Vincent Le - Entry No 5 (Taussig)

Along with WikiLeaks, Snowden’s revelations of the NSA global mass surveillance program functions in the tradition of the news report as a counter-discourse which speaks out and denounces the dominant State ideology, thereby making overt its covert wars and public its private, paranoiac deeds. Although the revelatory report harks back till at least Daniel Ellsberg’s revelations of COINTELPRO and the WaterGate tapes, Snowden and particularly WikiLeaks were able to construct the most elaborate and all-encompassing exposé of the internal mechanisms of State power apparatuses, because of the technological developments by which governments now store their secret documents in coded online databases, while hackers like Snowden and Manning break their encryptions. Of course, such technological developments are also what precisely permitted the NSA to build their vast global network of surveillance in the first place. But while the alliance between States and technology is not new, the name ‘Snowden’ signifies a new alliance between technology and the powerless through the creation of a counter-discourse with which the latter can speak out against their hegemonic oppressors. In an age of imperialism in the guise of ‘humanitarian aid’ and ‘free trade agreements’ by advanced industrial societies whose prosperity depends upon buying diamonds from warlords in the Congo to manufacture computers and mobile phones in Asian sweatshops, the propping up of the Saudi Arabian dictatorship to maintain Western oil supplies, and so on, such counter-discourses are the singular means by which westerners are made aware of the violent, oppressive roots of our first-world societies. Thus, the report is not simply a necessary condition for political action against State powers; the report is a political action. That is to say, the very act of revealing the NSA’s surveillance program sparked international, diplomatic rows between the Obama administration and Russia who granted Snowden asylum, the Bolivian president whose plane was briefly ‘kidnapped’ on suspicion of smuggling Snowden on board, and the Brazilian and German presidents whose phones had been tapped. Moreover, the report was an act of economic violence insofar as U.S. Internet and telecom companies and networking sites such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, experienced mass consumer backlash for collaborating with the NSA. However, as Žižek argues, the revelations are not revelatory because they exposed any secrets, since we already knew that governments covered up their corruption and spied on us. Rather, the revelations were revelatory because they revealed that all of us know this such that none of us cannot not be complicit by pretending like we did not know or that no one but us knew. In this sense, Snowden is as revolutionary as the 1918 Bolshevik government, whose first act of power was to publicize all of the tsarist state secret documents, thereby exposing the entire functioning of the tsarist State-apparatus of power on display. In one of his essays, Taussig details an even earlier precedent for the report as counter-discourse: the British public outcry due to magazine articles describing the unbelievable brutality of a British rubber company towards its Indian labour force. As Taussig elucidates, for a counter-discourse to be effective it must convey both empirical facts about the victimized bodies, as well as the actual experience of said bodies as humans and not merely enemies, savages, or labour commodities. Certainly, both the magazine reports and the WikiLeaks video of a U.S. drone strike satisfied both of these criteria. However, Snowden’s revelations were, indeed, empirical, but ALSO existential insofar as the facts reoriented the way we experience OUR VERY OWN BODIES, which are constantly being surveyed. What the reports about British imperialism, the Snowden files and WikiLeaks reports all did, then, was to destroy the illusion of State terror as sporadic, isolated outbursts against other States in favour of exposing what Taussig calls the ‘culture of terror’ as the dominant discourse structuring our everyday lives, from when we post a tweet to when we call a friend on an Apple iPhone. Why, then, do we not simply overthrow our governments in a revolutionary fervor akin to the 1792 September Massacres, which were provoked precisely by the opening up of King Louis’ armoire de fer full of State secrets? Indeed, the fact that neither the reports on the British rubber company’s brutality or American mass surveillance actually ended these activities is what motivates Žižek to modernize Marx’s maxim, ‘they do not know what they are doing, but they are doing it’, so that it reads: ‘we know very well what we are doing, but still, we are doing it’. Or as Latour wonders, do reports like Snowden’s or the ICCP’s actually provide us with any knowledge if we fail to reorient our actions and practices accordingly? All of this is to say that our outrage at the great centralized State-apparatuses of power only masks the way power really functions by permeating the entire social body, thereby determining how we think, work, consume, and so on. In other words, such reports as Snowden’s have only ever produced trivial, superficial reforms to the liberal democratic organization of our societies that can always be repealed, such as a parliamentary inquiry here or a police investigation there. The report is no counter-discourse at all if it cannot surmount the systemic, discursive practices of the dominant discourses, but only ever comprises with, and is hence mistranslated and pacified by them, such as the way WikiLeaks and Snowden were forced to collude with the major media conglomerates in order to speak against power, paradoxically, through that very power. In short, the Snowden files released in September 2013 cannot be a counter-discourse without an accompanying September MASSACRE.