Recently, I took part in an excellent interdisciplinary symposium (hosted by Ted George and Kristi Sweet of the Texas A&M Philosophy Department) focused on “Hermeneutics, the Humanities, and the Future of Interpretation.” All of the presentations were great, but the one that has stuck in my craw, and which I suspect I will not be able to pry loose for quite some time, was a brilliant paper given by Alberto Moreiras (Department of Hispanic Studies, Texas A&M) entitled “Notes on the Illegal Condition in the State of Extraction: How Not to be an Informant” (download the pdf here). I was so intrigued by Moreiras’ paper that I spent the entire plane-ride home jotting down notes about it. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
In sum, Moreiras contends that we have a moral and political obligation not to be informants. This is not primarily because snitches get stitches, mind you, but rather because permitting oneself to conform to the figure of an “informant” accelerates the arrival of a totalitarian state and, with it, the end of human freedom.
[Please keep in mind that I am glossing over many of the very important nuances in what follows!]
Moreiras argued that the contemporary political condition is one in which we, humans, find ourselves regularly reduced to that of political subjects qua data-sets or repositories of information. (I trust that regular readers of this blog can see already why my interest was piqued.) On Moreiras’ account, our relationship to the State is one of a political subject to a political authority in which the latter’s primary exercise of authority is subjugation-via-forced-exposition or “extraction.” For Moreiras, the “expository State” in which we now live (a term he borrows from Bernard Harcourt’s Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age) is consistent with, but excessive of, other well-rehearsed and largely Foucaultian configurations of State authority in late modernity e.g., the “disciplinary” State, the “control” State, the “security” State, or the “surveillance” State.
Ventriloquizing Moreiras, we might say that, yes, it is still the case that The Man wants to discipline you. Yes, it remains the case that The Man aims to control you. Yes, The Man still manufactures all sorts of security theaters and commands all manner of security apparatuses, which you are involuntarily compelled to participate in and which utilize your passive consent to conscript you into volunteering for larger surveillance systems that do not require your consent, but only your complicity. At the end of the day, however, what The Man actually wants is not discipline or control, not security or surveillance, not even really your consent to or your complicity with its instrumental tools of subjectificaton. Rather, what The Man wants is to extract your information.
The State of Extraction wants both the information you have and the information you are.
The political authority of the expository State, on Moreiras’ account, is most clearly manifest in its “extractionary” function, its implicit demand (via the “Force of Law,” or what Derrida called its metaphysical foundation of authority) — but, more often, its explicit demand (via frequent, coercive, cruel, and often torturous interrogations by state agents)– that one “exposit,” reveal, disclose, translate, de-cipher, or serve as an informant. Moreiras’ argument depends, in a deeply Gramscian sense, on the presumption that what he calls “the State of Extraction” is something like the perfect execution of hegemony, which even in Gramsci’s account always depended on the unholy conjunction of coercion and consent. The expository state (or, in Moreiras’ account, “the State of Extraction”) requires informants in the same way that we, flimsy mortal humans, require air and water and food.
It turns out, though, that informants come in many varieties. In his paper, Moreiras articulated an entire taxonomy of “informants” that included both the familiar (garden-variety, self-interested “snitch”), the imaginary (allegedly “just” informant, who acts in accordance with what Kant would have recognized as a good will), and every manner of voluntary or coerced confessor in between. Those taxonomic differences between forms of informants notwithstanding, Moreiras argued that informants as such are always morally suspect, not because it is impossible to imagine a morally upright informant– e.g., an informant who informs in the interest of justice, like the “undercover cop”– but rather because “the Law” itself, which marks the border between informant and extractor-of-information, only rewards “evil” (in the Kantian sense) informants and never rewards (for lack of a better descriptor) morally just informants.
It does so because “justice” or “the Good” is not a primary, or even auxiliary, concern for the State of Extraction. To an information-collector, charged only with the task of collecting information, all information in equally valuable, after all. It does not matter if the information is”true” or “false.” It only incidentally matters if the information is utile. The primary concern is that the information is extractable, or that the possessor of information takes the form (or can be made to take the form) of an informant.
The acquisition of information– more information, better information– such that it can be possessed and controlled by an absolutely centralized Information Authority is the sine qua non of the State of Extraction. And that is the basis of Moreiras’ well-founded worry that, aided by information technologies, the State of Extraction is on a fast-track to totalitarianism.
No surprise then, that Moreiras goes on to argue that we have both a moral and a political duty to resist being deciphered, to resist being coerced into expositing ourselves in the service of the instrumental ends of State authority, to resist disclosing, divulging, translating, or confessing the information we have and the information we are.
That sort of resistance is hard work in this, our Information Age. We regularly (daily, hourly, sometimes minute-by-minute) volunteer expositions of ourselves in Facebook statuses, tweets, Instagram images, and all manner of digitized communications (voicemails, emails, Snapchats, text messages) with one another. We semi-involuntary do the same whenever we shop, or bank, or look for Google/Amazon/Netflix recommendations, or visit a doctor, or vote, or go to school. We carry around tracking and extracting devices with us everywhere, which we adorably call “smartphones.” We cannot help but be locatable, readable, iterable, analyzable, and monetizable every waking moment of our existence. (Sleeping moments, too!) So, Moreiras implores us to intentionally and conscientiously invest in the hard work of preserving– or, perhaps, discovering for the first time– a state in which our secrets can remain secret, a state in which we can remain silent, a state in which we are not forced to be informants.
Moreiras allows for the possibility of such a human “state,” by which he does not mean a political State, but rather something more like an existential situation. In fact, he consistently described this non-extractionary and non-extractable human space as prior to or below or beyond what we currently think of as the political condition. It is a “protoplitical” or “infrapolitical” condition. (Moreiras offered it as an alternative account of what Arendt or Hamacher might have called “the right to have rights.”) In one of the most compelling moments of his talk, Moreiras described this protopolitical/infrapolitical state as such:
I could think of a place, the border of the border, where information would not have to be shared, where language and politics would not come together under the imperative to inform, an opaque space of silence and secrecy, a place of radical reticence concerning unconcealment..
As someone thoroughly disenchanted with the nation-state and deeply invested in border-erasure, I found this description of the “protopolitical” or “infrapolitical” condition qua “an opaque space of silence and secrecy” compelling. And I found myself genuinely moved by Moreiras’ call for us to imagine a political condition that would assume this as a proto-political right: the right to refuse disclosure, to refuse to inform, to refuse to share secrets or, in what Moreiras suggested amounts to the same thing, a right to remain silent. Moreover, I think that Moreiras is correct to insist that, at least in the near future, we have an immediate moral obligation to learn “how not to be an informant” if we want to allow for the the possibility of a (human, political) future that is non-totalitarian.
But, alas, you knew this was coming… I have some reservations.
Before I jump into the specific concerns that Moreiras’ paper raised in my own mind, let me first say that his was one of the most brilliant and provocative papers that I have heard since the panel on “monotheism(s), politics and democracy” at SPEP in 2017 (which I wrote about here). I trust I am not the only one for whom this is the case but, in my experience, as I have grown older and more sedimented in my views, I find precious too few opportunities to interact with other scholars in venues like the symposium this past weekend, where one finds oneself in an intimate-enough “thinking space” that allows for people-who-otherwise-share-common-concerns to really consider the manner in which the way their concerns are considered are often informed by un-reflected-upon or not-yet-thematized “first principles” that inevitably steer “shared” concerns in often contradictory directions.
(That was an unforgivably clunky sentence. Mea culpa.)
I spent a good amount of time chatting with Moreiras between sessions and those were some of the most productive conversations I’ve had in a long time with someone who I would describe as a techno-pessimist. I am well aware that my own (bordering-on-pathological) techno-optimism sometimes has a tendency to cloud my judgment of tech-suspicious arguments. In my experience, that is usually because my interlocutors either (a) possess a grossly reductive, outdated, or uninformed understanding of emergent technologies, (b) want to romanticize “unplugged” life in a way that is no longer realistically possible or, in what amounts to the same thing, in a manner that their own daily use of technology betrays, or (c) are clinging to some mystical/magical conception of “the human” with a medieval Great-Chain-of-Being death-grip that does not allow for the impending and inevitable death of “the human.” Moreiras’ arguments, thankfully, escaped all three of above. Rather, my experience listening to Moreiras’ paper and speaking with him informally was to find myself pressed upon by this question: how is it that I can unreservedly agree with all of the premises and yet find myself denying the conclusion?
Would that I had this experience more often!
At any rate, if I had to put a finger on the sticky point between Moreiras’ argument and my own reservations, it would be something like the following:
Silence and secrecy cannot, and ought not, be conflated.
I’m convinced that the contemporary democratic (classical liberal) understanding of the “right to remain silent” already presumes a conflation of silence and secrecy that is ultimately unsustainable. In fact, “the right to remain silent” is exemplary of exactly the same sort of autoimmune tendencies that Derrida argued (rightly, in my view) are operational in all fundamentally democratic concepts: friendship, cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, hospitality, animality, gift-giving, even “democracy” itself.
There are, of course, many good reasons to advocate for a more expansive interpretation of the right to remain silent, especially in what Moreiras described as our current State of Extraction. (If you haven’t already, I highly recommend everyone read James Duane’s You Have The Right to Remain Innocent, a text that I will be incorporating into all of my classes next semester, inspired by Moreiras’ paper.) Nevertheless, the “right to remain silent” is a state-sanctioned right, Constitutionally secured by the Fifth Amendment and pursuant to Miranda v. Arizona. In the United States, it allows citizens to refuse to disclose information that might incriminate them and, therefore, is best described as a right to keep secrets “secret” from the State and not a right to keep secrets “silent.” The “right to remain silent” as it is currently configured, enacted, and enforced is not, strictly speaking, a right to remain silent, but rather a right to refuse the disclosure of (already-shared) secrets.
I am all on-board for reconsidering our principled, democratic Miranda right to remain silent as not only fundamental, but essential, to our effective and free participation in the political sphere as it is currently configured. But I wonder: can we consider the “right to remain silent,” as Moreiras suggests, a proto-political or infra-political right? That is, can we think of “the right to remain silent” as the (“proto-political”) condition for the possibility of politics, or the (“infra-political”) ground of politics itself?
I’m inclined to think not. That is, I’m inclined to think that “the right to remain silent” is incapable of accomplishing the same work that Arendt or Hamacher intended “the right to have rights” to accomplish, i.e., as articulating the condition for the possibility of entering the political sphere at all (“proto-“), or the condition for the possibility of participating in politics simpliciter (“infra-“) because, I would argue, the natural, inevitable, and logical predicate of “politics” is disclosure.
Politics abhors silence like Nature abhors a vacuum.
What it means to be an active and concerned participant in the operations of “politics,” of a demos, of a “people” or a polis, is not only the willingness to, but the volitional consent to, share information. Sharing information is politics. Some of that information is shared as “secrets,” yes, but secrecy and silence are not synonymous.
Secrets are not, and cannot be, silent.
Here’s the thing about secrets: in order to be “secrets,” the information contained in the secret must be shared. (I am, of course, repeating the basic argument of Derrida in Shibboleths: For Paul Celan here, but an “unshared” or “silent” secret is not, properly speaking, a secret at all.) Secrets must be disclosed, decoded, translated, or communicated– at least with a single other– in order to to properly fall under the category of “secrets.” Secrets, qua “secrets,” must not only contain information that can be transmitted, but must have been transmitted. That is to say, inasmuch as any of us know secrets, we are not just “potential” informants, we are already informants (or extractors of information).
So, if I had to summarize my resistance to Moreira’ argument that we have an immediate obligation to amplify or hyperbolize our “right to remain silent” as some kind of protopolitical right, it would be that there is an irreducible difference between silence and secrecy. Secrecy is political; silence is not.
All that does not mean that I fundamentally disagree with the normative claim of Moreiras’ paper, i.e., that we ought to resist being informants today, for the purpose of preventing (or at least slowing down) the transformation of our current State of Extraction into a totalitarian state. There are many good reasons to adopt Moreiras’ position as a default civic posture. (Or anti-civic posture. I’ve left out all of the really interesting anarchic undercurrents of Moreiras’ argument.) I suppose, though, that I would say that the “remaining silent” ship has already sailed as a resistance strategy.
All we have left is to manage, as best we are able, the extent to which we can be coerced to disclose, the extent to which we can be forced to inform, the extent to which we respect (or disrespect) the borders that are drawn for us, the extent to which we still reserve the right to share our secrets and with whom. But all of those strategies of resisting the State of Extraction absolutely require that we loudly, intrusively, and conspicuously occupy the space of political activity and not the proto- or infra-political space.
I’m inclined to think of Moreiras’ invocation to “be silent” along the same lines as the oft-repeated advice to “just unplug” or to return to Nature and live “off the grid.” Those recommendations are not without some merit, of course, but they are fundamentally apolitical recommendations. They are not so much strategies of resistance as they a refusal of politics altogether. Consequently, I find it very difficult to see how they might impede the rapidly approaching totalitarian State or how they might enhance or preserve whatever human freedom we have left.
One last thing about snitches…
Let’s consider the reason why snitches get stitches, why informants are considered traitorous, which is because they have betrayed a non-universalizable obligation to keep their secrets secret. Snitches, in the garden-variety sense, trade information for favors. Sometimes those favors are trifling, sometimes that are a matter of life and death. Whether informants “exposit” voluntarily or under coercion is, in the getting-stitches sense, immaterial. They have betrayed a special obligation.
“Special obligations,” which oblige us to some others but not to all others, are always difficult to parse philosophically, though common sense morality seems to understand them intuitively. Our relationships to other humans are many and varied. Each variety– family, friends, colleagues, fellow citizens, comrades, lovers, et al– requires a site-specific set of (spoken or unspoken) promises that serve as the ties that bind that relationship and obligate us to it.. Special obligations are interesting, in part, because they are a subset of what Kant named (in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals) “hypothetical imperatives”: they appear to conform to the model of natural duties, and yet they are conditioned by obviously self-interested or instrumental ends. I do not share my friend’s secrets with you– not even if they have committed a crime, not even for a million dollars, not even if you threaten my life– because my promise to my friend that I will keep our secrets secret is the substantive content of our friendship.
Should I ever snitch and break that promise or betray that friendship, my infidelity would constitute a Judas kiss, a personal offense, to be sure. But, I would argue that it is also a “political” offense– not in the sense of law-breaking or explicitly defying State authority– but rather in the Aristotelian sense of undermining the conditions for the possibility of “the affairs of cities” itself. One the one hand, one could say that the snitch has simply chosen to make a different set of promises to a different set of people, but that would be to skip over something very important in what the snitch does. What the snitch does is betray his or her promises/obligations to a specific community not for the sake of “another” community, but for no one in particular, for the sake of abstract-State favors, thereby undermining the verity of special obligations as such. That is, the snitch sabotages the imminent potential contained within the proto-political/infra-political condition, which is always, first and foremost, one that secures not only the bare-minimum prospect of being-together, but the much more desirable prospect of being-together well… as a community, as friends, as confidantes, as “locals.”
Politics (or being-together well), as all of us are aware, requires constantly negotiating a host of mutually-exclusive special obligations. Given the limited intelligences we are, the limited information we can know or retain, and the limited amount of information we can effectively process, we humans must make (largely under-informed and imperfect) choices about the information we disclose and to whom. Those choices are political choices. Full stop.
To wit, I completely agree with Moreiras that the situation in which we currently find ourselves– caught in a State/Corporate vice that presses upon us, with increasing force, to conform to the form of the “informant” and to exposit the information we are lest it be extracted at our peril– should be actively and conscientiously resisted. However, I am inclined to think that political resistance n the Information Age cannot be grounded in the “apolitical” or “anarchic.”
It must involve, rather, politics of a different sort: an active and conscientious commitment to another set of promises, another arrangement of special obligations, another way of discriminating between those with whom secrets will be shared and those for whom secrets will remain silent, another route for crossing borders, breaking laws, infiltrating secure systems, and translating between people(s).
Democracy, like humanity, is nearing its end. Our best strategy for a least-awful near-future is not to run away, not to go “off grid,” not to unplug. It is not to be silent. It is, rather, to find ever more creative, ever more surreptitious, ever more clandestine, covert, stealthy, and unauthorized ways of being political.
That is to say, we have a special obligation to hack the shit out of things.