Public Secrets, Defacement, Witnessing, Compassion (Week 2)

The four assigned articles created a thread that was somewhat difficult to follow, but which nonetheless connected the idea of the "public secret", defacement (both literal and metaphorical), the act of "witnessing" (which, in true digital media style, has been appropriated by the author and its meaning altered), and the concept of compassion as it applies on a social scale.

The first article, written by the professor for this very class, Sharon Daniel, is both an expose' of the prison system and a discussion of the concept of the "public secret". The prison system is an enigma, for it is often dramatised on television to the point of unbelievability. Corrupt guards, sadistic cellmates, and gang rivalry fill the screen, and the viewer remembers the oft-printed disclaimer "based on true events": that is, exponentially more dramatic and insane than the true events themselves. Between prison as dramatised on television and prison as rarely spoken about negatively in the media, citizens don't really know what to think. But no matter what they think, it's usually in passing, because they don't really want to know the reality of the prison system. This is where the concept of the public secret becomes relevant. As the essay quotes, the idea of a public secret is "knowing what not to know". The problem of the military being unwilling to accept homosexuals was circumvented by creating a public secret of sexual orientation within the military ("don't ask, don't tell"). If no one knows whether anyone else is homosexual, it solves the problem of having to deal with issues that would otherwise inevitably arise. An equivalent policy actually "solves" the problem of negativity directed toward the prison system: by banning media from entering prisons, no one can ask or be told about the injustices that Daniel has documented for the last several years. Another example of a public secret involves the Iraq War. Regardless of one's stance as to whether or not it should have been started, there was obvious encouragement by the administration of the idea that there were links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. The "secret", which the White House even admitted, was that none had actually been found. While I would assume that knowledge of this public secret is greater than that noted by Daniel, they both are direct examples of the same concept.

A large-scale system, such as that which is able to create and perpetuate public secrets, is far too massive to oppose directly. It usually controls media coverage and has enough lawyers to take care of any small uprisings many times over. In this case, guerilla warfare becomes one of the few remaining options. Defacement as examined by Michael Taussig goes beyond the obvious definition of simply marring the surface of an entity. In this case, it is a metaphorical act as well. Greg Taylor created a sculpture of the Queen and Prince Phillip naked and rusting, in effect defacing them by creating art that depicted them vulnerable and grotesque. Also, your eye is actually a solar anus. Betcha didn't know that.