Secrets - the movie

1.

 

Childhood – middle class childhood – is, among other things, an education in secrets. Secret making and breaking. A paper by Yves de la Taille on the development of  “the right to a secret” among children cites researchers in the Piagetian school claiming that children develop a conception of secrecy around four years of age. I wonder if that has changed as we’ve plugged our kids into youtube and other internety business. I vaguely remember an Oswald the Octopus episode about a secret, which amused Adam in his toddler days.

I don’t think the secret begins as a peer to peer, sibling to sibling or playmate to playmate toy. Parents take great pleasure in making secrets part of kidlife. What would a present be if it isn’t wrapped – if it isn’t the subject of hints – if it isn’t hidden, after it is bought, in the parental closet or workroom? The present needs to be presented in the wrapping because the wrapping is the charisma of the gift. You tear it off, and you guessed right or wrong.

Gifts and guessing, that long bourgeois couple. It will outlast the love marriage.

2.

Secrets and secret societies play an abnormally large role in Georg Simmel’s theory of socialization. Consciousness itself is under the law of the secret. Self-consciousness is not only consciousness that I think, it is consciousness that you don’t know what I think. The cogito comes out as a sly devil, a hider. Epistemology must first deal with secrets and their breaking before we get to the other stuff. I know what I think as I talk to some Other, even while I am talking, and the Other can project this on me since the Other does the same thing. I can, of course, say what I think, but the phrase, “can I be frank,” or “can I tell you what I think” derives its affective sense from the fact that I don’t always, and in fact almost never, tell you what I think entirely. I edit for you. And thank God you edit for me. I’m uniquely equipped to do this, beyond the lie detector’s reach – which of course depends on physiological signs, and doesn’t really measure what’s held back – because I know my secret self. Which is my self, the one I take to the toilet, the shower, the bed. The intimacy here is, formally, a secret, and it is within that secret that all the variables of memory and sense hide. This secret distinguishes me from the Other, and the Other has its secret, and we exist as secret sharers side by side, or in traffic, or as fan to celebrity, lover to love, aging parent to child. We live in secret and we die that way. Here, it really is a matter of until death do you part. Or as Simmel puts it, this is the “deeply grounded circle of mental life.

Yet, such is the power and attraction of exposing oneself that it is a rare individual who goes about making a mystery of himself. The escaped convict, the confidence man, the revolutionary, the knight of faith – all do trail mysteries, but all are out of the mainstream. When Simmel published his Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, the mystery man in literature was in fashion. Hamsun wrote Hunger in 1890 and Mysteries in 1892, which had a tremendous influence on German literature, at least. Dostoevski’s The Possessed, published as Die Dämonen, was published in German translation in 1906. Les Caves du Vatican, Gide’s novel with its scene of the l’acte gratuity – Lafcadio’s murder of his seatmate on the train – was an act that was a mystery even to its perpetrator.

In this atmosphere – the nervous crisis of the European intellectual – putting the secret and the secret sharer as a whole chapter of the large book on sociology made sense. For Simmel, the internal secrecy of the consciousness was anything but a logical choice – it was a choice forced upon the subject by natural history. The secret (which is and is not the unconscious) is distinct as a form from the logic and reason that may advantage a person who wants to keep a secret. Simmel, living before the wireless, compares what happens in the mind of the socialized subject to a treebranch that is entangled in a telegraph wire, causing it to send out messages every time the wind blows. It “leaves signs that give us a reasonable sense” – but that are ultimately caused by something other than the sense. “If one looks at ideas as they continually flow in a time series through our consciousness, this flickering, zigzagging collision of images and ideas … is far distant from reasonable normativity.”

We are idiots babe. It’s a wonder that we still know how to breathe. Which is the expressionist message.

3.

 

In one of his essays, Louis Marin speaks of a certain book of traps, written by a 16th century Venetian. What an evocative title that is! Traps, spies and secrets have always fascinated me.

The secret itself – which tends fatally to the scenario of the trap - has not, for some reason, been a large topic in philosophy since Simmel,  even though it is certainly a conceptually involuted trope. It has been replaced, I think, with the problem of the unconscious.

My approach to the secret takes it that there are two broad secret types. First order secrets are those in which the content of the secret is secret, while the form (that is, that there is a secret there) is not; this is the usual type that is treated in the literature, both fictional and factual. We have, for instance, an intelligence agency and we know that it has put under lock and key documents about X. In this case, we know that X is secret. It is our minimal knowledge, but it is in itself non-secret knowledge. As well, our knowledge that the secret is being kept is public knowledge.

Sometimes, an institution will insert an ambiguity in that knowledge by saying that they can neither confirm or deny X. This is a step towards the second order secret. These are secret in which both the content and the form are secret.

For instance, you have a friend who, it turns out, is a murderer. The secret here is both that he is a murderer and that you never suspected he had a secret. I’ve often thought that if, somewhere, there really was a man who shot at Kennedy from the grassy knoll, and he kept that a secret all his life, it would form an interesting novelistic problem. How would you portray that secret keeping as the interesting novelistic theme without violating the secret – that is, approaching the life with an unsourced knowledge that the man had this secret? This would be possible only if something after the man died indicated that this man was the shooter on the grassy knoll. But if you told the tale from this “leak” of information, you would be starting out from a desublimated place; and the whole sublimity of the story is the fact that such a non-secret murder was effected by a man who kept it secret his entire life.

Secrets have a sublimity. A paranoid sublimity.  To keep it secret that you have a secret is to be an agent within a paranoid narrative.

The rough division of secrets does not really give us the essence of secrets, but it is a start.

I once dreamed of a novel in which this second order of secrecy forms the core. Unfortunately, to tell the tale is to violate the core.

You might think this is a trivial distinction, but actually, it is the distinction that informs the relationship between secrecy and political power. We know, for instance, that the CIA holds back information from American citizens - we know that they have secrets. The peculiar status of the CIA depends on our knowing that they know what we dont know in much the same way that the Minister D., in the Purloined Letter, holds sway over the Queen because she knows that he possesses a letter that she doesn’t  want the king to know about. The queen’s secret, then, is a second order secret, while D’s is a first order secret. Second order secrets are often such as to make their possessor vulnerable, while first order secrets are often of the type to make their possessor powerful. This generalization obviously has some very important exceptions, but when it comes, at least, to Intelligence agencies in the U.S., it holds true.

In fact I once dreamed of writing a little spy novel- the notes for which are in some box or other in somebody’s closet- in which the premise was that the real US Intelligence agency was the asphalt testing division of the US Department of Highways and Transportation, while the CIA and the NSA were shells. That was a sort of joke. It is funny because, of course, we think of the CIA, etc., as powerful, and even romantic, because we know they operate in secret, whereas asphalt testing has no James Bond-ian resonance. The charisma of the wrapper is on one, but not on the other.

Parents little think of what they are teaching their child with that first wrapped present.