[-empyre-] what is to be done: the public secret --forward from Sharon Daniel

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

hi List,

our mailman software is going nuts and just bouncing posts  
constantly.  I apologize for having to forward this new post from  
Sharon Daniel.

cm

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Hello,


My sincere apologies for entering this conversation so late. I have  
lurked a bit, and today I sped-read through the month's posts, but I  
have been unable to join you up to now because of a pressing project  
deadline. I have been working around the clock to prepare for the  
launch of project that I have been engaged in for more than three  
years. This project, "Public Secrets," will be published online in  
Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in just a few days. "Public  
Secrets," is, in part, why Christina invited me to participate in  
this discussion - because it implicitly and explicitly addresses the  
question "What is Bare-life," the second Documenta leitmotif and the  
focus of an earlier exchange on Empyre.

The 'public secret' - the secret the public keeps safe from itself -  
is interposed between the question of "what is Bare-life" and the  
question of "what is to be done." It is difficult to acknowledge the  
atrocities that we are implicated in - the pervasiveness of bare-life  
(the refugee, the prisoner, the illegal immigrant, the shanty-town  
resident), when we cannot see "what is to be done."

There have been many interesting and valuable points made so far in  
this discussion of "what is to be done," particularly in the various  
critiques of the of the question itself; its focus on futurity and  
problem solving, its assumptions and presumptions, its self- 
reflexivity in this context, and its implicit acceptance of power  
relations. I am too late to join in these threads and not sure I  
would have anything useful to add except to paraphrase Foucault (just  
in case no one else has) 'all domination is power, but not all power  
is dominationŠ" Power relations are inevitable but I believe that  
ethical resistance is possible.

To explain briefly what I am suggesting by the phrase "ethical  
resistance" I will to quote David Hoy -

"I use 'ethics' broadly to refer to obligations that present  
themselves as necessarily to be fulfilled but that are neither forced  
on one nor enforceableŠ
Ethical resistance involves the individual more than the institution  
or the population. It may be the basis for an individual's choice of  
engaging in social or political resistance. Yet it requires a  
different kind of explanation. For Emmanuel Levinas, ethical  
resistance is not the attempt to use power against itself, or to  
mobilize sectors of the population to exert their political power;  
ethical resistance is instead the resistance of the powerless." -  
Critical Resistance

To build on Hoy's explanation of ethical resistance I would like to  
return to an earlier adaptation of our question - "what is being  
done." The most obvious approach to me is to look at the practices  
that each of us engage, from within our own ethos, as artists,  
scholars, activists, colleagues, daughtersŠ

I am interested in developing an anecdotal theory of what can be done  
by looking at what we do and what we learn when we act out of our own  
ethos in response to our socio-political context on any scale -  
global, institutional or personal. I'd like to thank Ricardo Rosas  
and Dirk Vekemans for providing descriptions of wonderful projects in  
their recent posts. This is what I have to offer (not as an answer to  
"what is to be done" but as an indication of what I feel I should do  
- how I see my own responsibility to act in ethical and critical  
resistance), two projects; "Palabras_" and "Public Secrets".

You can find "Palabras_" here - http://palabrastranquilas.ucsc.edu
"Public Secrets" will launch in just a few days, here http:// 
www.vectorsjournal.org/  or you can go directly to the project at  
http://vectorsjournal.org/issues/04_issue/publicsecrets/ but you will  
miss all the introductory statements . Here is a copy of my "authors  
statement" about the project below. I apologize for the length.



"Truth is not a matter of exposure which destroys the secret, but a  
revelation that does justice to it."
Walter Benjamin - The Origin of German Tragic Drama

There are secrets that are kept from the public and then there are  
"public secrets" - secrets that the public chooses to keep safe from  
itself, like the troubling  "don't ask, don't tell." The trick to the  
public secret is in knowing what not to know. This is the most  
powerful form of social knowledge. Such shared secrets sustain social  
and political institutions. The injustices of the war on drugs, the  
criminal justice system, and the Prison Industrial Complex are  
"public secrets."

The public perception of justice - the figure of its appearance -  
relies on the public not acknowledging that which is generally known.  
When faced with massive sociological phenomena such as racism,  
poverty, addiction, abuse, it is easy to slip into denial. This is  
the ideological work that the prison does. It allows us to avoid the  
ethical by relying on the juridical.

The expansion of the prison system is possible because it is a public  
secret - a secret kept in an unacknowledged but public agreement not  
to know what imprisonment really means to individuals and their  
communities. As the number of prisons increases, so does the level of  
secrecy about what goes on inside them. The secret of the abuses  
perpetrated by the Criminal Justice System and Prison Industrial  
Complex can be heard in many stories told by many narrators, but only  
when they are allowed to speak. After a series of news stories and  
lawsuits documenting egregious mistreatment of prisoners in 1993, the  
California Department of Corrections imposed a media ban on all of  
its facilities. This ongoing ban prohibits journalists from face-to- 
face interviews, eliminates prisoners' right to confidential  
correspondence with media representatives, and bars the use of  
cameras, recording devices, and writing instruments in interviews  
with media representatives. Women incarcerated in California are  
allowed visits only from family members and legal representatives.  
Inmates are not allowed access to computers, cameras, tape recorders  
or media equipment of any kind. Such restrictions preserve the public  
secret.

For the past three years, I have visited the Central California  
Women's Facility [CCWF] as a legal advocate. I work with a non- 
profit, human rights organization, Justice Now http://jnow.org.  
Together we have been documenting conversations with women prisoners  
at CCWF, the largest female correctional facility in the United  
States in an effort to unmask the well known, yet still secret  
injustices that result from our society's reliance on prisons to  
solve social problems. Given the ban on conversations with the media,  
I would not have had access to the women who have contributed to  
Public Secrets without the support of Justice Now. As a "legal  
advocate" I am allowed to record my conversations with the women and  
solicit their stories, ideas, and opinions.

The visits require adherence to Kafkaesque regulations and acceptance  
of invasive search and surveillance procedures. I am registered for  
each visit in advance and searched on entry. I am allowed to bring in  
only a clear plastic baggie with a clear ink pen, my drivers license,  
a blank legal pad and my mini-disc recorder. The recorder has to be  
approved weeks in advance (the serial number is registered and  
checked) and the device is inspected on entry and exit. Only factory- 
sealed discs are permitted in.

After our interviews the women are subject to strip search and visual  
body cavity searches that may be performed by male guards.

Clearly, the women I work with are highly politicized and are  
seriously committed to this endeavor. For these women our  
conversations are acts of ethical and political testimony - testimony  
that challenges the underlying principles of distributive justice and  
the dehumanising mechanisms of the prison system. They are quite  
literally historians and theorists who speak out in an effort of  
collective resistance. I collaborate with them first as a witness and  
then as a "context provider." After soliciting their opinions and  
collecting their stories, it is my responsibility to create a context  
in which their voices can be heard across social, cultural and  
economic boundaries. My  conversations with these women therefore  
form the basis of Public Secrets which in turn brings their voices  
into dialogue with other legal, political and social theorists such  
as Giorgio Agamben, Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin, Fredric  
Jameson, Catherine MacKinnon, and Angela Davis. While this is a  
dialogue that I have constructed between interlocutors whose  
perspectives originate from very diverse social locations, for me all  
of their voices emerge out of a shared ethos and converge in critical  
resistance.

The linking of these voices that occurs in Public Secrets began in an  
essay "The Public Secret: Information and Social Knowledge http:// 
www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol6_No2_community_domain_daniel  
that I wrote for a special issue of the online journal Intelligent  
Agent. The essay also provided a point of departure for the design of  
the data structure that organizes the content of Public Secrets. In  
all of this work, I see the public secret as an aporia - an  
irresolvable internal contradiction, between power and knowledge,  
between information and denial, between the masks of politics and the  
goals of an open society (one in which the state is expected to act  
for the people as guarantor of human and civil rights). Building on  
this concept, we have created three main branches within Public  
Secrets, each structured as an aporia; inside/outside, bare-life/ 
human-life, and public secret/utopia. Each aporia frames multiple  
themes and threads elaborated in clusters of narrative, theory and  
evidence. Together they explore the space of the prison - physical,  
economic, political and ideological - and how the space of the prison  
acts back on the space outside to disrupt and, in effect, undermine  
the very forms of legality, security and freedom that the prison  
system purportedly protects.

Three years ago, on visiting day, I walked through a metal detector  
and into the Central California Womens' Facility. It changed my life.  
The stories I heard inside challenged my most basic perceptions - of  
our system of justice, of freedom and of responsibility. Walk with me  
across this boundary between inside and outside, bare-life and human- 
life, and listen to Public Secrets.