Popular secrecy and occultural studies

Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies, 2007

Cultural Studies, 2007

The current climate of secrecy, this essay contends, demands scrutiny. In order to do this, however, I suggest that cultural studies must think through its own secrets. I try to follow through one such secret here: namely the secret of cultural studies’ possible ‘illegitimacy’ as a discipline, a possibility that haunts us at every turn. While this might sound contentious, I argue that the possibility of illegitimacy is the condition of all knowledge. Rather than the universality of this condition absolving cultural studies of the responsibility of owning up to it, however, I argue that cultural studies is well-placed to think through questions of illegitimacy and accountability. If we can address these problems, we will be better equipped to approach the culture of secrecy currently characterising US and British foreign policy.

Anthropology and cognate disciplines have long addressed the complex and troubled relations of public and private life, supplying insight into such matters as identity, politics, and civic life. In the multiple, interconnected settings of an intricately globalized and mediatized twenty-first century, how secrets are made, maintained, and broken remains vitally important to social science and its publics. The special issue we introduce here brings together anthropologists and social scientists working in health, museology, media, and cultural studies to interrogate secrets and secrecy, the private and the public, in diverse yet interrelated domains and national contexts. Our introduction explores ways to think critically of secrets and secrecy and related ramifications for private and public life by highlighting some key ethical, intellectual, and epistemological complexities. We consider the contemporary forms of life of the secret in social settings and public institutions and then consider how secrets die, in the small metaphorical sense that they cease to exist in their telling, but also in the more literal sense in which secrets and privacy are displaced by social systems built on " big data " and the politics of transparency and exposure. We chart also the politics of secrecy, illuminating how secrets may be revealed through disclosure and exposure across multiple forms of media and myriad public spheres today.

Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 2019

F ew things inspire the anthropologist’s imagination and analytical speculation as much as silences and secrets encountered in fieldwork. They compel one to ponder whether something interesting might lie beneath what appears to be covered by silence or secrets, and if so, through what means that something might be uncovered. Relatedly, few things launch the anthropologist into more profound methodological, ethical, and political deliberations than the silences one does unveil and the secrets one is made privy to in the field, many of these converging in the question of how secrets and silence should be treated in one’s writing. This special issue delves into the interconnections between these two: silences and secrets in fieldwork encounters, and the silences that are produced through the knowledge we gain within them. The articles examine how secrets and silences are embedded in social structures: how they include and exclude people and map the operations of power, and how they are reproduced, transformed, and broken in the narratives people tell about themselves.

Current Anthropology, 2015

Anthropology and cognate disciplines have long addressed the complex and troubled relations of public and private life, supplying insight into such matters as identity, politics, and civic life. In the multiple, interconnected settings of an intricately globalized and mediatized twenty-first century, how secrets are made, maintained, and broken remains vitally important to social science and its publics. The special issue we introduce here brings together anthropologists and social scientists working in health, museology, media, and cultural studies to interrogate secrets and secrecy, the private and the public, in diverse yet interrelated domains and national contexts. Our introduction explores ways to think critically of secrets and secrecy and related ramifications for private and public life by highlighting some key ethical, intellectual, and epistemological complexities. We consider the contemporary forms of life of the secret in social settings and public institutions and then consider how secrets die, in the small metaphorical sense that they cease to exist in their telling, but also in the more literal sense in which secrets and privacy are displaced by social systems built on "big data" and the politics of transparency and exposure. We chart also the politics of secrecy, illuminating how secrets may be revealed through disclosure and exposure across multiple forms of media and myriad public spheres today.

2003

Security Dialogue, 2020

Secrecy, especially state secrecy, has taken on increasing interest for scholars of international relations and security studies. However, even with interest in secrecy on the rise, there has been little explicit attention paid to exposure. The breaking of secrecy has generally been relegated to the role of a mere 'switch', whose internal workings and variations are of little consequence. This article argues that exposure is a significant process in its own right, and introduces a new conceptualization of exposure as a socially and politically constructed process, one that must be 'thickly described' if we are to understand how it occurs and has effects. I differentiate the process of exposure into two distinct aspects, reserving the concept of exposure to refer to releases of information, while introducing the concept of revelation to refer to a collective recognition that something has been exposed. The first part of the article explores existing understandings of secrecy and exposure to demonstrate why a new framework is needed, while the second part applies this framework to a case study of the exposure of the use of torture in the post-9/11 US 'war on terror'.

Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology, 2021

How have recent political developments impacted the practice and ethics of ethnographic research, especially given the growing anthropological interest in studying the far right? Drawing on my own experience as a researcher under a false name, in this article I reconsider the ethical imperatives of full disclosure and informed consent in the context of ethnographic fieldwork. I argue that such ethical standards presume an untenable notion of the speaking subject by granting the ethnographer a fixity and objectivity that, furthermore, we ordinarily deny our interlocutors. Instead, I ask, how do we draw our interlocutors into webs of complicity as we withhold or obfuscate information in our transactions with them? How, in turn, do they call upon us to reciprocate by upholding their own dissimulations? In particular, I look at four problems of identity and transparency in ethnographic fieldwork, which I call coherence, performativity, secrecy, and complicity. While conducting ethnographic research under a pseudonym brings into exceptionally sharp relief the intensive metapragmatic labor entailed in positioning oneself in the field, I argue that the questions it raises are of a more general nature for ethnographic research. Indeed, such questions saturate social life at large and hence, necessarily, ethnographic approaches to its study.

Foucault Studies, 2021

Brief reflections on the limits of protest, the relationship between culture and politics, self-censorship, and communication in the academy. Written as commentary for a symposium hosted by 'Foucault Studies' on Perry Zurn and Kevin Thompson's 2021 edited collection, 'Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970-1980).'

Seismograf, 2020

The ‘media reveal’ is a perspective and gesture of art and media making, theory and writing. It is a staging of continuous surprises – reveals – that denature and remove myth and illusion from media, often highlighting materiality or materialist function. In this essay, derived from a keynote lecture given at the 2019 RE:SOUND Media Arts Histories conference in Aalborg, Denmark, I attempt to characterise the media reveal narrative as it appears in media art, along with the stories media artists tell themselves through critical theory and thinking. Does this gesture expose or depose the always present power structures and technocratic didacticism that often remain? If we sought to go beyond the media reveal, what new practices of knowledge should emerge?