[-empyre-] what is to be done?

[Sharon Daniel <sdaniel@ucsc.edu>]

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 domination?" 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 
enforceable?
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, daughters?

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.