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