Review: Clare Birchall, ‘Radical Secrecy’
Review of Clare Birchall’s Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in Datafied America (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), 244 pages.
Abstract
Review of Clare Birchall’s book Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in Datafied America, which argues for a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the conventional ways we think of the relationship between secrecy and transparency, particularly as they pertain to left political action. For Birchall, the old model of democratic transparency is fundamentally broken, and it is necessary to think in new ways about the positive political value of secrecy and opacity.
Reviewed by Matthew Potolsky
Clare Birchall’s Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in Datafied America argues persuasively for a rethinking of the familiar binary opposition between secrecy and transparency that has long been foundational to left and liberal critiques of corporate and government power. For Birchall, the emergence of what Jodi Dean (2002) has called “communicative capitalism”—the commodified and privatized internet epitomized by social and digital media—and the post-9/11 surveillance state have decisively changed that traditional calculus.
The opposition between secrecy and transparency can be traced back to the Enlightenment. In his 1791 treatise Political Tactics, Jeremy Bentham (1999) influentially called on print media to play a central role in encouraging open government. Secrecy, he argued, is always evidence of corruption, and it is the task of publicity to hold those in power accountable by disseminating their legislative deliberations and votes. Transparency is a solution to the inherent threat of secrecy, and the necessary adjunct of democratic governance. This faith in transparency, popularized in fiction and film and epitomized by the many brave whistleblowers or intrepid reporters in the American cultural imaginary—think the Pentagon Papers and All the President’s Men, Edward Snowden, and Wikileaks—is so deeply baked into the Western sense of democratic responsibility that it is difficult to shake. And despite the growing doubts people have about the unqualified good of the industry, social media companies have ridden the Enlightenment valuing of openness to multibillion-dollar profits. Big business, too, has made transparency a buzzword.
As Birchall puts it, however, transparency is a form rather than a content, a way of framing information and not a quality of information itself. This fact poses a significant problem in what Birchall calls “Datafied America,” where, she argues, the logic of transparency has been hijacked by a range of actors, ideologies, and profit motives. Transparency is no longer an unproblematic good, Birchall argues, and on closer examination it never really was.
The most dramatic case of the way transparency is now broken can be found in the late and unlamented presidency of Donald Trump, which, as Birchall persuasively argues, radically overturned conventional notions about the unshakeable link between transparency and honesty. Taking daily to Twitter, Trump purported to speak openly about everything. He was, as his partisans claimed, wholly “unfiltered,” unafraid to hide his true feelings and intentions. In other words, he was transparent. But it early became clear that transparency in Trump’s case was never allied to truth-telling; on the contrary, it sought to obfuscate, making it difficult for the public to keep up with all the competing explanations of and justifications for unfolding events. Trump so badly scrambled the old opposition between secrecy and transparency that all the fact-checkers in the kingdom could not put it back together again.
Trump’s merely performative transparency was clearly a perversion of the Enlightenment ideal, but for Birchall even more damage has come from what she sees as the neoliberal hijacking of Bentham’s principle of publicity. Transparency here speaks the now-familiar language of public-spirited technocratic efficiency—more openness as a good in itself that contributes to economic growth, faith in government, and better decision-making—but really functions as another kind of obfuscation. In her illuminating discussions of transparency under the Obama Administration, Birchall shows that well-meaning efforts to make government data freely available to the public via the data.gov portal had the effect of outsourcing transparency to private businesses. Because the volume of data on the site is so great, no single citizen could possibly perform the kind of vigilant oversight that Bentham believed publicity made possible. There was so much data that the task of aggregation fell to private data-mining companies, who packaged and sold the government information back to the public that financed the venture. Transparency practices that were supposed to enable public oversight ended up subjecting openness to the principles of the market. Through the spread of what Birchall calls “transparency imperialism,” moreover, Western models of privatized openness are traveling to the developing world via platforms that promise “transparency in a box” for countries that want to make their governments more responsive to the public. In all these cases, transparency actually creates secrets by so overwhelming the public with data that useful facts become ever-more difficult to pick out of the data-noise.
Along with the much-discussed rise of the post-9/11 surveillance state, the growth of neoliberal transparency practices has engendered a new relationship between the citizen and the state, what Birchall describes as “shareveillance.” Defined by its antipolitical relationship to both open and closed data, the shareveillant subject, as Birchall’s portmanteau neology suggests, is called upon both to share data with the state and to respond to data shared by the state with citizens. Social media, of course, is built on a commercialized version of shareveillance: every act of sharing is also an occasion for surveillance by tech companies, who create data portraits of our preferences for prospective advertisers; social media is not a mirror of our lives but a datafied version of the self to which we happily assent. Shareveillant subjects are also increasingly comfortable with (actual or possible) government surveillance. Why else would we willing carry a GPS (originally a military technology) in our pockets nearly everywhere we go? The shareveillant subject is the distinct sense of selfhood that modern transparency ideology and the national security state have collectively wrought.
Shareveillance is problematic, for Birchall, because it prevents us from thinking about political action outside of the limited “distribution of the sensible” (to use Jacques Rancière’s term) afforded by social media and neoliberal transparency. It is extremely difficult now to imagine a politics that is not somehow routed through the resources of business or the state, Twitter’s much-vaunted role in organizing protests and the growth of Tik-Tok activism being prime examples.
Much of the second half of Birchall’s book attempts to define alternatives to this “shareveillant settlement.” Birchall’s analysis at this point becomes somewhat less sharp and the solutions remain vague, though this is arguably a necessary consequence of wading into uncertain waters.
One key concept Birchall introduces in this part of the book is what she calls “radical transparency”—not simply more openness, but an openness that is itself open to redefinitions of what and how transparency reveals. Radical transparency begins by questioning the merely formal openness of projects like data.gov. Wikileaks offers one productive example for Birchall, but it is a problematic one, as she recognizes. The site has come under suspicion among those on the left, who saw its document dumps as efforts to shore up Trump’s 2016 candidacy, but Birchall suggests (not entirely persuasively, to my mind) that its existence as an independent, decentralized platform unallied with any state or party makes it an important alternative to the official neoliberal model of openness.
The key alternative to shareveillance that Birchall proposes is a new relationship to the secret. For the Enlightenment, secrecy is the dark other to the pure light of transparency, a sign of deception, dishonesty, and conspiracy. As Birchall shows, however, the modern opposition between openness and secrecy is historically unique. For early modern political theorists, secrecy was a legitimate and necessary tool of statecraft; medieval and early modern scientists published their experiments in so-called “books of secrets,” which were circulated only among those in the know, who could be expected to use the findings responsibly. Such alternative ways of thinking about secrecy serve Birchall as a provocation. Modernity can only conceptualize the secret as an unjust withholding of information, but it is, for this reason, ripe for reconsideration as a technique of left political action.
For neoliberal theory, the only legitimate version of individual secrecy is privacy. But as Birchall points out, the notion of privacy, with its individualized and mostly reactive response to unwanted attention, is a poor model for collective political action. In its place, she draws attention to a number of modern experiments with secrecy. Her illuminating chapter on the “aesthetics” of secrecy focuses on the way artists like Trevor Paglen and Jill Magid have tried to make secrecy itself visible, scrambling the opposition between the known and the unknown. They create open secrets, striking images of the clandestine. In another chapter, Birchall looks at some left-leaning experiments with secret societies, like Georges Bataille’s Acéphale group and the radical Tiqqun collective and, again, Wikileaks, which showed the failings of transparency for radical politics.
As Birchall notes, all these examples are ultimately limited. What is needed is a recalibration of the entire Enlightenment paradigm opposing secrecy and transparency. Secrets can be revealing, and transparency can create as many secrets as it reveals: the two are not opposed but always intertwined. What Birchall proposes instead is what she calls “radical secrecy” or “postsecrecy.” This notion is at once the most exciting part of the book but also its least clearly articulated. Birchall means by these terms “an understanding and experience of the political that is free from the false choice between secrecy and transparency as these terms are commonly understood today” (176). Her key models here are the notion of a “right to opacity” proposed by the French Caribbean writer Édouard Glissant and the “unconditional secret” imagined by Jacques Derrida. Both notions propose a secret that is not simply the prelude to revelation. Opacity is, for Glissant, a form of relation, a respect we pay to others by not demanding that they reveal themselves as a condition of engagement. The unconditional secret is a notional secret that cannot be revealed, that we must live and engage with rather than figure out, like the will of God for Kierkegaard, on which Derrida models this notion in The Gift of Death (2008). As something irreducible but also shared, these secrets create “commons” on an entirely a new model. Secrecy, for Birchall, is not an end in itself but a way to reimagine the collective.
As Birchall acknowledges, postsecrecy is a utopian horizon—as is, arguably, radical transparency—and so the book necessarily leaves us with but a few scattered models for this horizon, sketched out in the “Conclusion,” and drawn mostly from the academic context. I was left wondering about large-scale consequences, though. As Bruno Latour has noted in “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?” many of the insights of poststructuralist epistemology critique have been readily adapted by the right to serve the aims of climate change denial and to challenge the authority of academic expertise. Postsecrecy seems ripe for just this kind of adaptation, and it seemed to me easier to imagine right-wing versions of the notion (however much they might pervert Birchall’s intent) than left-wing ones. Birchall does note that the right has tended to monopolize the resources of secrecy in recent years (168), but this only left me wondering whether the project of fashioning a politically effective secret of the left will be more of a challenge than the book makes it out to be.
References
Bentham, J (1999) Political Tactics, ed. M James, C Blamires, and C Pease-Watson. Oxford: Clarendon.
Dean, J (2002), Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell Press.
Derrida, J (2008) The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Latour, B (2004) “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?” Critical Inquiry 30, 2, pp. 225-48.
Matthew Potolsky is Professor of English at the University of Utah. He is the author of The National Security Sublime: On the Aesthetics of Government Secrecy (Routledge 2019), as well as several monographs, essay collections, and scholarly editions focusing on the literature and culture of the late nineteenth century in England and France.
Email: m.potolsky@utah.edu
Twitter: @mdpotolsky
