The National Security Sublime: On the Aesthetics of Government Secrecy 0367208911, 9780367208912

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Defining the National Security Sublime
2 Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy
3 The Genesis and Structure of the National Security Sublime
4 The Sublime Under the War on Terror
5 The Secret Without a Subject
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The National Security Sublime

Why do recent depictions of government secrecy and surveillance so often use images suggesting massive size and scale: gigantic warehouses, remote black sites, numberless security cameras? Drawing on post-War American art, film, television, and fiction, Matthew Potolsky argues that the aesthetic of the sublime provides a privileged window into the nature of modern intelligence, a way of describing the curiously open secret of covert operations. The book tracks the development of the national security sublime from the Cold War to the War on Terror, and places it in a long history of efforts by artists and writers to represent political secrecy. Matthew Potolsky is Professor of English at the University of Utah.

Routledge Studies in Espionage and Culture Series Editors: Nicholas Barnett (Swansea University, UK) and Laura Crossley (Bournemouth University, UK)

Routledge Studies in Espionage and Culture is an interdisciplinary series with a transnational focus that seeks to generate new insights into the connections between espionage and culture. The twentieth century saw the emergence and growth of the espionage genre in literature, popular fiction, cinema and television. This series explores all aspects of that genre, its audiences and its relationship with the “reality” of espionage. The series investigates representations of the intelligence world and how we interact with it, using an international scope to compare cultures of espionage between nations, and also examine how works of culture are received internationally. It blends several disciplines including cultural studies, history, literature and film studies, and covers topics such as the spy novel, films, television shows, documentaries, games, music, fashion and materiality. The series is also concerned with political cultures and the everyday lives within the organisations themselves, as well as wider considerations of surveillance culture. The National Security Sublime On the Aesthetics of Government Secrecy Matthew Potolsky For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Espionage-and-Culture/book-series/RSIEAC

The National Security Sublime On the Aesthetics of Government Secrecy Matthew Potolsky

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Matthew Potolsky to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-20891-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-26395-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied upon to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it. —Marshall McLuhan There’s a moment when you’re sitting there and the scale of it hits you. —Edward Snowden, in the film Snowden

Contents

List of Figures Preface Acknowledgments 1 Defining the National Security Sublime

viii x xix 1

2 Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy

30

3 The Genesis and Structure of the National Security Sublime

58

4 The Sublime Under the War on Terror

97

5 The Secret Without a Subject Select Bibliography Index

138 166 178

Figures

1.1 Still from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, directed by Steven Spielberg. Paramount Pictures, 1981. 2.1 Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above a Sea of Fog (ca. 1818). Oil on canvas, 94.8 × 74.8 cm.  3.1 Still from North by Northwest, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. MGM, 1959. 3.2 Still from The Parallax View, directed by Alan J. Pakula. Warner Brothers, 1974. 3.3 Still from All the President’s Men, directed by Alan J. Pakula. Warner Brothers, 1976. 3.4 Richard Misrach, Bomb, Destroyed Vehicle and Lone Rock (1987). Chromogenic Print, 46.5 × 58.9 cm.  3.5 Mark Lombardi, © Copyright. Banco Nazionale del Lavoro, Reagan, Bush, Thatcher, and the Arming of Iraq, c. 1979–1990 (4th version) (1998). Colored pencil and pencil on paper, 127 × 304.8 cm.  3.6 Still from The X-Files, created by Chris Carter. Twentieth Century Fox, 1993. 3.7 Still from The X-Files: Fight the Future, directed by Rob Bowman. Twentieth Century Fox, 1998. 4.1 Trevor Paglen, Control Tower (Area 52); Tonopah Test Range, NV; Distance ~ 20 Miles; 11:55 am (2006). C-Print, 79.4 × 94.3 cm.  4.2 Trevor Paglen, KEYHOLE-IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite 186) (2008). Chromogenic print, 95.25 × 76.2 cm.  4.3 Trevor Paglen, Untitled and undated photograph of Lobo Solo. 4.4 Mishka Henner, Staphorst Ammunition Depot, Overijssel (2011), Archival pigment print, 153.7 × 170.5 cm.

2 32 62 63 65 77

82 86 90 102 104 105 107

Figures  ix 4.5 Charles Stankievech, The Soniferous Æther of The Land Beyond The Land Beyond, 35mm Film Installation with Dolby Sound (Film Still), 2013. 4.6 Jill Magid, Trust | Evidence Locker. Single-channel digital video, 18 min. 2004.  4.7 Hasan Elahi, Thousand Little Brothers (2014). Pigment Print on Canvas, 838 × 487 cm. 4.8 Still from The Simpsons Movie, directed by David Silverman. Twentieth Century Fox, 2007. 4.9 Still from Citizenfour, directed by Laura Poitras. Praxis Films, 2014. 5.1 Still from Enemy of the State, directed by Tony Scott. Touchstone Pictures, 1998. 5.2 Still from South Park, “Let Go, Let Gov,” created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Comedy Central, 2013.

111 115 117 129 130 142 157

Preface

My research for this book began with a seemingly banal question: why are there so few fictional depictions of the National Security Agency? Originally established during the Cold War as a hub for cryptographic analysis and signals intelligence, the NSA became the dominant American source of intelligence about global terrorism after the 9/11 attacks, and the remarkable scope of its operations the subject of dramatic whistleblower revelations over the past decade or so, culminating in Edward Snowden’s 2013 leak of a massive trove of documents demonstrating the agency’s surveillance of American citizens. Given this prominence, the NSA should by all rights hold a larger place in high and popular culture than it does. The Central Intelligence Agency, focused on foreign intelligence gathering and counterespionage, is a staple of popular cultural representation, as is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (which attends to threats within the United States), the British secret service MI6 (institutional home of James Bond), and the intelligence agencies of the former communist world, like the KGB and the East German Stasi. These entities have rich histories in film and popular literature, each with its own aesthetic, set of character types, and familiar storylines, but the activities of the NSA (and its cognates in other Western nations, like the British GCHQ) have seemed, if not unrepresentable, at least not productive of new fictional themes or resonant artistic images.1 Part of this relative absence surely has to do with the agency’s obscurity; created by a top-secret executive order rather than by statute, its acronym was regularly taken by those few in the know to mean No Such Agency. But even where the NSA has shown up, it lacks a unique identity. The film Enemy of the State (1998), perhaps the most notable cinematic representation, depicts the murder of a congressman opposed to agency surveillance by a rogue group of NSA agents, but it borrows heavily from narrative devices common in CIA conspiracy films. The UPN television series Seven Days, which ran from 1998 to 2001, features NSA agents traveling into the past in the interest of national security, using alien technology from the purported UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico, but it largely follows the script of science-fiction shows.

Preface  xi The 2009 feature Echelon Conspiracy concerns a plan by the NSA to build a self-aware computer program to monitor all global communications, but it draws mainly from the conventions of techno-thrillers, the agency head here playing the familiar role of megalomaniacal villain. Other references to the NSA in popular culture tend to be vague, depicting its agents as mostly undifferentiated from representatives of the other security services: ruthlessly efficient assassins clad in black or amoral spy masters wearing expensive suits. There would seem to be few, if any, new conventions specific to the workings of the contemporary national security state, a state that was dominated under the War on Terror by the agency’s aims and methods. This small question led to a broader consideration of what I call the aesthetics of government secrecy and representations of the national security apparatus since the Cold War. The difficulty I had finding interesting depictions of the NSA was symptomatic: the very nature of government secrecy changed under the War on Terror, pushed along by the agency’s methods as well as by parallel developments in the private sector that built on (and frequently supported and informed) them. Artists, writers, and, for that matter, legal and political theorists, are still in the process of trying to figure out how to capture what looks to be a major transformation of the relationship between citizen and state in Western democracies. Depictions of the NSA were, and still largely are, caught between two representational stools: they did not fit the old representational paradigm and the new one had not yet engendered durable conventions—nor, arguably, has it yet. This book is an effort to describe one significant but understudied convention for representing the covert activities of the national security state—with depictions of recent NSA surveillance as a key but not exclusive focus—and to consider its implications for a broader understanding of the nature of government secrecy. This convention, the national security sublime, draws upon the mental feeling that comes with trying to grasp, as Immanuel Kant describes it, something “absolutely great.”2 The sublime is an effect not of size or scope themselves, but of size or scope conceived imaginatively, rather than through measurement or calculation. It signifies an encounter with greatness as such, greatness experienced affectively or in a single image. Cutting across the worlds of photography, fiction, film, and television, sublime depictions of covert government provided a kind of DEW line, in Marshall McLuhan’s words—using imagery appropriately drawn from the lexicon of the national security state—that indicated changes not yet legible in other ways. The look and feel of the national security sublime crystalized a growing sense among citizens that the secret state apparatus devoted to protecting the nation from threats had become so vast and so pervasive that it passed beyond the realm of the measurable and the calculable.3 It evoked the same kind of response that Romantic writers—the conceptual and representational

xii Preface source for the mode—used to describe the wonders of nature: massive mountain peaks, endless polar wastelands, and the unimaginable scale of time and space. As Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Edward Snowden puts it in Oliver Stone’s 2016 feature Snowden, casting his experience of discovering the extent of NSA surveillance in the precise terms of sublime affect, “the scale of it hits you.”4 The journalist Glenn Greenwald makes a similar observation in Laura Poitras’ Oscar-winning 2014 documentary, Citizenfour, as Snowden methodically lays out for him the full extent of the NSA’s programs in his Hong Kong hotel room: “The magnitude of it. . . . This is massive and extraordinary—it’s amazing.”5 Sublimity is not the only aesthetic mode recent artists and writers have drawn upon to represent the specter of government secrecy, and as we shall see, history provides a range of forms for depicting the nature and fate of political unknowns, from early modern court tragedy to the intricate conspiracy theories woven by Gothic novels and spy thrillers. But the artists, writers, filmmakers, and television showrunners I discuss in this book made the sublime central to their accounts of state secrecy in the age of the NSA. Bulk data collection and automated surveillance seek to capture terrorist acts in the planning stages, before they pose an immediate threat to the homeland, but they sweep up with those plans the thoughts and fears of vast swathes of the population. The sublime dragnet authorized by Western governments during the War on Terror may or may not have posed the immediate danger to personal privacy that many activists claimed it did, but it decisively renegotiated the presumed epistemological relationship between citizen and state. Citizens became mysteries the state needed to figure out and the state, in turn, became a vast repository of secrets whose extent no single individual definitively knew or could hope to comprehend. I discuss the rise of the national security state and its current configurations in some detail, but this book is not about the workings of government secrecy or contemporary changes in surveillance per se. Rather, I  am interested in how a range of artists and other creators, spanning high and popular culture, sought to understand the mysteries that surround the political realm, and the visual and literary conventions they developed to depict them. It concerns the way aesthetic forms gain, lose, and regain their power and effectiveness, and in particular how a mode associated with Romantic landscape description was called upon, two centuries later, to define the nature of contemporary political secret keeping. This task remains urgent. Ideas about government secrecy do not necessarily begin as or remain limited to political analyses; they often borrow from artistic and literary forms, and come, in turn, to define many other ways of thinking about secrets in modernity. These ideas shape, and are shaped by, images and stories that arise to explain, criticize, or justify political secret keeping. Because political secrets are just that—secrets—all of those who find themselves on the outside are forced

Preface  xiii into a condition of speculation. Representation becomes a way of grasping at something unavailable or unknown, and conveying to contemporary culture, in McLuhan’s words, “what is happening to it.”6 In the minds of its most vigorous partisans, the War on Terror represents an unending struggle, a grand clash of civilizations, but for the purposes of this book, I define it as the fourteen-year period between the initial responses to the 9/11 attacks and the passage of the USA Freedom Act in June of 2015, which de-authorized the bulk surveillance programs at the NSA that Snowden had revealed. The new law did not truly end bulk surveillance, only outsourced much of it to telecommunications companies, and similar programs likely continue in the US and other countries under new names. Even though the Freedom Act limited their scope, moreover, the vast powers that the original USA Patriot Act—hastily passed little more than a month after the attacks of 2001— gave to the government, particularly under the notorious auspices of Section 215, remain a threat to the civil liberties of citizens.7 Nevertheless, the Freedom Act marked a watershed acknowledgment, following on the heels of President Obama’s decision to wind down the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, that the state of emergency under which the Western world was living for more than a decade had reached some kind of closure, however uncertain and unsatisfying. It is not clear whether the broader changes in the understanding of government secrecy that the War on Terror brought about will be temporary or permanent, and a major new attack will likely bring its worst practices roaring back. That said, something has changed. The early years of President Trump’s administration (unfolding as I write) have seemed like a throwback to another age entirely—an unholy combination of the Gilded Age, the beginnings of the Cold War, and the Watergate era— making the works I discuss in this book feel far more historical than they did when I conceived the project in 2015. The 2016 election will likely push the arts toward different representational concerns, and, if nothing else, the ongoing drama surrounding the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russian agents has turned security services like the NSA and their former directors from villains of the civil-liberties left into unlikely heroes of the Resistance.8 Should it soon fade as a dominant aesthetic mode, the national security sublime still demands attention for the insights it can provide contemporary culture about the changing nature of government secrecy. Though the NSA has been limited in its powers, companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook use many of the same methods the agency pioneered to collect data about their customers; the guiding principles of the War on Terror have become an everyday reality in an Internet economy based on increasingly sophisticated methods of dataveillance. And in public spaces: a short walk around a major city like London or New York makes one the subject of extensive surveillance, courtesy of a network of public and private cameras that proliferated in

xiv Preface the years after the 9/11 attacks. These legacies of the War on Terror will continue to shape, even as they were shaped by, our representations of covert government activities. * * * * The five chapters in this book weave a theoretical with a historical account of the national security sublime as it emerged in Cold War culture and then became a dominant representational convention during the War on Terror. I intend the book as a contribution to the emerging interdisciplinary field of secrecy studies, as well as to the study of contemporary art, American popular culture, government surveillance, and the history of aesthetics.9 Because it cuts across many fields of research, and takes in topics as varied as medieval political theory, Romantic aesthetics, and recent television series, the book relies on the works of specialists in many fields, and as a result, no doubt, leaves many aspects of these fields in the dark. My broadest aim in the book, though, is to suggest a model for making secrecy a historical and theoretical object of study in and of itself. This means framing secrecy practices as the products of long and complicated genealogies, tracking them through the myriad forms they take—artistic, literary, political, legal, technological, and so forth—and being attentive to the surprising places they make themselves felt. In the interest of foregrounding my argument about secrecy, I have been forced to sacrifice comprehensive coverage of the various historical moments and scholarly fields I discuss—though not to the point, I hope, of rendering them unrecognizable. Chapter 1, “Defining the National Security Sublime,” offers an overview of the argument of the book, using as its keynote a classic example of the national security sublime: the closing shot of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which depicts a massive warehouse stocked with wooden crates holding dangerous archaeological relics and managed by Army Intelligence. The chapter shows how the national security state became sublime. I  start with a brief history of the rise of the national security state in the years after World War II. Initially formed during the Cold War to protect nuclear secrets from Soviet espionage, the secret state has, since the 9/11 attacks, been tasked with protecting the entire populace from terrorist threats that could target nearly any spot in the homeland. The secret state has grown so rapidly in both size and mission that it has become almost impossible even for insiders to grasp. The nation itself has become akin to a warehouse filled with secrets, and every resident a potential suspect. The chapter then turns to the defining epistemological condition of the national security sublime: the status of covert government as what Michael Taussig calls a “public secret.” Spielberg’s image has sublime

Preface  xv force because the secret state is not really a secret to the public; informed over the years by leaks, journalistic scoops, and popular cultural representations, the public knows that the secret state exists, even if it does not know the specific secrets that it conceals. This curious half-knowledge contributes to the sublime experience of national security, for rather than grasping the contours of the secret state hermeneutically, we are left to experience them aesthetically, as a borderless world of hazy mysteries that can never be known in toto. The secret state seems all the bigger because we apprehend it in parts and flashes. Chapter  2, “Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy,” argues that the sublime is an aesthetic particularly suited to capturing the open secret of the national security state. Romantic poets and painters—a constant reference for contemporary artists—were fascinated with those things one can think but never fully grasp: the transcendent mysteries of nature or human relations that do not yield to rational analysis. The sublime is the aesthetic par excellence of the “known unknown,” the open secret. The chapter traces the rise of the Romantic sublime to a major change in the understanding of government secrecy that crystalized in the 1790s—a period of national security crisis in Britain sparked by the French Revolution. In the early modern era, secrets were considered at once a source and legitimate practice of governing authority, sanctioned by the doctrines of divine right, which lent monarchs the aura of religious mystery, and of arcana imperii, the “secrets of state,” which gave them the right to keep secrets from the public in the interest of social stability. Writing in the wake of the democratic revolutions in America and France, Enlightenment political philosophers like Jeremy Bentham began to regard secrets as fundamentally opposed to good government, a form of corruption rather than a normal way of doing business. We find this pervasive attitude reflected in a second major aesthetic innovation from the period, the Gothic novel, which, along with Romantic sublimity, constitutes a key source for the national security sublime. These novels tell of innocents tormented by conspiracies organized by corrupt representatives of the Church or the aristocracy; they regularly end with the conspiracy revealed to the public, and all the ghosts and mysteries that terrorized the innocents explained as effects of illegitimate power. If the Romantic sublime crystalizes the relationship of democratic citizens to government activities about which they have only indirect knowledge, Gothic gives narrative form to Bentham’s suspicion that all secrets conceal dirty doings. In Chapter 3, “The Genesis and Structure of the National Security Sublime,” I  look at the origins and early development of the mode in the years between the end of World War II and the 9/11 attacks, with a particular focus on how works in this period adapted key characteristics of the Gothic novel and Romantic painting and poetry to address contemporary questions. I  divide the period into two parts: the familiar epoch of the

xvi Preface Cold War, between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and an interregnum in the 1990s I  call the Echelon Moment, after the NSA surveillance network that was the subject of shocking revelations at the time. Each part finds sublimity in different aspects of the national security state. Cold War versions of the national security sublime tend to follow the model of the Gothic, responding with awe and trepidation to the possibility of massive conspiracies within and against the government. Using a range of examples from the Cold War era—early descriptions of the atomic bomb, Hitchcock films, paranoid conspiracy thrillers, novels by Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon—I show how the national security sublime associates intelligence agencies with a quasidivine power to keep unbreakable secrets, whether for good or ill. The chapter then turns to a survey of national security plots in art and television from the Echelon Moment, focusing on three key examples: the desert photographs of Richard Misrach, which documented the environmental damage inflicted by the US military in Nevada and Utah since the 1940s; the intricate pencil drawings of the Conceptual artist Mark Lombardi, who created vast maps of contemporary conspiracies; and Chris Carter’s long-running Fox Network show The X-Files, a veritable compendium of paranoid tropes, both old and new. All three examples reveal a Cold War order under increasing pressure in a world now devoid of a singular enemy. Works from the period continue to focus on the kinds of conspiracies that drove Cold War examples of the mode, but they become almost inconceivably large—global and even interplanetary in scope. Like the US intelligence agencies, which spent the 1990s reorganizing (unsuccessfully, it turned out) to anticipate new threats, the national security sublime, too, found itself caught between an older Gothic aesthetic and new insights lying just beyond its grasp. Chapter  4, “The Sublime under the War on Terror,” surveys recent depictions of government secrecy, with a particular focus on the period after 2005, when news of NSA surveillance programs first broke. These depictions, I  argue, closely track the increasing size and complexity of the national security state and reflect the extent to which it has become interwoven with the everyday lives of citizens. The sublime under the War on Terror presented a world defined by the open secret of mass government surveillance, as artists increasingly turned their attention to the secrets hiding in plain sight, from security cameras popping up on every corner to covert operations housed in suburban office parks. Looking at a wide range of recent works by artists, writers, filmmakers, and television showrunners—the art of Trevor Paglen and Jill Magid, Laura Poitras’ film Citizenfour, novels like Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, and episodes of Warehouse 13 and South Park—I show how recent examples of the national security sublime attest to the transformation of the security state from a hazy mystery into common knowledge.

Preface  xvii The first part of the chapter looks at the image of national security in contemporary art, an image I trace to Romantic landscape description. Paglen gives us mountainous landscapes very similar to what we find in the poetry of William Wordsworth, and Magid depicts city scenes that look back to early descriptions of the sublime crowds of nineteenth-century London and Paris. The sublime provides these artists with a visual language for characterizing the sprawling physical presence of government secrecy rather than its mysterious absence. In recent novels that engage with the rise of new surveillance technologies, we repeatedly encounter the ruinous remains of the Cold War national security state, a sublime reminder (and warning) about changing times. The chapter then turns to depictions of the NSA in popular culture, depictions that use the familiar genre cues of satire, horror, and the police procedural to underscore the new familiarity of national security surveillance. These genres have the effect of at once bringing government secrecy closer (by casting it in terms of known forms) and setting it at a distance (by making it seem silly, scary, or criminal). Chapter  5, “The Secret without a Subject,” draws broader implications from the revival of the national security sublime during the War on Terror. Early examples of the mode gave voice to the ideal of openness and transparency that Enlightenment political philosophers saw as the essence of democratic governance. In place of the old model, in which the state knew all and the citizens knew nothing, advocates for transparency promoted a world in which citizens knew more about their governments than their governments knew about them. The contemporary national security sublime suggests that the relationship between citizen and state is in the process of changing again. As a result of the big data revolution, governments have gained the upper hand. But this shift does not represent a simple return to the past—a new arcana imperii. It is more accurate to say that no one really knows all the secrets the NSA held (and doubtless still holds) in its servers. They are secrets without a subject, which exist independently of deliberate human knowers. Big data has displaced Big Brother, and the dogged government investigators and deeply secretive spies of popular imagination are now drowning in seas of information that not even the most sophisticated current algorithms can sort. The national security sublime under the War on Terror provided a powerful diagnosis of this transformation, giving aesthetic form to secrets so large and so detached from traditional ways of knowing that they passed beyond the comprehension of any one individual.

Notes 1. On conventions for representing the CIA, by far the most frequently depicted spy agency, see Oliver Boyd-Barrett, David Herrera, and Jim Baumann, Hollywood and the CIA: Cinema, Defense and Subversion (London: Routledge,

xviii Preface 2011). For a broad survey of national security themes in post-War American cinema, see Jean-Michel Valantin, Hollywood, the Pentagon and Washington (London: Anthem Press, 2005). 2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 131. 3. For reasons that will become clear over the course of this book, I would distinguish the national security sublime from the cognate function of the sublime in depictions and conceptualizations of terrorism. On such depictions, see Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2005). See also W. J. T. Mitchell’s discussion of the “unimaginable” in Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 55–68; and David Holloway, The Cultures of the War on Terror: Empire, Ideology, and the Remaking of 9/11 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008). On the contemporary relationship between terrorism and sublime “terror,” see Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (London: Routledge, 2007); and the essays in the special issue of Millennium: Journal of International Studies 34, no. 3 (2006), “The Sublime Today.” 4. Snowden, directed by Oliver Stone (Universal City: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2015), DVD. 5. Citizenfour, directed by Laura Poitras (Beverly Hills: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2015), DVD. 6. The quotation is traditionally attributed to McLuhan, but its source—often wrongly assumed to be either Understanding Media or Understanding Me— is, to my knowledge, unknown. 7. This section of the act permits the collection of “tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information,” a provision that was interpreted to allow intelligence agencies to demand that libraries hand over patron borrowing records, that technology companies provide access to customer email messages, and that telecommunications companies give the agency access to phone calls and metadata gathered by cell towers. See Scott F. Mann, “Fact Sheet: Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act,” CSIS Online, posted 27 February  2014, www.csis.org/analysis/fact-sheet-section-215-usa-patriot-act, accessed 31 October  2017. The USA Freedom Act curtailed many of these provisions, but other aspects of the Patriot Act continue to authorize different surveillance programs. And even before the 9/11 attacks, the NSA had robust signals intelligence capabilities that have not been affected by legislation. 8. See, for example, Christian Stöcker, “Nur die NSA kann uns helfen,” Spiegel Online, 5 February 2017, www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/donald-trumpund-sein-regime-nur-die-nsa-kann-uns-helfen-kolumne-a-1133067.html, accessed 4 November 2017. The piece argues that the information-gathering powers of agencies like the NSA may end up preserving democratic accountability from the predations of the Trump Administration. 9. For the idea of a multidisciplinary field of secrecy studies, see Susan Maret, ed., Government Secrecy (Bingley: Emerald House Publishing, 2011), xvi– xxii; and Clare Birchall, “Six Answers to the Question ‘What is Secrecy Studies?’ ” Secrecy and Society 1, no. 1 (2016), 1–13; http://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/ secrecyandsociety/vol1/iss1/2

Acknowledgments

In its broad conception, if not its final configuration, I have been planning a book on secrecy more than two decades, and have accrued a great number of intellectual debts along the way. I first began writing about the topic during my doctoral training at UC Irvine in the early 1990s, inspired by Jacques Derrida’s seminar on “The Secret,” and a seminar J. Hillis Miller gave on the novels and tales of Henry James. In the years since then, I have taught many iterations of a course on literary secrets, and I want to thank, first and foremost, my students at Harvard University and the University of Utah, who challenged me to clarify my ideas and led me to some of my best formulations. When I took up the project in earnest after a long hiatus devoted to topics in my field of specialization (late nineteenth-century British and French literature), I was gratified to find numerous colleagues across a range of disciplines interested in questions of secrecy—far more than when I first began my research. I particularly want to thank Clare Birchall, Russ Castronovo, Tim Melley, and Rachel Teukolsky, who read and commented perceptively on different versions of this book. Clare, in particular, has been an exemplary interlocutor, and it was for the conference we organized at King’s College, London, in May of 2015, “The Politics and Practices of Secrecy,” that I was prompted to write an early version of the argument I make in this book. Three anonymous readers for Routledge encouraged me to develop and expand parts of the argument that had been somewhat elliptical in the first version of the manuscript, and the book is much stronger as a result. My thanks, too, to series editors Laura Crossley and Nick Barnett for seeing the value in the book, and to Max Novick and Jennifer Morrow at Routledge for moving it quickly and efficiently through the approval and production processes. Anna Cekola brought her peerless editing skills to the manuscript in crunch time. I would also like to thank the following people for generously sharing ideas or work with me, reading early drafts, helping me fashion my own approach to the topic, or inviting me to present material from the

xx Acknowledgments project: Mario Biagioli, Hugh Urban, Stefano Evangelista, Trudo Lemmens, Julie Checkoway, Lisa Parks, Kate Adams, Zach Blas, Simon Stern, Megan Becker, Glenn Greenwald, Cory Doctorow, Jack Bratich, Neal White, John Beck, Deme Kasimis, Gordon Hutner, Alex Murray, Catherine Gander, Bryant Simon, Charles Stankievech, and Trevor Paglen. Many colleagues in and around Salt Lake City have also been instrumental in helping me shape this book. At the University of Utah, I  would particularly thank Andy Franta (who generously vetted a late revision of Chapter 2), Jeremy Rosen, Leslie Francis, John Francis, Stacey Margolis, Richard Preiss, Elijah Millgram, Jim Curry, Sean Lawson, Monty Paret, Nadja Durbach, Barry Weller, and Randy Dryer; and at Brigham Young University, Matt Wickman, Leslee Thorne-Murphy, and Nick Mason. My first stabs at the project took place thanks to an Aldrich Fellowship at the Tanner Humanities Center. I  am grateful to Bob Goldberg for facilitating discussions there, and to the other fellows during my tenure—Jared Farmer, Kevin Schultz, Jonah Schupbach, and Gema Guevara—who were excellent readers of a very (very) early draft of Chapter 2. In addition to the Tanner Center, the University Research Council, the Office of Undergraduate Studies (University Professor), and the College of Humanities at the University of Utah all provided support for this project. Above all, I  want to thank my family—Anna, Zoe, Noah, and my parents and in-laws—for enduring (and sometimes abetting) my obsession with secrets and secrecy through all its torturous iterations. Special thanks go to Zoe for spending a summer watching conspiracy movies and X-Files episodes with me. I want to express my sincere thanks to copyright holders for allowing me to reproduce material in this book. An early version of the argument of Chapters 2 and 5 first appeared in my review-essay, “Whither Secrecy?” American Literary History 28, 4 (2016): 786–99. Passages from that review are reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. Particular thanks go to Trevor Paglen, Charles Stankievech, Jill Magid, and Hasan Elahi for generously allowing me to reproduce their work, and for providing me with digital images. I also wish to thank all of those who helped arrange permissions through museums, galleries, and studios: Russell Perkins, Meghan Brown at Art Resource, Kathleen O’Brien at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery, Christina Samore at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, David Rozelle at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, James Woodward at Altman Siegel Gallery, Susan Swenson at the Pierogi Gallery, and Richard Sorensen at The Smithsonian American Art Museum. Full credits for the images reproduced in the book are given in the List of Figures.

1 Defining the National Security Sublime

The Warehouse Recall the classic final shot of Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), the first installment of the Indiana Jones franchise. The scene depicts a massive and dimly lit warehouse stocked with tall shelves holding wooden crates. Long aisles recede to a shadowy vanishing point, as a worker transports the most recent arrival, the legendary Ark of the Covenant, which the film’s protagonist rescued from Nazi agents who sought to use its awesome powers to defeat Allied forces, to its eventual place of storage. We see stenciled letters spray-painted on the side of the box—“Top Secret / Army Intel 9906753 / Do Not Open!”—as the ark is moved down the central aisle on a cart.1 The singular object of Indiana Jones’ first adventure here becomes one of what we are led to presume by the serial number to be nearly ten million other finds hidden away in the warehouse, or in others like it. No longer the focus of scholarly curiosity or the endpoint for a quest, the Ark is now a matter of national security, secreted in the interest of public safety, or perhaps stocked away for future weapons research. This scene constitutes one of the most resonant images of an aesthetic mode that I want to call the national security sublime. Evoking a realm of secret knowledge and clandestine activity that the artist or viewer struggles to comprehend, this mode figures the work of government, and in particular of the military and the intelligence agencies, in terms of mind-boggling scale: vast or distant installations, immense office spaces, dizzying arrays of images, unimaginable amounts of information. The origins of the national security sublime go back to the Cold War, and find their ultimate origins, as I shall argue, in the early years of British Romanticism; but the mode experienced a revival beginning around 2003 as artists, writers, filmmakers, and television showrunners, shocked by reports of massive government surveillance programs, struggled to depict the activities of the National Security Agency and other government intelligence entities under the War on Terror. The secrets of the contemporary national security state comprise the known unknowns, to quote a memorable distinction made by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, of the citizen’s relationship to the government.2 They are recognized as something hidden, a realm of covert

2  Defining the National Security Sublime

Figure 1.1 Still from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, directed by Steven Spielberg. Paramount Pictures, 1981.

operations and decision-making no one is surprised to learn exist when details trickle out—or arrive in a flood, as they did with Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013—but remain obscure in their specific content. Both the sheer number of such secrets, stacked like crates in a government warehouse, and the mystery of what they might conceal, contribute to a sense of the sublime. The mode constitutes a powerful, if oblique, reflection on the relationship between the citizenry and those chosen to make secret decisions on its behalf or to peer into the private lives of its individual members. The recent examples of the national security sublime that comprise the animating subject of this book are not just one more example of a familiar aesthetic form. For like early adumbrations of the mode during the Cold War, they foretell a fateful change in the relationship between citizen and state in Western democracies. The Cold War saw the rapid expansion of the national security state around nuclear secrecy and the threat of Soviet espionage. Vast swathes of scientific activity were subject to classification, and newly created intelligence agencies grew into gigantic bureaucracies with tentacles stretching to every corner of the world. The 9/11 attacks produced an equally dramatic expansion of what Hugh Urban has called the “secrecy-industrial complex,” this time out of a fear of Islamic terrorism, but the methods changed as well, reflecting both the widening range of targets that might be subject to threat, and the new importance of electronic surveillance and algorithmic data analysis, methods that, for many commentators, pointed to a dramatic, if largely unacknowledged renegotiation of the social contract.3 As the former FBI Director James Comey claimed in the wake of a 2017 WikiLeaks dump of information about CIA hacking

Defining the National Security Sublime  3 techniques, “There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America,” a fact many artists, writers, and political theorists have suspected since information about the NSA’s data collection programs first began coming out in the early years of the War on Terror.4 The very nature of government secrecy has been transformed under the influence of the NSA. As Timothy Melley and Eva Horn have persuasively shown, fiction and film have, in the modern era, been central to the way the public conceptualizes the activities of covert agencies, and even to the way these agencies understand their own activities. The many artistic representations of espionage and clandestine operations in the twentieth century have provided a forum for the public to encounter on the level of imagination the complicated ethics and practical value of secret state activities, sometimes in more sophisticated terms than policymakers could muster. They turned the existence (if not the exact details) of classified material into fictions, to be endlessly imagined but never truly grasped.5 Spy novels, conspiracy dramas, and geopolitical thrillers step into this realm of pervasive half-knowledge, providing a forum for cognizing the mysteries of state. Because, as Horn notes, Cold War politics were largely played out on the level of fiction—through scenarios, predictions, and simulations rather than actual battles—they were fundamentally literary, a product of the same imaginative work that writers perform in fashioning plots.6 It should come as no surprise that the intelligence agencies have tried their hand at fiction, often funding or actively participating in the creation of popular cultural representations of their activities, as was the case with the 2012 film Argo, for which the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs provided support.7 The crossing of fiction and politics—fiction about politics and politics as fictional practice—is not restricted to the twentieth century. Ideas surrounding the necessity and danger of government secrets have long engendered aesthetic conventions, from court tragedy to spy fiction, that at once inform and reflect what Horn calls the prevailing “logic” of political secrecy at a given historical moment.8 More broadly still, as David Rosen and Aaron Santesso have suggested, art and literature provide the conceptual and imaginative grounding for the modern surveillance state; the omniscient narrator paves the way for an omniscient government apparatus.9 Literary and artistic conventions shape representations of government secrets, but also the work of legal and political theorists, and, as the case of Argo suggests, the practices and worldview of government agents themselves.10 Given the Byzantine levels of classification and security clearance that stratify government agencies, the majority of those within the halls of power have little more grasp of the true secrets of state than individual citizens do. It is akin to an onion: all layers with no solid core. In such a world, conventions of representation are a primary rather than a secondary mode of understanding contemporary politics. Government secrets exist for nearly everyone in and through aesthetic forms—as stories, images, metaphors, and affects—rather than as hard information.

4  Defining the National Security Sublime When the epistemological relationship between citizen and state begins to change, these same forms can provide an anatomy of the present, or an anticipatory vision of the future. It is with this possibility in mind that I  approach the national security sublime, a mode that arose from conditions that may auger its ultimate demise. The Romantic sublime, a form frequently deemed obsolete, but which became a pervasive reference point for artists and writers in post-War culture, posits, according to Immanuel Kant’s influential formulation, a subject that rises above an immensity it initially struggles to grasp.11 Faced with looming mountains or frightful chasms that threaten to reduce it to insignificance, this subject looks inward, finding that reason can lift the mind above any physical or conceptual obstacle. The national security sublime gestures toward this kind of response, though the transcendent sense of elevation that marks the mode in its Romantic form often strains under the breadth and character of the mysteries it confronts, never quite finding the necessary reflective distance that sublime liking demands. The national security state here engenders what Neil Hertz has called “blockage”: the sublime experienced as a sense of bewilderment or exhaustion by a subject threatened with unresolvable perplexity and threats too large to contain.12 This response became increasingly characteristic of the mode as information about new surveillance programs prompted by the 9/11 attacks began to appear in the media, particularly as traditional strategies for combatting government secrecy seemed to offer no sure path through the thicket of the burgeoning national security state. Given the size and complexity of what Melley calls the “covert sector,” the free flow of information can easily become a flood.13 As Jodi Dean has argued, the idea of government transparency, which activists have long held up as a counter to excessive secrecy, can have the effect of overwhelming rather than informing the public, burying even the most thoughtful citizens under an inconceivable flow of information. In the face of daily revelations, the public feels a sense of helplessness instead of a resolve to bring about change. “Having it all,” Dean writes, “bringing every relevant and available fact into the conversation . . . may well entangle us in a clouded, occluded nightmare of obfuscation.”14 It is easy to see how the desire for transparency can shade into a vision of the sublime. So while the national security sublime has often been allied with the anti-secrecy activism that motivates figures like the journalist Glenn Greenwald or Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, its practitioners treat their subject chiefly, in Clare Birchall’s formulation, as an aesthetic rather than a hermeneutic problem, working to capture the specter of government secrecy in images and affective responses and not by revealing its contours through analysis and investigation.15 In its attention to the look and feel of government secrecy—its mysterious presence rather than its absent content—the national security sublime demonstrates the

Defining the National Security Sublime  5 limits of the hermeneutic approach to political hiddenness, an approach focused on detection and information collection, and guided by the possibility of full revelation. Evoking size, distance, and number as the most resonant figures for government secrecy, the national security sublime brings out both the immense scope of the national security state and the difficulty of understanding it by traditional means, proffering an aesthetic solution to a nearly intractable problem of interpretation. But the mode may signal a blockage even more permanent than the seemingly overwhelming surfeit of information suggests. In a world where both corporate and government surveillance is increasingly automated and its objects reduced to aggregated data points—“a flood of dataveillance without images,” in Garrett Stewart’s words—and where the very nature of secrecy is undergoing a radical transformation, the revival of the sublime during the War on Terror raises the possibility that the mode itself may have reached the end of the line as a viable aesthetic solution.16 As Russ Castronovo has noted, media and theoretical accounts of groups like WikiLeaks tend to orbit, for all their reliance on impersonal networks, around the traditional liberal subject of the American democratic tradition: a deliberate knower who keeps and reveals information in the interest of a greater good.17 But that subject gets hopelessly lost in the modern national security state. Machines process information about the object of investigation, and that object exists as a set of data points rather than as a conventional actor, fully aware that it is being (or could be) watched. We find here a much different version of surveillance than the deeply influential one imagined by George Orwell in 1984 or by Michel Foucault in his analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s panoptic prison designs. There is quite literally no free will to rise above sublime immensity, no embodied observer and no embodied object of observation: Big Data replaces Big Brother. The national security sublime no longer resides in a vast, hidden warehouse in the desert; it has been relocated to a faceless data center at the edge of a suburban town. Both the observer and the observed vanish in a swarm of numbers.

How the National Security State Became Sublime The national security sublime is a relatively recent aesthetic innovation because the national security state only dates in its modern form to the early years of the Cold War. In the wake of the Manhattan Project during World War II, secrecy became both the source of, and the sustaining principle for, large areas of government work, a kind of institution in its own right, fiercely defended, in line with Max Weber’s analysis of official secrecy, by massive intelligence bureaucracies and routinized security procedures.18 As Edward Shils notes in his classic Cold War-era discussion of national security policies, The Torment of Secrecy, “unshared

6  Defining the National Security Sublime knowledge” is part of “the art and practice of ruling,” traditionally tolerated, and even expected, in foreign and military policy, and grounded in a sense of professional responsibility.19 Nuclear weaponry and the attendant threat of foreign espionage engendered an entirely different order of secrecy, based on what Joseph Masco calls a “secrecy/threat matrix” that links the classified with the apocalyptic.20 All official secrets in the post-War era become a matter of national survival, not just diplomatic or strategic advantage. This matrix gave birth to the national security state as we have come to know it, a covert government devoted, in the face of anticipated annihilation, to protecting the civilian superstructure but increasingly not answerable to its authority or open to its scrutiny. Covert government is made up of myriad agencies, titled officials, unnamed operatives, mysterious dark sites, far-flung secret operations, black budgets, and countless levels of classification, as well as the many corporate entities that support its functions and extend its reach, from military contractors and giant construction companies like Halliburton to, more recently, the technology and telecommunications companies that aided the NSA in its data collection efforts. More pervasively, it comprises the overarching mindset defined by the imperative of “security,” a conceptualization of the homeland as a precarious space perpetually under threat.21 Security is a core justification for the social contract in classic political theory, but it has in recent years encouraged governments to envision the populace as above all a target. It justifies state secrecy, both because secrecy purports to enhance security, and because security sometimes demands actions that would, in the judgment of experts, best be hidden from the public. The Cold War did not just dramatically expand the size of the national security state, it also, as Peter Galison has argued, changed the very ontology of government secrecy, radically broadening the nature of the material and activities that it could be justified to cover. First understood in relatively narrow operational terms appropriate to wartime, government secrecy came, through a “great ratcheting process” that only accelerated under the War on Terror, to encompass “almost the whole of government and civil society.”22 In short, it became sublime—the potentially boundless realm suggested by Spielberg’s iconic warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The story of how the national security state became an object of sublime contemplation is not just one of increasing size—what can be measured by comparing budget numbers and personnel levels—but also of broadening scope and conception, a transformation on the level of imagination. At the same time, and precisely because of its increasingly secretive nature, the covert world passed over into something that could only be grasped imaginatively by the populace— akin to what Timothy Morton has termed a “hyperobject,” so massively distributed in time and space that its totality cannot be conceived in a single instantiation.23

Defining the National Security Sublime  7 The sublime architecture of the national security state finds its foundation in one piece of legislation: the Espionage Act of 1917, the single most important law concerning secrecy in American political history. Although, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan notes in Secrecy: The American Experience, the United States Constitution provides for closed-door legislative deliberations, and tacitly lent the executive branch freedom to control information in certain circumstances, openness was the practical and cultural norm in the years before the Woodrow Wilson administration.24 In 1794, the Senate opened its sessions to public viewing, and even under the strain of the Civil War, elected representatives saw publicity in lawmaking and diplomacy as a largely unquestioned virtue, or at least an uncontroversial one. The primary exceptions to this rule were the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, passed to silence opposition to an impending war with France, but these acts were controversial at the time of passage and only remained on the books for a few years. For the nineteenth century, Moynihan writes, government openness “came to be seen as something of a democratic virtue, even an aspect of national character.”25 The Espionage Act, like the Alien and Sedition Acts, was a response to war, and in particular to the fear of German spying in the midst of World War I. Debated over eleven weeks in the spring of 1917, the Act, which replaced an earlier and far more specific statute, the Defense Secrets Act of 1911, was still relatively narrow in its focus, outlining punishments for unlawfully obtaining and publicly disseminating defense information— espionage and sabotage in a strict sense. Precautions instituted during wartime, however, became the justification for an entire national security apparatus, a justification made all but permanent by subsequent legislation and by a range of Supreme Court decisions validating the legal foundations of government secrecy practices.26 After World War II, the United States and other nations began forming intelligence agencies, institutionalizing what Horn calls the “secret war” that shadows and sometimes replaces actual warfare in the modern era. As Moynihan puts it, “secrecy and conspiracy were to become primary instruments of statecraft even as states themselves attained unprecedented authority and presumption.”27 These instruments worked both to enforce loyalty within the national security bureaucracy and to repress dissent among the civilian population, controlling access to forbidden spaces and information, and putting restraints on the speech and activity of those privy to classified material. No category of information had a greater impact on the modern national security state than wartime research on nuclear weapons, what Evelyn Fox Keller calls “the biggest and best kept secret that science has ever harbored.”28 The Manhattan Project marked the first significant step in the “ratcheting” process Galison describes, changing not only the number of government secrets—which by all accounts grew rapidly in the post-War era—but also their very definition. Nuclear secrets were, as Masco has written, “the energizing core” of the entire modern system

8  Defining the National Security Sublime of classification, and contact with these secrets transformed the work of academic researchers—from nuclear scientists during the war to game theorists and translators, historians and mathematicians in the years after—into a matter of national security, whether it was undertaken in the course of military activity or not.29 Nearly anything associated with nuclear research was “born secret,” in national security parlance: classified automatically and kept scrupulously under wraps even after its danger had been rendered moot by espionage, changed political circumstances, or subsequent technological advances. Two pieces of legislation defined the Cold War ontology of secrecy, both of them direct legacies of the Manhattan Project: The Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which established the Atomic Energy Commission (later folded into the Department of Energy) and governed the information scientists engaged in nuclear research were allowed to share about their work for the government; and the National Security Act of 1947, which established the National Security Council and the CIA, largely to defend against the threat of nuclear espionage. Both acts greatly expanded the scope of the 1917 legislation upon which they were based, the former effectively breaking down, as Galison observes, the wall between pure and applied science, civilian and military research, and the latter creating an intelligence establishment that erased the distinction between wartime and peacetime limits on covert activities implicit in the original Act.30 Together, these Cold War laws turned the national security state, and its conceptualization of “secret warfare,” into a permanent part of the political landscape. Frederick Dolan describes the reorganization of governmental powers brought about by the National Security Act as a “revolutionary transformation” no less important to subsequent American culture than the founding.31 Despite occasional efforts by concerned parties in Congress to slow the rapid growth of government secrecy in the decades after World War II—Moynihan’s book was the fruit of one such effort—the arcanization of official life became self-generating and so decentralized that no one authority could bring it under control, even in the wake of scandals like Watergate or Iran-Contra, during which the needs of national security diverted attention from what amounted to criminal enterprises. Government secrecy practices under the Cold War constituted a permanent “state of exception,” in Giorgio Agamben’s formulation, which paradoxically violated democratic norms of openness to defend democracy.32 For quotidian government workers in key parts of the national security apparatus, secrecy became standard operating procedure, a way of life as well as a technique of information control. The threat of Islamic terrorism, made starkly evident in the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, DC, catalyzed a second “ontological” shift in the nature of national security secrecy, written into law with the passage of the Patriot Act in October of 2001, and institutionalized

Defining the National Security Sublime  9 by the Homeland Security Act of 2002. Because terrorism could make nearly any physical structure a target, crucial information about even unquestionably non-military infrastructure—dams, power plants, transportation systems—now became subject to classification. Such provisions entered the classification system during what I will call the Echelon Moment, an interregnum between the Cold War and the War on Terror in the 1990s, motivated by the first attack on the World Trade Centers in 1993 and actions against troops in the Middle East, but they were greatly expanded after 9/11 to include things like tourist sites, memorials, office buildings, and sports stadiums—anything that could be imagined as a potential target.33 The broadening scope of secrecy also led to the creation of a new category of protected document, “sensitive but unclassified,” defined by individual government agencies rather than by statute. Under this rubric, as Masco has shown, nearly any piece of information could be withheld from public circulation, rendering all government documents, like almost every piece of infrastructure in the country, a potential target needing the protection of secrecy.34 In addition to transforming the conceptualization of secrecy, the War on Terror led to a second massive expansion of the material foundations of the national security state. As the former Washington Post reporter Dana Priest shows in her 2011 book Top Secret America, the years after 9/11 saw new agencies and new buildings sprouting up around Washington, DC, and other cities, creating what Priest calls an “alternative geography” of secret operations across the American landscape. Governed by the immensely complicated new Department of Homeland Security, and housed in buildings indistinguishable from the bland corporate real estate in the suburban office parks where they are located, these agencies were christened with euphemistic names that belied their covert missions, and were typically staffed by contract employees rather than by government agents. They are now quite literally everywhere, comprising, as Priest writes, borrowing the familiar idiom of the sublime, a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre—and its entirety, as Pentagon intelligence chief James Clapper admitted, visible only to God.35 First and foremost among these entities was the NSA, which gained new prominence during the War on Terror. President Harry Truman established the NSA in 1952 as part of the larger reorganization of the intelligence agencies that began in 1947 with the National Security Act. The agency was originally housed under the military bureaucracy, but Truman spun it off as a civilian hub for signals interception and cryptographic analysis. Because the executive order creating the agency long remained classified, it was little known until the 1970s. Under the influence of

10  Defining the National Security Sublime the NSA, the second ontological “ratcheting” of the nature of government secrecy brought about by the War on Terror was supplemented by an equally significant epistemological transformation. President Bush turned to the NSA in the days after 9/11, and secretly authorized it to begin a domestic spying program to help fend off any future terrorist attacks—nearly a month before the signing of the Patriot Act. Subsequent legislation and executive actions have supported and often expanded this effort, though recent changes to the law curtailed the worst abuses.36 The surveillance effort, more than any other, made the administration’s ambitions clear. NSA surveillance capabilities had been the subject of scattered revelations since the 1960s, and in 2000 the European Parliament launched an investigation of the Cold War-era Echelon network, under which the agency, along with other intelligence entities in the “Five Eyes” alliance (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom), developed the capacity to tap into communication satellites and intercept private, military, diplomatic, and commercial traffic.37 News began coming out as early as 2003 suggesting that the government, in the name of national security, was attempting something much bigger—a new Manhattan Project, this time with the American public among its targets. Imagining a wholesale redefinition of the epistemological relationship between citizen and state, the project called upon the intelligence agencies to produce a body of knowledge about the citizenry that far exceeded the wildest dreams of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. The first indication was word of a massive initiative proposed by the Defense Department’s recently established Office of Information Awareness. Dubbed Total Information Awareness, and symbolized by an appropriately creepy logo that seemed to have been borrowed from the imagery of secret societies, the program sought to create a database gathering the personal information of every man and woman in the United States, from private email communications to credit histories, voter registration, and medical records, all with the aim of finding secret connections that could predict future terrorist acts. The program was a sublime response to the sublime proliferation of threats and targets that followed the dramatic events in New York and Washington, DC—the product of a “cold panic,” as Paul Virilio puts it, that marked the definitive end of the Cold War and the beginning of an uncertain new order.38 Everything became a matter of national security, and everyone was a potential suspect (though some, of course, were always more suspect than others). As Horn writes, 9/11 revealed something “hidden in the future” to a traumatized national security apparatus.39 The Total Information Awareness program was roundly criticized by the civil liberties community after the Bush Administration acknowledged its existence, and the Office of Information Awareness was eventually defunded by Congress, but the technology underlying its informationsharing and data-mining innovations was secretly taken up by the NSA,

Defining the National Security Sublime  11 where it was rebranded as “Aquaint,” fulfilling the informal motto coined by the agency’s director at the time, Keith Alexander: “Collect It All.”40 The specific nature of NSA surveillance only became the object of public scrutiny following a series of stories in the New York Times by reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau at the end of 2005, which detailed the existence of a wide range of surveillance programs at the agency, aided and abetted by allies in the Bush Administration and with the complicity of the telecommunications and technology industries. Priest’s reporting for the Washington Post on the expansion of the national security bureaucracy began to appear in 2010. All of these clues were confirmed and greatly expanded in 2013 with Snowden’s leak of a trove of agency documents to Greenwald and the filmmaker Laura Poitras. Snowden provided technical information about the agency’s abilities to collect and store personal communications and bulk metadata, and made clear the shocking extent to which domestic spying had woven its way into the day-to-day operations of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. The new regime of surveillance connected a dizzying array of entities— increasingly global and corporate as well as national and governmental—around the task of gathering information. Writing in 2011, Priest counted nearly four thousand different federal, state, and local organizations involved in domestic intelligence alone, well over nine hundred of them created since 9/11.41 Because the Patriot Act also broke down the formerly firm boundaries between criminal and intelligence investigations, making it possible to spy on citizens without probable cause, these agencies had wide latitude to collect information on nearly anyone deemed suspicious. The lion’s share of the suspicion, and the impact of the surveillance by various agencies, fell on members of the Muslim community, but the agency also swept up the phone calls, emails, and location data of millions of other citizens in the process. The War on Terror dramatically expanded the purview of government intelligence operations, and changed the very nature of what counted as a secret. There were, in effect, no limits: almost anyone could be a terrorist and so almost every aspect of contemporary life, foreign or domestic, became a matter of national security. There is little now that falls conceptually outside the realm of classification or surveillance. As Frederick A. O. Schwarz, Jr. writes, the NSA metadata program in particular “signaled a fundamental change in the relationship between the American government and the American people,” marking the zenith of what he calls “The Secrecy Era” that began under the Cold War.42 With the new sense of threat came floods of government money and novel justifications for spending it. Although the Department of Homeland Security was intended to encourage the sharing of information among intelligence agencies, this sharing did not by any means extend to the citizenry; nor, as Clapper’s sardonic comment suggests, did it render the national security state more transparent to those involved in running it. It is truly visible,

12  Defining the National Security Sublime he says, only to the eye of God. The new ontology of government secrecy brought about by the 9/11 attacks implied the possibility of a “boundless conflict,” in Galison’s words, eternal and planetary in its scope.43 And so the national security state became virtually boundless and eternal—that is, sublime.

The Ark and the Skull Foreign intelligence agencies like the CIA have always been devoted to information gathering, but following the passage of the Patriot Act, and driven by the newly empowered NSA, this task became the most basic goal and, in turn, the very essence of government secrecy-work under the War on Terror. Where the CIA has traditionally focused on espionage and counter-espionage—activities that assume a milieu of normative state secrecy protections on both sides—the NSA and allied agencies like the British GCHQ began, in the years after the 9/11 attacks, to sweep up unimaginable masses of data, deliberately concealed or not, in an effort to discern patterns of information. Thus the two ontologies of government secrecy that Galison describes also entail two distinct methodologies. Cold War secrecy was organized around protecting nuclear weapons research and, poised against a monolithic enemy, was obsessed with espionage and infiltration. Secrecy under the War on Terror, by contrast, was governed by the aim of defending people and infrastructure against potential terrorist attacks. The enemy was no longer monolithic and its likely targets were everywhere and mostly unhidden. The first methodology epitomizes what Brian Massumi calls a logic of deterrence, which responds in concrete ways to an objective danger, while the second embodies a logic of preemption, which anticipates an always potential danger, something yet to emerge.44 Guided by the logic of preemption, contemporary intelligence agencies increasingly supplemented or replaced familiar Cold War practices with predicitive analysis, searching masses of covertly assembled data for patterns of activity among myriad state and non-state actors, citizens and foreigners alike. The spy’s classic repertoire of high-tech gadgets gave way to a modernized version of the soothsayer’s crystal ball. Consider, from this perspective, the first and last films in Spielberg’s Indiana Jones series, which cleverly allegorize the evolving concerns and methodologies of the national security apparatus. In both films, Jones finds himself working as an informal covert operative, and the threats he contains epitomize the changing ontologies that have come to define the idea of national security and the government’s justification for undertaking secret activities. Both films feature the sublime warehouse filled with national security secrets: the first film ends with a view of this warehouse, while the plot of the fourth begins when a potentially dangerous secret is removed from its walls.

Defining the National Security Sublime  13 Raiders of the Lost Ark is set in the years prior to the Second World War. The main line of the plot begins when two agents from Army Intelligence approach Jones, played by Harrison Ford, and enlist his help in finding the legendary Ark of the Covenant, which the Nazis are seeking in the belief that the artifact would make their armies invincible. Jones sets off quite literally as a deputized agent of the nascent national security state; his colorful adventures constitute a covert operation in the service of the government to thwart a political conspiracy. It is telling that the agents visit Jones at his university office. Not unlike the many academic scientists recruited to work on the Manhattan Project, his story epitomizes the way in which government secrecy under the influence of atomic research broke down the line between civilian and military labor. Jones’ work as an archaeologist brings him within the purview of the national security state, turning him into a de facto secret agent, who, like a Cold War spy, infiltrates the Nazi conspiracy by sneaking into an excavation site and stowing away on a U-Boat to gain information. It is clear from Spielberg’s depiction of the Ark that the analogy between Jones and the scientists of the Manhattan Project is more than incidental. Before handing the Ark over to his Nazi overlords, Jones’ archaeological rival in the quest, René Belloq, opens the artifact to witness its true power. Like the observers at the early nuclear test sites, Jones and his lover Marion watch as the apparently empty Ark comes back to life, unleashing its secreted power on the Nazi agents, who die a fiery death that draws on classic visual images of the damage inflicted by the atomic bomb. A sublime pillar of fire, at once biblical and nuclear in its resonances, rises from the artifact and into the sky, engulfing the assembly—save for Jones and Marion, who wisely cover their eyes and take shelter.45 The conflagration ended and his enemies subdued, Jones dutifully delivers the Ark to his Army Intelligence handlers, who assure him it will be taken care of. Cut to the sublime warehouse. Made in the waning days of the Cold War, Raiders of the Lost Ark allegorizes the post-War rise of the national security state, the mysterious warehouse providing an image for the covert apparatus built up around the secret of nuclear weapons research: there to protect us but also hidden behind a sublime secrecy that even the relative insider is prevented from penetrating. Acting in the classic role of the Cold War spy, Jones dutifully serves a national security apparatus far larger, and far more secret, than he can understand, confirming but also greatly complicating his controversial status as an icon of rugged American masculinity and neo-imperial predation.46 In 2008, after a lag of nearly two decades following the previous entry in the series, Spielberg returned to the Indiana Jones franchise with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a film that picks up the national security allegory where the first film left off, and adapts the archaeological adventure story to allegorize the new national security

14  Defining the National Security Sublime state of the War on Terror.47 Set in 1957, at the height of the Cold War, the film opens with an army convoy traveling through a Western landscape clearly associated with nuclear research and testing. The convoy turns off the highway right next to the famous Atomic Cafe in Nevada, and rolls up to an isolated military base with all the trappings of a government black site. It turns out that the convoy is part of a KGB plot to infiltrate the base and—with the help of Jones, whom the Soviets have kidnapped and hold under threat—to steal another artifact with potential military implications. The agents take Jones to a massive warehouse, the doors of which are painted with the number 51, an allusion to the fabled top-secret military testing ground dubbed Area 51, as well as a hint that this warehouse is only one of many scattered across the desert landscape. The KGB agents demand Jones’ help in stealing an alien corpse recovered from the purported crash site at Roswell, New Mexico. Jones complies, expertly identifying the right crate in the massive space, packed to the rafters with other artifacts. He soon escapes his captors, only to find himself in a suburban Potemkin village, built to test the effects of an imminent nuclear blast—an allusion to the 1955 Operation Cue—which he survives by hiding in a lead-lined refrigerator.48 Thrown clear of the sacrificial village, Jones watches the mushroom cloud rise sublimely above the desert landscape, much as he observed the opening of the Ark in the first film. When he has been rescued by the Army, Jones is again visited by two agents of the national security state, now FBI rather than Army Intelligence. Instead of seeking his help in defending the United States from its enemies, they accuse him of collusion with his Soviet captors, an accusation Jones angrily tries to rebut with reference to his apparently legendary service to the nation fighting communists. Other details reinforce his national security bona fides. Early in the film, when the Soviet agents ask him for his proverbial last words before killing him, Jones utters, “I  like Ike.” He tells the FBI agents about a top-secret assignment in 1947, during which he, along with other academic specialists, was asked to help identify the alien remains—another task in which he was deputized by the national security state, and yet another allusion to the role of academic researchers in the Manhattan Project. The agents do not believe him, however, and he remains under suspicion, an archaeologist Oppenheimer. There are numerous references in the film to blacklisting and the Red Scare of the 1950s—Jones even loses his job at the university due to concerns about his loyalty—but the generalized sense of suspicion the agents evince also recalls the free-roving fear that marked the early days of the War on Terror. Indeed, the film begins in the world of nuclear secrecy, but quickly moves on to concerns that evoke more recent conflicts. Jones learns that the ultimate aim of the Soviet agents is to gain control of a piece of alien technology: a mysterious crystal skull that provides

Defining the National Security Sublime  15 its possessor with telepathic powers. Jones’ Soviet rival, Irina Spalko, says it opens a “psychic channel” into the mind of the enemy, a power she wants to harness to anticipate and control the enemy’s thoughts and feelings. Now freelancing rather serving as a deputized agent, Jones sets out to prevent this from happening, and in the end returns the skull to the waiting aliens concealed beneath ancient native ruins in the Amazon, who need the artifact to return to their home planet. Much as in the first film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull concludes with Jones’ rival destroyed by the ancient technology she had hoped to use militarily against the United States. An allegorically nuclear pillar of fire incinerates Belloq; Spalko is consumed by knowledge. Having followed Jones and his allies to a buried spaceship, she demands that the aliens give her knowledge: “I  want to know,” she intones. Ghostly tendrils enwrap her, her eyes begin to spark and catch fire, and she vanishes in flames. Information, Spielberg cannily implies with these parallel scenes, is the nuclear secret of the contemporary national security state—a secret that consumes the overly curious no less violently than an atomic blast does. His rival defeated, Jones witnesses a second sublime spectacle, as the alien spacecraft rises from the ruins and returns to space, transforming the very landscape in the process. A higher species, rather than a more secretive branch of the shadow government, now protects the dangerous artifact. Together, the first and last Indiana Jones films describe the changing modus operandi of the national security state. In the first film, we find a dark repository of dangerous secrets—a proxy for nuclear secrets—protected by all the powers of the state; and in the last, we find an omniscient, almost divine entity with the unbounded power to ferret secrets out of an entire population. The two nemeses embody Massumi’s two responses to threat. The Nazis stand in for the Soviet nuclear spying of the Cold War, with Jones running a counter-espionage mission in defense of the nation. They are a known danger the national security state needs to deter. Although the KGB agents, their association with “aliens” resonating with the political fear surrounding immigration after 9/11, might seem to fill the role of Islamic terrorists, the film, in fact, identifies terrorism with the work of the contemporary national security state and its prevailing logic of preemption. As Spielberg surely knew when shooting on the film began in June of 2007, the American government had been waging a kind of clandestine psychic warfare on its citizens for more than five years in an attempt, straight out of Philip K. Dick’s story “Minority Report,” to predict and preempt future terrorist attacks.49 Represented by the FBI agents who unfairly impugn Jones’ patriotism, the intelligence agencies have turned all of America into a mysterious warehouse teeming with secrets; or rather, the walls have come down and the world itself has become the warehouse, the secrets of which the government collects and sorts in order to see into the future. In Spielberg’s allegory, the real aliens

16  Defining the National Security Sublime take their dangerous technology with them, effectively refusing to let it become the kind of weapon—a computational crystal ball rather than a crystal skull—the NSA has sought to press into use.

The Open Secret of Hidden Power The secrets of the national security state are not a mystery to the citizens, and this fact, too, contributes to their sublimity. The covert state operates under a cloak of deep secrecy, protected by a range of laws, regulations, and official practices—a Byzantine system of classification and compartmentalization intended to control sensitive information and keep it safely within the halls of power. By some estimates, the covert state now covers a larger realm of government activity than the open state, and, as Guy Debord has suggested, the latter now takes its cue from the former: “almost every aspect of international political life and ever more important aspects of internal politics are conducted and displayed in the style of the secret services.”50 But the distinction is not quite as simple as the familiar opposition of secrecy and transparency would suggest. Although citizens may not know the content of all the classified information swirling up from the banks of the Potomac and from American and allied installations around the globe, they are well aware that this secret world exists and acts on their behalf. “For all its operational secrecy,” Melley writes, “covert government is not secret.”51 The secret state, as Horn points out, is something like the secret of sexuality in Foucault’s “repressive hypothesis”: a putatively forbidden subject no one seems able to stop discussing.52 No form of power works wholly in the dark: there is always an element of spectacle, a pervasive dialectic of exhibition and withdrawal. The gruesome public execution of the would-be regicide, as Foucault vividly shows in Discipline and Punish, demonstrates “the unrestrained presence of the sovereign” even in his literal absence from the scene.53 But the public’s knowledge of modern covert government has a different character, and not simply because the secret state actively seeks to conceal its work. As Melley and Horn both suggest, the modern covert sector has the status of what Michael Taussig calls a public secret. Public secrets comprise readily available knowledge that citizens apprehend but cannot, or refuse, to comprehend. They are not just a matter of reticence, discretion, or decorum—though these forms of inhibition are part of their power—but of an “active not-knowing,” a curiously willed ignorance.54 Slavoj Žižek calls them “unknown knowns,” “the disavowed beliefs, suppositions, and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, although they form the background of our public values.”55 Everyone knows the government keeps secrets, and keeps them in many cases to shield illegal or immoral actions, even if they do not know their specific contents. Indeed, at the same time that it has vastly expanded the realm

Defining the National Security Sublime  17 of government secrecy, the contemporary covert state has effectively flooded the public realm with evidence of its activities and its extent. The public learns of top-secret drone strikes on terrorist suspects.56 Working with readily available sources, journalists publish exposés revealing the contours of covert operations. We navigate the web in full knowledge that the NSA (along, of course, with Google and Facebook) may be collecting our search data. The Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives publishes a yearly tally of classification activity. Redacted maps and documents and pixilated satellite photos, as Trevor Paglen points out, “announce the fact that there’s something hidden.”57 Yet the secret state persists, at once deeply concealed and, in Debord’s words, habitually revealed as a “necessary incomprehensibility,” a paradoxically spectacular secret.58 This paradox brings out what is perhaps the most powerful quality of public secrets: they are “not destroyed through exposure.”59 As Georg Simmel notes in his classic 1907 sociological analysis of secrecy, everyday secrets are threatened by their logical opposite, betrayal: “The secret contains a tension that is dissolved in the moment of its revelation. This moment constitutes the acme in the development of the secret.”60 Public secrets are an exception to this general rule. Because their existence is already open and available to those notionally on the other side of the veil, learning the truth does little more than confirm what one always already knew. Their power lies not (or not only) in a jealous gathering of information, but in the fact that more knowledge does not liberate those who come upon them. Public secrets are built into and propped up by social and political relationships, and it is only by changing those relationships, not by providing new information, that one dispels the secret and its power. The structure is very similar to the logic of Marxian commodity fetishism, which, as Žižek has argued, is embedded in objective practices and daily interactions, notably economic exchange. There is no dark hidden wisdom that need only see the light of day for the secret to be disclosed, only familiar acts of exchange. This means that fetishism persists as a subjective conviction long after its objective falsity has been revealed by analysis.61 Even cynicism and irony, traditional strategies of ideological demystification, cannot reveal the secret: because they function by denouncing “the way things are,” they necessarily confirm the existence of the fetishized experience of reality they want to unmask. Government representatives have long known how to use the public circulation of secrets to their advantage, playing a game of peek-a-boo with classified information to protect themselves or promote their agendas. Troublesome disclosures can be made perfectly legitimate by subsequent changes to the law. Paglen points to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which suspended habeas corpus rights for so-called “enemy combatants,” and effectively legitimated CIA practices of extraordinary rendition—yet another covert initiative authorized under the War on

18  Defining the National Security Sublime Terror—just after these practices came to light in news reports. “Blank spots on maps,” he writes in reference to secret prison complexes that housed these combatants, “have generated blank spots in the law.”62 Shocking revelations retroactively become normal operating procedure, something best left to experts, no longer worthy of further investigation. “Bringing the war on terror’s black geography into the light did not make it disappear,” Paglen concludes, “Instead, the secret world sculpted the surrounding state in its own image.”63 The secret prisons persist because they need no longer function strictly as operational secrets. As Masco has argued, similarly, the government secrecy system under the War on Terror has become so unmoored from its original task of protecting vital national security secrets that secrecy now works as “an empty signifier that stands in for governance, rationality, and evidence,” and can be readily deployed as an autonomous justification.64 Designating information as secret serves as its own form of proof. This was the case with the intelligence purportedly documenting Saddam Hussein’s extensive weapons programs leading up to the Iraq War. Officials revealed a few choice secrets, like schematic diagrams of concealed weapons factories, making it clear to a public already in on what Louis Marin calls the “secrecy game” that still more and better intelligence lay just behind the veil, bolstering the credibility of the government’s claims, even if that intelligence turned out to be built on sand.65 We find much the same dynamic surrounding revelations about NSA surveillance. The deep secrecy of the NSA’s programs has lent them an air of authority, one that was not dispelled by the 2009 report from the Inspector General’s Offices of the major intelligence agencies, which found little publicly available evidence that the programs had been successful.66 The very same revelations that look like a smoking gun to activists can also bolster the authority of covert agencies: they operate in the dark and therefore infallibly. The open secret of hidden power constitutes a “chink in the chain of cognition,” thwarting a strictly hermeneutic approach to government secrecy.67 At the same time, though, it makes the aesthetic approach promoted by the national security sublime possible. The very act of cloaking renders the covert state visible and representable. The secret, writes Pamela Lee, “paradoxically possesses something like an appearance—an aesthetics, if you like.”68 We can see what we are not permitted know: the cloak itself, but not what it conceals. The effect, ultimately, is to increase the sense of sublimity, the vast extent of what we see lending to what we cannot see an even greater potential scope than it might actually possess. The peculiar manner in which information about the national security state typically reaches the modern public—through whistleblower leaks, scandals, and journalistic scoops—also bolsters the power of public secrets, making openness a source of mystery rather than its solution. Stories of espionage or covert operations, widely publicized arrests of spies and informers, dumps of classified information, and blockbuster

Defining the National Security Sublime  19 investigative reports, all remind interested observers of what they always already knew about the secret reaches of governmental activity to which they will never have full access. Strange for the details they reveal, but familiar for their confirmation that political leaders conceal what they really know, such disclosures jar the habitual complacency of the public secret, briefly lifting the veil on an entire mysterious world.69 Although such revelations provide new information, and accordingly might seem to confirm a traditional hermeneutics of secrecy, their most resonant impact is affective and imaginative.70 Like a Romantic poet gazing from the heights of a majestic mountain peak—an iconic image to which we shall return in the next chapter—contemporary observers come to look upon the state as a vast repository of mysteries, set sublimely apart from everyday life: Mont Blanc on the banks of the Potomac. David Lyon, a prominent scholar of corporate and government surveillance, who should be unsurprised about any leak, provides a signal example of this response in his recollection of the first inklings of what Snowden disclosed: “So while some details of the Snowden revelations are tantalizingly patchy, for the most part the sheer volume of files and the range of areas to which they refer are nothing short of mind-boggling.”71 It would be no less correct to say that the “patchy” quality of the revelations produces their “mind-boggling” sublimity rather than curtailing it. The most explosive national security secrets exist in a state of what David Pozen has called “deep secrecy.” These are the unknown unknowns of government operations, secrets confined to a small circle of insiders and no one else.72 Whistleblower leaks, scandals, and journalistic scoops render deep secrets shallow, but they also create a pervasive sense that there are more and even greater secrets still locked away. We are shown that secrets lurk in every corner of the governmental apparatus, endless fodder for future revelations. Shown, but not fully informed. The landscape of post-War American political history is dotted with such sublime disclosures, which collectively made evident the changing ontologies of government secrecy along with specific information about previously hidden activities, both legal and deeply questionable, undertaken in the apparent interest of national security.73 From the first use of the atomic bomb, which unveiled the secret of the Manhattan Project, to the Rosenberg trial, the U-2 spy plane incident, the Bay of Pigs, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, the public debate over Saddam Hussein’s production of weapons of mass destruction, and Snowden’s leak—these revelations seemed to throw open the warehouse doors, disclosing a hidden world of scientific research, sophisticated spy games, and occult machinations of power. We see the crates, not what they contain. But the public effect of such scandals is not simply more truth. The release of the Pentagon Papers assured no one that the true story of the Vietnam War was now fully available; indeed, along with Watergate, this revelation paradoxically produced greater suspicion,

20  Defining the National Security Sublime evident in the flood of paranoid conspiracy narratives that marked fiction and film throughout the 1970s. The Snowden leaks revealed surveillance of such an unprecedented scope that the initial public anger has largely resolved into an awed resignation in the face of the government’s unbounded epistemological powers. Consider the curious history of the first public revelations about the activities of the NSA. Beginning in the early 1960s, a series of leaks and defections confirmed for the first time the existence of this secretive agency, but as the information piled up, the experience of dramatic revelation scarcely changed. Every new disclosure elicited the same feeling of sublime wonder (or terror)—a signature of the open secret. The first major leak of information about the agency came from two NSA analysts, Bernon Mitchell and William Martin, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1960 and held a press conference in September of that year, during which they revealed many details of the agency’s operations.74 In the face of vigorous government denials, however, the information failed to penetrate the public consciousness. Twelve years later, the New Left journal Ramparts again revealed the existence and activities of the agency, as if for the first time, publishing an anonymous interview with a twenty-fiveyear-old former NSA analyst named Perry Fellwock, who was inspired by Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers to detail his experiences in the covert sector. Entitled “US Electronic Espionage: A Memoir,” the article offered an extensive overview of the NSA’s mission, describing the security at Fort Meade, the deep secrecy under which the agency operated in Europe and Vietnam, and the scope of its signals interception capabilities. In addition to keeping track of Soviet aircraft and submarines, Fellwock revealed, the NSA also monitors and records a staggering range of non-military communications, including radio broadcasts around the globe and “every trans-Atlantic telephone call.”75 “What we are dealing with,” the unnamed author of the piece (probably David Horowitz) intones in the introduction to the interview, “is a highly bureaucratized, highly technological mission whose breadth and technological sophistication appear remarkable even in an age of imperial responsibilities and electronic wizardry.”76 The US government chose not to prosecute Fellwock, fearful that a court case would only serve to publicize the former analyst’s report about the agency.77 This strategy also seemed to have worked. A full three years after the Ramparts piece, when the NSA again came to national attention during hearings held by the Church Committee, the agency still had the effective status of a secret. The United States Senate formed the Church Committee in the wake of the Watergate scandal to address privacy abuses by the intelligence services dating back to the Eisenhower Administration. Although the bulk of its attention went to the domestic surveillance activities of the CIA and the FBI, in October of 1975, it took up the subject of NSA surveillance, and in particular, accusations that the agency, under

Defining the National Security Sublime  21 the auspices of Project MINARET, had illegally monitored the communications of well over a thousand American citizens placed on a secret watch list of suspected subversives. In this context, too, the mere existence of the NSA and the vast scope of its activities seemed to come as a shock. The committee chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, began the hearing by observing, “one has to search far and wide to find someone who has heard of the NSA.” Falling into the language of the sublime, he describes the agency as “an immense installation” that “employs thousands of people and operates with an enormous budget. Its expansive computer facilities comprise some of the most complex and sophisticated electronic machinery in the world.”78 He tasks the committee with exploring the extent to which the NSA might “turn its awesome technology against domestic communications,” a patently illegal act that Fellwock had already confirmed in his interview, and which should accordingly have surprised no one.79 A steady drip of revelations about the activities of the NSA and allied agencies in other nations continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s, eliciting the same wonder of a first encounter that we find in the Ramparts piece and in the Church Committee hearings. In the May 1976 issue of Time Out, Duncan Campbell and Mark Hosenball, relying on information provided by Fellwock (now using the pseudonym Winslow Peck), penned the first exposé of the activities of GCHQ, the British equivalent of the NSA. The early years of the Reagan Administration saw the publication of two significant reports on the activities of the NSA: James Bamford’s The Puzzle Palace (1982), a deeply informed history of the agency; and David Burnham’s The Rise of the Computer State (1983), which included an extensive discussion of its technological capabilities. A New York Times Magazine piece Burnham adapted from his book, entitled “The Silent Power of the NSA,” opens by noting that the agency—he is writing eleven years after Fellwock’s leak, and eight years after the Church Committee hearings—is “virtually unknown,” and describes its mission in the breathless language of the sublime, as if we were encountering the agency for the first time. Operating like a “massive computerized funnel” powered by a “massive bank of what are believed to be the largest and most advanced computers now available to any bureaucracy in the world,” this “extraordinarily powerful and clandestine agency” has a budget larger than the CIA’s and reputedly employs more than 100,000 people—a sprawling secret workforce six times greater than that of the FBI.80 In 1988, Campbell published a piece in the New Statesman describing a project ominously named P415, which would make possible the “near total interception of international commercial and satellite communications” around the globe.81 And, as I noted previously, the European Parliament undertook an investigation of the Echelon network in 2000, initially prompted by another set of rumors about NSA activities circulating in 1996, releasing a report in July of 2001, just months before

22  Defining the National Security Sublime projects prompted by the 9/11 attacks would make the agency’s surveillance capabilities (yet again) a matter of shocking revelation. As these examples demonstrate, the effect of national security leaks and exposés is not simply hermeneutic, but also broadly aesthetic, shaping the imagery, narratives, and affective registers through which observers seek to explain government secret keeping. Leaks engender a variety of what Masco terms “national security affect,” the “potentially endless conceptual space of worry and projected dangers” that Western governments have opened up for their citizens since the Cold War. The sublime glimpse into a secret world that leaks provide captures one specific affective register produced by the “ever-expanding universe of objects” that falls under the aegis of the national security state.82 Observers are at once informed and excluded, allowed the compensatory satisfaction of knowing (finally, definitively) about the existence of an awesome secret world, though it is one they cannot directly grasp or control, only “feel”: hence the repeated expressions of surprise and sublime wonder that attends the series of revelations about the NSA in the examples above. Leaks occasion a peculiarly contemporary experience of the sublime, an aestheticized encounter with the open secret of covert government. Although leaks might seem to promote the goal of transparency, in fact they belie its helplessness in a world of public secrets. Secrecy is the very ether in which the national security state subsists, ordinary rather than extraordinary for both insiders, who live the quotidian reality of the classification system, and for the outsiders who “know” of their activities. Just this public and all-embracing quality of government secrecy makes it resistant to traditional techniques of revelation. Modern transparency practices began with the Freedom of Information Act, signed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966, and strengthened in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Along with the equally significant 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed in the wake of the 1976 Church Committee Report, which put judicial controls on both foreign and domestic snooping, these laws marked a political watershed for open government. Pozen calls them “the closest thing we have to a constitutional amendment on state secrecy.”83 In their wake, calls for transparency have become akin to rituals in a secular religion of modern democratic governance, a faith fervently promoted by anti-secrecy activists and followed, assiduously if often grudgingly, by government workers and elected officials at all levels. The comparison to a religion is not merely metaphorical. As Samuel Weber has noted, an influential vision of theological transparency underlies Saint Paul’s metaphor for Christian revelation from I Corinthians 13: “For now we look through a glass darkly, but then face to face.” Alluding typologically to the veil that Moses used to cover the radiance of his face after he encountered God on Mount Sinai, Paul opposes the mediated relationship to divinity in the old dispensation with the full disclosure

Defining the National Security Sublime  23 of Christian revelation. The veil of secrecy is a fallen condition, mired in doctrinal error.84 Conversion lifts the veil, floods the darkness with light, and makes all truth evident. Modern variations on the metaphor of the dark glass carry the missionary fervor of Paul’s original proclamation, as Weber suggests, the demand for transparency reflecting “a theological heritage that is all the more powerful for being ‘secularized.’”85 There is simmering doubt, particularly among scholars on the academic left, about whether this heritage remains effective.86 Norberto Bobbio has argued that democratic theorists often conflate public visibility with openness and honesty, a conflation that speaks to the metaphorical underpinnings of transparency.87 But seeing power is not the same thing as being able to hold it accountable, and visibility can be a tool of mystification as well as illumination. If the early years of the Trump Administration have demonstrated nothing else, it is this. Bombarded on what feels like a daily basis with shocking revelations of incompetence and corruption, one nevertheless feels helpless; knowledge becomes a tool of obfuscation rather than the confident means of overcoming it. Disclosure follows disclosure, but the public secret persists. As Dean has persuasively argued, the culture of dramatic disclosures— a culture that now all but defines our understanding of national security issues—has not expunged secrecy from the social body. To the contrary, the very construction of the public sphere, of an imagined public with the fundamental right to know, leaves in its wake a persistent suspicion, an unavoidable sense that someone, somewhere, is hiding crucial information to which everyone ought to be privy. Publicity, for Dean, promotes the fantasy of a quasi-Lacanian “public-supposed-to-know,” for which the position of (perpetually unknowing) knower is more politically significant than any information the public may actually gather.88 It is this very fantasy that produces the public as a recognizable entity. Convinced of their epistemological exclusion, people rush after the merest hint of a conspiracy in a frenzy to know all, to be in on the secret, to be a part of an imaginary group of insiders that always seems one step ahead. Publicity in this way creates secrets no less surely than it reveals them. Each revelation gives us new information, but at the same time reinforces the fantasy of a public-supposed-to-know, leaving a potentially sublime trail of undisclosed secrets in its wake. We shall explore the origins of this dynamic in the next chapter. Here again, Spielberg’s warehouse provides a resonant image. The misty interior of the massive structure conceals as well as reveals. For what, after all, do the open doors disclose? Stacks upon stacks of crates, where the “real” secrets reside. Dean’s point is that no amount of peering will satisfy the structurally suspicious knower: new discoveries provide compensatory satisfaction, yet more and greater mysteries always abide. The national security sublime works to capture just this feeling.

24  Defining the National Security Sublime

Notes  1. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, directed by Steven Spielberg (Hollywood: Paramount Home Entertainment, 2008), DVD. Following in Spielberg’s wake, the massive warehouse has become a signal trope in films about government secrecy. At the beginning and end of The Lives of Others (2007), for example, we see rooms filled with files containing information collected by the Stasi about the activities of East German Citizens; the documentary Secrecy (2008) signals the extent of clandestine government operations with recurrent images of piles of paper and shadowy rooms filled with shelves and boxes. The Lives of Others, directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2007), DVD; Secrecy, directed by Rob Moss and Peter Galison (Oley, PA: Bullfrog Films, 2008), DVD.  2. Department of Defense News Briefing, 12 February  2002, archive. defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=2636, accessed 13 March 2017.   3. Hugh Urban, Secrets of the Kingdom: Religion and Concealment in the Bush Administration (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 19.  4. Julian Borger, “FBI’s James Comey: ‘There Is No Such Thing as Absolute Privacy in America,’ ” The Guardian Online, US Edition, 8 March  2017, www.theguardian.com/world/mar/08/fbi-james-comey-privacy-wikileakscia-hack-espionage, accessed 9 March 2017.   5. Timothy Melley, The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012).   6. Eva Horn, The Secret War: Treason, Espionage, and Modern Fiction, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 238–50.   7. Jason Leopold, “The CIA Helped Produce an Episode of ‘Top Chef,’ ” Vice News, 6 April  2016, news.vice.com/article/cia-helped-produce-top-chef-co vert-affairs, accessed 16 August 2016. For more on the long history of cooperation between the movie industry and the national security apparatus, see Simon Willmetts, In Secrecy’s Shadow: The OSS and the CIA in Hollywood Cinema, 1941–1979 (Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 2016).   8. Eva Horn, “Logics of Political Secrecy,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011): 103–22.   9. David Rosen and Aaron Santesso, The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 10. Another example: Glenn Greenwald dug up what were purported to be pictures of a “Star Trek” room at NSA headquarters, designed for visiting elected officials who saw intelligence operations as akin to science-fiction television. See Glenn Greenwald, “Inside the Mind of NSA Chief Gen Keith Alexander,” The Guardian Online, US Edition, 15 September 2003, www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/15/nsa-mind-keith-alexanderstar-trek, accessed 2 March 2017. 11. As Timothy Costelloe writes, apropos of the sublime, “It is almost as fashionable in the history of philosophy to declare certain concepts dead and buried as it is, periodically at least, to announce the discipline itself to be at an ‘end.’ ” The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1. 12. Neil Hertz, “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime,” in The End of the Line (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 40–60. 13. Melley, The Covert Sphere, 6.

Defining the National Security Sublime  25 14. Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 47. 15. Clare Birchall, “Aesthetics of the Secret,” New Formations 83, no. 1 (2014): 25–46. 16. Garrett Stewart, Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 253. 17. Russ Castronovo, Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 33. 18. “Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret.” Max Weber, “Bureaucracy,” in Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 233. 19. Edward A. Shils, The Torment of Secrecy (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1956), 23. On norms of secrecy in liberal governance, see also, Dennis F. Thompson, “Democratic Secrecy,” Political Science Quarterly 114, no. 2 (1999): 181–93. 20. Joseph Masco, The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 113. 21. See Mark Neocleous, Critique of Security (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). 22. Peter Galison, “Secrecy in Three Acts,” Social Research 77, no. 3 (2010): 941. 23. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 24. The so-called “Journal Clause” states: “Each House shall keep a journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting in such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy.” US Constitution, art. 1, sect. 5, cl. 3. This clause gives wider latitude to Congress than a similar clause in the Articles of Confederation, which limited secret deliberations to matters “relating to treaties, alliances or military operations.” Articles of Confederation, art. 9, para. 7. On early debates about political secrecy, see Daniel N. Hoffman, Governmental Secrecy and the Founding Fathers (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981). It should be noted that my focus here is primarily on secrecy practices and their cultural interpretation in the United States, but other countries have their own histories of national security secrecy. See, to take one cognate example, David Vincent, The Culture of Secrecy: Britain, 1832–1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). I explore the uses of government secrecy in 1790s Britain, a period that arguably gave birth to the modern national security state, in Chapter 2. 25. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 82. 26. Moynihan notes the importance of Schenk v. United States (1919), in which Oliver Wendell Holmes formulated the test of “clear and present danger” to justify Congressional limitations on speech pertaining to national security matters (108). For a discussion of later cases bearing on the so-called state secret privilege, see Scott Michaelsen and Scott Cutler Shershow, “Is Nothing Secret?” Discourse 27, nos. 2–3 (2005): 124–54. 27. Moynihan, Secrecy, 84. 28. Evelyn Fox Keller, “From Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death,” in Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender, and Science (New York: Routledge, 1992), 43. 29. Masco, The Theater of Operations, 119.

26  Defining the National Security Sublime 30. Galison, “Secrecy in Three Acts,” 952. 31. Frederick M. Dolan, Allegories of America: Narratives, Metaphysics, Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 60. 32. Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 33. A suggestive anecdote: a friend of mine who works for a military contractor tells me that even the bills sent by the landscaping company that tends the property around his building are routinely classified. On the conditions underlying such decisions, see Steven Aftergood, “An Inquiry into the Dynamics of Government Secrecy,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 48, no. 2 (2013): 511–30; as well as the essays on national security secrecy in Susan Maret, ed., Government Secrecy (Bingley: Emerald House Publishing, 2011). 34. See Masco, The Theater of Operations, 113–44. 35. Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 52. 36. For a concise account of the surveillance programs run by the NSA in the wake of 9/11, see Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 90–169; for a broad reflection, see David Lyon, Surveillance After Snowden (London: Polity Press, 2015); on the legal and political contexts of these surveillance programs, see Jon L. Mills, “The Future of Privacy in the Surveillance Age,” in After Snowden: Privacy, Secrecy, and Security in the Information Age, ed. Ronald Goldfarb (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 191–260. 37. I discuss the history of the Echelon network in Chapter 3. 38. Paul Virilio, Art as Far as the Eye Can See, trans. Julie Rose (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 3. 39. Horn, The Secret War, 330. 40. James Bamford, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 326. 41. Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, 133. 42. Frederick A. O. Schwarz, Jr., Democracy in the Dark: The Seduction of Government Secrecy (New York: The New Press, 2015), 4. 43. Galison, “Secrecy in Three Acts,” 970. 44. Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 3–19. 45. On the association of divine and nuclear power in this scene, see Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan  .  .  . and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 150. 46. For an influential adumbration of this now-familiar reading of the film, see Patricia Zimmerman, “Soldiers of Fortune: Lucas, Spielberg, Indiana Jones, and Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Wide Angle 6, no. 2 (1984): 34–39. 47. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, directed by Steven Spielberg (Hollywood: Paramount Home Entertainment, 2008), DVD. 48. Operation Cue was the most famous of several such projects, in which the Civil Defense Agency built and destroyed imaginary installations or towns to test the effects of an atomic blast on infrastructure. For the affective logic of the operation, see Masco, The Theater of Operations, 57–63. 49. Spielberg, who may well be the unacknowledged poet laureate of the national security state, directed the 2002 film adaptation of Dick’s story, which tellingly moves the action from New York to Washington, DC. On the legal and conceptual aspects of predictive analysis, see Tal Zarsky, “Transparent

Defining the National Security Sublime  27 Predictions,” University of Illinois Law Review 2013, no. 4 (2013): 1503–69; and Mark B. N. Hansen, “Our Predictive Condition; or, Prediction in the Wild,” in The Nonhuman Turn, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 101–38. James Kendrick argues that the Indiana Jones films epitomize Spielberg’s long-running interest in government conspiracies, and compares Raiders of the Lost Ark to roughly contemporary, and deeply cynical, productions like Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974). Darkness in the Bliss-Out: A Reconsideration of the Films of Steven Spielberg (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 133. Spielberg’s 2017 political film The Post, based on the history of the Pentagon Papers, only confirms this insight. 50. Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London: Verso, 1998), 59. For the ratio of secret to public knowledge production, see Peter Galison, “Removing Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (2004): 229–43. 51. Melley, The Covert Sphere, 8. On the association of open national security secrets with the landscapes of the American West—sites of great importance to many of the authors, writers, and filmmakers I discuss in this book—see John Beck, Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 52. Horn, “Logics of Political Secrecy,” 105. 53. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 49. 54. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 7. 55. Slavoj Žižek, “Philosophy, the ‘Unknown Knows,’ and the Public Use of Reason,” Topoi 25, nos. 1–2 (2006): 137–42. 56. See Chris Wood, “A Secret in Plain Sight,” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 393–99. 57. Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (New York: Dutton, 2009), 17. 58. Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 59. 59. Taussig, Defacement, 3. 60. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: The Free Press, 1950), 333. 61. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 1–56. 62. Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map, 276. 63. Ibid., 273. 64. Masco, The Theater of Operations, 124. 65. Louis Marin, “The Logic of Secrecy,” in Cross-Readings, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1998), 200. 66. Offices of the Inspector General, Unclassified Report on the President’s Surveillance Program (Washington, DC, 2009), 33. 67. Birchall, “Aesthetics of the Secret,” 34. 68. Pamela M. Lee, “Open Secret,” Artforum, May 2011, no pagination, www. artforum.com/inprint/issue=201105&id=28060, accessed 9 May  2017. See also Alison Young, “The Art of Public Secrecy,” Australian Feminist Law Journal 35, no. 1 (2011): 57–74. 69. Here I modify Birchall’s valuable mapping of the aesthetic possibilities of the secret, in “Aesthetics of the Secret.” Where Birchall locates the sublime on the side of revelation and transparency, I would instead place it on the side of the open secret—at once revealed and concealed. 70. See Michael Dango, “Leaks: A  Genre,” Post45, November  2017, http:// post45.research.yale.edu/2017/11/leaks-a-genre/, accessed 29 June  2018.

28  Defining the National Security Sublime Dango’s illuminating study focuses on the generic link between leaks and the affect of embarrassment. 71. Lyon, Surveillance After Snowden, 13. 72. David E. Pozen, “Deep Secrecy,” Stanford Law Review 62, no. 2 (2010): 257–339. 73. John B. Thompson would call them “Power Scandals,” which reveal the hidden workings of political power. See Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 196–232. The caveat is that in these cases, the public always already knows about (or has a distinct fictional image of) the reality of hidden power. On the complicated legal, political, and informational contexts surrounding national security leaks, see David E. Pozen, “The Leaky Leviathan: Why the Government Condemns and Condones Unlawful Disclosures of Information,” Harvard Law Review 127, no. 2 (2013): 512–635; and Mark Fenster, The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrollable Government Information (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 92–103. 74. “Two Code Clerks Defect to Soviet,’ ” The New York Times, 7 September 1960. 75. “US Electronic Espionage: A Memoir,” Ramparts, August 1972, 37. 76. Ibid., 36–37. 77. James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 262. 78. The National Security Agency and Fourth Amendment Rights: Hearings Before the Senate Select Comm. to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Volume 5, 94th Congress, First Session (1976) (Statement of Frank Church, Senator and Committee Chairman), 1. For a history of the Church Committee, see Loch K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1985); and Kathryn S. Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). One of the committee’s most shocking findings was the existence of Operation SHAMROCK, under the auspices of which major telecommunications companies had, since the 1940s, allowed the NSA access to their transmissions. Public attention and changes in policy ended the program in the 1970s, but reporting in the early years of the War on Terror made it clear that it was restarted—under the same name—in early 2001, before the 9/11 attacks. 79. The National Security Agency and Fourth Amendment Rights (Statement of Frank Church), 2. The members of the Church Committee worried openly over the fact that the NSA was founded on the basis of a top-secret executive order, and therefore had no statutory authority, which, in their eyes, made it frighteningly easy for the agency’s mission to be broadened by executive branch fiat. Even years after the Snowden leaks revealed that the Bush Administration had done just that in the days after the 9/11 attacks, there is still no statute to prevent it from happening again. Reading the transcripts of the Church Committee hearings is an uncanny experience: one encounters the same concerns about the NSA that civil liberties groups would press during the War on Terror. The Snowden leaks were only one more lifting of the translucent veil that has cloaked the NSA’s activities since the 1960s. 80. David Burnham, “The Silent Power of the NSA,” New York Times Magazine, 27 March  1983, www.nytimes.com/1983/03/27/magazine/the-silentpower-of-the-nsa.html, accessed 2 April 2018. 81. Duncan Campbell, “They’ve Got it Taped,” The New Statesman, 12 August 1988, 11. 82. Masco, Theater of Operations, 14.

Defining the National Security Sublime  29 83. Pozen, “Deep Secrecy,” 314. For a historical account of the origin of transparency policies, see Michael Schudson, The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945–1975 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). 84. John W. P. Phillips, “Secrecy and Transparency: An Interview with Samuel Weber,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011): 162. 85. Ibid., 163. 86. For persuasive articulations of this critique, see Jack Bratich, “Popular Secrecy and Occultural Studies,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 1 (2007): 42–58; Clare Birchall, “Transparency, Interrupted: Secrets of the Left,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011): 60–84; and, from a somewhat different perspective, Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum, Obfuscation: A  User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015). For a longer intellectual history of the left critique of transparency, see Stefanos Geroulanos, Transparency in Postwar France: A  Critical History of the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017). 87. Norberto Bobbio, “Democracy and Invisible Power,” in The Future of Democracy: A Defense of the Rules of the Game, trans. Roger Griffin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 79–97. 88. Dean, Publicity’s Secret, 18.

2 Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy

Sublime Disclosures Boundless and eternal: these are the words Peter Galison uses to describe the realm of secrecy opened up by the United States government and its allies under the auspices of the War on Terror.1 They also indicate the native territory of the sublime, an aesthetic mode that has long been associated with the massive scale and unimaginable scope that epitomize the post-War growth of the national security state—the kind of scale and scope that state wielded to thwart the Soviet Union during the Cold War or to defend the homeland in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Longinus, whose ancient treatise, On the Sublime, was rediscovered in the late sixteenth century and prompted a vogue for the mode, compares sublime language to “a bolt of lightning” that “shatters everything . . . and reveals the full power of the speaker at a single stroke.”2 For Longinus, this destructive power is rhetorical, an effect of the speaker’s great soul rendered in language, but modern commentators readily connect the feeling to other natural and human objects. The sublime, to Edmund Burke, writing in 1757, is a passion motivated by self-preservation, a response to the terror (a newly appropriate term in the post-9/11 world) roused by the spectacle of overwhelming power. “I know of nothing sublime, which is not some modification of power,” he writes.3 The national security sublime associates this kind of spectacle not with open displays of force or natural might but with the public secret of covert government activity. It intimates powers the viewer or reader knows to exist but cannot readily perceive: myriad state secrets, sprawling clandestine operations, deeply concealed weapons programs, great repositories of dangerous information mobilized in the interest of national security. In their spectacular ability to control information, government agencies and operatives—the many classified entities that make up the secret state—become the sublime vision that the artist (and the viewer) tries to comprehend. Even early commentators recognized the political implications of sublimity, which they typically associated with the representational

Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy  31 strategies of state power rather than with those seeking to resist or uncover it. Immanuel Kant, writing in 1790, notes that governments often encourage visible displays of power as a means of making the citizen passive so that “he can be more easily dealt with.”4 Burke argues that power is sublime not only by virtue of its superior force, but also because it wraps itself in mystery: “It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passion.”5 He offers the telling example of “despotic governments,” which use secrecy to stoke the “the passion of fear” in their subjects, keeping the leader hidden “from the public eye” to increase mystery and strike a disabling terror in those who confront him.6 The sublime, in this view, gives form to the feeling of being beset by unseen or unknowable powers, whether natural or political. Hidden despots are sublime both because we know they wield great power and because they are veiled or invisible. Mystery and power alike engender awe and terror—all the more so when they are combined. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), conversely, Burke makes use of characteristically sublime imagery to describe the threat posed to traditional authority by the open revolt of the masses.7 But the sublime offers something in addition. Particularly in the Romantic tradition—in the writings of William Wordsworth or the landscape paintings of the Hudson River School—the mode brings out the peculiar relationship to knowledge that defines an encounter with the public secret.8 In Romantic art and poetry, the observer regularly encounters what we might describe as the open secrets of nature: present and perceptible, but invested with divine truths the artist or poet can never hope to grasp in toto. The observer is privileged with a disclosure, gaining a precious flash of insight into what Percy Bysshe Shelley, in “Mont Blanc” (1817), calls “The secret Strength of things.”9 Yet the disclosure only reveals a greater mystery that leaves the poet awed but not fully informed. Consider Caspar David Friedrich’s famous 1818 painting Wanderer above a Sea of Fog, one of the perennial visual touchstones of the Romantic sublime. The painting depicts a lone young man wearing a dark green coat and viewed from behind, standing at the top of a mountain and gazing over a valley obscured by fog. Craggy peaks jut out from the fog in the foreground and still others rise up in the distance. The wanderer gazes over the expanse of mist, his literal and figurative elevation over the landscape representing at once disclosure, for he has climbed above what obscures the view, and concealment, for what he sees covers the valley below. The fog, an ancient emblem of mystery, is the chief object of contemplation, simultaneously visible and cloaking. One would be hardpressed to come up with a better allegory for the open secret of hidden power in the age of the national security state. Like the secret warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it gives us a striking vision of

32  Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy

Figure 2.1 Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above a Sea of Fog (ca. 1818). Oil on canvas, 94.8 × 74.8 cm. Inv: 5161. On permanent loan from the Foundation for the Promotion of the Hamburg Art Collections. Photo Credit: bpk Bildagentur/Hamburger Kunsthalle/photo: Elke Walford/Art Resource, NY.

concealment. The wanderer’s elevation allows him to contemplate what he cannot see or know completely. For Kant, the sublime results from a mental effort to apprehend absolute greatness aesthetically rather than conceptually—through images or affects rather than by measurement or logical analysis. The imagination strives to capture something beyond its scope or threatening to its very

Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy  33 existence as a single, unified representation but fails, producing a cognitive break. Stretched beyond its capabilities, and reaching the very limits of representation, the imagination succumbs to a sense of blockage, fear, or confusion: “there is in the comprehension a greatest point beyond which it cannot go.”10 The true distinction of the sublime lies not in this failure of comprehension—the mere feeling of fear or mental dissonance— but in what it allows us to recognize. Although the mind initially recoils at the effort to grasp absolute greatness, the subject leaves the experience with a sense of elevation, an empowering conviction that human reason stands above mere nature in its ability to strive for what lies beyond its grasp. “The mind feels elevated in its own judging,” Kant writes.11 We all become Friedrich’s wanderer on some level. The sublime is not a property of large or extremely distant things but of the mind’s reflection upon its transcendent powers, its ability to derive clarity of purpose from the most threatening or overwhelming experiences. Through an encounter with immensity, we come to recognize that our spiritual and intellectual vocation is “sublime in comparison with” nature.12 It is this feeling of elevation that differentiates the sublime from mere terror or intellectual perplexity, and constitutes what Thomas Weiskel refers to as the “compensation principle” at the heart of the mode.13 The subject contemplates nature as fearful or impossibly immense, a looming might it cannot hope to defeat physically or fully grasp mentally, yet without being overwhelmed by it. In so doing, Kant suggests, we discover “the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature.”14 The sublime sense of elevation is affective and imaginative rather than hermeneutic, however. It provides a feeling of insight and deep interconnection without definitive facts or rational deductions. In Kant’s terms, it is the product of an aesthetic rather than a cognitive judgment, something we contemplate and judge but do not understand logically. As Terry Eagleton puts it, the “daunting totality” reason strives to grasp “is not ours to know . . . but it is ours to feel.”15 In “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798), Wordsworth describes sublime insight as “that blessed mood,/In which the burthen of the mystery,/In which the heavy and weary weight/Of all this unintelligible world/Is lighten’d.”16 The key word here is “mood”: the sublime lends the poet a sense of relief that seems to bring him close to the truths underlying “this unintelligible world,” but the mystery is by no means dissipated, as a definitive revelation might bring closure to a secret. The weight of mystery is only “lighten’d,” and so the world remains fundamentally unintelligible, reposing in its “secret strength” while the poet is left to wonder with inner reassurance at the unfathomable mystery, his ego satisfied even if his hermeneutic desire can never be. Friedrich Schiller explains the process this way: “reason thus encompasses in a unity that is thought, what the understanding cannot combine into a unity that is known.” The subject takes up the inscrutable, turns it into an object of awed or fearful

34  Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy contemplation, but does not thereby understand it, making “this inscrutability itself the standpoint of the evaluation.”17 The sublime fails to resolve the secret, but fears and admires it, finding mental elevation in its fearful or murky depths. The national security sublime arose in response to a new form of inscrutability—governmental rather than natural—and one specific to the post-War growth of the national security apparatus, with its existence as a public secret, but the writers, artists, filmmakers, and television showrunners working in the mode drew repeatedly and often self-consciously on the foundational Romantic encounter of the lone wanderer confronted with an open yet still inscrutable secret. The mode evokes Burke’s insight into the terrifying union of power and mystery, a union it approaches with the skepticism characteristic of the post-Romantic and postmodern tradition of the sublime, which tends, as Philip Shaw has noted, to stress a sense of resignation or bewilderment at such encounters rather than the traditional feeling of elevation and transcendence. The sublime here affirms “nothing beyond its own failure.”18 As we shall see in Chapters 3 and 4, the national security sublime always remains uncertain about its ability to rise above the absolute greatness of the covert sector, and true revelations are few. Both cognition and imagination find themselves thwarted, even if the desire for the secret remains strong. “Water, water, every where,” intones Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, looking out over a sublimely vast and empty seascape, “Nor any a drop to drink.”19 Secrets, secrets everywhere, echoes the national security subject, perennially seeking the revelation that will slake its thirst for truth.

The Rupture The sublime is often dismissed as apolitical or reactionary, an elitist, individualist, and masculinist response to the demands of the real world, but the political origins and resonances of the mode speak to the affective groundings of the modern idea of open government in ways that complicate conventional ideas about the cultural positioning of the sublime viewer. The discourse of the sublime had perhaps its greatest artistic and poetic efflorescence in an era of national security crisis in the United Kingdom, prompted by the rippling effects of the French Revolution, which sparked widespread fears of foreign sabotage and the purported machinations of secret societies. It was an age marked by rampant conspiracy theories, government surveillance, and myriad political secrets—the spiritual origin, we might suggest, for the contemporary national security state. This crisis was part of a larger transformation of the overarching epistemological relationship between citizen and state taking shape in the second half of the eighteenth century, a transformation that radically changed prevailing ideas about government secrecy. Understanding the political implications of the national security sublime from the Cold

Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy  35 War to the War on Terror requires us to place it in this deeper historical context—a history not of individual secrets or secret keepers, but of secrecy itself. In his essay on secrecy and secret societies, Georg Simmel points to a shift over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the way Western cultures understood the legitimate scope of political secrets. In the early modern period, the state was “clothed with mystical authority,” asserting an absolute right to keep secrets and, concomitantly, to pry into the secret lives of its subjects.20 The sovereign knew all, while the people were open books. In the wake of the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, the doctrine of arcana imperii, which endowed the sovereign with unquestioned authority over the secrets of the realm, gave way to a general policy of openness in public affairs and privacy in personal life. What followed was, as Alain Dewerpe describes it, a “rupture” in the history of political secrecy, a new configuration of the cryptic.21 Now, government was supposed to be the open book, and the people had a right to keep secrets, protected by the presumption of individual privacy against intrusions by the state. “Politics, administration, and jurisdiction thus have lost their secrecy and inaccessibility in the same measure in which the individual has gained the possibility of ever more complete withdrawal,” Simmel writes.22 Having once been the very emblem of royal authority and an acknowledged source of social stability, the secret becomes a by-word for corruption, to be rooted out through openness and publicity. This shift in expectations about covert governance took place against the backdrop of a larger change in Western ideas about secrecy. The public discourses of ancient, medieval, and early modern Europe tended to associate secrecy with the divine and the inscrutable, an association that had important consequences for how secrets were represented, controlled, and disseminated. Across these very different historical moments, the secret recurrently wears the guise of the sacred, and therefore belongs to an elite capable of receiving and sheltering it. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus states: “For there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was any thing kept secret, but that it should come abroad” (4:22). This sounds to contemporary ears like a defense of openness, and, as I noted in the last chapter, Paul’s similar promise in the First Epistle to the Corinthians became a conceptual touchstone for the theory of transparency, but the epigram in fact counsels a very different relationship to the secret. Jesus is speaking to the twelve apostles, who have asked him in private to explain a parable he had earlier shared with a great multitude by the sea. He tells them that they alone are privileged to understand “the mystery of the kingdom of God”; for the others, he speaks only in parables, so “[t]hat seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand” (4:11–12). As Frank Kermode has noted, Mark’s formula for revelation expressly excludes outsiders. The Greek word hina, meaning “so that” or “in order

36  Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy that” (“that seeing they may see, and not perceive”), implies that the parables are intended to preserve secrecy rather than to reveal the truth in another form, at least to those who lack “ears to hear.”23 Secrets “come abroad” exclusively for those authorized and prepared to receive them, at least until the Judgment Day. The “good news” belongs in its fullest scope only to an elite. Matthew’s version of this parable substitutes the word hoti (“because”) for hina, reconstructing the epigram to suggest that parables are simply a means of better teaching that “good news” to uncomprehending outsiders, not a deliberate tool for concealing it from them: “Therefore I  speak to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand” (13:13). But Mark’s Jesus is concerned with eschatological rather than moral or ethical truths, revelations that cannot be conveyed by mortal teachers: a secret subject to messianic time rather than a lesson to be applied in the here and now. The pious Christian is passive before this kind of secret, waits hopefully for its apocalypse rather than actively seeking it out. And when the secret is disclosed, it enters the world through the sublime and mysterious symbols of Revelation—fire, horsemen, trumpets, and beasts—mysteries one can only accept and obey, but never expect to know in full. When Jesus dies on the cross, the veil over the temple door tears, but it is not entirely removed. From the perspective of modernity, this attitude toward secrecy smacks of elitism and priestly deception, but thinkers in antiquity or in medieval and early modern Europe did not understand it this way. Rather than opposing secrecy to openness, these thinkers opposed it, as Gerald Bruns has argued, to the profane or the commonplace.24 Secrets were a fragment of the divine demanding protection rather than open revelation. They were reserved for initiates who knew how to use them responsibly and were committed to their preservation, only becoming problematic when they escaped this magic circle. Keeping a secret in the period, Daniel Jütte writes, “was a question of honor as well as a moral responsibility; if secrets were divulged and ended up in the wrong hands, the consequences could be disastrous.”25 To manage secrets prudently and shelter them from unwarranted dissemination was the legitimate task of initiates; those unprepared for the task should not seek knowledge at all.26 Far from being a brave act of truth-telling or distributive justice, publicity followed from misunderstanding, profanation, or poor secrecy management, and an entire practice of esoteric writing arose to protect secrets and their authorized keepers.27 Openness, in this culture, was anything but an unalloyed good. Consider the analogy for secrecy proffered by the Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides in his twelfth-century manual for Biblical interpretation, The Guide of the Perplexed. Maimonides compares revealed truth to a sublime flash of lightning that briefly illuminates the surroundings and then plunges the knower back into night. This lightning is fundamentally

Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy  37 different from the lumen naturale—the natural light of reason—that Descartes celebrates in the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). It comes from without, not from within, a divine gift rather than an inherent capacity one can train like a flashlight upon any object of inquiry. In stark contrast with modern metaphors for epistemological obscurity, the light and the secret are one and the same thing. This light does not provide the same kind of illumination for all who see it: like the mystery of the kingdom of God for Jesus, it favors an elite. Maimonides describes various levels of understanding, keyed to the worthiness of the seeker. Standing atop Mount Sinai, Moses received so many flashes of light that “night appears to him as day.” Others receive flashes intermittently: the truth floods the night for a moment, but “matter and habit” soon return them to a condition of obscurity, almost as if they never saw the light at all.28 The less worthy experience the light as a reflection in polished metal or stone, the illumination weaker and secondary but still emanating from a divine source; the vulgar never see it at all. Even the one who has seen the light cannot be said to possess the divine knowledge it reveals. He finds it difficult to translate what he has learned into human language, and “is unable to explain with complete clarity and coherence even the portion that he has apprehended,” Maimonides writes.29 Would-be teachers of the truth must resort to parables and riddles, which succeed, as for Mark’s Jesus, not because they more effectively convey the truth to outsiders, but because they reproduce in language the obscurity that attends all genuine revelations. There is no other way to teach great mysteries, no literal terms in which they can be spoken. Divine truth inevitably appears under cover, like the radiant face of Moses hidden behind a veil. A “way of saying what cannot be said” about the unknowable, as Bruns puts it, the secret is a necessary circumlocution, not the confident possession of a knower that need only be spoken clearly to be understood.30 Teachers who attempt to speak openly about the divine in an earnest effort to avoid mystery end up being “so obscure and brief as to make obscurity and brevity serve in place of parables and riddles.”31 Medieval and early modern political theorists took many of their formulas and key principles from theology, but they were far more practical in defining the uses of official secrecy, translating the divinity and exclusiveness of the secret into justifications for projecting and preserving power. Eva Horn usefully distinguishes two prevailing “logics” of political secrecy in the era, which she terms mysterium and arcanum.32 Mysterium associates the secret with the sacred, wreathing human authority in divine sanction necessarily hidden from the vulgar. This is the kind of hidden power Burke associates with the sublime, a dialectic of exhibition and withdrawal that puts mystery on display to overawe the royal subjects. In a classic article on the medieval “mysteries of state,” Ernst Kantorowicz points to a series of conceptual exchanges between throne

38  Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy and altar in the middle ages, in which the church came to associate the powers of the Pope with those of the sovereign, and the state linked the powers of the sovereign with those of the Pope. One result was a configuration Kantorowicz calls “royal ‘Pontificalism,’ ” a representational practice in which the sovereign adopts the rituals, vestments, and insignia of the church—and with them, all the mysterious powers and divine sanction claimed by the pontiff.33 Mysterium is a frankly theological politics, not a political theology, to borrow Carl Schmitt’s term, which ostentatiously links the king’s body with the corpus mysticum, the theological body of the church. Absolutist monarchs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries eagerly used the medieval mysteries of state to justify their legal powers as a “divine right,” and subsequent rulers have long sought the same unassailable authority, or at least its dim modern reflection.34 Arcanum, by contrast, is a wholly secular political technique, which asserts the ruler’s singular authority to know and control the secrets of the realm. The logic originates in the writings of the Roman political historian Tacitus, who coined the term arcana imperii in his account of a series of secretive assassinations undertaken by the emperor Tiberius to secure his succession. Early modern political theorists, under the influence of Machiavelli, popularized the concept in a raft of treatises outlining the best practices for managing the flow of information at court.35 Rather than evoking the “mysteries of state,” arcanum promotes the “reason of state,” a practical justification for concealment grounded on the needs and capabilities of the ruler and in the interest of public safety. It is the privilege and exclusive right of sovereigns to keep or share secrets as they see fit, according to the means-end rationality of prudence, and to maintain strategic advantage over internal rivals and external enemies. The secret is held back, encrypted, kept under lock and key to ensure political stability. “Secrecy has its own rules and limits,” Horn writes, “rules of caution, rational foresight, and strategic shrewdness that often preclude violence—but for reasons of efficiency, not ethics,” and well outside of the ecclesiastical justifications that ground the logic of mysterium.36 Schmitt compares the arcana imperii to business “trade secrets”: a matter of technique for insiders rather than a display intended for outsiders.37 Both mysterium and arcanum continue to shape contemporary theories of governance: they are evident, for example, in the pageantry that surrounds modern power, and in practices like classification and claims of executive privilege. Most of the justifications for national security secrecy fall under the umbrella of arcana imperii, even if they are put forward in the interest of preserving democracy. Beginning in the seventeenth century, however, the combined effects of secularization, the scientific revolution, new information technologies, and, as Simmel stresses, democratic political theories dramatically undermined the medieval and early modern order of secrecy. By the end of the eighteenth century, the two older logics Horn describes were becoming obsolete as legitimate

Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy  39 governing philosophies in the democratic West.38 Modernity coincides to a remarkable degree with the repudiation of early modern attitudes toward the secret. Science, politics, media, economics, and personal ethics all operate under the principle (one not always translated into practice) that information should ideally be public and secrets the rare exception rather than the rule. Inherently pathological, secrets are evidence of bad intentions, burdens to be shed, or shadows to be dissipated by the bright light of truth. The function of secrecy is always to obscure a natural state of openness, to muddy clear waters and block the truth from appearing as it seeks naturally to do. Removing secrecy from a system means returning to the true and the real, setting that system aright. Openness, honesty, publicity, and transparency stand as the unmarked other of the secret, defined by the absence of concealment or, metaphorically, by an unobstructed view. Take William Godwin’s unreserved praise of sincerity as an ethical and political value in Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), which reads like a point-by-point critique of the entire early modern culture of the arcane, a culture Godwin associates not with preservation and the sacred, but with falsehood and willful obfuscation. Much like Kant, who insisted that we should not lie even to protect our friend from an assassin, Godwin argues for the absolute and irreducible necessity of openness.39 “I am not empowered,” he writes, “to conceal any thing I know of myself, whether it tend to my honour or to my disgrace.” Each man should make the world “his confessional,” and the entire species “the keeper of his conscience.”40 Sincerity here underwrites a more general commitment to free and open social communication, a fundamental belief that concealment is incompatible with a just society. Secrets are a distinctive wrong, and their effects ramify throughout the social order: “We cannot determine to keep any thing secret without risking at the same time to commit a hundred artifices, quibbles, equivocations and falshoods.”41 The individual act of concealment goes on to corrupt multiple interactions, producing more secrets in its wake. Sincerity, by contrast, creates a virtuous circle, each gesture of openness eliciting openness from those whom it benefits. Expressed in full and without restraint, truth “prepares the equality and happiness of mankind.”42

Openness and Suspicion Voices like Godwin’s—they were legion—demonstrate how persuasively the modern opposition between secrecy and openness contested the older opposition between secrecy and vulgarity at the end of the eighteenth century. No longer sacred or privileged, the secret is nefarious, “the sociological expression of moral badness,” as Simmel puts it.43 Openness stands as the norm, and secrecy the rare or aberrant exception. Theory and practice did not always align, however, a fact that is of crucial

40  Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy importance to an accurate understanding of the modern political secret. The framers of the United States Constitution fashioned their arguments for open government in the strictest secrecy during the Constitutional Convention in 1787, even nailing the windows shut in the meeting place to prevent members of the press and public from eavesdropping on the proceedings. James Madison, the founding father most frequently quoted by contemporary privacy and transparency advocates to support their cause, explicitly credited these secret deliberations with making consensus on divisive issues possible.44 The push for openness did not eliminate government secrecy—it only changed the way secrecy was valued, understood, and practiced. Henceforth, the state is obliged “to hide the fact that it has secrets.”45 Simmel argues that the modern distribution of openness and secrecy conforms to a general rule characteristic of democracies, by which “what is public becomes ever more public, and what is private becomes ever more private.”46 But there is, he insists, no logical connection between democracy and openness—consider the fundamental importance of the secret ballot—and it is entirely possible that the governing apparatus could again operate in the dark. Nor is personal privacy immutable: the balance of secrecy in a society can take any number of forms. “One could, therefore,” Simmel speculates, entertain the paradoxical idea that under otherwise identical circumstances, human collective life requires a certain measure of secrecy which merely changes its topics: while leaving one of them, social life seizes upon another, and in all this alternation it preserves an unchanged quantity of secrecy.47 There is a physics of the secret, an indestructible quantum of concealment in social systems that just changes location or form rather than ever being destroyed. Though shifts in social and political mores can dramatically transform the distribution of secrets within a given society, we are never truly done with secrecy. The most fervent eighteenth-century critic of the early modern logics of political secrecy, Jeremy Bentham, acknowledged as much when he called publicity, one of the key mechanisms in his theory of open government, a “system of distrust.”48 Bentham argues for the value of transparency across the political realm, but as Jodi Dean makes clear, his theory (it remains our theory, or at least our aspiration) has had the ironic effect of promoting suspicion rather than enhancing trust: “Publicity holds out the promise of revelation, the lure of the secret,” Dean writes, “[i]ts pervasive mistrust drives the will to seek out and expose.”49 In the Essay on Political Tactics, a treatise written in 1791 for the revolutionary French government (though unpublished in English until 1816), Bentham calls for an end to nearly all forms of political secrets and the full publicizing

Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy  41 of government decision-making. Seeking what Andrew Franta calls “an ideal of perfect transparency in the operations and deliberations of political assemblies,” he describes publicity, a word he introduced into the English language, as a means for making politics more honest by making it less secretive, through the crucial oversight of a free press and the most engaged members of the public.50 Concealment is anathema to politics, not, as with the logics of mysterium and arcanum, its very rationale. “Honesty,” he asserts, should be the “animating principle” of every political assembly.51 Secrecy, by contrast, “is an instrument of conspiracy,” which “ought not, therefore, to be the system of a regular government.”52 A splinter of darkness in a realm that should be flooded with light, secrets can only be dishonest and corrupt. No longer understood as a right or a responsibility, they are reflexively associated with conspiracy and corruption, and anything hidden is thereby suspect. “Suspicion always attaches to mystery,” Bentham notes, “It thinks it sees a crime where it beholds an affectation of secrecy; and it is rarely deceived.”53 Although publicity seeks to short-circuit the corrosive speculation that attends secretive political decision-making, it demands a perpetually suspicious public. Rather than eliminating covert power, theories of open government like Bentham’s produce the distinctly modern logic of political secrecy that Horn terms secretum. Unlike mysterium and arcanum, which define secrecy as a legitimate foundation or technique of power, secretum regards the secret as a social relation of inclusion and exclusion.54 The secret is information withheld from the public, illegitimately concealed from those with a right to know. Secrecy, as Michel de Certeau succinctly puts it, is not only the state of a thing that escapes from or reveals itself to knowledge. It designates a play between actors. It circumscribes the terrain of strategic relations between the one trying to discover the secret and the one keeping it, or between the one who is supposed to know it and the one who is assumed not to know it.55 Because the early modern paradigm defined the social, political, and ritual practices of secrecy in terms of specific secrets and their legitimate keepers, the “strategic relation” was always established in advance. Secretum emphasizes fluid social relationships, in which the play of concealing and revealing defines the secret keeper’s relationship with others instead of following from it. No longer an essential mystery valuable in and of itself, the secret comprises a game of hide and seek played with any available information and among participants striving for status or control. Secretum invariably takes the position of the one assumed not to know, looking suspiciously over the boundary that separates the aggrieved outsider from the fully informed insiders. It is an affective regime, which functions most efficiently in a political vacuum, and produces what Jacques

42  Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy Derrida calls “secrecy effects”: the secret as empty form rather than a concealed content, a sublimely inaccessible truth the knower is structurally incapable of revealing.56 Elias Canetti writes that, “Secrecy lies at the very core of power”; secretum regards both the power of secrecy and the secrecy of power as inevitably conspiratorial and unquestionably corrupt.57 Only full disclosure—that impossible dream of the modern political imaginary—can cut through the Gordian knot that binds the two together. This is the stated aim of both establishment promoters of transparency and more radical figures like Julian Assange, who set out his working principles in a 2006 essay entitled “Conspiracy as Governance.”58 The logic of secretum shapes the attitudes of those inside and outside the halls of power. Open government made politics less arcane to the people, but its concomitant presumption of privacy in personal life also made the people intolerably arcane to the government: arcana imperii gives way to arcana populi. Since the 1790s, a decade that put secretum at the very center of political discourse in the Anglo-American world, these two poles of suspicion have circled one another like a binary star system. The public is convinced that the government is keeping secrets, the government is convinced that the public is keeping them, and both sides demand that the concealed information be shared—a demand ritually intoned whether the secret exists or not. This system has been jostled at times over the past two centuries by technological innovations, political disruption, and populist agitation, but the two stars remain tethered in their ceaseless orbit, powered by suspicion and the modern faith in transparency. Consider the political history of the 1790s. Bentham gave voice to his praise of publicity at a moment that starkly belied his ideal—a moment driven by precisely the ramifying suspicions that Dean sees as the logical implication of the new distribution of secrecy and openness established by the system of publicity.59 The early years of the French Revolution were marked in Britain by enthusiasm among intellectuals and workingclass activists but by great wariness within the government. Decades of attacks on traditional claims about authority, as well as social changes like the rise of the bourgeois public sphere, had put the monarchies of Europe on guard, wreathing them in what John Barrell has described as a “mist of suspicion” that led them to impose harsh limits on free speech, and to jail or intimidate activists who gave voice to enlightenment ideals.60 The Revolution only thickened that mist in England, where the popularity of groups like the London Corresponding Society, founded in 1792 to promote the spirit of the Revolution, raised alarm at court. What followed was the originary modern national security crisis: an imposition of emergency measures expanding government secrecy and curtailing civil liberties in the face of threats from without and within. In May of 1792, George III issued a royal proclamation, at the behest

Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy  43 of Prime Minister William Pitt, condemning all seditious publications, a proclamation under which Thomas Paine would be tried and sentenced in absentia for publishing The Age of Reason (1794). This was only the beginning of what came to be called “Pitt’s Terror,” which was unleashed in its full force after Britain declared war on France in 1793. Following the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette that year, the United Kingdom became a virtual police state, wracked by fears of subversion, invasion, and insurrection. Britain long presented itself to the world as the very beacon of liberty, but under Pitt’s Terror “[t]he self-declared constitutional protector of the rights of the individual began to assume the characteristics of the demonised other, the secret state, and saw the ideal of the ‘free-born Englishman’ it had cultivated in the past used to challenge its authority” by both citizens and by critical voices in other nations.61 Substantial evidence to support such fears was (and for most modern historians remains) entirely out of proportion to the extreme response, but Pitt nevertheless continued to institute repressive laws and policies over the course of the decade that, like the slightly later Alien and Sedition Acts in the United States, sought to crush dissent before it could gain a foothold in the streets and the countryside. Parliament suspended habeas corpus in 1794, allowing the government to hold political opponents without charge, and passed two draconian laws in 1795—the socalled “Gagging Acts”—that outlawed speaking against the king and limited public meetings to no more than fifty participants. By the end of the decade, the government had arrested and tried scores of activists— including close friends of Wordsworth and Godwin—and outlawed dissident groups like the London Corresponding Society. Other new laws expanded government surveillance, allowing the authorities to open the mail of suspected traitors, to track the activities of foreign visitors, and to require the licensing of all printing presses, subjecting newspapers to close political oversight. Pitt deployed an army of spies, informants, and loyalist agitators to infiltrate opposition groups and threaten their leaders and supporters. Two Parliamentary Committees of Secrecy released salacious but most likely exaggerated reports on the activities of radical groups in 1794 and 1799, which sought to justify the government’s past actions and led to further attacks on political opponents during the early years of the nineteenth century. Under Pitt’s Terror, contemporary observers came to see private life as little more than an extension of the political conflicts of the era, bringing the war home in a very literal sense.62 A recurring historical irony sees the publication of utopian defenses of open government mere years before governments find new reasons and new ways to keep their own secrets and to pry into those they suspect the populace of harboring. There is something tragic about transparency. Bentham, as we have seen, found inspiration in the French Revolution and the new democratic authority it instituted across the English

44  Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy Channel, but those same events brought about a raft of repressive measures by the British government that set the modern legal template for the national security state. The irony marks twentieth-century defenses of openness as well, confirming Simmel’s observation about the structural necessity of secrecy in political life. Karl Popper published his landmark defense of liberal democracies, The Open Society and its Enemies, in 1945, just as the Cold War national security state was about to find its legal and institutional footing. David Brin’s The Transparent Society (1998), which argues for the value of “general transparency” and an ethos of radical openness, came out a few years before the 9/11 attacks led the NSA to conduct its own “experiment” in transparency (an experiment from which the agency naturally exempted its own secrets).63 Brin imagined a world where mutual surveillance enabled by cheap new technologies would help to hold both government and the people accountable, breaking the two-century-old link between openness and suspicion. History had other ideas.

Gothic Secrets The cultural and political history of the secret I  have sketched in the last two sections of this chapter provides a suggestive context for understanding the resonant encounter with mystery that drives the Romantic sublime. Alongside its other cultural functions in the period, the sublime helps to make representational sense of the gap between democratic ideals and actually existing conditions, between the tantalizing possibility of full transparency held out by the faith in open government and the reality of perpetual suspicion made manifest in repressive actions like Pitt’s Terror. It projects a realm of freedom above and beyond the limitations of everyday political life, secularizing the older sense of divine mystery that the theory of open government was relegating to the dustbin of history, and finding it again, as Robert Doran has argued, in the awesome face of nature or in the countless faces passing on city streets.64 Wordsworth contemplates the liberty afforded by sublime emotion near Tintern Abbey because such liberty remains difficult to find in the world of politics. This is another “compensation principle” inherent to the mode: it turns collective disappointment into individual gain; natural wonders provide the feeling of freedom that proves elusive in the public square. The sublime is an aesthetic and affective solution to a crisis of political transparency, an occluded eschatology of publicity, a dream of full disclosure conjured in an age of secrecy and national security crisis. The national security sublime affords a similar solution to the spectacle of modern covert government, though typically in a less optimistic key, and often admixed, as we shall see in what follows, with elements of other eighteenth-century aesthetic forms. It, too, projects an occluded desire for liberty onto an inaccessible realm of secrecy, a desire that

Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy  45 registers individually rather than collectively, as image and affect, not as an explicit demand for change. Spielberg’s warehouse reveals a deeply problematic violation of the principle of open government, but it strikes the viewer first and foremost as an elevating spectacle, a fleeting glimpse into a hidden world no less exotic than the jungles Indiana Jones plunders for treasure. We shall take up the political implications of this affective substitution in more detail at the end of Chapter  5, but it would be wrong simply to understand it as a form of obfuscation. Aesthetic response tells us something about the current order that we cannot quite grasp in everyday political discourses. Each of the three logics of political secrecy Horn describes relied (and still relies) upon a distinct aesthetic that promoted, defended, or justified its authority. Mysterium drew upon the liturgical imagery of the medieval Church and adopted its ancient association of the secret and the sacred. It demonstrated its hidden authority with an aesthetic of grand appearances: the vast spaces of the cathedral; the sublime grandeur of the procession; the deep resonance of ancient rituals. Arcanum, consistent with its Machiavellian inspiration, understood politics as a form of theater, a performance of speech and silence, mask and dissimulation, public gestures expressing hidden machinations. Its symbol was the Hellenistic god Harpocrates, who appears with a finger held theatrically over his lips—a paradoxical representation for everything that must be withheld. By contrast with these aesthetics of display, secretum purports to be fundamentally anti-aesthetic. A negation of the deceptive appearances that characterize secretive governance under the two other logics, it aims only at plain speaking. But its earnest quest for honesty and truth does have a visual adjunct: glass and light, open doors and windows, the transparent and the illuminating, the unveiled. Consider the emblematic name of one of the leading contemporary organizations fighting for openness in business and government: The Sunlight Foundation. But each logic also gave birth to popular forms like the Romantic sublime, which reflected upon and often critiqued the official discourses and their captive aesthetics. The most important genre for representing political secrets in the early modern era, for example, was court tragedy, a form that would be inconceivable without the doctrine of arcana imperii.65 In court tragedy, theater meditates on the theatricality at the heart of absolutism, telling of corrosive secrets circulating in the halls of power, secrets that turn the sovereign’s decisive right to keep and reveal hidden information into a destructive rather than a stabilizing force. Walter Benjamin identifies the crucial importance of court intriguers to these tragedies, figures like Iago or Polonius, who keep and reveal secrets to serve their own ends, sometimes buffoonishly and sometimes malignantly, but always in ways that undermine the social order.66 Usurping royal authority by his covert machinations, and bringing tragic consequences to himself and to the court when the secret gets out, the intriguer shows

46  Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy power to be a function of prudent secret keeping. Consider the example of Hamlet, the greatest early modern play about the effects of secrecy, which might be roughly summarized as the tale of a king’s failure to keep his Machiavellian crime under wraps. The rise of democratic openness made court tragedy effectively obsolete, and in its wake a range of political (or highly politicized) genres emerged over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to characterize the increasingly destabilized epistemological relationship between citizen and state. All of them either implicitly or explicitly touted the value of openness and revelation. Libertine fictions joined shockingly frank criticisms of clerical and monarchial abuses of authority with equally frank sexual imagery, equating political freedom with freedom of expression. Asserting a continuity between arcane sexual knowledge and the arcana imperii, libertinism, as Robert Darnton has argued, prepared the way for the overthrow of the ancien régime in the decades prior to the French Revolution.67 The revival of satire in the eighteenth century adopted the voice of skeptical worldliness from Roman figures like Juvenal and Horace to call out the hypocrisy of those in power. Satire presents itself as a form of truth-telling, a practice of radical transparency, which aims to bring private vices into full public view for the benefit of society.68 The sentimental novels of the eighteenth century promoted this kind of transparency on the personal level, valorizing, in ways that influenced Godwin, the open expression of emotion as a counter to older courtly practices of dissimulation.69 Both libertinism and satire survive as modes of political critique, on regular display in tabloid sex scandals and political jokes on late-night talk shows; through the vast influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, sentimental openness became a virtue in the public as well as the private sphere. By far the two most significant and innovative aesthetic forms for the representation of government secrecy under the logic of secretum, though, were the Romantic sublime and another mode that also saw its most influential flowering in 1790s Britain: the Gothic novel.70 Like the Romantic sublime, the Gothic novel tries to make affective sense of the gap between ideal and reality, though it stresses explanation over idealization. Its chief contribution to the aesthetics of government secrecy is the conspiracy narrative. Along with its German counterpart, the Bundesroman or “lodge novel,” focused on the machinations of secret societies, it comprises the original source for the modern conspiratorial imaginary.71 Gothic, in Michel Foucault’s words, represents the “negative of transparency.”72 It is the enthusiastic house style of the logic of secretum. In court tragedy, conspiracies pose a threat to legitimate (if mismanaged) power; they represent a rival regime that challenges, for good or ill, the prince’s exclusive right to control the secrets of the realm. In the Gothic novel, all power is potentially conspiratorial and inevitably corrupt.73 The great Gothic works of the late eighteenth century, deeply

Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy  47 influenced by, but also decisively transforming, the political dynamic of Hamlet, tell of innocents subject to dirty dealings stage-managed by those who should be the trustworthy paragons of the social order: parents, aristocrats, members of the church hierarchy. They constitute an allegory of political power turned against those it should properly serve, an allegory made even more explicit in the political genres that descend from the form and that dominated twentieth-century representations of government secrecy. Spy stories and conspiracy thrillers forego the moaning ghosts and rattling chains of eighteenth-century Gothic, but retain its familiar plot structure and dim view of established power. Even when the heroes and heroines in these works are relative insiders—the disinherited damsel in a Gothic novel, a professional archaeologist like Indiana Jones, or a betrayed former operative from an intelligence agency—they experience secrecy as outsiders, implicitly mirroring the perspective of the people rather than the powerful. If early modern tragedy begins with a breach of secrecy, Gothic begins with its terrifying success. Court tragedy implicitly argues for the necessity of political secrets, which become dangerous only when they fall into the wrong hands. They are a source of stability, central to a just political order. Consistent with medieval and early modern thinking, these tragedies oppose secrecy not to openness, as we have become accustomed to doing in the wake of Bentham, but to vulgarization: a movement of the secret from its proper place in the halls of power and near the person of the sovereign to a wider, lower, and generally unauthorized sphere.74 The public in Hamlet, represented by the crowd outside the castle gates clamoring for the ascension of Laertes, is not privy to the secrets circulating in the court; nor should it be, according to the logic of arcanum. Secrets belong to those legitimately endowed with the power to control them, and openness marks a catastrophic failure of order rather than its triumphant success. Gothic, by contrast, arises from the modern idealization of openness and transparency. It gives voice on multiple levels to a conviction that secrets are essentially corrupt, fundamentally incompatible with justice and truth. Comprising a powerful, if oblique, argument in favor of Bentham’s political thought, Gothic lends narrative and imagistic shape to what Edward Shils calls “the conspiratorial conception of society,” underwriting the headlong drive toward publicity and suspicion in the modern age.75 The innocent victims of Gothic conspiracies prevail when they bring the clandestine doings of their elders or social betters to light. All the mysterious noises and ghostly manifestations that made these works so wildly popular in the period are evidence not (or not only) of the divine or the demonic, but of toxic secrets that need to be revealed, expelled from the social body. This is the recurring premise of Ann Radcliffe’s immensely influential novels of the 1790s, which are all governed by a signature technique: the supernatural revealed. Radcliffe was particularly taken by Schiller’s unfinished but widely read lodge novel The Ghost-Seer (1789), which

48  Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy shows a sequence of bizarre supernatural events to be the doings of a secret society akin to the Illuminati, and she incorporates much the same link Schiller forges between the ghostly and the clandestine in her own works.76 Radcliffe’s books, often set in past centuries defined by absolutism and oppressive ecclesiastical power, always end with mystery explained as conspiracy. Their technique is part of the broader Enlightenment epistemology that many critics have found at play in Gothic novels.77 No terrifying sound, no ghostly apparition can remain unexplained, and no dirty dealing can remain hidden from the public eye. The Gothic, as fashioned by Radcliffe and filtered through the increasing influence of Bentham’s political theory, gained such unquestioned cultural authority over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that it is now difficult to imagine secrets as anything other than a tool of conspiracy. Radcliffe developed the template for this technique in her first Gothic novel, A Sicilian Romance, published in 1790. The story concerns a wealthy Italian marquis with a mysterious past who lives with his two daughters, Julia and Emilia, in a castle the longtime servants are convinced is haunted. A ghostly figure carrying a lantern appears occasionally in the abandoned southern wing of the building, striking fear into the hearts of the castle’s residents. Radcliffe’s narrator notes that “the minds of the vulgar” (she means the servants) receive “any species of the wonderful” with avidity, but the noble daughters of the marquis are infected with the same terror.78 Julia finds herself “[a]stonished and terrified” at a sighting one night, and almost collapses in fear.79 The loyal servant Vincent tries to confess something to her about “the secret which is so mysteriously connected” to the southern wing of the castle, but dies before he can reveal it.80 Even the intrepid Ferdinand, Julia and Emilia’s long-absent brother, who was inspired “with an irresistible desire to penetrate the secrets” of the castle, cannot find an explanation for the ghostly apparition.81 The marquis purports to reveal the truth to Ferdinand, but he lies, telling him of a murdered nobleman, Della Campo, who haunts the precincts.82 Ferdinand, too, begins to hear mysterious sounds that set his mind racing: “he could not doubt that the spirit of the dead had for once been permitted to revisit the earth, and to call down vengeance on the descendants of the murderer.”83 The truth is not revealed, as is typical, until the end of the novel. After Julia is forced to flee the castle to escape a marriage her father has arranged for her, the action shifts to the Sicilian countryside and the story of Julia’s flight. It is only when she has returned to confront her father that we learn the truth: the apparition is not a ghost at all but, in an anticipation of the famous plot twist in Jane Eyre, the marquis’ first wife, whom he imprisoned in the southern wing in order to marry another woman. The ghost does not bear a secret, but conceals one. When Julia finally finds her imprisoned mother and listens to her tale, “the cloud of mystery which had so long involved the southern buildings broke at once

Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy  49 away: and each particular circumstance that had excited her former terror, arose to her view entirely unveiled.”84 The cloud and the veil, perennial figures of mystery long associated with the secrets of the divine, are here instantly dispelled with the revelation of a conspiracy carried out by the nefarious marquis. Compare this Gothic reversal, the very epitome of the logic of secretum, to the unraveling of Claudius’ hidden crime in Hamlet, a play that deeply influenced Gothic writers, but which embodies very different ideas about secrecy. Hamlet, like every hero or heroine in a Radcliffe novel, seeks to reveal the hidden crimes of an outwardly pious figure of authority. He repeatedly tries to prod a telltale sign of guilt from Claudius, playing both madman and theater director to coax his uncle into a confession that he murdered his brother and predecessor. Any such confession would, however, be for Hamlet alone, a confirmation of the accusation leveled by the ghost of his father, and not a revelation naturally and necessarily conveyed to the public. The ghost in Shakespeare’s play tells Hamlet—and only Hamlet—the truth about his uncle, providing evidence from beyond the grave that the king is in fact a murderer; the ghost will only speak to the legitimate authority, while the soldiers, who also see the apparition and note its mouth moving, pointedly cannot hear its voice. Old Hamlet bears a secret that belongs to one living person. It is quite literally a secret of state, privileged information that cannot be shared with the vulgar, and that no one other than the legitimate authority needs to know. Hamlet has no intention of using the royal subjects to hold Claudius to account for his actions, nor would the crowd be a source of justice, the ultimate arbiter of the guilty secrets that haunt the halls of Elsinore. The few times Hamlet does accuse the king of crimes in front of assembled auditors—notably, during the performance of “The Mousetrap”—the court dismisses his statements as signs of madness. Publicity simply does not register as a legitimate form of truth-telling. The earliest Gothic novels, like Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), a work that wears its debts to Hamlet on its sleeve, for the most part simply add new supernatural elements to the type of plot familiar from court tragedy. Walpole’s novel begins with an inexplicable event—a massive helmet falls from the sky, killing the son and heir of the protagonist Manfred—but as in Shakespeare’s play, we are privy to all the conspiratorial plans Manfred conjures up to secure his legacy. The novel ends with Manfred chastened and repentant for his scheming, but he is not subject to the judgment of publicity like the marquis in A Sicilian Romance. It is only with novels of the 1790s that conspiracy and publicity become definitively tethered. The scenes of revelation in these later Gothic novels serve a very different function from what we find in Shakespeare or Walpole, one that confirms the monumental change in the conception of government secrecy that took place over the course of the eighteenth century, and fully crystallized in Britain in its final decade.

50  Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy Consider the dramatic public revelation of the crimes committed by the prioress of the convent of St. Clare in Matthew Lewis’ 1794 novel The Monk. Lewis’ hero, Don Lorenzo, knowing that “among those who chaunted the praises of their God so sweetly there were some who cloaked with devotion the foulest sins,” and that “a sanctified exterior does not always hide a virtuous heart,” takes the opportunity of a midnight procession of the nuns through the streets of Madrid to bring the prioress’ secreted torment of his pregnant sister Agnes to light. With the aid of a dissident nun, Mother St. Ursula, Lorenzo resolves “to set before the people, in glaring colours, how enormous were the abuses but too frequently practised in monasteries, and how unjustly public esteem was bestowed indiscriminately upon all who wore a religious habit.”85 The convent is an organ of church, not state, but Lewis makes the analogy between royal and ecclesiastical power clear in his depiction of the procession. As the parade in honor of St. Clare weaves through the streets of Madrid, Lorenzo witnesses the most anticipated element of the display: “a machine fashioned like a throne” that rolled on “concealed wheels” and was bedecked with innumerable jewels, carrying the most beautiful virgin in the city as a representative of the saint. The display is patently absurd, as St. Clare was revered for her strict vows of poverty and her seclusion from the world, but it clearly demonstrates Lewis’ attitude toward official secrets. The throne, emblem of monarchy and an aesthetic adjunct of the logic of mysterium, is not the glorious exhibition of an unfathomable divine truth, but the shiny exterior that conceals purely secular crimes committed by the prioress and her inner circle. The prioress follows right behind the throne in the procession: “no feature betrayed her secret pride at displaying the pomp and opulence of her convent.”86 As in any number of modern books and movies about government conspiracies, one finds here the suspicion that those in positions of power or responsibility are not as virtuous as they seem, and that the trappings of authority are a mere cloak for nefarious intentions. But even more centrally, Lorenzo gives voice to the signal sentiment of modern thinking about government secrets: that the only way to combat hidden crimes is a full public unmasking. Lorenzo and his compatriots halt the procession and, in the presence of all the residents of the town, accuse the prioress of the murder of Agnes. “Ah, great God,” she cries, “I am betrayed.” At this, Mother St. Ursula, privy to all the secret transgressions, rebukes her: “not betrayed, but discovered.”87 The difference is crucial, for it moves the act of revelation from the confines of palace intrigue—the narrative locus of a play like Hamlet—to the court of public opinion. Revelation is not one more secret move in a game of power, a tool used to make or break alliances, but a final unveiling of the truth. And the public does have its say. With the prioress and her allies subdued, Mother St. Ursula climbs onto “the vacant throne,”

Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy  51 now repurposed as a soapbox, and declares the crimes she witnessed to the gathered crowd.88 “A secret, an horrible secret,” she states, “weighs heavy upon my soul: no rest can be mine till I  have revealed it to the world.” “I  am now at liberty,” she continues,” to relate a tale, whose circumstances will freeze every honest soul with horror. Mine is the task to rend the veil from hypocrisy, and shew misguided parents to what dangers the woman is exposed, who falls under the sway of a monastic tyrant.”89 Mother St. Ursula’s revelation constitutes a small Gothic novel within the larger text, a story of secret horrors that will terrify its audience—and reveal a hidden truth about power, a truth the nun tellingly associates not only with the crimes of the church, but with the freighted political concept of tyranny. The public’s response to this story is significant. Begged by Lorenzo and his allies to leave the prioress to the judgment of the Inquisition, the crowd instead takes matters into its own hands, and, in a scene that Ronald Paulson has linked to contemporaneous reports of street violence in the French Revolution, tears the disgraced nun limb from limb and burns down the convent.90 The revelation does not simply indict the prioress but the entire institution of which she was a part. The deceived public sees itself as a victim of the crime against Agnes, and revenges itself on the body of the prioress. Even after the prioress has been killed by a blow to the head, the crowd continues to trample on her lifeless body until it is “no more than a mass of flesh, unsightly, shapeless, and disgusting”— no longer divided, we might suggest, between a concealed inside and a deceptive outside.91 The same thing happens to the convent, of which only a single wall remains after the crowd is done. This scene of public revelation underscores the monumental change in the conception of government secrecy that Gothic novels both document and promote. What Gothic lends this conception is a characteristic narrative and affective register: the revelation of mystery as conspiracy, the unmasking of supernatural terror as a secular technique of power that crumbles when disclosed to the public. It undermines both the supernatural order of mysterium and the political trade secrets of arcanum. The public, however vaguely evoked, inevitably serves as the ultimate arbiter, the proper subject of the secrets of the realm. By contrast with Hamlet, where the ghost alone speaks the truth, in The Monk, the supernatural quite literally serves to conceal the secrets of the powerful. The prioress restrains the curiosity of the nuns outside her inner circle by circulating a story about a haunted statue of St. Clare in the catacombs of the convent. Lorenzo pities the people of Madrid for their weak-minded belief in “the artifices of the monks,” who peddle “miracles, wonders, and suppositious reliques” to stoke the superstitions of believers.92 But even he approaches the statue with some trepidation when he encounters it, surrounded by a group of frightened nuns, while searching the bowels of the

52  Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy convent for his sister during the riot. The nuns tell him that the prioress warned of “fatal consequences” for any who dared to touch the miraculous statue, and recount the story of a robber whose attempt to steal a priceless ruby on its hand and was thwarted when the statue grabbed the robber’s own hand and would not let go.93 The statue’s supernatural power is further confirmed for the nuns by the mysterious sounds that regularly emanate from within it. As Lorenzo soon finds, the statue conceals a dungeon where the prioress punishes her enemies, including Agnes. The mysterious sounds are the echoing groans of the prisoners below—the supernatural cover story for official secrecy and political repression, and more proof of Lorenzo’s insistence that monkish “artifice” only serves to dupe the innocent public. Is it any surprise that this kind of narrative would appeal to a readership roused by the logic of secretum to expect guilty secrets in the halls of power? As we shall see in the next two chapters, Gothic conspiracy and the Romantic sublime, twin-born out of the repression and paranoia of the 1790s, and modified by their nineteenth-century reception, provide the basic building blocks for the national security sublime in modern American culture. Together, they help chart the evolution of covert government in the United States from the earliest days of the Cold War to the waning of the War on Terror.

Notes   1. Peter Galison, “Secrecy in Three Acts,” Social Research 77, no. 3 (2010): 970.   2. Longinus, “On the Sublime,” trans. W. H. Fyfe, rev. by Donald Russell, in Aristotle “Poetics,” Longinus “On the Sublime,” Demetrius, “On Style” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 163–65.  3. Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 9 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–2015), 1:236.   4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 156.  5. Burke, Writings and Speeches, 233.  6. Ibid., 231.  7. See Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 57–73; and Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 115–37.   8. The concept of a specifically Romantic sublime has come under criticism by scholars of the period, who argue that it obfuscates differences among various Romantic writers and overemphasizes the importance of Kant, whose works were not universally known, over earlier eighteenth-century models. I use the term in this study because it offers a useful way to characterize a common attitude in the period toward mysteries inspired by or associated with the natural world; the term also helps to characterize the reception of Romantic imagery in the national security sublime. For a cogent argument against the existence of a single Romantic sublime, see Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Romantic Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–12.

Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy  53   9. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” in The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 3 vols., ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000–), 3:89. 10. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 135. 11. Ibid., 139. 12. Ibid., 148. 13. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 44. 14. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 145. 15. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 92. 16. William Wordsworth, “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Itahca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 117. 17. Friedrich Schiller, “Concerning the Sublime,” trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, in Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 1993), 80–81. 18. Philip Shaw, The Sublime, 2nd ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 167–68. See also Steven Vine, Reinventing the Sublime: Post-Romantic Literature and Theory (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2013). 19. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969–2002), 16,1:381. 20. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: The Free Press, 1950), 336. 21. Alain Dewerpe, Espion: Une anthropologie historique du secret d’État contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 11. 22. Simmel, The Sociology, 336. 23. See Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 29–32. 24. Gerald L. Bruns, “Secrecy and Understanding,” in Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 22. On the differences between modern and early modern secrecy, see also Koen Vermeir, “Openness Versus Secrecy? Historical and Historiographical Remarks,” British Journal for the History of Science 45, no. 2 (2012): 165–88. 25. Daniel Jütte, The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets, 1400–1800, trans. Jeremiah Riemer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 21. Much of the most important scholarship on early modern secrecy focuses on the history of science and craft knowledge. See William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); and Mario Biagioli, Galileo’s Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 26. On this epistemological dynamic, see Carlo Ginzburg, “The High and the Low: The Theme of Forbidden Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 54–67. 27. On these practices in early philosophical discourses, see Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

54  Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy 28. Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 7. 29. Ibid., 8. 30. Bruns, “Secrecy and Understanding,” 21. 31. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 8. 32. Eva Horn, “Logics of Political Secrecy,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011): 108. 33. Ernst Kantorowicz, “Mysteries of State: An Absolutist Concept and Its Late Medieval Origins,” Harvard Theological Review 48, no. 1 (1955): 72. 34. See, for example, Hugh Urban, The Secrets of the Kingdom: Religion and Concealment in the Bush Administration (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). 35. For a useful discussion of these treatises, see Jon R. Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 106–58. 36. Horn, “Logics of Political Secrecy,” 113. 37. Carl Schmitt, Dictatorship, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (London: Polity, 2014), 10. 38. For the early history of this change, see Jürgen Habermas, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989); and Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988). 39. See Immanuel Kant, “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy,” in Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 605–15. 40. William Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols., ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering, 1993), 3:135–36. 41. Ibid., 140. 42. Ibid. 43. Simmel, The Sociology, 331. 44. See Daniel L. Hoffman, Governmental Secrecy and the Founding Fathers (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 20–24. 45. Metahaven, Black Transparency: The Right to Know in the Age of Mass Surveillance (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015), xi. 46. Simmel, The Sociology, 337. 47. Ibid., 335–36. 48. Jeremy Bentham, Political Tactics, ed. Michael James, Cyprian Blamires, and Catherine Pease-Watkin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 37. Kant’s political writings, notably Perpetual Peace (1795), are no less central to this critique of government secrecy, though they are of a more theoretical cast. For a discussion, see Geoffrey Bennington, “Kant’s Open Secret,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011): 26–40. 49. Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 22. 50. Andrew Franta, Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1. On the early history of debates about government secrecy, see also Sandrine Baume and Yannis Papadopoulos, “Transparency: From Bentham’s Inventory of Virtuous Effects to Contemporary Evidence-Based Skepticism,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 21, no. 2 (2018): 169–92; and Christopher Hood, “Transparency in Historical Perspective,” in Transparency: The Key to Better Governance?, ed. Christopher Hood and David Heald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3–23.

Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy  55 51. Bentham, Political Tactics, 19. 52. Ibid., 39. 53. Ibid., 30. 54. Horn, “Logics of Political Secrecy,” 109. Horn’s conceptualization of secretum resonates with Eve Sedgwick’s influential analysis of critical suspicion and paranoid affect in the humanities. See “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think the Introduction Is About You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–37. 55. Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume One, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 97. 56. For Derrida, literature best exemplifies the secrecy effect: “literature is the place of all these secrets without secrecy, all these crypts without depth, with no other basis than the abyss of the call or address, without any law other than the singularity of the event called the work.” Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 157. 57. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Noonday Press, 1984), 290. Julian Assange, “Conspiracy as Governance,” web.archive.org/ 58. web/20070129125831/http:/iq.org/conspiracies.pdf, accessed 8 March 2017. 59. For a more detailed account of the political history of the 1790s than I can provide here, see Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). 60. John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 2. 61. E. J. Cleary, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 167. 62. Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism, 4. 63. See David Brin, The Transparent Society (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998). 64. See Robert Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 65. For the conventions surrounding secrecy in the visual art of the period, see Timothy McCall, Sean Roberts, and Giancarlo Fiorenza, eds., The Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2013). 66. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), 126. 67. Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1996). For the political implications of libertinism, see also Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York: Zone Books, 1993); and Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 68. See Melinda Alliker Rabb, Satire and Secrecy in English Literature from 1650–1750 (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007). In the British context, we should also add to the list of political forms the minor genres of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin fiction that flourished around the turn of the nineteenth century, and explicitly reflected public debates about the French Revolution. See Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); and M. O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British

56  Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 69. For sentiment, see Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 70. Gothic novels frequently include descriptions of sublime experiences, whether natural or supernatural, but to more carefully delineate their respective conventions, I  treat the Gothic and the Romantic sublime as distinct aesthetic modes. The conspiracy narrative is what Gothic gives to the modern aesthetic of government secrecy, apart from any other aesthetic modes it may deploy. On the relationship between Gothic and sublime, see David B. Morris, “Gothic Sublimity,” New Literary History 16, no. 2 (1985): 299–319; Vijay Mishra, The Gothic Sublime (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994); and Andrew Smith, Gothic Radicalism: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 11–38. 71. On the Bundesroman, see Theodore Ziolkowski, The Lure of the Arcane: The Literature of Cult and Conspiracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 65–98. My approach to Gothic in this chapter concerns its fascination with conspiracies, but the mode also provides other narrative resources for political thinking. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Richard Devetak, “The Gothic Scene of International Relations: Ghosts, Monsters, Terror and the Sublime After 9/11,” Review of International Studies 31, no. 4 (2005): 621–43. 72. Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 154. 73. In The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Methuen, 1986), Sedgwick compares the inscrutable manuscripts that populate Gothic novels to “the Watergate transcripts” (14). 74. Bruns, “Secrecy and Understanding,” 22. 75. Edward A. Shils, The Torment of Secrecy (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1956), 29. 76. On the link between conspiracy and the supernatural in gothic, see Cleary, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 133–71; Stefan Andriopoulos, “Occult Conspiracies: Spirits and Secret Societies in Schiller’s Ghost Seer,” New German Critique 35, no. 1 (2008): 65–81; and Markman Ellis, “Enlightenment or Illumination: The Spectre of Conspiracy in Gothic Fictions of the 1790s,” in Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction, 1780– 1830, ed. Jillian Heydt-Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 77–98. 77. See Marshall Brown, The Gothic Text (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 78. Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance, ed. Alison Milbank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 10. 79. Ibid., 9. 80. Ibid., 12. 81. Ibid., 37. 82. Ibid., 52–53. 83. Ibid., 98. 84. Ibid., 177. 85. Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk, ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Peterborough: Broadview, 2004), 294.

Toward an Aesthetics of Government Secrecy  57 86. Ibid., 297. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid., 298. 89. Ibid. 90. See Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 215–47. 91. Lewis, The Monk, 302. 92. Ibid., 294. 93. Ibid., 308.

3 The Genesis and Structure of the National Security Sublime

The Cold War Sublime The Gothic novel and the Romantic sublime, aesthetic mediations of the same moment of national security crisis in the 1790s, provide the raw material for nearly every modern depiction of government secrecy that follows in their wake. The spy novel and the techno-thriller would be inconceivable without their example, as would many non-literary forms like investigative reporting: the dogged pursuit of hidden corruption, the stunning discovery of the actual scope of the crime. The two modes opened up an innovative set of visual and narrative conventions for representing covert political actions that rendered the absolutist aesthetic of court tragedy mostly obsolete in British and American culture. Court tragedy does survive, but primarily in period dramas and in narratives about organized crime; in both cases the genre is called upon to represent worlds markedly foreign to the everyday experience of their intended audiences. The Gothic and the sublime, by contrast, capture the contemporary look and feel of political mystery. The aesthetic of the sublime has provided artists and writers since the seventeenth century with a way of intimating the existence of boundless secret powers that barely escape the grasp of the knowing subject. Born of a curiously pleasurable failure of comprehension, it conjures mysteries so great that they can be contemplated or felt but never truly understood. It is an aesthetic of the open secret. The mysteries of the sublime are the known unknowns, the outcome of an encounter with massive powers or vast extent. The Gothic, too, presumes the existence of hidden powers, but here they are conspiratorial, dark plots organized by the established interests of throne and altar to torment innocents and to preserve their ancient prerogatives. Gothic cloaks incomprehensibility in the fearful garb of the supernatural: all the rattling chains, ghostly apparitions, and living pictures that define this aesthetic remain beyond the grasp of the innocent so long as the conspiracy continues to operate. Once brought into the open, revealed to the public or to honest authorities, the supernatural is laid bare as the all-too-human manipulations of corrupt authorities.

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  59 The two modern aesthetics of government secrecy lent narrative and visual form to a significant change in longstanding beliefs about the epistemological relationship between citizen and state. Echoing the claims of eighteenth-century advocates of open government like Jeremy Bentham, they figured political mysteries from the position of the public rather than the reigning power. Both modes, as I argued in the last chapter, embody the logic of secrecy Eva Horn calls secretum, registering the fear and perplexity engendered by the overriding contradiction, in a moment of actual or imagined crisis, between the ideal of open government and the reality of hidden power.1 They continue to describe this contradiction in the age of the national security state. As John Beck has noted, the “recognition that the freedom and transparency of democracy are underwritten by unseen and often unknowable powers” is the “defining characteristic of the postwar world.”2 Everyone knows the conspiracy exists, even if they do not know precisely what it hides: it becomes two secrets rather than just one, a deeper mystery concealed within the quotidian revelations of public secrecy. Powerfully adapting eighteenth-century forms to contemporary concerns, the national security sublime is a vital resource for describing the scope, nature, and everyday consequences of government secrecy in modern culture. Cold War secrecy engendered a distinct amalgam of Gothic and Romantic elements in the literature and popular culture of the period. Steven Spielberg’s shadowy warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark is both massive and hidden, a sublime space deliberately concealed from the public by Army Intelligence, the misty vanishing point of the image representing at once the impossibly large scope of the secret and a conspiratorial theory of government power. This amalgam reflects the particular conceptualization of secrecy and the prevailing concerns that guided national security policy in the era: covert nuclear research, and the twin threats of sabotage and espionage. Knowers are recurrently presented with a stunning vista or a great danger, a strangely familiar glimpse into a secret world that we tacitly authorize to protect us, but which is jealously kept from our knowledge. Nevertheless, these knowers find a way to rise above this world, literally or through the imagination. Their confrontation with mystery leaves them wiser, though not inevitably educated. The mystery remains intact, but the knowers reach a tentative resolution, more affective than hermeneutic, about its nature. Depending upon the aims of the artist and the nature of the historical moment, this sublime experience can signal true insight or mystified confusion, a powerful revelation or hopeless perplexity. Visual and narrative depictions of the sublime encounter during the Cold War, the modern starting point for the national security sublime as I define it in this book, tend to follow a familiar structure, with three chief elements that both build upon and transform Romantic models, blending them with elements of the Gothic as they are adapted to the

60  The Genesis of the National Security Sublime spectacle of government secrecy and the culture of leaks. These elements comprise: the privileged view, which describes the special perspective of a knower let in on some secret; the mysterious proliferation, which characterizes the fearful or unbounded nature of the sublime object for that viewer; and the elevated awareness, which defines the affective and intellectual outcome of the encounter with mystery. The three elements correspond to the three-part movement Immanuel Kant describes in his anatomy of the sublime, by which subjects (privileged view) encounter an immensity (mysterious proliferation) that threatens to overwhelm them, but rise above their initial perplexity to achieve the affective sense of insight (elevated awareness) associated with sublime experiences. Each translates the moments of judgment into stories, character types, settings, and figures. The Privileged View In Cold War representations, the sublime spectacle of national security typically falls to a single individual or select group, like the young man in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer above a Sea of Fog, which I discussed in the last chapter. The wanderer has achieved an outlook denied to those unwilling to undertake the arduous climb. Given the deep secrecy that enwraps the national security apparatus, only the privileged few have access to its mysteries, either as insiders and initiates, or as outsiders who happen to stumble upon them. The initial view opens onto a vast repository of mysteries. As Frances Ferguson has argued, the sublime has always been a discourse of individuation. By contrast with the conventionally social appreciation of the beautiful, the sublime sets the isolated subject against some difficulty it is forced to face largely alone.3 This is the experience, as we saw in Chapter 1, of Indiana Jones and his rivals: at the end of the first and last films in the series, they watch as the artifacts reveal their true destructive power to the select few with the special knowledge and skills to pursue them. The privileged view characterizes the position of the true believer and the conspiracy theorist alike, both of whom gain (or believe they have gained) unique insight into a sprawling network of secrets. The existence of the vast warehouse suggests, however, that even the sublime experience of the intrepid explorer fails to comprehend the immensity of secret government operations. The archetype for the privileged view is Pentheus in Euripides’ Greek tragedy the Bacchae. Angered and disturbed by the arrival of the god Dionysus and his followers in the kingdom of Thebes, the ruler secretly watches a forbidden nighttime gathering of Bacchic Maenads while concealed in a tree—until he is discovered, pulled down from his place of hiding, and torn limb from limb by a frenzied pack that includes his mother.4 Indiana Jones survives his own dangerous encounters with

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  61 sublime spectacles, but the scenario is strikingly similar: the experience of the privileged view is individuating, separating the viewer, for better or worse, from the larger social body, and threatening his safety. Both the individuation and the threat are a precondition of that viewer’s insight. We find a telling echo of Euripides preserved in the reports filed by the scientific and military observers at the early atomic bomb tests. These were the first witnesses of the primal secret around which the post-War national security state organized itself. Those present at the 1945 Trinity test in the New Mexico desert, the first full-scale detonation of a thermonuclear device, wrote of the experience in language that evokes the experience of the sublime, not only in its references to awesome power, but also in the self-conscious awareness of a privileged view.5 The often-quoted words of General Thomas F. Farrell are the most explicit: The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately. Thirty seconds after the explosion came first, the air blast pressing hard against the people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty. Words are inadequate tools for the job of acquainting those not present with the physical, mental and psychological effects. It had to be witnessed to be realised.6 Farrell returns throughout this passage to the exclusiveness of the company present at the blast. He is acutely aware of being in on a secret, and his awareness becomes a proxy for his inability to describe the sublime spectacle. The test is an “unprecedented” display of “tremendous power”; the light effects “beggared description,” outstripping in their “beauty” (he clearly means sublimity) the efforts of great poets; they “must be seen to be imagined.” No human had seen their like in world history; the “whole country” is illuminated, but this small group alone sees the light. Words are “inadequate tools” for conveying the spectacle to “those not present.” Farrell imagines himself witnessing the end of the world (“doomsday”), like John atop Patmos in Revelation. He recognizes

62  The Genesis of the National Security Sublime the awesome and quasi-divine power of the bomb, but at the same time finds the transcendent power of reason in the experience of viewing the blast from relative safety, a safety that allows him to describe what he sees rather than being destroyed by it. We find examples of the privileged view throughout Cold War fiction and film, epitomized by figures who, through some special skill or by mere accident, find themselves present at the unveiling of a great secret with national security implications. Those with special skill are the professional spies like James Bond, who seems inevitably to witness the revelation of the diabolical villain’s plan for world domination. No less often, the privileged viewer comes upon the secret by accident. Alfred Hitchcock places many of his protagonists in this position, as in Rear Window (1954) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), both of which tell of characters who stumble (or worm themselves) into witnessing crimes. Hitchcock weds this experience of what we might call the “accursed view” to a national security plot in North by Northwest (1959), one of the most influential avatars of the national security sublime. Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill finds himself mistaken by foreign spies for a secret agent and is eventually roped, not unlike Indiana Jones, into an intelligence agency operation to thwart a theft of unspecified United States government secrets.7 The film turns to the sublime as Thornhill makes his way westward in search of the truth. Hitchcock places his hero in the midst of vast spaces, like the empty road flanked by brown cornfields where he is supposed to meet a contact, but instead must escape a crop duster that descends from the sky and strafes him with bullets.

Figure 3.1 Still from North by Northwest, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. MGM, 1959.

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  63 The film concludes with a dramatic pursuit down the face of Mount Rushmore, with Thornhill clutching secret microfilm documents while perched on that quintessential locus of government-made-sublime. In these images, Hitchcock establishes a key correspondence that will come to define the national security sublime: the closer the lone protagonist comes to the secret, the more sublime the surroundings. Thornhill’s spiritual descendants include Warren Beatty’s intrepid journalist Joe Frady in Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 classic of what Ray Pratt calls “visionary paranoia,” The Parallax View; and Matthew Bennell, the San Francisco Health inspector, played by Donald Sutherland, in the 1978 remake of the 1950s Communist subversion allegory The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.8 Both figures are dogged researchers caught up in massive conspiracies, who encounter the truth in a moment of sublime illumination, quickly followed, in accordance with the grim vision of their post-Watergate historical moment, by defeat. Frady finds himself drawn into a political assassination plot, organized by the shadowy Parallax Corporation, which recruits and trains killers—as well as those who can unwittingly be framed for their crimes. At the end of the film, in an extended allusion to a similar scene from the 1962 conspiracy thriller The Manchurian Candidate, he watches from the rafters of a massive convention center as a Senate candidate is assassinated before his eyes, confirming his dawning suspicion of a global conspiracy. His pursuit of the assassin places him at the scene of the crime, however, and he is shot by the authorities.9 Bennell discovers an alien conspiracy to replace people with emotionless doubles grown from large pods, which usurp the place of the

Figure 3.2 Still from The Parallax View, directed by Alan J. Pakula. Warner Brothers, 1974.

64  The Genesis of the National Security Sublime original while the latter sleeps. The plant-like aliens infiltrate government agencies, taking control of the city and the police. At the end of the film, Bennell discovers a giant waterside warehouse where workers grow and distribute the pods. “It’s enormous—what do we do, there are so many,” says his lover, Elizabeth, who shares the privileged view just moments before her death.10 Bennell climbs into the rafters to get a better look, gaining much the same viewing angle Frady has at the end of the Parallax View. He, too, loses his battle with the mysterious conspiracy; we discover at the end of the film, set amidst sublimely receding lines of dormant trees in the plaza flanking San Francisco City Hall, that he has been replaced by a pod. The privileged view in both films is fleeting and precarious, the reflection of a more cynical social context, in which Thornhill’s ability almost single-handedly to thwart a national security plot came to seem naïve. The Mysterious Proliferation The second structural element of the national security sublime is the mysterious proliferation. Proliferation is a term familiar from the discourse of national security, naming the dangerous international spread of nuclear capabilities, but it is also closely connected to the concept of the sublime. The mysterious proliferation describes the way national security secrets seem to multiply and expand—both in number and power—in the mind of the privileged viewer, much as the foggy landscape unfolds into the far distance before the wanderer in Friedrich’s painting, or the pods multiply before Bennell’s eyes. Burke singles out two particular sources of obscurity that produce feelings of the sublime: darkness, on the one hand; and infinity, on the other. Both are sublime because they affect us like secrets; the first through privation and lack, and the second through excess and unbounded succession. We are made conscious of powers and epistemological vistas far beyond our physical or mental ability to grasp them. “When we know the full extent of any danger,” Burke states, and “when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes.”11 Insofar as they conceal the “full extent” of the dangerous secret, both darkness and infinity proliferate in the imagination. Darkness multiplies terrors through uncertainty: wrapped in literal or figurative obscurity, “it is impossible to know in what degree of safety we stand.”12 What Burke calls the “artificial infinite,” infinity suggested by a uniform succession of parts, offers the literal spectacle of proliferation: “you can nowhere fix a boundary; turn which way you will, the same object still seems to continue, and the imagination has no rest.”13 The secret lies just beyond the reach of the privileged viewers, manifest in its hiddenness but ungraspable in its scope or scale. This is the experience of Oedipa Maas in Thomas Pynchon’s archetypal conspiracy novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). The unassuming

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  65 Northern California housewife is drawn into the network surrounding an underground postal system—a conspiracy potentially spanning centuries—when she is named the executor of a former lover’s will. As the story unfolds, Oedipa finds telltale traces of the post horn, sign of the mysterious WASTE system, nearly everywhere she looks, but she comes across it first in a bar emblematically called The Scope, frequented by defense workers from the Yoyodyne Corporation in San Narciso, a fictional town in Southern California. When the privileged viewer Oedipa catches her initial glimpse of this city, looking from above like Friedrich’s wanderer, she compared the neat gridwork of streets and the “vast sprawl” of buildings to the printed circuit in a transistor radio. The sight evokes the sublime sense of “a revelation” that “trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.”14 Oedipa compares this sense to a “religious instant,” but it opens onto the secular revelation of a conspiracy so dizzying in its complexity that she can never be sure it is real. It allows her imagination, as Burke would say, “no rest.” Pynchon characteristically associates this feeling with the industries and technologies supporting the burgeoning national security state. Consider another well-known example of the mysterious proliferation: the shadowy parking garage, low pillars receding to an uncertain vanishing point (a textbook example of Burke’s “artificial infinite”), where Robert Redford’s Bob Woodward arranges to meet his source Deep Throat in Pakula’s telling of the Watergate scandal, All the President’s Men (1976).15 Over the course of the film, Deep Throat slowly reveals to the privileged viewer the existence of a conspiracy that encompasses nearly every branch of the government. Although the garage is largely

Figure 3.3 Still from All the President’s Men, directed by Alan J. Pakula. Warner Brothers, 1976.

66  The Genesis of the National Security Sublime empty it becomes a scene of revelations, as the oracular source lets his initiate in on an ever-widening gyre of secrets. Pakula sets up a suggestive comparison between the parking garage and the newsroom through cues in the production design. Although it is busy, noisy, and chaotic—piles of books and papers on every surface, the incessant sound of mechanical typewriters on the soundtrack—the newsroom nevertheless shares with the garage a receding line of pillars, along which the camera often pans. It is telling that the film ends when the two reporters finally put the pieces of the Watergate conspiracy together. Pakula surely assumed that his audience would know the rest of the story and therefore did not need to learn all the details again, but his decision also puts the emphasis on the experience of proliferation, the piling up of partial clues and leads, rather than on the clarity of final revelations. Farrell’s vision of the atomic blast points to what is perhaps the most familiar trope of the mysterious proliferation during the Cold War. Burke notes the longstanding association of the “sacred and reverential awe” that characterizes the sublime with “our ideas of divinity.”16 In trying to grapple with the immensity of what the Manhattan Project had achieved, Farrell, like Oedipa, rediscovers the ancient association of the secret and the sacred by way of a spectacle produced by technological innovation. Divinity names those unknowable and overwhelming powers we cannot grasp, the explosion suggesting for Farrell a blasphemous appropriation of powers previously reserved for “The Almighty.” He notes that in the moments prior to the test, even the atheists in the room were praying.17 Other observers also hint at supernatural powers. General Leslie R. Groves, who penned the generally dry and factual official report on the Trinity Test, incongruously claims that a blind woman unconnected with the project “saw the light” from the explosion, evoking Christ’s many healings of the blind in the Gospel narratives, as well as the flashes of illumination Maimonides associates with the revelation of divine truths.18 The vision of proliferation produces in the privileged viewer a sense of divine mystery and scale, offering what Fredric Jameson terms a “cognitive map” of a secret world that seems to lie beyond individual comprehension.19 The association of mysterious proliferations with the divine extends to the intimation of an all-seeing and all-knowing, if not inevitably benevolent, intelligence apparatus. This is the vision articulated by Beryl Parmenter, the wife of one of the CIA operatives plotting to assassinate President Kennedy in Don DeLillo’s novel Libra (1988), a veritable summa of the national security sublime as it emerged during the Cold War. Published at the end of that era, the novel looks back to what may be the definitive outbreak of the logic of secretum in modern American life: the age of the Warren Report, a document that purported to reveal the truth about the assassination but itself became (and remains) the object of deep conspiratorial suspicions. DeLillo presents what looks

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  67 to be yet another version of the truth behind the report, going into the minds of historical figures involved in the assassination or its aftermath, but details instead a systemic pathology of secrecy, in which even the plotters see themselves as outsiders gazing upon a vast world of national security mysteries to which they are not privy.20 Beryl, a privileged if second-hand viewer, observes that the agency was the one subject in her husband’s life “that could never be exhausted.” For her own part, she understood it as “the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God.”21 This divine vision of the CIA as a mystical center of human knowledge ironically echoes the more earthly but no less sublime experience of Nicholas Branch, the operative tasked by the agency with writing a history of the assassination. In an office bursting with papers, more and more sent daily by the mysterious “Curator,” he experiences secrecy as sheer profusion, an “incredible haul of human utterance” that “resembles a kind of mind-spatter”; “The endless fact-rubble of the investigations,” he calls it, characterizing the mysterious proliferation as a mounting disaster.22 “It is essential to master the data,” Branch assures himself, to sort through all the facts pertaining to the assassination and reduce them to a coherent story.23 Branch, too, sees the agency in quasi-religious terms. There is something “holy” in his work, he suggests, and the agency comprises for him a kind of church, organized around a vast “theology of secrets,” the facts of which it is unwilling to reveal even to insiders.24 The Elevated Awareness The “sacred and reverential awe” that Burke identifies in the passion of sublimity points to the third structural element in early adumbrations of the national security sublime. Friedrich’s painting makes the elevation implicit in the experience of awareness literal: the wanderer stands above a vast landscape, awed by the scenery and lifted out of his everyday experience. The same kind of elevation marks the experience of the emblematically named Thornhill on top of Mount Rushmore, where he finally recognizes the nature of the plot; of Oedipa perched above the streets of San Narciso, where she feels the dawning of some revelation; and of Frady in the rafters of the convention center, where the assassination conspiracy unfolds before him. The affective range of this experience includes the traditional registers of the mode to which Burke, Farrell, and DeLillo’s two characters appeal: astonishment, awe, and respect. But the national security sublime produces many other affects as well. Spielberg’s image of the government warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark blends the feeling of sublimity roused by immense size with a gloomy suggestion of bureaucratic neglect, the mysteries of the universe reduced to one more crate on a shelf.25 Much the same thing is true of the shadowy garage in

68  The Genesis of the National Security Sublime All the President’s Men, which becomes the primal scene for a growing suspicion about the trustworthiness of those in power. In addition to awe and respect, one also finds, in examples of the national security sublime, anxiety, curiosity, cynicism, and outrage.26 Pynchon’s Oedipa, for example, never learns the truth about the WASTE system; despite all the scattered indications of a real underground, the book ends with her awaiting the revelation of the mysterious force behind the system at an auction of rare stamps. She is poised at the brink of elevation—or perhaps, she grimly realizes, further proliferation: Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back.27 At one point in The Crying of Lot 49, she fears that she may be pregnant— an allusion, Pynchon makes clear, to the Annunciation—and schedules an appointment with a doctor under the name of “Grace.”28 Yet the Word never truly arrives to her ear. The “overexposed blank” that describes Oedipa’s sublime elevation points at once to the divine and the demonic, spiritual revelation of the sort described by Maimonides and the unholy “blaze” of an atomic blast. The experience of the sublime allows the privileged viewer the satisfaction that comes with greater awareness, with rising above—if only in thought and often attended by a maddening inability to act—the unfathomable or the omnipotent. But it is never clear whether the elevated awareness is a blessing or a curse. The feeling comes across as a respect for the secrets of the past in the Indiana Jones films; as a sense of technological achievement mixed with trepidation in the observations of the atomic bomb; as the increasingly grim reportorial insight into the existence of a conspiracy in All the President’s Men; and as churchly reverence in the visions of Beryl Parmenter and Nicholas Branch. In Cold War culture, the experience of elevated awareness is most notable on the paranoid end of the spectrum, in the conspiratorial imaginary so often allied in the period with responses to the spectacle of national security. DeLillo provides numerous variations on this affect in Libra. Win Everett, the retired CIA agent and chief plotter of the fictional Kennedy assassination, imagines the government as an edifice built on a proliferation of ignorance he alone seems privileged to understand. A member of a top-secret group set up to confront the threat posed by Castro’s Cuba, he recognizes that a large part of his job is maintaining the illusion of plausible deniability for those above him in the chain of command. “The men at his level,” he reflects, “were spawning secrets

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  69 that quivered like reptile eggs,” but those in greater positions of authority see ignorance as “a cherished asset,” the president being “the summit of unknowing.” Everett enumerates the levels of ignorance like a catechism: the Director of Central Intelligence “was not to know important things”; the Joint Chiefs viewed knowledge as a “form of contamination”; the Deputy Secretaries “expected to be misled.”29 Deliberate ignorance is the open secret of the national security hierarchy, whose members make a secret of government secrecy itself. Many of the other plotters and military figures in the novel regard their own covert operations and extra-judicial investigations as but the small and insignificant shadows of greater secrets the government is keeping from them, their awareness likewise measured along a sliding scale of apparent access. Lee Harvey Oswald sees himself as “part of something vast and sweeping,” though he struggles throughout the novel to understand his place in it.30 General Ted Walker, at whom Oswald directed an errant bullet before the Kennedy assassination, muses on the existence of what he calls the Real Control Apparatus, a massive left-wing conspiracy managed by the government that has infiltrated the body politic with “every modern sickness,” sapping the will to fight the enemy. DeLillo imagines him declaiming against the Apparatus in a Senate hearing from 1962. Asked to name its members, Walker demurs, appealing instead to a conspiratorial sublime: “This is like naming particles in the air, naming molecules or cells. The Apparatus is precisely what we can’t see or name. We can’t measure it, gentlemen, or take its photograph. It is the mystery we can’t get hold of, the plot we can’t uncover.”31 Later in the novel, another character, David Ferrie, trying to persuade Oswald to take part in the plan to assassinate the president, speculates out loud on the possibility that Kennedy and Fidel Castro are in on a plot together, a prospect that turns history itself into a sublime proliferation of mysteries: “There’s something they aren’t telling us. Something we don’t know about. There’s more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.”32 He knows very well what he does not (or is not permitted to) know. The experiences of Walker and Ferrie, faced with the possibility of immense conspiracies, resemble the awe-struck responses of Beryl and Branch, or the cynical knowingness of Everett: a sense of vast scale and great power—secrets all the way down—that ultimately produces a feeling of expanded awareness. It is perhaps no surprise that Ferrie tells Oswald he once started his own church.

The Echelon Moment DeLillo’s account of an America gripped at all levels by sublime visions of sprawling national security conspiracies and covert government was published a little more than a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall

70  The Genesis of the National Security Sublime transformed the familiar binary confrontation of the Cold War into the multi-lateral New World Order. Christened by Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush (a former head of the CIA) at a celebrated summit in Malta, in December of 1989, the New World Order imagined an era of superpower cooperation and world governance unhindered by national rivalries, exclusive economic blocs, and Third-World proxy wars, in which the “great game” of espionage, along with the national security agencies that played it, would largely become things of the past. Reality did not match this dream, and the first official test of the new order was yet another war—the invasion of Kuwait to repulse the aggressions of Saddam Hussein—but globalization of other sorts continued apace. With the growth of world economic markets and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the West came face-to-face with what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, writing at the turn of the millennium, describe as an “omni-crisis”: “Today it is increasingly difficult for the ideologues of the United States to name a single, unified enemy; rather there seem to be minor and elusive enemies everywhere.”33 And so the covert national security apparatus, far from withering away, found new missions and new political justifications, setting in motion changes to the Cold War ontology of secrecy that would be fully realized during the War on Terror. The omni-crisis of the post-Cold War world suggested, to many in the intelligence agencies, a sublime proliferation of new threats and new technologies, like strong encryption, which made the traditional mission of information gathering immensely more difficult.34 Thomas Reynolds, the rogue NSA official played by Jon Voight in Tony Scott’s influential conspiracy thriller Enemy of the State (1998), neatly encapsulates this experience while trying to justify his covert actions to a wily former agency operative named Brill (Gene Hackman). Reynolds was responsible for the assassination of a congressman opposed to a bill that would give the NSA nearly unlimited surveillance powers over the American public. Brill holds evidence of the assassination, and Reynolds tries to persuade him to give it up by appealing to the new challenges faced by the agency. “You won the war,” Brill tells Reynolds, referring to Cold War battles with Russian intelligence. “Now we’re fighting the peace,” Reynolds responds. “It’s a lot more volatile,” he continues, Now we’ve got ten million crackpots out there with sniper scopes, sarin gas, and C–4. Ten-year-olds go on the Net, downloading encryption we can barely break, not to mention instructions on how to make a low-yield nuclear device. Privacy’s been dead for years because we can’t risk it. The only privacy that’s left is the inside of your head. Maybe that’s enough. You think we’re the enemy of democracy, you and I? I think we’re democracy’s last hope.35

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  71 A new sense of sublimity suffuses these words, displacing the prevailing Gothic plots of the Cold War sublime, in which secret powers manipulate the course of history like diabolical puppeteers. Rather than a single, all-powerful rival, Reynolds sees “ten million crackpots,” at home and abroad, with ready access to military-grade weapons and myriad reasons to use them against the public. It is no longer a game played by professionals and according to familiar rules of engagement. Reynolds’ solution to this terrifying new world order is equally sublime. The only acceptable response to the mysterious proliferation of threats is a massive proliferation of surveillance efforts, wiping out privacy protections even for American citizens. The only private space left is the inside of one’s head. Although it was short-lived as a political ideal, the New World Order did find a technological realization of sorts in the NSA’s Echelon surveillance network, the most ambitious covert project of the post-Cold War interregnum, and the obvious inspiration for Reynolds’ declaration that “Privacy’s been dead for years.” Brill dramatically lays out the capabilities of the system for Robert Dean (Will Smith), a Washington, DC, lawyer who accidentally acquires evidence of the congressman’s murder and becomes the agency’s unwitting target over the course of the film. “In the old days,” Brill tells him, “we actually had to tap a wire into your phone line. Now, with calls bouncing off satellites, they snatch them right out of the air.” “They get into your bank statements, computer files, email, listen to your phone calls. . . . Every wire, every airwave,” he states. The surveillance state here becomes at once dramatically global and alarmingly personal, a means of using invisible waves suffusing the very air we breathe to penetrate the private lives of citizens. It is a sublime solution to the sublime sense of threat Reynolds describes. The reality was not all that far removed from Brill’s fantastic description. A joint operation run by the NSA and allied spy agencies in the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada (the so-called “Five Eyes”), Echelon linked satellites, radio and microwave receivers, and taps on landbased communications, allowing what Nicky Hager describes as “near total coverage of the world’s communications”—a New World Order of signals intelligence.36 The roots of the project go back to a top-secret agreement among the Five Eyes called UKUSA. Formalized in 1946, but not publicly acknowledged until 2005, the agreement cemented a wartime intelligence-sharing relationship between the US and key members of the British Commonwealth, effectively carving up the post-War world into what James Bamford calls “spheres of cryptologic influence,” with the NSA overseeing the entire operation, and often jealously guarding its discoveries.37 Beginning in the 1970s, when telecommunications companies increasingly routed international communications through satellites, the NSA transformed the global alliance into a secret web of listening stations, knitted together by “an enormous worldwide computer network”

72  The Genesis of the National Security Sublime headquartered at Fort Meade, which allowed it to capture, sort, and relay transmissions from anywhere in the world to any of its partner agencies almost instantaneously.38 The network comprised a covert Internet, as Duncan Campbell characterizes it, functioning well in advance of its public sibling.39 Echelon was not just a triumph of technological innovation, but also a visionary reimagination of intelligence gathering. It was a truly global system, “a staggeringly comprehensive” meshwork of linked eavesdropping posts that could snatch from the air, to use Brill’s image, any electronic signal sent anywhere in the world.40 The network was unique in another way as well. Unlike earlier signals intelligence efforts, which relied upon human ears and analysis, and targeted certain individuals or regions, Echelon was largely automated and far more comprehensive in the communications it intercepted. The network fed information gathered from around the globe into a sorting system that looked for keywords compiled in what the NSA called “Dictionaries.”41 Supercomputers scanned incoming communications for relevant names, places, telephone numbers, and technical terms, only alerting human analysts when the system found a match. In practice, the Echelon system was used primarily to target known threats; the NSA lacked the storage, processing, and analysis capabilities to monitor the entire globe. In principle, however, it radically altered the nature of surveillance: there were no limits on what the agency could hear, and no a priori discriminations made between the words of the innocent and the guilty, foreign and American citizens, military and civilian messages. Everyone could be a suspect, and every signal potentially concealed an explosive secret. All the world’s information became a mystery waiting to be plumbed. And whereas Cold War intelligence worked in the interest of deterrence, Echelon, with its stunning reach and flexible Dictionary system, gave the NSA the capability to anticipate or quickly adapt to emergent threats. The agency could go into the business of mind reading. Echelon anticipated by decades the new ontology of government secrecy Peter Galison finds in the War on Terror; history, technology, and the specter of new threats needed only to catch up with it.42 The Echelon network was already becoming obsolete by the time it began to enter popular consciousness in the 1990s, as telecommunications companies started moving their operations from satellite links to underground and undersea fiber-optic cables, and the agency was forced to move with them.43 Nevertheless, it so defined the interregnum between the last days of the Cold War and the first glimmerings of the War on Terror that the period may justly be called the Echelon Moment. The Echelon Moment defines the contours of an emerging post-Cold War world, a world relieved of the terror of imminent nuclear annihilation and the specter of Soviet espionage, but confronted with the anxiety of a new order that reconceived national security on a global scale, erasing

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  73 customary borders between east and west, military and civilian threats. In many ways, the Echelon Moment simply brought out aspects of the Cold War world masked by the binary logic of that conflict. As John Beck and Ryan Bishop have noted, our contemporary sense of the global was deeply influenced by the “metaphysical recalibration” of space and time that the nuclear age brought about. Intercontinental missiles made distant threats feel all-too-close.44 The political fundamentalisms that would begin to loom large in the period first gained traction as a result of Cold War geopolitics. But the Echelon Moment had specific visual, narrative, and affective characteristics that distinguished it both from what came before and what would come after it. The operational details of Echelon were held in the strictest secrecy, but like so many other aspects of the national security apparatus, the network itself was, as I  noted in Chapter  1, known by the public; its name and descriptions of its capabilities akin to the tutorial Brill gives Dean in Enemy of the State crop up regularly in fiction, film, and television throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. For all their wonder at the technological wizardry of the network, however, such descriptions are often tinged (like Brill’s) with a knowing cynicism, reflecting the affective and epistemological condition of a public already grimly aware of the work of the intelligence agencies in the wake of Watergate, the Church Committee hearings, and the Iran-Contra affair. It had become clear that the intelligence agencies would continue to grow and develop, becoming a permanent (and often pernicious) part of American history, a manifest mystery never to be fully uncrated. The national security sublime in the period powerfully reflects upon this condition. Evincing all the paranoia that marked artifacts of the later Cold War era, works from the Echelon Moment also began to grapple with the specter of new intelligence capabilities. Political secrets, however tawdry and venal, now have the breathtaking reach of a comprehensive global network; the intelligence agencies are always listening, always gathering, but without recognizably human ears to hear. The national security sublime in the 1990s continues to feature deep conspiracies—they become, if anything, larger, more capable, and far more terrifying than their Cold War ancestors—and it continues to maintain the traditionally Gothic faith in the power of public revelations. But the mode also comes to terms with the possibility that secret government may be akin to the atmosphere from which NSA agents grab signals: invisible but all-pervasive, at once local and global, the most public of mysteries.

Dynamic and Mathematical The two most original visual poets of the Echelon Moment were the photographer Richard Misrach, whose stunning pictures of military-scarred landscapes in the American West captured the damage left behind by

74  The Genesis of the National Security Sublime Cold War research and weapons testing; and the celebrated Conceptual artist Mark Lombardi, whose intricate, carefully researched, and strangely beautiful pencil diagrams document global networks of corruption involving political, military, financial, and organized crime figures. Misrach and Lombardi both became interested in the look and feel of the national security state before the end of the Cold War, but their works in this vein first gained widespread public notice in the 1990s. They represent distinct aesthetic variations on the national security sublime, two visual languages for describing government secrecy, which at once consolidate the representational conventions of the Cold War sublime and give shape to the emerging concerns of the Echelon Moment. Misrach presents us with vast open spaces and scenes of appalling destruction, a sublime of size, scope, and power; while Lombardi depicts massive international conspiracies, a sublime of number, extent, and complexity. Their works in this way gravitate toward the poles epitomized by Kant’s two canonical variations of the sublime: the dynamic and the mathematical, respectively. The dynamically sublime arises from an encounter with a great physical power that viewers overcome through the reflective abilities of reason. Contemplating natural might from a position of relative safety, these viewers are elevated by their ability to master in thought what they could never master by force. Friedrich’s wanderer will never best the mountain, but its peak elevates him above the limits of everyday experience. Kant associates the dynamically sublime with a dramatic range of natural phenomena: Bold, overhanging, as it were threatening cliffs, thunder clouds towering up into the heavens, bringing with them flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder, volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean set into a rage, a lofty waterfall on a mighty river.45 The dynamically sublime encompasses those things in the visible world that dwarf us, threaten us, render us physically insignificant, but which we can bring to heel through reflection and contemplation. Perhaps the locus classicus for the dynamically sublime in Romantic poetry is William Wordsworth’s account of his climb up Mount Snowdon in Book Thirteen of the 1805 Prelude. Wordsworth and his companion set out before sunrise to take on the forbidding peak and find it enshrouded with a “dripping mist/Low-hung and thick” that defeats their vision. Nevertheless, they pursue the journey undaunted.46 With nothing to see, the hikers climb in silence, Wordsworth panting “as if in opposition set/Against an enemy.”47 Suddenly, the mist clears and the poet turns to see much the same sublime sight Friedrich would depict:

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  75 The Moon stood naked in the heavens at height Immense above my head, and on the shore I found myself of a huge sea of mist, Which meek and silent rested at my feet. A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved All over this still ocean, and beyond, Far, far beyond, the vapours shot themselves In headlands, tongues, and promontory shapes, Into the sea, the real sea, that seemed To dwindle and give up its majesty, Usurped upon as far as sight could reach.48 This vision, “most awful and sublime,” clears the mental as well as the atmospheric mist.49 Wordsworth finds in it “The perfect image of a mighty mind/Of one that feeds upon infinity,” and exerts “domination . . . upon the outward face of things.”50 Despite the seemingly endless proliferation of fog “as far as sight could reach,” the feeling of the sublime carries the poet confidently upward and outward. Beneath and beyond the sea of fog he perceives hundreds of mountains, as well as the “real sea” just beyond the limits of his vision. The moon “stands naked,” an emblem for Wordsworth’s clarity of vision, but also for the secret (apparently) revealed. The ascent of Mount Snowdon discloses a mental and not just a physical landscape, serving as a figure for spiritual, political, and artistic revelation. This trope goes back to Moses’ canonical ascent of Mount Sinai in Exodus: being closer to heaven, the mountain provides a special access to divinity; being difficult to master, it represents a trial for the one gifted with insight. But the mountain is only a temporary obstacle, which yields to a higher vision of the world beyond the “outward face of things,” the truth here emerging from the fog of distortion brought on by the limits of human eyesight. Characteristically, this truth is experienced rather than interpreted. Wordsworth feels that he has conquered the might of nature: the mountains lie below him, and the fog sits “meek and silent” at his feet, much as the sea seems to “give up its majesty” beneath the fog. But the victory is affective rather than physical, an achievement of reason and imagination alone. The insight that comes from the imagination does not reveal the truths of nature, only the power of mind to rise above a challenge. Nature still reposes in its power, its “meek” submission only apparent, an open secret even as the poet’s spirit revels in admiration of its own abilities. In the Cold War sublime, this feeling comes across in reflections on the size and force of the secret state: its massive installations, unimaginably destructive weapons, and godlike ability to know (or extract by force or technological wizardry) all the secrets of the realm. The vast powers of the covert state unfold before privileged viewers like the fog

76  The Genesis of the National Security Sublime at the poet’s feet, an expansive landscape of secrets, punctuated by scattered visible promontories that they struggle to comprehend. This is the feeling Misrach captures, and modifies for a new historical moment, in a series of photographs taken in the late 1980s and early 1990s that document weapons testing sites in the sublime deserts of Utah and Nevada. The images record the open secret of covert government operations by way of the mute remnants these operations left behind: rusting shrapnel, rotting animal carcasses, crumbling test structures, tire tracks embedded in mud. Part of an ongoing series of landscape photographs begun in 1979 entitled Desert Cantos, these works were compiled in two books published in the early years of the Echelon Moment: Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West (1990), which focuses on an illegal Navy bombing site on public lands near Fallon, Nevada; and Violent Legacies: Three Cantos (1992), which depicts other militarized remains in the West: shredded Playboy magazines used as target practice; livestock poisoned by contaminated water; abandoned ammunition bunkers in Utah associated with the top-secret “Project W-47,” where the atomic bombs destined for Hiroshima and Nagasaki were modified, assembled, and flight tested. As in North by Northwest, the covert state finds its physical and spiritual home in sublime Western landscapes. Although Misrach was driven by environmental and anti-nuclear activism rather than by a deliberate effort to expose the contours of the national security state, the photographs result from the same careful research and gimlet-eyed distrust of authority that characterized the whistleblowers and investigative journalists who helped shape the affective structure of the Cold War world. He studied government records, interviewed those involved in Project W-47, and collaborated with local activists to identify classified landscapes. The works in these cantos have a documentary quality that underlies their careful attention to space and texture, as if they represented evidence of an ancient conspiracy, long since defunct. “I discovered historical traces and details that betrayed its concealed past,” Misrach says of the Wendover site.51 As Rebecca Solnit has noted, the images frequently evoke Civil War battlefield photographs, with animal carcasses or spent munitions scattered impersonally across a vast open space.52 The national security state, Misrach implies, has turned entire regions of the homefront into de facto war zones, long kept secret from the public but now ripe for revelation. Along with other photographers working in the same sublime idiom during the 1990s—Peter Goin, David T. Hanson, Jan Faul, Mark Ruwedel—Misrach’s work reminds its viewers that, while the Cold War may be over, the country has yet to count all the dead, or truly beat its swords into plowshares.53 The secrets are still visible on the sublime landscape, and the photographs bring us “face to face with news from our besieged world.”54

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  77

Figure 3.4 Richard Misrach, Bomb, Destroyed Vehicle and Lone Rock (1987). Chromogenic Print, 46.5 × 58.9 cm. 1990.66.2. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift of the Consolidated Natural Gas Company Foundation. Source: © 1987 Richard Misrach.

Misrach approaches these devastated places with the same desire for imaginative elevation that we find in Wordsworth’s ascent of Mount Snowdon. In the “Preface” to Bravo 20, he recalls being led to the bombing range by a local contact. Hours of driving on rough mining roads eventually give way to what Misrach calls a “post-apocalyptic landscape” riddled with craters and overshadowed by the eerie form of Lone Rock, a dormant volcanic plug. He captures one view of the scene in Bomb, Destroyed Vehicle and Lone Rock (1987). “As far as the eye could see in any direction was man-wreaked devastation,” he writes.55 The term “canto” here truly alludes to one of its original literary inspirations, Dante’s Divine Comedy.56 Misrach’s contact encourages the photographer to camp alone at the site; despite his trepidation, he agrees with the plan. After a fitful night—he worries that the Navy, “with its incredible surveillance ability,” will discover him—Misrach’s fear transforms in the morning light into sublime wonder at the sheer size of the place and the destructive forces to which it bears witness.57 “The landscape was magnificent,” he writes,

78  The Genesis of the National Security Sublime I was surrounded by the vast expanse of the alkali flat, which acted like a great reflector of light. . . . I found myself at the epicenter, the heart of the apocalypse. Alone, no sounds, no movement. No buildings, no roads. No indication of life, no promise of civilization. Only the smell of rusted metal. Bombs and lifeless holes. Side by side were great beauty and great horror.58 After hours of wandering through this wasteland, Misrach climbs on all fours to the peak of Lone Rock, and, like Wordsworth atop Mount Snowdon, experiences the singular sense of elevation he had sought: “I felt like I was hovering above a vast landscape. I experienced an unusual solitude and calm.”59 The bombing range becomes a locus of the sublime. Misrach evokes the Romantic language of the sublime, but his photographs also speak to the concerns of the Echelon Moment: the militarized landscapes they depict bring local and global together in a way characteristic of the era. The photographs are notable for their ingenious framing of small details within vast spaces. Craggy mountain peaks in the distance are set against stark images of rusted detritus and tumbledown structures in the foreground—material objects that landscape photography in the tradition of Ansel Adams would subsume into the larger view. But the small and the local in these photographs are not simply opposed to the sublime mountains and expansive spaces; they stand in a testamentary relationship to military missions with worldwide reach. The area around Wendover Airbase is at once a sublime desert plateau and the historical launching pad for the nuclear rivalry of the Cold War. A single tire track preserved in the mud connects the soldiers who tinkered with the bomb in 1945 to the apocalyptic landscapes their work produced on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. The physical devastation Misrach tracks in Nevada and Utah is but one link in a chain of secreted crimes that is “literally global in scope.”60 Wordsworth looks at a sea of fog and sees his imagination; Misrach looks at the desert and sees evidence of a vast wartime enterprise. There are no people in these pictures, an absence that alludes to the destructive powers that shaped the scenes—the terror proper to the feeling of the sublime—but that also suggests the secrets they still conceal. Like the desert, the national security state swallows up everything that falls under its influence. If the dynamically sublime seeks to grasp great power, what Kant calls the mathematically sublime describes the effect of contemplating an infinite series aesthetically rather than conceptually: not through counting or calculation, but as a single totality. Reason wants imagination to think of infinity as a unity or an image rather than as an orderly sequence, a task that makes the subject aware of its own mental inadequacy. As in the dynamically sublime there is the compensatory satisfaction of recognizing the supersensible gift that makes such a demand possible: “even

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  79 to be able to think the given infinite without contradiction requires a faculty in the human mind that is itself supersensible,” Kant writes.61 The sheer extent of that totality exhausts the understanding, leaving the subject shattered by awe and wonder. It may be impossible to hold the infinite scale of the universe in mind, but contemplating this impossibility brings its own rewards. During the Cold War, we find this valence of the sublime in reflections on the massive extent of the national security state, from the reams of secrets it conceals to its uncanny ability to be everywhere and hear everything. If the dynamically sublime comes to the fore in depictions of government power—nuclear bombs, vast spaces, massive installations—the mathematically sublime defines the warehouse aesthetic—piles of paper, stacks of crates. This is the sublime epitomized by Nicholas Branch in his office, and by Bob Woodward in the shadowy parking garage in All the President’s Men. We find a characteristic nineteenth-century example of the mathematically sublime in Charles Baudelaire’s 1858 poem “Les Sept vieillards [The Seven Old Men],” which shifts the scene of revelation from a natural to an urban landscape. Baudelaire follows the lead of Edgar Allan Poe, whose proto-detective tale “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) he greatly admired. Poe tells of a baffling encounter with a mysterious urban wanderer his narrator follows through the streets of London for twenty-four hours; Baudelaire recoils before what seems to be an endless series of such encounters. The logic of his experience is similar to what we find in Wordsworth: faced with an unfathomable mystery—of number and an infinite series rather than of physical power—Baudelaire’s speaker finds comfort and tentative resolution in an affective rather than a hermeneutic response to a vision he cannot wholly grasp. The poem begins with an image of profusion: Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves, Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant! Les mystères partout coulent comme des sèves Dans les canaux étroits du colosse puissant.62 [Teeming city, city full of dreams, where the ghost in full daylight accosts the passerby! Mysteries everywhere flow like sap through the narrow canals of the powerful colossus.] Baudelaire’s description of the urban landscape presents two sublime images: the city as teeming multitude and as looming colossus, whose narrow streets course with mysteries. Baudelaire plays on the two senses of the French word “plein,” which appears twice in the stanza. In the first line, the word means full or replete, while in the second it means open or evident (as in the English phrase “plain view”). The contrast sets the tone for the poem: the openness and profusion of city life presents

80  The Genesis of the National Security Sublime endless mysteries that nevertheless repulse the one who seeks definitive answers. The city epitomizes the logic of the public secret. Both images point toward the feeling of the mathematically sublime—the seemingly endless multitudes providing an impression of great numbers, and the ramifying canals of the “colossal” town suggesting vast extent rather than overwhelming power—and both point to realities that lie beyond what the speaker can mentally grasp. In the midst of this scene, the streets swirling with dirty fog, Baudelaire’s speaker encounters the arresting form of an old blind man with a look of incorrigible evil in his face. This man is followed by his exact double: “Son pareil le suivait: barbe, oeil, dos, bâton, loques,/Nul trait ne distinguait [His double followed him: beard, eye, back, stick, tatters, no detail distinguished them].”63 Five more of the same follow these two, leaving Baudelaire’s speaker mystified by the unintelligible vision: “À quel complot infâme étais-je donc en butte,/Ou quel méchant hasard ainsi m’humiliait? [Of what cruel plot was I the dupe, or what evil chance thus humiliated me?].”64 The speaker concludes that the man is akin to a phoenix, and reproduces his form over and over again, an infinite regress of sinister faces. Overwhelmed by the sight, and incapable of unraveling the “plot” that seems to lie just beyond his understanding, Baudelaire’s speaker returns, shaken, to his room and imagines himself in the midst of a more traditionally sublime scene: a tempestuous seascape, upon which his confused soul is tossed, “dansait, dansait, vieille gabarre/ Sans mâts, sur une mer monstrueuse et sans bords! [dancing, dancing, an old barge without a mast, upon a sea, monstrous and without limits].”65 The dynamically sublime, however bleak the scene it promises, enters the poem as a kind of compensatory gesture, a way of halting the regression suggested by the vision of the seven old men. The barge represents Baudelaire’s addled mind, turning the conceptual proliferation prompted by the vision of an endless chain of old men into an affective and physical sensation, and links the novel terrors of the urban multitude to the familiar image of a tossing sea. Physical danger steps in to explain and contain the terror of infinite numbers. Where Misrach’s desert landscapes appeal to the dynamically sublime, Lombardi’s work draws its unique power from the experience of the mathematically sublime. It is an art of links and connections, proliferating names and institutions rather than overwhelming spaces—the city or the warehouse rather than the contaminated desert. “The drawings present a litany of the famous and the infamous,” writes Tan Lin, “names of government and corporate officials, media magnates, sheikhs, mobsters and terrorists—everyone from Pope Paul VI to Osama bin Laden.”66 Although meticulously detailed and carefully organized, the diagrams leave the viewer with the sublime sense that a secretive network of power players really governs the world. Lombardi’s particular obsession was the many Cold War-era links between the politically connected Bush

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  81 family and Texas oil money, the Savings and Loan crisis, Saudi royalty, the national security apparatus, and a range of covert guerilla and terrorist operations around the world. These actors appear in one drawing after another: like the proliferating old men in Baudelaire’s poem, they show the same evil countenance wherever the viewer looks. The drawings literally sketch the material and financial contours of the secret state and its many ties with shady non-state actors—so effectively, in fact, that the FBI, CIA, and NSA reportedly consulted them for leads in cases and, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, to use as models for mapping terrorist networks.67 Lombardi wrote his dissertation on panoramic history paintings, and as Robert Hobbs has shown, he regarded his work as an updated variation on this genre, to which he gave the name “Narrative Structures.” Rather than depicting familiar images from the past, however, his narratives chart the hidden networks that underlie recent events, imagining history as the product of both knowing and unknowing conspiracies, a characteristically Gothic plot at once bubbling up and trickling down from the shadow worlds managed by the connected and the powerful.68 As Deven Golden succinctly puts it, the subject of Lombardi’s works is “always the same: conspiracy.”69 The conspiracies in Lombardi’s drawings are not like the tightly wound plots of paranoid thrillers from the 1970s, however. Their great innovation, and their signal link to the Echelon Moment, was to depict conspiracies as decentered networks, agglomerations of many tangential players, drawn from both the national security and the economic elite, all with something to gain by their participation, but not necessarily driven by the same motive. They are global networks, structurally akin to Echelon: constellations of power, money, influence, and self-interest through which quasi-criminal enterprises like financial fraud, arms dealing, or the Iran-Contra scheme, that hallmark of geopolitics in the waning days of the communist threat, join national security interests with the profit motive of the well connected. As in Misrach’s battle-scarred landscapes, the local detail reveals global reach. Consider the epic drawing Banco Nazionale del Lavoro, Reagan, Bush, Thatcher, and the Arming of Iraq, c. 1979–1990 (4th version) (1998). Ten feet long, nearly five feet tall, and detailing more than 340 connections, the sprawling work diagrams the shady role of the Italian Banca Nazionale del Lavoro in funding the arms trade in the Middle East through the 1980s. The drawing links the bank to US and British intelligence, as well as to a raft of prominent political figures and shadowy operatives on both sides of the Atlantic. Another well-known work, Oliver North, Lake Resources of Panama, and the Iran-Contra Operation, ca. 1984–86 (1999), takes the shape of a large sphere, hinting formally at the global reach of the conspiracy, but also at its ultimate, if unverifiable, unity. Lombardi uses French arcs to link North, the prime mover of the Iran-Contra operation, to a striking array of corporate and political

Source: Courtesy Pierogi Gallery and the Lombardi Family. Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 3.5 Mark Lombardi, © Copyright. Banco Nazionale del Lavoro, Reagan, Bush, Thatcher, and the Arming of Iraq, c. 1979–1990 (4th version) (1998). Colored pencil and pencil on paper, 127 × 304.8 cm. Gift of Shirley and Donald Lombardi, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA.

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  83 players: Texas political luminaries, Central American autocrats, international banks, dubious shell corporations, ex-CIA operatives and former generals, Middle-East oil interests, and even the Unification of Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. In both works, the spidery lines never converge on a single, central node, suggesting, by contrast with a typical Gothic plot, that no one individual was truly in charge of the operation. Instead, we encounter a sublime proliferation of shady relationships that countenanced and enabled the conspiracy. These relationships seem to function all by themselves: there is no directing force in Lombardi’s work, no arrows demonstrating the movement of influence, and few hints other than the density of links surrounding them about the relative importance of the players. The diagrams depict something approaching self-organizing systems—phoenix-like, as with Baudelaire’s proliferating old men— powered by pre-existing business and social relationships through which money and intentions flow autonomously, achieving a political aim and diffusing responsibility at one and the same time. Although Lombardi’s works parallel the emerging ontology of secrecy made possible by the Echelon network, they also keep one foot firmly planted in the representational world of the Cold War sublime. Like Misrach, Lombardi saw his art as a means of revealing hidden truths, a heroic form of investigative journalism. He consulted with lawyers and former government agents, maintained ties with the anti-corruption organization Transparency International, kept file boxes packed with tens of thousands of note cards containing information on the people and transactions he sought to track, and adapted the form of his works from a litigation tool, common in financial fraud investigations, called an interlock search, which seeks to reveal corruption by tracing the flow of funds to and from a suspect business or individual. “He claimed that his drawings could be read like a newspaper,” writes Patricia Goldstone.70 True to its post-Watergate heritage, this desire to reveal was closely linked with the conspiratorial imaginary. The artist used to hand out business cards printed with the half-sardonic slogan “Death Defying Acts of Art and Conspiracy.” And, as if on cue, his death at the age of 49, in 1999, at a moment of great professional success, became the subject of swirling conspiracy theories. Police discovered Lombardi hanging from a rope thrown over an exposed water pipe in his New York apartment, and quickly deemed him a suicide, though many details suggested foul play for those inclined to suspicion.71 As the analogy with investigative journalism suggests, Lombardi’s work maintains a faith in the ability of citizens to disclose the secrets of modern politics, though this faith was always leavened with irony. Lombardi never believed that his drawings, inevitably dismissed as “mere” artworks, would have the same effect as Congressional inquiries or whistleblower leaks. “You can hang the truth on a wall for everyone to see,” he once said, offering a perceptive anatomy of the open secret, “and most people won’t give a damn.”72 But the artist also sought to surround his

84  The Genesis of the National Security Sublime work with mystery. There is no key to the meaning of the variously dotted and solid lines that connect the players in his diagrams, and when gallery owners or museum directors asked him whether they could display the potentially illuminating note cards alongside his art, Lombardi would always refuse, effectively cloaking the drawings with precisely the hermeneutic veil they were designed to lift. This gesture is telling: conspiracy is both the form and the content of Lombardi’s work, at once its chief subject and the affective mode it seeks to engender in the viewer. But the nature of the conspiracy undergoes a radical transformation under his sharpened pencil: like the Echelon network, Lombardi combines a visionary glimpse of the future with an old-line commitment to the power of revelation. He recognizes that conspiracies inside and outside the government function as open secrets, woven through decentered networks of money, power, and influence that are a genuine secret to no one, but he also maintains the faith in openness that links the Cold War sublime to the Gothic tradition. Much like Misrach’s photographs, Lombardi’s works straddle two ontologies of government secrecy, one rooted in the past, and one anticipating a future yet to come.

The Truth Is Elsewhere Misrach’s photographs and Lombardi’s drawings subtly transform the three core elements of the Cold War sublime, bringing them into line with the new political and technological realities of the Echelon Moment. The privileged view, for both artists, shares much with the works of figures like DeLillo and Pakula, whose paranoid characters see national security conspiracies everywhere—and are not at all surprised to find their suspicions confirmed. They are lone warriors for what can only, given the gravity of the challenge, be lost causes. Both artists also recall Cold War visions of the mysterious proliferation, from the unfolding evidence of apocalyptic destruction in Misrach’s account of his first visit to Bravo 20, to the tangle of nefarious bonds Lombardi documents in his drawings. The global scope of this proliferation transcends the binary world order of the post-War period, but the works have much the same affective and epistemological force as Spielberg’s warehouse does, revealing a hidden world teeming with mysteries. The elevated awareness undergoes perhaps the most significant change from its Cold War model in these works. Rather than seeking clandestine plots organized by a single, diabolical genius or by some tightly controlled organization, both Misrach and Lombardi are drawn to open secrets, subtly shifting the dominant aesthetic register in their works from the Gothic to the Romantic sublime. Misrach records the material remnants of top-secret programs, left casually behind by forces seemingly unconcerned with their discovery, while Lombardi depicts the dubious connections of names familiar from finance, politics, and the newspaper society pages. Both artists capture the same depressingly predictable

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  85 truths: profit for the wealthy and connected; impunity for the powerful; poverty and environmental devastation for the beset; the impotent halfknowledge of public secrecy for everyone else. They disclose the open secret about power at nearly every turn. A similar reworking of the elements of the Cold War sublime marks the most characteristic media product of the Echelon Moment, Chris Carter’s perennially popular Fox Network series The X-Files, which ran from 1993–2002, and was revived for a limited run in 2016. The series shares much with the work of Misrach and Lombardi. In each case we find evidence of massive international plots that secretly determine the course of contemporary history, leaving their mark in the physical remains and human costs of the Cold War national security state. And in each case there is a split between a vestigial Gothic faith that the secrets of covert government can be unveiled through careful investigation and a dawning recognition that these secrets have become so large and pervasive that the powerful no longer need veils of mystery to carry out their appointed tasks. Despite very different surface aesthetics—deep shadows, alien hybrids, and lurking terrors on The X-Files; precise pencil lines on starkly white paper for Lombardi; bright desert vistas in Misrach—these three bodies of work are remarkably like-minded, committed to certain beliefs and habits of mind drawn from the Cold War past, but also cognizant of an emerging global order, one that would radically transform the nature of government secrecy during the War on Terror. As Paul Cantor has put it, The X-Files explores “the nightmare aspects of globalization.”73 One might say the same thing about Lombardi’s drawings and, in a different key, Misrach’s photographs. The show’s two protagonists, FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), are devoted to revealing secrets, driven by a characteristic faith that, as the famous motto for the series goes, “The Truth is Out There.” Allison Graham has compared them with Woodward and Bernstein.74 In the so-called “mythology” episodes, which form a single narrative arc spanning the entire run of the series, the pair plumb the depths of the Cold War military-industrial complex, unmasking a conspiracy to hide a planned alien colonization of earth. Organized by a cabal of scientists and State Department leaders known as the Shadow Syndicate—a group modeled on the apocryphal “Majestic Twelve” the Truman Administration is said to have convened to investigate evidence of alien visitations in the 1940s—the conspiracy includes human experimentation, assassinations, and secret diplomacy, all purportedly to defend the earth from the coming invasion. Its origins go back to 1947, the year that Truman signed the National Security Act, establishing the CIA and laying the legal foundations of the national security state; this was also the year that an alien craft is said to have crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. The conspiracy extends to the contemporary world of the series, evidence of its activities hidden in vaults, buried in the

86  The Genesis of the National Security Sublime deserts of the Southwest, under the ice and snow of the poles, and lodged in the bodies of surviving test subjects. Robert Markley has commented that the mythology arc proposes an entire “political history of America since Roswell.”75 These episodes reverse the conventional plot design of a Gothic novel: rather than using the supernatural to conceal a conspiracy, the government conspires to conceal evidence of the supernatural (or more precisely, the extraterrestrial). They carry much the same affective charge as their eighteenth-century models, however, joining a pervasive anxiety at the possibility of hidden truths to a concomitant drive for full disclosure.76 The pilot episode of the series provides the first evidence of this cover-up, drawing upon the familiar resources of the Cold War sublime to hint at its alarming size and scope.77 While investigating potential alien abductions in Oregon, Scully recovers an unidentifiable device from the nasal cavity of an apparent victim. At the end of the episode, she hands the device to her supervisor, who had tasked her with debunking Mulder’s work on paranormal phenomena. Scully tells him that she cannot identify the metal from which the device is made, suggesting that it may be of alien origin. In the next scene, we see the shadowy figure who will come to be known as the Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis) walking down the long aisle of a massive warehouse, tall shelves stacked with file boxes receding into the shadows. He pulls down a box labeled “Evidence” and puts the device into a plexiglass container that holds a number of other similar devices. Returning the box to the shelf, he continues his slow walk down the aisle until he exits a door marked with a diagram of the Pentagon’s emergency escape plan.

Figure 3.6 Still from The X-Files, created by Chris Carter. Twentieth Century Fox, 1993.

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  87 The national security sublime here signals the existence of a vast government conspiracy. The Cigarette Smoking Man, who was lurking silently in the room when Scully first met with her supervisor, and who will, later in the series, be revealed as the prime mover behind the government’s cover-up of alien life, deliberately conceals evidence from another government agency, placing the interests of national security (represented by the Pentagon) over those of a criminal investigation (the purview of the FBI). We do not know at this point how big the secret is, but the show’s evocation of the sublime indicates at a glance that it will be immense, comprising millions of pieces of evidence. The long aisle of shelves produces a sense of the artificial infinite, stoking fear and suspicion in the sublime glimpse it affords of a deeply concealed national security landscape. The image of the Pentagon warehouse marks the beginning of the perennially frustrated effort by Mulder and Scully to reveal the full truth about this conspiracy. The agents are tireless in their pursuit of evidence, but their quest also shows much the same post-Watergate gloominess about the abuse of government power that we find in films like The Parallax View. As Markley argues, the show oscillates uneasily between paranoia and cynicism.78 We are repeatedly presented with evidence of a massive conspiracy, signaled by the familiar tropes of spy thrillers from the Cold War era: secret military bases, shadowy informants lurking in dark parking lots, smoke-filled rooms, dubious congressional hearings, and, of course, warehouses full of incriminating records.79 Pratt describes the series as “a pastiche or parody of prior conspiracy thinking.”80 More than one episode includes a scene at the Watergate Hotel; Mulder’s first informant is nicknamed Deep Throat; and in “Little Green Men,” an episode from season two, Mulder recalls his sister being abducted from the family home by an alien ship while the Watergate hearings are playing on the living room television set. But the evidence the two agents collect always crumbles when exposed to light, leaving a cynical sense that the conspiracy will continue to operate in the face of every effort to disclose it. There is no epiphany, no unequivocally persuasive clue to demonstrate the reality of the secret: photographs are confiscated or turn out to be doctored; an alien corpse disappears in the night; a trusted source is assassinated by professional hit men; some compromised superior puts roadblocks in the way of the investigation. Whenever one of the pair witnesses a dramatic revelation, the other is absent or unconscious, leaving the veracity of the observation in doubt.81 The many sublime moments in the mythology arc conform to just this pattern, providing a glimpse into the heart of the conspiracy that inevitably falls short of full disclosure. The privileged viewer (typically Mulder) comes tantalizingly close to the truth, all the proliferating pieces of evidence seem to shimmer with a long-awaited coherence, yet the elevated awareness proves elusive. In other cases, as in the pilot episode, another character has a sublime experience that the agents miss, rendering them

88  The Genesis of the National Security Sublime second-hand observers of the secreted truth—suspicious but incapable of overcoming the obstacles barring disclosure. Reduced to a conventional sign of revelation, the sublime in the series fails to produce its promised transcendence. Mulder and Scully come away from their sublime experiences with little more than the renewed conviction that the alien conspiracy exists, their paranoia reinforced and a looming cynicism about the possibility of full disclosure unassuaged. Conspiracy itself is the sublime open secret of the series, a grounding condition of the plot as much as an activity carried out by the Syndicate. The X-Files draws freely in these scenes on the traditional representational resources of the sublime, from its Romantic heyday to its dramatic return during the Cold War, and takes in both its dynamic and mathematical forms. Consider just a few of the many recurring sites for the national security sublime in the series, which constitute a relatively complete topography of the mode.82 Mountains As in Wordsworth’s poetry or Friedrich’s painting, mountains are frequent sites for the privileged view—a view inevitably spoiled in the series by bad timing or dashed hopes. The agents become modern avatars of the ancient general Philip of Macedon, who, in the historian Livy’s telling, ascended Mount Haemus in Thrace in search of a strategic advantage in his war against Rome—as well as the pleasures of a dramatic view—only to find the top enshrouded in fog, his hopes dashed and his troops exhausted.83 In “Ascension,” a pivotal episode from season two, for example, Mulder tracks a psychopathic mental hospital escapee named Duane Barry (Steve Railsback), who has abducted Scully, to the fictional Skyland Mountain in Virginia. Commandeering a gondola, Mulder ascends to the misty peak of the mountain, and, in a moment that recalls Thornhill’s perilous escape on Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest, nearly falls to his death when Alex Krycek (Nicholas Lea), an agent secretly in the employ of the Cigarette Smoking Man, sabotages the controls. When he finally reaches the top, Scully has vanished, apparently into an alien ship, and the elevated awareness falls to Barry, whom Mulder finds standing rapt at the abduction site. Sublime mountains are also a frequent site for the discovery of alien bodies and artifacts. In the fourth-season finale, “Gethsemane,” Mulder treks to the top of a snow-capped peak in the Saint Elias Mountains in Canada, where explorers have discovered a frozen alien corpse. With the help of scientists from the team, he brings the corpse back to Washington, DC, and witnesses an autopsy that seems to prove the existence of alien life—along with the conspiracy to conceal it. A  Defense Department informant later tells Mulder that his surmise was wrong: government scientists had carefully constructed the alien to throw him off the scent of the real conspiracy, one involving experimental military

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  89 programs. When Mulder goes in search of the corpse, it is gone, leaving him unable to confirm either the discovery or the conspiracy theory. The sublime here reveals deception, not truth. The two-part final episode of the original run of the series, “The Truth,” which first aired in May of 2002, takes Mulder to the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center in the Blue Ridge range in Virginia, the designated site for the relocation of high-level government officials in the event of an extreme national security crisis. Mulder accesses top-secret documents at the center that suggest the alien invasion is underway—the culmination of the grand conspiracy—though the episode concludes ambiguously. Wastelands As in so many Romantic narratives of exploration, The X-Files also takes its intrepid protagonists to sublime wastelands, overwhelming for their stark emptiness as much as for the secrets they conceal. In “Endgame,” from season two, Mulder tracks a disabled submarine, which seems to have encountered a downed alien spacecraft, to the Arctic Circle, a scenario that, as Jason Vest has shown, alludes in many details to the frame narrative of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.84 Mulder travels to Antarctica in the first X-Files movie, Fight the Future (1998), which continues the mythology arc, in search of the comatose Scully, whom the Syndicate has abducted. Trudging through vast fields of snow and ice when his snowcat breaks down, he comes across a massive hidden research station: a giant alien spacecraft housing frozen extraterrestrial and human test subjects deep beneath the earth. Mulder peers at the station from atop a craggy hill, making literal the elevated awareness he believes awaits him inside.85 But he damages the station while rescuing his partner, and when the spacecraft emerges from the ice to escape the chain reaction he set off, it destroys all remaining evidence of the conspiracy. Scully is still unconscious during the ship’s spectacular escape, leaving Mulder without another set of eyes to confirm his sublime vision. In other episodes, like “Anasazi,” the season-two finale, the sublime secrets are hidden in the deserts of the Southwest, home to so many Cold War military research projects, as Misrach’s photographs make plain. A Native American resident of the area leads Mulder to a train car buried in a forbidding rocky canyon containing the corpses of scores of medical test subjects. He nearly dies when the Cigarette Smoking Man orders a soldier to burn the bodies with the agent still inside the car. Fight the Future begins with a group of children stumbling upon a cache of what comes to be called the “black oil,” an alien infectious agent, in a sublimely vast Texas landscape; when the agents arrive to investigate, the site has been replaced by a hastily constructed playground. In “Apocrypha,” from season three, Mulder and Scully find themselves in a Cold War nuclear wasteland: a field of abandoned missile silos in the barren plains

90  The Genesis of the National Security Sublime

Figure 3.7 Still from The X-Files: Fight the Future, directed by Rob Bowman. Twentieth Century Fox, 1998.

of North Dakota, where they have tracked Krycek, who leads them to an underground complex made up of endless hallways that recede into shadowy darkness. An alien spacecraft—the evidence the agents truly need—sits inside a silo behind a locked door they fail to discover. Warehouses No post-Cold War depiction of the national security sublime is complete without a warehouse and, true to form, these spaces play a central role in The X-Files, where they inevitably contain, as in the pilot episode, fleeting evidence of conspiratorial government secrets—the covert as the mathematically sublime. Perhaps the signal example is the warehouse that figures in the first-season finale, “The Erlenmeyer Flask.” Mulder gains access to a storage facility in which a murdered doctor had been performing experiments with alien viruses, and finds rows of bodies suspended in large tanks, a scene that recalls the waterside warehouse Matthew Bennell discovers in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Whereas Bennell’s discovery confirms (albeit fruitlessly for him) the truth of alien colonization, Mulder’s proves more fragile: when he returns later with Scully, the entire set-up is gone. In “Paper Clip,” the second episode of the third season, the sublime moment occurs in the bowels of an abandoned West Virginia coal mine, a reminder of lost Cold War-era industrial glory. The episode is the culmination of a three-part arc concerning medical experiments undertaken by doctors from Nazi Germany and

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  91 Imperial Japan, protected from prosecution under an actual secret program called Operation Paperclip. The two agents discover a vast underground tunnel filled, as far as the eye can see, with the medical records of everyone who received a smallpox vaccine in childhood, the artificial infinite here indicating, as in the pilot episode, the existence of a massive conspiracy touching nearly the entire American public. Before Mulder and Scully can carefully inspect the records, however, a black-ops team storms the building, forcing them to retreat. A gigantic airplane hangar plays the role of secret warehouse in the sixth-season episode “One Son,” where the members of the Syndicate gather, first in 1973, and then again in the diegetic present, to negotiate with the alien invaders. Mulder and Scully are not privy to these scenes, however, and the only evidence of the meeting is the charred remains of the conspirators, who were killed by a faction of rebel aliens. As with the shelves of evidence in the series pilot, the agents witness the sublime at second hand, and are left without evidence they can use.86 * * * * As we have seen, the sublime images of test sites in Misrach’s photographs, of global conspiracies in Lombardi’s drawings, and of alien invasions in the mythology arc of The X-Files betray an impasse characteristic of the Echelon Moment. All of them embody an earnest postWatergate commitment to the disclosure of truth, a commitment that finds its origin in the Gothic vision of government secrecy that defined the Cold War sublime. Misrach, Lombardi, and their FBI counterparts are driven by the familiar conviction that nefarious forces are actively concealing the truth. The sublime reflects a profound faith in the possibility that all the shattered pieces of this truth can be drawn together in a single, apocalyptic moment of revelation. But their faith is never rewarded: the conspiracy is too big, too embedded in powerful bureaucracies, too global in scope to be explained in conventional terms. The underlying Gothic optimism of the Cold War sublime turns like spoiled milk, but it prophetically sets the stage for a new configuration of the sublime in the years after the 9/11 attacks, when, as we shall see in Chapters  4 and 5, the open secret of covert government becomes so evident that it begins to replace the older conspiratorial imaginary that dominates the national security sublime during the Cold War and the Echelon Moment. There is a powerful intimation of this change built into the narrative structure of many X-Files episodes. In all of their sublime encounters with secret government, Mulder and Scully embody the logic of secretum. Members of the national security apparatus, they nevertheless play the role of outsiders, separated from the truth by rival forces within

92  The Genesis of the National Security Sublime the apparatus that want to keep it to themselves. The audience roots for the agents from precisely this position, identifying with their outsider status—a status that mirrors its own relationship to government secrecy. But we always know more than Mulder and Scully do. The typical X-Files episode begins with an objective depiction of precisely the evidence that the agents seek. The audience witnesses the abduction, the meeting of conspirators, the massive warehouse, the nefarious experiment, while the agents find themselves one step behind, separated by space or time from the crucial secret and desperately trying to piece together the evidence we already possess. Perhaps the best example of this narrative dynamic comes in “Nisei,” from season three. The pretitle sequence of the episode depicts, from an objective perspective, an alien autopsy conducted in a mysterious train car in a Tennessee rail yard. A  black-ops team storms the car, killing all of the researchers and packing the alien corpse in a body bag. The next scene begins with Mulder watching a grainy surveillance video of the autopsy, which he purchased from a dealer in conspiracy materials who advertised it in the back of a magazine. The video ends just as the black-ops team enters the car, persuading Mulder that the scene is authentic and sending him on a mission to discover the truth. In the next episode, “731,” Mulder finds the tell-tale train car—at the same time as an NSA operative, who tries to kill him—but it has been rigged with a bomb that destroys all the evidence. The narrative structure of these two episodes, and others like them, contrasts strikingly with the more conventionally Gothic plots of the Cold War sublime, where the audience discovers the hidden truth along with the protagonist. We only learn the nature of the conspiracy at the very end of a film like North by Northwest or The Parallax View, much as in Ann Radcliffe’s most famous novels, which always conclude with the narrator or her proxy laying out a detailed explanation for all the terrifying mysteries reader and protagonist alike encountered along the way. The audience for The X-Files typically knows the truth that Mulder and Scully struggle to uncover from the start. We watch the agents unearth what we have already witnessed, overcoming false leads or interference from their myriad nemeses. The spectacle produces a curiously split subjectivity, which knows (from the objective perspective of the audience) and does not know (from the limited perspective of the agents) at the same time. Viewers undergo an experience that mimics the structure of the public secret: a sublime glimpse of the secreted reality of the national security state that remains, for us as for Mulder and Scully, epistemologically inert. The truth is indeed out there, but no one in the diegetic frame of the show can fully grasp it; we cannot share what we know with the agents, and they cannot act on our behalf. Revealed and concealed at once, government secrecy is both available and inoperative—hidden in plain sight.

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  93

Notes   1. See Eva Horn, “Logics of Political Secrecy,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011): 103–22.   2. John Beck, Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 6.   3. Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3.   4. See Theodore Ziolkowski, The Lure of the Arcane: The Literature of Cult and Conspiracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 11–17.   5. On the sublimity of the atomic bomb, see David E. Nye, The American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 225–56.   6. Philip L. Cantelon, Richard G. Hewlett, and Robert C. Williams, eds., The American Atom: A Documentary History of Nuclear Politics from the Discovery of Fission to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 56–57.  7. North by Northwest, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2010), DVD.  8. Ray Pratt, Projecting Paranoia: Conspiratorial Visions in American Film (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 9.  9. The Parallax View, directed by Alan J. Pakula (Burbank: Warner Home Video, 1999), DVD. 10. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Philip Kaufman (Beverly Hills: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2012), DVD. 11. Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 9 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–2015), 1:231. 12. Ibid., 294. 13. Ibid., 244. 14. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Perennial, 1966), 24. 15. All the President’s Men, directed by Alan J. Pakula (Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2006), DVD. 16. Burke, Writings and Speeches, 241. 17. Cantelon, ed., The American Atom, 55. 18. Ibid., 55. 19. Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347–60. 20. This feeling constitutes an example of what Melley calls “agency panic,” the overriding sense that one’s life is under the control of powerful external forces. See Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 12; and, on the function of agency panic in DeLillo’s Libra, 133–59. 21. DeLillo, Libra, 260. 22. Ibid., 181, 300. 23. Ibid., 442. 24. Ibid., 15, 442. 25. Lester Friedman notes that, in his final line in the film, Jones refers to the Army Intelligence agents who take control of the Ark as “Bureaucratic fools,” suggesting a critique of governmental incompetence. Lester D. Friedman, Citizen Spielberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 115. 26. Joseph Masco, The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 34. 27. Pynchon, Crying of Lot 49, 95. 28. Ibid., 171.

94  The Genesis of the National Security Sublime 29. DeLillo, Libra, 21–22. 30. Ibid., 41. 31. Ibid., 283. 32. Ibid., 321. 33. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 189. 34. On the NSA’s fears about new threats and technologies, see Patrick Radden Keefe, Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping (New York: Random House, 2005), 109–15. The challenge of strong encryption was the topic of one of the earliest popular culture depictions of the NSA, the 1992 film Sneakers, which features Robert Redford as a private security specialist hired by criminal operatives posing as NSA agents to steal a “black box” capable of breaking any code. The mathematician who created the box describes the challenge he faced in the familiar language of the sublime: “The numbers are so unbelievably big that all the computers in the world could not break them down.” Sneakers, directed by Phil Alden Robinson (Universal City: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2003), DVD. 35. Enemy of the State, directed by Tony Scott (Burbank: Touchstone Home Entertainment, 1999), DVD. 36. Nicky Hager, Secret Power (Nelson, New Zealand: Craig Potton, 1996), 37. 37. James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 309. 38. Ibid., 101–2. 39. Duncan Campbell, “Inside Echelon: The History, Structure, and Function of the Global Surveillance System Known as Echelon,” in CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 160. 40. Hager, Secret Power, 56. 41. The name Echelon originally referred to a computer system that allowed the NSA to sift through the enormous mass of communications filtering through the network, and not to the broader network itself. See Keefe, Chatter, 117. 42. See Peter Galison, “Secrecy in Three Acts,” Social Research 77, no. 3 (2010): 941–74. 43. James Bamford, The Shadow Factory (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 161. 44. John Beck and Ryan Bishop, “Introduction,” in Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics, ed. John Beck and Ryan Bishop (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 11. 45. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 144. 46. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 458. On the sublime ascent in Romanticism, see Cian Duffy, Landscapes of the Sublime, 1700– 1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 28–67. 47. Wordsworth, The Prelude, 458. 48. Ibid., 460. 49. Ibid., 462. 50. Ibid., 460–62. 51. Richard Misrach, Violent Legacies: Three Cantos (New York: Aperture, 1992), 86. 52. Rebecca Solnit, “Scapeland,” in Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach, ed. Anne Wilkes Tucker (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1996), 46. Max Kozloff compares the images in Bravo 20 to Roger Fenton’s famous Crimean War image The Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855), which depicts a depression littered with canon balls. “Ghastly News from Epic Landscapes,” American Art 5, nos. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 1991): 131.

The Genesis of the National Security Sublime  95 53. On the works of this group, see Lars Nowak, “Traces of Traces,” Places Journal, June 2017, https://doi.org/10.22269/170613, accessed 23 August 2018. 54. Misrach, Violent Legacies, 90. 55. Richard Misrach and Myriam Weisang Misrach, Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), xiii. 56. “The Divine Comedy,” Solnit writes, apropos of Misrach, “is among other things a great landscape poem” (Solnit, “Scapeland,” 52). 57. Misrach, Bravo 20, xiii. 58. Ibid., xiv. 59. Ibid. 60. Misrach, Violent Legacies, 86. 61. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 138. 62. Charles Baudelaire, “Les Sept vieillards,” in Œuvres complètes, 2 vols., ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 1:87; my translation. 63. Ibid., 88. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Tan Lin, “Following the Money,” Art in America, November 2003, 143. 67. Robert Hobbs, Mark Lombardi: Global Networks (New York: Independent Curators International, 2003), 11. Hobbs traces Lombardi’s researchedbased practice to the work of Hans Haacke from the 1970s, who revealed the shady ties linking museum board members with slum lords (12). Lombardi’s influence can be seen in the recent work of artists and activists like Josh On and the French collective Bureau d’études, who likewise seek to visualize conspiracies and corruption. See Jakub Zdebik “Networks of Corruption: The Aesthetics of Mark Lombardi’s Relational Diagrams,” Revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review 36, no. 2 (2011): 66–77. 68. Hobbs, Global Networks, 12–15, 20–23. 69. Deven Golden, “Mark Lombardi,” BOMB 85 (Fall 2003): 102. 70. Patricia Goldstone, Interlock: Art, Conspiracy, and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2015), 171. A selection of Lombardi’s note cards can be seen in Mark Lombardi, 100 Notes 100 Thoughts, Documenta Series 071 (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2012). 71. See Alexander Nazaryan, “Mark Lombardi’s Art Was Full of Conspiracies— Now His Death Has Become One,” Newsweek Online, 16 October 2015, www. newsweek.com/2015/10/16/contemporary-artist-mark-lombardi-death379532.html, accessed 29 October 2017. 72. Quoted in Goldstone, Interlock, 263. 73. Paul A. Cantor, “The Truth Is Still Out There: The X-Files and 9/11,” in Homer Simpson Marches on Washington: Dissent Through American Popular Culture, ed. Timothy M. Dale and Joseph J. Foy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 80. On images of globalization in the series, see also Katherine Kinney, “The X-Files and the Borders of the Post-Cold War World,” Journal of Film and Video 53, no. 4 (2001): 54–71. 74. Allison Graham, “ ‘Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?’: Conspiracy Theory and The X-Files,” in “Deny All Knowledge”: Reading the X-Files, ed. David Lavery, Angela Hague, and Marla Cartwright (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 59. Graham notes that Carter has described the Watergate scandal as the decisive political event of his youth. 75. Robert Markley, “Alien Assassinations: The X-Files and the Paranoid Structure of History,” Camera Obscura 14, nos. 1–2 (1997): 82. 76. In season five of the series, Mulder reverts to a more familiar Gothic interpretation of the conspiracy, claiming that all the evidence of alien visitations he has amassed was in fact planted to divert the American public from the secret Cold War crimes of the military. He regains his belief in the alien conspiracy in season six.

96  The Genesis of the National Security Sublime 77. “Pilot,” in The X-Files: The Complete Collector’s Edition, created by Chris Carter (Beverly Hills: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007), DVD. 78. Markley, “Alien Assassinations,” 77. 79. The fourth-season episode, “Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man” plays on all of these tropes, placing the titular protagonist, through a series of flashbacks, at every conspiratorial hotspot in recent American history. In one flashback, he is reading Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate, and in another he discusses rigging the Academy Awards. On the show’s ironic relationship to the American tradition of conspiracy theories, see Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X Files (London: Routledge, 2000), 218–25. 80. Pratt, Projecting Paranoia, 230. 81. Mark Fenster points out that the show’s serial structure also militates against closure; the agents come to recognize that a conspiracy exists, but can never bring its existence into the open, lest the series lose its paranoid allure. Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 132–38. 82. The only obvious missing location from the canon of the sublime is the city street, a location which, as we shall see in the next chapter, has a specific relationship with themes of surveillance that come to the fore in the years after the 9/11 attacks. 83. Livy, History of Rome, 14 vol., trans. J. C. Yardley and others (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017–18), 11:452–53; 40.22. 84. Jason P. Vest, “The Truth Is Back There: The X-Files and Early Science Fiction,” in The X-Files and Literature, ed. Sharon R. Yang (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), 106–29. 85. The X-Files: Fight the Future, directed by Rob Bowman (Century City: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2001), DVD. As if to remind viewers about its relationship to the Cold War sublime, the film alludes to a famous scene in North by Northwest, when Mulder and Scully try to escape two black helicopters pursuing them by hiding in a cornfield. 86. Mulder finds the elusive Pentagon warehouse in the opening episode of the fifth season, “Redux I,” though he is there in search of a cure for Scully’s cancer, and has no time to plumb its many secrets. The vial of fluid he takes from the warehouse in the hopes that it contains a cure turns out to be plain water, leaving him frustrated rather than informed.

4 The Sublime Under the War on Terror

Everyday Mysteries The national security sublime began in the early days of the Cold War, shaped by the fear of foreign espionage and by the scattered leaks and revelations that defined the characteristic paranoia of the period. Its three core elements—the privileged view, the mysterious proliferation, and the elevated awareness—all circled around the recognition of conspiracies, whether foreign or domestic, tying the mode closely to its Gothic heritage. Works from the Echelon Moment reflected the new global focus and not-so-secret operations of the national security state in the 1990s. These works remain transfixed by covert operations and government conspiracies, but they are also marked by a particular irresolution and uncertainty. Exposure will not change the networks of power Mark Lombardi diagrams, and it never brings justice to the victims of medical experiments conducted by the Shadow Syndicate on The X-Files. It was only shortly after the 9/11 attacks that we began to learn about the secretive national security actions of the Bush Administration, from covert prisons run by the CIA to the vastly expanded NSA surveillance programs. These actions, along with the slow drip of terror warnings by the Department of Homeland Security, and false claims about Iraqi weapons systems coming from the military and the CIA, opened the warehouse doors on what seemed to be a whole new era. The national security sublime changed again as a result. Led by a group of contemporary artists interested in questions of security, surveillance, and government secrecy, the mode became a way of exploring everyday mysteries—the public secrets of the War on Terror—rather than deeply hidden conspiracies. The Gothic heritage faded into the background, to be replaced more explicitly by the influence of the Romantic sublime As David Holloway has pointed out, the assertion that 9/11 marked a radical historical break has been used to justify some of the worst excesses of the War on Terror.1 We need to be careful to note continuities as well as distinctions in the evolution of the national security state. The agencies are largely the same (though reorganized now under the umbrella of

98  The Sublime Under the War on Terror the DHS), and the two ontologies of secrecy Peter Galison identifies have their roots in the same authorizing laws and court decisions. Still, the unfolding of a putatively eternal War on Terror throws certain characteristics of the two ontologies, and the changing aims of intelligence work they embody, into sharp relief. This is a fact that artists, writers, and filmmakers have not failed to notice. With an eye firmly, if often obliquely, fixed on the Romantic and Cold War versions of the sublime, they turned their collective gaze toward a very different landscape, one that seemed closer in shape and spirit to the world described by William Wordsworth than Ann Radcliffe. This turn from Gothic to Romantic influences had an important impact on the imagery of the national security sublime in the period. Thomas Weiskel distinguishes between what he calls, after Roman Jakobson’s canonical structuralist opposition, the metaphorical and the metonymical sublime, which, we might suggest, constitute two basic representational logics for rendering an encounter with the inscrutable. Although they might be associated with the dynamically and the mathematically sublime, respectively, these two logics concern methods for resolving cognitive breakdown rather than distinct orders of imagery. The metaphorical sublime resolves the breakdown through substitution, finding meaning in the very lack of certainty; the recalcitrant secret becomes a figure for significance as such.2 This is the approach of Beryl Parmenter in Don DeLillo’s Libra, who, when confronted by the sublime spectacle of the CIA, figures state secrecy in terms of divine mystery; or of The X-Files, which figures it in terms of an alien conspiracy. The metonymical sublime, by contrast, eschews metaphorical totality for a string of displacements, turning the encounter with mystery into proliferating images of spatial or temporal contiguity. It works by addition and subtraction rather than by substitution, warding off cognitive breakdown through what Weiskel terms a “saving continuity.”3 Meaning is not absent but ubiquitous, like the papers that pile up in Nicholas Branch’s small office, or the multiplying nodes in Lombardi’s diagrams of global networks. Jean-François Lyotard echoes Weiskel’s two logics with his influential distinction between the modernist and postmodernist sublime. Lyotard associates the representational logic Weiskel calls metaphorical with the sublime of high modernism, such as the massive monochromatic canvases of Abstract Expressionists like Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, which strive to “present the fact that the unpresentable exists.”4 The artists have an idea of totality for which they cannot find an adequate illustration: it proves too large and too amorphous to be reduced to a single image or example. The idea, for the sublime, is thus “unpresentable.” These canvases embody a sense of nostalgia for lost totality, making the transcendence of representation their very subject. The metonymical sublime is suggested in Lyotard’s account of the depthless stylistic selfconsciousness of postmodernism, which “puts forward the unpresentable

The Sublime Under the War on Terror  99 in presentation itself,” ranging over the formal history of artistic techniques to produce works marked by dizzying juxtapositions that deny singular meanings.5 Art here gives up the quest for totality in its attention to proliferating surfaces and allusions. The three historical variations on the national security sublime that I have distinguished all arguably fall within the stylistic and chronological scope of postmodernism, yet in a rough but suggestive sense each gravitates toward one of the two representational poles Weiskel and Lyotard describe.6 The Cold War sublime tends to imagine the national security state through substitutions, figuring the overwhelming glimpse of state secrecy in terms of divine mystery and deep conspiracies. Following the legacy of Gothic novels and their stylistic progeny, it seeks the meaning of proliferating secrets in a hidden totality, like a quasi-divine CIA, a global plot, or the massive warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, whose ultimate inaccessibility it sorely laments. Jodi Dean finds a similar metaphorical substitution in narratives of alien abduction, where the sublime possibility of contact with a superior species serves to conceptualize “our passivity in the face of increasing complexities” characterizing the modern democratic polis.7 During the Echelon Moment, the Gothic legacy still serves as a beacon, informing Richard Misrach’s images of violent destruction and Lombardi’s pictures of global networks of influence. It similarly drives fictional figures like Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. But in all of these cases, the conspiratorial imaginary begins to curdle; the desired substitution does not function as it once did. Faced with global conspiracies that operate with impunity or in the absence of a singular directing hand, or perpetually frustrated by sublime revelations that never quite arrive, these figures find themselves at the conceptual limits of the Gothic paradigm. Peering into the abyss, they glimpse a world defined by public secrets rather than hidden plots, but fail fully to incorporate this world into their thinking about covert government. Mountains and frozen wastelands are important sites of the sublime secret in The X-Files, but conceptually they are just warehouses without walls, sites where the show’s protagonists are confirmed in their belief about the existence of a conspiracy, but denied the satisfaction of full disclosure. As we shall see, the sublime under the War on Terror gives up the desire for totality and coherent explanations and focuses instead on making sense of the immanent physical presence and technological underpinnings of the national security state—metonymy rather than metaphor. Instead of Gothic conspiracies, it looks to the open secrets described by the Romantic sublime, finding the reality of the secret state everywhere, from the street corner security camera to the spy satellite streaking across the night sky and the military installation hidden in plain sight in the desert. Relenting in the quest for a lost totality, the national security sublime during the War on Terror puts forward multiplicities. It finds

100  The Sublime Under the War on Terror the existence of state secrecy in familiar spaces and places—the everyday realm in which public secrets live and breathe—and not in some mysterious beyond: a sublime focused on surface rather than depth, the physical and contiguous rather than the invisible and ineffable. In Clare Birchall’s words, recent artists show that secrecy “has a materiality, leaving traces that can consequently become the focus of artistic practice.”8 The critical power of the contemporary national security sublime lies in this: bringing viewers face-to-face with the mysteries that cling to the obvious. Effectively autonomous in their everyday operations, the secrets of the national security state are ever-present, but nevertheless feel just beyond the reach of the interested observer. The artists, writers, filmmakers, and showrunners I discuss do not purport to reveal the content of those secrets, to lift the veil concealing the true mysteries of state once and for all. Public secrets do not work that way. Rather, they explore the curious circulation of national security secrets in and through the non-classified world, bringing out the look and feel of government secrecy. Public secrets pass as perennial features of the political landscape, things we would never question, like the continuing existence of a mountain or a river. The key recent avatars of the national security sublime, true to the mode’s roots in Romantic landscape description, try to make those secrets recognizable as powerful secrets rather than matters of fact.

Mount Snowden [sic] The most influential purveyor of this new variety of sublime national security vistas is the artist Trevor Paglen. Paglen became interested in government secrecy while working on his PhD in geography, and began documenting the visual culture of the national security state in a number of related projects inspired by the response to 9/11. Paglen’s most significant and influential foray into the mode came in a photographic series focusing on remote military installations in the American West—the secreted infrastructure of the national security state. Conceived in 2003, the same year news of the Total Information Awareness program first broke, the series, entitled Limit Telephotography, is collected, along with another series of sublime images depicting the movement of spy satellites, The Other Night Sky (2008), in the book Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes (2010). The photographs try to capture the look of state secrecy. Paglen is hardly the first photographer to turn his lens on militarized landscapes—Misrach’s images are a notable antecedent—but he is distinct in his evocation of what Pamela Lee calls the “covert sublime.”9 His works press against the limits of Immanuel Kant’s “maximum,” the felt point beyond which imagination cannot proceed without cognitive breakdown. Paglen identifies this point in the play of light and vision, which mimics

The Sublime Under the War on Terror  101 the frustrated hermeneutic task of an observer faced with the extent of government secrets: “these photographs capture not only images of hidden places but also images of what it looks like when the physical properties of vision are pushed to their limit, and light itself collapses into a jumbled mess.”10 The “jumbled mess” is not a property of light itself, but a reflection of the mental effort necessary to discern the “hidden places” obscured in the photographs, and more pertinently, to place them within the comprehensive landscape of national security secrecy. The effect of Paglen’s photographs arises from their dynamically sublime materialization of extreme distance. The installations and satellites he captures are unremarkable; what stands out is the fact that we can see them at all. Because most government darks sites are located in remote locations and protected by miles of restricted terrain and airspace, they can only be viewed from far away, sometimes as much as forty miles, requiring special optical equipment, tools Paglen borrowed from astronomers. This equipment extends human vision—and by implication the purview of the privileged viewer—beyond its natural range, but it remains fully within the realm of the tangible. The buildings we see are material but literally shrouded by the space that separates the national security state from the citizen. The desert images look grainy and unfocused, more like a shimmering fata morgana than visual evidence of a physical structure. “In the blurry image,” Thomas Keenan writes of these photographs, “the distance itself is evident—perhaps more so than the subject.”11 The atmospheric distortions created by Paglen’s attempts to capture great distances frequently give the photographs the look of abstract paintings, though the effect here is quite different from the nostalgia for totality that Lyotard finds in the sublimity of an artist like Newman. Much the same thing is true of the satellite photographs, which use time-lapse techniques to capture the movement of covert objects across the night sky. The photographs do not lament the absence of the secret but explicitly present it, bringing what Paglen refers to as “the materiality of state secrecy” before our eyes, and documenting the way it “congeals into the land through strange dances of visibility and invisibility, absence and presence.”12 However distant the secrets may be from the viewer in the gallery, Paglen insists on their reality in physical space. They exist, he writes, “in plain view,” open secrets we can apprehend even if we do not comprehend them.13 The photographs make deep secrets shallow. There is little sense of just what purpose the dark sites or satellites serve, of who staffs them, or of what order of mysteries the great distances shelter. In place of revelations, the core expectation underlying a hermeneutics of secrecy, we find visual traces of secrets that are concrete and material— physically present rather than transcendent and ineffable—but still sublimely elusive.14 Paglen is clearly aware of the Romantic lineage that informs his work. In Invisible, he compares the blurriness of his images to “nineteenth-century

102  The Sublime Under the War on Terror

Figure 4.1 Trevor Paglen, Control Tower (Area 52); Tonopah Test Range, NV; Distance ~ 20 Miles; 11:55 am (2006). C-Print, 79.4 × 94.3  cm. Purchased with Funds from the Paul L. and Phyllis C. Wattis Fund, from the Permanent Collection of the Utah Museum of Fine Art. UMFA2008.34.2. Source: © Trevor Paglen. Courtesy of the Artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Altman Siegel, San Francisco.

landscape and spirit photography”; and in an interview from 2011, he acknowledges the influence of the aesthetics of the sublime.15 Consider Paglen’s attraction to mountainous landscapes, which here, as in the Romantic tradition, at once promise and withhold revelation. Paglen tells of the difficult ascents he endures in pursuit of his photographs, describing the struggle with raw nature that should result in an elevated awareness. In an essay from 2006 entitled “Cultural Geographies in Practice,” he narrates his ascent of a mountain overlooking the Tikaboo Valley in Nevada, home of the top secret Groom Lake Air Force base. Along with an activist named Lobo Solo, Paglen climbs Tikaboo Peak to gain a clearer view of the base. “The ascent is quite a hike,” he writes, “particularly if you’re not in very great shape. And if you’re carrying a full backpack, water, food, tent, sleeping bag and, in the case of Solo and I, dozens of pounds of optics, it’s even harder.”16 The ascent serves

The Sublime Under the War on Terror  103 quite literally as a means of gaining clarity and perspective, the optical equipment Paglen carries increasing the difficulty of the climb and at the same time securing its desired outcome. In Invisible, Paglen describes a road trip in the Nevada desert with another artist, Aaron Gach. Paglen and Gach set up camp in the Pahranagat Range, and, carrying “a bottle of whiskey and a video camera,” hike “for several hours through knee-high snow” to the top. “Upon reaching the summit,” he continues, “we looked west into the expansive ranges and valleys beyond the Nellis Range’s restricted borders,” eventually discerning “two small points of light” in the distance that come from Groom Lake.17 Elsewhere he tells of “long expeditions into some of the remotest regions of the desert,” to reach these elevated outlooks.18 Paglen’s descriptions of difficult ascents explicitly recall many similar scenes in Romantic poetry, albeit with the extra burden of video cameras and other optical equipment. Compare Wordsworth’s account of his climb up Mount Snowdon, which I discussed in Chapter 3. Much as Wordsworth and his companion set out before sunrise to climb a mountain they find enshrouded with a “dripping mist/Low-hung and thick” but pursue their journey undaunted, so Paglen and Gach trudge valiantly through the snow.19 And like Wordsworth’s ascent, or Misrach’s very similar ascent of Lone Rock in Bravo 20, Paglen’s climb up Mount Tikaboo reveals a mental and not just a physical landscape, serving as a figure for spiritual, political, and artistic clarity. Paglen draws a characteristically Romantic lesson from his vision, glimpsing the result of his quest—the hidden reality of the national security state—in two telltale lights glimmering in the distance, which recall the shining moon Wordsworth sees rising above the valley. But where Wordsworth has reached the culmination of his quest, Paglen only peeks through the warehouse doors: he gains a clearer view of the open secret of covert government, secrets we can freely apprehend but will likely never fully comprehend. Paglen draws on Romantic visual conventions for representing the sublime ascent throughout his work. Sometimes he depicts surveillance stations perched atop mountain peaks, or captures the movements of spy satellites in photographs where mountains loom in the foreground, as in Four Geostationary Satellites above the Sierra Nevada (2007) or Keyhole-Improved Crystal, from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite 186) (2008).20 More frequently, as in his pictures of the Groom Lake site, or in the luminous They Watch the Moon (2010), which depicts an Echelon listening station in rural West Virginia, the viewing angle demonstrates that the photographer, like Wordsworth or like Caspar David Friedrich’s famous wanderer, is positioned high above his subject, looking down with an elevated eye on the hidden workings of the national security state. The photograph of Lobo Solo that Paglen includes in his “Cultural Geographies” essay neatly reproduces the scene depicted in Friedrich’s

104  The Sublime Under the War on Terror

Figure 4.2 Trevor Paglen, KEYHOLE-IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite 186) (2008). Chromogenic print, 95.25 × 76.2  cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund Purchase. Source: © Trevor Paglen. Courtesy of the Artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Altman Siegel, San Francisco. Photograph: Don Ross.

canvas. Both show the climber from behind, gazing out at the hard-won prospect of the valley below, the sublime clarity gained by difficulty overcome. The mist that Friedrich’s wanderer observes reappears in Paglen’s emphasis on the effects of atmospheric distortion. What the sublime gives is not simply the things in the valley—whether natural objects or military

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Figure 4.3  Trevor Paglen, Untitled and undated photograph of Lobo Solo. Source: © Trevor Paglen. Courtesy of the Artist.

bases—but the visionary moment itself, the ability of human reason to recognize and appreciate the vast extent of what it does not know. Yet while Paglen’s references to the Romantic sublime evoke the ideal of spiritual elevation so central to the mode, they remain ambivalent. Lobo Solo is looking through binoculars and surrounded by photographic equipment, for example, belying the purity of vision in Friedrich’s canvas. And while Wordsworth’s “immense” moon lights up the physical and spiritual landscape, the two small beacons Paglen observes do little more than signal further mysteries. Physical elevation does not lead to full illumination, as might seem possible to the dogged conspiracy theorist—just to the prospect of more crates on more classified shelves. Paglen shows us the peak of Mount Snowden, not Mount Snowdon. In Romantic poetry, the visionary moment comes across as affect rather than as determinate insights, but the nature of the affect changes with the objects that excite it. Paglen uses the sublime to highlight public secrecy, not to realize the dream of full revelation. The distances he materializes remain emblems of our curious half-knowledge about the extent of state secrecy and the strange combination of placidity and frustration it entails. They evoke, but can never fulfill, the desire for transcendence that underlies the Cold War sublime. However much we lift ourselves above

106  The Sublime Under the War on Terror the desert installations, the secrets persist, glimmering in the distance like a beacon we can never quite reach—at least while relying on the familiar ways and means of knowing the world.

Depopulation Paglen’s fascination with desert landscapes, a key legacy of Misrach’s work, directs us to another meeting point of the discourse of the sublime and the national security state. The government has historically scattered its most secretive installations throughout the vast and empty spaces of the Intermountain West because these spaces are so deeply inhospitable.21 Secrets are all the more effectively concealed when there is no one around to find them. But the same vast and empty spaces that veil clandestine activity are also a source of the sublime: full of mysteries and apparently boundless in size, a great physical and mental challenge for the knowing subject.22 Although Paglen frequently casts his work as collaborative, the photographs themselves tend to be void of people, emphasizing the sublime emptiness of the covert landscape. The effect evokes what Frances Ferguson calls the “nuclear sublime,” a mode of reflection on nuclear annihilation that locates sublimity in the specter of future depopulation, not just in the awe-inspiring destructive power that so impresses observers like Farrell.23 The vision of depopulation might seem opposed to the mysterious proliferation that defined the sublime during the Cold War and the Echelon Moment, for in place of swarming secrets we see little more than emptiness. But the two orders of imagery are closely connected, giving material form to the two elements Edmund Burke associates with the feeling of sublime mystery: darkness (absence, emptiness) and infinity (boundlessness). The image of depopulation defines many works of the contemporary national security sublime, bringing out the way secretive government activities erase people from the landscape—figuratively and often literally— and using imagery borrowed from Romantic artists to grapple with the open secrets of the national security state. Consider Mishka Henner’s series Dutch Landscapes (2011). Henner paints over Google satellite images of classified sites in the Netherlands, substituting colorful patterns for the pixelated dots imposed by government censorship. Evoking the long tradition of Dutch landscape painting, these images frequently tend toward the picturesque rather than the sublime, foregrounding the neat grids and agricultural plots amidst which the government has chosen to locate classified sites.24 Henner’s designs effectively cover up the coverup, making the dark sites and secret spaces, as in Staphorst Ammunition Depot, Overijssel, stand out even more than other landscape features. The banality of the designs, which often ironically evoke the colors and shapes of military camouflage, creates a playful contrast with the deep seriousness of the secrets they cloak: mysteries stand cheek-by-jowl with everyday life.

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Figure 4.4 Mishka Henner, Staphorst Ammunition Depot, Overijssel  (2011), Archival pigment print, 153.7 × 170.5 cm. Source: © Mishka Henner. Courtesy of Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York.

Henner’s work alludes to David T. Hanson’s overhead photographs of nuclear missile silos in the American Midwest from the 1990s, as well as to Harun Farocki’s influential installation Eye/Machine (2000), which used footage from remotely guided bombs deployed during the Gulf War. Satellite images, as Laura Kurgan notes, are also an artifact of the national security state, a technology first deployed for espionage that came to serve civilian purposes. Now ubiquitous, such images were intended initially for secret military use, so although they seem to present an objective picture, the perspective comes laden with ties to covert government.25 The very same satellites that help us find our way home also helped Robert Dean’s NSA tormenters in Enemy of the State track their target through the streets of Washington, DC, and now help guide drones in search of terrorist subjects. Like Farocki, Henner brings out the underlying alliance of artistic and military image-making, an alliance that, as Paul Virilio has demonstrated, is nearly as old as cameras themselves.26

108  The Sublime Under the War on Terror Henner’s aim is to highlight the proximity of national security operations to everyday life in the Netherlands; in some images, the dark sites sit right next to civilian buildings. Nevertheless, the works still feel both vast and empty, not unlike Paglen’s desert landscapes. National security secrecy, both artists suggest, distorts the physical spaces of the homeland, figuratively interspersing forbidding desert landscapes amidst fields of tulips or urban blocks. They demonstrate that the sublime expanses in Paglen’s photographs are not just places, but ontological bubbles that alter the shape of everyday life around them. Henner effectively turns the homeland into a wasteland. The repeated geometrical lines marking off farm plots become so repetitive over the course of the series as to approach Burke’s “artificial infinite”; and the satellite images are taken from such great heights that people are simply too small to register, except insofar as their activities seem to mark the landscape. The literal and figurative elevation enabled by satellite technology is the very means by which people can be eliminated or conveniently ignored.27 Paglen and Henner identify the same goal of operational secrecy in very different sublime landscape depictions; the one marked by vast open spaces, the other by the interstitial distribution of secret spaces amidst everyday life. Like Henner, the data artist David Gurman uses the depopulating perspective of found satellite images to bring out the secreted violence of national security operations. In Tigris-Potomac IKONOS View (2007), for example, he juxtaposes satellite images of the Tigris and Potomac rivers (running through Baghdad and Washington, DC, respectively) so that they seem to be one body of water. The views evoke the imagery of targeting, in which the existence of people can only be inferred, or tallied in collateral damage estimates. The privileged view becomes both automated and militarized. Seen from this height, the two cities look eerily similar, underscoring the effect that decisions grounded on national security considerations have for the obscured populace. Gurman’s Baghdad Moon—EOS ASTER Satellite/Armstrong Hasselblad Diptych (2008) juxtaposes the famous historical image of astronaut Buzz Aldrin taken by Neil Armstrong—who is reflected, holding his camera, in Aldrin’s face shield—with a thermal satellite image of Baghdad on the morning after the first bombings of the city during “Operation Shock and Awe,” in March of 2003. As Gurman writes in his notes on the work, the image of Aldrin evokes the tradition of great explorers—Hillary on Mount Everest, Shackleton in the North Pole—who seek out spots so harsh they can never support continuous human life.28 The image of Baghdad, by contrast, depicts a spot made all but uninhabitable by the sublime display of American military power. The thermal imagery serves as a rough proxy for population density: the more people and human structures, the warmer the space. All of this is obscured in the picture by plumes of dark black smoke that provide evidence of violent and rapid depopulation. Like Henner and Paglen, Gurman finds a kind of insight, albeit

The Sublime Under the War on Terror  109 mutilated, in the experience of elevation, a new perspective, enabled by a mechanical rather than a human eye, that reveals the presence of secrets that can be recognized but never fully known. Romantic writers and artists were frequently drawn to empty and radically inhospitable landscapes: harsh deserts, forbidding mountain peaks, and, above all, the frozen wastelands of the north. Only recently subject to Western exploration, they became imaginary sites of sublime reflection. The British artist Neal White plays on this narrative context in his Overt Research Project (2009–10), which uses a combination of fieldwork and GPS technology to map secret spaces in the United Kingdom, creating a sort of sightseeing guide for the willing national security tourist. The homeland is turned into terra incognita—rife with dark places, a forbidding and exotic landscape in need of exploration, much as in Dutch Landscapes.29 In a similar way, Chloe Dewe Mathews’ book, In Search of Frankenstein—Mary Shelley’s Nightmare (2018), juxtaposes sublime photographs of Mont Blanc with shots taken inside the vast network of bunkers the Swiss government dug into the Alps to protect the population in the event of nuclear holocaust.30 Looming, snowy peaks contrast in the book with the artificial infinite of endless service tunnels and the banality of Spartan bedrooms and supplies piled in storerooms, capturing the entire spectrum of the national security sublime: a mode that here yokes the everyday to the apocalyptic, the greatest forces of nature to the longue durée of post-nuclear survival. Taking the example of exploration narratives more literally, the Canadian artist Charles Stankievech’s filmic installation from 2013, The Soniferous Æther of The Land Beyond The Land Beyond, looks back to the tradition of the arctic sublime, a frequent subject of literary and artistic representation in the nineteenth century, most famously evoked in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838)—and much more recently, as we saw in the last chapter, in the first X-Files film, Fight the Future (1998).31 Stankievech’s installation documents a recently declassified security service listening post in the Arctic Archipelago, Canadian Forces Station Alert, the northernmost permanently inhabited human outpost in the world, just a little more than 500 miles from the North Pole. CFS Alert was founded as a joint American and Canadian weather station in 1950, but its proximity to the Soviet Union—it is closer to Moscow than to Ottawa—made it useful for signals intelligence, and in 1958 it also became a listening station contributing to various global intelligence-sharing efforts starting in the 1960s. At the height of the Cold War, the station housed upwards of 200 personnel; while still in use, it is increasingly depopulated (there were roughly 50 people working there when Stankievech visited, though none of them appear in the film), since intelligence operations now rely more on remote and automated data collection than on intensive human

110  The Sublime Under the War on Terror observation. Working in crystal clear black and white, each scene a meticulously framed time-lapse photograph transferred to 35-millimeter film, the installation draws upon the ambiance of classic science-fiction film, as if the artist were encountering the abandoned ruins of some lost race.32 The shots are void of human inhabitants and seem to arrive from some indeterminate, even interstellar, past. As Carmen Victor puts it, the film “documents a catastrophe that has both already occurred and has yet to happen.”33 Recordings of signals intelligence gathered at the station, broken by static, and haunted by a treated loop from Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, comprise the soundtrack. CFS Alert takes its name from the history of arctic exploration. HMS Alert, a ship that served several missions to reach the North Pole in the nineteenth century, was trapped in ice not six miles from the station during the winter of 1875–76. There is a hint of the polar exploration narrative in Stankievech’s work. Early in the film, Stankievech provides an establishing shot of the sublime and snow-covered landscape around the station. Because the station is located so far north, it does not see the sun from October to February, and this landscape is surrounded by pitch darkness. Another establishing shot reveals a vast basin, with the lights of the station visible in the distance and rocky outcroppings in the foreground.34 The shots continue to move closer to the station, and in subsequent images we see evidence of human habitation: light poles, fences, an airfield, fuel storage tanks, outbuildings, an abandoned snowcat—but no people. The film then moves inside the installation. There are eerie shots of empty hallways, control panels, an abject bowling alley (with pins curiously akimbo, as if just hit by a ball), and a storage room with two forebodingly laden stretchers on the floor. Then we find ourselves outside again, surveying the snow-covered wreckage of a small airplane: an explanation, perhaps, for the lack of people, and a testament to the precarity of life in a sublimely harsh environment. The shots continue to move farther away from the station, and the installation ends with a view of the stars—a near-repetition of the first shot in the film—shrouded with an aurora, its veil-like diaphanousness hinting at still further mysteries. The Soniferous Æther turns Paglen’s desert vistas into a generalized sense of extreme spatial and temporal remoteness. The clarity of Stankie­ vech’s photographic technique reflects the very different atmosphere of the far north—which tends to reduce rather than expand the effect of distance—but it also underscores the fact that disclosing the secret world of the national security state will not bring us any closer to understanding it. The film resembles a detective story that ends where it begins, with a mysterious proliferation of clues but no final revelation. The secret is inaccessible because no one remains to tell the tale. The remoteness is filmic as well as physical, doubly distancing its subject through selfconsciously outdated genre cues, a technique we will encounter again in popular cultural versions of the national security sublime. Stankievech

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Figure 4.5 Charles Stankievech, The Soniferous Æther of The Land Beyond The Land Beyond, 35mm Film Installation with Dolby Sound (Film Still), 2013. Source: © and courtesy Charles Stankievech 2013.

had worked on the crews of science-fiction films before he became an artist, and as he notes in an interview, the genre “provides the language to look at what is in front of us with alien eyes.”35 Classic science fiction gives Stankievech a visual language for framing the militarization of the depopulated landscape. Stankievech has pointed to the influence of the twentieth-century Canadian artist Emily Carr, who was noted for her sublime modernist landscape paintings often dotted with First Nation artifacts.36 Typically devoid of living people, the paintings juxtapose wide-open spaces with the material remains of the communities increasingly forced out of those spaces by white settlers. Like Stankievech’s installation, they seem to represent a search for a lost population, victims of suppressed military actions. The 1930 canvas Vanquished depicts a series of broken and off-kilter totems against a background of soaring, jagged mountain peaks, with almost material beams of sunlight streaming through looming clouds. The title of the painting poses a mystery that it also implicitly answers: it is not the totems but the people that have been vanquished, the sublime depopulation a sign of prior violence. Stankievech imagines a similar mystery, playing on the theme of depopulation in Carr’s paintings. He made use of an automated camera to capture the scenes depicted in the film, exploring

112  The Sublime Under the War on Terror the extent to which a human artist—the very epitome of the privileged viewer—might not be necessary to the production of images, much as the Echelon network made human listeners all-but unnecessary to the work of intelligence gathering. The title of the film alludes to the motto of the Alert station, a translation of the Inuit description of the place: “the land beyond the land of the people.” Stankievech modifies the end of motto, removing “the people” from the title no less definitively than he does from the scenes depicted in the installation. As in Carr’s canvas, the violence is implicit, built into the station’s military function, and made evident only in the sublime spectacle of depopulation.

The Sublime Object of Surveillance The sublime depictions of harsh, distant, and depopulated landscapes in the work of Paglen, Henner, Gurman, and Stankievech draw upon what Kant, as I noted in Chapter 3, calls the dynamically sublime, which characterizes nature in terms of might, rousing a sense of fear and danger that the subject struggles to overcome. This connection underlies early observations of the atomic bomb, and Paglen, too, makes it explicit in his mountain climbing narratives, much as Stankievech does by enduring subzero temperatures to capture the otherworldly listening station. The military function of the sites these artists depict also evokes the power and danger of the secret state. In all of these cases, the privileged view achieved by the artist—a view that brings them to places few other people have seen—demands a struggle against a greater and potentially violent force. But recent artists also make use of the mathematically sublime, relocating Burke’s “artificial infinite” into the mind of the knowing subject. The vastness of the desert landscape has something of this effect, and as I noted in the last chapter, it also informs Lombardi’s depictions of conspiratorial networks. The mathematically sublime underlies another important tendency in contemporary representations of the secret state. Closely associated with the practice of surveillance art, it piles up views and images to represent the overwhelming variety of ways in which governments turn their eyes on modern citizens. Surveillance art was particularly influential in the 1990s, when the computer revolution and the rise of the Internet brought networked cameras and other forms of electronic tracking into everyday use. Shaped by the thinking of George Orwell and Michel Foucault, much of the most important work in this period focused on questions of privacy and identity, tracing the many effects of surveillance on the nature of the modern self.37 The War on Terror made the mode more explicitly political, and directed its attention to questions of citizenship rather than selfhood. This shift is reflected in the fascination of many recent surveillance artists with the proliferating material infrastructure of the national security state, which replaces the all-seeing eye of Big Brother or the panoptic gaze

The Sublime Under the War on Terror  113 Foucault traced to the work of Jeremy Bentham with myriad autonomous devices that passively collect information. They notice the small and multitudinous rather than the singular and foreboding: Argus instead of the Cyclops. Defined by their sheer ubiquity rather than by their remoteness or inaccessibility, these devices comprise the everyday interfaces of life under the national security state: security cameras, dome mirrors, facial recognition scanners, motion sensors, and closed-circuit monitors, along with the grainy, pixelated, or schematic images they deliver. The mysterious proliferation of the Cold War sublime here becomes all proliferation and little genuine mystery. Many artists work to make these objects stand out in the cityscape, reminding viewers that they are surrounded by mechanical eyes and ears. In System Azure Security Ornamentation (2002), for instance, Jill Magid encrusted the security cameras at the Amsterdam Police Headquarters with rhinestones, turning the machinery of surveillance into an aesthetic object to be looked at and admired, not just noted with trepidation, if seen at all. Antonia Hirsch’s Double Blind installation (2008) placed dome mirrors over the façade of a building on the campus of a Vancouver, BC, community college, ironically evoking the raised dots of braille, and hinting at the crossing of blindness and insight that shapes national security surveillance. James Coupe and Zach Blas, building on the example of works like Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Dollie Clone Series (1995–98), incorporate the material technologies of national security surveillance— cameras, monitors, biometric sensors—into their works and installations. For his Face Cages project (2013–16), Blas turned the diagrammatic lines that biometric facial recognition programs use to map the human face into heavy metallic masks that evoke torture devices, making the digital physical, and the ineffable alarmingly material. Surveillance art is very much of an urban genre, for it is primarily large cities that, so far, have installed extensive security networks, and as such it frequently evokes the urban sublime of the nineteenth century. Writers like Wordsworth, Poe, Charles Dickens, and Charles Baudelaire all describe the, by turns, terrifying and exhilarating experience of wandering through the city streets surrounded by a crowd: a sublime landscape transposed to urban surroundings. As Thomas De Quincey succinctly puts it: “To be hidden amidst crowds is sublime.”38 A great part of the pleasure of these experiences comes from the opportunities for participatory surveillance. Feeling largely anonymous, the writer can follow strangers at will, speculate on their interior lives, peer into the illuminated windows of houses on the roadside, and vanish into a side street to take in the passing river of humanity. All too often in nineteenth-century writing, this quest ends, as we saw for Baudelaire in Chapter 3, with a frustrated repudiation of the kind of insight Wordsworth achieves on Mount Snowdon: overwhelmed with mysteries, writers rhetorically throw up their hands, admitting failure. “There

114  The Sublime Under the War on Terror are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told,” writes Poe in “The Man of the Crowd” (1840).39 Wordsworth describes the sublime profusion of the city by reference to one of the same features the state will use (as Blas reminds us) to anchor identity: the face. “The comers and the goers face to face/face after face,” he writes of the London crowds in Book Seven of the Prelude.40 With the substitution of a single preposition, Paul’s signal metaphor for divine revelation, and, as I noted in Chapter 1, the theological underpinning for the modern rhetoric of transparency—seeing “face to face” rather than “in a glass darkly”—becomes a resonant image of sublimely incomprehensible urban proliferation. As with the natural sublime, the urban sublime entails a double movement of disclosure and concealment. The city provides endless potential revelations in the faces of the passersby; but the mysteries come so fast that the walker cannot begin to grasp them all. Baudelaire’s speaker in “Les Sept vieillards,” as we saw in Chapter 2, describes his brain “dancing, dancing, an old barge without a mast, upon a sea monstrous and without limits.”41 The mathematically sublime urban spectacle is at the center of a number of works that appropriate the tools and techniques of modern surveillance to bring out the public secrets of life under the national security state. Magid’s Evidence Locker project, from 2004, used the security services in the United Kingdom as an unlikely artistic collaborator. Magid spent thirty-one days in Liverpool, at the time among the most densely surveilled cities in the world, walking the streets in a bright red trench coat intended to stand out in CCTV footage. At random moments, she called the police officers on surveillance duty, and—in a reversal of Marie Sester’s 2003 Access installation, which allowed visitors remotely to pursue strangers on the street—asked them to train the video cameras on her. The officers then captured her in various poses or directed her through the city while she had her eyes closed. The resulting images and videos were put together in a series of installations. Magid then composed thirty-one public records requests for the scenes, written as love letters to the Merseyside City Watch system—a novella, as she describes it. Conflating personal with political forms of revelation, the letters provide “an intimate portrait of the relationship between herself, the police and the city.”42 Magid’s project turns the typical passivity of the national security subject into an active and creative performance, shaping the mostly automated and unwitting process of disclosure into a deliberate confession, and making an anonymous relationship manifest. But Magid also implies that a similar “relationship” binds every citizen to the surveillance state: the love stories are potentially endless, not unlike the endless stream of anonymous confessions left on websites such as PostSecret and Secret Regrets—or the reams of personal data piling up in the servers of security services around the world. The personal is the political as mathematically sublime.

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Figure 4.6 Jill Magid, Trust | Evidence Locker. Single-channel digital video, 18 min. 2004. Image modified by the Liverpool Police Forensic Imaging Unit. Source: Courtesy the artist, LABOR, Mexico City, and Until Then, Paris.

The mathematically sublime also shapes two striking works included in the important exhibition of surveillance art entitled Watching You, Watching Me, on display at the Open Society Foundations in New York from November 2014 to September 2015. Both works use sublime proliferations of urban images to characterize the visual culture of national security surveillance, particularly as it affects targeted suspect populations. Josh Begley’s Information of Note (2014) is a photographic installation made up of hundreds of images taken from surveillance materials collected by the New York Police Department’s Demographics Unit, a product of the War on Terror. Each image captures a Muslim-affiliated business, house of worship, or gathering place that was the subject of the unit’s scrutiny, complete with names, addresses, and other “information of note” collected by officers. Like Magid, Begley makes the urban police into an artistic collaborator, but he underscores how little insight comes from the simple piling up of national security data, a hermeneutic task with no apparent end and little pertinent issue: as the exhibition notes point out, the unit had to date produced not a single lead.43

116  The Sublime Under the War on Terror Hasan Elahi’s massive installation Thousand Little Brothers (2014) aims for an even more sublime effect by capturing the mysterious proliferation of surveillance images from the other side of the equation. Nearly thirty feet tall and sixteen feet wide, the piece was conceived after the FBI mistakenly subjected the artist to a six-month investigation for alleged terrorist activities. In response, Elahi began documenting his every move with photographs that he sent to the bureau as a kind of mock compliance with its aims that echoes Magid’s love letters to the Liverpool police. From a distance, the work looks like the well-known Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers color bars, an artifact of the Cold War national security state originally intended to provide a visual announcement over broadcast media for civil defense alerts.44 Close up, one finds 32,000 small reproductions of Elahi’s self-surveillance pictures, sorted by color and shape—a sublime assemblage of the banal details of everyday life, from the food the artist ate to the places he passed while running errands. The ironic implication is that the scrutiny of even the most workaday life can look, to the securitizing gaze of the intelligence apparatus, like a state of emergency. As with Begley’s work, the sublime proliferation of national security material leads to little real insight for the authorities, not to mention the endless chain of worry it engenders in the innocent subject: a Kafkaesque judicial variation on Burke’s artificial infinite. Elahi turns the proliferation of surveillance images against the watchers. Artists such as Magid, Begley, and Elahi produce works that take control, however tentatively, of the surveillance apparatus engendered by the War on Terror. David Rokeby produces a sublime effect by allowing that apparatus to run by itself, hollowing out the privileged view as the very technologies that are supposed to identify terrorist threats spin out a mysterious proliferation of images that, lacking the discerning power of reason, thwarts elevation. In his installation Sorting Daemon, first shown at the Goethe Institut in Toronto in 2003, Rokeby programmed a surveillance camera to identify random people passing by the gallery. An algorithm of the type commonly used by intelligence authorities then sorted the resulting images by color, creating a constantly changing composite picture in an adjacent darkened room. The faces of passersby are separated from their bodies and placed on one side of the composition, sorted by flesh tone and size, while their bodies are placed on the other side, sorted and combined by the colors of their clothes and bags. Mimicking the practices of security programmers, and bringing the implicit prejudices of their work to the surface, Rokeby demonstrates in striking visual terms the way algorithms effectively dismember the individual person in their search for larger patterns. The resulting displays become increasingly sublime: as the camera captures more and more people, it becomes impossible to make out individual faces and bodies in the resulting jumble of images. Multiplicity replaces singularity; whole people are reduced to a profusion of parts. We find a similar effect in Rokeby’s installation

Figure 4.7 Hasan Elahi, Thousand Little Brothers (2014). Pigment Print on Canvas, 838 × 487 cm. Source: © Hasan Elahi. Courtesy of the Artist and C. Grimaldis Gallery.

118  The Sublime Under the War on Terror Gathering (2004), which likewise sorts passersby by color into a massive composition projected onto eight video screens on the walls of the gallery. Not unlike Baudelaire’s speaker in “Les Sept vieillards,” viewers find their minds “dancing, dancing” at the colorful proliferation of images. The result in this and other works is materialized blockage rather than elevation. These pieces suggest that surveillance technologies, at least given the racial, national, and religious categories that so often guide their use, make elevated awareness impossible for citizen and state alike— despite repeated claims by authorities that technology only records but does not judge. There is proliferation with little insight, an eyeless camera on every corner but no revelations that pass beyond the public secret of what one always already knows.

Ruins The War on Terror, like the Cold War, began with a searing and painfully sublime image of ruination, the smoldering remains of the Twin Towers displacing, for a time at least, the destruction wrought upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the atomic bomb in the global national security imaginary. Consistent with their longstanding function in Western thought, ruins place privileged viewers at the end of one historical arc and the beginning of another, confronting them with the sublime spectacle of unfolding time and the relentless power of transience. “There is grandeur in the thoughts that ruins awaken in me,” writes Denis Diderot, in a classic expression of this characteristically sublime experience: All things vanish, die and pass away. Only the world remains. Only time persists. How ancient this world is! I walk between two eternities. Wherever I cast my eyes, the objects around me herald the end of things and resign me to the end that awaits me. What is my fleeting existence compared with this rock as it sinks down, this valley hollowing out its path, this forest about to fall, these unsteady masses hanging above my head. I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and I don’t want to die! I want to preserve a feeble tissue of flesh and nerves in the face of a universal law which works its will on bronze! Nations are swept along one after another in a torrent which carries them down into a common grave, and I, I alone aspire to stop at the edge and cleave through the waves which flow beside me!45 This statement neatly epitomizes Kant’s description of the dynamically sublime, but with human ruins (depicted in the academic history painting of the mid-eighteenth century that Diderot surveys) epitomizing the powers of nature rather than massive mountains and dizzying cliffs. Surrounded by evidence of time’s corrosive influence over marble and bronze, Diderot lifts himself mentally above the material and tries to

The Sublime Under the War on Terror  119 resist in thought what he can never resist as mere “flesh and nerves.” Safely removed from immediate danger, he feels “freer, more alone, more myself, closer to myself” precisely because he can recognize in the ruin’s image of transience the real difference between mind and matter.46 Like the Gothic novelists and Romantic poets who would echo his sentiments to the point of near-parody, Diderot finds a sense of freedom among the ruins, looking across a grand historical divide that Renaissance humanists first discerned between the pagan past and Christian modernity, a divide epitomized in Giovanni Piranesi’s widely circulated pictures of moldering Roman piles. When Diderot thinks of ruins, he sees something very old: “the remains of a triumphal arch, a portico, a pyramid, a temple, a palace.”47 The national security state not only began in ruins, but also left new ruins wherever it expanded, through the damage it has inflicted around the globe on real or perceived threats to the homeland, and within the boundaries of the homeland itself. Operation Cue, which I mentioned in Chapter 1, was an experiment in the creation of nuclear ruins: a small suburb, complete with mannequin citizens and purpose-built to be destroyed, its brief existence devoted to the sublime elevation of military scientists and strategists who would learn valuable lessons from its sad fate. We find similar images in Misrach’s photographs of bombing ranges, and in the many industrial ruins that become scenes of revelation in The X-Files. Given the ever-increasing rate of technological change in weapons and defense systems since World War II, many sites that the military and intelligence agencies built for their own use were likewise destined to become relics not long after they were completed. The rise of the national security state has been nothing if not a massive public works project, which scattered military infrastructure across the landscape: missile silos, Army bases, radar installations, situation rooms in inconspicuous buildings made of hardened concrete. Such military ruins have long been the subject of perceptive study by writers and artists, notably in Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology, which meditates on the looming concrete coastal fortifications built by the Nazis in France during World War II, the socalled “Atlantic Wall.” These ruins, dotted along the seacoast, on isolated beaches, and in the very midst of villages, recall for Virilio “the Egyptian mastabas, the Etruscan tombs, the Aztec structures.”48 Ruins also play a central part in artistic projects concerning the Cold War, from James Acord’s celebrated but uncompleted plan to create what he called a nuclear Stonehenge constructed from uranium waste outside the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state; to Jane and Louise Wilson’s Gamma project (1999), a video installation shot in a decommissioned and now-abandoned US Air Force Base in the UK, the former home of nearly one hundred nuclear cruise missiles. Ruins also feature prominently in the photographic portfolios created under the auspices of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, which frequently document

120  The Sublime Under the War on Terror the infrastructure of national security—uranium disposal cells, bombing targets, reinforced bunkers—in the American West. Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 feature Stalker depicts national security ruins from the other side of the Cold War divide.49 The film tells of an expedition led by the titular Stalker into a mysterious site, dubbed the Zone, which has been sealed off by the government for unspecified security reasons, and which reputedly contains a room that will grant wishes to those who enter it. Entirely depopulated and left to grow wild, the space is nevertheless guarded by a strict military blockade. It is sublime in its desolation, filled, like Misrach’s pictures, with the signs of prior conflict: there are moldering tanks and rusted small arms, shattered buildings and defunct utility poles, broken down artillery and battered jeeps. The room the characters seek lies in an abandoned factory. The whole film is overshadowed by the specter of nuclear destruction. The Stalker’s mute, telekinetic daughter, we hear one character say, is a child of the Zone, born without legs, as if damaged in the womb by radiation. Another character, who works in a military bunker, has carried a nuclear device of his own design into the Zone, intending to destroy the place because he fears that its power may be appropriated for military use. He decides against completing the plan, adding his bomb to the ruins. When the Stalker returns home with his wife and daughter, the family passes a nuclear power plant, an image that also links the sight of ruins to the animating conflict of the Cold War. Filmed in 1979, as the Soviet Union was approaching collapse, Stalker, not unlike Stankievech’s The Soniferous Æther, which, as we saw, is also structured as an expedition narrative, uses science-fiction tropes to contemplate the national security ruins of a near future. Just a year later, the wildly hyped American television movie The Day After would imagine Cold War nuclear ruin in far more literal terms. The ruin, it is often noted, promotes an aesthetic of the fragment, elevating the partial and the impermanent over the unified and universal, the metonymic over the metaphorical sublime. “The architectural ruin,” writes Andreas Huyssen, “seems to hover in the background of an aesthetic imagination that privileges fragment and allegory, collage and montage, freedom from ornament and reduction of the material.”50 In a number of recent novels that take the national security state under the War on Terror as their explicit subject, we find, by contrast, the Cold War ruin imagined as the sublime reminder (or imminent warning) of a fearful totality: the total destruction of nuclear war, the total social control of a surveillance society.51 Although defunct, these ruins come back to life as sites of repression—or of hesitant resistance to it. The material remains of the Cold War national security state, turning up everywhere one looks, a vast array of open secrets, become sublime reminders of a past that is giving birth to a terrifying new order. Consider The Traveler (2005), by the pseudonymous author John Twelve Hawks, who also penned a manifesto on the encroaching

The Sublime Under the War on Terror  121 surveillance state, Against Authority (2016). Written before the most explosive information about NSA spying became public, The Traveler imagines a strangely familiar world in which Western societies are subject to extensive surveillance by the “Vast Machine,” under the ominous auspices of which all the various tracking devices of daily life—ATM cameras, GPS devices, credit cards, satellite images—can be quickly deployed by a ruling cabal called the Brethren to maintain social control. Travelers are individuals who have the power to separate the soul—what Twelve Hawks calls their “Light”—from their physical bodies and travel to other realities. Their mobility represents an existential threat to the total surveillance of the Vast Machine, and the Brethren pursue and assassinate them whenever possible. The novel tells the story of two Travelers, Gabriel and Michael Corrigan, whom the Brethren want to capture for experimental purposes, and a young woman named Maya, a so-called Harlequin, trained from childhood to defend Travelers. While the conforming Michael has willingly offered his services to the Brethren, Gabriel (the brothers take their names from Biblical angels) goes into hiding with the help of Maya, eluding their pursuers by disappearing into the vast wastelands of the American West. Maya takes Gabriel to a spiritual guide who resides in an abandoned nuclear missile silo in the Arizona desert, where he hopes to test his ability to send the Light out of his body. “This used to be a missile base,” someone tells them, “It was active for about thirty years. Fenced off. Top secret.”52 The site has been left in ruins: groundwater drips into its subterranean hallways; the generator in the control room “was covered with mold that clung to the steel like a fuzzy green carpet”; the “gauges and panels” in the room “had been smashed and looted. Electric cables hung from the ceiling like roots in a cave.”53 Maya describes the base as “a wasteland.”54 The guide locks Gabriel in the underground site to develop his abilities, the Cold War ruin becoming a scene of sublime transcendence and a tool of resistance to the Vast Machine. Venturing one day into a missile silo, Gabriel climbs down a rickety metal staircase that suddenly detaches from the wall. Hanging precariously above the depths, he “felt as if something was ripping, tearing inside him.”55 The blinding light that Maimonides associates with divine revelation, and that first signaled to observers like General Farrell that the Trinity test had been successful, here becomes the Light, a means of rising above the Cold War heritage and its subsequent legacy of national security surveillance. Gabriel realizes that he is “an entire ocean contained within a drop of water, a mountain squeezed into a grain of sand.”56 Losing consciousness of time and space, he passes to another dimension, where he can clearly see “the hidden towers and walls of the Virtual Panopticon.”57 The ruined material remains of the Cold War national security state here become, under the threat of physical danger, a place of sublime elevation, the starting

122  The Sublime Under the War on Terror point for an escape from the Vast Machine. Once a site of unimaginable destructive power, the silo serves the function Diderot ascribes to ruins: it represents a defunct order, formerly mighty but now brought low by time. Standing in (or under) the desert like the weathered monument in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (1818), the elevation of the privileged viewer follows from the recognition of time’s inevitable, and inevitably ruinous, passage. Twelve Hawks’ novel is rife with allusions to Cold War paradigms for surveillance, from the evocatively named Brethren (echoing Orwell’s Big Brother) to its use of the Foucauldian panoptic paradigm for imagining the surveillance society. Although it regards the Cold War past as a ruin, the novel still bears traces of that older vision of national security. As the War on Terror dragged on, and as more specific revelations about the NSA made their way into public consciousness, the imagery of ruins subtly changed. The relics become revenants, prodded back into life by threats to the homeland and teeming again with the kind of activity that marked their original function. Cory Doctorow’s young-adult novel Little Brother (2008), for example, clearly gestures toward Orwell in its title, but it envisions the national security sublime in terms more specific to the later years of the War on Terror. Little Brother tells of a technologically savvy high school student named Marcus Yallow, who unwittingly comes under suspicion of being involved in a terrorist attack on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Like The Traveler, the novel takes place in a speculative near future, where schools are outfitted with the latest in surveillance gear and keep tabs on students even outside of classes through modified laptop computers their charges are required to keep with them. In the early chapters of the book, Marcus repeatedly shows his ability to outwit school surveillance, but after the attack, he and two friends are captured by DHS agents and covertly transported to what he later realizes is a newly established secret prison on Treasure Island, in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Located in a former Cold War naval base, the prison has the look and feel of a ruin: “The cell was old and crumbled, and smelled of sea air. There was one window high up, and rusted bars guarded it.”58 The steel grid reinforcing the concrete walls “was rusting in the salt air” and its pattern shone through the green paint.59 At first he thinks he may have been transported to Alcatraz, but the place “felt like it dated back to World War Two,” its particular form of ruination linking the present moment to an earlier era of national security threat.60 Marcus is eventually released from this prison after giving the DHS agents his computer passwords. Incensed with his treatment, he begins a youth rebellion against government surveillance by flooding the system with false positives and organizing disruptive public events to bring the department’s repressive force into the open. Tellingly, he holds an organizing meeting for this rebellion at another ruin: Sutro Baths, a public

The Sublime Under the War on Terror  123 bathing house from the Victorian era that fell into decay during the Cold War: “All that’s left is a labyrinth of weathered stone set into the sere cliff face at Ocean Beach. It looks for all the world like a Roman ruin, crumbled and mysterious.”61 This ruin offers the sense of freedom denied to Marcus on Treasure Island. The youth movement causes enough trouble for the DHS that agents again take Marcus into custody and transport him back to their makeshift prison. This time, however, he finds a sense of elevation. Returned to a ruined cell, and subjected to waterboarding, he experiences an unexpected sense of calm that resembles Gabriel’s revelation in the missile silo, or Misrach’s serenity at the peak of Lone Rock: “I closed my eyes and let the ocean lift me. I floated away. Somewhere, far below me, was my body.” Marcus figuratively rises above his fearful circumstances, recognizing that the brute force of the DHS could not defeat him. “I’d had the worst they could throw at me, and I’d survived it, and I’d beaten them . . . I’d won,” he reflects, echoing Diderot’s vision of ruins.62 Like The Traveler, Little Brother ends with the protagonist’s victory (however temporary) over the surveillance state, but not as a result of sublime elevation. Before being recaptured, Marcus had spoken with a reporter about his initial confinement, and it is only after the story has been published that he is released from the grips of the DHS. Doctorow’s novel maintains a Benthamite faith, however wavering, in the power of old media in an era of new threats from secret government.63 Thomas Pynchon’s 9/11 novel, Bleeding Edge (2013), is somewhat less sanguine about such a victory. The novel tells of Maxine Tarnow, a New York detective and “defrocked” financial fraud examiner, who finds herself, at the close of the Echelon Moment, caught up in the shady financial dealings of the menacing tech tycoon Gabriel Ice.64 The novel begins in the spring of 2001 and incorporates the attack on the Twin Towers into its plot. Like so many other Pynchon novels, it swarms with conspiracy theories both big and small; Ice even has a daughter named Kennedy. In pursuit of the investigation, Maxine finds herself sneaking into a house Ice is renovating near the Montauk Point lighthouse on Long Island. The starkly modern house seems at first to preclude the conspiratorial imaginary: “How could there be secrets here? Drive-through kitchen, state-of-the-art projection room, everything out in the open, no passages inside the walls, no hidden doors, all still too new. What could lie behind a front like this, when it’s front all the way through?”65 But as with all public secrets, the real mystery lies on the surface. Montauk Point was the home of a Cold War Air Force station that served as part of the NORAD early warning system. The site was decommissioned in 1981 and part of it turned into a park or sold for real estate development, though the shell of the Cold War station remains standing. Driving up to Ice’s house, located on “Coast Artillery Road,” Maxine notices the ruin right within view: “Over the tops of the trees rises a giant old-time radar

124  The Sublime Under the War on Terror antenna from the days of anti-Soviet nuclear terror, soon to be a statepark tourist attraction.”66 While searching for clues in the basement of the house, Maxine finds a telling link to the national security past: a “shadowy, almost invisible door” behind which lies “a long corridor, swept, austere, track lighting at wide intervals” that apparently leads toward the “abandoned air base with the big radar antenna.”67 The depths make clear a link that is manifest from the street—the open secret of how technology companies like those run by Ice collaborated with secret state surveillance in the early years of the War on Terror. Maxine hears the sounds of Cold War communication technology as she ventures further down the hallway: “the air is increasingly full of numerals and NATO phonetic letters . . . affectless voices distorted by radio interference, crosstalk, bursts of solar noise.”68 Later in the novel, she encounters the Cold War ruins in an unlikely but telling space: an experimental web portal called DeepArcher, which provides a visual tour of what Pynchon calls the Deep Web, and which both Ice and the NSA want to control. Maxine becomes fascinated with the site for the sense of escape she finds in its sublime depths; its splash screen features an abyss. Passing down into this void during one visit, not long before the 9/11 attacks, she finds a “neighborhood” full of defunct links redolent of the Cold War: Broken remnants of old military installations, commands long deactivated, as if transmission towers for ghost traffic are still poised out on promontories far away in the secular dark, corroded, untended trusswork threaded in and out with vines and leaves of faded poison green, using abandoned tactical frequencies for operations long defunded into silence.  .  .  . Missiles meant for shooting down Russian prop-driven bombers, never deployed, lying around in pieces, as if picked over by some desperately poor population that comes out only in the deepest watches of the night. Gigantic vacuum-tube computers with half-acre footprints, gutted, all empty sockets and strewn wiring. Littered situation rooms, high-sixties plastic detailing gone brittle and yellow, radar consoles with hooded circular screens, desks still occupied by avatars of senior officers in front of flickering sector maps, upright and weaving like hypnotized snakes, images corrupted, paralyzed, passing to dust.69 Maxine notices a map centered on Montauk, and finds what looks to be the virtual double of the space she discovered beneath Ice’s mansion. The avatar of an Air Force colonel fills the screen, and explains that the base once served as “a kind of boot camp for military time travelers,” training children in an “unforgiving discipline” with “no redemption—of, or from, anything.”70

The Sublime Under the War on Terror  125 The colonel’s speech recalls for Maxine rumors of the “Montauk Project,” a conspiracy theory from the 1980s linked to the air base. Pynchon’s resident professional paranoid, March Kelleher, describes it to her this way: “The Montauk Project is every horrible suspicion you’ve ever had since World War II, all the paranoid production values, a vast underground facility, exotic weapons, space aliens, time travel, other dimensions.”71 When she was wandering through the tunnel beneath Ice’s mansion, Maxine seemed to encounter evidence of this conspiracy. Reaching a stairwell that led even deeper into the “terminal moraine,” and extending “[f]urther than she can see,” she catches sight of a mysterious creature clad in a “child-size fatigue uniform . . . rising as if on wings, its eyes too visible in the gloom, too pale, almost white.”72 The sight sends her running for the exit. Maxine never returns to Ice’s compound to investigate; consistent with Pynchon’s fictional practice elsewhere, we are left only with the traces of a conspiracy rather than full illumination. The curious creature, described in the language of Gothic horror, seems to be a living remnant of the apocryphal project, one of the timetravelling children the colonel describes. But it is also a reminder that ruins are not always defunct. When she first looks into the tunnel, Maxine recalls “somebody’s idea of Cold War salvation  .  .  . some faith in brute depth, some prayerful confidence that a blessed few would survive, beat the end of the world and the welcoming-in of the Void.”73 This sublime sense of elevation distinctly recalls Diderot’s reflection on the “common abyss”: just as the “blessed few” who constructed the tunnel imagined they might survive the nuclear apocalypse, so Maxine looks back at the notion of “Cold War salvation” from the putative safety of a new era. The ruin seems to exist in a past of which she is not a part. But past and present are not so far apart as they might seem, the past not so deeply buried as this underground space would suggest; the renovation of Ice’s fortuitously placed mansion figures the impending renovation of the national security state. For Maxine at least, the nuclear era seemed safely lodged in the past, but her encounter with the ruins of the national security state in DeepArcher feels less certain and more immediate. Pynchon’s novel came out in September of 2013, only three months after the Snowden revelations demonstrated (yet again) that the national security state was very much a present reality. David Alworth has written of the ruins of Malta that Pynchon depicted in V (1963) that “time is calcified there, yet not arrested.”74 Much the same thing is true here, amidst the ruins of the nuclear age that are preserved and revivified in the Deep Web. The avatar of the Cold War era comes to life there not just for Maxine, but also for the entire nation. It embodies the national security state again triumphant, if radically transformed, by the War on Terror, and working hand in hand with technology companies.

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Representing the NSA I noted in the Preface that, while the other intelligence agencies in the United States have rich histories of visual and fictional representation, the NSA stands as something of a blank space on the map—an artistic cypher to match the agency’s own cryptographic labors. The CIA, with its focus on human intelligence and daring foreign missions has always been a more amenable subject in fiction and film. For this reason, references to the NSA in popular culture have tended to borrow from the representational conventions that had grown up around other agencies. The agency took on the role typically assigned to the CIA (as in Enemy of the State) or to the megalomaniacal villain in a Bond film. During the War on Terror, as the NSA gained a greater public role, and then became the center of debates over bulk data collection, a new set of conventions began to emerge, drawing upon the representational resources of the sublime. Contemporary depictions see the NSA as, in Kant’s terms, “absolutely great,” distinguishing it from other similar governmental organs by its sheer size and extent. A massive agency dealing in massive amounts of information and employing a massive global workforce, the NSA evokes both the dynamically and the mathematically sublime. In line with many other recent examples of the national security sublime, its existence also appears as quotidian and banal, identifiable in the many faceless office buildings and unassuming installations that make up the contemporary national security state: a proliferation no longer mysterious, the warehouse stripped of its most compelling shadows.75 The relatively few existing pictures of the agency headquarters at Fort Meade show what looks to be little more than a large office building, surrounded by parking lots filled with cars but void of visible workers. It appears to be a suburban workplace rather than a teeming international center of espionage. The better known the agency became among the general public, the more its dual character—mysterious and banal, massive and depopulated— came to the fore in popular representations. Among the earliest examples of this new mode for representing the NSA is the 2006 Italian production In Ascolto (it was released in the United States as The Listening, and in France as Project Échelon).76 Conceived in the 1990s and completed before the biggest revelations about NSA spying, and therefore still somewhat mixed in its aesthetic, the film draws upon information made public in leaks revealing the Echelon signals intelligence network. The language of the European Parliament investigation of the network and its listening capabilities, concluded in 2001, is quoted at the opening of the film. The narrative begins in 1999 at the RAF’s Menwith Hill listening station in Yorkshire, UK, a station, we are informed, that works with the NSA to capture satellite transmissions and monitor conversations around the world. The film depicts the station as starkly depopulated, not unlike CFS Alert in Stankievech’s installation: a collection of monolithic white

The Sublime Under the War on Terror  127 orbs next to a busy roadway, surrounded by barbed-wire fences, and staffed by a few scattered agents from the NSA, but otherwise largely empty. It runs autonomously, springing into action only when a Dictionary lights upon a keyword or a suspect’s name. The film depicts this action not by human movements but by close-ups of computer monitors filled with rapidly scrolling text. We see empty hallways and workstations with no one sitting in front of them—the depopulated heart of a vast global network. The plot centers on a technological innovation brought to the agency by an unscrupulous corporate contractor. Dubbed “Tumbleweed,” a name that evokes the desert wastelands of Misrach’s and Paglen’s photographs, the product allows agents to turn telephones and other electronic devices into bugs. A manual for Tumbleweed is stolen from a company salesman in Rome and discovered in the street by an innocent woman, who is then mistaken for an industrial spy. Longtime NSA agent James Wagley (Michael Parks), disturbed by growing corporate influence at the agency, goes rogue to protect the woman from those who want her silenced. With the help of an old ally, he devises a plan to use Tumbleweed against its masters, a plan that takes the group to a remote shack on the slopes of Mont Blanc—the very epitome of the Romantic sublime, filmed in sweeping panoramas— where these privileged viewers can carry out their counter-surveillance mission without being detected. Working together, the NSA and the corporate contractor eventually track down their antagonists and Wagley sacrifices himself, leading his pursuers to the peak of the mountain while the others escape down to the valley, eventually making their way to Antarctica—the only place in the world, we learn early in the film, where a person can hide from the reach of government surveillance. The imagery that dominates In Ascolto recalls (or anticipates) nearly every key characteristic of the national security sublime we found in the past works of the tradition, as well as those of its contemporary artistic apogees: the mountainous vistas of Paglen’s photographs; the frozen landscapes from The X-Files and The Soniferous Æther; and, in the open secret of the Menwith Hill station, the proximity of the mechanisms of global surveillance to everyday life that marks the work of Henner, Magid, and Elahi. The film’s ambiguous ending, with the remaining protagonists facing an uncertain future in a harsh wasteland, throws into doubt the sublime elevation they seem briefly to achieve at the top of Mont Blanc. Still, the film quite explicitly plays on the traditional registers of the sublime, a fact signaled by its emblematic locations. The sublime peaks of the Alps and the depopulated regions of Antarctica provide an escape from the reach of state secrecy. The fact that Menwith Hill (another mountain, of sorts) is also depicted as depopulated suggests the potential limitations of the sublime mode: no longer a way of rising above the pursuit of the NSA, the sublime comes to describe the agency itself.

128  The Sublime Under the War on Terror Beginning in 2007, about a year and a half after the initial New York Times stories about NSA activities made the agency a subject of popular discussion, a new tone enters into representations of the agency. These new representations play on the sheer size of the national security apparatus, treating it variously as an object of satire or as a kind of monstrosity. Although they continue to strive for a sense of elevation over the spectacle of state secrets, they do so by inflating and deflating the powers and pretensions of the NSA—often activating the subtle alliance of the ridiculous and sublime, as Kenneth Burke describes it, to arouse fear or provoke ridicule.77 To this extent, the national security sublime in these works might best be termed a post- or anti-sublime, which willingly forgoes the transcendence traditionally associated with the mode in favor of more familiar pleasures, in this case the distancing reaction of satire or horror.78 The first notable instance I have been able to identify of this particular iteration of the national security sublime is a brief scene from The Simpsons Movie (2007).79 Borrowing the images of endless rows of shelves from Raiders of the Lost Ark, the scene depicts NSA agents as minor and unremarkable cogs in a vast bureaucratic machinery that resembles the call center of a multinational corporation rather than the operations room of an advanced spy agency. By contrast with the “G-Men” of FBI fame or the shadowy spies of the CIA, the agents in this scene are seated at identical terminals, dressed in inconspicuous business wear, and listening passively to phone calls for evidence of wrongdoing. When one agent overhears a conversation that reveals the location of the fugitive Simpson family, he leaps up to announce his discovery like a salesman who has just closed a deal. We find a similar depiction of the agency in an episode of South Park from 2013 (written in the immediate wake of Snowden’s revelations) entitled “Let Go, Let Gov,” in which the character Eric Cartman, a fourth grader, infiltrates the agency by pretending to apply for a job, and is given a personal tour of the NSA’s Maryland headquarters by the director. The interior recalls a gigantic suburban office park.80 Lines of desks recede to the vanishing point, all the agents again clad in standard business wear and eavesdropping on the banal activities of teenage girls and pizza guys in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Jacksonville, Florida. Inspirational banners that read “Defending our Nation, Securing the Future” (the NSA’s motto) hang over their desks. The sheer size of these two operations centers, which seems to extend well beyond the frame of the shots, produces the cognitive dissonance of the mathematically sublime. They present a resonant image of the metonymical, a veritable delirium of contiguity. Although the aesthetic gesture in both cases is conceptually akin to the work of someone like Elahi, the distance they engender is satirical rather than directly political, deflating the mysterious activities of the spy agency by teasing out an element of the ridiculous in the task of monitoring a nation of people whose lives are dull and routine. The size of the NSA is overwhelming, but the viewer

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Figure 4.8 Still from The Simpsons Movie, directed by David Silverman. Twentieth Century Fox, 2007.

ostensibly gains clarity by finding something silly amidst the spectacle of row upon row of desks. Much the same order of imagery marks the pilot episode of The Syfy Channel series Warehouse 13, from 2009.81 The show posits the existence of a secret warehouse in the Badlands of South Dakota housing dangerous and supernatural artifacts from around the globe, overseen not by the military, but by a former NSA cryptographer named Artie Nelson. One scene depicts the size of the warehouse with a dramatic tracking shot that pulls back from the two secret service agents mysteriously assigned to work there—they are told only that their task is “a matter of national security”—revealing a vast collection of objects as the agents recede into the sublime distance. The warehouse is large enough to house a zeppelin, and the objects range from the mythical to the merely silly: Pandora’s Box, the Mayan Calendar, Lucrezia Borgia’s comb, and a tea kettle that moves autonomously and grants wishes. Located in a stereotypically depopulated region once primarily associated with Cold War missile installations, the warehouse offers another image of an NSA defined by zany multitudinousness and unimaginable profusion. This is not the sublime proliferation Nicholas Branch tries to tame, which resembles nothing so much as a glance through a peephole into some divinely inaccessible world. Instead, the agency is just large, breathtakingly large, and its sheer largeness comprises the chief difficulty it presents to the understanding. In her Oscar-winning documentary, Citizenfour (2014), based on her meetings with Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras uses the intimation of absolute largeness to a different effect, drawing not on the resources of comedy but on the language of horror film—Gothic

130  The Sublime Under the War on Terror stripped of its optimistic faith in revelation—much as Stankievech points to science-fiction tropes in his depiction of CFS Alert. Poitras intersperses intimate and tightly framed scenes in Snowden’s Hong Kong hotel room and claustrophobic views of receding tunnels and long, empty hotel hallways that evoke the artificial infinite, with broadly framed shots of NSA installations, including footage of Menwith Hill, the construction site for the massive agency data center in Bluffdale, Utah, and other looming structures. Often taken from great distance, mostly shot in daylight, and evoking Paglen’s photographs (Paglen contributed footage to the film), the shots convey the fearful scope of NSA surveillance. Whereas The Simpson’s Movie, South Park, and Warehouse 13 make the NSA seem silly, Poitras wants to terrify us. She shows sites in the US, Germany, Great Britain, and elsewhere, presenting a kind of travelogue-cumhorror show that shadows Snowden’s globe-trotting escape from the authorities. The fearful quality of these scenes is heightened by filmic techniques that draw, as A. O. Scott has noted, on the visual language of Japanese horror cinema, and a soundtrack comprised of minor-chord drones made famous by John Carpenter’s Halloween.82 In its power to track subjects wherever they may be, the NSA here recalls the impersonal and unhidden ferocity of a killer from some 1980s slasher film.83 Despite her stylized gestures, Poitras does not lose the crucial link between state secrecy and everyday life that defines so many other key works of the national security sublime during the War on Terror. The film includes a number of interviews with Snowden conducted while he is getting dressed or putting in his contact lenses. No doubt, these scenes arose from the exigencies of Snowden’s efforts to evade the authorities, but they are interesting in another way as well. By bringing her camera into such personal spaces, Poitras mimics the very theft of privacy that drove Snowden to his whistleblowing.

Figure 4.9  Still from Citizenfour, directed by Laura Poitras. Praxis Films, 2014.

The Sublime Under the War on Terror  131 The most popular and commercially successful use of the newly emerging NSA aesthetic was the CBS show Person of Interest, which ran from 2011–16. Like Citizenfour, the show draws upon familiar popular cultural genre cues—in this case, what Macgregor Wise calls the “surveillance procedural,” wedding awe-inspiring surveillance technology to the tropes of police dramas—to underscore the everydayness of government surveillance.84 The X-Files is a clear forerunner of the formula, as is the 2009 thriller The Echelon Conspiracy, but Person of Interest for the most part plays it straight, avoiding the experimentation and irony of its 1990s model or the satirical edge of more recent depictions of the NSA. There is nothing particularly original about the uses of the national security sublime in the series, but this is precisely the point: the recognizable genre cues both mirror and reinforce the wartime experience of the audience—open secrecy as usual. The show concerns a brilliant and wealthy computer programmer, Harold Finch, hired in the wake of the Patriot Act to help the NSA sort the mountains of data it has compiled in search of terrorist plots. Finch builds a massive computer system he calls (echoing The Traveler) the Machine. So successful is his venture that the Machine reveals not only the plans of would-be terrorists but also less dramatic threats to people whose communications have been caught in the web of surveillance: wives threatened by cheating husbands; employees who have run afoul of crooked bosses. Overwhelmed with the ethical implications of these revelations—“the numbers never stop coming,” Finch wearily remarks in the pilot episode—he hires a former CIA operative named John Reese (Jim Caviezel) to help him seek out and rescue the people who live unaware of their fate—and of the surveillance systems that make it visible to their hidden defenders.85 Person of Interest constantly reminds viewers about the vast extent of government surveillance, often by evoking the aesthetics of 1990s national security conspiracy films. Scene changes over the run of the series are marked by mathematically sublime juxtapositions of images from surveillance cameras—a technique borrowed from the innovative title sequence of Enemy of the State—and overlaid with rapidly scrolling information and lines of code. The show frequently turns to the urban sublime as well. Many scenes take place on the busy streets of New York City, dotted at every turn with surveillance cameras, and teeming with crowds into which suspects always threaten to vanish. The final scene of the pilot gives us yet another characteristic image of the national security sublime: rows upon rows of the servers that constitute the Machine receding in one long shot into a distant vanishing point,. Person of Interest is a signal instance of what Richard Grusin has called “premediation,” by which cultural forms attempt, on the level of imagination, to anticipate or prevent the shock of another event like 9/11.86 The show repeatedly reassures viewers that, even if the government may no longer be trusted—most government agents in the series are shady or corrupt, and representatives of the NSA appear in a uniformly negative

132  The Sublime Under the War on Terror light—the information collected under the sublime dragnet unleashed by the Patriot Act still has the power to bring about good. A  running joke concerns the combined sense of shock and relief expressed by those Finch and Reese rescue when they realize how much the team knows about their lives. Unnerved but thankful, they are proxies for the audience, which is reminded on a weekly basis of the extent to which national security surveillance has become a quotidian fact, a background hum distant enough for us to deny its immediate relevance to our choices. It is now just as familiar to the rhythms of everyday life as the plot points of the police procedural has become to longtime television viewers. The later seasons of the series pit the increasingly personified Machine (one character pointedly refers to it as “she”) against another, more powerful, system, dubbed Samaritan, which a secretive corporation called Decima Technologies has persuaded the US national security apparatus to integrate into its networks. As Samaritan consolidates its control of the population—autonomously hiring operatives, appropriating private surveillance cameras, ordering assassinations, and collecting DNA samples, like the Syndicate in The X-Files—the Machine is forced to hide in the city’s electrical wires to avoid detection. Like all of the main characters on the series, it becomes an outsider, dwelling silently in the infrastructure of the urban landscape, much as Finch sets up shop in abandoned libraries and subway stations, and communicating with the team by various back channels. The show signals this new outsider status with a telling allusion to the history of the national security sublime. To facilitate its movement through the wires, the Machine orders electrical contractors to install bespoke junction boxes throughout the city. The name of the fictional company emblazoned on these boxes? Thornhill Industries. This allusion brings us full circle: built to enable the surveillance efforts of the NSA, the Machine itself becomes an object of surveillance. The potentially sinister program Finch worries over misusing now plays the role of the innocent outsider, accidentally roped into a national security plot it finds itself illprepared to manage. Even technological revolutions devour their children.

Notes   1. David Holloway, The Cultures of the War on Terror: Empire, Ideology, and the Remaking of 9/11 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 4.   2. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 79–81.  3. Ibid., 30.   4. Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Régis Durand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 78.  5. Ibid., 81.  6. Melley argues, in The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), that the aesthetics

The Sublime Under the War on Terror  133 and epistemology of postmodernism can be traced directly to the rise of the national security state. As my attention to Romanticism suggests, I want to place the national security sublime in a longer aesthetic lineage, but Melley’s argument is particularly persuasive in terms of the Cold War works I  discussed in the previous chapter, which frequently concern conspiracies involving the military or intelligence agencies. See also, in this regard, Joseph Tabbi, The Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Daniel Grausam, On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2011).  7. Jodi Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 12.   8. Clare Birchall, “Aesthetics of the Secret,” New Formations 83, no. 1 (2014): 33.   9. Pamela M. Lee, “Open Secret,” Artforum, May 2011, no pagination, www. artforum.com/inprint/issue=201105&id=28060, accessed 9 May 2017. 10. Trevor Paglen, Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes (New York: Aperture, 2010), 146. 11. Thomas Keenan, “Disappearances: The Photographs of Trevor Paglen,” Aperture 191 (2008): 38. 12. Trevor Paglen, “Pictures from Nowhere: Three Moments,” Art Journal 66, no. 3 (2007): 58. 13. Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (New York: Dutton, 2009), 17. 14. Here is how he puts it in a New Yorker profile: “Paglen welcomes distortion in his images because his aim is not to expose and edify so much as to confound and unsettle. He said that his photographs are ‘useless as evidence, for the most part, but at the same time they’re a way of organizing your attention.’ ” Jonah Weiner, “Prying Eyes: Trevor Paglen Makes Art Out of Government Secrets,” The New Yorker, 22 October 2012, 56. 15. Paglen, Invisible, 151; Julian Stallabrass, “Negative Dialectics in the Google Era: A  Conversation with Trevor Paglen,” October 138 (2011): 3–14. On Paglen’s relationship to American landscape traditions, see Henrik Gustafsson, “Foresight, Hindsight and State Secrecy in the American West: The Geopolitical Aesthetics of Trevor Paglen,” Journal of Visual Culture 12, no. 1 (2013): 148–64; and John Beck, “The Purloined Landscape: Photography and Power in the American West,” Tate Papers 21 (Spring 2014), www. tate.org.uk/research/ publications/tate-papers/21/the-purloined-landscapephotography-and-power-in-the-american-west, accessed 9 March 2017. 16. Trevor Paglen, “Cultural Geographies in Practice: Late September at an Undisclosed Location in the Nevada Desert,” Cultural Geographies 13, no. 2 (2006): 295. 17. Paglen, Invisible, 144. 18. Paglen, “Pictures from Nowhere,” 58. 19. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 458. 20. On the links between Paglen’s sky series and the Romantic sublime, see John Beck, “Signs of the Sky, Signs of the Times: Photography as Double Agent,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011): 123–39. 21. See John Beck, Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); and David Río, “The Desert as a National Sacrifice Zone: The Nuclear Controversy in Nevada Fiction,” in American Secrets: The Politics and Poetics of Secrecy in the Literature and Culture of the United States, ed. Eduardo Barros-Grela

134  The Sublime Under the War on Terror and José Liste-Noya (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011), 61–72. 22. On the Romantic fascination with desert landscapes, see Cian Duffy, Landscapes of the Sublime, 1700–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 135–73. 23. Frances Ferguson, “The Nuclear Sublime,” Diacritcs 14, no. 2 (1984): 4–10. 24. Paglen aimed for a similarly picturesque vision of the national security state in his project at the Gloucester Road station of the London Underground (now replaced), which drew upon the familiar scenery and style of John Constable. 25. Laura Kurgan, Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (New York: Zone Books, 2013), 9–36. See also Lisa Parks, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the word satellite commonly connoted the unscrupulous retinue of guards surrounding royalty; as in their modern technological sense, satellites covertly serve the needs of the powerful. 26. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989). 27. Kurgan points out (Close Up, 19–24) that satellite images first came to prominence in popular culture during the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s, as means of demonstrating mass killings of civilians. Artists like Tomas van Houtryve and James Bridle achieve similar effects with photographs taken from drones or incorporating drone shadows, which create a sense of impending threat, bringing out violence implicit in the nature of the view. 28. davidgurman.com/#/baghdad-moon-eos-aster-satellite-armstrong-hassel blad-dyptich/, accessed 12 December 2016. 29. See Neal White and John Beck, “Overt Research,” in Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics, ed. John Beck and Ryan Bishop (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 252–72. 30. Chloe Dewe Mathews, In Search of Frankenstein–Mary Shelley’s Nightmare (Baden, Switzerland: Kodoji Press, 2018). The book arrived after the semiofficial end of the War on Terror, but clearly partakes of the national security sublime from the era. 31. For a survey of this topos, see Duffy, Landscapes of the Sublime, 102–34; and Chauncey C. Loomis, “The Arctic Sublime,” Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 95–112. 32. A trailer for the film can be found at www.stankievech.net/projects/aether/ trailer/index.html. The installation builds on Stankievech’s earlier DEW Project (2009), which documented communications technologies in the Arctic. See www.stankievech.net/projects/DEW/info/index.html. 33. Carmen Victor, “A World Without Us,” Prefix Photo Magazine 32 (2015): 77. 34. Stankievech describes the shot in these terms: “The sublime size of the chasm yet without any sense of scale, the total darkness and the psychological impression of how remote I was after flying for days on a military transport, all collided to create a sense of pure geological time. I  felt I  was either in a pre-Anthropocene Age or on another planet.” Pete Brook, “Declassified Spy Outpost Lurks on the Dark Side of the Earth,” Wired, 11 June 2013, no pagination, www.wired.com/2013/06/charles-stankievech-northernmostsettlement/, accessed 10 August 2018. 35. Brook, “Declassified Spy Outpost.” 36. Charles Stankievech and Ola Wlusek, “The Embedded Landscape: Unearthing the Duality of Site,” www. Stankievech.net/projects/aether/ critical/ ottowa/index.html, accessed 28 November 2016.

The Sublime Under the War on Terror  135 37. The indispensible overview of surveillance art in the years before the War on Terror is Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, eds., CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). For some examples of exhibitions and artistic reflections on surveillance, in addition to those I discuss in this section, see João Ribas, Under the Clouds: From Paranoia to the Digital Sublime (Porto: Serralves, 2015); Ann-Christin Bertrand and James Bridle, Watched! Surveillance, Art and Photography (Cologne: Walther König, 2016); Laura Poitras, ed., Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 2016); and Magdalena Taube and Krystian Woznicki, A Field Guide to the Snowden Files: Media, Art, Archives (Berlin: Diamondpaper, 2017). 38. Thomas De Quincey, “Secret Societies,” in Historical and Critical Essays, 2 vols. (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1959), 2:276. 39. Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), 388. 40. Wordsworth, The Prelude, 234. 41. Charles Baudelaire, “Les Sept vieillards,” in Œuvres complètes, 2 vols., ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 1:88; my translation. 42. www.jillmagid.com/projects/evidence-locker-2, accessed 7 March  2017. Compare Cornelia Schleime’s important work Bis auf weitere gute Zusammenarbeit, Nr. 7284/85 (Here’s to Further Useful Collaboration, No. 7284/85) (1993), in which the artist pasted staged pictures of herself into reports by the East German Stasi of its surveillance of her activities. 43. www.opensocietyfoundations.org/moving-walls/22/plain-sight-visual-ver nacular-nypd-surveillance, accessed 30 June 2018. 44. www.opensocietyfoundations.org/moving-walls/22/thousand-little-brothers, accessed 30 June 2018. 45. Denis Diderot, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. Geoffrey Bremner (London: Penguin, 1994), 277. 46. Ibid., 277. 47. Ibid., 274–75. 48. Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, trans. George Collins (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 11. On Cold War ruins, see also Jonathan Veitch, “Dr. Strangelove’s Cabinet of Wonder,” in Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 321–38; and Luke Bennett, ed., In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker: Affect, Materiality and Meaning Making (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). 49. Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2017), DVD. 50. Andreas Huyssen, “Authentic Ruins,” in Hell and Schöle, eds., Ruins of Modernity, 19. 51. As Gene Ray has noted, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which resulted in shocking levels of death and destruction, turning the city into a modernday ruin, was an important impetus for the aesthetic of the sublime in the eighteenth century. Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005), 19–32. 52. John Twelve Hawks, The Traveler (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 317. 53. Ibid., 338. 54. Ibid., 317. 55. Ibid., 346. 56. Ibid., 347. 57. Ibid., 378.

136  The Sublime Under the War on Terror 58. Cory Doctorow, Little Brother (New York: Tor Books, 2008), 52. 59. Ibid., 62. 60. Ibid., 53. 61. Ibid., 156. 62. Ibid., 343. 63. This optimistic ending was not in Doctorow’s first draft of the novel, which originally concluded with Marcus going underground in Southern California; a sequel would have told of his continuing battle against the DHS (Personal Communication, 15 April 2016). Marcus does return in the role of a whistleblower in the novel Homeland (2013), released just months before the Snowden revelations. 64. Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (New York: Penguin, 2013). 65. Ibid., 191–92. 66. Ibid., 191. 67. Ibid., 192–93. 68. Ibid., 193–94. 69. Ibid., 241–42. 70. Ibid., 242–43. 71. Ibid., 117. 72. Ibid., 194. 73. Ibid., 194. 74. David J. Alworth, Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 115. 75. It is worth noting that the NSA has its own internal aesthetic, one very different from the sublime vision of outsiders. The PowerPoint slides Snowden gave to Glenn Greenwald paint the agency in the bland colors of a multinational corporation. The agency “brands” each of its surveillance operations, for example, giving them memorable names like Blarney and Fairview, as well as themed logos that grace the headers of each report on their activities. Informational materials describe “strategic partnerships” with private companies, and list the government entities that the agency serves as “customers.” Perhaps the most striking example of this strange conflation of surveillance activities with the visual rhetoric of the modern corporation comes in the slides describing project PRISM, one of the major revelations of Snowden’s leaks, in which the NSA worked closely with technology companies to collect the private communications of their customers. Here the project logo and that of the division of the agency under which it was organized (Special Source Operations) are juxtaposed with the corporate logos of industry giants such as Google and Facebook. The corporate identifications of the NSA extend to the nature of the agency’s workforce, a large portion of which is farmed out to private companies like the military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, where Snowden worked when he collected his information. Before that he worked for the Dell Corporation. See Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 90–169. 76. In Ascolto (The Listening), directed by Giacomo Martelli (LaVerge, TN: Monarch Home Video, 2007), DVD. 77. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 61. 78. Allan Stoekl, “ ‘After the Sublime,’ After the Apocalypse: Two Versions of Sustainability in the Light of Climate Change,” Diacritics 41, no. 3 (2013): 40–57.

The Sublime Under the War on Terror  137 79. The Simpsons Movie, directed by David Silverman (Beverly Hills: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007), DVD. 80. South Park: The Complete Seventeenth Season, created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (Hollywood: Paramount Home Entertainment, 2014), DVD. 81. Warehouse 13: The Complete Series, created by Jane Espenson and D. Brent Mote (Universal City: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2014), DVD. 82. A. O. Scott, “Intent on Defying an All-Seeing Eye,” The New York Times, 24 October 2014. 83. Oliver Stone’s 2016 production Snowden, by contrast, largely avoids the sublime aesthetic of Poitras’ documentary, many scenes from which it recreates, following instead the well-worn path of the bio-pic. The one telling exception is a sequence in which Snowden explains the NSA’s surveillance capabilities. The film here turns to delirious data-visualization graphics to demonstrate the sublime extent of these capabilities. Snowden, directed by Oliver Stone (Universal City: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2015), DVD. 84. J. Macgregor Wise, Surveillance and Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 101. 85. Person of Interest: The Complete Series, created by Jonathan Nolan (Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2016), DVD. 86. Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

5 The Secret Without a Subject

Beyond Conspiracy The works I  discussed in the previous chapter recurrently find state secrets in tangible artifacts: furtively glimpsed installations and spy satellites; proliferating security cameras; listening posts and electrical junction boxes. As official secrecy expanded to meet new threats, the material footprint of the intelligence apparatus expanded to keep pace, visible in hastily constructed office buildings and data centers on the outskirts of cities across the homeland. These paradoxically open artifacts of the covert sector are sites of mostly equivocal elevation. With the notable exception of Gabriel in The Traveler, who discovers his supernatural vocation in an abandoned missile silo, the privileged viewers experience sublime awareness in curtailed or degraded forms. Trevor Paglen recreates William Wordsworth’s ascent of Mount Snowdon only to encounter, glimmering in the distance, yet another secret; Charles Stankievech and Mishka Henner present sublime vistas caught through automated cameras, effectively excluding the artist from the scene; and Thomas Pynchon’s character Maxine discovers the national security “Void” in a dank tunnel beneath suburban Long Island. The Simpson’s Movie and Warehouse 13 replace elevation with deflation, blending the sublime with the ridiculous, and creating a sense of sheer distance in the viewer rather than provoking awe and wonder. In all of these ways, the national security sublime reworks a familiar Romantic aesthetic to capture a world increasingly defined by public secrets rather than hidden truths. One effect of this shift to the tangible was a waning fascination with conspiracy narratives, the beating heart of the national security sublime in its Cold War guise and during the Echelon Moment. Where Romantic writers transcend mystery on mountaintops, the conspiratorial imaginary descended from Gothic novels finds sublime proliferations in the endless twists and turns of underground plots. The sense of conspiracy, so central to American political culture, as Richard Hofstadter and others have shown, seems muted in recent examples of the national security sublime, suggesting that conspiracy thinking had exhausted its aesthetic and

The Secret Without a Subject  139 explanatory power, at least as a way of describing government secrets.1 In this chapter, I want to ask why Gothic conventions, and even in some cases the sublime itself, lost their traditional affective qualities for artists, writers, showrunners, and filmmakers during the War on Terror—and, more importantly, what this shift tells us about the changing nature of national security and government secrecy in the period. I argued in Chapter 2 that literary and artistic representations of political secrecy have long tracked revolutions in the prevailing justification for secret keeping in the halls of power. Changes in form tend to cluster around moments of crisis or transformation in government, as we saw with the rise of Gothic novels and the Romantic sublime at the end of the eighteenth century, which together came to replace court tragedy much as democratic political theory gained legitimacy over absolutism. The Cold War and the War on Terror were just such moments. When the perceived threat broadened from Soviet nuclear espionage to international terrorism, the scope of official secrecy expanded as well to meet the challenge. Like the late eighteenth century, the beginning and the end of the Cold War engendered a redefinition of what counted as an acceptable justification for concealment, an ontological shift, as Peter Galison puts it, in government secrecy. Along with this redefinition came a set of new (or renewed) conventions for representing secrets. The period did not give birth to wholly original genres; instead, changes in the nature of secrecy came across as changes within the conventions of the national security sublime itself. The Cold War ontology of secrecy engendered stories about conspiratorial control. The vast machinery of the national security state cautiously protects, or illegitimately conceals, some great mystery—a dangerous technology or crucial piece of information that would prove disastrous were it to fall into the wrong hands. This ontology presents the national security state as master of the secret, the awe and wonder it inspires a reflection of its ability to keep its activities scrupulously out of the public eye. It is managed by professionals rather than by common citizens. This is the sublime of Steven Spielberg’s warehouse, with its secrets carefully crated and kept from the knowledge of even relative insiders. It is also the aesthetic underlying the James Bond franchise, in which a diabolical villain aims to displace the great powers precisely as the master of an explosive secret and legions of covert operatives. The villain, in this worldview, corresponds to Carl Schmitt’s definition of politics as the opposition between friend and enemy.2 All-powerful and well organized, both friend (the CIA, MI6) and enemy (the Soviets, Spectre) work undercover with clockwork precision. In its cynical, post-Watergate mood in the 1970s, and in the techno-thrillers of the 1990s, the conspiracy still works with great precision, but it demonstrates the corruption of the national security state, and the perversion or exhaustion of its outmoded practices. Its powers shade into illegality and self-interest. In the first

140  The Secret Without a Subject case, the sense of the sublime comes from the sheer size and force of the secretive operation we observe—swarming troops; the massive power of a hidden weapon; the scope of what has somehow been hidden—while in the second it comes from the seemingly infinite regression, significance fading into hopeless obscurity, that a still-latent but potentially disastrous conspiracy reveals to the privileged viewer. Under the War on Terror, we find yet another version of the sublime, this time defined above all by “boundless” size and scope. It is an aesthetic grounded chiefly in images rather than narratives, flashes of insight rather than a coherent theory about the nature and propriety of government secrecy. This new aesthetic reflected a changing threat: the opponent was no longer a rival nation—the singular enemy mirroring a singular friend—but any number of amorphous collectives, united by religious fervor and an Internet connection: the “ten million crackpots” that the NSA’s Thomas Reynolds identifies in Enemy of the State transformed into a sublime and shadowy army. This opponent worked not through centralized conspiracies, but individually or in small cells, posing a threat of random violence against scattered civilian targets. It did not seek to undermine the nation from within through ideological subversion, but to create generalized fear. Beginning in the 1990s, when the new threat became a central concern to the intelligence agencies, and much more dramatically after 9/11, the national security state transformed itself to address the new global reality. In the process, it became no less amorphous than the terrorists it sought to defeat. Like the enemy, the secret state is now potentially everywhere, unobtrusively occupying space in the neighborhood office park, watching the local water treatment plant with a hidden security camera, and listening in to our most banal conversations. The clandestine warehouse mutates into a massive data center clearly visible from the interstate, or the listening post nestled behind high-security fences in the Yorkshire countryside; and the dangerous secrets over which the covert state claims sovereignty migrate from the weapons research laboratory to the hearts and minds of the entire populace. Twenty-first-century examples of the national security sublime captured this transformation by foregrounding the materiality of state secrecy: the dynamically sublime view of secret bases in vast and empty landscapes; the mathematically sublime impression of cameras on every street corner, or of hordes of agents seated at listening stations. There was little effort to plumb the depths of these sublime proliferations, because artists, writers, showrunners, and filmmakers recognized that the great expansion of secret government after 9/11 increasingly was a secret to no one. Sheer proliferation was both the means and the end of the new national security state. This shift comes across on the level of technique as well. Artists replaced the privileged view, associated since Romanticism with the transcendent human subject, privy to the insights granted

The Secret Without a Subject  141 by reason, with the impersonal eye of technology, making aesthetic use of many resources originally developed by the national security state, from satellite imagery and remotely operated cameras to visual arrangements enabled by computer algorithms. They broke the mysterious proliferation down into two hollowed out alternatives, both of them open rather than deeply concealed: on the one hand, images of teeming cities, dizzying arrays of security devices, and massive office spaces; and on the other hand, its logical opposite, the specter of depopulation, figured by vast spaces bereft of human inhabitants but dotted with black sites. And they transformed the elevated awareness that Immanuel Kant found in the experience of the sublime, and that so often came across in quasitheological terms during the Cold War, into a vision of the everyday reality of life under secret government—a recognition not of deep mysteries but of public secrets. Contrast the keynotes of the national security sublime during the War on Terror with the uses of sublime imagery in Enemy of the State, which we briefly discussed in Chapter 3. A key product of the Echelon Moment, and one of the few works of popular culture to feature the NSA in the period before the 9/11 attacks, the film cleverly updates the plot of North by Northwest with striking modern technology and a different kind of conspiracy.3 Like Roger Thornhill, Robert Dean, a Washington, DC, lawyer on the trail of the Mafia, finds himself, by sheer chance, in possession of a video depicting the assassination of the congressman whose opposition to a surveillance bill makes him a threat to Reynolds’ ambitions for the NSA. This is the evidence the official tries to extract from the former agency operative Brill when he describes the sublime array of new threats the agency faces. Reynolds figures out that Dean is in possession of the video, and assembles a small team of operatives at the NSA to get it back, using all the formidable resources of the agency. They follow Dean in real time with spy satellites, bug his home, place nearly undetectable trackers in his clothing, and destroy his life by freezing his financial accounts and disseminating false stories about an affair. He loses his home, his family, and his reputation, and like Thornhill, he sets out on a quest to reveal the truth and recover his former life. Brill, who lives in an abandoned warehouse, uses his own technological savvy to help Dean evade the surveillance of Reynolds’ team and prevail in the end. Like so many other works of the Echelon Moment, Enemy of the State straddles two ontologies of government secrecy. In its depiction of a shadowy covert operation within the intelligence apparatus, the film looks back to the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, notably Sydney Pollock’s Three Days of the Condor (1975), which tells of a splinter group within the CIA pursuing its own national security agenda and carrying out unauthorized assassinations to get its way. Robert Redford takes on the Thornhill role here, playing a low-level CIA analyst who accidentally discovers the conspiracy and must avoid the wrath of those in the agency

142  The Secret Without a Subject who want to keep him quiet.4 The conspiracy in Enemy of the State is rather tawdry by comparison. Reynolds tells the team he assembles that their pursuit of Dean is part of a training mission; believing they are only role-playing, the team members cheer and high-five to celebrate their successes. Brill and Dean finally take down their nemesis by tricking him into a firefight with a Mafia family. The implication is clear: Reynolds is akin to a criminal using the awesome powers of the NSA to pursue illegitimate aims. The team works out of a dark and cramped room rather than a massive operations center, metaphorically figuring the shadowy aims and dubious justification for their work. The shabbiness of the team’s surroundings contrasts with the sublime surveillance capacities they control—precisely the capacities that writers, artists, showrunners, and filmmakers in the years after the 9/11 attacks came to associate with the NSA’s role in the War on Terror. The film depicts these powers through the creeping proliferation of listening devices, which seem to be everywhere and hidden on everyone, as well as through montages of satellite images and surveillance footage, cross-cut with views of operations centers and Washington, DC, landmarks, which anticipate the mathematically sublime use of such images in the works of Jill Magid and Hasan Elahi. Enemy of the State shares with several other films from the same historical moment a pervasive anxiety about the ability of rogue factions to turn the powers of the national security apparatus against (more or less) innocent victims. This is a central feature of the conspiracy in The X-Files, but it gained special purchase at the end of the decade. The films show us the possibility that elements of the national security state have fallen from their Cold War heights into mere criminality. In Murder at 1600 (1997), a shady National Security Advisor, played by Alan Alda, uses the resources

Figure 5.1 Still from Enemy of the State, directed by Tony Scott. Touchstone Pictures, 1998.

The Secret Without a Subject  143 of the Secret Service to frame the president’s son for the murder of his lover, a ploy intended to force the cautious president to resign, thereby giving the military a freer hand to use its power to resolve an unfolding national security crisis involving North Korea. DC police officer Harlan Regis (Wesley Snipes) plays the Thornhill role: drawn into the conspiracy while investigating the murder, he uncovers the truth with the help of a suspicious Secret Service agent.5 Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), a film conceived in the late 1990s but released after the 9/11 attacks, features a similar conspiracy to conceal an assassination by a member of the national security hierarchy; in the Bourne Identity (2002), also in development in the late 1990s, we find a cabal within the CIA trying to cover up a tawdry murder at the expense of a deactivated operative (Matt Damon) who is suffering from amnesia; and in Mercury Rising (1998), a former FBI agent, played by Bruce Willis, is called in to protect an autistic child who has solved a cryptographic puzzle formulated by the NSA and becomes a target of assassins.6 All of these films also resemble Enemy of the State in their attention to wondrous surveillance technology, a legacy of contemporary news reports about the Echelon network. In Minority Report, the authorities can observe crimes even before they have happened. For all their techno-fetishism, though, Enemy of the State and these other films of the late 1990s remain Gothic conspiracy stories, in which powerful forces use all the means at hand to terrify or destroy an innocent target. The sublime surveillance capacities of the NSA in Enemy of the State serve much the same function that living pictures and rattling chains play in an Ann Radcliffe novel. And as in one of these novels, the end of the film sees the conspiracy laid bare and the conspirators punished, even if the general public never learns of its details.7 Recent examples of the national security sublime question the legitimacy of this paradigm. Conspiracy narratives can be powerful tools for challenging the claims of entrenched power, but they remain invested in a hermeneutics of secrecy. One is reminded of the police Prefect in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter” (1844), who describes his painstaking but unsuccessful examination of a suspect minister’s apartment. Police officers, the Prefect tells Poe’s protagonist Auguste Dupin, searched the apartment in minute detail for the titular letter, but with no success: Why the fact is, we took our time, and we searched every where. I have had long experience in these affairs. I took the entire building, room by room; devoting the nights of a whole week to each. We examined, first, the furniture of each apartment. We opened every possible drawer; and I presume you know that, to a properly trained police agent, such a thing as a secret drawer is impossible. Any man is a dolt who permits a “secret” drawer to escape him in a search of this kind. The thing is so plain. There is a certain amount of bulk—of space—to be accounted for in every cabinet. Then we have accurate

144  The Secret Without a Subject rules. The fiftieth part of a line could not escape us. After the cabinets we took the chairs. The cushions we probed with the fine long needles you have seen me employ. From the tables we removed the tops.8 This description goes on for two more pages. The upshot of Poe’s story, of course, is that the letter was not hidden at all, but left in the open above the minster’s desk, a fact only Dupin is clever enough to realize. The Prefect’s failing, Poe implies, follows not from a lack of resources or techniques, but from a faulty theory of the secret: he overlooked the letter because he believes that all secrets are concealed. The national security sublime during the War on Terror largely passes beyond the Prefect’s error, reworking the three structural elements of the sublime mode as they functioned in Cold War culture to account for the increasingly public status of covert government. The mysterious proliferation that, when seen correctly, reveals the existence of a master conspiracy instead goes to demonstrate the sheer ubiquity of the national security apparatus; one can find its traces on nearly every street corner and in any bland office park, merely confirming what everyone always already knew about the intelligence agencies. The artists I discussed in the last chapter were deeply suspicious of encroachments by the national security state, and always critical of burgeoning official secrecy, but they also recognized that conventional ideas about revelation, closely tied to the conspiratorial imaginary and having their roots in Gothic fiction and Jeremy Bentham’s political theory, no longer hold unquestionably true. Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, and the other beset protagonists of the Echelon Moment were at once the last gasp of an old order and the first explorers of a brave new world they did not even realize they had discovered.

Conspiracy Nostalgia Recent examples of the national security sublime frequently draw upon the narrative forms and visual styles of older versions of the mode. We find many of the same places and images familiar from the Cold War sublime. Paglen even evokes the visual rhetoric of conspiracy theorizing in his use of grainy telephoto shots, and frequently depicts himself as a dogged researcher in search of hidden truths, not unlike Bob Woodward or Joe Frady. What this work shows us, however, is not the tantalizing trace of a deep conspiracy but the strange banality of contemporary secrecy practices, available to any citizen with the will to find them. In a recent series of photographs that alludes to Richard Misrach’s apocalyptic On the Beach series, Paglen frames shots of nondescript beaches and vacationers sunning themselves near sites where the NSA has tapped the undersea cables that carry global Internet traffic. Government secrecy exists sideby-side with everyday life, just beneath the surfboards and inner tubes of the bathers. Much the same thing is true of artists like Elahi, who

The Secret Without a Subject  145 does not unveil the hidden existence of the surveillance state—everyone knows at some level that they are being watched—but makes immediate and material the dizzying array of information it seeks to generate and process. Even the physical look of the work of these artists departs from the warehouse aesthetic that we find in Raiders of the Lost Ark and The X-Files. In place of shadows, whispered confessions, and endless aisles stacked with evidence—ready visual metaphors for conventional (Gothic) ideas about mystery—we have bright lighting, open spaces, crystal clear images, and a vivid color palette. A similar aesthetic impulse drives the turn toward genres like satire and horror in recent depictions of the NSA, which frame the agency in terms of familiar popular cultural affects, evoking the experience of the suburban multiplex rather than multinational intrigue. The works I discussed in the last chapter tend to depart in this way from the dominant form of sublimity in the postmodern era—what Fredric Jameson calls the postmodern technological sublime, a mode epitomized in the cyberpunk novel, with its fixation on the nexus of technology and global conspiracy. For Jameson, such conspiracy narratives constitute a mystified rendering of the world system knit together by multinational capital, a “degraded attempt,” as he puts it in Postmodernism, to map the “impossible totality” of late capitalism.9 In the Geopolitical Aesthetic, Jameson sees much the same process of cognitive mapping in a range of 1970s conspiracy films, including All the President’s Men and The Parallax View, which present the image of “a potentially infinite network, along with a plausible explanation of its invisibility.”10 Catherine Zimmer has argued that Enemy of the State embodies this kind of mapping narratively in its recurrent use of satellite images to “place” Dean within a global surveillance system; he becomes quite literally part of the map, visually located within a technologically (if not conceptually) coherent world system that links the banal details of his home life to a geopolitical conspiracy.11 We find a very similar sense of totality in the image of the Cigarette Smoking Man walking down the aisle of a secret warehouse in the pilot episode of The X-Files, an image that uses the national security sublime to indicate a carefully crafted but mysteriously proliferating conspiracy, embodied in the figure of a single man who has access to the inner workings of the FBI and the military establishment alike. For the Cigarette Smoking Man, the shelves of evidence are not sublime; he is master of the secret, the ultimate privileged viewer, controlling information by putting it under lock and key. For everyone else it can only be a source of awe and wonder, a potentially interplanetary proliferation of clues, rendered (barely, fleetingly) comprehensible by the suggestion of a conspiracy and the fearful possibility of totality it opens up. As I have argued, the works of artists, writers, showrunners, and filmmakers under the War on Terror aimed for a different kind of cognitive mapping, overawed not by the specter of conspiracy but by the sheer

146  The Secret Without a Subject size, scope, and encompassing power of the national security state and its global reach. The secrets of state remain deeply concealed, but there is no secret about the vast extent of state secrecy itself, and for this reason the effect of revealing such secrets is not the same as blowing the lid off a covert plot. In Paglen’s work, the national security state poses as a feature of the landscape: self-evident, perennial, and apparently unchanging, a monolithic presence, not unlike the mountain ranges that surround Groom Lake. In novelistic representations of the surveillance state, the material remains of Cold War military installations stand like Romantic ruins, haunted by the past and awaiting their future repurposing. Stankievech shows us the extent to which national security concerns shaped the landscape even of places little more habitable than the moon; while Elahi and Magid remind us of the pervasive government surveillance to which we are potentially subject whenever we step out of our houses. In none of these cases does the fact of secrecy come to us in a blinding revelation. Rather than the detectives and hermeneutic puzzles of post-modern conspiracy, as Jameson frames it (puzzles implicitly holding out the possibility that they may be solved), these artists give us spaces and multiplicities that are not hidden but that nevertheless defy normal comprehension. This is the animating condition of the Romantic sublime rather than the Gothic novel. Although it may seem a perversely counter-intuitive claim to make at a historical moment saturated with conspiracy theories, the development of the national security sublime in the early twenty-first century embodies the exhaustion of conspiracy theory as a viable aesthetic of government secrecy. Such theories continue to circulate in fiction, film, and various social discourses, particularly on the political right, and can still have powerful sociological effects, but they no longer serve their foundationally Gothic function of shining the harsh light of publicity on the unseen machinations of the powerful and the corrupt. The logic of secretum has lost its original political role. We see the beginnings of this exhaustion as early as The X-Files, which repeatedly brings Mulder and Scully to the edge of discovery, only to lower the veil again when their evidence disappears or proves inconclusive. The inevitable failure of revelation is compounded by another curious fact about the show: even if the agents were able, finally, to reveal the truth, it is never clear in the series just how they would convey it to the public. As Richard Flannery and David Louzecky have pointed out, there are vanishingly few reporters in The X-Files, and the one journalist Mulder and Scully do encounter, in “Fallen Angel,” the tenth episode of the first season, turns out to be a military plant.12 The Cigarette Smoking Man moves in and out of the FBI office building with ease, making it clear that the organs of the national security state are controlled by the conspiracy and will more likely conceal the truth than disclose it to the public. Much the same thing is true of Congress, as we learn in “Terma,”

The Secret Without a Subject  147 the ninth episode of the fourth season, when Scully is called before a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and tries to read a statement detailing the secret workings of the Syndicate. The committee chairman receives a mysterious note, and quickly changes tack, refusing his witness the opportunity to speak. Mulder’s various informants have a dubious relationship to truth, and often lead him dangerously astray; unlike the most famous whistleblowers of past fifty years, none of them has any interest in revealing his secrets to the press. The only consistent partners Mulder and Scully have outside of the government are the three conspiracy enthusiasts known as the Lone Gunmen, who publish a grimy tabloid from which they take their collective name—hardly the institutional organ of publicity that Bentham imagined the press and the engaged public to be. Openness in The X-Files feels like an empty ritual, its necessity intoned in nearly every episode, but its effectiveness never tested and its familiar tools neglected, corrupted, or ignored. It is an anthropological survival from a previous generation of fictional investigators that no longer seems to function in a dawning age of public secrets. The War on Terror broke the last crucial link to the Benthamite belief in the effectiveness of political transparency, the Gothic faith par excellence and the driving force behind the logic of secretum. This belief still motives the narrative form and prevailing aesthetic of The X-Files, even if it has become inoperative as a method of revelation, but the national security sublime in the years after 9/11 pushes the critique of openness even further. Conspiracy itself survives here only as a hollow form, rousing anger, signaling group membership, or providing a reassuring sense of explanatory coherence without the responsibility of revealing anything tangible. Indeed, for artists in this brave new world, conspiracy theories seemed to reflect not a desire for knowledge, but a desire for the desire for knowledge, a nostalgia for truth akin to what Jean-François Lyotard finds in Abstract Expressionist canvases. Rather than revealing the hidden truths of covert government, they demonstrate the power of public secrecy to undermine a traditional hermeneutics of concealment and disclosure. “Some conspiracies,” notes March Kelleher in Bleeding Edge, “they’re warm and comforting, we know the names of the bad guys, we want to see them get their comeuppance.”13 Pynchon’s comment speaks to a fatal divorce of form and function. In an age defined by open secrets about government surveillance, conspiracy stories veer closer to kitsch than to intrepid truth-telling, valued for their affective charge rather than their political effectiveness. This is a point Mark Lombardi’s works begin to suggest—conspiracy takes the form of “mere” art rather than journalism, entertainment as much as illumination—but it is central to recent examples of the national security sublime. 2016 was a banner year for what we might call conspiracy nostalgia, which exemplifies

148  The Secret Without a Subject the transformation of conspiracy thinking into empty ritual. The wildly popular Netflix series from that year, Stranger Things, explicitly looked back (misty-eyed, one senses) to the seemingly more committed conspiratorial world of shows like The X-Files.14 Set in the 1980s, the show blends an often lyrical depiction of simpler times, when children could spend the day riding their bicycles far from adult supervision, with a conspiracy story, inspired by rumors about the Cold War-era Montauk Project, featuring aliens and human experimentation being kept under wraps by government agencies. The two stories—lyrical and conspiratorial—resonate with one another, the desire for a simpler past finding its echo in the desire for a simpler image of government secrecy. The government base is on the edge of town, and both the local police and the children who are the focus of the show seem able without much effort to infiltrate its boundaries. The secret here is localized and open to a process of discovery and solution. A similar alliance of nostalgia and conspiracy drove the successful presidential campaign of Donald Trump, which, apparently aided and abetted by Russian trolls—the Cold War enemy now transformed into covert friend—circulated numerous conspiracy theories and “fake news” stories about the neoliberal world order epitomized by his rival Hillary Clinton, alongside a promise, as the campaign slogan put it, to “Make America Great Again.” Typically drawn from the world of the so-called alt-right of white nationalists, these conspiracies impugned cosmopolitan elites, often evoking older theories of nefarious Jewish machinations right out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, accusing them of working with a range of hostile forces to undermine American greatness, a greatness associated with some vaguely imagined Cold War-era moment of unquestioned racial and national hegemony. Conspiracy here is not, as is in Stranger Things, an object of nostalgia, but a way of inspiring nostalgia. The aim was not to argue for greater transparency—to drag America’s enemies into the harsh light of publicity—but instead to inspire longing for a world now purportedly lost. The early years of the Trump Administration have only accelerated the degradation of the conspiratorial imaginary. While hinting repeatedly at hidden enemies in the “Deep State” to rouse the ire of his political base, Trump has openly pursued policies that support much the same corporate elite he impugned during the campaign. Consistent with the logic of public secrets, it is a strategy that relies on cognitive dissonance and a shameless unconcern with revelation rather than on the radical transparency that conspiratorial thinking traditionally seeks out. Consider, to take one last example, the role that nostalgia for a “warm and comforting” conspiracy played in the public response to the bizarre case of Maria Butina, which unfolded in the summer of 2018. A graduate student and gun-rights activist from Siberia, the red-haired Butina ingratiated herself into a wide range of right-wing groups, from the National

The Secret Without a Subject  149 Rifle Association to the Republican National Committee. She carried on affairs with at least two Republican officials and posed for photographs with a panorama of conservative movement luminaries, all while apparently taking orders from a handler with close ties to Russian intelligence. When Butina was arrested by the FBI and charged with conspiracy and operating as an unregistered foreign agent, the media response looked to Cold War spy stories to explain her actions. Reports compared her to famous female spies from the past and described the familiar “honeytrap” technique, by which a powerful man is seduced into complicity with a plot. Commentators speculated that the conservative movement may be rife with other secret agents plying the same clandestine trade, or referenced the FX Network show The Americans (2013–18), another (ambivalent) avatar of conspiracy nostalgia, which features two Russian spies posing as a suburban American couple in the 1980s. Butina was anything but hidden in her intentions, however. She maintained a Facebook page proudly touting her Russian identity, her religious convictions, and her love of guns; her phone case sported the famous picture of Russian President Vladimir Putin shirtless and riding horseback. Butina and her contacts shared the aim of improving relations between Moscow and Washington, the chief purpose of her mission. What she achieved was closer to networking than to traditional spycraft, making her a veritable poster girl for the age of the public secret. The media response to her case looked for deep conspiracy where the real story lay in the prospect of open collaboration between Russian intelligence and elements of the American conservative movement that had once enthusiastically promoted the very same tropes of Cold War paranoia that were being resurrected to explain their (purportedly unwitting) involvement. As this example suggests, conspiracy nostalgia hews closely to the example of the Cold War sublime, which subordinated its images of overwhelming government mysteries to the model of Gothic conspiracy, finding elevation in the sense that some omniscient directing authority, whether benevolent or malign, really controlled the proliferating secrets of the realm. This model offered a straightforward metaphorical substitution: conspiracy for mystery. As it developed under the War on Terror, the national security sublime came to abandon this substitution, pointing to a more general exhaustion of the Gothic paradigm and the political work of revelation it once so persuasively supported. Ubiquity tends to disarm conspiracy, and the more extensively the tendrils of the national security state worked their way into everyday life, the more they came to look like familiar features of the landscape rather than evidence of a hidden plot. An effective conspiracy conceals its very existence, rendering the outsider doubly ignorant. It is a second-order secret, cloaking hidden intentions behind dissimulated identities and veiled motives. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the national security state increasingly hid in plain sight,

150  The Secret Without a Subject making secrecy at once visible and inaccessible to the citizen in ways that contemporary artists sought to apprehend through the visual language of the Romantic sublime. Government secrecy practices—and even Russian spies—no longer quite resembled the cloak-and-dagger exploits brought to light by the novelists and intrepid reporters of the Cold War era, and aesthetic responses to these practices changed to capture the ambient circumstances. Dramatic revelations no longer function as they once did in this new world shaped by public secrets. Take another example suggesting the exhaustion of the Gothic conspiracy paradigm: the Marvel film Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a nostalgic pastiche of familiar tropes from older conspiracy narratives that also shares many of the aesthetic modes and political insights of the contemporary artists I  have discussed. Released in 2014, in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations, the film tells the story of a quasigovernmental conspiracy to do away with all future terrorist threats by using data mining and secret algorithms to predict, and to preemptively execute, everyone on earth with radical leanings.15 Project Insight, as the plan is called, clearly alludes to the predictive intelligence work of the NSA that Snowden disclosed, and perhaps most notably to its intellectual inspiration, the Total Information Awareness program. Set largely (and tellingly) in Washington, DC, the film uses a superhero story to reflect upon current anxieties about the nature and scope of government secrets. Finding that they have unwittingly been working in the service of a dark conspiracy, the heroes of the film do battle with their own agency to protect the world from its imminent realization. The screenwriters modeled Captain America: The Winter Soldier on classic 1970s conspiracy films like The Parallax View, and in particular on Three Days of the Condor.16 The conspiracy here has a somewhat different outcome from that imagined in paranoia films. Project Insight turns out to be the culmination of a plot that goes back to Nazi Germany. Dubbed HYDRA, and led by Captain America’s handler at SHIELD, Alexander Pierce, played by Redford—now ironically in the role of head conspirator—its aim is to persuade the citizens of the world to give up their freedom in the interest of security by orchestrating scenes of sublime chaos: terrorist attacks, natural disasters, economic crises. Project Insight is the global coming out of the long-secreted plan, kept alive in an underground bunker since the end of the Second World War.17 Pierce openly reveals his intentions to members of the World Security Council, and its denouement takes place in broad daylight rather than in shadowy darkness. These details alone suggest a shift in the nature of the conspiracy narrative that drives the film. The prime movers of HYDRA see no reason to conceal their intentions any longer, for the citizens of the world are now scared enough to accept, or at least tolerate as a public secret, their data-driven vision of security. The battle between HYDRA and the agents of SHIELD does not concern hidden intentions, but the

The Secret Without a Subject  151 success or failure of now-manifest plans. Publicity no longer looks like a means of blowing the lid off conspiracies; instead, it simply demonstrates the extent to which the HYDRA conspiracy has become everyday social reality. Perhaps the most telling image of this change in the film is the three massive Helicarriers, bristling with weaponry, which will bring Project Insight into public view. Connected to a network of spy satellites and guided by HYDRA’s algorithm, they can carry out mass assassinations across the globe over the course of just a few minutes. The imagery here veers from the familiar registers of the Gothic that still dominate the conspiracy films of the 1970s and their stylistic offspring like The X-Files and Stranger Things—claustrophobic rooms, dark alleyways, masked assassins—to an aesthetic of the sublime. The Helicarriers in the film are gigantic, and their instantaneous global reach is projected on a massive screen in the control room of the agency. They are a visual image for the secrets of the national security state: unimaginably vast, driven by data, and perhaps most crucially, operating with only the veneer of democratic oversight. When the Helicarriers are finally brought down after a dramatic airborne confrontation between heroes and villains, the effect is also sublime. One craft plunges into the SHIELD headquarters on the banks of the Potomac, producing massive destruction that recalls the 9/11 attacks. This crash brings Project Insight to an end, and marks the failure of the HYDRA conspiracy, but the image might also be taken as a metaphor for the changing nature of government secrecy under the War on Terror. The two aesthetics of Captain America: The Winter Soldier—Gothic conspiracy and Hollywood sublime—make the film into a stylistic and conceptual portmanteau. The filmmakers evoke two distinct conceptions of government secrecy, one that regards it as shadowy and clandestine, and the other that regards it as open and visible to the public, but inaccessible by virtue of its size and power. Although the plot stitches these two aesthetics together, the manifest action being a result of the clandestine plot, they actually point to very different orders of concealment. The Gothic conspiracy narrative imagines secrets as truths kept illegitimately from the public—and even from the agents who are tasked with carrying it out. The Helicarriers are a resonant emblem of an emerging order of secrecy, one no longer associated chiefly with daring agents or criminal masterminds, but with large agencies and massive scale: a matter of logistics rather than conventional spycraft.

Secrecy and Sovereign Power The famous ending of Three Days of the Condor shows Redford’s character, having survived a series of assassination attempts, standing near the offices of the New York Times, where it becomes clear that he has told his

152  The Secret Without a Subject story about the conspiracy to a reporter. The film concludes ambiguously— we never find out whether the story appears in the newspaper or whether the CIA managed to have it suppressed—but the scene retains a residual faith in the ability of openness and transparency to root out government secrets. Journalistic publicity, even if it falls victim to the machinations of the powers that be, still stands as an ideal. A similar faith drives even the most cynically minded conspiracy films, like The Parallax View and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which seek to produce a general suspicion of covert authority. The protagonists of both films fall victim to sublimely dark forces, but the audience leaves the theater with its critical powers intact, and on the lookout for similar plots. The Gothic mode that so deeply informs contemporary thinking about government secrecy inevitably holds out the possibility of full disclosure. By contrast, the shortlived AMC Network series Rubicon (2010), a show explicitly modeled on Three Days of the Condor, and produced in the wake of early revelations of NSA surveillance, imagines the newspaper as a very different vehicle for revelation: the nefarious conspirators embed hidden messages in crossword puzzles. Transforming the quintessential organ of publicity into a cryptograph, Rubicon’s clever plot twist, like the sublime imagery of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, underscores the extent to which the Gothic paradigm had lost its hold under the War on Terror. There was no need to hide anymore: the secrets of the realm are so vast and all-encompassing that no single citizen, at least one lacking superpowers, could ever hope to understand them—they even grace the pages of the daily paper. Revealing is just another mode of concealing. Government secrets in this way produce a sense of imaginative breakdown appropriate to a world in which the clandestine has become largely manifest, a public secret the national security apparatus barely pretends to hide. The result, as I  have argued, was a transformation of the national security sublime. The exhaustion of the conspiracy paradigm in recent artworks about the national security state was matched, as I noted in Chapter 4, by a different sense of exhaustion in popular depictions of the NSA after 2007 (even more so after 2013), when stories about NSA surveillance reached a broad audience. These depictions replaced or supplemented the ideal of elevation descended from the Romantic sublime with the distancing forms of horror or parody. The hordes of agents in business wear that we find in The Simpsons Movie underscore the silliness of trying to discern deep conspiracies in the banal lives of everyday citizens; by the same token, Laura Poitras’ use of genre cues from slasher films in Citizenfour has the curious effect of at once distancing the agency and making it more familiar: we know all too well what happens when the killer shows up, even if his motives and the source of his quasi-supernatural powers remain a mystery. In neither case are viewers afforded the feeling of transcendence that traditionally comes with the sublime. There is

The Secret Without a Subject  153 only number and power, the triggering conditions of sublimity stripped of their provoking mystery. This is the obverse of conspiracy nostalgia: a headless sublime, awareness without elevation. The sublime and the ridiculous alike give aesthetic form to life in a world well stocked with manifest mysteries. But there was also something deeply perceptive about this drift away from the traditional affective rewards of conspiracy narratives and sublime elevation in the later years of the War on Terror. For in their emphasis on sheer number and power, recent depictions of the NSA reflect perceptively on key changes in the nature of government secrecy-work, changes that came to define the response to the 9/11 attacks. The image of numbers is particularly telling. The national security sublime here depicts the NSA as an agency made up either of hordes of low-level operatives or eerily depopulated listening stations like Menwith Hill, monitored by no one. In The Simpsons Movie and South Park, we get images of offices filled with row upon row of desks; similar images define the work of artists like Elahi. In Ascolto and Citizenfour, like Paglen and Stankievech, give us nearly empty landscapes, the visual obverse of the sea of identical agents, and of listening stations that operate with no active human participation. Filming in the most densely populated city in the world, Poitras shows us the single figure of Snowden mostly alone in his small hotel room. The national security state is literally or figuratively faceless, a vast body of secrets without a singular subject. No one seems to be overseeing the surveillance; it all runs like a machine, automated, impersonal, and for that reason potentially boundless. The train engineer who overhears the Simpsons turns out to be a robot; the Helicarriers in Captain America: The Winter Soldier are operated by algorithm. In effect, there is no one listening and no one deciding, either because there are so many nameless bureaucrats passively monitoring so many nameless citizens, or because the listening posts run all by themselves. Such sublime images of overpopulation and depopulation perceptively capture the nature of intelligence work in the so-called Age of Big Data. The NSA has never relied on clandestine operations like those made famous by the CIA or MI6 to reveal secrets. Instead, the agency restricts its mission to the collection and analysis of signals intelligence information. After the 9/11 attacks, under orders from the Bush Administration, the work of collection grew exponentially, so much so that the agency itself grew and changed to manage it. Scooping up sublime quantities of information, far more transmissions than an Echelon Dictionary could encompass, it developed tools to help it find the few secret needles in these new haystacks of data. Rather than tracking suspects through their signals, the agency now searched the signals for suspects. The aim was to find patterns that would reveal unrecognized conspiracies. The agency’s methods during the War on Terror constitute the contemporary apotheosis what Alain Badiou describes as the “empire of number,” a drive to

154  The Secret Without a Subject reduce the knowable to the countable and the calculable.18 The great innovation of the NSA, the upshot of its new Manhattan Project, and the capability that Joseph Masco suggests may be “one of the most profound achievements of the War on Terror,” was to turn intelligence gathering into something more like number crunching than traditional sleuthing, piecing together secret clues from the avalanche of information it gathered and mined for leads.19 This fact helps to explain the question that provoked my book: why there are so few contemporary depictions of the agency in popular culture. Film and fiction are drawn to the singular and the exceptional; the secrets of the NSA are simply too numerous, and too numerical, to make for compelling representation, except as sublime (or anti-sublime) spectacle. Hence the recent popularity of the figure of the hacker, that typically lone figure who cuts through and controls data rather than being awed by it; the national security hacker represents the other side of the national security sublime, a position equivalent to conspiratorial figures like the Cigarette Smoking Man in The X-Files. The NSA’s fundamentally anti-sublime orientation toward the numerical makes it unrepresentable as anything other than a paragon of unrepresentability. There is no recognizable personality one could ascribe to its activities. But the agency’s focus on big data also has another striking implication, one that carries over to commercial data collection practices by technology companies that imitate the aims and methods it deployed during the War on Terror. Critics of the rise of mass data collection by governments and corporations—and they are legion, as befits its public secrecy—have argued that we are witnessing the clandestine return to the order of arcana imperii. Everyday citizens are again becoming open books to those in power, who gather and sort reams of information about their choices, habits, movements, contacts, beliefs, and behaviors.20 Anything one does online, and increasingly much of what one does off-line, leaves electronic traces stored in databases that can be mined for insights, rendering moot the division between public and private codified over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the same time, and despite the efforts of whistleblowers like Snowden, these new masters remain mysterious, protected by veils of classification and non-disclosure agreements. The ritually intoned praise of openness and sharing belies a new reality: secret keeping in the Age of Big Data is again a prerogative of the powerful, while individual secrets are increasingly difficult to maintain. Dennis Broeders terms this the “transparency paradox”: “the citizen becomes ever more transparent to the government, while it becomes increasingly complex for the citizen to understand which governmental organisations hold which information about him or her.”21 Frank Pasquale describes the regime of big data in business and government as “a star chamber,” alluding to the secretive court notoriously used by Stuart monarchs in seventeenth-century England to buttress their power

The Secret Without a Subject  155 against the aristocracy and religious dissenters.22 Paglen calls modern state secrecy an illegitimate form of sovereign power persisting in the democratic polis: “It is a tool of kings.”23 And Bruce Schneier describes Google’s business model as “analogous to feudal lords,” reaping profit from its legion of digital serfs.24 Such characterizations of the emerging world order foretell a literal or figurative return to the earlier distribution of secrecy Simmel describes, one defined by high levels of official secrecy and little personal privacy: a resurrection of monarchial prerogative in an age purportedly defined by what Gilles Deleuze terms “control societies.”25 But this may not be the whole story. Big data has automated, and in the process depopulated, the act of gathering and storing personal information; the word “population” now as readily describes a movement of data as a group of people. This possibility represents an epochal transformation in the historical understanding of secrecy. Simmel canonically defines secrets in terms of social relationships. Keeping and sharing secrets helps us define our bonds with others, provides a technique of individualization, divides insiders from outsiders, and lends cultural capital to those in the know. “The secret is a sociological determination characteristic of the reciprocal relations between group elements,” he writes.26 Simmel’s definition dominates sociological, anthropological, and psychological accounts of secrecy, and it underlies the conspiracy paradigm of shows like The X-Files, as well as the work of anti-secrecy activists like Greenwald and Julian Assange. The truth is out there—and someone is by definition keeping it from me, a fully intentional actor in control of hidden information that serves his or her purpose. The chief tropes and character types of the traditional spy genres in fiction and film are consistent with this characterization. The charismatic agents of the CIA or MI6 are set apart by the secrets they keep, share, and unveil. While their exploits may be extraordinary, their secrecy practices tread familiar ground. But what if, as recent examples of the national security sublime suggest, there is no truth out there, and no people who conceal or discover it? What if there is no government conspiracy, no single directing intelligence? Residing in reams of data put off without a thought by billions of phone and Internet users, which are sorted automatically by proprietary algorithms and stored in massive server farms, the secrets of the type discovered by NSA surveillance might never pass through a human consciousness or circulate in a human community before having effects in the world. This reflects a development beyond the instances of “sighting without a seeing subject” that Garrett Stewart finds in recent films about surveillance.27 Here there is not even “sighting,” only processing, no vision or consciousness to speak of. Modern conceptualizations of surveillance assume, whether literally or figuratively, a conscious observer like Orwell’s Big Brother or, in John Twelve Hawk’s The Traveler, the allusively named Brethren. But the NSA

156  The Secret Without a Subject and its corporate partners and imitators use methods closer to what Philip Agre describes as “capture,” rather than surveillance as it is traditionally understood. Capture, Agre explains, passively generates and parses data by tracking movements and measuring them against a normative “grammar of actions,” not by active watching.28 Metadata analysis of phone conversations, to take a cognate example, discerns illegal activity not by interpreting the hidden intentions of a suspect’s words, but by logging movements and patterns of contact, only noting unusual clusters of activity or deviations from a norm. It is a fundamentally counter-hermeneutic form of intelligence work that marks a significant departure even from the keyword Dictionaries in the Echelon network. Capture can be entirely automated: people define the norms, build and maintain the servers that store tracking data, and design the algorithms that sniff out deviations, but the secrets these systems discover remain a mere string of numbers. They are small points in a vast field of information, dots connected in networks discerned by all-seeing eyes without a face. As Friedrich Kittler writes in a prescient article about the agency published in 1986, the NSA elevates automated data processing to such an extent that “individuals or messages”—the targets of traditional human intelligence—no longer count.29 The real “audience” for contemporary secrets is the algorithms that sift and sort the data trail we emit, and the machines that “see” and “read” it; no single person could ever hope to apprehend, let alone master, the sublime floods of information that agencies like the NSA or corporations like Google gather every minute.30 Jussi Parikka puts it this way: “this reality is not about communication aimed at humans and decipherable with hermeneutics but is taking place at such frequencies that can be captured only at the level of the technical apparatus.”31 Much as the flood of data results from our unthinking or unwitting interactions with technology (the metadata thrown off when we navigate to a web site or make a mobile call), so, too, no human need even cast a cursory glimpse over the data to analyze it. There is only the low hum of servers at work in some vast data center tended by a few caretakers. This is a key plot point in In Ascolto, where the mostly abject human listeners seem always to be waiting patiently for automated computerized systems to cue them into suspicious activity. Big data methods, these scenes suggest, engender secrets without a subject, not an unqualified return to the order of arcana imperii. Schmitt famously defines sovereignty as a “monopoly to decide” rather than a monopoly on coercive power.32 Now, in place of the sovereignty of kings or of the people, we have what Tung-Hui Hu calls “the sovereignty of data”: a regime in which decisions, even those over life and death, follow not from the dictate of a singular authority, but from aggregations of information, mechanically subjected to predetermined norms.33 Control over the arcane does not buttress the power of the absolute monarch, as it did in early modern Europe, but brings

The Secret Without a Subject  157 about the increasing obsolescence of traditional forms of secrecy and sovereignty alike. The episode of South Park I discussed in the previous chapter cleverly allegorizes the automation of secrecy in the contemporary national security state by positing a mythical rather than a technological explanation for the feeling of sublime elevation. For Kant and the Romantic tradition, the sublime is ultimately spiritual, a recognition of our inherent ability to strive for insights that lie beyond visible nature. This distinction is represented in “Let Go, Let Gov” by the reactions two different characters have to Snowden’s revelation of government surveillance. While the cynical Eric Cartman gains no sense of what Kant calls the supersensible “vocation” from his encounter with the NSA, the far more credulous Butters takes it all too literally, openly welcoming the prospect of government surveillance and construing it as evidence of modern divinity.34 He prays to the government before bed and confesses his sins to a clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles, fashioning a new religious revival around the image of a benevolent and omniscient bureaucracy. Cartman thinks in terms of secrets and conspiracy, the favored tropes of the older national security sublime, while Butters construes mass surveillance, not unlike Beryl Parmenter in Don DeLillo’s Libra, by analogy with divine omniscience. The punch line of the episode is that Butters is right. On his tour of the agency, Cartman is given special access to the deep secret behind the

Figure 5.2 Still from South Park, “Let Go, Let Gov,” created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Comedy Central, 2013.

158  The Secret Without a Subject NSA’s powers of surveillance: Santa Claus, wired up to massive computer servers. Nothing but the divine, the absolute subject from whom no human quality is concealed, can adequately capture the work of secrecy in the Age of Big Data. But it is an avatar of the divine put in the service of machines and algorithms: one more source of data to parse and classify. Santa Claus looks alarmingly abject, with a dazed expression on his face and what seems to be a colostomy bag hanging between his legs, evidence that he is more prisoner than partner.35 The image alludes to two famous scenes from films conceived in the Echelon Moment: the three precogs lying in a trance-like state in a room nicknamed The Temple, feeding their thoughts to computers at the Precrime Division in Minority Report; and the revelatory moment from the first Matrix film (1999), where we see the truth behind the computer simulations of reality, namely thousands upon thousands of human bodies hooked up to machines as a source of energy.36 Even divine omniscience remains mired in the empire of number, no more able than the average citizen to understand the great secrets managed by modern government.

Prospects In his photograph of Lobo Solo gazing (we presume) at the top-secret Groom Lake base from the peak of Mount Tikaboo, Paglen captures a detail that raises significant questions about the political stakes of the national security sublime. The back of the activist’s shirt bears a slogan coined by the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore: “Democracy is not a spectator sport.” There is a certain irony in this detail, for Lobo Solo is only looking, but the irony is also telling. The national security sublime tries to grasp the truth of government secrecy precisely as an effect (and affect) of spectatorship. For Kant and for many subsequent theorists of the mode, the sublime goes beyond mere looking. The agitation of sublime passions, roused by the encounter with absolute greatness, yields to a more reflective state of mind, replacing fear and frustration with elevation and a sense of vocation. Privileged viewers do not just see the spectacle of wild nature, but also reflect upon their ability to grasp through the imagination what they could never master physically or conceptually. They perceive and experience what it is manifestly beyond their ability wholly to know. Artists, writers, filmmakers, and showrunners during the War on Terror brought this reflective state of mind to the spectacle of government secrecy, albeit typically with a skeptical edge. Presenting sublime vistas of the national security state—listening stations perched on mountaintops or situated on frozen wastelands; city streets teeming with security cameras; massive rooms filled with agents eavesdropping on our conversations— they encouraged viewers to reflect on the public secret of covert governance, the strange hermeneutic game by which citizens repeatedly come

The Secret Without a Subject  159 to know what they are not permitted to know: the known unknowns. We gain insight not into the secrets themselves, which remain ineluctably concealed, like the mist-enshrouded valley beneath the young man in Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above a Sea of Fog, but into the mental and material structures that make it possible for the government to keep secrets openly in a democratic society. By contrast with Cold War purveyors of the national security sublime, who maintained a faith in the ultimate ability of openness to reveal hidden truths, recent figures wanted us to “see” the public secret, to grasp the way secrets hide in plain sight. They placed the material facts of the national security state at the center of their aesthetic. For this reason, the national security sublime under the War on Terror marked a decisive shift away from the theological underpinning of the politics of transparency. Artists largely eschewed the Gothic fascination with conspiracy narratives, bound up as these narratives inevitably are with the desire for full transparency, and drew instead upon the more equivocal insights of the sublime as it emerges in Romantic poetry and painting. They implied that the Gothic legacy, historically and conceptually linked to arguments for open government, had run its course, at least insofar as the national security state is concerned. The new ontology and epistemology of secrecy ushered in by the War on Terror demanded a new aesthetic—or rather, a return to a different old one. Openness no longer reliably engendered truth. Granted, power does often conform to the Gothic script, but one can no longer unquestionably rely on what Louis Brandeis famously described as the sanitizing work of sunlight— the standing prescription of theorists like Bentham and recent antisecrecy activists alike.37 Slavoj Žižek, apropos of All the President’s Men, aptly describes the anti-conspiratorial ideal descended from Bentham this way: “a couple of ordinary guys uncover a scandal which reaches right up to the President, forcing him to step down.”38 Both the sheer size and scope of the national security state, and its now-pervasive status as public secret, render this ideal obsolete. As President Trump has made clear, open deceit, rendered impervious to correction by incessant repetition, is also an effective way to carry out covert aims. Given technological advances in surveillance and predictive analytics achieved by the NSA during the War on Terror, and made into a business strategy by its corporate partners and imitators, transparency may be a threat rather than a salvation. As Byung-Chul Han has argued, in The Transparency Society, modernity’s overriding faith in the social and political efficacy of openness increasingly leads not to truth and justice, but to a world frighteningly devoid of secrets. Under the regime of transparency, “secrecy, foreignness, and otherness represent obstacles” that need to be surmounted to achieve an ideal of “communication without borders”: the total transparency of the body politic.39 The rise of transparency as dream and policy may mean the end of nefarious secrecy,

160  The Secret Without a Subject as Bentham predicted, but it also foretells the marginalization of every mode of being that cannot easily become data—just more fodder for the national security state to sort and analyze. Hiding might be a viable strategy of resistance rather than the chief method of secret government. As Jacques Derrida writes, “If a right to the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space.”40 This critique of transparency arguably applies to sublime spectatorship as well. Just watching, however sophisticated, can be a dangerous game. Politically, it may lead not to illumination but to one of two self-defeating affective responses: either the endless cycle of suspicion that Dean finds in the regime of publicity; or the kind of willing submission to authority exemplified by Butters’ divinely inscrutable DMV. Both responses serve the bidding of the national security state. However oppositional their intentions, the artists, writers, showrunners, and filmmakers become unwitting publicity agents for secret government, their sublime images leaving the audience prostrate and easily managed; convinced, as both Kant and Edmund Burke understood, that hidden powers seem immeasurably great, omniscient, and omnipotent precisely because they are unseen. All the sublime images of secret warehouses and remote installations of the past half-century (and beyond) become a form of propaganda that makes the open secrets of covert government appear all the more massive and unavoidable.41 Conspiracy narratives possess the distinct advantage of offering an explanation and a path to action, directing us to the guilty party (inevitably hidden) and how we can defeat it (inevitably through exposure). It is surely for this reason that the Trump Administration has made conspiratorial thinking central to its political strategy. If nothing else, as Peter Knight has written, conspiracy “offers a symbolic resolution to the problem of representing who is responsible for events that seem to be beyond anyone’s control.”42 Does the sublime provide a path from seeing to doing? Scholars have long debated this question, asking whether the compensatory relationship to power inherent in the mode is a political asset or merely another form of accommodation. Lyotard argues that sublimity can “wage a war on totality,” disrupting the legitimating narratives of power with praise of the incommensurable.43 The sublime brings out the cracks and fissures that riddle all efforts at control. Building upon Lyotard’s claim, Michael Shapiro sees sublime experiences like collective trauma as a way of creating new communities of sense; the sublime challenge to totality makes it possible to imagine a reconfiguration of the current order.44 Critics like Terry Eagleton, echoing Burke, counter that the sublime merely “crushes us into admiring submission” to authority. Blissful but ultimately prostrate, we remain satisfied with affect rather than action; indeed, Eagleton implies that affect works to thwart collective action, not to promote it.45 Other critics have pointed to the individualist and

The Secret Without a Subject  161 masculinist bias of the sublime. The privileged viewer is a rugged explorer— autonomous, independent, and inevitably male—making sublime insights partial and ideologically problematic.46 Nearly all the artists and characters associated with the national security sublime conform to this stereotype, from Thornhill and Indiana Jones to Paglen, who often describes the physical and intellectual lengths he is forced to go to discover the traces of secret government. In The X-Files, it is inevitably Mulder who achieves the sublime experience, while Scully is absent or unconscious. This masculine bias does not rule out the use of the sublime by women or for collective elevation—witness the uses of the mode by Poitras or by Magid—but it does potentially narrow its appeal and thereby constrain its political power, at least in traditional formulations. I would argue, however, that debating the immediate effects of a work or a mode, whether subversive or accommodating, is the wrong way to evaluate the political implications of the national security sublime. Aesthetic forms need not have direct political effects to be politically effective in the long view. As Jacques Rancière has written, The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parceling out of the visible and the invisible.47 The national security sublime, particularly in its recent iterations, shows us that the visible and the invisible, the concealed and the revealed, are not simply opposed but often mutually complicit. It recognizes that secrets might have no singular subject, no devious master keeping the truth under lock and key, with the disturbing corollary that there might be no intrepid seeker able to bring that truth to light, and that light does not always evenly illuminate the truth. Perhaps most importantly, the mode has made evident in word and image an ongoing and potentially epochal shift in the epistemological relationship between citizen and state. Much as Gothic and the Romantic sublime arose alongside the theory of open government that had displaced the old order of arcana imperii, so the national security sublime provides an aesthetic appropriate to a world in which secrets as we have long understood them are becoming a thing of the past. Recall my suggestion in Chapter  2 that the Gothic novel and the Romantic sublime arose in the 1790s as an occulted critical response to government repression, an implicit argument for political freedom at a moment of national security crisis. The contemporary national security sublime embodies this same contradiction between democratic ideal and political reality. There are limits to what artistic forms can achieve. Gothic novels insist that something is wrong with the way things are, but leave us mystified until the end about what precisely that is. The

162  The Secret Without a Subject sublime expresses a desire for freedom and revelation, but does so chiefly on the level of individual response. Still, both forms begin from a sense that something is wrong, that the world could be different; this is the indispensable starting point for any movement to bring about political change. The sublime will always remain a starting point rather than a comprehensive solution, but as Rancière reminds us, that is the promise of aesthetics, not its failing. Taussig claims that only a strong public defacement or desecration can break the spell of a public secret: bolstered by alibis, excuses, and a complicit acceptance of the way things are, it survives through the recurring non-decisions of habitually passive subjects. Desecrations punch through that deadening passivity.48 It remains an open question whether the national security sublime achieved, or could achieve, that kind of affective impact. Would Snowden’s revelations on their own have brought Congressional action in the absence of a culture made more sensitive through art, fiction, film, and television to the perils of unbounded data collection? Perhaps. But though it may not rise to the level of a desecration, the sublime jars the placidity of the public secret, lifts its maddeningly translucent veil by provoking strong affective responses. Those affects might not be strong enough, and purveyors of the national security sublime may find themselves latter-day Cassandras, heard but never understood, warning of a future they ultimately cannot prevent. The sublime ascribes visionary powers to individual knowers, but this fact marks its ultimate limits in the brave new world forged by the intelligence agencies during the War on Terror. Can this vocation survive a world in which such knowers have little or no place—in which the shadowy hidden warehouse has been replaced by the bland data center, the elevated awareness by a swarm of numbers?

Notes   1. See Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Vintage, 2008).   2. See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).   3. Screenwriter David Marconi has said that he conceived the plot of Enemy of the State when he noticed a publicity poster for North by Northwest on the wall behind a studio executive who was trying to recruit him into the still-inchoate project. See Eric Benson, “Will Smith Already Played Edward Snowden,” New York Online, 30 June  2013, ymag.com/news/frank-rich/ enemy-of-the-state-2013-7, accessed 3 August 2018.  4. Three Days of the Condor, directed by Sydney Pollack (Burbank: Warner Home Video, 1999), DVD.  5. Murder at 1600, directed by Dwight H. Little (Burbank: Warner Home Video, 1997), DVD.  6. Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg (Universal City: Dreamworks Video, 2003), DVD; The Bourne Identity, directed by Doug Liman (Universal

The Secret Without a Subject  163 City: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2016), DVD; Mercury Rising, directed by Howard Becker (Universal City: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 1998), DVD.   7. As Macgregor Wise points out, the film leaves the legal and political questions surrounding NSA surveillance mostly unexplored. Once the bad eggs have been exposed, the system can get back to business as usual. J. Macgregor Wise, Surveillance and Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 64. One could say much the same thing about films like Murder at 1600 and Minority Report, which likewise tend to concern abuses of the system rather than inherent problems in the system itself.   8. Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), 684–85.   9. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 38. 10. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 9. 11. Catherine Zimmer, Surveillance Cinema (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 114, 121. 12. Richard Flannery and David Louzecky, “Postdemocratic Society and the Truth Out There,” in The Philosophy of the X-Files, ed. Dean A. Kowalski (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 59. 13. Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (New York: Penguin, 2013), 118. The passage continues, however: “Others you’re not sure you want any of it to be true because it’s so evil, so deep and comprehensive.” 14. Stranger Things: Season One, created by Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer (Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2017), DVD. 15. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo (Burbank: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 2014). 16. Asawin Suebsaeng, “ ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ Is About Obama’s Terror-Suspect Kill List,” Mother Jones Online, 4 April 2014; www.motherj ones.com/politics/2014/04/captain-america-winter-soldier-obama-kill-listpolitics-drones-nsa/. 17. The 2015 James Bond film, Spectre, has a strikingly similar plot, focusing on the super-villain Ernst Blofeld’s plan to launch a nefarious global surveillance network with the unwitting help of the major powers. The secret headquarters for the program, dubbed “Nine Eyes,” after the actual “Five Eyes” alliance of Anglo-American intelligence agencies, is based, emblematically, in the midst of a vast desert. As the leader of this effort, Franz Oberhauser, tells Daniel Craig’s Bond, Spectre has been behind a whole series of terrorist attacks intended to frighten the major powers into joining the network. Spectre, directed by Sam Mendes (Beverly Hills: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2016), DVD. 18. Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers, trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 1. 19. Joseph Masco, The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 35. David Lyon provides a concise survey of implications of the NSA’s metadata techniques in Surveillance After Snowden (London: Polity Press, 2015), 57–74. 20. On the new corporate economy grounded on sharing, see Clare Birchall, Shareveillance: The Dangers of Openly Sharing and Covertly Collecting Data (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

164  The Secret Without a Subject 21. Dennis Broeders, “The Secret in the Information Society,” Philosophy and Technology 29, no. 3 (2016): 299. 22. Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 149. 23. Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (New York: Dutton, 2009), 15. 24. Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (New York: Norton, 2016), 58. 25. See Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3–7. 26. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: The Free Press, 1950), 345. 27. Garrett Stewart, Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 210. 28. Philip E. Agre, “Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy,” The Information Society 10, no. 2 (1994): 101–27. 29. Friedrich Kittler, “No Such Agency,” trans. Paul Feigelfeld, Theory, Culture  & Society Blog, 12 February  2014, www.theoryculturesociety.org/kit tler-on-the-nsa/, accessed 13 November 2017. 30. On the algorithm as subject of contemporary computing culture, see Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); and Ted Striphas, “Algorithmic Culture,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 18, nos. 4–5 (2015): 395–412. 31. Jussi Parikka, “The Signal-Haunted Cold War: Persistence of the SIGINT Ontology,” in Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics, ed. John Beck and Ryan Bishop (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 174. On the increasing transformation of humans into “machine-readable data” since the Cold War, see Mark Coté, “ ‘Bulk Surveillance,’ or the Elegant Technicities of Metadata,” in Beck and Ryan, eds., Cold War Legacies, 188–209. See also John MacWillie, “From Keyhole to Big Brother: The Legacies of Cold War Surveillance,” Surveillance and Society 16, no. 2 (2018): 203–18. 32. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 13. 33. Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), 139. 34. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 141. 35. South Park: The Complete Seventeenth Season, created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (Hollywood: Paramount Home Entertainment, 2014), DVD. 36. The Matrix, directed by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski (Burbank: Warner Brothers, 1999), DVD. 37. Louis D. Brandeis, “What Publicity Can Do,” Harpers Weekly, 20 December 1913, 10. 38. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2011), 408. 39. Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), viii. 40. Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 59. See also, Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity,” in Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 159–94. Glissant argues for a “right to opacity.” 41. Hu offers a critique of Paglen’s photographs along just these lines, arguing that the works reproduce and reinforce the covert practices of the intelligence

The Secret Without a Subject  165 agencies they purport merely to depict. To the extent that Paglen and artists who have followed in his wake borrow methods and even materials (like satellite images) from the dark world of national security, they place the gallery viewer in precisely the position that the work seeks to elucidate. There is little transcendence here, only repetition and feedback loops. A Prehistory of the Cloud, 126–34. 42. Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X Files (London: Routledge, 2000), 32. 43. Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Régis Durand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 82. 44. Michael J. Shapiro, The Political Sublime (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). 45. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 54. See also Ned O’Gorman, “The Political Sublime: An Oxymoron,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 34, no. 3 (2006): 889–915. 46. See Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 85–106. 47. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 19. 48. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 3. For a suggestive, and fundamentally anti-sublime, alternative to the heroic model of demystification that attends so many treatments of the open secret discussed in this book, see Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). For François, the openness of the open secret implies vulnerability and communality as well as misrecognition, encouraging a response deriving from the theological concept of grace rather than the political concept of ideology: the gratitude of receiving a gift supplements the labor of disclosing or recovering something hidden.

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168  Select Bibliography Stone, Oliver, dir. Snowden. DVD. Universal City: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2015. Tarkovsky, Andrei, dir. Stalker. DVD. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2017. Taube, Magdalena, and Krystian Woznicki. A Field Guide to the Snowden Files: Media, Art, Archives. Berlin: Diamondpaper, 2017. Tucker, Anne Wilkes. Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach. Boston: Bullfinch Press, 1996. Twelve Hawks, John. The Traveler. New York: Doubleday, 2005. von Donnersmarck, Florian Henckel, dir. The Lives of Others. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2007. Wachowski, Lana, and Lilly Wachowski, dirs. The Matrix. DVD. Burbank: Warner Home Video, 1999. Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800. Edited by James Butler and Karen Green. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. ———. The Prelude. Edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979. Critical, Historical, and Theoretical Works Aftergood, Steven. “An Inquiry into the Dynamics of Government Secrecy.” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 48, no. 2 (2013): 511–30. Agamben, Giorgio. The State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Agre, Philip E. “Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy.” The Information Society 10, no. 2 (1994): 101–27. Alworth, David J. Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Andriopoulos, Stefan. “Occult Conspiracies: Spirits and Secret Societies in Schiller’s Ghost Seer.” New German Critique 35, no. 1 (2008): 65–81. Badiou, Alain. Number and Numbers. Translated by Robin Mackay. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008. Bamford, James. The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. New York: Doubleday, 2008. ———. The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America’s Most Secret Agency. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Barrell, John. The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Battersby, Christine. The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference. London: Routledge, 2007. Baume, Sandrine, and Yannis Papadopoulos. “Transparency: From Bentham’s Inventory of Virtuous Effects to Contemporary Evidence-Based Skepticism.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 21, no. 2 (2018): 169–92. Beck, John. “Signs of the Sky, Signs of the Times: Photography as Double Agent.” Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011): 123–39. ———. Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London: Verso, 1985.

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170  Select Bibliography Castronovo, Russ. Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Cleary, E. J. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Costelloe, Timothy. The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Coté, Mark. “ ‘Bulk Surveillance,’ or the Elegant Technicities of Metadata.” In Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics, edited by John Beck and Ryan Bishop, 188–209. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Dango, Michael. “Leaks: A Genre.” Post45, 11 November 2017. http://post45. research.yale.edu/2017/11/leaks-a-genre/. Darnton, Robert. The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. New York: Norton, 1996. Dean, Jodi. Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. ———. Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Debord, Guy. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Malcolm Imrie. London: Verso, 1998. de Certeau, Michel. The Mystic Fable, Volume One. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3–7. Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Translated by David Willis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. ———. Specters of Marx. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Derrida, Jacques, and Maurizio Ferraris. A Taste for the Secret. Translated by Giacomo Donis. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Devetak, Richard. “The Gothic Scene of International Relations: Ghosts, Monsters, Terror and the Sublime After September  11.” Review of International Studies 31, no. 4 (2005): 621–43. Dewerpe, Alain. Espion: Une anthropologie historique du secret d’État contemporain. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Diderot, Denis. Selected Writings on Art and Literature. Translated by Geoffrey Bremner. London: Penguin, 1994. Dolan, Frederick M. Allegories of America: Narratives, Metaphysics, Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Doran, Robert. The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Duffy, Cian. Landscapes of the Sublime, 1700–1830. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ———. Shelley and the Romantic Sublime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Eamon, William. Science and the Secrets of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Ellis, Markman. “Enlightenment or Illumination: The Spectre of Conspiracy in Gothic Fictions of the 1790s.” In Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction, 1780–1830, edited by Jillian Heydt-Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman, 77–98. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010.

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Index

Acord, James 119 Agamben, Giorgio 8 Agre, Philip 156 Alexander, Keith 11 algorithms xvii, 2, 116, 141, 150, 151, 153, 155, 156, 158 Alworth, David 125 Americans, The 149 arcana imperii 15, 17, 35, 38, 42, 45 – 6, 154, 156, 161 Assange, Julian 4, 42, 155; see also WikiLeaks Badiou, Alain 153 Bamford, James 21, 28, 71 Barrell, John 42 Baudelaire, Charles 79 – 80, 81, 83, 113, 114, 118 Beck, John 27n51, 59, 73 Begley, Josh 115, 116 Bentham, Jeremy 5, 42, 43, 147; as critic of secrecy xv, 40 – 1, 59, 123, 159, 160; influence on Gothic xv, 47 – 8, 144; panoptic prison design 5, 113 Benjamin, Walter 45 Bible: Corinthians 22, 35; Exodus 75; Gospels 35 – 6, 66; Moses 22, 37, 75; Revelation, 36, 61 Birchall, Clare 4, 27n69, 100 Bishop, Ryan 73 Blas, Zach 113, 114 Bobbio, Norberto 23 Bond, James (character) x, 62, 126, 139, 163n17 Bourne Identity, The 143 Brandeis, Louis 159 Bridle, James 134 Brin, David 44

Broeders, Dennis 154 Bruns, Gerald 36, 37 Bureau d’études 95n67 Burke, Edmund 30 – 1, 66, 67, 160; “artificial infinite” 64, 65, 108, 112, 116; sublimity and mystery 31, 34, 37, 64, 106, 160; see also sublime Burke, Kenneth 128 Burnham, David 21 Bush, George H.W. 70 Bush, George W. 10, 11, 28n79, 97, 153 Butina, Maria 148 – 9 Campbell, Duncan 21, 72 Canetti, Elias 42 Cantor, Paul 85 Captain America: The Winter Soldier 150 – 1, 152, 153 Carr, Emily 111 – 12 Carter, Chris xvi, 85, 95n74 Castronovo, Russ 5 Center for Land Use Interpretation 119 – 20 Church Committee Hearings 20 – 1, 22, 28n78, 28n79, 73 Citizenfour see Poitras, Laura Clapper, James 9, 11 classification 2, 3, 6, 7 – 8, 9, 11, 16, 17, 18, 22, 26n33, 30, 38, 154, 158 Clinton, Hillary 148 Cold War x, xi, xiii, xvi, 3, 10, 22, 30, 52, 74, 76, 78, 89, 109, 116, 129, 142, 148, 149; compared with Echelon Moment xvi, 69 – 73, 97, 138; compared with War on Terror 8 – 12, 97 – 8, 139 – 41, 144, 150, 159; and origins of secret state xiv,

Index  179 2, 5 – 8, 44, 139; representations of national security xvi, xvii, 1, 12 – 15, 58 – 69, 71, 75 – 6, 79, 83 – 6, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 105 – 6, 113, 118 – 25, 139 – 40, 146, 149 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 34, 109 conspiracy 13, 49, 59, 60, 96n79, 105, 123, 138 – 44, 153, 155, 157, 160; in Cold War culture xvi, 20, 63 – 9, 138 – 40; during Echelon Moment 70, 76, 81 – 4, 85 – 91, 92, 98, 99, 131, 138 – 43; and Gothic xii, xv, 46 – 8, 52, 56n70, 149 – 51, 159; Montauk Project 125, 148; nostalgia 144 – 51, 153; and postmodernism 145 – 6; and publicity 7, 23, 34, 41, 49 – 51, 58, 151 – 2 Costelloe, Timothy 24n11 Coupe, James 113 court tragedy xii, 3, 45 – 9, 58, 139 Darnton, Robert 46 Day After, The 120 Dean, Jodi 4, 23, 40, 42, 99, 160 Debord, Guy 16, 17 de Certeau, Michel 41 Deleuze, Gilles 155 DeLillo, Don: Libra xvi, 66 – 9, 79, 84, 98, 129, 157 Department of Homeland Security 9, 11, 97, 98, 122, 123, 136n63 De Quincey, Thomas 113 Derrida, Jacques 41 – 2, 55n56, 160 Dewerpe, Alain 35 Dick, Philip K.: “Minority Report” 15, 26 Dickens, Charles 113 Diderot, Denis 118 – 19, 122, 123, 125 Doctorow, Cory 122 – 3, 136n63 Dolan, Frederick 8 Doran, Robert 44 Eagleton, Terry 33, 160 Echelon Conspiracy xi, 131 Echelon Moment xvi, 9, 74, 76, 78, 106, 123, 158; contrasted with War on Terror 97, 99, 138, 141, 144; defined 69 – 73; role of conspiracy in 73, 81, 84, 85, 91 Elahi, Hasan 116, 127, 128, 142, 144, 146, 153

Ellsberg, Daniel 20 Enemy of the State x, 70 – 1, 73, 107, 126, 131, 140, 141 – 3, 145, 162n3; Robert Dean (character) 71, 73, 107, 141, 142, 145; Thomas Reynolds (character) 70 – 1, 140, 141, 142 Euripides: Bacchae 60 – 1 Facebook xiii, 17, 136n75, 149 Farocki, Harun 107 Farrell, General Thomas F. 61, 66, 67, 106, 121 Faul, Jan 76 Fellwock, Perry 20, 21 Ferguson, Frances 60, 106 Foucault, Michel 5, 16, 46, 112 – 13 Franta, Andrew 41 French Revolution xv, 34, 42, 43, 46, 51, 55n68 Friedrich, Caspar David: Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog 31 – 3, 60, 64, 65, 67, 74, 88, 103 – 5, 159 Galison, Peter 6 – 8, 12, 30, 72, 98, 139 Godwin, William 39, 43, 46 Goin, Peter 76 Golden, Deven 81 Goldstone, Patricia 83 Google xiii, 17, 106, 136n75, 155, 156 Gothic xii, 46 – 52, 119, 125, 145; and Cold War representations xvi, 59, 71, 84 – 5, 91, 92, 138 – 40, 149; and conspiracy 46 – 8, 52, 58 – 9, 81 – 4, 86, 97, 138 – 43, 150 – 2; and open government xv, 47, 49, 51, 73, 144, 146 – 7, 159; and the Romantic sublime 52, 56n70, 58, 84 – 5, 97 100, 138, 146, 159, 161 – 2 Graham, Allison 85 Greenwald, Glenn xii, 4, 11, 24n10, 129, 136n75, 155 Grusin, Richard 131 Gurman, David 108 – 9, 112 Haacke, Hans 95n67 Hager, Nicky 71 Hamlet 46, 47, 49, 50, 51 Han, Byung-Chul 159 Hanson, David T. 76, 107 Hardt, Michael 70

180 Index Henner, Mishka 106 – 8, 112, 127, 138 Hertz, Neil 4 Hirsch, Antonia 113 Hitchcock, Alfred xvi, 62; North by Northwest, 62 – 3, 76, 88, 92, 96n85, 141, 162n3; Roger Thornhill (character) 62 – 3, 64, 67, 88, 132, 141, 143, 161 Hobbs, Robert 81, 95n67 Hofstadter, Richard 138 Holloway, David 97 Horn, Eva 3, 7, 10, 16, 37 – 8, 41, 45, 55n54, 59; see also logics of political secrecy Hosenball, Mark 21 Houtryve, Tomas van 134n27 Hu, Tung-Hui 156, 164 – 5n41 Huyssen, Andreas 120 In Ascolto (The Listening) 126 – 7 Information Security Oversight Office 17 Intelligence Agencies: Army Intelligence xiv, 13, 14, 59, 93n25; CIA x, 17 – 18, 20, 21, 66 – 7, 69, 70, 81, 83, 85, 97, 98, 99, 126, 128, 139, 141, 143, 152, 153, 155; FBI x, 14, 15, 20, 21, 81, 85, 87, 91, 116, 128, 143, 145, 146, 149; GCHQ x, 12, 21; KGB x, 14 – 15; MI6 x, 139, 153, 155; Stasi 10, 24n1, 135n42; see also National Security Agency Invasion of the Body Snatchers 63 – 4, 90, 152 Iran-Contra Affair 8, 19, 73, 81 Jameson, Fredric 66, 145, 146 Johnson, Lyndon B. 22 Jütte, Daniel 36 Kant, Immanuel xi, 4, 31 – 3, 52n8, 60, 100, 126, 141, 157, 158; dynamically and mathematically sublime 74, 78 – 9, 112, 118; ethical and political thought 39, 54n48, 160; see also sublime Kantorowicz, Ernst 37 – 8 Keenan, Thomas 101 Keller, Evelyn Fox 7 Kermode, Frank 35 – 6 Kittler, Friedrich 156 Knight, Peter 160 Kurgan, Laura 107, 134n27

landscape: arctic xii, 89, 99, 109 – 112, 127, 146, 158; desert xvi, 5, 14, 61, 76 – 8, 80, 85, 86, 89, 99, 101, 103, 106, 108, 109, 121 – 2, 127, 163n17; Dutch 106 – 8; mountain xii, xvii, 4, 19, 31 – 2, 64, 67, 74 – 6, 78, 88 – 9, 99, 102 – 5, 109, 111, 112, 118, 127, 138, 146, 158; photography 76, 78, 100; in Romantic poetry and painting xii, xvii, 31, 98, 100, 101 – 2, 103, 106, 109, 138; urban 79 – 80, 113 – 14, 132; see also ruins; warehouses leaks and political scandals xv, 8, 18 – 23, 28n73, 28n79, 60, 65, 83, 97, 126 Lee, Pamela 18, 100 Leeson, Lynn Hershman 113 Lewis, Matthew: The Monk: 50 – 2 Lichtblau, Eric 11 Lin, Tan 80 Lives of Others, The 24n1 Lobo Solo 102, 103, 105, 158 logics of political secrecy 4, 37 – 8, 40, 41, 45, 55n54, 59; arcanum 37, 38, 41, 45, 47, 51; mysterium 37 – 8, 41, 45, 50, 51; secretum 41 – 2, 45, 46, 49, 52, 55n54, 59, 66, 91, 146, 147 Lombardi, Mark xvi, 74, 80 – 4, 85, 91, 95n67, 97 – 9, 112, 147 Longinus 30 Lyon, David 19 Lyotard, Jean-François 98 – 9, 101, 147, 160 Madison, James 40 Magid, Jill xvi, xvii, 113, 114 – 15, 116, 127, 142, 146, 161 Maimonides, Moses 36 – 7, 66, 68, 121 Manchurian Candidate, The 63, 96n79 Manhattan Project 5, 7, 8, 10, 13, 14, 19, 66, 154 Marin, Louis 18 Markley, Robert 86, 87 Masco, Joseph 6, 7, 9, 18, 22, 154 Massumi, Brian 12, 15 Mathews, Chloe Dewe 109 Matrix, The 158 McLuhan, Marshall xi, xiii Melley, Timothy 3, 4, 16, 93n20, 132 – 3n6

Index  181 Mercury Rising 143 Misrach, Richard xvi, 73 – 74, 76 – 8, 85, 89, 91, 119, 120, 123; compared with Mark Lombardi 80, 81, 83, 84, 99; influence on Trevor Paglen 100, 103, 106, 127, 144 Morton, Timothy 6 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick 7, 8, 25n26 Murder at 1600 142 – 3, 163n7 National Security Agency (NSA) xiii, 24n10, 81, 128, 136n75; during Cold War x, 9 – 10, 18, 20 – 2; Echelon network xvi, 10, 71 – 3, 126; growth during War on Terror 10 – 12; post9/11 surveillance programs xii, xiii, xvi, 3, 10 – 12, 18, 28n78, 28n79, 44, 97, 121, 122, 128, 152, 153 – 8; and technology and telecommunications companies xiii, 6, 17, 159; representations of x – xii, xvii, 1, 15 – 16, 70, 92, 94n34, 107, 124, 126 – 32, 140, 141 – 3, 144, 145, 150 – 1, 152; see also leaks and political scandals; Snowden, Edward national security legislation: Alien and Sedition Acts 7, 43; Atomic Energy Act 8; Defense Secrets Act 7; Espionage Act 7; Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act 22; Homeland Security Act 9; Military Commissions Act 17 – 18; National Security Act 8, 9, 85; Patriot Act xii, xviiin7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 131, 132; USA Freedom Act xiii, xviiin7 Negri, Antonio 70 Newman, Barnett 98, 101 North by Northwest (see Hitchcock, Alfred) nuclear: espionage xiv, 2, 8, 6, 12, 15, 72, 139; research 7 – 8, 12, 13, 14, 59; sublime 106; tests 13, 14, 61 – 2, 78, 119; weapons 6, 13, 15, 64, 73, 79, 89, 107, 109, 119, 120, 121,125; see also secrets and secrecy, nuclear Obama, Barack xiii Office of Information Awareness (Total Information Awareness) 10, 100, 150

On, Josh 95n67 Orwell, George: 1984 5, 112, 122, 155 Paglen, Trevor xvi, 100 – 6, 130, 133n14, 134n24, 144, 146, 155, 158, 161, 164 – 5n41; compared with Mishka Henner 108; deserts and wastelands, 106, 110, 112, 127, 153; mountains and ascents xvii, 102 – 5, 112, 127, 138; on state secrecy 17 – 18, 155 Pakula, Alan J. 84; All the President’s Men 65 – 6, 68, 79, 145, 159; Joe Frady (character) 63, 64 67, 144; The Parallax View 63, 87, 92, 145, 150, 152 Parikka, Jussi 156 Pasquale, Frank 154 – 5 Paulson, Ronald 51 Pentagon Papers 19 – 20 Person of Interest 131 – 2 Piranesi, Giovanni 119 Pitt, William 43; “Pitt’s Terror” 43 – 4 Poe, Edgar Allan 79, 109, 113 – 14, 143 – 4 Poitras, Laura 11, 137n83, 161; Citizenfour xii, xvi, 129 – 30, 152 – 3 Pollock, Sydney 141 Popper, Karl 44 postmodernism 34, 98 – 9, 101, 133n6, 145 Pozen, David 19, 22, 28n73 Pratt, Ray 63, 87 predicitive analysis 10, 12, 15, 26 – 7n49, 150, 159 Priest, Dana 9, 11 publicity 7, 23, 35, 36, 39, 40 – 1, 42, 44, 47, 49 – 51, 146 – 7, 148, 151, 152, 160; see also transparency Pynchon, Thomas xvi, 125; Bleeding Edge xvi, 123 – 5, 138, 147; The Crying of Lot 49 64 – 5, 68 Radcliffe, Ann 47 – 8, 49, 92, 98, 143; A Sicilian Romance 48 – 9 Rancière, Jacques 161, 162 Reagan, Ronald 21 Redford, Robert 65, 94n34, 141, 150, 151 Risen, James 11 Rokeby, David 116, 118 Rosen, David 3 Rothko, Mark 98

182 Index Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 46 Rubicon 152 ruins xvii, 15, 110, 118 – 25, 135n51, 146 Ruwedel, Mark 76 Santesso, Aaron 3 satellites 10, 21, 71, 72, 107, 126, 134n25; images 17, 106, 108, 121, 134n27, 141, 142, 145, 165n41; spy 99, 100, 101, 103, 138, 141, 151 Schiller, Friedrich 33 – 4, 47 – 8 Schleime, Cornelia 135n42 Schmitt, Carl 38, 139, 156 Schneier, Bruce 152 Schwartz, Frederick A.O. 11 Scott, A.O. 130 Secrecy 24n1 secrets and secrecy: aesthetics of xi, xii, xvii, 3 – 4, 33 – 4, 45 – 52, 58 – 9, 74, 99 – 100, 128 – 32, 139 – 41, 146, 149, 151, 161; government xi, xii, xiii, xv, xvi, xvii, 1 – 2, 3, 4, 5 – 12, 13, 16 – 17, 18, 30 – 1, 37 – 9, 42, 49, 51, 58, 59, 70 – 1, 73 – 4, 91, 97, 100 – 1, 106, 108, 112 – 13, 128, 138, 146, 149 – 50, 153 – 8; history of, 35 – 4, 155; medieval and early modern 35 – 8, 66, 154 – 5; nuclear xiv, 2, 7 – 8, 13, 14, 15, 61, 66, 68; ontologies of secrecy see Galison, Peter; open/public xiv – xv, xvi, 16 – 23, 27n69, 30, 31, 34, 58, 69, 80, 84 – 5, 91, 92, 99 – 100, 101, 103, 105 – 6, 114, 120, 123, 138, 140 – 1, 147, 148, 159, 162; and publicity 4, 35, 39 – 42, 44, 123, 146 – 7; secrecy studies xiv; see also arcana imperii; classification; logics of political secrecy Sester, Marie 114 Seven Days x Shapiro, Michael 160 Shaw, Philip 34 Shelley, Mary 89, 109 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 31, 122 Shils, Edward 5 – 6, 47 Simmel, Georg 17, 35, 38, 39, 40, 44, 155 Simpsons Movie, The 128, 152, 153 Sneakers 94n34 Snowden, Edward x, xiii, 2, 11, 19 – 20, 28n79, 125, 128, 129 – 30,

136n63, 136n75, 150, 154, 157, 162; in Citizenfour xii, 153, 129 – 30; in Snowden xii, 137n83 Solnit, Rebecca 76, 95n56 South Park xvi, 128, 130, 153, 157 – 8 Spielberg, Steven 12 – 16, 26 – 7n49, 68; Indiana Jones (character) 12 – 16, 45, 47, 60, 62, 161; Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull 13 – 16; Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark xiv, 1, 6, 13, 59, 67, 93n25; Minority Report 143, 158, 163n7; warehouse imagery xvi – xv, 6, 23, 24n1, 45, 59, 67, 84, 139 Stankievech, Charles 109 – 12, 120, 126, 130, 134n32, 138, 146, 153 Stewart, Garrett 5, 155 Stone, Oliver: Snowden xii, 137n83 Stranger Things 148, 151 sublime 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 34, 36, 42, 45, 76, 78, 80, 86, 88, 91, 100, 108, 110, 111, 118 – 20, 125, 150, 151, 157 – 8, 161 – 2; arctic 109; Cold War xiv, xvi, 1 – 2, 13, 59 – 69, 71, 75 – 6, 83 – 4, 85, 86, 91, 92, 99, 105, 113, 138, 139 – 40, 144, 149; defined xi, 4 – 5, 32 – 4, 60, 66; during Echelon Moment xvi, 70 – 92, 97, 99, 138, 141 – 3, 146 – 7; dynamically and mathematically 74 – 5, 78 – 80, 90, 98, 101, 112, 114 – 18, 126, 128, 140, 142; metaphorical and metonymical 98 – 9, 120; nuclear 106; and open secret xv, xvi, 18 – 23, 27n69, 44 – 5, 59, 97 – 100, 101, 105, 131, 138, 141, 152, 158 – 9, 162; postmodern 98 – 9, 145; post-Romantic 34; and power 30 – 1, 37 – 8, 58 – 9, 108, 160; and ridiculous 128, 138, 153; Romantic xv, 1, 4, 31 – 2, 34, 44, 45, 46, 52n8, 56n70, 58, 78, 84, 89, 97 – 8, 102 – 6, 109, 127, 139, 146, 150, 152, 159, 161; urban 113 – 14, 131; during War on Terror xii – xiii, xvi – xvii, 1 – 2, 5, 6, 10, 12, 91, 96n82, 97 – 100, 112 – 13, 120, 122, 125 – 32, 138 – 9, 140, 143 – 4, 146 – 7, 149, 152 – 5, 159 surveillance xii, xiv, xvii, 5, 11, 19, 20, 34, 43, 44, 77, 92, 97, 127, 131 – 2, 142, 143, 147, 155 – 6,

Index  183 163n17; art 96n82, 103, 112 – 18; automated 2, 5, 72, 153; bulk data collection xii, xiii, 153 – 7; and capture 156; state 3, 120 – 3, 124, 145, 146; see also National Security Agency Sutherland, Donald 63 Tacitus 38 Tarkovsky, Andrei 120 Taussig, Michael xiv, 16, 162 Thornhill, Roger see Hitchcock, Alfred Three Days of the Condor 141, 150, 151 – 2 transparency 22, 39 – 41, 43 – 4, 46, 59, 148, 159 – 60; and Gothic 47 – 52, 147, 159; and open government xvii, 4, 23, 40 – 1, 44, 152, 154; opposed to secrecy 16, 39, 42; theology of 22 – 3, 35, 114, 159; see also publicity Truman, Harry 9, 85 Trump, Donald xiii, xviiin8, 23, 148, 159, 160 Twelve Hawks, John: The Traveler 120 – 2 Urban, Hugh 2 Vest, Jason P. 89 Victor, Carmen 110 Virilio, Paul 10, 107, 119 Walpole, Horace: Castle of Otranto 49 warehouses xiv, 12, 5, 6, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 23, 24n1, 31, 45, 59, 60, 64, 79, 80, 84, 86 – 7, 90 – 1, 92, 96n86, 97, 99, 103, 126, 129, 139, 140, 141, 145, 160, 162; see also landscape; ruins Warehouse 13 xvi, 129, 130, 138

War on Terror: and Cold War 12, 70, 99 – 100, 120 – 5, 139 – 40; defined xiii; and Echelon Moment 70, 72, 97, 99 – 100, 141 – 4; effects on art and culture xvi – xvii, 5, 97 – 100, 112 – 13, 116, 126, 130, 139 – 40, 145 – 6, 154, 158 – 9; effects on government secrecy xi-xii, xiv, xvi – xvii, 3, 6, 9 – 11, 12, 18, 30, 52, 70, 72, 85, 139, 151, 152, 153 – 8, 159; and Gothic conspiracy 144 – 51, 159 Warren Report 66 Watergate xiii, 8, 19, 20, 22, 56n73, 65 – 6, 73, 95n74; post-Watergate period 63, 83, 87, 91, 139 Weber, Max 5 Weber, Samuel 22 – 3 Weiskel, Thomas 33, 98, 99 White, Neal: Overt Research Project 109 WikiLeaks 2, 4, 5 Wilson, Jane and Louise 119 Wise, J. Macgregor 131, 163n7 Woodward, Bob 65, 79, 85, 144 Wordsworth, William xvii, 31, 33, 43, 79, 88, 98; The Prelude 74 – 5, 77 – 8, 103 – 5, 113 – 14, 138; “Tintern Abbey” 33, 44 X-Files, The xvi, 85 – 92, 97, 98, 119, 131, 132, 146 – 7, 148, 155; Cigarette Smoking Man (character) 86, 96n79, 145, 146, 154; Dana Scully (character) 85 – 92, 96n85, 96n86, 99, 144, 146 – 7, 161; Fight the Future 89, 96n85, 109; Fox Mulder (character) 85 – 92, 95n76, 96n85, 96n86, 99, 161; influence of 142, 148, 151, 154; landscape imagery in 88 – 92, 99, 127, 145 Zimmer, Catherine 145 Žižek, Slavoj 16, 17, 159