ABSTRACT
In February 2005, a seemingly scandalous series of revelations appeared in the New York Times and other mainstream news organs (Kirkpatrick 2005). Doug Wead, a friend of George W. Bush, released selected secret recordings of his phone conversations with the then-Texas governor. Among the items revealed in these tapes was the apparent admission by G.W.B. of his use of narcotics (including marijuana and cocaine). Just over ten years earlier, Bill Clinton’s disclosure that he had smoked marijuana once dogged him for years through the punch line/mantra “I didn’t inhale.” How could this discrepancy in exposures be explained? One possible explanation (along with the existence of an increasingly timid and reactionary press) is that a shift in “perception management” has occurred. In a nutshell, psywar techniques have become commonplace in domestic opinion-making, specifically the use of what I call “strategic revelations.” Although this style of opinion-management has a long history (under the various categories of propaganda and psych warfare), what we are seeing today is a fundamental shift in relations between publicity and secrecy, culminating in a decisive break between the act of exposure and the production of truth. In other words, faith in the bond between making-visible and truth-telling has eroded. This, I argue, is not a cause for lamentation, but an opportunity to reinvent conceptual strategies and forms of truth-telling.1
