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PUBLIC SECRECY AND IMMANENT SECURITY

The Spring 2004 issue of the Mass School of Law Journal was a special issue titled, ‘Secrecy is Everywhere’. This enigmatic phrase, which itself seems to be everywhere, poses a riddle for us to decipher. For it is not the case that secrets are everywhere, but that secrecy itself has become omnipresent, even public, in ways that do not destroy secrecy. Secrecy proliferates everywhere, but is not negated in revelation. How can we communicate this secrecy proliferating? How are we to think of secrecy in the current conjuncture, in what has been called ‘The New Normal?’ The New Normal is a term used post-9/11 to signify a world destabilized by terrorism, economic fluctuations, and contagion prevention (notably SARS and Avian Flu). Significantly, the New Normal means that stability is no longer equivalent to normality. At best, everyday life is a managed instability a permanent crisis that has formalized what Brian Massumi (1993) calls ‘the politics of everyday fear’. The emergence of permanent and infinite war, with its unspecified enemy and immanentization of terror into everyday life, is constitutive of this New Normal. And it is here that Homeland (In)security moves beyond being a State initiative to become reflexive governance in a whole way of life. How does the recent increase in public secrecy contribute to this? In this essay, I argue that recent events in the construction of Homeland Security compel us to revise our conceptions of publicity, secrecy, and activist strategy. I will specifically speak to some of the recent changes in secrecy and its offerings. First, I examine post-9/11 innovations in strategic secrecy, specifically focusing on the Terror/War, Iraq Theater. Homeland security, I argue, depends on the spectacular deployment of secrecy. However, marshalling secrecy as strategy means it is not reducible to the instrumentalizations by the State. In the second part I explore the possibilities posed by what we might call popular, minor or insurgent secrecy. I argue that reconceptualizing secrecy as strategy not only unmoors it from its State deployments, it also provides conceptual tools to rethink security itself. Following Paolo Virno’s argument that the multitude has a ‘need for refuges that safeguard us from previous forms of protection’, this section ends by finding in the proliferation of secrecy a strategic potential for inventing new safeguards and countersecurity.