We are accustomed to thinking about secrecy as a problem of knowledge, a matter above all of moral decision and of epistemological privilege and exclusion. Who knows the “true story”, and who is on the outside looking in? Is this division just or unjust? According to the canonical definition, a secret is information deliberately concealed from another person or group. It is knowledge we consciously hold back, keep hidden, prevent from circulating. Whether innocent or guilty, personal or political, minor or world changing, the secret is significant for what it veils. Clare Birchall and I have for more than a decade (independently and in collaboration) been trying to think about the secret differently: from the perspective of aesthetics rather than ethics or hermeneutics. While we have each been particularly interested in the uses of secrecy in art and literature, this is not all that we want the term to designate. Secrets, we suggest, have a look and a feel as well as a content; they are a matter of imagery, narratives, and affects as well as information. Jacques Derrida refers to his “taste for the secret,” a phrase that can be taken quite literally, according to both meanings of the word taste: as a sensory phenomenon and as a kind of judgment traditionally associated with the aesthetic (see Derrida 2001). The secret in and of itself, the very fact of its existence and circulation, even apart from what it conceals, draws into its orbit a range of aesthetic strategies and affective responses that seek to make it visible or describe its effects for the one who knows it—or the one who desires to know it.
At first glance, this idea might seem paradoxical, even nonsensical. How can one represent what is expressly concealed? The secret is a sign of absence rather than presence, and the aesthetic traditionally concerns the manifest. But it is not difficult to call up images that we readily associate with secrets, such as darkness, veils, locked boxes, and sacred spaces. Gaston Bachelard directs us to the habitual connection between secrets and drawers, chests, and wardrobes (Bachelard 74-89). Secrets also evoke a range of affects, from curiosity and suspicion to fear and awe. They inspire narratives of initiation, confession, and detection. These images, feelings, and narratives operate even (perhaps especially) in the absence of the information secrets withhold, but they are no less important to the social, psychological, and political effects those secrets have in the world. The presence of a secret can bend space and time, creating the condition Frank Kermode calls Kairos: the interval between fictional beginnings and endings in which every moment is dense with quasi-apocalyptic significance.1 This apocalypse need not be that of the Last Judgment but of what may be everyday knowledge, as in Kermode’s example of the “tick” and “tock” we hear in the sound of a clock, the former sound signaling a beginning and the latter an end. It marks the tension that exists between concealment and revelation. Indeed, in many areas of life, like religion or national security, the aesthetics of secrecy are primary rather than secondary, almost wholly defining our relationship with secrets that can never be fully revealed. Religions need an aesthetics of the secret because divine will is always a mystery. Writers and artists concerned with espionage and national security have a similar need, because their subject, too, as Timothy Melley and Eva Horn have noted, is necessarily kept from the public.
Clare and I began working on these questions during the Snowden era, when the stakes surrounding and theoretical resources for thinking about secrecy seemed clear for American culture. Times have changed, however, and both of us saw a need to update our account of the aesthetics of secrecy for a world shaped by the explosion of online conspiracism and by renewed urgency surrounding questions of race, gender, and identity. Secrecy in America has a new look and feel and the old polarities that distinguished the secret from the revealed and the private from the public have shifted in dramatic ways. Hence this conversation, which we initiated at the invitation of James Dowthwaite. Clare and I posed four questions about the recent American aesthetics of secrecy to each other, which we answered independently; afterward, we discussed our answers, prompting a good deal of revision. We hope the conversation will itself prompt further study of the aesthetics of secrecy.
(It should be noted that we completed this conversation before President Trump was elected to a second term. We have decided not to correct some now-dated references to retain the specific moment in which our conversation took place. Based on what is still early evidence, however, little that we suggest here about Trump’s effect on the dynamics of secrecy and transparency needs revision—only amplification.)
Matthew Potolsky
I. How has your work engaged with an aesthetics of the secret?
Clare Birchall (CB): In one way or another, all of my work has addressed questions regarding an aesthetics of the secret. Even my master’s thesis, written in another century, considered secrecy and secrets as a narrative system in the novels of Don DeLillo. In published work, a chapter in my book, Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in Datafied America (2021), is directly engaged with the role that art can play in approaching political secrecy. I wrote it after the Snowden revelations out of frustration with the public debate that seemed to stall on matters of regulation and reform, treating secrecy, securitization, and surveillance largely in procedural terms. The argument, as always, was framed as a fine balance between state security and individual privacy. I sought to interrupt the containment strategies of communicative capitalism and/or neoliberal democracy evident in these debates by configuring secrets as subject to and the subject of radical politics rather than regulation.
My proposition was that we might be better able to form a radical political response to mass surveillance of civilians by imagining a secrecy of the left: asking what collectivities and subjectivities the secret makes available. In that chapter, I look at the artwork of Trevor Paglen and Jill Magid, arguing that both help us to stay with the secret as secret, rather than foregrounding the more individualistic notion of privacy or moving too quickly towards revelation (and, consequently, the desire to re-establish a status quo via regulation). The point of this, for me, was to try to move away from a hermeneutics of the secret (which seeks to burrow down into the truth, answering who, what, why, when) and towards an aesthetics of the secret. Of course, I wasn’t thinking about aesthetics as being outside of politics. Rather, I drew on Jacques Rancière’s work to think about aesthetics as a “distribution of the sensible,” a delimitation of space, time, the visible, the sayable, the audible, and political experience (Rancière and Rockhill). Rather than see secrecy as negative, which is very tempting in an era in which it has been commandeered by regressive and repressive forces, I tried to think through those spaces and times when secrets and secrecy can be productive. As a reimagined role for secrecy is largely speculative and the very idea of the secret veers towards abstraction, aesthetics has an important role to play in experiments of this kind.
Another strand of my work is concerned with conspiracy fictions and theories. My first book, Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip (2006), examines the cultural aesthetics of conspiracy fantasies to question the distinction between critique and conspiracy theory. This was a sound exercise at the turn of the Millennium when most conspiracy theorizing was firmly rooted in post-countercultural leftist parapolitics guided by an instinct to question authority. In those days, critique and conspiracy theories shared a purpose and some formal aspects. Since the rise of right-wing populism in the United States and elsewhere, an argument like this becomes more problematic since cultural theorists themselves are configured as the conspiring elite (think of the culture wars discourse surrounding critical race theory or cultural Marxism for example). Conspiracy aesthetics—once exemplified by Alan J. Pakula’s 1970s paranoia trilogy, Mark Lombardi’s intricate and sprawling network diagrams of various scandals, and the 1990s TV-series The X-Files—are now dominated by right-wing memes, disinformation-riddled faux documentaries, YouTube-rants, and the repurposing of Open Source Intelligence Tools (OSINT) to regressive ends. In mainstream popular culture, it might even include Oliver Anthony’s hit song, “Rich Men North of Richmond” and the film “Sound of Freedom,” which allude to the beliefs of QAnon.
Despite shifts in politics, mediation, and aesthetic paradigms, conspiracy theories are always engaged in the representation of secrecy and secrets—they seek to give covert plots shape, bring the “deep state” to the surface, give hidden events narrative form and, in the process, transform structural forces into agential forms. Because knowledge and certainty elude, conspiracy theories are reliant on fabrication and bravado. This, too, is a form of experimentation with secrecy; but not in the way I imagined in Radical Secrecy. If mainstream responses to the Snowden revelations fell back on an idealization of the sovereign liberal subject via the notion of privacy, calling for minor reform, conspiracy theories are even more problematic. Conspiracy theorists are obsessed with sovereignty (whether in terms of a body free from vaccines, the right to bear arms despite gun violence or the liberty to drive gas guzzling cars in the face of climate change), reinforcing the idea of the liberal subject (albeit reimagined through a libertarian lens). They are not interested in “staying with the secret” to experiment with other kinds of political responses to our securitized environment, as Magid and Paglen are. Secrets are so unbearable to conspiracy theorists that they have to be invented in order to be immediately and performatively exposed.
To update my analysis of conspiracy theories, I recently co-wrote a book called Conspiracy Theories in the Time of Covid-19 (2022) and am currently working on another, for MIT Press, which answers the question: What difference has the internet made to conspiracy theories? Much of this work is concerned with how conspiracy theories engage in various forms of world-building to present fears and anxieties in ways that will appeal to other people. Tapping into underlying grievances, as well as fears and anxieties, helps to unravel what is going on. Is it any wonder, for example, that there is an obsession with the “deep state” when years of neoliberal messaging presented the state as an untrustworthy and inefficient entity rather than as that which can provide a safety net and facilitate mechanisms, albeit modest, of redistribution? But this too can sometimes feel like a form of paranoid reading—feeding a desire to reveal secrets Qua ideology. Which brings us back to the connection between critique and conspiracism that I began with in my first book. Rather than becoming paralyzed by this, which would give more ground to right wing populist conspiracism today, we must simply recognize this and experiment with other forms of reading—forms that are sensitive to both the political and epistemological moment.
Matthew Potolsky: My interest in secrecy goes back to my graduate education at the University of California, Irvine, in the 1990s. Two main influences informed my understanding of the secret as something to be evaluated, as Clare puts it, aesthetically and not hermeneutically. The first was Jacques Derrida’s seminar on “The Secret,” which he gave in 1991; some of the material from that year ended up in Donner la mort (1999) and other publications.2 The seminar was part of a series on Responsibility (it also included Derrida’s celebrated inquiries into hospitality), and it was in these terms that Derrida approached the topic. He lectured on Heidegger, Melville’s “Bartleby,” the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, Poe and Baudelaire on crowds, Kierkegaard’s meditations on the story of Abraham, and, in a memorable reading, Ovid’s story of Echo and Narcissus. What binds these disparate examples is a core insight: that the secret has the paradoxical quality of both concealing us from and binding us to others. Even unknowable secrets produce a sense of responsibility to and an entanglement with the other.
The second early influence on my thinking about secrecy was queer theory, particularly Eve Sedgwick’s reflections on the closet in Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Building on Foucault’s foundational recognition in The History of Sexuality (1976) that sex was a matter of knowledge and epistemological power as much as bodies and pleasures, Sedgwick drew attention to the swirl of speculations that surround queer people as they interact with others and present themselves to the world. There is, of course, the closet itself: the secret that queer people keep from others. But maybe more important is the epistemological superiority that others assert over the queer person: their “knowingness” about this person’s sexuality. The closet is made of glass—an open secret that at once conceals and reveals the “truth” of sexuality.
The thing I most took from Derrida and Sedgwick was the insight that secrets are notable for their effects in the world. Derrida returned repeatedly in his seminar to what he called “the absolute secret:” a secret, like God’s will in the Abraham story, that can never be revealed or known. Building upon this resonant point of departure, he found a raft of “secret-effects” that follow in the wake of what is hidden (Derrida 2008, 117-158). Secrets engender social relationships and bind us to powers greater than ourselves. They spark curiosity, compel a response from the one excluded, and produce a sense of responsibility in those tasked with protecting them. For Sedgwick, the closet may be a matter of hiding and knowing, but revelation here is never finished, and the play of willed blindness, epistemological one-upmanship, and open secrecy that swirls around it is renewed with each new relationship.
I have regularly been offering courses on secrecy in literature, but I was finally pushed to write about secrecy by the discovery of government surveillance programs in the wake of the 9/11-attacks, and the countervailing work of figures like Julian Assange of Wikileaks, the Anonymous collective, and Edward Snowden. I was particularly interested in the long historical arc of which this fallout seemed to mark a dramatic endpoint. The National Security Agency’s now-notorious data-gathering programs coincided with the rise of surveillance capitalism, leveraging the agency’s vast computing power to reverse the modern epistemological relationship between state and citizen in Western democracies. In place of a world in which citizens (potentially) knew as much about the state as the state knew about them, the NSA was returning us to an earlier order, in which the state deemed it necessary to know everything it could about its citizens and to leave citizens themselves in the dark.
Melley puts his finger on what is particularly odd about the logic of national security secrecy in The Covert Sphere. Government secrecy, he points out, is an open secret: we know that the government is hiding information in the interest of national security, even if we will never know the precise content of those secrets (Melley 8). Not unlike Derrida’s “absolute secret” or Sedgwick’s “glass closet,” the secrets of state are recognized as a secret but remain inaccessible to everyday citizens. Even Snowden’s revelations did not change the dynamic, since we only learned about the raft of surveillance programs the NSA was running but next to nothing about the specific data they managed to collect.
This was the starting point for my book The National Security Sublime: On the Aesthetics of Government Secrecy (2019). My first stab at the book was written for a conference that Clare and I organized in 2015 in London: “The Politics and Practices of Secrecy.” That year I had also put together a major event at the University of Utah on government secrecy, “Secrecy Week,” which included a public lecture by Glenn Greenwald. The following year, I also brought Cory Doctorow to campus to discuss the changing shape of online privacy and worked with the Utah Museum of Fine Arts to arrange a visit by Trevor Paglen, whose images of government dark sites, as Clare points out above, perfectly captured the open secrecy of the national security state.
My book focused on the aestheticized “secret-effects” of government secrecy: the look and feel of secrets and the effects they produce on those around them, even absent revelation. I focused on one common aesthetic effect of government secrecy in the post-9/11-period: the sense of the sublime. This is evident in Paglen’s landscapes and Magid’s cityscapes, but also in popular culture images of the NSA itself. In a signal example from The Simpsons Movie (2007), which went into production shortly after the first revelations of NSA surveillance programs were published in the New York Times, we see the agency imagined as a massive room full of identical desks, each one occupied by an agent listening to the banal doings of average Americans. Such an aesthetic of the vast and unimaginable had become a way to describe the look and feel of the open secret of national security surveillance. The parodic quality of the image from The Simpsons Movie only confirmed the familiarity of this feeling for the public.
The national security sublime, I discovered, was not wholly new. I found earlier versions of the aesthetic in the British Gothic novels that appeared just after the outbreak of the French Revolution—perhaps the first modern national security crisis—and in the Romantic nature poetry of William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley, which reflected on the open secrets of the natural world at the same pivotal historical moment. Cold War artists, writers, and filmmakers returned to the national security sublime during the development of the US national security state. In this regard, post-9/11 figures like Paglen, Magid, and the producers of The Simpsons Movie were building on—but also transforming—a long representational tradition.
II. What has changed since the Obama/Snowden era?
CB: Ten years is a long time when it comes to secrecy. Everyone reading this will remember the Snowden revelations and their reverberations. The afterlife of the leaked documents was named the “Snowden effect” by Jay Rosen: “the direct and indirect gains in public knowledge from the cascade of events and further reporting that followed Edward Snowden’s leaks of classified information” (Rosen). While I was personally concerned that the regulatory reaction did not go far enough, we should note that, among other “gains,” the USA Freedom Act (2015) prevented the mass dragnet of calls of American citizens not under suspicion; and the EU’s GDPR might have been strengthened by what was learnt about platform-state cooperation regarding user data from Snowden. It is also true that after Snowden, no-one can maintain the illusion of online privacy. We might spend time adjusting our privacy settings on our new phone or app, but who among us really thinks that the security agencies could not access our data if they really wanted to? Snowden put surveillance and data privacy under the spotlight.
Many artists were already engaged with an aesthetics and politics of secrecy prior to Snowden, responding to increased securitization and surveillance during the War on Terror. Jenny Holzer’s “Redaction Paintings” (2007), Hasan Elahi’s carefully documented self-surveillance (2009), Mishka Henner’s engagement with black sites in “Dutch Landscapes” (2011), and Zach Blas’s “Facial Weaponization Suite” (2011–14) are exemplary of the concerns of this period. After Snowden, attention to the politics and affects of surveillance practices and infrastructures intensified. For example, Simon Denny’s Venice Biennale show, “Secret Power” (2015) showcased the NSA artwork within Snowden’s leaked documents in a feat of counterespionage; Hito Steyerl’s 2013 “How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. Mov File” explores the risks for minorities of being both hypervisible and invisible; and Paglen’s “Undersea Cables” (2015) emphasizes the materiality of surveillance by bringing internet cables laid on ocean-beds into view. Such art forced encounters with that which, in principle, resists representation: secrets and secrecy.
Rather than revelation, the artworks above rehearse the uncanny, tantalizing experience of not quite seeing and knowing. Denny’s reproduced NSA illustrations tell us more about the aesthetic challenges of information rich environments than they do about classified secrets. We see a superpower and its geopolitical concerns through the limited graphical design templates of PowerPoint. Steyerl’s video is anything but a traditional “How (not) to”-guide, but rather a meditation on technologies of making visible and on the possibilities of refusal or withdrawal under ubiquitous surveillance. Paglen’s “Undersea Cables” offer submerged images of sometimes barely noticeable lines lying on, or partially obscured by, sand through various murky shades of sea blues and greens. Such images certainly reveal a layer of largely invisible or ignored infrastructure that encircles the globe, but methods of data extraction and exploitation, by private corporations and platforms as well as state-sponsored security agencies, are left opaque. The revelations give rise to more questions that might never be fully answered.
Such cultural examinations contribute to what Timothy Melley calls the “covert sphere:” “an array of discursive forms and cultural institutions through which the public can ‘discuss,’ or, more exactly, fantasize the clandestine dimensions of the state” (Melley 5), because, as Matthew notes, the vast majority of us do not have any kind of security clearance, we will never have access to the secrets of the state, but through cultural representation, we can explore various scenarios. Not all cultural texts will neatly tie up narrative loose ends to give us all the secrets necessary for a fully-fledged state secrecy imaginary. Postmodern fiction, for example, often playfully holds back. Think of the way that Thomas Pynchon holds back the identity of the bidder at the end of The Crying of Lot 49. This move interminably blocks any certainty over the sanity of the protagonist-quester, Oedipa: either she is “in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia,” or her theory about a powerful underground system is true (Pynchon 150). Pynchon’s hesitation to resolve this dilemma and, ultimately, an undecidability at the heart of epistemology, alongside the ambivalence towards the very possibility of revelation in the artworks described above; all offer a different way of reading the secret. An aesthetics of the secret is nothing if not an examination of the way in which something is always secret. In Radical Secrecy, the guiding concept, or perhaps force, was Jacques Derrida’s unconditional (or “absolute”) secret, to which Matthew has already drawn attention above. Derrida tells us that this kind of secret, as opposed to the conditional or contextual secret, is that which cannot and does not present itself; it is “not phenomenalizable” (Derrida 1992, 25). Derrida calls it “non-knowing” because this secret is “an experience that does not make itself available to information” (Derrida 1995, 201).
In literature, this unconditional secret ensures “endless interpretation” (Derrida 1992, 34), In political terms, it saves a democracy committed to forms of transparency, belonging, and participation from sliding into totalitarianism (Derrida 2001, 59). In art (all art but it might be particularly pertinent in relation to art that is explicitly about conditional, contextual secrets) the unconditional secret makes us sit a while with the secret and secrecy, however uncomfortable that might be.
Maybe we could think of the work described above, with a nod to Walter Benjamin, as art in the age of mass surveillance. If so, what has changed since the immediate aftermath of Snowden? Clearly, digital capacities for tracking, scraping, and storing have only become more efficient in the ensuing decade. The increased reliance on algorithmic governance based on information gathered via data surveillance is also notable. Recently, debates in machine learning alert us to the fact that datasets are not static archives but the fuel of reproductive technologies. Politically, the covert sphere has been muddied by a turn in the US and elsewhere to populist-conspiracist approaches to knowledge and knowing that make any “revelation” suspect. Today, Snowden’s revelations might be framed as a false flag or hoax designed to distract from “what is really going on.” This is the conspiracist mill in auto-mode that absorbs every and any news item. Today, secrecy imaginaries are dominated by conspiracy theories that configure the “deep state” as the real power broker. Any event or revelation is therefore fashioned as part of a “psyop,” making it hard to know what matters any more or what is at stake (de Zeeuw, et al.).
MP: The years since Trump’s election have seen a radical change in what we had come to understand about secrecy. It was something of a shock to discover that my account of contemporary art and aesthetics could be so quickly rendered merely “historical” by new political circumstances. As Clare notes, ten years can be a long time in the world of secrecy studies.
In The National Security Sublime, I argued that sublime depictions of government secrecy tend to fall into one of two camps: the Gothic and the Romantic. Gothic depictions of secrecy emphasize vast mysteries and sprawling conspiracies, though they retain a residual faith in the power of individuals to unmask the truth, something that Clare highlights in the left-liberal conspiracy thought of the 1970s. Early Gothic novels showed the innocent heroes and heroines tormented by the far-reaching machinations of aristocrats and church authorities, which they eventually exposed. These Gothic conventions later informed detective and spy fiction, forms which, as Luc Boltanski has noted, “call into question the reality of reality” (Boltanski 18, emphasis in the original). The Romantic sublime, by contrast, is an aesthetic of the open secret, which confronts the unknowable character of the manifest. It ponders mysteries that are evident in nature or society but that still overwhelm human cognition: what is at once present in reality and incomprehensible. Rather than questioning the reality of reality, the Romantic sublime questions the knowability of the known.
These two aesthetic modes of response to government secrets—suspicion and sublime wonder—have been central in the era of the national security state. Gothic tropes predominated during the Cold War, a choice perhaps best epitomized by Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), the paranoid thrillers among Pakula’s 1970s films, and Lombardi’s complex flow charts depicting conspiratorial networks of influence. The national security sublime during this period evoked dark conspiracies of massive scale. Hitchcock, for example, located his scene of national security revelation in the sublime setting of Mount Rushmore. Pakula’s films feature protagonists who get but a fleeting glimpse of the kinds of vast corporate or government conspiracies Lombardi draws. Although practitioners of the national security sublime during the period were often deeply cynical about secret power, the Cold War versions of the aesthetic retained a residual faith in the power of revelation. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976) ends ambivalently, and before President Nixon was forced to resign, but the viewer knows the history. Sydney Pollack’s CIA thriller Three Days of the Condor (1975) ends with a famous shot of Robert Redford in front of the New York Times building. Allied with the contemporary Enlightenment push for open government, the Gothic implies a belief, as the famous motto of the The X-Files put it, that “the truth is out there.”
Something different marks the national security sublime after 9/11. In Romantic literature, the mysteries are typically natural, but in the period after 9/11, artists and writers came to associate them with the massive size and scope of the national security state. Instead of Gothic conspiracies, we find largeness as such—sprawling buildings, endless rows of computer servers, vast empty distances—unredeemed by the possibility of some final revelation, however compromised. Many of the artists Clare mentions above make use of this sublime idiom, but Paglen’s landscape photographs are exemplary, since they use an aesthetic traditionally associated with the impressive natural imagery of Romantic poetry to capture secret government outposts. Elahi’s photographic collage Thousand Little Brothers (2014) evokes what Immanuel Kant calls the “mathematically sublime” by juxtaposing a thousand quasi-surveillance photos the artist took of his banal doings in response to discovering he was the subject of government suspicion.
As I was researching this project, I noticed that there was no popular cultural aesthetic proper to the NSA, unlike many of the other three-letter agencies of the national security state. The national security sublime filled in for that lack, giving us an image of the agency as sublimely large, all-knowing, and beyond the comprehension of American citizens. This was an aesthetic response to the shifting epistemological relationship between state and citizen that I described above. Powered by big data rather than by intrepid spies, the national security state was returning us to the older and illiberal distribution of secrecy that characterized the absolute monarchies of the seventeenth century.
In the wake of the Trump presidency, both versions of the national security aesthetic seem to have been drained of their critical power, although the epistemological situation to which that aesthetic responded has not changed, and, indeed, has become more entrenched. In part, the loss of critical power was political. With his populist disdain for government professionals, Trump took aim at the power of the “deep state,” adopting a version of the Cold War national security sublime to undermine what he saw as enemies in the government, with the president and his followers playing the investigating journalists of a Pakula film—without, of course, actually doing any investigation. As Clare notes, right-wing conspiracy theorizing borrows much from the language of the old liberal critique of government surveillance even as it hollows out its critical spirit. For the left, by contrast, the same “deep state” agencies came to seem almost heroic. Once vilified for their unauthorized surveillance of American citizens, the CIA and the NSA looked like principled allies in the resistance to Trump’s authoritarian political style (Stöcker).
The legal and journalistic resistance to Trump adopted its own version of the national security sublime, but without much effect. In its early days, for example, the investigation into Russian influence on the 2016 election read, in journalistic accounts, a bit like a paranoid spy thriller, with mysterious operators like Maria Butina and a Manchurian candidate. But that narrative quickly fell apart, and with it the entire aesthetics of government secrecy I had described in my book. So, also, did the earnest journalistic efforts to fact-check Trump’s myriad lies and obfuscations. A reboot of the old Gothic story of overmatched heroes and heroines revealing the evil machinations of the rich and powerful, this effort fell victim to the fact that Trump and his followers did not care at all about the truth and flooded the public sphere with so many falsities that it was impossible to keep up.
Trump in effect broke the old liberal paradigm embodied in the national security sublime by paradoxically treating publicity as a form of obfuscation. For the founders of this paradigm, like Jeremy Bentham, publicity was a way of keeping the government honest. Shadowy conspiracies, Bentham specified in writings from the 1790s, were impossible in the light of official transparency (Bentham 39). Trump exploited transparency itself. Talking incessantly, he practiced a kind of linguistic shell-game that concealed the truly important secrets of his administration in plain sight. There were so many outrages, so many half-truths, so many clues suggesting unethical or illegal acts, that no one researcher could begin to make sense of them. Trump was transparent about his designs, so the entire Gothic logic of exposure that underlay Bentham’s theory felt redundant. The banality and stupidity of so many of Trump’s proclamations also evaded the grip of the sublime, which, as Kenneth Burke has noted, is easily undone by the ridiculous (Burke 61). One just felt confused and overwhelmed by the firehose stream of obfuscations.
As Clare notes, something similar also happened in the world of conspiracy theory, which modulated into what Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead call “conspiracism:” conspiracy without the theory or even the narrative. Rather than trying doggedly to connect the dots, conspiracists in this new era toss out accusations of hidden evil primarily as gestures of affiliation, they argue (see Muirhead and Rosenblum). There is no genuine effort to discover the truth, as with the old Gothic aesthetic, just a desire to sow confusion, question authority, and, as Clare has argued, to assert some vaguely defined sense of sovereignty. The paranoid figures in 1970s conspiracy films, as I have noted, were typically journalists (as in many of Pakula’s films) or security professionals (like Fox Mulder in The X-Files). Robert Redford’s character in Three Days of the Condor was tasked by the CIA with reading novels. Now conspiracy theorizing seems more like a hobby than a serious profession. In some ways conspiracism pushes the practice even more firmly into the realm of the aesthetic, though not in a good way. The supposed hermeneutic quest is mostly for show.
In her book Doppelganger (2023), Naomi Klein pushes back against the rise of right-wing conspiracism by trying to revivify Gothic tropes. She attends to the strange merging of elements of the political left and right around conspiracist ideas—a phenomenon political scientists have termed “diagonalism”—by exploring her persistent public confusion with the writer Naomi Wolf (author of The Beauty Myth). Wolf was once also an ally of the left but has increasingly been drawn to conspiratorial thinking and the right-wing media ecosystem. Klein wonders whether the confusion is not just a casual mistake made by under-informed commentators but is in fact an indicator of the pervasive spread of modern conspiracism. Certain traditional partisans of the left, too, are drawn to conspiratorial stories about the machinations of power, she notes, often as a performance of conviction rather than an earnest quest for truth. We can point to the increasingly wide circulation of antisemitic conspiracist tropes—durable cognitive maps for the mysterious nature of the modern world system since at least the eighteenth century—on both sides of the political divide, as well as the wide circulation of fears about vaccines, which map fears about the body politic on to fears about the body as such. The Doppelgänger, the ghostly double, is, of course, a familiar Gothic trope, and Klein adeptly draws upon it to characterize the uncanny mirroring of leftist ideas and talking points by right-wing agitators like Steve Bannon. She repeatedly sees her own ideas about disaster capitalism turned into fodder for Covid-truthers and anti-vaxxers. Klein points out that Wolf’s father Leonard was a noted scholar of Gothic fiction—the literary model for contemporary conspiratorial thought of all stripes.
Despite Klein’s heroic efforts, I still fear that the age of Trump has rendered the old Benthamite (and Gothic) polarity of secrecy and transparency moot, revealing it to be “merely” aesthetic. During the Trump years, all the secrets were out in the open, and gestures of transparency were deployed to conceal. The left became conspiracist and the right became suspicious of the military-industrial complex. The QAnon Shaman consorted online with urban yoga moms. I’m not sure whether the Gothic and the sublime will ever have quite the critical power they did in the period before Trump. Indeed, as Klein notes, the uncanniness of right-wing mirroring made her question her own convictions. Gothic here is turned to regressive rather than potentially progressive ends.
III. Is there a contemporary aesthetics of the secret?
CB: The art world has responded to the new “post-truth”-approach to secrecy Matthew and I have described in inventive ways. This means that the new “covert sphere” encompasses both vernacular critique qua conspiracy theory and works of art about vernacular critique. It’s not always easy to tell them apart, which is the point. “Cherrypicker,” by Ellie Wyatt, for example, is a moving image montage of contested visual “evidence.”3 Are those hazy images mermaids, angels, UFOs? Wyatt uses a red circle to highlight elements of the stills, to guide our vision and attention ... “Cherrypicker” makes us experience the internet as a wild, sublime repository of uncanny images veering towards meme status. Aesthetically, it offers a nostalgic throwback to Web 1.0 while imitating the iterative and algorithmic logic of Web 2.0-platforms and social media feeds, as a series of similar images gives rise to a new sequence in a case of radical context collapse. While the sheer number of connected images would suggest they had been collated by AI, they were in fact scraped manually. Wyatt’s artistic process therefore imitates automated data methods as well as the conspiracist mindset that sees patterns everywhere, implores everyone to “do their own research,” but cherry picks evidence to support certain connections and theories. By the end of the video, the viewer is left stimulated or agitated but ultimately uninformed. The drama of evidentiary aesthetics is called upon to reveal “secrets,” but the status of those revelations is highly ambiguous. While we often lend more weight to knowledge that was once secret (secrets accrue value), revelation can always be performative, creating the appearance of truth—perhaps one of Derrida’s secrecy-effects Matthew mentions above. Wyatt helps us to experience this uncomfortable epistemological uncertainty.
The New York Met hosted an exhibition, Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy, to explore similar themes in 2018. The notion that “Everything is Connected” is one of Michael Barkun’s three cardinal rules guiding conspiracism, along with “nothing is as it seems” and “nothing happens by accident” (Barkun 3-4) The curators divided the pieces into two sections. The first was filled with work by artists that “uncover covert networks of deceit by hewing strictly to the public record” (Eklund and Altever 19). It included works such as Paglen’s photographs of CIA black sites (“Black Site, Kabul, Afghanistan, 2006” and “The Salt Pit, Northeast of Kabul, Afghanistan, 2006”) and Lombardi’s labyrinthine, intricate charts mapping power and profit (“Bill Clinton, the Lippo Group, and Jackson Stephens of Little Rock, Arkansas” and “BCCI-ICIC & FAB, 1972–91”). The second section of the exhibition grouped together artists “who dive headlong into the fever dreams of the disaffected, creating fantastical works that, nevertheless, expose uncomfortable truths” as the catalogue puts it (Eklund and Altever 19). Of these pieces, Jim Shaw’s UFO Photos-Series stands out as emblematic of the more phantasmagorical responses to conspiracist stimuli.
While the Met exhibition stopped short of the 2016 election with a heavy focus on the second half of the twentieth century, other curators and writers have brought up to date a concern with conspiracy and secrecy in relation to aesthetics. For example, with a focus on the “technoscene,” the art curator and writer, Nadim Samman, looks to tropes such as the black site, the black box, and the black hole to navigate a twenty-first-century aesthetics of the secret. All three offer challenges to artists who must contend with military, technological, and epistemic opacity and obfuscation. The chapters on black sites and black boxes discuss “artistic meditations upon an increasingly encrypted or screened-off world; diagnoses concerning a landscape of nested black boxes” (Samman 97). The last chapter veers in a different direction, to consider artists that “conjure icons for agency, metabolism, or world-forming power behind the scenes” [Author’s emphasis]. Samman writes about art that gives form to otherwise abstract forces—calling on “ghosts, spies, conspiracies” (98).
In What We Do Is Secret, the art theorist Larne Abse Gogarty pushes this connection between art and conspiracy further. Rather than turn to art that approaches conspiracy through attempts at figuration, she experiments with what it might mean to think of art itself as a conspiracy capable of interrupting the complicity between dominant aesthetic practices and the racial capitalist horizon. This is not dissimilar to the goal I outline in Radical Secrecy: to imagine a secrecy of the left that could challenge not only a neoliberal notion of transparency but also the ways in which secrecy has been monopolized by the securitizing tendencies of the state. To this end, Gogarty considers different artworks that might be said to conspire (at least in the way she intends this term). In fact, she sees some of the work I’ve mentioned already, critical as it is of state and corporate secrecy and surveillance, as art that reinforces the (neo)liberal status quo by putting excess faith in the ability of revelation (about surveillance practices, algorithmic governance, or black box technologies, for example) to provide a corrective. She writes, “legibly political art’s accumulative relationship to information risks losing sight of the immediate need to begin re-making our world, all facts present or not” (Gogarty 79).
In fact, Gogarty is especially critical of Paglen’s work, seeing it as emblematic of a problematic configuration of the subject: “Although these works are by no means intentionally racist […] they are founded upon valorizing the mastery of the self-possessed rational subject in confrontation with the unbounded, unrepresentable sublime, an aesthetic model that has deeply racialized origins” (Gogarty 90-91). In this somewhat uncharitable critique, Gogarty tries to reveal the (dirty) secret of these artistic critiques of secrecy. In doing so, she herself replicates something of the bind those artists are in, for her ideology critique rehearses a hermeneutics of suspicion that Eve Sedgwick and others have shown to be invested in the image of the masterful detective-critic (see Sedgwick). Isn’t this a construct as rooted in problematic ideologies as the rational subject in the face of the sublime? Gogarty herself claims to want to avoid critique and its tendency towards the accumulation of knowledge “that lies proximate to the accumulation of power” in favor of a mode of writing that assumes “a proximity” with the operation of these works of art (Gogarty 34). Perhaps her will to unveil is a momentary lapse in this endeavor, but I would argue that Paglen’s work holds a more ambivalent relationship to the accumulation of knowledge and revelation of information than Gogarty allows.
For Gogarty, art that permits us to consider “conspiracy as a kind of collective, revolutionary code that proposes a transformative theory of history” (Gogarty 34) includes Ima-Abasi Okon’s Infinite Slippage (2019) Gogarty reads Okon’s installation at the Chisenhale Gallery in East London as one that captured the spirit of the Latin root of conspiracy: conspirare, meaning, to breathe together. A lowered ceiling to emulate office interiors smeared with a mixture of ultrasound gel, morphine, insulin and the artist’s mother’s jewelry; air-conditioning units breathing out a wheezy soundtrack; lamps made from cognac decanters—a drink to be shared. Gogarty reads Okon’s installation as an “invitation to know and breathe together that seems to suggest a connection between embodiment and knowledge along lines that, in [Okon’s] words, connect with a desire to be ‘intentionally irrational’” (158).
Gogarty is not alone in trying to appropriate the spirit of “conspiracy.” Conspiracist Manifesto is the latest publication from a member of the anonymous theory collective, the Invisible Committee.4 Starting from a militant leftist despair that a critique of attacks on civil liberties during the pandemic was left to the populist-conspiracist right, Conspiracist Manifesto reclaims that ground in a relentless provocation. The book’s thesis is that “it was the goal of crisis management of the ‘pandemic’ to freeze the wave of global revolts that preceded it” (see Conspiracist Manifesto 57). The book doesn’t explicitly endorse the Great Reset-conspiracy theory, whereby the pandemic is seen as an orchestrated hoax to justify a whole range of enslaving surveillance technologies, but it deliberately swims in the same water. Thus, the book tries to destigmatize the label “conspiracy theory” by claiming it as a necessary tool in understanding power today and showing that its derogatory connotations are a result of a concerted effort by thinkers like Karl Popper to demarcate legitimate and illegitimate knowledge as part of a naturalization of neoliberal rationality. The book is an appropriation of both “conspiracy theory” and, like Gogarty’s work, of “conspiracy.” It considers “conspiracy, not as attitudes and airs of initiates on the part of those wanting to convey to others that they are hip to things, but as an ethical continuity that inheres in genuine relations between beings as an absolute limit to the cybernetic capture of those relations” (357).
Because Conspiracist Manifesto makes a case for conspiring across identity boundaries (“the social categories are not real,” Conspiracist 359), difference is sacrificed. But secrecy, security, and conspiracy are not experienced as universal. There is now a wealth of literature that tracks how forms of capture by AI affect minoritized peoples the most, for example. And there is also a body of artwork exploring these themes, such as ImageNet Roulette by Paglen and Kate Crawford (2019). Other artists explore how state-imposed mechanisms of transparency might unfairly disadvantage Indigenous communities and other people with non-standardized or undocumented claims. In a show curated by Rachel Horvath-Ebo titled “Open Secret” at BARD in 2023, she included an artist approaching questions of belonging, ownership, and identity via the secret. This was a deliberate attempt to widen the conversation about secrecy aesthetics from the geopolitical realm to the legal land claims of Indigenous peoples. In collaboration with Hemish leaders Pah-Tow Wei (Paul Tosa) and Sée-Shu-Kwa (Christopher Toya), Nina Valerie Kolowratnik’s Secret Proof (2020–2023) produces a cartography of occlusion. Indigenous to New Mexico, the Hemish people’s rights to their land have been obscured by different transactions over time. Kolowratnik’s maps chart the Hemish peoples’ spiritual and ceremonial encounters with the land. Rather than replicate the colonial impulse to capture and control, however, these maps acknowledge a “right to opacity”—the right to remain unreadable and uncategorized by the colonizer’s gaze (Glissant 189-194). They are respectful and necessarily partial given that the nature of much of the Hemish peoples’ knowledge is sacred and secret. It seems clear to many that secrecy, surveillance, transparency, and even conspiracy need to be examined from the perspective of those that are disproportionately affected by them. Out of this concern emerges a plurality of aesthetic responses to the secret.
MP: As Clare’s account of recent artistic and critical work makes clear, the fascination with secrecy has not abated in the wake of Trump’s undoing of the old liberal polarity between secrecy and transparency, and a corner of the art world that remained dominated by white middle-class practitioners has begun to take account of how the harms of surveillance are not evenly distributed across the social field. Still, I’m not sure I see this work cohering yet into an original aesthetic of secrecy appropriate to the changing epistemological relationship between citizen and state. Trump largely killed off the old relationship, which was justifiably on its last legs, but we have yet to see what emerges in its place. The language of conspiracy and the critique of government surveillance still fall within the ambit of the Gothic aesthetic, though, as I have noted, without its critical thrust.
Some larger culture shifts that coincided with (and were probably accelerated by) Trump’s presidency have had a similarly deflating effect on the older aesthetics of secrecy. A second core principle of the liberal paradigm inaugurated by Bentham opposes secrecy and privacy. While secrecy has always been suspect to the liberal tradition, particularly when practiced by governments or powerful corporations, privacy has long been regarded (at least since the 1890s, when Brandeis and Warren argued for an affirmative “right to privacy”) as a cornerstone of modern selfhood, the guarantee that allows true human flourishing (see Brandeis and Warren). It is this polarity that came out in the popular understanding of the Snowden revelations, which cast NSA surveillance primarily as an unconstitutional invasion of personal privacy. Clare notes above that this is a very limited understanding of what was really happening, and, as I suggest in The National Security Sublime, the implications of the new surveillance methods are far reaching.
But the right to privacy is no longer the rallying cry it once was. Most digital natives have a very different idea of privacy than older generations do, eroding the familiar notion that government or corporate intrusions into our private doings are a threat to the constitutional order. For younger generations, privacy is less about concealing aspects of the self and more about negotiating forms of revelation. Indeed, few people, young or old, make use of the privacy features built into websites and social media platforms.5 The racial reckoning that followed the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020, similarly, has instilled a new openness around racial, sexual, gender, and political identities, often cast in the therapeutic language of confession and radical transparency. One sees a new commitment to the anti-secrecy logic of the recovery movement, for which, famously, “we are only as sick as our secrets.”
The effect of these trends has been a superficial return to the old liberal notion of secrecy as repressive and openness as truthful, but without that notion’s faith in the possibility of full disclosure and without its political commitment to representative democracy. The truth in question here is largely a personal one. Affect theorists have made the powerful argument that individual feelings cannot be divorced from larger social structures, and that social and political structures are shaped by feelings. But this new affective order has come to the fore at a moment when the government and corporate hoarding of secrecy has continued unabated. For all its now-obvious blind spots, the Benthamite dream of full publicity, as it was embodied in the Gothic tradition at least, offered a model for challenging the epistemological power of the emerging modern state. Clare’s persuasive argument in Radical Secrecy for the political value of embracing secrecy may have better traction—and I hope it does—but that still remains to be seen.
The most interesting contemporary aesthetic questions about secrecy, to my mind, concern what, in The National Security Sublime, I called “the secret without a subject:” secrets associated not with concealment and disclosure by a conscious doer, but instead discovered in masses of data. This practice was pioneered by data brokers, technology companies, and NSA programmers in the 1990s and it became pervasive under the War on Terror and with the rise of surveillance capitalism. The practice takes the hermeneutic almost entirely out of the process of discovering secrets. There is no Sherlock Holmes here, and arguably not even a criminal perpetrator. Algorithms are written to find patterns and connections among data points. These patterns and connections, in turn, identify hidden desires (criminal or consumerist) attached to a given data source, with the promise of predicting future actions.
I’m focused right now on questions of secrecy surrounding Artificial Intelligence, which extends the notion of “the secret without a subject” in striking new ways. During the post-9/11 moment, the masters of the secret were agencies like the NSA, with its legions of mathematicians and cryptographers, who used the computing power at their disposal to predict (or so they believed) future terrorist acts. Google and Meta do something similar in the realm of targeted advertising. Now, even the programmers of AI chatbots admit that they do not quite know how their creations work. The notorious black box has expanded from a proprietary secret protecting intellectual property to a kind of ontological ignorance.6 AI engenders ignorance in other registers as well: in the relationship of teachers to students who may be cheating, for example, and that of content creators, who may be using AI to produce deepfakes, to media consumers. Artificial ignorance may turn out to be a more significant problem than artificial intelligence. We have long known, too, that surveillance and dataveillance practices tend to impact marginalized communities disproportionately (see Browne) Much the same is already proving true of AI.
Another aesthetic question raised by AI concerns the logic of prediction. Generative AI answers questions posed to it not simply by searching the web for relevant information but by predicatively estimating what a correct answer will sound like. The shift here is subtle but theoretically important. As Reinhart Koselleck has noted, modern theories of history emerged in the eighteenth century after a long period in which the force of intellectual speculation was directed toward the future, not the past (Koselleck 9-25). Before the modern era, the past existed chiefly as chronicle, that is, as a sequence of events or a register of heroic names preserved for posterity. When people were unsure about what to do, they sought the counsel of prophets and oracles, who were presumed to possess the secrets of the future. Modernity inaugurated a different sense of the past, one in which present and future alike were part of an encompassing historical unfolding, with time seemingly accelerating along with political and technological developments. To understand ourselves, we needed to look to and preserve the receding past. This is true both on the collective and the individual levels; Hegel and Freud alike tell us to seek the truth of the present and counsel for future choices in the past—for Freud a past often secreted away in the unconscious.
This shift in our sense of time has implications for an aesthetics of the secret. With its emphasis on prediction, generative AI may be returning us to the superseded order of the oracular secret. This is true both because AI works through prediction, and because its greatest promise seems to lie in giving us advice about what we should do in the future. Researchers ask AI to find new cures for cancer, say, or solutions to vexing social and scientific problems. AI may well scrape its data (typically without permission) from the repositories of the past, but its potential lies in what it can teach us about the future. Will we, in this spirit, be returned to the world of angry prophets, astral influences, and legible tea leaves? The internet has already had the effect, as many have noted, of flattening out the culture of the past. It is possible that generative AI will complete the ongoing erosion of the eighteenth-century history paradigm and unwittingly return us to something even older.
When people prognosticate about the effects of AI, they tend to invoke the tropes of science fiction: robots bettering their masters, humans turned into mere fodder for our electronic overlords. But antiquity offers another model. In classical epic and tragedies, oracles are maddeningly vague, leading characters into error more often than to illumination. Biblical texts are full of false prophets and obscure parables. The real challenge posed by AI may not be its seemingly supernatural perspicuity but its (literally) mindless productivity. Asked to answer a query, it will quickly produce a response, though without any guarantees that this response is reliable or actionable, as the many reported cases of AI “hallucinations” make clear. In such cases, the interpretive task falls to the human questioner. I argued in The National Security Sublime that modern government secrecy can only be grasped aesthetically, and not hermeneutically. Perhaps AI will return us to a hermeneutics of the secret, albeit one that seemed obsolete under the liberal paradigm that emerged in the eighteenth century, and today still feels “merely” aesthetic. Indeed, one important avenue for research into the aesthetics of secrecy concerns the entanglement of the hermeneutic and the aesthetic: the way one can turn into the other given changing historical circumstances.
IV. There was a recognizable set of theoretical resources in the past to help researchers understand secrecy. What is helpful today?
MP: One of the most exciting aspects of research on secrecy is the broad interdisciplinarity of the scholarly corpus. I’ve found valuable models of analysis in works of theology, philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and the history of science, as well as cultural studies, literary criticism, queer theory, and poststructuralist thought. The starting point for just about any work on secrecy is Georg Simmel’s 1907 essay “The Secret and the Secret Society,” which frames secrecy both sociologically and historically in powerful ways, but it has somewhat less to offer an aesthetics of secrecy.
I find myself going back often to Louis Marin’s 1984 essay “Logiques du Secret,” which spins an original account of the secret from the Latin etymology of the word (secernere, meaning to sift or sort). In the process, though without intending it, he offers an anticipatory theory of the secret in the age of big data and AI. As Marin points out, wheat is not properly “hidden” in the chaff, only mixed into it; its status as a secret only emerges retrospectively, after it has been sorted out. It is the process of sorting, and not deliberate concealment, that really engenders the secret-effect. One can carry this analysis over to the sorting of data. The secret of our desires is not really hidden from the algorithmic perspective but unsorted. Finding patterns in the data, the wheat amidst the chaff, brings those desires into relief, engendering them as valuable secrets to be sold to advertising companies or scrutinized by enforcement agencies. Although the algorithmic secret is novel, it gives new life to old metaphors. This is also true, as Marin suggests, about the metaphor contained in the etymology of the word secret. The secret here is not necessarily something deliberately hidden in a lock box or buried like a treasure. Instead, it is like the relationship of signal to noise, a manifest figure in the carpet that needs only to be recognized. Indeed, the secret is created by the very process of looking for it: the discarded chaff in effect creates the wheat. Because the data field is so vast, moreover, the secret is no longer a human property, no longer something a diligent farmer can bring out on the threshing floor, but a matter necessarily left to machines.
CB: Like Matthew, I too have found Simmel, Derrida, and Marin to be useful companions for thinking through not just secrecy’s past but its present and future. Matthew and I were both trained in English departments with deep commitments to poststructuralism and so, it’s not a coincidence that we are attracted to theories that are attuned to the unseen, the unrepresentable, and the unconditional. I am not sure if his interest in secrets and secrecy precedes an interest in deconstruction; for me, they are inextricably entwined. And so, even when I am confronted with infrastructures of secrecy, I am thinking about how my reading of it is shaped by that which does not and cannot present itself.
More recently, I’ve been attentive to actor network theory that provides an account of secrecy-effects sustained through assemblages of human, more than human, and non-human nodes. Horizontal distributions of agency offer an alternative mode of knowing and reading to a hermeneutics of suspicion that risks reifying the secret qua ideology. In fact, I think there is a way of reading that respects both depth and surface, that doesn’t shy away from critique when critique is needed (forms of justified or necessary paranoia), but is equally willing to sit with the text, the event, the secret—to not always seek the cause of effects but to simply acknowledge affects.
Because my project is rehabilitative at heart—asking what a progressive form of secrecy might be—I have been inspired by the Martinique philosopher, Édouard Glissant. His seminal work on a poetics of resistance that posits “a right to opacity” as the right of minoritized subjects to remain unknowable according to a (post)colonial epistemology is one that has permeated all kinds of activism, scholarly writing, and artistic practice. While Glissant is primarily concerned with literature, the idea of an irreducible ontological opacity travels far beyond aesthetic concerns today. In an era of biometric data surveillance, the burdens of which fall heavily on racialized and minoritized bodies, opacity is a precious and oft abused entity. Privacy is a concept that risks positing the self as one that lives in political isolation; it is also one that has been critiqued by the left for its protection of property and by feminists for historically obfuscating the abuse of women in the home. Opacity, by contrast, is more productive to think with in an era of digital dataveillance that has already rendered the idea of the liberal autonomous subject obsolete.
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