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CHAPTER 1
On Leaking
FROM THE ARABIAN NIGHTS TO WIKILEAKS
When we look at the term data, we generally do not recognize its Latin origin, as the plural form of datum, meaning "[a thing] given." The French word for data, donnée ("given," from donner, "to give"), retains the Latin sense exactly. If data are the "things" given, then what is it that gives data? Aside from having the speculation in mind that this givenness comes from God, we should recognize that since 1946, the word data has had an additional meaning: "transmittable and storable computer information." This second understanding of data suggests the need for a reconsideration of the philosophy of objects, because it can no longer be assumed to refer entirely to sense and noetic data. Instead, one should recognize this translation as taking on a material form and consider how this materiality constitutes a new form of "givenness."
— Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects
Faucets, bodies, taps, roofs, spills, streaming, letting things in or out, leaks perform the breakdown of containment, breaching the dam, regularly and incessantly, through fissures, holes, ports, crevices. Refugees leak across borders and expose in doing so leaky national boundaries and models of citizenship. Hannah Arendt theorized this in her work on refugees in the post–World War II period, asking what happens to human rights without a state to guarantee them? Arendt captures a biopolitical condition that seeks to reclaim rights beyond modernity's imagined communities. Rethinking the political and the contestation of power from this perspective requires an examination of involuntary acts, compulsive acts, coerced acts, and acts of last resort by leakers who also become targets, refugees, exiles, and prisoners of their own leaks: fluids, secrets, videos, stories, war experiences.
When WikiLeaks first started posting the correspondence of the American armed forces in Iraq in 2010 and 2011, the leaks were experienced as a deluge of data that risked submerging the public, the actors in these revelations, and the political structure altogether. The scandal was so great that it was compared to a "tsunami" that would bring about "the end of diplomacy as we know it." The leaks — hundreds of thousands of messages and documents — were not individualized, with each text containing specific damning information. Unlike the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, contemporary leaks are associated with a radical bursting of the containable, of the dam that eventually cracks open to produce a flood, thereby drawing on the register of natural disasters. So when it was revealed in July 2015 that the US government was hacked, compromising the personal information of employees and contractors, CNN headlined: "Government data breach affected over 22 million." The reaction of the CNN presenter was "Wow!" when hearing from her colleague that it was "five times more than they had expected or announced." The article on the news site went on to describe the unprecedented "magnitude of this security breach," framing the event as earthquake.
As bundles and zip files of data unfolded on websites and airwaves, the leaks depended on a logic of anticipation, propelling someone like Julian Assange to the position of leak master (as in "master of ceremonies"), who announces that on this day thousands of leaks will be revealed, or that what was revealed was only the tip of the iceberg. The announcer of the catastrophic turned the public into terrified yet avid readers of a diluvial text that consumes, submerges, and fills every hole. Though the timing of the leak is part of a practice that creates anticipation, the revelations themselves could not be sorted, understood, or contained in terms of their circulation, effect, and meaning. The leaks have become transnational, involving multiple locales, languages, and political contexts, requiring deciphering, editing, and translation projects. When the Panama Papers leak hit in April 2016, it was announced as the biggest leak ever: millions of documents implicating world leaders in corruption scandals from the United States to Russia. It was an operation that took a year of preparation, with hundreds of journalists, editors, and translators working together to produce the story. The Panama Papers became a topic to which newspapers such as the Guardian and Le Monde devoted entire sections, reporting on them for days as more and more information was revealed. Once unleashed, the leak becomes an apocalyptic scene of revelation, a tsunami, a deluge, a body of texts that is simultaneously translatable and untranslatable.
In Arabic, the register of leaks is expressed through terms such as tasrib (leak) leading to a tufan (flood), capturing the erasure of the trace, the origin, or the source. A 2015 Al-Jazeera article about the leaking of a torture video from Lebanese prisons describes how the minister of justice "ordered a criminal investigation of that which was leaked (fi ma tasarraba) on social media as pictures showing the torture of detainees." Here, the leaker is unknown, as if it had dissolved in the act of leaking. In fact, the Arabic noun tasrib belongs to grammatical form II (al-wazn al-thani as intaf'il), which has no actor or the actor is unknown, drawing attention to the leaked rather than the leaker, and presenting the act of leaking — or the leakage — as autonomous, happening by itself, as if it were an act of nature (like earthquakes and tsunamis), or part of a digital condition. With the leaker erased or unknown, the leak becomes merely given — donnée, data — thereby complicating our understanding of agency, authorship, intention, and text. Who leaked the videos? Of course, we have seen with WikiLeaks how leakers become superstars, villains, and heroes, thereby fixing their authorial intentions and assigning them specific liberationist projects or evil and traitorous schemes. This process, however, is often established retrospectively through a production that involves leak masters and state apparatuses, public opinion and popular culture. But most leaking occurs through compulsive and ongoing processes that trickle and expose. In the prison video example given above, the leaker is not identified as a conscientious objector to government policies but rather needs to be read as an economy, a network, a default condition, and a digital ecosystem of giving (donner), sharing, uploading, exposing, and watching. As if leaking acts on its own, is itself given, source and origin at the same time. It is the leak that makes the torture known and legible but also unacceptable and therefore requiring an investigation.
In this chapter I explore leaking as bodily function, tying it to fiction and author function. Engaging the theoretical framework of the leaking body from The Arabian Nights onwards, I examine how leaks became WikiLeaks, thereby questioning their framing as an attempt to fix the empire or restore the violated subject of the liberal state whose rights and privacy have been suspended or tampered with. This chapter traces the transformation of the leaker into superstar traitor and hero, and the making of the leak as "true knowledge" or encyclopedic knowledge by adding "Wiki" to "Leaks." The Derridean reste of this transformation is the leaking body and the leaking fiction — the subject of my investigation throughout the book. I argue that as leakers occupy liminal states of juridical limbo such as embassies, airports, and solitary confinement, their bodies become marked and their subjectivity undone and reconstituted while simultaneously undoing and reconstituting the law that they purportedly violate. Thus, leaking washes away its origin as a condition of contesting, knowing, and belonging. Approaching leaks as bodily functions that subvert both political and discursive orders, I engage theories of fluidity and materiality by drawing on affect theory and feminist critiques of psychoanalysis. From leak as symptom or lack associated with an unsettled symbolic that needs to be reactivated through redemption and ritual purification, we move to leak as political affect that exposes both the leaking subject's body and the insecurities and violations of power: abuse, secrets, security holes, jouissance. It is this double exposure of the leaking body and of the body politic that I focus on in this chapter.
REGISTERS OF THE LEAK
In the Arab context leaking as an act of exposure and unveiling is often emphasized through the process of fadh (exposing, making a scene) and kashf (unveiling, revealing). Media reports use the expressions tasrib yakshuf (a leak reveals) and tasrib yafdah (a leak exposes) to designate the operation and effect of the leak. Kashf, which I take up in more detail in chapter 3, is linked to the Sufi concept of mukashafa, which marks the collapse of subject/object relation, the veil, or the Apollonian. It is the moment of visibility that frames fadiha (scandal), engulfing seer and seen, actor and acted upon, setting the stage for a new mode of knowing and touchability. Fadiha engulfs and breaks down the subject/object binary structuring the model of knowledge (who knows and what is known) and its dynamic of control and domination that Said critiques in Orientalism (knowledge as power) by drawing on Foucault. This epistemological collapse brought about by the act of leaking ushers in a new form of knowledge, which is fundamental to the critique of leaking as a way of enlightening the public in a cyberspace often idealized as a Habermassian public sphere.
The knowledge revealed by the leak performs fadh (exposure) and kashf (unveiling), thereby exposing another text and other information that needs to be recognized, acknowledged, seen under a new light, touched. This "other text" or "other object of knowledge" requires the kind of lighting as in the hacking example discussed in the introduction, thereby setting the stage for a new model of reception and critique of power. This critique, which makes a scene of power through the leak and makes power recognizable and exposed in the event of leaking, is coextensive with a textual production, a story, and a scandalous fiction that acts affectively on the viewer or reader. This fiction emerges from the leaking event and makes the knowledge that the leak reveals legible and affective at the same time, touching bodies and altering narrative course, subverting power relations and the codes regulating gender, the sacred and the profane, the private and the public, and the knowable and the unknowable. The event of leaking reveals a scene, a drama, and a web of interconnections that tie in fiction and affect, bodies and texts, and aesthetics and politics.
The intertwinement of bodily conditions, the critique of power, and fictions revealed in the event of leaking are best captured in two tales from The Arabian Nights. In addition to reading the Nights itself as a collection of leaks, which obliterates and fictionalizes its source or moment of origin — an "anonymous" text or a text "given," donnée — leaking bodies are a constitutive part of the narrative as such."The Story of the Lady and Her Five Suitors" shows how the body, when confined and panicked, leaks, subverting hierarchies and power relations. The tale is about a woman who invites the chief of police, the judge (Kazi), the minister (Wazir), and the king to her house for an amorous encounter in exchange for the freedom of her alleged brother — in fact, her lover. Scheduling their visits one after the other, she commissions a chest of drawers that would each fit a man from a carpenter who would join the fray at the lady's house. When each man arrives, she asks him to take off his official garb and don a house robe, obtains his signature on a release form, and orders him to hide in one of the drawers once a knock at the door is heard. After locking them all up, including the carpenter, she frees her lover from jail and escapes with him.
Meanwhile, the five abode each in his compartment of the cabinet without eating or drinking three whole days, during which time they held their water until at last the carpenter could retain his no longer; so he urined on the King's head, and the King on the Wazir's head, and the Wazir on the Wali, and the Wali on the head of the Kazi; whereupon the Judge cried out and said: "What nastiness is this? Doth not what strait we are in suffice us, but you must make water upon us?" The Chief of Police recognised the Kazi's voice and answered, saying aloud, "Allah increase thy reward, O Kazi!" And when the Kazi heard him, he knew him for the Wali. Then the Chief of Police lifted up his voice and said, "What means this nastiness?" and the Wazir answered, saying, "Allah increase thy reward, O Wali!" whereupon he knew him to be the Minister. Then the Wazir lifted up his voice and said, "What means this nastiness?" But when the King heard and recognised his Minister's voice he held his peace and concealed his affair. Then said the Wazir, "May God damn this woman for her dealing with us! She hath brought hither all the Chief Officers of the state, except the King." Quoth the King, "Hold your peace, for I was the first to fall into the toils of this lewd strumpet." ... And they fell to talking with one another, diverting the King and doing away his chagrin.
The tale presents a sadomasochistic encounter wherein the woman seduces the men, ties them up, and leaves. The men lose control of their body functions and begin to leak on one another. Pissing on the king's head is the outcome of confinement that accentuates the subversive aspect of leaking. As the men leak, they become aware of each other's presence and of the power dynamic that had just been unsettled. Leaking makes them legible to one another and creates recognition through voice recognition not the garb; through desire and the power of the woman over them and not through their fixed positions in the political hierarchy; and through fluids seeping through cracks in the wood and not through visual recognition. The collapse of the visual paves the way for the emergence of leaks (pissing) and sound (talking) as the framework of political subversion and the production of new models of recognition that tie in subjects to one another. Leaking thus makes something known and heard, thereby exposing and making a scene of the subversion of power, which recognizes its downfall in the event itself. In the absence of the official garb and the symbolic power of kingship, a new intersubjectivity predicated on leaks (leaking subjects versus subjects of the king) emerges in this story.
Simultaneously, the story exposes the subversion of the codes regulating sex and desire. The alleged brother who is in jail emerges at the end as the woman's lover. The leak and the political subversion it enacts coincide with the breakdown of the codes of haram and halal, the permissible and the illicit. Thus the exposure of political authority in this tale coincides with a more radical subversion of sexual codes of love and the prohibition of incest. Leaking thus conditions a critique of political structure and of social order predicated on codes and prohibitions fundamental to patriarchy as such. The symbolic is unsettled in this leaky story, fundamentally forcing us to rethink what it means to desire, what objects of desire are sanctioned and which ones are not, blurring the boundaries between the permissible and the reprehensible, only to expose the ways in which these boundaries are established in the first place. The fiction of the "brother in jail" foregrounds the event of the leak only to be undone by it in the end. The fictional development of the imprisoned brother who becomes the liberated lover is both mediated by the leak and makes the leak possible. The question of gender and the position of the woman vis-à-vis the structure of power, and her ability not only to negotiate with it but to subvert it completely, emphasizes the relation between the bodily and the order of fiction as the leak exposes and intervenes in the political.
While leaking, both as a bodily condition and dramatic effect, subverts power and reshuffles amorous and intersubjective relations through a new mode of knowledge and recognition in "The Lady and Her Five Suitors," in "The Steward's Tale" leaking produces a fiction that critiques power as well as the exclusion of women as the basis of patriarchal community formation. Further questioning the limit and the boundary that separate the permissible from the forbidden, and the sacred from the profane, "The Steward's Tale" is about a girl who serves Lady Zubaida, wife of Caliph Harun al-Rashid. When the girl falls in love with a merchant in the souk, her mistress asks her to bring him to the harem so she can meet him and make sure that he is fit for her beloved servant. They devise a plan to smuggle him into the harem, hidden in a wooden chest along with other chests carrying clothes for Lady Zubaida.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals"
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