Post #575

О суверенности, а также секретности и приватности какъ ея условіяхъ: I refer to the state’s central need to pursue, generate, and manage secret knowledge in order to sustain its sovereignty. The capacity to do this is actually indispensable to the sovereignty that modern states claim and aim to practice today. Indeed, a state that cannot produce or manage secret knowledge — that is to say, a state that has no secrets and cannot hide its secrets simply cannot be sovereign. That is why scholars such as the historian Michael Warner* have defined the very notion of intelligence (as in, intelligence agencies) as the pursuit and management of secret knowledge by and for the preservation of sovereignty. And while the practices of espionage may be ancient, and not confined solely to states, Warner (2014) points to a set of fundamental transformations at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries that gave rise to what we now call “intelligence” — where it becomes bureaucratized, professionalized, centralized, institutionally independent, and increasingly indispensable to the modern state as it becomes the primary claimant to sovereignty. Warner shows that the institutionalization of secrecy and suspicion comes about historically with the modern state’s becoming the main claimant to sovereignty, above all other entities. Importantly, liberal democracies are not exempt from this requirement of sovereignty and, thus, from their need to constantly gather secret knowledge. Without such sovereignty, they cannot claim to be genuinely democratic, as they would then be vulnerable to both external intervention and internal subversion. And if they cannot be genuinely democratic, then their claim to being liberal is also rendered unstable (think, for example, about the hacking of elections). It might seem as though the pursuit of secret knowledge through surveillance is incompatible with liberal democracy, but in an important sense, quite the opposite is true because the effective generation of secret knowledge requires that there be a domain of privacy. If there were nothing hidden from anybody, no one could have secret knowledge or the need to generate it. For the surveillance that generates secret knowledge to yield the results it seeks, people must believe in a domain where they are unseen, where they can act “as themselves” without hindrance, without their actions being guarded. Of course, the suspicion that such surveillance is happening can make people more guarded in their private lives, and this can generate a complex, intensifying dynamics of evasion and pursuit. That is one reason why the state aims to conduct its intelligence-gathering activities in secret. What I want to emphasize here is that the liberal democratic state not only requires secret knowledge to sustain its sovereignty but is, with its commitment to personal privacy, especially conducive to the generation of that knowledge. Maybe that is why, in liberal democracies like the United States, the amount of classified information is several times larger than all the information available in the public domain (see Masco 2014). ___ * Not Michael Warner the critical theorist. Hussein Ali Agrama - After Muslims: Authority, Suspicion, and Secrecy in the Liberal Democratic State in "Conspiracy / Theory" (2024), pp. 399-400 Любопытная статья (по большей части о паттернѣ смѣшенія или сліянія въ общественномъ воображеніи идей скрытой истины и латентной угрозы, которое авторъ находитъ не естественнымъ положеніемъ дѣлъ, а специфическимъ раскладомъ, источникъ котораго, если я правильно поняла, онъ видитъ въ "shifts in the structure and performance of secrecy as part of state governance in the wake of the atomic bomb and the rise of counterterrorism", ссылаясь, понятно, опять-таки на Джозефа Маско) со множествомъ полезныхъ ссылокъ; сборникъ уже выложенъ на Дженезисѣ. Надо будетъ еще кое-что процитировать. Если нуженъ переводъ - я сдѣлаю.