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ABSTRACT
With the intensifying demand for transparency in government has come a dramatic increase in the number of spectacular public leaks that carry dramatic public consequences. This essay reviews how transparency has been considered an ideal of democratic theory and critical media scholarship and offers several psychoanalytic tenets for reading public demands for transparency. The essay then analyses discourse by and about WikiLeaks to illustrate how Julian Assange's discourse results in a program of transparency that engages in destructive rituals of disavowal and exposure.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Emily Winderman, Zornitsa Keremidchieva, Ronald Walter Greene, Laura Gurak, Michael Lechuga, Paul Johnson, and Claire Sisco King for generous feedback and recommendations, as well as to Briankle Chang for editorial guidance during the revision process. I would also like to thank Celeste Condit, Thomas Lessl, and Barbara Biesecker for their guidance on the earliest versions of this essay.
Notes
1 Andrew Glass, “Watergate ‘Smoking Gun’ Tape Released, Aug 5, 1974,” POLITICO, August 5, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/yd364tx4.
2 Mark Fenster, “Transparency in Search of a Theory,” European Journal of Social Theory 18, no. 2 (2015): 153.
3 Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro, Politicians Don't Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 321.
4 Torin Monahan, “Algorithmic Fetishism,” Surveillance & Society 16, no. 1 (2018): 2.
5 Calum Lister Matheson, “Psychotic Discourse: The Rhetoric of the Sovereign Citizen Movement,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 2 (2018): 189.
6 Dennis F. Thompson, “Democratic Secrecy,” Political Science Quarterly 114, no. 2 (1999): 182.
7 Thompson, “Democratic Secrecy,” 183.
8 Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 67.
9 Jodi Dean, Publicity's Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 32.
10 T. Gregory Garvey, “The Value of Opacity: A Bakhtinian Analysis of Habermas's Discourse Ethics,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 33, no. 4 (2000): 373.
11 Michael Schudson, The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945–1975 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2015), 18. An alternative to Schudson's history of transparency is the history of anti-epistemology, which describes the rise secrecy practices in the United States through intensifying rituals of classification. See Peter Galison, “Removing Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (2004): 229–43.
12 Schudson, The Rise of the Right to Know, 239.
13 Ibid., 234–38.
14 Ibid., 241.
15 Ibid., 242–43.
16 Ibid., 14.
17 Ibid., 6.
18 Michael Saward, “The Representative Claim,” Contemporary Political Theory 5, no. 3 (2006): 301.
19 Garvey, “The Value of Opacity,” 377–78.
20 Ibid., 386.
21 Jacques Alain Miller, “Language: Much Ado About What?” in Lacan and the Subject of Language, ed. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher (London: Routledge, 1991), 23.
22 Simon Morgan Wortham, Resistance and Psychoanalysis: Impossible Divisions (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
23 Jay Haley, “The Art of Psychoanalysis,” Review of General Semantics 15, no. 3 (1958): 194.
24 Christian Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 2012), 110.
25 Ibid., 113.
26 Kendall Gerdes, “Trauma, Trigger Warnings, and the Rhetoric of Sensitivity,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 49, no. 1 (2018): 7.
27 Schudson, The Rise of the Right to Know, 15.
28 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 397–402.
29 John B. Thompson, “The New Visibility,” Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 6 (2005): 31–51.
30 Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), 296.
31 Johnny Ryan, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 15.
32 J. C. R. Licklider, “Computers and Government,” in The Computer Age: A Twenty-year View, ed. Michael Dertouzos and Joel Moses (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), 109.
33 Vint Cerf, “A Brief History of the Internet and Related Networks: Introduction,” Internet Society, https://tinyurl.com/ybgrqgsv; see also Ryan, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future, 42–44.
34 Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History (New York: Norton, 2016), 252–55.
35 Adam Liptak and Brad Stone, “Judge Shuts Down Website Specializing in Leaks, Raising Constitutional Issues,” New York Times, February 20, 2008, https://tinyurl.com/y94g3ewt.
36 Elizabeth Matthews Losh, Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 195.
37 Rid, Rise of the Machines, 269.
38 Morozov, The Net Delusion, 243.
39 Mark Andrejevic, “WikiLeaks, Surveillance, and Transparency,” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014): 2619, 2621.
40 Morozov, The Net Delusion, 152–63.
41 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 92.
42 Marcia P. Miceli, Janet P. Near, and Terry M. Dworkin, Whistle-blowing in Organizations (London: Routledge, 2008).
43 Dana L. Cloud, “Private Manning and the Chamber of Secrets,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1, no. 1 (2014): 85.
44 Jela Krečič, “Exclusive Interview: Julian Assange, a Spy for the People,” Delo, August 12, 2013, https://tinyurl.com/ycb36l42; qtd. in Michael Kaplan, “‘Spying for the People’: Surveillance, Democracy and the Impasse of Cynical Reason,” JOMEC Journal 12 (2018): 166–90. https://tinyurl.com/y9we85pu.
45 Joshua Hanan and Catherine Chaput, “WikiLeaks and the Production of the Common,” in What Democracy Looks Like: The Rhetoric of Social Movements and Counterpublics, ed. Christina R. Foust, Amy Pason, and Kate Z. Rogness (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017), 246.
46 Claire Birchall, “Transparency, Interrupted: Secrets of the Left,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011): 62.
47 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 27.
48 Anthony Wilden, “Lacan and the Discourse of the Other,” in Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press), 279.
49 Dean, Publicity's Secret, 5.
50 Rebecca Jennings, “Slowly but Surely, the Amazon Prime Backlash is Coming,” Vox.com, November 27, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/y95375hd.
51 Dean, Publicity's Secret, 134; Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (New York: Verso, 1999), 322–69; Kaplan, “‘Spying for the People,’” 169.
52 Dean, Publicity's Secret, 13.
53 Kaplan, “Spying for the People,” 176.
54 Dean, Publicity's Secret, 78.
55 Losh, Virtualpolitik, 194.
56 Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 90.
57 Julian Assange, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies,” November 22, 2006, cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf.
58 Matthew Weaver, “9/11 Re-enacted: Wikileaks Publishes September 11 Pager Messages,” Guardian, November 25, 2009, https://tinyurl.com/ya5b9o4c.
59 Stephanie Strom, “Pentagon Sees a Threat from Online Muckrakers,” New York Times, March 18, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/ycdm6ew8.
60 Steven Lee Myers, “Charges for Soldier Accused of Leak,” New York Times, July 6, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/y9a3buue.
61 Noam Cohen and Brian Stelter, “Airstrike Video Brings Attention to Whistle-Blower Site,” New York Times, April 7, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/y9pvbr8s.
62 “The Iraq Archive: The Strands of a War,” New York Times, October 22, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/y74b9gbh; Hamit Dardagan and John Slobada, “WikiLeaks Iraq War Logs: Why Iraq Has the Right to Know the Full Death Toll,” Guardian, October 22, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/ybcoadpc; Der Spiegel, “The WikiLeaks Disclosures: New Dimensions in the Iraq War,” October 22, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/ycbj9alp.
63 Ellen Nakashima, “WikiLeaks Spokesman Quits, Describing Internal Dysfunction,” Washington Post, September 29, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/yb4dk5vn.
64 Helen Pidd, “Assange Was Obsessed by Power, Former Insider Claims,” Guardian, February 11, 2011, https://tinyurl.com/yd55xbva.
65 Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website (New York: Crown Publishers, 2011).
66 Glenn Greenwald, “The War on WikiLeaks and Why It Matters,” Salon, March 27, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/y9fm3hbu.
67 Scott Shane and Andrew W. Lehren, “Leaked Cables Offer Raw Look at U.S. Diplomacy,” New York Times, November 28, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/y732oc3x.
68 Andy Greenberg, “Visa, MasterCard Move to Choke WikiLeaks,” Forbes, December 7, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/y8hne4sd.
69 Julian Assange and Sir David Frost, “Julian Assange Interview,” Al-Jazeera News, December 22, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/ycbg82l5.
70 Ravi Somaiya, “WikiLeaks Founder Turns to Ecuador for Asylum,” New York Times, June 19, 2012, https://tinyurl.com/ydbv5xvg.
71 “Ecuador Expels U.S. Ambassador over Wikileaks Cable,” BBC News, April 11, 2011, https://tinyurl.com/yag8uy82.
72 Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives (New York: Vintage Books, 2014).
73 Julian Assange, “The Banality of ‘Don't Be Evil,’” New York Times, June 1, 2013, https://tinyurl.com/mutpgcq.
74 David Kravets, “Wikileaks Goes Behind Paywall, Anonymous Cries Foul,” Wired, October 11, 2012, https://tinyurl.com/yaw5znqp. The article cites a tweet dated October 11, 2012, from @YourAnonNews: “This, dear friends will lose you all allies you still had. @ wikileaks, please die in a fire, kthxbai.”
75 “Hillary Clinton E-mail Archive,” WikiLeaks.org, March 16, 2016, https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/.
76 “The DNC E-mail Database,” WikiLeaks.org, July 22, 2016, https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/.
77 Jonathan Martin and Alan Rappeport, “Debbie Wasserman Schultz to Resign D.N.C. Post,” New York Times, July 24, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/hewynxw.
78 Amy Chozick, “John Podesta Says Russian Spies Hacked His Emails to Sway Election,” New York Times, October 11, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/yafpqhjr; “The Podesta E-mails,” WikiLeaks.org, n.d., https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/.
79 Gabrielle Healy, “Did Trump Really Mention WikiLeaks over 160 Times in the Last Month of the Election Cycle?” Politifact.com, April 21, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/ydhgjrsj.
80 “Press Release,” WikiLeaks.org, March 7, 2017, https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/index.html.
81 Steven Erlanger and David E. Sanger, “Ecuador Cuts Internet of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ Founder,” New York Times, October 18, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/19/world/europe/julian-assange-embassy.html; Jon Henley, “Ecuador Cuts Off Julian Assange's Internet Access at London Embassy,” Guardian, March 28, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/y8z8fnye.
82 Henley, “Ecuador Cuts Off Julian Assange's Internet Access.”
83 Natasha Bertrand, “Roger Stone's Secret Messages with WikiLeaks,” Atlantic, February 28, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/ybwwxt87.
84 Julian Assange, “First Letter from Julian Assange to Benedict Cumberbatch Over The Fifth Estate,” WikiLeaks.org, October 9, 2013, https://wikileaks.org/First-Letter-from-Julian-Assange.html.
85 Nicholas Rapold, “One Built a Pipeline for Secrets, and the Other Pumped Them Out,” New York Times, May 23, 2013, https://tinyurl.com/y8bvyxae.
86 Peter Debruge, “Cannes Film Review: ‘Risk,’” Variety, May 19, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/yaeo9kak.
87 Claire Sisco King, “It Cuts Both Ways: Fight Club, Masculinity, and Abject Hegemony,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 4 (2009): 382.
88 Paul Elliott Johnson argues that “Demagogues encourage audiences to self-identify as victims on the basis of felt precarity, encouraging the well-off and privileged to adopt the mantle of victimhood at the expense of those who occupy more objectively fraught positions” “The Art of Masculine Victimhood: Donald Trump's Demagoguery,” Women's Studies in Communication 40, no. 3 (2017): 2 original emphasis.
89 Julian Assange, Risk., dir. Laura Poitras, (London: Dogwoof Pictures, 2017).
90 Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 148–49.
91 According to Lundberg, enjoyment (or jouissance) “gives coherence to the subject's world by investing it with an identity and a set of predicable habituated relationships to its world” Lacan in Public, 113. To say that masculine fragility strives to be the master of the other's jouissance therefore means to assume control of the investments that give the other their identity, or to make the other's identity completely contingent on the fulfillment of one's own.
92 Assange, Risk.
93 Renata Avila, Sarah Harrison, and Angela Richter, Women, Whistleblowing, WikiLeaks: A Conversation (New York: OR Books, 2017).
94 Ibid., 117–18.
95 Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (New York: OR Books, 2016).
96 David Leigh and Luke Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), 52.
97 Ibid., 140.
98 John Kampfner, “WikiLeaks Turned the Tables on Governments, but the Power Relationship Has Not Changed,” Guardian, January 17, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/jan/17/wikileaks-governments-journalism.
99 Slavoj Žižek, “Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks,” London Review of Books 33, no. 2 (2011): 9–10, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n02/slavoj-zizek/good-manners-in-the-age-of-wikileaks.
100 Doug Saunders, “Catch Me and I’ll Drop a Bomb of Data, Assange Warns,” Globe and Mail, December 6, 2010, A1.
101 Leigh and Harding, WikiLeaks, 140.
102 William Branigin et al., “Anatomy of the Leak,” Washington Post, November 30, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/2wy4cz6.
103 Leigh and Harding, Wikileaks, 211.
104 Max Fisher, “Stratfor Is a Joke and So Is WikiLeaks for Taking It Seriously,” Atlantic, February 27, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/yanfd7fs.
105 Andrejevic, “WikiLeaks, Surveillance, and Transparency,” 2623.
106 Ibid., 2622.
107 Leslie Gelb, “What the WikiLeaks Documents Really Reveal,” Daily Beast, July 25, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/ybmd6rtf, qtd. in Andrejevic, WikiLeaks, Surveillance, and Transparency, 2622.
108 Raffi Khatchadourian, “Julian Assange, a Man Without a Country,” New Yorker, August 21, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/julian-assange-a-man-without-a-country.
109 Ibid.
110 Dean, Publicity's Secret, 126.
111 Whereas desire “perpetually postpones fulfillment, reflexively turning the impossibility of satisfying desire into the desire for unsatisfaction,” the drive is the opposite: “rather than never attaining satisfaction, this subject always gets it; in fact, he gets it through the very movement of trying to repress it” Dean, Publicity's Secret, 117.
112 Andrejevic, “WikiLeaks Surveillance, and Transparency,” 2624.
113 Robert Mackey, “What Julian Assange's War on Hillary Clinton Says about WikiLeaks,” Intercept, August 6, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/htuetxs.
114 “Cablegate: 250,000 U.S. Embassy Diplomatic Cables,” WikiLeaks.org, November 28, 2010, https://wikileaks.org/Wikileaks-Statement-on-the-9-Month.html.
115 Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Remarks to the Press on the Release of Purportedly Confidential Documents by WikiLeaks,” U.S. Department of State, November 29, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/y8xowytd.
116 Mark Clayton, “WikiLeaks List of ‘Critical’ Sites: Is It a ‘Menu for Terrorists’?” Christian Science Monitor, December 6, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/yc3hzszb.
117 “CIA Statement on Claims by WikiLeaks,” cia.gov, March 8, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/zd54b3p.
118 Robert Mackey, “Julian Assange's Hatred of Hillary Clinton Was No Secret. His Advice to Donald Trump Was,” Intercept, November 15, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/yd9k69rj.
119 Russell Berman, “What the WikiLeaks Emails Say about Clinton,” Atlantic, October 12, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/ydbq5t5z.
120 Assange, Risk.
121 Atilla Hallsby, “The Rhetorical Algorithm: WikiLeaks and the Elliptical Secrets of Donald J. Trump,” Secrecy and Society 1, no. 2 (2018): https://tinyurl.com/y7p62tbb.
122 Robert Mackey, “Assange Claims Credit for Egypt's Revolution,” July 6, 2011, New York Times, https://tinyurl.com/y9xmgf6n.
123 Michelle Ye Hee Lee, “Julian Assange's Claim that There Was no Russian Involvement in WikiLeaks Emails,” Washington Post, January 5, 2017. https://tinyurl.com/yd3ue9h5.
124 “Read the Emails on Donald Trump Jr.'s Russia Meeting,” New York Times, July 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/11/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-email-text.html; Jacqueline Thompson, “Assange: I Tried to Get Trump to Publish the Emails with WikiLeaks,” Hill, July 11, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/yav3euob.
125 Dean, Publicity's Secret, 20.