Questioning the moral attachment to transparency Clare Birchall, University of Kent, UK 1. The Revolution will not be transparent

We are told today that transparency can solve all our problems. It is entrusted with the

task of fostering accountability and strengthening participatory democracy. It is

expected to weed out and prevent corruption or, to invoke the early twentieth century

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ famous phrase, disinfect public life (1913).

More specifically, it has been called upon to: prevent the undue influence of lobbyists on

U.S. representatives (see OpenSecrets.org); thwart the abuse of UK MPs’ expenses

(Brooke, 2010); foster economic growth1; pave the way for financial recovery (Roth,

2009); democratize aid (Barder, 2010); and even help tackle global warming.2

The etymology of transparency, as Christopher Hood writes, moves from ‘perviousness

to light’ to connote a doctrine of governance that includes ‘decisions governed by clearly

established and published rules and procedures rather than by ad hoc judgments or

processes; methods of accounting or public reporting that clarify who gains from and

who pays for any public measure; and governance that is intelligible and accessible to

the “general public”’ (Hood, 2006a: 5). Drawing on the allure of such ideals, both Barack

Obama in the U.S. and David Cameron in the UK campaigned on the promise of

transparency in government and have taken a number of steps in this direction. Obama

has implemented wide-reaching initiatives including a shift in governmental attitude

towards Freedom of Information requests, and the introduction of the Open

Government Directive which requires all government agencies to implement

transparent strategies. When agreeing its policies, the UK Conservative/Liberal

Democrat coalition also committed itself to greater transparency, pledging in its

‘Programme for Government’ to publish the salaries of highly paid civil servants online,

create a new ‘right to data’, introduce protections for whistleblowers, and ensure the

availability of data-sets in open and standardized formats. The coalition have since

established a new Public Sector Transparency Board intended to ensure that all

Whitehall departments meet the new deadlines for releasing key public datasets.

The ideal of open government, as one context for transparency, and the public’s right to

‘scrutinize and participate in government dates back at least to the Enlightenment’

(Lathrop & Ruma, 2010: xix), but in recent years transparency has been given a modish

inflection through its association with and dependence on e-technologies, as well as its

invocation in the U.S. by Obama who has been called ‘America’s first hip president’

(Fullwood, 2009). Moreover, it is the object of a whole movement that has recruited

some of the best and brightest young campaigners. To go against transparency in the

‘west’ today is to be opposed to progress (conservative in the general sense); corrupt (if

there is nothing to hide, why fear transparency?); or anti-democratic (the link between

transparency and democracy has become unassailable).

I want to try to open up a more nuanced debate in this paper. And so, after examining

transparency’s ascendance, I will be asking whether a moral attachment to

transparency is obfuscating ethical decisions in this realm. In light of this, I argue that

the socialist and radical Left, so often with no choice but to support liberal tenets, might

be better off thinking about how it can appropriate the secret from the processes of

(in)securitization that became a feature of the Bush administration, rather than

investing wholly in transparency.

As I see it, the problem is not that America ‘has forgotten how to keep a secret’ as

Donald Rumsfeld claimed in 2004, but that the Left has forgotten to think through and

with the secret; it has abandoned secrecy and its productive possibilities. The lessons

and strategies of secrecy have been obscured, that is, by a moral attachment to

disclosure. Recognizing this could open up a new public discourse: one that does not

presume the political and moral alignments of concealment and disclosure.

2. Articulations of/to transparency

To take an influential context in relation to transparency in government, the American

twentieth century has been punctuated by a series of important legislative measures to

demonstrate commitment to open government. As ‘the daily compendium of almost all

activities of the executive branch agencies, but also a principal mechanism for

permitting citizens to know about and participate in agency decision making in a timely,

uniform manner’ (Feinberg, 2001: 359), the Federal Register of 1935 was arguably the

first. The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 required federal officials to publish

information about their operations and can be seen as a direct progenitor of both the

disclosure requirements of World Trade Organization agreements and the Freedom of

Information Act (FOIA), implemented in 1966 in the U.S. and strengthened following the

resignation of President Richard Nixon (see Roberts 2006a: 13-14). Though it is

possible that in practice some FOIA initiatives have resulted in tighter central

management of information (see Roberts, 2006b), the FOIA affirms that government

documents belong to citizens. After the Cold War, principles of the FOIA spread around

the globe. Thomas Blanton calls the period between the fall of the Soviet Union and the

collapse of the twin towers the ‘Decade of Openness’, and writes about the 26 countries

that enacted statutes to ensure citizens’ rights to government information (2002: 50).

Against the support for transparency embedded in legislative apparatus, the presidency

of George W. Bush (2001-2009) ‘created an extended period of retrenchment in public

access to government information, driven both by national security concerns and by

politics and bureaucratic instincts’ (Fung, Graham & Weil, 2007: 27). Indeed, the Bush

administration reversed a trend set by President Clinton and his Executive Order of

1995 which ‘initiated one of the largest declassification efforts in modern history,

releasing millions of formerly classified documents’ (Bailey, 2004: 188). Instead of

declassification, Bush was more intent on keeping information out of the public domain:

‘In fiscal years 2001 to 2003, the average number of original decisions to classify

information increased 50% over the average for the previous five fiscal years’ (Barone,

2006: xii-xiii). It would be easy to attribute this penchant for secrecy to the increased

security concerns after September 11, but even before the terrorist attack, ‘the 260, 978

classified documents in the executive branch represented an increase of 18 per cent

over the previous year’ (Bailey, 2004: 188). And the official advice for FOIA officers

changed from support for disclosure to withholding (see Sassen, 2006: 183). By 2004, J.

William Leonard, the official responsible for oversight of classification, complained that

war was being used ‘as an excuse to disregard the basics of the security classification

system.’

With the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009, a commitment to open and transparent

government was expressed with a moral urgency to match that of Woodrow Wilson in

the early Twentieth Century who claimed ‘Government ought to be all outside and no

inside… Secrecy means impropriety’ (1913/2008: 70). On his first day in office, Obama

issued a memorandum setting a new tone for Washington D.C.:

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness

in Government… Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote

efficiency and effectiveness in Government. (White House, 2009a)

At the end of that first year, the subsequent Open Government Directive (White House,

2009b) sought to institutionalize a culture of transparency in all government agencies.

While we could question whether this is an ethics or performance of transparency (civil

rights campaigners have complained, for example, about Obama’s continued use of the

State Secrets Privilege, and the administration’s response to the WikiLeaks’ diplomatic

cable disclosures, also poses a serious challenge to Obama’s credibility on this issue),

what is pertinent here is that Obama’s rhetoric and strategies confirm that transparent

and open government has (once again) become a legitimate mainstream concern with

moral and political force.

Despite (or because of) the Bush administration’s investment in state secrecy, the drive

for (and rhetoric of) transparency has reached new heights. Transparency has become a

ubiquitous rallying cry – its realization greatly facilitated by the reduced cost of data

storage and delivery made possible by e-technologies. More than a political doctrine,

transparency has taken on the identity of a political movement with moral imperatives.

Law professor, Patrick Birkinshaw, has gone so far as to claim that transparency

constitutes a human right (2006: 47-57).

As part of this movement, the Sunlight Foundation is probably the most visible online

project in Washington at present (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/). Its aim is to

‘make government more accountable and transparent’ through the use of ‘cutting-edge

technologies and ideas’, and its website calls on citizens to become a part of the

transparency movement. Other groups and web projects that fall under the banner of

the transparency movement include OpenSecrets.org, which charts the relationship

between financial interests and public policy; Transparency International: USA, which is

committed to combating corruption and promoting transparency and integrity in

government, business and development assistance; and MAPLight.org, which is a

database highlighting the links between campaign donations and legislative votes. On

the guerilla fringes of the transparency movement, WikiLeaks has posed the biggest

challenge to traditional classification systems and closed government. Despite differing

strategies, all of these groups or projects are acting on the assumption, as Mark Schmitt

puts it, that ‘publicity prevents the corruption that is almost inevitable in closed

processes…; information allows citizens to participate in democratic decision-making;

and this knowledge makes people better “consumers” of both public and private goods

and allows voters more effectively to hold politicians accountable’ (Schmitt, 2010).

But the ‘transparency’ of this movement is not stable. It is notoriously ill-defined in

everyday invocations (Hood writes: ‘Like many other notions of a quasi-religious

nature, transparency is more often preached than practiced, more often invoked than

defined’ (2006a: 3)). It might therefore be best to think of transparency as a ‘floating

signifier’. And what the celebratory rhetoric of Julian Assange might miss is that

transparency, like all floating signifiers according to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,

are subject to an ongoing contestation over meaning and can be articulated to radically

different political projects (1985: 113).

Indeed, although transparency is mostly associated with liberal democracy, open and

transparent government, along with free speech, has become the cause around which

groups from a range of political positions can cluster. A representative of the libertarian

CATO Institute explains the widespread appeal: ‘Transparency is a pan-ideological good.

Libertarians and conservatives want more transparency to reduce demand for

government. Liberals see opportunity to validate government and root-out corruption’

(quoted in Triplett, 2010). Laclau writes, ‘the same democratic demands receive the

structural pressure of rival hegemonic projects’ (2005: 131).

Rather than interpreting transparency as a radical force ‘powerful enough’, as Assange

has put it, ‘to break the fiscal blockade’ (2010), it is also possible to read transparency

as wholly compatible with, and supportive of, neo-liberalism (as characterized by free-

market conditions and an endorsement of individualism). For, as Garsten and Montoya

write, ‘One of the prerogatives of late capitalism, it seems, is making the world

hospitable for translocal, universal forms of administration and governance and this

entails making the world legible and transparent’ (2008: 1). They also describe how

ideals of transparency fit in with a ‘certain way of organizing society that emphasizes

the individual as the basic constitutive active agent in the construction of his or her fate

and of society-at-large. In such a vision of social life, the transactions between citizens

and the state and within the economy must be open and observable in the interests of

maintaining a level playing field for all concerned’ (2008: 4).

We could add that transparency might produce information about government agencies

and private corporations in lieu, rather than as part of, regulation, facilitating free

market trading (see Swartz, 2010). Moreover, there is a very real link between

transparency and contemporary audit culture (Strathern, 2000: 60; Garsten & Montoya,

2008: 7). Inventories legitimized through the project of transparency, that is, might

make processes of rationalization that privilege the market over other markers of

success easier to implement. (Academics in the UK will be familiar with this process

through the Research Assessment Exercise and its successor, the Research Excellence

Framework.) Given dominant associations of transparency with greater accountability

and the public’s right to know, it is important to note its compatibility with an ideology

that champions private control of public services, creating pockets of unaccountable

secrecy (see Roberts, 2006a: 152; Hood, 2006b: 213). Private companies employed to

carry out government work are often exempt from disclosure policies. The concern is

that private interests in public institutions foster a lack of accountability. Such concerns

were inevitably raised by the use of private security contractor Blackwater (later Xe

Services) in Iraq.

Despite this close relationship between transparency and neoliberalism, the Left is at

risk of echoing Liberal celebratory rhetoric around transparency. It has done this

before. During the Bush administration, for example, the Left felt compelled to defend

the basic principles of liberalism in terms of civil liberties. Thus, when the secrecy of the

Bush administration became an identifying feature, the Left supported transparency as

the only envisaged alternative to government secrecy. Though pragmatic, the problem

with such a position, as Wendy Brown points out in her essay, ‘Neoliberalism and the

End of Liberal Democracy’, is that ‘it does not facilitate a left challenge to neoliberalism

if the Left still wishes to advocate in the long run for something other than liberal

democracy in a capitalist socioeconomic order’ (2005: 55).

Brown examines this relationship between liberal tenets and the Left in psycho-political

terms. If the Left had an ambivalent relationship to liberal democracy before

neoliberalism co-opted its principles when it was ‘alive’ – ambivalent because it wanted

to ‘transform it into something else – social democracy or some form of radical

democracy’ (2005: 53) – it is now in mourning for its lost object of critique. But in the

Left’s ‘guilt, anxiety, and defensiveness over the loss of liberal democracy, we would feel

compelled to defend basic principles of liberalism or simply defend liberalism as a

whole, in a liberal way, that is, we would give up being critical of liberalism and, in doing

so, give up being left’ (55). If the left champions transparency, it risks supporting at best

liberal democracy as an organising political principle, at worst neoliberalism or

libertarianism. Either way, the opportunity to make a case for ‘an alternative vision of

the good’ (59) will have been missed. Transparency is a means to an end – good and fair

government that can be trusted – not an end in itself. If the means supports ideologies

the Left cannot subscribe to, or that render the ideal of democracy flawed, it is

necessary to find alternative routes to good and fair government and trust as well as a

different vision for what might constitute ‘good’ and ‘fair’ in this context.3

Moralism floods in as an authorising agent when the facts are lacking. Could the

ascension of transparency in politics be understood in such terms? Indeed, the need for

transparency is often presented in terms of a crisis of trust. Thus, on its website the

Sunlight Foundation claims its founding has to be understood in the context of abundant

political scandal in 2005: ‘trust in government was falling to another all time low.

Multiple corruption scandals engulfed Washington.’ Elsewhere, the founders write,

‘Improved transparency is not a threat to public trust; it is the very basis for restoring

that trust’ (Miller & Klein, 2009). And yet, as Hood points out, while it is impossible to

prove increased transparency results in less trust, we can say that the recorded decline

of trust in government after 1970 indicates that, contrary to the claims of transparency

advocates, there is no correspondence between increased transparency and trust

(2006b: 218). If restoring trust is a primary goal, there is no evidence that transparency

measures are the most successful means. In light of such a formulation, the comments of

Tim Wu are salient. He suggests that rather than transparency, civic virtue – an internal

rather than external control – is the key to restoring trust. For him, ‘It’s a change not in

what we know about the people in power, but rather who those people are’ (Wu, 2009).

Onora O’Neill’s BBC Reith Lecture on this issue questions the assumed links between

trust, honesty and transparency:

Transparency certainly destroys secrecy: but it may not limit the deception

and deliberate misinformation that undermine relations of trust. If we want

to restore trust we need to reduce deception and lies rather than secrecy.

Some sorts of secrecy indeed support deception, others do not. Transparency

and openness may not be the unconditional goods that they are fashionably

supposed to be. By the same token, secrecy and lack of transparency may not

be the enemies of trust. (2002)

By suggesting that secrecy need not be in the service of deception, O’Neill’s comments

question the working principles and moralism of the transparency movement. No

longer, she claims, can the ‘goodness’ of transparency be taken for granted. Rather, each

encounter with transparency and secrecy must be considered on its own merits.

For example, although Freedom of Information Acts are widely considered the bedrock

of the transparency movement and representative of its commitment to citizen

participation in government, America’s FOIA was, as Thomas Blanton writes, ‘not the

product of democratic enlightenment, but rather Democratic partisanship. The

legislation emerged from 10 years of congressional hearings (1955–65) as the

Democratic majority sought access to deliberations of the Republican executive branch

under former President Dwight D. Eisenhower’ (2002: 52). It is also little known that

America’s FOIA was initially used primarily by businesses seeking information on other

businesses rather than by individual citizens (Fung et al, 2007: 27). The use of the FOIA

to benefit political parties or private companies rather than the public does not render

it null and void, but it does bring into question belief in it as a bastion of democratic

participation. This might simply be the difference between ideals and implementation:

and given that transparency is not anything until it is put into practice, the transparency

movement’s rhetoric might need to be passed over in favour of particular realisations of

transparent policy. Yet, this rhetoric is currently setting the transparency agenda and

moral register and therefore demands attention.

Lawrence Lessig (2009) has criticized the transparency movement for its lack of

specificity. It is easy to find support for some aspects of his argument. One data

visualization on the Sunlight Foundation’s website maps the increasing occurrences of

the word ‘transparency’ in the New York Times since 1990.

http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/2009/03/06/transparency-visualized/

If based on a clock, 11pm would bring us up to 2009. Entitled, ‘The Arrival of

Transparency’, this graphic says more about the transparency movement’s approach to

transparency as a global ‘good’ than transparency itself. Without a context for each

iteration of ‘transparency’ in the New York Times, the graph merely charts the rise of a

buzzword rather than provides evidence that we live in more transparent times or, in

fact, what the effects of this might be. In fact, one search result for the term

‘transparency’ in the graph’s most transparency-laden year (2009) on the New York

Times database reveals that the word occurs in an article about a film festival. (Writing

of the renovated Alice Tully Hall, Manhola Dargis describes how it ‘transmits a sense of

light and air and transparency’ (2009).)

While many of the articles that feature ‘transparency’ are concerned with the

availability of government and corporate data, the point here is that when celebration is

prioritized over detail, the signifier is at risk of becoming divorced from the

circumstances in which it is employed. When this happens, as Lessig observes, we are in

danger of ‘not thinking critically enough about when and where transparency works,

and where and when it may lead to confusion’ (2009). Crucially, if openness is pursued

‘without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness’ the

movement will ‘inspire not reform, but disgust’. We could say that this graphic on

transparency is far from transparent. It can only testify to the triumph of the

transparency movement rather than transparency as a model of governance or

corporate ethic.

Unsurprisingly, Lessig’s remarks were received negatively by the transparency

movement (see Miller & Klein, 2009). Like o’Neill, Lessig questions the assumption of

transparency as a universal good and in a manner deemed irresponsible for a former

advocate of transparency (Lessig is on the board of the Sunlight Foundation). But it is

possible to turn the tables and present advocates of greater transparency as not acting

responsibly or ethically. I mean this in the sense that Jacques Derrida (e.g. 1992), among

others, formulates responsibility: it would appear that some advocates of transparency

have already decided in advance what transparency is (along with the ethical choice,

and of course the secret from which transparency saves us).

Take the memorandum from Obama’s office I invoked earlier:

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness

in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a

system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will

strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in

Government.

The language of memoranda is obviously not going to demonstrate philosophical

speculation and I am not suggesting it should, but it is clear that openness or

transparency is a fixed goal, not an object of debate or enquiry here. Wouldn’t any

understanding of open government or transparency worth its salt be subject to, and the

result of, transparent processes such as ‘public participation’ and ‘collaboration’? What

would a ‘transparent transparency’ look like? It is entirely possible that a notion of

transparency created through transparent measures might look very different from the

concept configured by campaigners, pundits and skeptics.

The White House memorandum also expresses a fixed notion of democracy, of course,

and positions greater transparency as a means to achieve this fixed notion. But in the

same way that transparent transparency would have to allow for the possibility of

transparency mutating into something very much unlike current understandings, real

democracy has to allow for secrets qua singularities. For Jacques Derrida, if democracy

is to mean anything, it must be hospitable to multiple singularities – which might

include those who do not wish to respond, participate in or belong to the public sphere.

More than this, democracy is nothing but the play between openness and secrecy,

between belonging and non-belonging, between collectivity and singularity. Democracy

is always ‘to come’, as Derrida puts it, because it has to take account of singularities, of

secrets. It is an impossible project: true democracy would create belonging among

people who will never belong.

In light of this, transparency is doomed: not because there is always more to know as

advocates of transparency position the problem (which may or may not be true in any

given case); but because it becomes drafted into the service of a democratic project

intent on reconciling an irreducible tension between secrecy/privacy/self-exclusion on

the one side, and openness/publicity/belonging on the other. Transparency cannot

easily accommodate those who want to be exempt from the project, those who want to

remain secret, or those who, when consulted in the name of ‘public participation’

express a different understanding of transparency; and then transparency begins to

look less like an agent of democracy and freedom and more like totalitarianism. Derrida

writes, ‘If a right to the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space’ (Derrida

2001: 59). He is categorically not referring to the right to privacy here, but rather, the

right to be singular, to not belong, to be a secret to the state, the community and oneself.

The problem, therefore, with much liberal discourse on transparency, exemplified by

Obama’s administration and the ‘transparency movement’, is not only the more

common accusations from the radical Left that lip service to transparency is paid by the

state to secure hegemony (where freedom of information is taken for actual liberty), but

that there is no responsible decision being made. All of the decisions about what

constitute transparency, secrecy and democracy (and what is best for the public) have

already been taken in a different political conjuncture to the one we are currently living

through. A responsible decision requires us to disinvest ourselves from pre-given

ideology and confront the circumstance anew each time. If transparency is only offered

to reinforce the beliefs of half the country, it is not a tool of democracy but a tool of

ideology, conformity and moralism. And so, being responsible might require us not to

view transparency and secrecy as discreet options that ask us to make a choice, but to

hold them in tension in order to make decisions about knowledge, secrets,

accountability and public access.

For all the furore from those in the US administration, WikiLeaks, too, cannot presume

the radicality of its actions made in the name of transparency. Jodi Dean, for example,

insists that transparency is beside the point. ‘All sorts of horrible political processes are

perfectly transparent today. The problem is that people ... are so enthralled to

transparency that they have lost the will to fight’ (2002: 174). She calls for ‘decisive

action’ as remedy. Alasdair Roberts makes a similar argument: ‘The significance of Abu

Ghraib,’ he writes in this context, ‘may also lie in the extent to which we overestimated

the catalytic effect of exposure’ (2006a: 238). For him, democracy has to involve the

responsibility of the public to act upon the information it apparently has a right to.

Lessig insists that techno transparency has to be accompanied by suggestions for

reform to have any worth (2009). Jeremy Gilbert asserts that any tendency towards

transparency ‘has to go beyond the mere telling of secrets and become real acts of what

we might call ... “publication”, or “publicity”,’ (2007: 38) which involves the

politicization of an event or issue – making them objects of debate, discussion and

intervention.

However, I would argue that this radicalization of exposed secrets is only one element

of the working-through necessary here. Expose the ills of government, to be sure, and

make those ills the subject of radical democratic debate – perhaps WikiLeaks has even

done this. But total reliance upon revelation (even when accompanied by action) might

not be as radical as it at first seems for the three reasons I have already discussed:

1) Because of transparency’s complicity with neoliberalism;

2) Because transparency is a means to an end, not an end itself;

3) Because of the way transparency presupposes the answer to all sorts of

questions today and therefore might not constitute an ethical or responsible

decision;

4) Because the desire to render everything and everyone transparent might not

allow for singularities, and once this happens, we are closer to totalitarianism

than democracy.

4. Recuperating Secrecy

The Left, in this case, might be better to forget transparency and look for other

strategies. In this final section, I want to challenge the traditional political alignments

(right=secret; left=open) and think through what a secrecy of the Left might be.

Though the non-statist left has had its need of secrecy – think of McCarthy-era

Communist cells, and, as Jack Bratich has written about, the Zapatistas’ use of the

balaclava, and black bloc anti-capitalist masking (2007: 49) – secrecy as a modus

operandi is more often associated with Republican governments in North America

(President Nixon’s role in Watergate or, more recently, President George W. Bush’s

penchant for secrecy throughout his time in office; with non-democracies (the notorious

operations of Communist bloc secret services such as the Stasi, for example, or state

censorship in China); or with the state in general (as that which has the power to keep

certain information out of general circulation).

Information and knowledge are the currency in these examples; secrecy equals power

and transparency weakness. The contemporary liberal championing of transparency

has attempted to reverse the terms of this opposition by attributing power to

transparency (as an agent of change, accountability, trust-building, and efficiency) and

re-inscribing secrecy as a weakness (as a strategy only employed by those whose

policies would not bear up to public scrutiny). Many of the more recent manifestations

of this discourse in the U.S. are an understandable response to the Bush

administration’s over-reliance on secrecy during the ‘war on terror’. But this

championing of transparency has created a taboo not only of secrecy as used in

processes of (in)securitization, but by association, the secret in general.

However, this simultaneous fashion for transparency and taboo around secrecy

threatens to close down our thinking about and through the secret. The characterization

of secrecy as a function of hegemony may well go unchallenged in public discourse.

Rather than a strategy that ‘naturally’ lends itself to, and aligns with, state processes of

(in)securitization, we could refashion secrecy as that which resists ‘enclosing’

discourses of this kind. After all, although the content of contextual secrets might be

said to belong to an individual or institution, the same cannot be said of secrecy (as a

system or strategy that survives the disclosure of any one secret). Secrecy cannot

belong to anyone or any political project, and is therefore a potential resource for

everyone. It is, to put it in terms referred to at the beginning of this article, a floating

signifier like transparency; but rather than see this as a pitfall – a weak concept with no

‘natural’ allegiance – we could think about it as a productive or resistant possibility.4

As one way to think secrecy (and therefore transparency) otherwise, we could draw on

a notion highly popular in the radical Left at present - that of the commons.5 Used more

frequently in relation to environmental, institutional, labour and species commons, the

idea of ‘collective but decentralized control over resources’ (de Peuter and Dyer-

Witheford, 2010: 30) might have force in relation to secrecy. For if the commons is to be

a term that speaks of more than simply ‘on message’, progressive themes (such as the

endorsement of Creative Commons licences for open access publishing; or the state

ownership of institutions like hospitals or schools), it needs to be mobilized for those

‘resources’ the political Left is much less enthusiastic about. (How, for example, could

we think about the non-western proliferation of nuclear arms through the commons?)

Secrecy constitutes one of these problematic or unpalatable instances of a common

resource that has been tainted by, and, in recent years, largely left to, the political right.

But by thinking through ‘toxic’ commons, the language of the political and philosophical

left will avoid being hijacked by a moralism that can only address pre-approved themes

that do not demand responsible and ethical decision-making. As the lexicon of popular

culture shows the left can raid the larder of the right (such as the appropriation of the

word ‘Nigga’ in rap music) just as the right has raided that of the left (think of the

championing of localism, co-operatives, and direct democracy in David Cameron’s ‘Big

Society’). If the left does not recognise secrecy as a common resource, not only will the

right have unrivalled use of this strategy, but the link between transparency and

moralism will be reinforced at the expense of an ethical decision (about the times and

places in which transparency is the best policy).

In this view, what is exciting or radical about WikiLeaks is, perhaps, not that it provides

an example of a community of cyber-libertarian transparency in the service of

accountability (in these aims it is quite in-keeping with a First Amendment liberal

democratic tradition), but, as a virtual, non-state, largely anonymous community, it

treats secrecy as commons. In a statement to the press on the day of Julian Assange’s

arrest in London (7th December 2010), his lawyer, Mark Stephens, commented that

WikiLeaks is a ‘virtual journalistic community around the world’, indicating that its

work couldn’t be halted by the arrest of one person (quoted in Weaver and Adams,

2010). Assange himself had earlier remarked that ‘the Cable Gate archive has been

spread … to over 100,000 people in encrypted form.’ He added, ‘If something happens to

us, the key parts will be released automatically’ (2010). And while Assange’s

assumption of the role of spokesperson has rendered him as an individual far from

secret, the structure of secrecy remains an instrumental strategy of WikiLeaks.

Transparency, though certainly the most discussed aspect of the WikiLeaks project, is

arguably the least radical; while the way in which the force of this transparency

demands a level of secrecy equivalent to that practiced by the state might be the most.

This is the difference between the treatment of secrets per se as commons (which is

tantamount to transparency) and of secrecy as strategy as commons.6

If the political Left leaves secrecy to the enclosing, (in)securitizing forces of the right, it

risks missing vital opportunities to explore forms of knowledge which do not conform

to revelatory logic. It risks missing the chance to make something else ‘happen’. The

secret is powerful – but not only for the opportunities of control and malfeasance the

right, or state, has exploited. It can interrupt transparency and promote resistance and

change – elements vital to democracy. The secret, qua singularity, can stage the ethical

demand of democracy.

Such formulations lack political expediency – they do not lend themselves to attractive

data visualisation; they cannot be the basis of a ‘movement’, or a positive community of

action in the way that transparency can. But to ignore secrecy, to deny its status as a

common resource or strategy, means that it will remain a tool of ideology and power.

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1 The EC’s ‘Transparency Directive’ states: ‘Efficient, transparent and integrated securities markets

contribute to a genuine single market in the Community and foster growth and job creation by better

allocation of capital by reducing costs’ (2004).

2 David Milliband’s answer to the controversy surrounding leaked e mails of climate change scholars at

the University of East Anglia was, ‘maximum transparency – let’s get the data out there. The people who

believe that climate change is happening and is man-made have nothing to fear from transparency’

(quoted in Westcott, 2009). And more generally, transparency concerning carbon trading schemes and

green technologies is promoted as progressive.

3 Stuart Hall (2011), speaking on the BBC Radio 4 programme, ‘Thinking Allowed’, comments on the

ubiquitous use of the term ‘fair’ by the UK Coalition, for example. He explains that in these terms fairness

means “we’ll tax the poor and the rich the same. Isn’t that fairness? Well, yes, except that it leaves the rich

rich and the poor poor. It leaves the structure within which fairness is being exercised as a given. Nobody

questions that.”

4 Jack Bratich (2006) has written about the productive possibilities of secrecy as leftist strategy, but, in

contrast to the current article, without a dual focus on the public discourse of transparency. I urge anyone

interested in this topic to seek out his excellent work.

5 An ‘enclosing’ discourse is not the same, of course, as the acts of privatization being imposed on social

and environmental commons. Nevertheless, I think the comparison stands – for the discourse of

(in)securitization has effectively harnessed the profitability of secrecy as a strategy.

6 In the way it has treated both secrets and secrecy as commons, particularly through the release of the

U.S. diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks has prompted a widespread debate about transparency. This outcome

chimes with what I am calling for here. But the opportunity for radical change on the back of

transparency has been contained in two ways. The first comes from some sectors of the transparency

movement itself as it strives to keep WikiLeaks at a distance by making a distinction between responsible

and irresponsible transparency (e.g. Aftergood, 2010). The second comes from the state in its attempts to

make the disclosed content, and the act of disclosure, objects of (in)securitization. Such discourses do not

constitute ethical decision-making because they follow already-prescribed understandings of good

transparency and American unity that have been threatened by a rogue element (rather than the

practices of America’s own diplomats, soldiers, politicians).