Political sociology of secrecy

Students of political history is often faced with the problem of accounting for normative processes of violence, gross injustices, and disavowal. In this chapter, departing from positivistic characterization of relations of power where the being of power is conceptualized only through tangible effects, we will analyze absentee character of power without reducing it to presence.

“The state organized immorality–internally: as police, penal law, classes, commerce, family; externally: as will to power, to war, to conquest, to revenge.

How does it happen that the state will do a host of things that individual would never countenance? –through division of responsibility, of command, and of execution.” The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche (p. 382.)

As the prominent theorist of power in critical theory, Nietzsche highlights divisions that allow possibility of executing tasks which would be perhaps unbearable for a single individual. Nietzsche uses power as a descriptive analytics ad not as a sufficient prescriptive tool insofar as undifferentiated idealization or demonization of power would be meaningless. Yet, he finds a disavowal of the desire for power operating underneath the modern political projects and scientific methods. Internally, within the domain of the states, classification of population into functionally separated units allows conducting large-scale projects whose scope, purpose and true-effect might be escaping its participants.

While separation of powers into executive, legislative and judiciary branches is introduced as a defense against unlimited exercise of power, it also thereby allows growth of modern political systems into unprecedented scopes. Beyond formalized separation of powers lies the political character of distributed social relations. The networked character of division of labor in society produces a general displacement of sovereign subject as in metonymic sliding of the signifiers in structuralist theory as discussed in the chapter on power. De-centering and networking of relations of power allow accumulation of enormous capabilities of power without pinning this power to any particular subjectivity, social formation (families, associations, councils etc.) or political office.

Resonating with the processes of naturalization, de-centering of growing networks of power leads to disappearance of historicity of emergence of this network thereby minimizes the possibility of critiquing its function. Thereby, classical political philosophy of Montesquieu (1748) that shaped modern constitutions by creating a theoretical framework for separation of powers becomes inadequate for where operativity of network power is irreducible to three branches and legal formalism.

What’s an epistemological problem from the scholarly perspective is arguably political effectivity from the perspective of networks of power. Perhaps, contra Foucault’s dictum of co-operativity of knowledge and power, there is also an asymmetrical relationship as well between knowledge and power. Power grows by erasing its functioning, by disavowal, in short, in secrecy. There’s a correlate process of growing visibility of governed bodies and growing opacity of effective logic of power that eschews generalization. Symptomatic of this shift, executive decrees, arduous interpretative processes as well as exceptional ad hoc solutions take precedence over mere application of law. Thus, state is both the mask and the ghost vis-à-vis networks. Its concreteness functions as a fig-leaf that covers non-identity of effective networks. Here, the topic of secrecy more than particular particular secrets, like a turn from content to form, allows exploration of this problematic without erasing its intangible and inaccessible dimensions. Secrecy is the modality whereby networks and states encounter their differences. In his philosophical investigation into Being that encapsulates all beings, Nietzschean philosopher Heidegger examines this ontological uncertainty of the state.

Technologies of secrecy and surveillance

In this chapter, we will contend with theorists in their move from secret to secrecy. After a review of some mainstream issues in the sociology of secret, we will examine this material to delve into question of anonymity of contemporary networked power with the hope of showing the need to establish a genealogical link between the sovereign organization of secrecy and sophisticated techno-scientific developments that build on the biopolitical infrastructure of previous century. We will synthesize the technological account of power with psychoanalytical writings of Sigmund Freud in the latter’s reactions to political repression in the context of warfare and in the way in the political repression has been constitutive in the theory of unconscious processes that edit conscious thoughts and feelings. We will extrapolate from this constitutive conjecture a model of contemporary political ground where modulation of energy flows and information flows will become central preoccupations in a decentered political field.

Sociology of secrecy

With the intrusion of ever more elaborate capacities of surveillance into everyday life the topic of secrecy continues to occupy public debate. Next to the actors and institutions traditionally associated with secrecy such as security agencies of the states, new personal devices, alongside impersonal digitized environments, which effectively form a living network of information extracting minute data from everyday life of populations; demand renewed and nuanced conceptions of secrecy.

Secrecy as a social phenomenon can be considered by elaborating on the problematics advanced in the subfields of sociology of knowledge, political sociology, and history of sciences. Secrecy then is understood both as secret in the sense of concealed content and secrecy as a modality of social relationship. Then these studies analyze historically specific organizational secrecy and situated production and role of secret knowledge in social relations. In this respect, understanding the role, value and nature of secrets require study of the type of relationship in which they operate. It is also important to note that secrets and secrecy are conceptualized always in relational terms, therefore the field is not standardized. Secrecy is always understood in contrast to different modes of behavior depending on the context in which the analysis has been made e..g, secret vs. open, secret vs. public etc.

Agonism between competition vs. access

Vermeir and Margocsy in their introduction to the special issue on secrecy in British Journal for History of Science (2012) underlines exactly this ambivalence regarding the nature of secret and secrecy and remind us the unresolved character of conceptual debate in the literature. They review historiographic work dealing with the social practices of secrecy focusing on especially European and North American contexts.

On the one hand, commercial incentives and market economy creates sociopolitical environments where withholding information, skills and new inventions from public sight becomes a rational tactic. Thus, as a result, the temporality of knowledge-production is managed and punctuated by profit and political concerns. In this understanding, culture of secrecy is an outcome of social life dominated by dynamics of competitiveness. Authors support this argument by emphasizing the process of origination of idea of intellectual property in early modern urban centers as craft secrets and trade secrets.

On the other hand, countering this position especially with regard to emergence of scientific knowledge production, they underline how modern science has arisen out of the system of courtly patronage in which scientists had the incentive to publish openly in order to be rewarded for their work. Vermeir and Margocsy refer to the work of Joel Mokyr who argues that it was the Enlightenment ethos of openness and reduced access-costs to scientific knowledge that catalyzed industrial revolution. Social theorists such as Habermas underlined the importance of public sphere in the formation of Enlightenment culture of openness wherein “professional, academic and amateur journals, scientific shows and demonstration lectures and scientific discussion in coffee houses, clubs or newspapers” practically constituted space of openness as opposed to protected privacy and secrecy.  It is in fact within this tension between private interests in an increasingly capitalist market economy and unfolding spirit and practices of public knowledge, secrecy becomes a problematic dynamic entangled with political, economic and social implications.

Sociologist Robert Merton puts this point succinctly in the politically overburdened atmosphere in the aftermath of Second World War: “The commercialism of wider society had a more pernicious effect on science than issues of national security. The communism of the scientific ethos was abstractly incompatible with the definition of technology as private property in a capitalistic economy.” The question of how to reconcile private interests invested in technology with the ‘communal sprit’ of scientific advances was pressing as it is today.

Yet, the question of secrecy can be posed in different ways to show the role of diverse actors which are by-passed in the binary opposition of private and public spheres which respectively correspond to the values of secrecy and openness with regard to innovation and science. As the authors of the article notes, the equation of private enterprises with secrecy and public space with openness is untenable. “While commercial secrecy has shifted from mercantilist governments to multinational companies, the modern state maintains a strong interest in the techno-scientific as it relates to the military and issues of national security.” Thus, secrecy in scientific and technological research is not only a rationalist outcome of capitalist market economy but it is also an essential military necessity and tool. For instance, nuclear research was organized as military research where physicists were isolated from public and they were prohibited from publishing the results of their findings in public journals. With the advent of the neoliberal age, the state also started to outsource its intelligence operations and research to private companies complicating entanglements of private and public stakes involved in the formation of secrecy surrounding production of scientific knowledge.

In this sense, secrecy needs to be situated not only within social dynamics such as competitiveness stemming from particular economic arrangements but also placed within shifting power relations which may take many shapes and may stand heterogeneous to economic logics. Instead of merely focusing on why secrets proliferate, one might ask what kind of relation secrecy produces. Vermeir and Margocsy argues that “What is kept secret is not even relevant for studying the dynamics of secrecy i.e. practices of simulation and dissimulation, the rhetoric of secretiveness or the strategies of hiding and revealing that are employed.” (p. 160)

Then, contending with the fact that secrecy is essentially tied to the notions and practices of power which are historically specific, we can ask whether it is accurate to state that “modern infrastructure of science is distinct by developing powerful incentives for the practice of openness and public good.” There is a baked-in-contradiction to modern power with regard to its attitude towards information withholding and distributing. During the age of scientific humanism, the individuated populations also become biopolitical units within the systems of power that interpellate them as “entrepreneurial selves,” therefore incentivized towards privatization and socialization of knowledge. Moreover, studied and invested by an assemblage of neoliberal economy working with “datalogical” and “networked” science in terms of “neurochemical self”, every moment of openness actually becomes the possibility of establishment of a new asymmetrical relation of power. As Deleuze states in his seminal work, Difference and Repetition, mere abstract statement of difference in this political context is not adequate to affirmation. Absence of selection and process leads to reification and fetishization of objects and figures of thought.

“Those commentators on Marx who insist upon the fundamental difference between Marx and Hegel rightly point out that in Capital the category of differenciation (the differenciation at the heart of a social multiplicity: the division of labour) is substituted for the Hegelian concepts of opposition, contradiction and alienation, the latter forming only an apparent movement and standing only for abstract effects separated from the principle and from the real movement of their production. Clearly, at this point the philosophy of difference must be wary of turning into the discourse of beautiful souls: differences, nothing but differences, in a peaceful coexistence in the Idea of social places and functions … but the name of Marx is sufficient to save it from this danger.

The problems of a society, as they are determined in the infrastructure in the form of so-called ‘abstract’ labour, receive their solution from the process of actualisation or differenciation (the concrete division of labour). However, as long as the problem throws its shadow over the ensemble of differenciated cases forming the solution, these will present a falsified image of the problem itself. It cannot even be said that the falsification comes afterwards: it accompanies or doubles the actualisation. A problem is always reflected in false problems while it is being solved, so that the solution is generally perverted by an inseparable falsity. For example, according to Marx, fetishism is indeed an absurdity, an illusion of social consciousness, so long as we understand by this not a subjective illusion born of individual consciousness but an objective or transcendental illusion born out of the conditions of social consciousness in the course of its actualisation. There are those for whom the whole of differenciated social existence is tied to the false problems which enable them to live, and others for whom social existence is entirely contained in the false problems of which they occupy the fraudulent positions, and from which they suffer.” (Deleuze, 1968/2004, p. 207)

Both in the case of the figure of the scientist and in the biopolitical capture of human behavior, a regime of power and economy replaced the model of secret as information-withheld-by-rational-actor with distributed secrecy. Then, we can ask the question of secrecy by reference to the theories of sociality which move beyond conceptions of intentional secret in the form of individuals or institutions withholding information to an anti-humanist epistemology of social life developed in the theoretical lineage running from Nietzsche and Heidegger through Althusser to Foucault and more recent social theory, where political technologies are diffused to society in complex ways where secrecy emerges less as in the content, i.e. withholding; and more in the form i.e., distributing information that circulates dissociatively. This distinction then becomes epistemologically necessary to understand advanced types of power relations whereby the scientist, the expert and the state merely function as figures of a field that transcend them in its efficacy. In this sense, historical nature of the system cannot be tackled/uncovered except in the elaborate and, to some extent impossible, immanent critique of it.

From secret to secrecy

In this sense, we contend with the instructive move of the authors from focusing on the content of secret hidden for the reasons of profit or security towards critical elaborations on the notion of secrecy as the set of dynamic social relations. At the same time moving forward, by conversing with Foucault’s study of unfolding forms of power which bring detailed visibilities that can be acted upon, we will further comment on the uncanny constellation of secrecy of power with visibilities of subjects and populations.

In thinking with Foucault and reflecting on how modern discourses of ‘man’ brought together institutional concerns of governing his actions on the basis of scientific concerns about knowing his nature, it becomes apparent that man appears as a surface, as set of possible and traceable trajectories tightly made an object of knowledge, as cluster of molecular life-capacities that falls increasingly under the radar, net and circulation of certain analytics, namely, microphysics of power.

Then, political theoretical problem becomes the possibility of thinking secrecy alongside modern forms of power such as “discipline” and “biopolitics” which are more concerned with diffused system of visibilities than secrecies in Foucault’s theory. It is a question Foucault himself asked in his studies of sexuality by contrasting repressive hypothesis with incitement to constantly talk about sexuality. Therefore, Foucault rejected elaborating his thinking on power beyond positivities it shapes —he did not enter into speculation.

In this context, it would be interesting to note that Foucault came from a family of medical doctors. Specifically, his father was a surgeon. While it would be reductive to claim that this is the only determinant factor in Foucault’s obsession with describing the ever unfolding surfaces upon which power is applied, there is nevertheless an apparent interest examining emergence and breakdown of systems, the way they are wounded by accidents of history and the way they display a complexity (incomplete set of relations of power with respective to technology and historicity) under the smooth surface of the skin (“meaning”).

In the interiority of individual or political body, Foucault have seen overlapping systems whose logic cannot be completely derived from one another. Simultaneously, this does not stop him from articulating local affinities, transfers and frictions, i.e. interrelations between systems such as disciplines of body and judicial articulation of reform program, neoliberal economic theory and national security. In fact, for him writing critically about power allowed its problematization. Therefore, he did not write or lecture about the logic of his other obsession namely creative expression and experimentation as if to avoid these becoming fixed rules to be repeated. Only in his late work, Foucault turned towards “The Use of Pleasure” where the cultivation of subjectivity, heterogeneous to logic of oppression, is explored. Thus, extra-formalism of secrecy in the age of networks carry over this ambivalent relation of power to subjectivity and life.

Having in mind this ambivalence of secrecy and visibility, next we will focus on the sociologist Georg Simmel’s conceptualization of secrecy in his 1906 article. We will utilize his work to discuss Foucault’s historical grounding of technologies of subjectivity (the genre of case, panopticon, statistical production of population, etc.) which bring forth visibilities that can be acted upon.

Socialization and secrecy

“Secrecy is a universal sociological form, which as such, has nothing to do with moral valuations of its content” (p. 463) For Simmel, social situations are intrinsically imbued with secrecy which is “a necessary element of human society.” With this postulate, he drew attention to structures formed around secrets irreducible to the withheld content. In fact, this generative aspect of secret will give way to the modern genre of detective story starting with Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter, growing its popularity with the serial of rendering of Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. In the work of Franz Kafka, this absent center formed around the negativity of secret will allow him to differentiate the processes that encapsulate the modern subject. Simmel writes:

If we read Simmel’s beginning remarks on secrecy in other terms, we can observe that secrecy is situational, existential, and confrontational. It emerges on a continuum of knowing and not knowing, presupposing and misunderstanding. We see that it is from their own interiority individuals attempt to reach towards the other in order to code the terms and rules of sociality under which they will operate. Emphasis is made more on the existential tasks of intentional subject than conditions which always already determine the capacity, possibility and ground of social relation such as ideology, language, or technicity. In this respect, the nature of secrecy requires us to keep open the question of right unit of analysis and methodology. The analysis has to oscillate between 1) humanism, i.e. conceptualization focusing on illuminating the human condition and at times basing itself on the rational intentionality of individuals to find the meaning in a given social problem or text 2) anti-humanism (from Nietzsche and Freud to Deleuze and Foucault) whereby effective agents of history are not given through the motivational structures of humans as these are effects of relations of power sedimented by socio-physical environments.

Simmel goes on to underline the element of reciprocity in relationships. The difficulty of detecting the ways in which knowledge is affected by the standpoint from which it is formed.

At the same time, Simmel detects a process of impersonalization because of complexity of objectification of social in modern contexts. Through institutions and force of public opinions the element of subjective information significantly diminishes in making sense of the social situation as they are “so fixed and reliable that one needs only certain externalities with reference to the other to have confidence necessary for the associated action.” (p. 451)

Simmel coined an ideal sphere which characterizes the personal boundary that have connotations regarding person’s significance and honor. Reverberating Nietzshe’s pathos of distance that allows creation of values, he understands distance as a sociologically important dimension of the extent to which intrusions of knowledge-demands can be made. “To penetrate this circuit is violation of his personality.” (p. 454)

It is interesting note that modern science, in his bracketed-off neutral space of examination of body and psyche, can get rid of this ‘ideal sphere’ in many ways. This is possible without explicitly undermining honor as one becomes a-case-under-study erasing singular status of individual enjoyed outside of scientific gaze. Hence the very question of social play of secrecy is eliminated or transformed into a non-question from the beginning in the face of scientific practices that deal with the individual as a case. This can be placed in contrast to Simmel’s reflections on the practices of reticence exercised in non-western cultures:

This practice of self-knowledge in the form of living memory of tradition residing in the member of society becomes obsolete in biopolitical sciences of modern societies. Man becomes a generic capacity to be invested, a productive force to be maximized, and a biological unit similar to any scientific object studied by the scientist who is subjectively detached from the method of inquiry. He or she is also through veils of scientific community operates on the body and psyche without making himself or herself socially present to social play of secrecy and knowledge. This transformation is beautifully captured by Foucault who described the passage from singular intimacy entertained with knowledge to becoming a case of impersonal corpus scientific archive:

Transformation of scientific subjectivity as it is explained by Michel Foucault is paralleled with an impersonal institutionalization of science which resonates with elements of secret societies that emerge as secondary communities investing in an imaginary abstract ideal which shifts moral commitments of its members.

For Weber as well, sociologically, secrecy is an inevitable reality of institution. Every bureaucracy seeks to further their superiority through the means of keeping its intentions and knowledge secret. The aspect of secrecy lies at the heart of institutional objectives directed toward outside whether it is case of an economic competition or political hostility. For him this direction toward outside leads to secrecy. (Weber 2006)

He notes intrinsic fragmentation of knowledge within state. “Bureaucracy naturally prefers a poorly informed, and hence powerless, parliament –at least insofar as this ignorance is compatible with the bureaucracy’s own interest.” (Weber 2006) On this point, Weber is in line with Simmel as shared secrecy becomes the glue of shared identity of a group. Simmel contends that “social unities may rest, so far as their content is concerned, upon many sorts of presumption about grounds of confidence” (p. 472)

“The mere form of secrecy as such holds the associates safer than they would otherwise be from disturbing influences, and thereby make concord more feasible”. At this point, we move from inter-personal secrecy to secrecy as an instrument of group formation. By means of secrecy which is protected by highly ritualized socializing techniques, a particular society within general society is created.

Individuals who belong to an organization imbued with secrecy acquires a kind of anonymity in their relation to external society which puts forward problematic of responsibility in organized societies in a new way: “Nevertheless, responsibility is quite as immediately joined with ego –in fact that removing the marks of identity of the person has, for naïve understanding in question, the effect of abolishing responsibility.” (p. 496)

“The irresponsibility is here also the consequence or the symbol of the same intensified sociological de-individualization which goes with the secrecy of group-action. In all directorates, faculties, committees, boards of trustees, etc., whose transactions are secret, the same thing holds. The individual disappears as a person in the anonymous member of the ring, so to speak, and with him the responsibility, which has no hold upon him his intangible special character.” (p. 497)

For Simmel, if on the one hand secret societies limit the actions of their members by strict mechanisms of control rely on internal tradition, on the other hand the secondary socialization within secret group frees the individual in its action in and towards greater society where goal of the group holds the upper hand in the case of conflict with the morality and legality of external society. Conversely, this creates an intrinsic tension from the outset: “Accordingly secret society seems to be dangerous simply because it is secret . . . . The jealous zeal of the central power against every special society (Sonderbund) runs through all political history.”

Secrecy of institution or secret societies disrupt any functionalist understanding and ideal of society in general. From natural reciprocal secret keeping to secrecy as group-forming social mechanism Simmel unfolds truly sociological role of secrecy in its heterogeneity. He moves from timeless characteristics of secrecy as a functioning of interpersonal relationships to higher levels or scales in which secrecy operates as capacity of differentiation and means of escaping from and acting over social institutions which impose norms on the population irrespective of the personality of members. It is fruitful in this sense to think in what sense formation of secret societies within public bureaucracy or within public sphere constitutes an aberration from biopolitical processes which discipline and manage individual and population as cases, as units of its measuring apparatus, given that social engineering interests flats out social heterogeneity within its spaces of enclosure such as school, prison, factory, hospital. Or is it only a natural consequence of the processes in which the power’s necessity to escape being captured by its own techniques of de-personalization of biopolitical knowledge-claims in order to be able to protect an amount of sovereignty over this process?

Can we understand the peculiar organization of science in 20th century in this perspective, the consequence of the population doubling itself as both the subject and the object of knowledge practices, at the tension between being public and secret, being coherent body of knowledge and being effectively de-centralized system of knowledge production, a biopolitical assemblage whose power-effects are orchestrated only in complex ways by the participation of non-scientific institutions of security and media?

Reflecting more on the hierarchies embedded in secret societies, Simmel questions what are the mechanisms with which group membership, attachment, emotional investment in the power relation that group commanding structure exerts on the individual members are secured. Again we see although with a different aim how impersonalization through abstraction or through invisibility figures as the social principle of binding individual to the group:

As such, secret societies figure a secondary and in some sense more fundamental secrecy in the central head of the community. With the disappearance of its physical presence, by becoming abstract and imaginary, Simmel argues headship exerts the most distinct and most intense form of power over its members, one that is willed and imagined by the members of secret society and not simply imposed upon them.

Simmel unlike Foucault does not ground his analysis in a philosophy that favors historical epistemology wherein French science studies grounded rationalities within their specific historical context as opposed to seeing rational deliberation as a meta-historical and transcendental capacity of humans that universally conditions social life. Nevertheless, we can see an embryonic understanding of invisibility of power similar to that of Foucault’s theory of transformation of power through technological figures such as “panopticon”  which is in parallel with Simmel’s conception of the process in which secrecy arranges intense power relations by making itself nonvisible (focus imaginarius) and hence expected everywhere.

In an extraordinary passage, Foucault by close study of emergence of techniques of what he calls micro-physics of power, conceptualized as “discipline,” shows a series of transformations happened in the mode of visibility of power’s appearance.

Going beyond its usual understanding as the rational behavior of an opportunist scientist and state interested in maintaining its intellectual property and interest, we could synthetically ground modern practices of knowledge at the dynamic intersection of impersonal and public ethos of science and the sovereign interests of “state” in secrecy as these help socialize secondary communities and acquire intense forms of attachments to their goals and commands.

In this way, our puzzlement in the face of extreme practices of human sciences in the age of world wars and social engineering, the conundrum of visibility enforced upon human life and invisibility and secrecy of organizing principle of technology of power can be conceptualized in a more sociologically and historically nuanced way if not solved. Power becomes an anonymous technology, diffused through practices, only occasionally appears or wrongly figured through ideals such as scientific truth, security of nation, improvement of life-capacities whose images do not correspond to the actual tremendously complex organization which becomes the secret animating ground. Another quote at length Foucault’s elaboration on this point of anonymity of power operating through an immanent surveillance and disciplinary practices.

Psychological Shadow of Power

Paradoxical governmental doublet of visibility and secrecy is nicely captured by Freud as it is discussed by Peter Galison: “The State exacts the utmost degree of obedience and sacrifice from its citizens, but at the same time it treats them like children by an excess of secrecy and a censorship upon news and expressions of opinion which leaves the spirits of those whose intellects it thus suppresses defenseless against every unfavorable turn of events and every sinister rumor.” (p. 244) According to Peter Galison, Freud reflected this oppositional political topology of censorship and knowledge instigated by state in his model of psyche. “Have you ever seen a foreign newspaper which has passed the Russian censorship at the frontier? Words, whole clauses and sentences are blacked out so that what is left becomes unintelligible. A Russian censorship of this kind comes about in psychoses and produces the apparently meaningless deliria”. (Galison, 2012, p. 238)

Freud interpreted forgetting as secrecy as the intentional concealment by a hidden internal censor. In this theory there is an unconscious interiority of psyche beyond consciousness which is controlled by a censoring agency. “In 1890s he explicitly had drawn a link between psychological and political censorship. By then, Freud had begun to think about psychodynamic censorship as being of a piece with public censorship that political authorities imposed on written material.” (Galison, 2012, p. 238) Following the argument we have been developing in this chapter and taking the cue from Galison and Foucault’s elaboration in chapter entitled “Man and His Doubles” of Order of Things, we can argue that this model reflects modern divide in the structure of power as secrecy of organizing principle and form and immense dynamic visibility of objectified and subjugated human existence.

“The postal censorship makes such passages unreadable by blacking them out; the dream censorship replaced them by an incomprehensible mumble.” (Galison, 2012, p. 251) As space of consciousness of a person is conditioned and limited by an agency which also belongs the person, we can see that modern society operates within a similar divided arrangement of disciplined bodies and biopolitical populations on the one side and governmental practice and human sciences coordinated in a networked fashion as a secondary society supported by security and media apparatus whose principle of organization is diffused and becomes anonymous, invisible, secret just like an unconscious, constituting secret interiority of society. “Censorship was, for Freud, even in the early days, both a psychic agency and a literal mechanism enlisted for political repression and stabilization.” (Galison, 20212, p. 238) Thus we can conceptualize a historically opened fissure in our consciousness of society as social beings caused by this doubling. Our image of science, practice of knowledge, the role of state, the principle and diverse beings of power is essentially fragmentary; even on both side of this divide it is humans that take up different roles.

“For the patient, huge pieces of this primal scene simply vanished: most notably, her father himself –gone. The scene, minus the father, seemed ‘delirious’. All that remained were fragments, isolated details of the mother’s.” It is not clear how practical and effective unity or reconciliation of these two sides of social life are possible, a process of realization which is achieved only by the help of a third i.e. analyst in the psychoanalytical context. “A similar difficulty confronts the political writer who has disagreeable truths to tell those in authority. If he presents them undisguised, the authorities will suppress his words – after they have been spoken, if his pronouncement was an oral one, but beforehand, if he had intended to make it in print. A writer must beware of the censorship, and on its account he must soften and distort the expression of his opinion.” Freud quoted by Galison (2012, p. 242)

Holquist in his study of Soviet practices of surveillance proposes to study surveillance “as a project (rather than simply as a source)”. Since for him, “surveillance may be best understood, not as a Russian phenomenon but as a subfunction of the modern form of politics, of which totalitarianism is one expression.” At the same time when he conceptualize surveillance as a political practice he clarifies what he means by this term by reference to state. “[…] Study of surveillance as a political practice, for it permits comparative analysis. (By “political practices I mean the repertoire of measures a state employs to realize the goals it has set for itself.)” (p. 418) This confusion about where political practices emanates from ends up placing that source of generating practices at the state or private interests. Then this grants animating intentionality to a social institution which acts as spatio-temporal origination point. Yet according to Foucault’s conceptualization we can talk about a field of power pulsating in-itself, concretizing in diverse relations and nodes.  While Holquist is line with Foucault as he sees surveillance part of a functionality of governmentality but at the same time his conceptualization of power falls short of undermining of intentionality of actors in Foucault. In this respect, it becomes unlikely to understand historicity of forms of such as governmentality, biopower and discipline as forces set in motion without being controlled by an overarching structure, actor nor plan. Put in these terms state acquires an agency of its own separate from practices it generates and people it governs and preserve its centralized sovereign status.

Putting philosophical nuances aside, as much as they alter the character of the framework of analysis, Holquist emphasizes just like Foucault or Deleuze modular aspect of surveillance over representative purposes. “Surveillance was not designated to uncover popular moods and sentiments, nor was it intended merely to keep people under control; its whole purpose was to act on people, to change them.” (p. 417) This points out a shift in the method of ruling from governing territory towards governing populations. More specifically “a governmental state seeks to manage its population not so much legitimately or righteously as effectively and economically.” (p. 419)

Through information networks, state attempted at capturing the moods of the population level in the face of total war conditions. This shows on one level how from a very early moment, state thought of capturing life-capacities through affective lenses beyond what they think ideologically. Surveillance’s effect on populations is not only realized through providing information about the moods also modulating those moods through the standardization of how they can be expressed. “Russian Empire compiled “summaries” (using mimeographed forms) and categorized (in statistical percentages) all correspondence as “patriotic,” “depressed,” and “indifferent”. And like their associates in Britain, authorities in Russia sought not only to record but also to shape soldier-correspondants’ means of self-expression–and indeed their identities-through standardized form letter and postcards.” (p. 430)

A letter sent to the absent center of power

Let’s conclude by pondering on the letter a soldier wrote to the officials which is quoted by Holquist to underline how “soldiers were aware that the authorities had a newfound interest in their letters. Many refrained from using the military postal system and tried to use only the civil post instead. One soldier tried another tack and appealed to the censor directly, by appending a PS to his letter: “Dear sir, Mr. Censor: let this letter through, because you yourself know that we are being slaughtered like cattle to no purpose”” Is it possible to address governmental or biopolitical power by second-person pronoun –you? What capacities are assumed to be personally located when the soldier imagines, perhaps sarcastically, in the face of vast machinery of surveillance, a human being capable of conversing with the a case of individual who is perceived within a project of population management? How tragicomic is the fact that soldier is assuming reciprocity of human contact where modern biopolitical discourse and practices emerged fundamentally as unidirectional gaze. Holquist puts this in a slightly more simple terms: “Thus surveillance involved not only collecting material but also had begun to shape how people thought they could express themselves –while at the same time suggesting to them their views mattered.” (1997, p. 430)

Not only thought but fantasy also operates as an affective force forming images, subjects and thoughts. Fantasy of subjectivity, attachments, and investments which was used to be a means of construing the social reciprocity is effectively eliminated by modern forms of power. Processes of impersonalization entangled within affectively loaded but nevertheless unprecedentedly calculated operations ground relations of people to science and state. Statistically subjugated populations are not just uni-directionally studied but an excess of biopolitical confrontation makes itself known as the fantasy of intersubjectivity as is felt in the letter of the soldier. What we feel more an excessive affect surfacing as an expression of subject. It is basically a scream in between Foucauldian surgical excavation of systems of power and everyday play of meaning.

“The boundaries between fiction and reality become indistinguishable, endowing encounters between the state and terrorism with a phantom quality . . . . These are not just moments of repression against enemies that are already there; they are fields in which the state and its enemies are created and recreated as powerful fictional realities (Siegel 1998) through what Derrida has called “a phantomatic mode of production” (1994, p. 97), a structure and modus operandi that produces both the state and its threatening Other as fetishes of each other, constructing reality as an endless play of mirror images.” (p. 402)

To end this chapter on the historically situated play of secrecy around biopolitical power and institutional science let’s examine illustrative passages from Begona Aretxaga who in her psychoanalytically sensitive ethnographic studies of (state) terrorism, eloquently presents this fantasized excess of the biopolitical field where state and terrorism call forth one another:

“Fantasy here is not meant as a purely illusory construction but as a form of reality in its own right, a scene whose structure traverses the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious (Laplanche & Pontalis 1989).” (p. 402, Aretxaga)

Conceptualization of political field requires an attention to the domain political subjectivity. Political realities are foremost subjective realities. In this sense, fantasy as a dimension of formation of subjective reality is not what opposed to that reality but acts often as the glue that holds disparate elements together forming a new image that’s invested in and communicated. Therefore, in psychoanalytically informed theorization of political field, fantasy acts as the subjective vehicle through which reality emerges a component and supposed container of experience. Here, political entities are screens for these subjective projections. There is desire, distaste and fear in the way political relations are formed.

“Fantasy in this sense belongs to the “objectively subjective” (Zizek 1997). It is not opposed to social reality but constitutes its “psychic glue.” The state can be considered then as “a privileged setting for the staging of political fantasy in the modern world” (Agamben 1998; Rose 1996, p. 4) … This is not to say that rational technologies of control are unimportant to the materialization of state power; it is to say that they are animated by a substrate of fantasy scenes that betray complicated kinds of intimacy, sensualities, and bodily operations.” (p. 403, Aretxaga)

Works Cited:

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