The ‘Fall’ of the Absolute Secret

We may soon talk — some do already — about a change in the concept of secrecy and its meaning in culture nowadays: a change that could be understood if we confront it through two extreme, radically opposed examples depicting an imaginary passage from one concept of the secret to another [i]; two different conditions, through which a secret becomes important while included in an archive, define this text. The two types of archiving I am referring to do not necessarily belong to any specific period. Each one radicalises a concept for the secret. We may obtain a concrete idea about the first type of secret if we refer to the archive work traditionally undertaken by many states’ secret services: secret information is collected in order to prevent so-called ‘illegal actions’. We consider the dynamics of the absolute secret — the ‘top secret’ character attributed to these archived files — a sign of weakness installed in the state mechanism’s center. The revelation of such secrets usually denotes a major failure of the system. Entering any personal space through data collected from the secret services already provides a way to understand how one’s personal life could be of interest to a state system. It also shows which weakness rules this particular revelation of the secret. The second example that I bring up here has to do with a different way of archiving a person’s life: for the requirements of this text I will consider the Internet an open archive. A rhetorical power of ‘no concealment’ is linked to the internet rationale.

I will try to create a double function of the abstract person described by the two different archive conditions. I could argue that a shift as regards the possibility and the condition of a secret and its political value may be clearly traced through this comparison. This shift implies the collapse of secrecy and leads to a different projection of the personal factor and its inner space in the political sphere.

One could propose a political-psychological formula which would relate the quantity of secret information to the faith of the citizens in their political system: the more the need for secret information at the center of the system grew, the more the system would display an increasingly authoritarian and correctional character; the more it would tend to become totalitarian; and the more vulnerable and shallow its power would become. This authority, which may, at first sight, appear classical, raises questions and exhibits complications if it is examined at the two different archive moments I choose. The two types of archiving substantiate a transformation in the way the individual functions when ‘included’ in an archive. In order to see the complications and the questions I refer to, we need only construct the concept of ‘residing in the archive’ [ii] and consider that — first of all — the surveillance archives reserved a compulsory residence of this kind for a citizen. We will also need to approach the present-day moment of the — usually voluntary — registration of data on the Internet as another kind of ‘residence in the archive’.


A Classical Secret Place

When the secret services open a file, they operate according to the logic of an organisational fear: the fear of an unforeseen strike, conspiracy, mutiny. The archive is the collection created by the eye of the system and residing in it realises a centrally supervised society where this fear of the state reigns.

I think the power of the secret archive is captured at the precise moment the secret space is plundered and I will insist on this particular moment. Living under supervision means coexisting with the prospect that the secret entries will be read. A vehement proscribed reading is always ‘already installed’ in any surveillance archive. This unattainable reading exists as the creator of the surveillance condition. Residing in the archive is, in this case, an abstract condition and it dominates society’s ‘imaginary’ without the archive ever having to reveal its presence beyond certain indications. The archival mechanism substantiates the everyday in a transcendent way: supervision records and remembers. A citizen’s any given action may constitute a wrong step which will lead to complications if included in this undesirable compilation.

Here ‘remaining in the archive’ is identified with the possibility of this particular imaginary revelation. It denotes a belonging to this revelation. Any possible present is haunted by the anticipated moment when the archives will be opened. The former Eastern Bloc societies and the dictatorships of the West give a good account of the permanence of this extreme situation in everyday life. The condition of concealment required by the secret archive glorifies, from the outset, the opening of the archive and the collapse of secrecy. A reading of the archive’s entries, after this opening, is not a mere accident for the secret archive. It is its innate dramatic event and it forms the secret archive’s constitutive narrative power: the opening of the archive is equivalent to the social narrative itself but also to the end of this narrative. The narrative’s construction depends on never seeing the archive; all it takes is for the door to the archive to open in order for the narrative to end. This door (its surface, its hinges and its key) rules the narrative of the hidden and this hidden room is, concurrently, the work, the archive and the narrative. It condenses the form and the content of betrayal. The opening of this space means betrayal.

The concept of betrayal is defined by this violation of an obscure terrible space. As such, the betrayal is always double: the secret existence of the enclosed room hides a second secret, which is much more powerful in narrative terms. The collapse of this double secret inaugurates a double betrayal. Entrance into the archive’s space is forbidden and the secret archive’s rule is betrayed upon entry. But this unauthorised unsealing of the door, this destructive curiosity forms only the frame for a desired reading. The archive room contains a double betrayal. But its hidden secrets abolish the frame of the room and nullify the transgression. Their reading installs a single ethical perspective regarding the betrayal and a particular future for those who infringe on the archive. At the same time, it also sets up the likelihood for the unwanted visitor to reside among the archive’s corpses. [iii] One may consider that opening the forbidden door of the Stasi discharged this narrative power.

The evidence contained in the secret archive tends to be interpreted one-dimensionally as specific evidence of betrayal. This archive is not the kind that served simple functions but rather which serves, in an icy manner, functions that are forbidden: the archive is organised along with the hypothesis of its concealment. It is a confidential archive, not because it contains information that will expose those who are listed in it, but because, through the opening of the archive, through its revelation, that which is exposed is the spirit which organises the archive. This spirit is identified with the spirit of betrayal created by the archivist. The organisation of the archive is carried out according to the method of secret services, by a systematic classification of documents which are secretly amassed: without the knowledge of those who constitute the archive’s targets, and without the knowledge of those who do not constitute the archive’s targets. Any publicising of the existence of the archive puts in danger its very rationale which is to survive beyond the actual filing; to save itself while its idea of survival is the dominance of the general rule that manages to preserve the secret. A certain authority that monitors the archive, guards it as if there were no question of its possible overthrowing, since its overthrowing demolishes an important part of the system’s exterior image. The archive exists with the certainty of the longevity of a hidden, threatening secret.

Concealment is marked by yet another development which does not escape us. The authority that files the document is also the one that asks and constructs the document in its univocal reading. Something is obscured in order to achieve or to avoid a certain situation. That, for the sake of which something was concealed, clearly forms a multi-leveled world that must remain hidden. It forms an exclusion in the interior, it makes the room, the door and the prohibition of entry. It’s not surprising that the word archive initially meant ‘a house, a residence, an address, the abode of the highest-ranking noblemen, those that commanded’. [iv] The same secret evidence is organised as a concave space of exclusion but is read as such only when it is conquered and reveals, through an explosion of unimaginable force, the thing it is hiding in its interior. It is then possible to read instantly, not only the content that substantiates the traumatic revelation, but also the systematic, coolly organised deception perpetrated by both the concealment and the content. And the authority that monitors the archive lies installed in a despicable way in the interior of a structure that has been made in order to receive and exclude the one it awaits inside it: the authority that monitors the archive has betrayed everything that lies outside the archive so as to construct this secret interior for itself.

Significance is attached to the treacherous installation, as well as to its examination in every detail that organises it. The treacherous installation is significant; so is the scrutiny of every one of its organising elements. Significance is also attached to taking a stand in the interior of this archive as taking a stand against mendacity and immorality, in a time when mendacity and immorality no longer cause any disturbance as value mechanisms: in the contemporary West, people converse without being scandalised by mendacity and they no longer seek the moral element the way they used to. Nevertheless, the archival of betrayal truly scandalises and creates the image of a revelation in an era with no time for revelations. The archival of betrayal nods towards the region of a certain elusive faith in a certain morality.


Betrayal Creates Intimacy

The secret archives construct an old narrativity, reminiscent of the drama of fairy tales. I maintain that state authority avoids narrativity more and more. If we agree, as I am suggesting here, that the powerful structure of supervision constructed some sort of imaginary residence in the archive, the moment of recognition and opening of the secret archive substantiates and sheds new light on the formation of the modern dictatorships’ societies within the aim taken by the secret services. The moment at which the archives are opened may be symbolic, constituting the one great moment of a dictatorial regime’s collapse.

The revelation of the secret archives did not bring to light something unheard of, which we were not already suspecting. However, what is emphasised here is the change, and indeed the change that arises as the onset of the inauguration of the period needed for the healing of the wound: betrayal and the secret archive space are constructing a wound. According to Derrida: ‘The archive never surrenders … during a visionary commemorative act which would rekindle, alive, innocent or neutral, the origin of an event’. [v]

Perhaps it does not surrender and it certainly does not rekindle an innocent or neutral origin; furthermore the archive of a betrayal is ideal for one to realise how a univocal reading constructs an illusionary, live duration, at the moment when the archive’s time of reference has certainly elapsed. The archive of betrayal installs a new time and that is its deeper narrative work: the tracing of betrayal organises, using even the tiniest details, the new treacherous regions for the time of the secret, extending the reading of betrayal to an absurd malice without limits. The problem with betrayal is that it always contains a reason at its core and it is always confined by limits. Its immorality is not due so much to an overstepping of limits but to the underestimation of the presence of the betrayed. Some kind of non-existence of the other is always being constructed at the core of every treacherous act. Based on the evidence of betrayal, the archive constructs a time which did not exist but now installs itself as the time of the plan of betrayal which is now necessarily distorted from the place of observation that is set up in space ‘after the betrayal’, after the opening of the secret space.

The imaginary residence in the secret services archive is founded in strong, dramatic, narrative structures: betrayal, wound, oblivion, forgiveness, revenge, covering up, all these constitute important concepts for the description of time which is organised around the explosive opening of the secret archives. Even when they are closed, even as they remain hidden, the secret archives of the traditional Western European countries — though they may not grow to such a scale as to have the entire population under surveillance — may still exhibit the living basis for the dramas that might unfold in the sphere of politics. They are important works in progress, even the most despised among them: each one has its own particular narrative and political interest.

In order to describe societies that were organised and functioned for decades based on the rationale of secret surveillance and under the shadow of the intelligence services, I employ the phrase ‘residing in the archive’. The person under surveillance was always potentially inside the archive, which might be documenting him against his will. An archival function of the person and of the concept of ‘personal space’ is proposed through this description: being observed and watched in secret correspond to a specific construction of personal space and to its particular projection to communal life.


Politics for an Open Archive

It has been already more than 20 years since the appearance of the first hypertext browser and the first WWW application. Something which had been in preparation for a long time is, therefore, creating a residence condition inside the internet. On the internet or in the Western world, we can talk, in different terms, about a certain literality of ‘residing in the archive’; about new ‘self’ functions and different ways to appear in private places and in public ‘areas’ under deployment. The commitment to this residence is, this time, usually voluntary. There is no obvious eye (at least not today), monitoring citizens on the internet, though their communications have taken on forms that can be digitally entered and filed. No major wound, no betrayal, no revenge and no forgiveness in this account of self exposition. The impression of openness and the rhetoric of randomness play a decisive part in the formation of the internet. But there’s also something more going on; according to Derrida: ‘There is no archive without a locus of documentation, without a technique of repetition and without a certain externality. There is no archive without an outside’. [vi]

If the internet is termed an archive or an archive of archives, it should be emphasised that it is presented ‘without’ a place of documentation and, possibly (which constitutes this essay’s working hypothesis), ‘without an outside’. Based on these traits, it continues to organise itself like a special archive. What also makes the internet a distinctive archive is the fact that its size seems to be practically limitless, not so much because it is constantly growing, but because its scale reverses, within the social imaginary, the concept of limitation to which Derrida referred. Its swelling allows us to observe it in a different way.

The intellectual scope of the internet appears in the reversal of the concepts of interior and exterior. Its interior structure constructs a possible exterior world. The post-internet world is organised on an imaginary level as just such a warehouse and as a series of versions for every single thing. Concreteness is at risk: every single thing is an entry open to the addition of new information. Residing in the archive, I form the world as structured by entries. Thus, for once, we can conceive the idea that nothing exists beyond the archive. The testimony of existence is the presence in the archive. Furthermore, something general or specific exists if it can take the form of an entry or if it has already been entered that way: the difference is of no particular significance here [vii]. Existence is identified with recordability.

So we may be moving on from the illness of the archive, which Jacques Derrida called the ‘mal d’archive’, to another archival syndrome of this era, which arises this time from the particular condition of the intellectual confinement in the archive, in which the condition of the Internet unfolds. We don’t need to perceive this passage as an event registered on a certain historicity. Derrida used the term ‘mal d’archive’ to describe the incessant search for an archive where the archive is hidden; the desire to return to origin could be for him already archival. Nostalgia for the return to the locus of the absolute beginning was, according to the description of ‘mal d’archive’, the particular element that constituted the archive internally.

In order to describe the syndrome of confinement in the archive which organises a large part of modern-day ‘reality’, we will have to accept that — for reasons still undetectable — this conservative mania for the return to the origin, by virtue of which Derrida formulated the ‘mal d’archive’, can be considered ended and senseless when living, without anxiety, between the entries and data of the hyper-archive of the internet and the rationale according to which it is organised today. A certain stability of the data entered relegates any movement towards origin to a position of lesser importance. That is to say, we can consider that the quest for origin, which (besides the conservative reflex of metaphysical thought) might develop based on a post-Freudian unfolding of curiosity [viii], is obliterated inside the multi-entry rationale according to which the Internet archive is constructed internally: if an entry on the internet is organised as a series of diverse data entered, this does not simply draw attention to a structure that responds to search engines· the expansion of the function of the entry has already formed a way of perceiving things. The object is identified by a series of versions of itself, the personal space by a collection of data. Within this ‘democratic’ conception of the object and of the self, concreteness will be redefined while the idea of anxiety concerning depth, which explains the state of things at any given time, is already being mourned.

Residing in the archive today nullifies, in this perspective, the anxiety about origin which constituted the description of the archive according to Derrida. The data entry depends on an entry, not on some elusive, vague origin it may have. Every entry of data functions on a multi-entry level, it arrives at the archive formed as a total of entries, and it can change, and a new one can be added to the same entry.

I described a wounding caused by the opening of the secret archives, the treacherous dynamics of residing in the particular archives and the conditions of social supervision carried out by intelligence services. Next to this residence I construct the schema of a different residence, in a different archive.

On the internet, a momentum is displayed in terms of the archive: let us describe it through the same wiki logic, but also through the pointing out of so many data repositories, which, through a certain mental geotagging, chart the map of the world as a grouping of its different versions. Here, in a juxtaposition structure where no opposition, no conflict seems — structurally — possible, nothing appears dramatic.

The space of the archive of the secret services, seen through a modern-day perspective, appears extremely old and obsolete. But is it? It doesn’t really matter. Perhaps that which could take on political value is precisely this imaginary transformation of the rationale of the archive within the new syndrome of archival confinement that I am trying to describe. This confinement, is, moreover, presented at the outset as a realistic possibility for the removal of any confinement. In its interior there are no dramatic tensions. Its narratives are flaccid. The terrible disasters that open up rooms of betrayal and forgiveness, the concepts of the secret, appear in its interior either as laughable or as old and nullified. The revelations in the condition of the contemporary residence in the archive are carried out in obviousness. The secret itself is submerged in obviousness and the syndrome of confinement introduces us to a certain populisation of the secrets of Lacan’s purloined letter. [ix] The secret services are working for authority, authority is granted religious sanctity. But how can one stand before authorities that are enforced ‘through the use’ of the syndrome of confinement in the archive [x], i.e. through the use of the invisible presence that allows this syndrome, or through intrusion in what was, until today, considered a domestic space? Isn’t the undisturbed juxtaposition of any one of their active structures lost alongside inert structures while questioning it? The plethora nullifies the difference and the hierarchy between entries. Any alternative proposal marks just another proposition. [xi] Thus, the significance of opposition, dispute and conflict is lost in the interior of the archive. Opposition contained within the archive is not, structurally speaking, opposition any more. The panoptical world of versions constructed during the development of the archive’s confinement syndrome dedramatises reality. Narrative dynamics are burned within the exposition of different versions: the short narrative reigns and thus there is no betrayal that cannot be recovered from. An archive of betrayal deserves condemnation, war against a certain obviousness of evil. The question concerning the continuation of political vigilance is that it can function within the conditions of this blinding from the viewing brought on by the particular condition of residing in the archive. Within the archive, political weighing cannot circumvent the fact that — in terms of structure, for the forming of today’s world — nothing is left that deserves utter faith: the risk is for one to imagine ways towards a subversive political stance in the ‘interior’ of the condition of residing in the archive.

The contemporary person remains constantly busy, concentrating keenly on distinctive mnemonic pockets to which he surrenders without faith. Outside of these, all that exist are other similar ones. We will remain for quite some time in the condition of the archive syndrome I am describing. A kind of ‘post-event’, organised in a different way than Badio [xii] imagined, is under formation. The internal denerving of the event using the rationale of the version suspends the meaning and intensity of any action. The event is always rendered ‘not specific enough’. In an analogous sense the house and the private space seek new meanings. And what remains excluded from any possibility of entering an archive shows a possible research area. The future of politics could be a way to penetrate and inhabit the archive.

The shift from a limited personal space to an unconstrained one carries the weight of this extreme transformation of the ‘secret imaginary’ as encountered here. We describe a change in a function of the archive, namely ‘the person’. Even if some have not experienced the terror of residing inside a military or a police secret archive, even if life within the Internet condition continues to remain an unrealised condition, we can understand what different strategies towards public space tend to be present in societies of involuntary or voluntary submission of the self to an archive, and which combined conditions may be created in the intervening space. In this transformation the ‘person’ is different while he now confronts open space in a different way and is expected to act in it differently. The person also becomes different as he devises other types of stratagems in order to invent enclosed, protected areas in this condition.


This text is first published in Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary catalogue for the exhibition Other than Yourself: An investigation between Inner and Outer Space, 08.02–21.09 2008; some of the ideas presented here are proposed in Residing in Archives, a text written as part of the project Monument to Transformation, presented in Prague, Tranzit Display, 2007, and Bratislava, 2008.


[i] Two parallel readings are proposed here: Georg Simmel’s text on the secret where Simmel writes about the formation of sociability from a secret in Secret et Sociétés secrètes, (French Translation, Circé, Paris, 1996), and the last period of Jacques Derrida’s work on secret. Cf. e.g. his text The Gift of Death or his series of dialogues with Maurizio Ferraris A Taste for the Secret. Derrida gave the title The Secret to many of his last seminars; he sometimes mentioned he had decided to keep “the secret” as a permanent seminar title.
[ii] A definition of the notion of archive and an idea about an inhabitation of it are needed here.
[iii] I refer here to archived corpses, thinking of a typical betrayal space such as Perrault’s Bluebeard — the opening of the secret room in this text is described as a passage from darkness to light: ‘At first she saw nothing, because the windows were closed; after a few moments she began to see that the floor was all covered in curdled blood and that in the blood were reflected the bodies of several dead women hanging along the walls’. In only a few words, the narrative energy of the story is vented. But we can nevertheless claim that the story was organised in the anticipation of and the mourning for this phrase. The phrase which describes the opening of the room as well as the simple act of opening one’s eyes puts an end to and, in a way, exhausts the story while gathering around itself. Moreover, the interior of the room is especially important as it is presented as a [fairytale] space of horrible betrayal. Perrault, Charles. Contes. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k101479h, 27.07.2007. Perrault’s Fairy Tales. George Steiner uses the Bluebeard mythology in a different way. See In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture, 1971.
[iv] Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, Greek edition, p. 16.
[v] Ibid., p. 12.
[vi] The emphasis is Derrida’s Archive Fever, Greek edition, p. 28.
[vii] Thoughts on residing in the archive as a continuation of Vilém Flusser’s early and prophetic thoughts in his book on writing and the transition to the digital age, Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft?, Göttingen, 1987.
[viii] The unfolding of scientific curiosity, which, for Freud, stems from the curiosity about one’s genitals. See Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory from his Childhood, New York, 1964, (1910).
[ix] See also Lacan’s thoughts on Edgar Alan Poe’s short story, The Purloined Letter. A lecture on the topic was given on 26 April 26 1955 during the seminar Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse, first published in 1956, La psychanalyse, No. 2, 1957, pp. 15–44, with an introduction, pp. 1–14.
[x] In the writings of Slavoj Zizek, we often come across the concept of complication which is exhibited by the authority that accepts any opposition remaining intact in the face of any opposition. The description could be interpreted by the syndrome of the archive that we are describing here. Zizek gives a Lacanian version regarding the origin of this condition, e.g. Interrogating the Real, Continuum, 2006. The issue of the invisible action and the absence of concreteness constitute the perspective I am organising here, the very condition of life in the archive.
[xi] The nullification I am referring to may be linked to the understanding of equality, which Rancière connects to writing: ‘the equality of all subject matter is the negation of any relationship of necessity between a determined form and a determined content. Yet what is the indifference after all if not the very quality of everything that comes to pass on a written page, available as it is to everyone’s eyes?’, The Politics of Aesthetics, New York, 2004, and Paris, 2000.
[xii] Alain Βadiou, Being and Event, translated by Oliver Feltham, Continuum, 2007, New York and London (L’être et l’événement, Paris, Seuil, 1988).