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WikiLeaks, the New Information Cultures and Digital Parrhesia by P. Nayar

WikiLeaks, the New Information Cultures and Digital Parrhesia by P. Nayar

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Published by Boris Loukanov
Pramod K Nayar (pramodknayar@gmail.com)
is at the department of English, University of
Hyderabad.
Pramod K Nayar (pramodknayar@gmail.com)
is at the department of English, University of
Hyderabad.

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Published by: Boris Loukanov on Jan 06, 2011
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COMMENTARY 
Economic & Political
Weekly
 
EPW
december 25, 2010 vol xlv no 52
27
Pramod K Nayar (
 pramodknayar@gmail.com
)is at the department of English, University of Hyderabad.
WikiLeaks, the New InformationCultures and Digital Parrhesia
Pramod K Nayar 
How does one understandWikiLeaks, which has not only redened media ethics buthas also redened what weunderstand as media cultures?
W
ikiLeaks (currently at http://213.251.145.96/) has redenednot only media ethics, it hasredened what we understand as infor-mation cultures itself. This commentary on perhaps one of the most signicantdevelopments since the arrival of internetcultures outlines certain ways of under-standing WikiLeaks (
WL
, for short).
1
Ishall do this through a series of proposi-tions, given that we have no idea yet how
WL
will shape up and so the present com-mentary also has to be partial, fragmen-tary and unnished.
WL as a Cultural Phenomenon
WL
cannot be identied just with an indi- vidual Julian Assange, even though hepops up as soon as one opens the website. Assange is a messenger, he is neither mes-siah nor the message. But, fortunately orunfortunately, he has become identied asthe “face” of 
WL
. However, to do this is topersonalise-individualise what is really a
cultural
phenomenon.
2
It draws breathfrom the subcultural hacker movement which arose primarily out of the belief (now the hacker credo): “information wants to be free”. Years ago the Cult of theDead Cow (
CDC
) delivered its HacktivistDeclaration:
We view access to information as a basic hu-man right. We are also interested in keepingthe Internet free of state-sponsored censor-ship and corporate chicanery so all opinionscan be heard (http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_les/Hacktivismo
FAQ
.html).
This declaration itself drew upon theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights(
UDHR 
), quoting its Article 19:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinionand expression; this right includes freedomto hold opinions without interference and toseek, receive and impart information and ideasthrough any media and regardless of frontiers.
Like
CDC
,
WL
also sees itself as derivingits moral and ethical stance from the
UDHR 
(citing Article 19 on its website), andthus locates itself in a
 global cultural ap- paratus
: the universal movement for hu-man and related rights. What
WL
repre-sents is a new culture of information thatdovetails into two other cultural practices: whistle-blowing and
 parrhesia
(truth-tell-ing). At the end of this essay I shall returnto the second one for a more extensivediscussion.Despite this emphasis on the culture of dissidence, resistance and truth-tellingembodied by 
WL
, it cannot be denied thatindividual whistle-blowers have put theircareers and their lives on the line. Forto the “media industry” and if democracy is to be preserved in any society everyoneshould practise journalism in whicheverform they can.While till recently there were severenancial and technological barriers toordinary citizens trying to spread theirtake on what constitutes news and whatdoes not all this has changed considerably in recent years.The dawn of the internet era and theproliferation of various other communi-cation technologies has already revolu-tionised how “news” is produced and dis-seminated in the developed countries.Today in highly wired countries like the
US
, Japan and South Korea internet blogsand publications have higher readershipthan printed newspapers while it is just amatter of time before web-based newschannels take on their satellite or ter-restrial counterparts.Even in the case of the Radia tapesscandal mainstream media was forced totake up the issue and discuss it only after asustained campaign by hundreds of out-raged and anonymous “netizens” cam-paigned through social media networks.So today, if many members of theIndian public believe that the media, which is supposed to be the fourth pillarof popular democracy has become in factthe fth column of corporate autocracy I will say you are absolutely right. I willcaution though that this has become pos-sible only because as societies we have tooreadily given up the citizen’s right andindeed responsibility to inform others andbe informed ourselves, entirely to thecorporate media.This is not unlike the way we havegiven up the task of looking after ourhealth to the medical industry, our ghtagainst injustice to the legal industry, theeducation of our children to the educa-tion industry, the governance of oursocieties to both governments and cor-porations. If the media in our timeshas become powerful and corrupt it is
“WE THE PEOPLE”
who are to blame.So stop complaining and start doing journalism wherever you are!
Note
1 http://www.socialjustice.in/documents/Caste inthe newsroom/Upper castes dominate nationalmedia.pdf 
 
COMMENTARY 
december 25, 2010 vol xlv no 52
EPW
 
Economic & Political
Weekly
28
 protest to effect any political change, cyborgtheorist Chris Hables Gray, the creator of the Cyborg Bill of Rights, points out, itrequires embodiment: “you testify to thetruth with your body” (2001: 44). The per-secution of Assange – his dramatic arrest,the rape charges, the threats of extradi-tion and possible assassination – makesfor a very strange mix where the virtualmeets the esh-and-blood: online activity  whose validity and value are sworn to by the very real threat to the
 person
of Julian Assange. Conversely, does eliminating the“body” of Assange alter the virtual threatthat the new culture of information repre-sents? The answer is “no”, for we are inthe age of an electronic civil society andinformation culture unlimited to bodies,geographies or national boundaries.
WL as Public Witnessing 
WL
shapes a new textualisation and visu-alisation of how international relationsand global geopolitics work. That is, some-thing as abstract as geopolitics or interna-tional relations that very often manifestonly as nalised treaties or speeches orpolicy documents gets broken down intoits dirty, messy constituent parts. Wetherefore must see
WL
’s collection of docu-ments as the
 processes
that make up the world’s functioning. In a sense,
WL
directsus, for the rst time, to the
making
of the world order (or disorder).
WL
emerges out of digital and net- worked technologies that enable “public witnessing” (Reading 2009). Here theproduction of information about humanrights violations, war, oppression, atro-city, disaster and suffering have beenthe work not solely of 
CNN
and the statebut amateurs wielding mobile phonecameras and camcorders. Traceable back to the epoch-making Rodney King beat-ing in Los Angeles in 1989, public wit-nessing is the user-generated content of the horrors of war or disaster. In such acontext
WL
feeds an already ravenousappetite for such content. In an era where extreme cultures constitute thescreen in the form of extreme sports, ex-treme deprivation and extreme violence,
WL
is one more component of such cul-tures. Thus to see
WL
as completely unique would be to deny signicance to the visualcultures of Abu Ghraib-Guantanamo Bay,Katrina, the 2004 tsunami or the 2010Haitian earthquake.Public witnessing ensures that the in- visible becomes visible as well. For exam-ple,
WL
’s rst major exposes were of theIraq war, many visuals being uploaded(and later acquired by 
WL
) by soldiersfrom the front. As Noel Whitty suggests inhis study of soldier photography (2010), a whole new “visualisation of war” is nowpossible with such visuals. Those scenes we were not meant to see – which is whatNicholas Mirzoeff terms “invisible” – suchas Saddam Hussein’s execution, the tor-tures in Abu Ghraib or the massacre of ci- vilians in Iraq and Afghanistan can nowbe seen. We are now in the era of theh yper-visible, by which I mean the excessiveand repeated circulation of such images we were not intended to ever see.In the age of human rights campaigns, agreat deal of value is attached to the visualevidence of atrocity (Girling 2004). Thatis, there is a visual culture of human rightstoday, a cultural apparatus through whichhuman rights are refracted for public con-sumption. The Iraq War Logs and the“Collateral Murder” video which rstbrought
WL
global attention are instancesof this visual culture of human rights andinternational humanitarian law. Scenes of  war, classied documents that legitimisedtorture, secret parleys behind policy con-stitute what we might term a counter-archive. An archive has traditionally beena space where documents are stored andthe rights of interpretation of these docu-ments rest with a chosen few (known inclassical times as “archons”). Here, in
WL
’sarchives we have a database from which we, as readers, need to build narratives.I am drawing attention to two specicdetails here. The collection of documentsmight have an “internal” narrative but weneed to see them as a database. A data-base in cyberspace leaves us many optionsof traversals (reading, following links). As we traverse we build a narrative throughthe database. I have elsewhere arguedthat this construction of narrative from a“raw” database is fundamentally a matterof choice: what paths we choose to takethrough the database (Nayar 2010).Therefore, the archive of documents
WL
 leaks must be, and can be, made to tell astory – about injustice, corruption,deprivation, suffering in
any
part of the world – depending on our choice of framesof interpretation and wanderings throughthe corpus.
WL
-facilitated public witness-ing could therefore become the means of producing a globalisation of conscience.
WL, Knowledge-Making anda Virtual Public Space
WL
constitutes a rupture in dominantand dominating patterns of knowledge-making and interpretive schemes. Previ-ously knowledge that was hierarchic, cen-tralised and graded, is now random, non-hierarchic and user-generated, resultingin distributed knowledge (or “infotopia”,Sunstein 2006; Lévy 2001, Chapter 10).
WL
’s leakage of thousands of documentsoffers contestatory narratives of the “waron terror”, to take just one instance. Thesecontestatory narratives provide the neces-sary corrective to centralised and controlledstate discourses about Iraq and Afghanistan.With
WL
, a gap in knowledge about thesame event has occurred, between therhetoric of the
US
government regardingthe “war on terror” and the stories told inthe leaked cables. This gap in knowledgecannot be really lled because of the con-testatory nature of the counter-archive. If knowledge proceeds by debates, in thetrue Socratic function,
WL
offers us anopportunity to situate two discourses andsets of narratives in dialogue.What
WL
does is not to pinpoint blamesfor wrongdoing on
X
or
Y
. Rather, it givesus a glimpse of the institutional, state,organisational cultures that made
X
or
Y
’sacts possible. Records on/at
WL
must beseen not as individual instances but asembodiments of institutional politics andpower games. In other words, we need totreat the documents in the archive not asilluminating the perversions of one soldierin Iraq or Abu Ghraib: they must be evalu-ated as synecdochic of a culture where
available at 
Rajesh Manish Agencies
Shop No. G3 B II,Jaipur - 302 003,Rajasthan.Ph: 2326019
 
COMMENTARY 
Economic & Political
Weekly
 
EPW
december 25, 2010 vol xlv no 52
29
such acts of atrocity were made possible,and even legitimised. It is therefore inter-esting to note how former soldiers whofought in Iraq
 support
 
WL
’s efforts.
We did unto you what we would not wantdone unto us… Our heavy hearts still holdhope that we can restore in our country theacknowledgement of your humanity, that we were taught to deny (qtd in Lazare andHarvey 2010: 27).
What
WL
does is to locate a LynndieEngland (the infamous prison warden at Abu Ghraib) within a
US
culture of warand a war effort that empowered such in-dividuals. The individual soldiers only de-note individual wrong-doing, but what weneed to see is the connotation – which isthe cultural apparatus of atrocity.Individuals like Bradley Manning (themilitary intelligence analyst who allegedly leaked the documents to
WL
, and is now inprison, and likely to remain there for along time), see their acts as a public ser- vice. Thus, to bring the argument fullcircle, to see Assange or Manning as indi- vidual heroes is to miss the point. If thepublic space has to possess a certainmorality – of giving visibility to humanrights violations, deprivation, sufferingand cruelty (i e, whistle-blowing) andoffering the chance for people to voicetheir dissent and discontent – then it isthe rise and dissemination of counter-narratives such as those archived at
WL
 that remake the space. If the public spaceis the space for different people to telltheir stories,
WL
marks the arrival of sucha space. This is the main reason why it isfascinating to see how the
US
, the so-called defender of free speech and there-fore multiple stories, has suddenly decid-ed that
WL
is not about free speech at allbecause it hurts “global” interests (
US
 commentators have even called for thedeath penalty to Bradley Manning). InJanuary 2009
US
Secretary of State,Hillary Clinton, claimed a new nervoussystem for the globe: the internet. Sharply critical just last year of China’s efforts atlimiting Google (known among hactivistsas “the great rewall of China”), this sameClinton is now up in arms against
WL
.
WL and the Archive of the Future
Hactivism such as
WL
’s is always open tocharges of being unethical, especially  when their disclosures affect powerfulstate and corporate interests. However, weneed to see their ethics as “deriving fromthe future”, as Tim Jordan argues abouthactivists (2002: 138).
WL
cannot really predict what its disclosures will result in.In this sense,
WL
is not embedded either inthe past or the present: it draws its cour-age from a
 promise of a future when thingscould be
 
different
. But it can also be read asa moral/ethical position on free speech – aposition and policy endorsed by various gov-ernments in the past – being taken to its logi-cal end and directed at the future.The entire
WL
project must be seen asan archive whose uses would only be inthe future, it is therefore a responsibility and response directed at the future of knowledge-production, international rela-tions and authority. Currently, as it stands,the 2,50,000 + documents
WL
plans torelease slowly is in fact “virtual”: for the word virtual means “something with thepotential to become real”. This archive hasthe potential – the future – to remake the world through the rise of a globalconsciousness.
WL and the Culture of Parrhesia
To return to the point with which I began,the cultures of information,
WL
can beread as marking the arrival of a digitalparrhesia, or truth-telling. Derived from“para” meaning “beyond” and “resis”,meaning “speech”, parrhesia is truth-tell-ing performed at risk to the truth-teller.
3
 In Athenian democracy, parrhesia was animportant component, but it was alsoa feature that distinguished the goodcitizen, Michel Foucault notes (1983). Itinvolves citizens acting as individuals,but also acting as an assembly in theopen space:
Parrhesia, which is a requisite for publicspeech, takes place between citizens as indi- viduals, and also between citizens construedas an assembly. Moreover, the agora [theopen space] is the place where parrhesia ap-pears (Foucault, online, unpaginated).
Two preliminary points. First, it is notpossible, given the nature of global com-munications and the globalisation of freespeech, to think of a single truth-teller,unless one were to, mistakenly, in my opinion, assign this status to Assange. But,as noted earlier, we must be careful inconverting the messenger into a messiahor even the message itself. The most onecan say about Assange is that he functionsas a cipher in the free ow of informationthat is digital parrhesia. While accusa-tions about his autocratic and anti-
US
biasdo the rounds, it remains indisputablethat the documents speak for themselves,in the medium which is cyberspace and
WL
. A second point to be noted is that par-rhesia is performed at the risk to the truth-teller. Here, if we assume the speech-actas a manifestation of the structures ena-bling transmission of truth, then Assangeand Bradley Manning are indeed thestructures at risk.These seem to be two apparently con-tradictory points – about digital parrhesiabeing performed at risk to the truth-tellerand contemporary condition where wecannot pinpoint a single truth-teller. I pro-pose a slightly different parrhesia, onethat is less interested in the truth-tellerthan in the
culture
 
of 
 
truth
-
telling
. Digitalcultures create a new communicationsculture, which generates a new community,the global civil society (we have seen thisin the case of online supports, campaigns,humanitarian efforts in the wake of thetsunami, Katrina, the Haiti earthquake,protests against the
WTO
, etc), and the glo-balisation of conscience.
WL
is an embodi-ment of this new form of communications-leading-to-community, a digital parrhesia. At risk is digital space as parrhesiastic space. At risk is a new media cultural practice(Napster, Bit Torrent, Rapidshare, CreativeCommons, Open Source Movement, Wiki-pedia, WikiLeaks),
not
the individual voice. At risk is the entire culture of informationsharing, the agora of information.Parrhesia has a close link with self-examination (Foucault). Foucault of coursemakes much of the fact that a truth-teller’stelling and his life must be in what he calls“harmonic relation”. Thus, it calls uponthe speaker to examine what s/he believesand therefore for a closer scrutiny of her/him-self. Hence the attacks on Assange’spersonal life are aimed at discrediting hisrole as truth-teller, but miss the crucial pointof the contexts of parrhesia. By targetinghim, the governments are hoping to changethe cultural form itself. His morality infact has nothing to do with the culture of communications. What the contemporary 

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