Political sociology of secrecy

Students of political history are often faced with the problem of accounting for normative processes involving violence, gross injustices, and disavowal. In this chapter, departing from positivistic characterizations of relations of power where the being of power is conceptualized only through tangible effects, we will analyze the absentee  character of power, which cannot be reduced to presence.

Friedrich Nietzsche, a prominent theorist of power in critical theory, in this passage, highlights divisions that allow the possibility of executing tasks which would be perhaps unbearable for a single individual. Nietzsche uses power as a descriptive analytics and not as a sufficient prescriptive tool insofar as the 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 state, the classification of the population into functionally separated units allows conducting large-scale projects whose scope, purpose, and true-effects  might be escaping its participants.

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

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

What presents itself as an epistemological problem from a scholarly perspective arguably constitutes the political effectivity operative in the diffuse networks of power of modern politics. Perhaps, contra Foucault’s dictum of the co-operativity of knowledge and power, there is also an asymmetrical relationship between knowledge and power. Power grows by erasing its functioning, by obscuring its own operations , by disavowal—in short, in secrecy. Correspondingly, there emerges a dual  process: on the one hand, there is a growing visibility of the individual bodies subjected to myriad forms of governance and discipline, and, on the other hand, a growing opacity of the effective logic of power, which itself eschews generalization. Symptomatic of this shift is the proliferation of executive decrees, arduous interpretative processes, and exceptional ad hoc solutions, which increasingly take precedence over the mere application of law. Thus, grasped in its relations to the underlying networks of power, the state is both the mask and the ghost of these networks. Its concreteness functions as a fig-leaf that covers over the non-identity of effective networks. In our efforts to understand these paradoxical dimensions of power, the concept of secrecy, rather than any particular secret itself, serves as a shift of attention from content to form, allowing the 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 investigations into the Being that encapsulates all beings, the Being on the basis of which any being is always already tacitly understood, the Nietzschean philosopher, Martin Heidegger, examines this ontological uncertainty of the state.

Technologies of secrecy and surveillance

In this chapter, we will enage with theorists who shift their attention from the secret to secrecy as such . After a review of some dominant themes  in the sociology of the secret, we will delve into the question of the 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 the previous century. We will synthesize the technological account of power with the psychoanalytical writings of Sigmund Freud, focusing on the latter’s reactions to political repression in the context of warfare in order to probe the constitutive role of political repression in the development of the theory of the unconscious processes that regulate or modify conscious thoughts and feelings. We will extrapolate from this constitutive conjecture a model of the contemporary political ground where the 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. Alongside the actors and institutions traditionally associated with secrecy (such as state security agencies) new personal devices embedded within impersonal digitized environments—environments which effectively form a living network of information that extracts minute data from the everyday life of populations—demand renewed and nuanced conceptions of secrecy.

Secrecy as a social phenomenon can be considered by further elaborating upon the problematics advanced in the subfields of the sociology of knowledge, political sociology, and the history of the sciences. In these scholarly contexts, secrecy is understood both in terms of particular concealed contents (i.e., as specific secrets themselves) and as a determinate modality of social relationships. Such studies analyze historically specific organizational secrecy and the situated production and role of secret knowledge in social relations. In this respect, understanding the role, value, and nature of secrets requires the 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

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

On the one hand, commercial incentives and the market economy create 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 the profit motive and by political concerns. In this understanding, the culture of secrecy is an outcome of a social reality that is dominated by the dynamics of competitiveness. Authors support this argument by emphasizing the process through which the idea of intellectual property originated in early modern urban centers in the form of craft secrets and trade secrets.

On the other hand, countering this position (especially with regard to the emergence of scientific knowledge production), they underscore the ways in which modern science arose from out of the system of courtly patronage, wherein scientists were incentivized 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 the industrial revolution. Social theorists such as Habermas highlighted  the importance of the public sphere in the formation of the 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 a space of openness as opposed to the protected spheres of privacy and secrecy.  It is in fact within this tension between the predominance of private interests in an increasingly capitalist market economy, on the one hand, and the unfolding spirit and practices of public knowledge, on the other, that 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 [the]  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 as 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 note, 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 the capitalist market economy but it is also an essential military imperative  and tool. For instance, nuclear research was organized as military research—whereby physicists were isolated from the 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 began  to outsource its intelligence operations and research to private companies, complicating the entanglements of private and public interests involved in the formation of the secrecy that surrounds the production of scientific knowledge.

In this sense, secrecy needs to be situated not only within social dynamics stemming from particular economic arrangements (such as competitiveness) 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).

Thus, contending with the fact that secrecy is essentially tied to notions and practices of power that are historically specific, we can ask whether it is accurate to state that the “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 the withholding and distribution of information. During the age of scientific humanism, the individuated members of the populations also become biopolitical units within the systems of power that interpellate them as “entrepreneurial selves”—who are thereby incentivized to embody practices that result in the simultaneous  privatization and socialization of knowledge. Moreover, although every moment of openness is studied and invested by an assemblage of neoliberal political  economy that works with “datalogical” and “networked” science in terms of the “neurochemical self”, nonetheless, each such moment becomes a possibility for the establishment of a new asymmetrical relation of power. As Deleuze states in his seminal work, Difference and Repetition, the mere abstract statement of difference in this political context is not adequate to affirmation. The absence of selection and process  leads to the 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 the secret as information-withheld-by-a-rational-actor with the model of distributed secrecy. Then, we can ask the question of secrecy with reference to the theories of sociality which move beyond conceptions of intentional secrets 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 throughout society in complex ways where secrecy emerges less as any specific content (i.e. withholding particular information) and more as a historically specific form (i.e., the distribution of information that circulates dissociatively). This analytical  distinction then becomes epistemologically necessary in order to understand advanced types of power relations whereby the scientist, the expert, and the state merely function as figures of a field that transcends them in its efficacy. In this sense, the historical nature of the system can only be tackled/uncovered insofar as it is subjected to an elaborate and, to some extent impossible, immanent critique.

From secret to secrecy

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

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

The political theoretical problem thus becomes the possibility of thinking secrecy alongside modern forms of power such as “discipline” and “biopolitics,” which, in Foucault’s theory, are more geared towards accounting for diffused systems of visibilities than secrecies as such. Nonetheless, It is a question asked by Foucault himself in his studies of sexuality when he contrasts the  repressive hypothesis with the incitement to constantly talk about sexuality. Therefore, Foucault refused to elaborate  his thinking on power beyond the 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 also an apparent interest in examining the emergence and breakdown of systems —what’s behind the veil/surface, i.e., the function—, the way they are wounded by accidents of history and the way they display a complexity (incomplete sets of relations of power with respect to technology and historicity) under the smooth surface of the skin (“meaning”).

In the interiority of the individual or the political body, Foucault perceived  overlapping systems whose logics 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 the body, on the one hand, and, on the other, the judicial articulation of reform programs, neoliberal economic theory, and national security. In fact, for Foucault, 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—which seems to have been deliberately avoided so as to prevent these from becoming fixed rules to be repeated. Only in his late work (e.g., “The Use of Pleasure”) did Foucault turn towards an exploration of the cultivation of subjectivity understood as heterogeneous to the logic of oppression. Thus, the extra-formalism of secrecy in the age of networks carries over this ambivalent relation of power to subjectivity and life.

If we pay close attention to Simmel’s opening remarks on secrecy, 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 that individuals attempt to reach towards the other in order to code the terms and rules of sociality under which they will operate. Emphasis is placed more on the existential tasks of the intentional subject than on the conditions which always already determine the capacity, possibility, and ground of social relations such as ideology, language, or technicity. In this respect, the nature of secrecy requires us to keep open the question of the proper unit of analysis and methodology. The analysis has to oscillate between 1) humanism, i.e. a conceptualization aiming to illuminate the human condition and at times basing itself on the rational intentionality of individuals to find meaning in a given social problem or text; and 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, which must be understood as historically determined effects of power relations that have sedimented in socio-physical environments.

Simmel goes on to underscore the element of reciprocity in relationships, through which he thematizes 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 resulting from the complexity inherent in the objectification of social life  in modern contexts. Due to the influence of institutions and the force of public opinion which are arguable “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) As a result, the capacity of subjectively generated information to make sense of the social situation is significantly diminished.

Simmel  conceptualized an ideal sphere which characterizes the personal boundary that determined by a person’s significance and honor. Resonating with Nietzshe’s pathos of distance that allows the creation of values, Simmel  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 to note that in the bracketed-off neutral space, posited by Simmel, of the examination of both body and psyche, modern science can get rid of this ‘ideal sphere’ in many ways. This is possible without explicitly undermining honor as one becomes a-case-under-study, thereby erasing the singular status the individual enjoyed outside of the scientific gaze . Hence the very question of the 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:

The transformation of scientific subjectivity as 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 the moral commitments of its members.

For Weber as well, sociologically, secrecy is an inevitable reality of institutions. Every bureaucracy seeks to further its 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 they are directed towards economic competition or political hostility. For Weber, this orientation toward the outside leads to secrecy. (Weber 2006)

He notes the intrinsic fragmentation of knowledge within the 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 insofar  as shared secrecy becomes the glue of shared identity that binds a group together . 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)

Individuals who belong to an organization imbued with secrecy acquire a kind of anonymity in their relation to external society, which puts forward the problematic of responsibility in organized societies in a new way: “Nevertheless, responsibility is quite as immediately joined with [the] 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)

For Simmel, if, on the one hand, secret societies limit the actions of their members by strict mechanisms of control that rely on internal tradition, on the other hand, the secondary socialization within the secret group frees the individual in its action in and towards the broader society, where the 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.”

The secrecy of institutions or secret societies disrupt any functionalist understanding or ideal of society in general. From natural, reciprocal secret keeping to secrecy as group-forming social mechanism Simmel unfolds the 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 a capacity of differentiation and a means of escaping from and acting over social institutions which impose norms on the population irrespective of the personality of its members. It is fruitful in this sense to consider the extent to which  the formation of secret societies within a public bureaucracy or within the public sphere might constitute an aberration from biopolitical processes which discipline and manage the individual and the population as cases, as units wholly measurable by the disciplinary, biopolitical apparatus. This question is especially pertinent given the fact that social engineering interests flatten out social heterogeneity within disciplinary spaces of enclosure such as the school, prison, factory, and hospital. Or is the rise of such structures of secrecy simply a natural consequence of the necessity that power avoid being trapped by its own techniques—the very techniques that depersonalize biopolitical knowledge-claims—in order to retain a measure of sovereignty over its constitutive processes?

Can we understand the peculiar organization of science in the 20th century as a consequence of the population doubling itself—as both the subject and the object of knowledge practices—at the tension between being public and secret, beinga  coherent body of knowledge and being an 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?

In further reflecting on the hierarchies embedded in secret societies, Simmel interrogates the mechanisms with which group membership, attachment, emotional investment are secured—specifically homing in on the ways in which the power relation through which the group’s commanding structure exerts various forms of control over or influence uponthe individual members. Though oriented towards a different end, once agina we see how impersonalization—whether through abstraction or invisibility—figures as the social principle that binds the individual to the group:

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

Unlike Foucault, Simmel does not ground his analysis in a philosophy that favors a historical epistemology wherein rooted in French science studies that ground forms of rationality within their specific historical context as opposed to projecting rational deliberation as a meta-historical and transcendental capacity of humans that universally conditions social life in all times and places. Nevertheless, we can see an embryonic understanding of the invisibility of power similar to that of Foucault’s theory of the transformation of power through technological figures such as the “panopticon”—which runs 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 closely examines the emergence of techniques of what he calls a micro-physics of power (conceptualized as forms of  “discipline”), thereby disclosing a series of transformations in the mode of visibility of power’s appearance.

Going beyond the usual understanding of knowledge practices as the rational behavior of the opportunist scientist, on the one hand, and the self-perpetuating state pursuing a narrowly-conceived national interest, on the other, we could synthetically ground modern practices of knowledge at the dynamic intersection of two processes: the impersonal, public ethos of science and the sovereign interest of “the “state in secrecy.” The field of forces at this site not only shapes the conditions of possibility for knowledge production, but also contributes to the socialization of secondary communities, fostering intense forms of attachment to the goals and commands of the institutions structured by the forces, practices, and knowledges cultivated by the interaction between scientific practice and state authority.

In this way, our puzzlement in the face of extreme practices of the human sciences in the age of world wars and social engineering—the conundrum of the ever-increasing visibility enforced upon human life and the simultaneous cloak of invisibility and secrecy behind which the organizing principles of myriad technologies of power remain hidden—can be conceptualized in a more sociologically and historically nuanced way, if not fully resolved. Power thus appears as an anonymous technology diffused through various practices, and only occasionally appears through the misleading figures or ideals of scientific truth, the security of the nation, or the improvement of life-capacities—the images of which do not correspond to the tremendously complex organization of actually existing power relations, which constitutes its secret animating ground. In a lengthy and incisive passage, Foucault elaborates on this very point: the anonymity of power operating through an assemblage of immanent surveillance and disciplinary practices.

Psychological Shadow of Power

Freud interpreted forgetting as secrecy as the intentional concealment by a hidden internal censor. In this theory, there is an unconscious interiority of the psyche existing 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’s reading of Freud and Foucault’s account in a chapter from The Order of Things entitled “Man and His Doubles”, we can argue that this model reflects the modern divide in the structure of power, which is simultaneously constituted as the secrecy of the organizing principle and form, on the one hand, and as the immense dynamic visibility of objectified and subjugated human existence, on the other.

“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)

In his study of Soviet practices of surveillance, Holquist 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 emanate from ends up locating the source of generative practices either within the state or from out of the unruly play of private interests.   This thus grants animating intentionality to a social institution which acts as a 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 agrees with Foucault in as much as he sees surveillance as a part of the functionality of governmentality, his conceptualization of power falls short of Foucault’s efforts to downplay the efficacy of the intentionality of actors. In this respect, it becomes difficult to understand the historicity of forms such as governmentality, biopower, and discipline—each of which Foucault conceives of as forces set in motion without being controlled by an overarching structure, actor, or plan. Put in these terms, the state acquires an agency of its own which is separate from the practices it generates and the people it governs and which is able to preserve its centralized sovereign status.

Putting philosophical nuances aside, as important as they are for constructing an adequate framework of analysis, much like Foucault and Deleuze, Holquist emphasizes the modular aspect of surveillance over any 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, the state attempted to capture the moods of the populationin the face of conditions of total war. On one level, this shows that, from a very early moment, the state aimed to capture the life-capacities of the population through the cultivation of affective lenses beyond what individuals they consciously think in terms of ideology. Surveillance’s effect on populations is not only realized through providing information about the moods of the social body, but also by 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 also fantasy operates as an affective force that forms images, subjects, and thoughts. The fantasy of subjectivity, attachments, and investments which were used as a means of construing 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 are positively constituted through affective investments bound up with the production of biopolitical knowledges. These knowledge procedures ultimately generate an excess of biopolitical confrontation, which makes itself known, for instance, as the fantasy of intersubjectivity as felt in the letter of the soldier. What we feel is more an excessive affect surfacing as an expression of the subject. It is basically a scream residing between the Foucauldian surgical excavation of systems of power and the everyday play of meaning.

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:

The conceptualization of the political field requires an attention to the domain of political subjectivity. Political realities are foremost subjective realities. In this sense, fantasy as a dimension of the formation of subjective reality is not opposed to that reality but instead often acts as the glue that holds disparate elements together, forming a new image that is both invested in and communicated. Therefore, in a psychoanalytically-informed theorization of the political field, fantasy acts as the subjective vehicle through which reality emerges as 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.

Works Cited:

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