THE POLITICS OF SECRECY

Abstract

This article takes as its point of departure the current sense of crisis around cultural studies’ politics. It argues that: • cultural studies’ attempts to be more political in the wake of 9/11, the attack on Iraq and the associated climate of secrecy surrounding the Bush and Blair governments, by turning away from the difficult, text-based, self-reflexivity of ‘Theory’ toward politics, economics and the ‘real’ are frequently not political enough; • far from failing to help with real, pragmatic decisions regarding ideas of political struggle, action, resistance and community, Theory in general, and deconstruction in particular, provides one of the most rigorous means of doing so; • deconstruction's thinking on the relation between the political and the secret has a direct connection to its difficulty (Derrida, for example, hopes that the meaning of his texts will remain secret to a certain extent to ensure the question of what it is to be political in a given situation is left open to the ‘absolutely indeterminate’ intervention that cannot be foreseen). The above is achieved by means of a reading of Hardt and Negri's Empire, a text it has been suggested cultural studies turn to in order to acquire a better understanding of global politics in what Stuart Hall and Lawrence Grossberg have described as a period of profound transition in the societies of the North Atlantic capitalist industrial nation-states. The article concludes by speculating on the invention of a new cultural studies: a cultural studies which comes after, not just the work of Hardt and Negri and Grossberg and Hall (and, indeed, Gramsci, hegemony theory and the Birmingham School), but theory and deconstruction too. It is a cultural studies which is thus open to the complexity and specificity of the contemporary conjuncture as well as its possible novelty and difference, and therefore very much concerned with both the questioning of the political space and the maintenance of the right to the secret.