Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The Subject of the Ethical Turn
- 2 Empiricism, the Ethical Subject and the Ethics of Hospitality
- 3 Sexing the Ethical Subject
- 4 Vulnerability to Violence and Ethical Sensibility
- 5 The Ethical Subject of New Media Communications
- 6 Secrecy and the Secret of Ethical Subjectivity
- 7 Censored Subjects
- 8 Suffering
- 9 Hospitality, Friendship and Justice
- 10 Death, or the End of the Subject
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Secrecy and the Secret of Ethical Subjectivity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The Subject of the Ethical Turn
- 2 Empiricism, the Ethical Subject and the Ethics of Hospitality
- 3 Sexing the Ethical Subject
- 4 Vulnerability to Violence and Ethical Sensibility
- 5 The Ethical Subject of New Media Communications
- 6 Secrecy and the Secret of Ethical Subjectivity
- 7 Censored Subjects
- 8 Suffering
- 9 Hospitality, Friendship and Justice
- 10 Death, or the End of the Subject
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Some archives must not remain inaccessible, and the politics of the secret calls for very different kinds of responsibility, according to the situation. Once again, that can be said without relativism but in the name of another responsibility which must each time be singular, exceptional, and thus as the principle of any decision, itself in some way secret.
SECRECY IN A WIRED WORLD
The interplay between secrecy and disclosure has recently crystallised as a defining feature of the contemporary Zeitgeist of the ‘wired’ culture and society. It is intrinsic to the multifarious phenomena of communicative capitalism's diverse trade in data and information, from the details of private lives, consumer habits, tastes and preferences to the production, packaging and distribution of informational products of all kinds within the knowledge economy; and the value of ‘secrets’ and the price (in several senses) of their disclosure is a matter of great public interest and fascination. The exploits of ‘hackers’ and ‘crackers’ are today not only typical items of daily news, but effectively key to the processes of news gathering and production themselves (as the 2011–12 News International phone-hacking scandal illustrates perfectly). These are all characterised by data-network interventions of one kind or another. Tabloid celebrity phone-hacking and serious political data-journalism both exploit this new technical capacity of networks and the data they carry. More than two decades ago Deleuze and Guattari anticipated that ‘the more the secret is made into a structuring organizing form, the thinner and more ubiquitous it becomes’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ethical Subjects in Contemporary Culture , pp. 106 - 123Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013