Sara S
03-25-2011, 06:33 AM
This was, for me, a new view:
TACT IN THE
AGE OF WIKILEAKS
By Slavoj Žižek, published in the January 20 issue
of the London Review of Books. Žižek’s essay “To
Each According to His Greed” appeared in the
October 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine.
In one of the diplomatic cables released by
WikiLeaks, Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Med-
vedev are compared to Batman and Robin.
It’s a useful analogy: isn’t Julian Assange,
WikiLeaks’ organizer, a real-life counterpart to
the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark
Knight? In the fi lm, the district attorney, Har-
vey Dent, an upstanding prosecutor who be-
comes deranged and himself commits mur-
ders, is killed by Batman. Batman and his
friend James Gordon, the police commission-
er, realize that the city’s morale would suffer if
the incorruptible Dent’s murders were made
public, so they plot to preserve his image by
blaming Batman for the killings. The fi lm’s
message is that lying is necessary to sustain
public morale. No wonder the only fi gure of
truth in the fi lm is the Joker, its supreme vil-
lain. He makes clear that his attacks on Go-
tham City will stop when Batman takes off
his mask and reveals his true identity; to pre-
vent this disclosure and protect Batman, Dent
tells the press that he is Batman—another lie.
In order to trap the Joker, Gordon fakes his
own death—yet another lie.
The Joker wants to disclose the truth be-
neath the mask, convinced that this will de-
stroy the social order. What shall we call him?
A terrorist? The Dark Knight is effectively a new
version of those classic westerns Fort Apache
and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which
show that, in order to civilize the Wild West,
the lie has to be elevated into truth: civiliza-
tion, in other words, must be grounded on a lie.
The fi lm has been extraordinarily popular. The
question is: Why, at this precise moment, is
there this renewed need for a lie to maintain
the social system?
Consider, too, the renewed popularity of Leo
Strauss: the aspect of his political thought that
is so relevant today is his elitist notion of de-
mocracy, the idea of the “necessary lie.” Elites
should rule, aware of the actual state of things
(the materialist logic of power), and feed the
people fables to keep them happy in their
blessed ignorance. For Strauss, Socrates was
guilty as charged; philosophy is a threat to soci-
ety. Questioning the gods and the ethos of the
city undermines citizens’ loyalty, and thus the
basis of normal social life. Yet philosophy is
also the highest, the worthiest, of human en-
deavors. The solution proposed was that phi-
losophers keep their teachings secret, as in fact
they did, passing them on by writing “between
the lines.” The true, hidden message contained
in the “great tradition” of philosophy from
Plato to Hobbes and Locke is that there are no
gods, that morality is merely prejudice, and
that society is not grounded in nature.
So far, the questions raised about the leaks
have been framed as a struggle between
WikiLeaks and the U.S. empire; is the publish-
ing of confi dential U.S. state documents an act
in support of the freedom of information, of the
people’s right to know, or is it a terrorist act that
poses a threat to stable international relations?
But what if this isn’t the real issue? What if the
crucial ideological and political battle is going
on within WikiLeaks itself: between the radical
act of publishing secret state documents and the
way this act has been reinscribed into the politi-
cal discourse by, among others, WikiLeaks itself?
This reinscription does not primarily concern
“corporate collusion” (i.e., the deal WikiLeaks
made with four big newspapers, giving them the
right to selectively publish the documents). Much
more important is the conspiratorial mode of
WikiLeaks: a “good” secret group attacking a
“bad” one in the form of the U.S. State Depart-
ment. According to this way of seeing things, the
enemy is those U.S. diplomats who conceal the
truth, manipulate the public, and humiliate their
allies in the ruthless pursuit of their own interests.
“Power” is held by the bad guys at the top and is
not conceived as something that permeates the
entire social body, determining how we work,
think, and consume. This dispersed power was on
display when MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal joined
forces with the state to sabotage WikiLeaks. The
price one pays for engaging in the conspiratorial
mode is to be treated according to its logic. (No
wonder theories abound about who is really be-
hind WikiLeaks—the CIA?)
The conspiratorial mode is complemented
by its apparent opposite, the liberal appropria-
tion of WikiLeaks as another chapter in the
glorious history of the struggle for the “free
fl ow of information” and the “citizens’ right to
know.” This view reduces WikiLeaks to a radi-
cal case of investigative journalism. Here, we
are only a small step away from the ideology of
such Hollywood blockbusters as The Pelican
Brief and All the President’s Men, in which a
couple of ordinary guys discover a scandal that
goes all the way to the president, forcing him
to step down. Corruption is shown to reach to
the very top, yet the ideology of such works re-
sides in their upbeat final message: What a
great country ours must be, when a couple of
ordinary guys like you and me can bring down
the president, the mightiest man on earth!
The ultimate show of power on the part of
the ruling ideology is to allow what appears to
be powerful criticism. There is no lack of anti-
capitalism today. We are overloaded with cri-
tiques of the horrors of capitalism: books, in-
depth reports, and documentaries expose the
companies that are ruthlessly polluting our en-
vironment, the bankers who continue to re-
ceive fat bonuses while their banks are rescued
by public money, the sweatshops in which chil-
dren work as slaves, etc. There is, however, a
catch. What isn’t questioned in these critiques
is the democratic-liberal framing of the fi ght
against such excesses. The (explicit or implied)
goal is to democratize capitalism, to extend
democratic control to the economy by means of
media pressure, parliamentary inquiries, harsh-
er laws, rigorous police investigations, and so
on. But the institutional setup of the (bour-
geois) democratic state is never questioned.
This remains sacrosanct even to the most radi-
cal forms of “ethical anticapitalism”—the Porto
Alegre forum, the Seattle movement, etc.
WikiLeaks cannot be seen in the same way.
There has been, from the outset, something
about its activities that goes way beyond liberal
conceptions of the free fl ow of information. We
shouldn’t look for these differences at the level
of content. The only surprising thing about the
WikiLeaks revelations is that they contain no
surprises. Didn’t we learn exactly what we ex-
pected to learn? The real disturbance was at
the level of appearances; we can no longer pre-
tend we don’t know what everyone knows we
know. This is the paradox of public space: Even
if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it
in public changes everything. One of the fi rst
measures taken by the new Bolshevik govern-
ment in 1917 was to make public the entire
corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy—all the se-
cret agreements, the secret clauses of public
agreements, etc. There, too, the target was the
state apparatuses of power.
What WikiLeaks threatens is the formal
functioning of power. The targets weren’t the
dirty details and the individuals responsible for
them; in other words, not those in power so
much as power itself. We shouldn’t forget that
power comprises not only institutions and their
rules but also legitimate (normal) ways of chal-
lenging it (an independent press, NGOs,
etc.)—as the Indian academic Saroj Giri put it,
WikiLeaks “challenged power by challenging
the normal channels of challenging power and
revealing the truth.” The aim was not just to
embarrass those in power but to lead us to mo-
bilize ourselves to bring about a different func-
tioning of power, one that might reach
beyond the limits of represen-
tative democracy.
It is a mistake, however, to assume that re-
vealing the entirety of what has been secret
will liberate us. The premise is wrong. Truth
liberates, yes, but not this truth. Of course
one cannot trust the façade, the offi cial docu-
ments, but neither do we fi nd truth in the gos-
sip shared behind that façade. Appearance,
the public face, is never a simple hypocrisy.
E. L. Doctorow once remarked that appear-
ances are all we have, so we should treat
them with great care. We are often told that
privacy is disappearing, that the most inti-
mate secrets are open to public probing. But
the reality is the opposite: what is effectively
disappearing is public space, with its atten-
dant dignity. Cases abound in our daily lives
in which not telling all is the proper thing to
do. In the fi lm Baisers volés, Delphine Seyrig
explains to her young lover the difference be-
tween politeness and tact: “A visiting gentle-
man accidentally opens a bathroom door and
discovers a woman completely nude. He
quickly takes a step back, closes the door,
and says: ‘Pardon, Madame!’ That is polite-
ness. The same gentleman, pushing the same
door, discovering the same completely naked
woman, then says, ‘Pardon, Monsieur!’ That
is tact.” It is only in the second case, by pre-
tending not to have seen enough even to
make out the sex of the person in the shower,
that one displays true tact.
A supreme case of tact in politics was the
secret meeting between Álvaro Cunhal, the
leader of the Portuguese Communist Party,
and Ernesto Melo Antunes, a pro-democracy
member of the army group responsible for the
coup that overthrew the authoritarian regime
in 1974. The situation was extremely tense: on
one side, the Communist Party was ready to
start the real socialist revolution, taking over
factories and land (arms had already been dis-
tributed to the people); on the other, conserva-
tives and liberals were ready to stop the revolu-
tion by any means, including the intervention
of the army. Antunes and Cunhal made a deal
without stating it: there was no agreement be-
tween them—on the face of things, they did
nothing but disagree—but they left the meet-
ing with an understanding that the Commu-
nists would not start a revolution (thereby al-
lowing a normal democratic state to come
about) and that the antisocialist military
would not outlaw the Communist Party. One
could claim that this discreet meeting saved
Portugal from civil war. And the participants
maintained their discretion even in retrospect;
when asked about the meeting (by a journalist
friend of mine), Cunhal said that he would
confi rm it took place only if Antunes didn’t
deny it—if Antunes did deny it, then it never
took place. Antunes, for his part, listened si-
lently as my friend told him what Cunhal had
said. By not denying it, he met Cunhal’s condi-
tion and implicitly confi rmed it. This is how
gentlemen of the left act in politics.
Insofar as one can reconstruct the events
today, it appears that the happy outcome of
the Cuban Missile Crisis, too, was managed
through tact, the polite rituals of pretended
ignorance. Kennedy’s stroke of genius was to
pretend that a letter had not arrived, a strat-
agem that worked only because the sender
(Khrushchev) went along with it. On Octo-
ber 26, 1962, Khrushchev sent a letter to
Kennedy confi rming an offer previously made
through intermediaries: The Soviet Union
would remove its missiles from Cuba if the
United States issued a pledge not to invade
the island. The next day, however, before the
United States had answered, another, harsh-
er letter arrived from Khrushchev, adding
more conditions. At 8:05 p.m. that day, Ken-
nedy’s response to Khrushchev was delivered.
He accepted Khrushchev’s October 26 pro-
posal, acting as if the October 27 letter didn’t
exist. On October 28, Kennedy received a
third letter from Khrushchev agreeing to the
deal. In such moments, when everything is at
stake, appearances, politeness—the aware-
ness that one is “playing a game”—matter
more than ever.
However, there are moments—moments of
crisis for the hegemonic discourse—when one
should take the risk of provoking the disinte-
gration of appearances. Such a moment was
described by the young Marx in 1843. In
“Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Phi-
losophy of Law,” Marx diagnosed the decay of
the German ancien régime in the 1830s and
1840s as a farcical repetition of the tragic fall
of the French ancien régime. That regime was
tragic “as long as it believed and had to be-
lieve in its own justifi cation.” The German re-
gime “only imagines that it believes in itself
and demands that the world imagine the same
thing. If it believed in its own essence, would
it . . . seek refuge in hypocrisy and sophism?
The modern ancien régime is rather only the
comedian of a world order whose true heroes
are dead.” In such a situation, shame is a
weapon: “The actual pressure must be made
more pressing by adding to it consciousness of
pressure, the shame must be made more
shameful by publicizing it.”
This is precisely our situation today: we face
the shameless cynicism of a global order whose
agents only imagine that they believe in their
ideas of democracy, human rights, and so on.
Through actions like the WikiLeaks disclo-
sures, the shame—our shame for tolerating
such power over us—is made more shameful by
being publicized. When the United States in-
tervenes in Iraq to bring about secular democ-
racy and the result is the strengthening of reli-
gious fundamentalism and of Iran, this is not
the tragic mistake
of a sincere agent but the
case of a cynical trickster being beaten at his
own game.
TACT IN THE
AGE OF WIKILEAKS
By Slavoj Žižek, published in the January 20 issue
of the London Review of Books. Žižek’s essay “To
Each According to His Greed” appeared in the
October 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine.
In one of the diplomatic cables released by
WikiLeaks, Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Med-
vedev are compared to Batman and Robin.
It’s a useful analogy: isn’t Julian Assange,
WikiLeaks’ organizer, a real-life counterpart to
the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark
Knight? In the fi lm, the district attorney, Har-
vey Dent, an upstanding prosecutor who be-
comes deranged and himself commits mur-
ders, is killed by Batman. Batman and his
friend James Gordon, the police commission-
er, realize that the city’s morale would suffer if
the incorruptible Dent’s murders were made
public, so they plot to preserve his image by
blaming Batman for the killings. The fi lm’s
message is that lying is necessary to sustain
public morale. No wonder the only fi gure of
truth in the fi lm is the Joker, its supreme vil-
lain. He makes clear that his attacks on Go-
tham City will stop when Batman takes off
his mask and reveals his true identity; to pre-
vent this disclosure and protect Batman, Dent
tells the press that he is Batman—another lie.
In order to trap the Joker, Gordon fakes his
own death—yet another lie.
The Joker wants to disclose the truth be-
neath the mask, convinced that this will de-
stroy the social order. What shall we call him?
A terrorist? The Dark Knight is effectively a new
version of those classic westerns Fort Apache
and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which
show that, in order to civilize the Wild West,
the lie has to be elevated into truth: civiliza-
tion, in other words, must be grounded on a lie.
The fi lm has been extraordinarily popular. The
question is: Why, at this precise moment, is
there this renewed need for a lie to maintain
the social system?
Consider, too, the renewed popularity of Leo
Strauss: the aspect of his political thought that
is so relevant today is his elitist notion of de-
mocracy, the idea of the “necessary lie.” Elites
should rule, aware of the actual state of things
(the materialist logic of power), and feed the
people fables to keep them happy in their
blessed ignorance. For Strauss, Socrates was
guilty as charged; philosophy is a threat to soci-
ety. Questioning the gods and the ethos of the
city undermines citizens’ loyalty, and thus the
basis of normal social life. Yet philosophy is
also the highest, the worthiest, of human en-
deavors. The solution proposed was that phi-
losophers keep their teachings secret, as in fact
they did, passing them on by writing “between
the lines.” The true, hidden message contained
in the “great tradition” of philosophy from
Plato to Hobbes and Locke is that there are no
gods, that morality is merely prejudice, and
that society is not grounded in nature.
So far, the questions raised about the leaks
have been framed as a struggle between
WikiLeaks and the U.S. empire; is the publish-
ing of confi dential U.S. state documents an act
in support of the freedom of information, of the
people’s right to know, or is it a terrorist act that
poses a threat to stable international relations?
But what if this isn’t the real issue? What if the
crucial ideological and political battle is going
on within WikiLeaks itself: between the radical
act of publishing secret state documents and the
way this act has been reinscribed into the politi-
cal discourse by, among others, WikiLeaks itself?
This reinscription does not primarily concern
“corporate collusion” (i.e., the deal WikiLeaks
made with four big newspapers, giving them the
right to selectively publish the documents). Much
more important is the conspiratorial mode of
WikiLeaks: a “good” secret group attacking a
“bad” one in the form of the U.S. State Depart-
ment. According to this way of seeing things, the
enemy is those U.S. diplomats who conceal the
truth, manipulate the public, and humiliate their
allies in the ruthless pursuit of their own interests.
“Power” is held by the bad guys at the top and is
not conceived as something that permeates the
entire social body, determining how we work,
think, and consume. This dispersed power was on
display when MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal joined
forces with the state to sabotage WikiLeaks. The
price one pays for engaging in the conspiratorial
mode is to be treated according to its logic. (No
wonder theories abound about who is really be-
hind WikiLeaks—the CIA?)
The conspiratorial mode is complemented
by its apparent opposite, the liberal appropria-
tion of WikiLeaks as another chapter in the
glorious history of the struggle for the “free
fl ow of information” and the “citizens’ right to
know.” This view reduces WikiLeaks to a radi-
cal case of investigative journalism. Here, we
are only a small step away from the ideology of
such Hollywood blockbusters as The Pelican
Brief and All the President’s Men, in which a
couple of ordinary guys discover a scandal that
goes all the way to the president, forcing him
to step down. Corruption is shown to reach to
the very top, yet the ideology of such works re-
sides in their upbeat final message: What a
great country ours must be, when a couple of
ordinary guys like you and me can bring down
the president, the mightiest man on earth!
The ultimate show of power on the part of
the ruling ideology is to allow what appears to
be powerful criticism. There is no lack of anti-
capitalism today. We are overloaded with cri-
tiques of the horrors of capitalism: books, in-
depth reports, and documentaries expose the
companies that are ruthlessly polluting our en-
vironment, the bankers who continue to re-
ceive fat bonuses while their banks are rescued
by public money, the sweatshops in which chil-
dren work as slaves, etc. There is, however, a
catch. What isn’t questioned in these critiques
is the democratic-liberal framing of the fi ght
against such excesses. The (explicit or implied)
goal is to democratize capitalism, to extend
democratic control to the economy by means of
media pressure, parliamentary inquiries, harsh-
er laws, rigorous police investigations, and so
on. But the institutional setup of the (bour-
geois) democratic state is never questioned.
This remains sacrosanct even to the most radi-
cal forms of “ethical anticapitalism”—the Porto
Alegre forum, the Seattle movement, etc.
WikiLeaks cannot be seen in the same way.
There has been, from the outset, something
about its activities that goes way beyond liberal
conceptions of the free fl ow of information. We
shouldn’t look for these differences at the level
of content. The only surprising thing about the
WikiLeaks revelations is that they contain no
surprises. Didn’t we learn exactly what we ex-
pected to learn? The real disturbance was at
the level of appearances; we can no longer pre-
tend we don’t know what everyone knows we
know. This is the paradox of public space: Even
if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it
in public changes everything. One of the fi rst
measures taken by the new Bolshevik govern-
ment in 1917 was to make public the entire
corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy—all the se-
cret agreements, the secret clauses of public
agreements, etc. There, too, the target was the
state apparatuses of power.
What WikiLeaks threatens is the formal
functioning of power. The targets weren’t the
dirty details and the individuals responsible for
them; in other words, not those in power so
much as power itself. We shouldn’t forget that
power comprises not only institutions and their
rules but also legitimate (normal) ways of chal-
lenging it (an independent press, NGOs,
etc.)—as the Indian academic Saroj Giri put it,
WikiLeaks “challenged power by challenging
the normal channels of challenging power and
revealing the truth.” The aim was not just to
embarrass those in power but to lead us to mo-
bilize ourselves to bring about a different func-
tioning of power, one that might reach
beyond the limits of represen-
tative democracy.
It is a mistake, however, to assume that re-
vealing the entirety of what has been secret
will liberate us. The premise is wrong. Truth
liberates, yes, but not this truth. Of course
one cannot trust the façade, the offi cial docu-
ments, but neither do we fi nd truth in the gos-
sip shared behind that façade. Appearance,
the public face, is never a simple hypocrisy.
E. L. Doctorow once remarked that appear-
ances are all we have, so we should treat
them with great care. We are often told that
privacy is disappearing, that the most inti-
mate secrets are open to public probing. But
the reality is the opposite: what is effectively
disappearing is public space, with its atten-
dant dignity. Cases abound in our daily lives
in which not telling all is the proper thing to
do. In the fi lm Baisers volés, Delphine Seyrig
explains to her young lover the difference be-
tween politeness and tact: “A visiting gentle-
man accidentally opens a bathroom door and
discovers a woman completely nude. He
quickly takes a step back, closes the door,
and says: ‘Pardon, Madame!’ That is polite-
ness. The same gentleman, pushing the same
door, discovering the same completely naked
woman, then says, ‘Pardon, Monsieur!’ That
is tact.” It is only in the second case, by pre-
tending not to have seen enough even to
make out the sex of the person in the shower,
that one displays true tact.
A supreme case of tact in politics was the
secret meeting between Álvaro Cunhal, the
leader of the Portuguese Communist Party,
and Ernesto Melo Antunes, a pro-democracy
member of the army group responsible for the
coup that overthrew the authoritarian regime
in 1974. The situation was extremely tense: on
one side, the Communist Party was ready to
start the real socialist revolution, taking over
factories and land (arms had already been dis-
tributed to the people); on the other, conserva-
tives and liberals were ready to stop the revolu-
tion by any means, including the intervention
of the army. Antunes and Cunhal made a deal
without stating it: there was no agreement be-
tween them—on the face of things, they did
nothing but disagree—but they left the meet-
ing with an understanding that the Commu-
nists would not start a revolution (thereby al-
lowing a normal democratic state to come
about) and that the antisocialist military
would not outlaw the Communist Party. One
could claim that this discreet meeting saved
Portugal from civil war. And the participants
maintained their discretion even in retrospect;
when asked about the meeting (by a journalist
friend of mine), Cunhal said that he would
confi rm it took place only if Antunes didn’t
deny it—if Antunes did deny it, then it never
took place. Antunes, for his part, listened si-
lently as my friend told him what Cunhal had
said. By not denying it, he met Cunhal’s condi-
tion and implicitly confi rmed it. This is how
gentlemen of the left act in politics.
Insofar as one can reconstruct the events
today, it appears that the happy outcome of
the Cuban Missile Crisis, too, was managed
through tact, the polite rituals of pretended
ignorance. Kennedy’s stroke of genius was to
pretend that a letter had not arrived, a strat-
agem that worked only because the sender
(Khrushchev) went along with it. On Octo-
ber 26, 1962, Khrushchev sent a letter to
Kennedy confi rming an offer previously made
through intermediaries: The Soviet Union
would remove its missiles from Cuba if the
United States issued a pledge not to invade
the island. The next day, however, before the
United States had answered, another, harsh-
er letter arrived from Khrushchev, adding
more conditions. At 8:05 p.m. that day, Ken-
nedy’s response to Khrushchev was delivered.
He accepted Khrushchev’s October 26 pro-
posal, acting as if the October 27 letter didn’t
exist. On October 28, Kennedy received a
third letter from Khrushchev agreeing to the
deal. In such moments, when everything is at
stake, appearances, politeness—the aware-
ness that one is “playing a game”—matter
more than ever.
However, there are moments—moments of
crisis for the hegemonic discourse—when one
should take the risk of provoking the disinte-
gration of appearances. Such a moment was
described by the young Marx in 1843. In
“Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Phi-
losophy of Law,” Marx diagnosed the decay of
the German ancien régime in the 1830s and
1840s as a farcical repetition of the tragic fall
of the French ancien régime. That regime was
tragic “as long as it believed and had to be-
lieve in its own justifi cation.” The German re-
gime “only imagines that it believes in itself
and demands that the world imagine the same
thing. If it believed in its own essence, would
it . . . seek refuge in hypocrisy and sophism?
The modern ancien régime is rather only the
comedian of a world order whose true heroes
are dead.” In such a situation, shame is a
weapon: “The actual pressure must be made
more pressing by adding to it consciousness of
pressure, the shame must be made more
shameful by publicizing it.”
This is precisely our situation today: we face
the shameless cynicism of a global order whose
agents only imagine that they believe in their
ideas of democracy, human rights, and so on.
Through actions like the WikiLeaks disclo-
sures, the shame—our shame for tolerating
such power over us—is made more shameful by
being publicized. When the United States in-
tervenes in Iraq to bring about secular democ-
racy and the result is the strengthening of reli-
gious fundamentalism and of Iran, this is not
the tragic mistake
of a sincere agent but the
case of a cynical trickster being beaten at his
own game.