Secrecy,publicity and the milieu of security

Critical scholarship about contemporary practices of security is not very optimistic about the state of the public. As Clive Barnett has forcefully argued in his article, there is a fairly widespread presumption among critical scholars that a kind of zero-sum relationship exists between securitization and publicness. This presumption holds that the more governments emphasize security as an overarching framework for public policy, the more they privilege temporalities of emergency and exception, and the more they cultivate affects of fear and anxiety among their citizenries, then the more degraded and eviscerated becomes the quality of public life in liberal democracies. Barnett challenges this pessimistic view on at least two fronts. First, he argues that critical scholarship tends to overstate the power of discourses and programmes of security to inculcate particular modes of subjectivity within a citizenry. Subjects are not as pliant and easily shaped by technologies of government as is often suggested, and critical scholarship needs a more modest account that registers the limits to practices of subject formation. Second – and this is the line of argumentation that interests me here – Barnett argues that critical scholarship has largely overlooked the various ways in which public values can be constitutive of security policies and not merely the latter’s victims. It has also failed to grasp that security programmes can become surfaces of emergent modes of public feeling and public action. As evidence of the latter he cites the extraordinary growth of humanitarian reason and how it has become closely articulated with security interventions in recent years. Humanitarianism is by no means an unambiguous good. Nevertheless, as Barnett insists, its ascendance suggests that public values and modes of public action are not being eroded by securitization. Instead they are being reconfigured.

Barnett makes an important contribution to debates about security precisely because he calls on us to take a more circumstantial and one might say sceptical view of security. Foucault famously rejected what he called ‘the blackmail of the Enlightenment’, stating that one should ‘refuse everything that might present itself in the form of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative’ of being ‘for’ or ‘against’ (Foucault, 1997: 312–313). I read Barnett as proposing a similar refusal – of the blackmail of security. This is a move I largely support. Rather than fostering reflexivity, some versions of security studies display a kind of reflex action: security is cast almost automatically as sinister, suspicious and nearly always anti-democratic. What we need instead is a form of inquiry that is attuned to the ambiguities and indeterminacies of security policy, one that takes its task to be not the denunciation of security, as such, but its reworking in relation to democratic concerns and public action.

In the remainder of this short commentary I seek to extend the argument Barnett has initiated by connecting it to an issue he largely passes over, namely secrecy. I want to develop the point that a better understanding of secrecy will deepen and complicate Barnett’s argument that transformations in the milieu of security are giving rise not to the eclipse of publicness but its reconfigurement.

The study of secrecy, and especially governmental secrecy, has recently made important advances. Whilst a liberal view of secrecy still prevails in disciplines like political science – where debate still orbits around questions about the trade-off between secrecy and openness in government policy – in fields like geography, anthropology and science studies, we have seen a renewed interest in theorizing secrecy as an affective mode of communication and a technology of power. This research has taken a number of theoretical, methodological and thematic forms. It includes investigations into the paradoxes of public secrecy (Horn, 2011; Taussig, 1999), the history of classified knowledge as a form of anti-epistemology (Galison, 2005), ethnographic inquiry into the cultures of secrecy that prevail in weapons laboratories (Masco, 2006), military bases, and other closed spaces (Belcher and Martin, 2013), and political sociologies of the leak (Ku, 1998), the scandal (Thompson, 2000) and other related cultural practices through which actors negotiate boundaries of the open and closed in political life. Thanks to such efforts a richer and more complex account of secrecy is emerging.

How might this renewed scholarly interest in secrecy deepen and complicate the argument Barnett advances, namely that we take a multisided, open-ended and circumstantial view of the relationship between security, public action and democratic politics? There are, no doubt, many ways that the study of secrecy could contribute to our understanding of the security/publicity relationship. In what follows I focus on one line of inquiry. I want to briefly consider the relationship between secrecy and the epistemology of security policy.

The critical literature on security tends to treat the knowability of its objects as unproblematic. Whether the topic is emergency preparedness or facial recognition technology, the presumption is that policies and practices exist in the world and, with the help of appropriate methods and methodologies, we can research them. Barnett seems to share this presumption when he advises that scholars should carefully examine ‘the forms of justification and legitimation these [security policy] fields operate with and through’ (p. 266).

But what do we do when policies are formulated and conducted covertly? How do we proceed when political actors invoke national security and enact closure so as to minimize their need to furnish public rationalizations and justifications for their actions? There is, of course, an element of secrecy inherent in most policy domains. Secrecy is likely to arise in any area that requires bureaucracy for its conduct (Weber, 1946: 232–235) and in many aspects of social and interpersonal life (Simmel, 1906). But when the degree of secrecy is intense and well institutionalized, then the policy domain and objects themselves become blurry and opaque. When we investigate a very contemporary issue like counterterrorism programmes, it seems we are dealing with quasi-objects, with phenomena that have a very partial presence and to which social inquiry has only a very limited and fragmentary form of access. What exactly are the modes of public reasoning at stake here and how can we know them?

To begin to answer this question, we need to recognize that some policies and programmes approximate the condition Pozen (2010) has termed deep secrecy. Information about them is so well guarded that, at a given moment, only a closed network of insiders know of their existence. To the vast majority of the public, they are unknown unknowns: we are simply unaware that particular secrets are being kept from us. Of course, nothing assures the permanence of deep secrets. Leaks happen. Accidents happen (Paglen, 2010). Regimes change. Programmes sometimes get declassified. Nevertheless, the concept of deep secrecy is important since it captures aspects of the qualities and intensities of secrecy and hints at a spectrum of states of non-knowing rather than a sharp boundary between hidden and visible.

But many other classified programmes and covert operations are not deep secrets so much as known unknowns. We know they exist but what most of us know is very partial and uneven. Take the example of the US drone policy whereby armed drones are being used as instruments of counterterrorism and targeted assassination (Shaw and Akhter, 2012). This has operated since about 2001 but only received official acknowledgement quite recently. What is interesting and seemingly paradoxical is that the drone programme is public and secret at one and the same time. Since it is secret all manner of operational criteria remain highly classified. For example, the Obama Administration refuses to disclose the criteria by which it condemns suspects to death by drone strike (Coll, 2014). The secrecy of drone policy is also manifest in the fact that the kinds of official texts and statements by which scholars might conduct a close reading of the forms of public reason at work – the kind of reading that Barnett advocates – seem to be rather thin on the ground. It is not as though one can point to a rich official archive comprising white papers, policy statements, official statistics or budgetary tables. A few white papers and legal memos have made it into the public sphere through leaks and anonymous statements, often to great public fanfare. But overall, the picture is different from a policy domain like transportation security where, typically, a dense official record is available and readily accessible.

At the same time, there is much about US drone policy that is known, albeit not through direct official channels. Public understanding of this programme has emerged in an uneven and piecemeal manner through multiple routes and mechanisms. Investigative journalists offer their readers ‘inside’ knowledge about the political machinations of the drone programme in Washington and on the ‘front lines’ of the war on terror in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen. Other civil society projects attempt to furnish statistical data on the incidence of drone strikes, the proportion of civilians killed and the psychological impact of drone war on communities. Courageous residents in the targeted regions have produced their own photographic records of the human face of drone violence (Walters, 2014). Meanwhile, the fact there are many grey areas and unknowns has not prevented drone policy and targeted assassination from becoming a forum of heated academic disagreement and public debate, with exponents highlighting its precision, economy and even humanitarianism and critics its risks, like collateral killing and military escalation.

All of this leads us to a somewhat paradoxical conclusion that, in a roundabout way, both supports Barnett’s argument whilst also qualifying and extending it. The point is that when a policy domain is designated as classified and governed according to various conventions of secrecy it does not necessarily serve to diminish its public profile. Public interest is not necessarily eclipsed or diluted but on the contrary intensified by the peculiar aura which secrecy confers upon its objects. Much of this has to do with the psychic charge which Simmel – in one of the first sociological treatments of the secret – clearly understood. ‘Secrecy involves a tension which, at the moment of revelation, finds its release. This constitutes the climax in the development of the secret; in it the whole charm of secrecy concentrates and rises to its highest pitch’ (Simmel, 1906: 465). Such is the aura, the energy that gathers in the secret that it is distinguished ‘by a degree of attention that published reality [cannot] command’ (1906: 464).

Foucault’s move to think of security in terms of its milieu is an important one, as Barnett recognizes. It is important because it locates the study of security not in institutions or speech acts but in dispersed processes, mechanisms and technologies that have a contingent relationship to the state, a relationship that critical analysis always has to establish empirically. Whether we want to understand the kinds of subjectivity that populate these milieux, or the affects that distinguish security governance, future research should take seriously the difference that the peculiar ‘charms’ and seductions of secrecy impart to the politics and publics of security.