Bodies as Evidence

Abstract

The constitution of a national security state transformed the United States into a new kind of secret society after World War II, one in which state power rests to an unprecedented degree precisely on the ability of officials to manage the public-secret divide through the mobilization of threat. This secrecy/ threat matrix marks all state secrets as equivalents of the atomic secret, making revelation a matter not just of politics but of the life or death of the nation-state. The Cold War arms race — founded on the minute- to-minute possibility of nuclear war — installed the secrecy/threat matrix as a conceptual infrastructure, enabling a new species of politics in the United States. Instead of enabling a system in which knowledge is power, the national security state’s system of compartmentalized secrecy produces a world in which knowledge is increasingly rendered suspect. This is a profound shift in how secrecy functions socially. In such a nation-state, secrecy becomes an increasingly pathological administrative form, one that prevents confidence in knowledge