective name” of Anonymous (Deseriis, 2012). ¹⁸ How does Anonymous constitute a network antagonism as well as further entanglements?

Anonymous is an exploit and a reversal of the state of exception. On a semiotic level, the use of the Guy Fawkes mask is an appropriation of a signifier from V for Vendetta, especially its Hollywoodized version. As mentioned earlier, pop occulture, while part of the public secret sphere, is open to appropriation insofar as that occulture revives secret agents not just of the State (spies, government seers) but of the war machine (witches, ninjas, sorcerers). The mask allows this war machine to return, exploiting a State-sponsored world of secret agents to both flee and oppose.

More broadly, Anonymous seeks to autonomize secrecy and security—to reappropriate and put into circulation secrecy to enhance the powers of collective subjects. Anonymous, in addition to being a meme, ethos, or organizing principle, is a public affirmation of secrecy, an implicit demand for its extension to all sectors, not just concentrated in the hands and boxes of the privileged. Anonymous exploits the State accumulation of secrecy’s power by “making use of what is hidden” (Debord, 1998).

This kind of secrecy, a popular secrecy, is rooted in usage and custom, not law (Bratich, 2007). It belongs to what Paolo Virno (2004) refers to as jus resistentiae, the right to resistance (pp. 42-43). Jus resistentiae is the obverse of the state of exception, as it allows for the suspension of the legitimacy of order when that order has tended toward despotism. Against the disruptive and invasive procedures of centralized power, the jus resistentiae was invoked to “defend plural experiences, forms of nonrepresentative democracy, of nongovernmental usages and customs” (p. 43). And this right was defensive, even reactive, by “safeguarding forms of life which have already been affirmed as free-standing forms, thus protecting practices already rooted in society” (p. 42).

Today, we might say, the safeguards are not just for already existing customs and practices under threat of extinction. Instead, refuge is for the forms of life not yet arrived, for emergent mutants, for conditions under which new forms are innovated. Antagonism and democracy means developing new hybrids of networks and institutions. These hybrids need protection against State despotism—a popular security.

Opening up to the archaic unleashes a number of virtual tendencies, ones that can only be briefly mentioned. First is the polemological revival of a war machine, one whose historic function was to ward off the concentration of power (Clastres, 1987; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Wilson, 1998). Anonymous’ secrecy is an active revival of these customs—a preventive resistance insofar as it preempts the concentration of the sovereign network.

Is Anonymous an example of Galloway and Thacker’s antiweb? Not another network but something that pushes through and unravels the ability of a network sovereign to form? For now this is an open question, as the topology of an antiweb is not easily visualized. While Anonymous doesn’t answer what the antiweb is, it does provoke us to think about postnetwork antagonisms (Coleman 2012; Halpin 2012). But perhaps this is not a new development, but an active revival of maneuvers and customs that were relegated to “secret corners and cracks” (Wilson, 1998, p. 76). Anonymous challenges us to find the basis of the antiweb in older forms of power (sovereign accumulation, customs of resistance) as the historico-ontological basis for the renewal of struggles.

Of course, there is a countermanoeuver by network sovereigns, who deploy conventional techniques of infiltration (mimicry), now with the easily retooled mask itself. The Department of Homeland Security gives it an appropriate name: Operation Unmask. However, police must use a mask (the undercover infiltrator) to perform this operation. In doing so, the mask proliferates even while network sovereigns try to monopolize its dispersion. Michael Taussig (2002) notes that masking involves the practice of nahual or the capacities of metamorphosis (pp. 239-242). The State (now in networked sovereign form) seeks to control all forms of becoming via coercive exposure, a concentration of the capacity to mask and unmask.

Even the attempts to de-facialize surveillance and control, like the big data model of surveillance TrapWire, do not stop popular secrecy. Anonymous-related hacktivists along with Wikileaks responded by revealing TrapWire’s existence and pervasiveness amidst the Stratfor email leaks in 2011. The response once again displays despotic anticommunication: a State crackdown on leaks (secretion) by classifying document-release as cyberterrorism. The demonization of Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald after the revelation of NSA power in 2013 furthers this despotism. Amid these entanglements and mimicries, we face yet again the intensification of antagonism, specifically around the condensation of sovereign powers amidst networks.

Conclusion

How does one value transparency in the public secret sphere? Ultimately, we need to reconsider any easy call for transparency. If it is a demand made on the State, we immediately encounter a shadowy context in which that State has been managing secrecy and revelations for some time now. Edward Snowden’s exposure was itself immersed in the murkiness accompanying all revealers. In and of itself, transparency can be spectacular, rendering social actors into spectators, even spectators who believe they are in on it because, as Guy Debord (1998) notes, they’re in the front row.

Instead, we can examine the contours of the public secret sphere as a way of locating new hybrids, actors, and antagonisms.

When it comes to sovereign networks, the contemporary development of the public secret sphere is inescapably tied to accumulation, disruption, and antagonism. How do we distinguish among these hybrids, between public secrecy and popular secrecy, among entangled secret networks? Here we return to the polemological dimension, as secrecy and transparency are not evaluated as values in themselves but rather situated in a terrain that distributes powers. Sovereign power now becomes hypervisible as overaccumulation, even contradiction. One network (police sovereigns) can only operate tyrannically, needing to disrupt the capacities of another network (dissenters, OWS) from developing. ¹⁹ Command is distilled, exposing the binding mechanism of the State as antidemocratic, as concentrated despotism suspending even the most basic of democratic rights. When such despotic accumulation of mechanisms takes place, what becomes transparent is the coercion at the heart of contemporary consent and dissent management.

Another disentangling device can be found in the concept pharmakon. As writers like Derrida, Stiegler, and Virno have noted, the pharmakon names a condition in which the cure can be found in poisons. Which networks promote the curative? Which exploits involve curating and care (Galloway & Thacker, 2007)? It is in the shadows, or more accurately in our relation to shadows, that we can evaluate mutants and reinvigorate a politics of the networked collective.