Publicity's Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy

At a time when much of the writing about the politics of net culture is glib and epigrammatic, Jodi Dean provides an analysis that is theoretically profound and politically astute. Publicity's Secret is an important and distinctive contribution to thought about the public sphere, democracy, and secrecy.

Cultural theorist Jodi Dean's latest book tackles the issue of the public sphere in a refreshingly contemporary and relevant way by focusing on the role of the technological media in the exercise of public democracy.... One of the most interesting discussions in the book is that of subjectification in terms of a drive toward celebrity, which seems to suggest, in a Sartrean vein, that we experience existence only in the eyes of multiple beholders.... The book serves, however, to raise the question of what democracy would look like without the rational monolith of 'the public' and goes some way to clearing the ground that has served to bolster this (from Dean's perspective) dangerous avoidance tactic.

Dean discusses how the popular belief in truth in reporting and fairness in the media is almost entirely a myth.... Dean's voice joins a number of other intellectuals such as Ishmael Reed, Joshua Micah Marshall, and Eric Alterman that have come out in favor of critical thinking in our age of Homeland Security Departments and the Office of Information Awareness. With a little luck maybe others will follow their lead.

Dean's book coalesces a number of approaches to the public and publicity, ranging from political theory to psychoanalysis and cultural studies. It identifies a new and consequential amalgam of public and new technologies. It warns of the dangers posed by information overload and generalized skepticism.

For Dean, the modern, and now postmodern, public sphere has always been based upon the integral relationship between secrecy and publicity.... Revealing secrets legitimizes the public realm, a public, however, that never really exists. 'The public' is a simulated, technocultural construct that most people believe actually operates as a democratic representation of 'the people.' It does not.

Jodi Dean takes us one step deeper into the mindscape of consumer capitalism.

Jodi Dean's new book approaches the key issue of today's critical theory: how are we to subtract the authentic democratic impulse from its perversion in the media-manipulated notion of 'public' and 'public support'? Is the situation so manipulated that true democracy cannot survive? Or should we start to look for sites of resistance even in odd places like UFO and conspiracy theories? In short, to say 'I am engaged in critical theory and don't want to read Dean's book'is a contradiction in terms: the book is A MUST!

Removing secrets from the soul, where we traditionally suppose them to hide, and from the acts of divination that pretend to uncover them, Jodi Dean examines the genesis of secrecy as a ploy of modern technology. In doing so she does far more than place the secret 'out there' in the various technologies that have become the life-support of a thriving capitalism, she exposes the way a new ideology of intimacy threatens the very possibility of radical democracy. Political, cultural, and psychoanalytic insights spring from each page of this lively and timely book, raising critical concerns about our hasty acceptance of degraded notions of publicity.

The World Wide Web has made those with access wary of surveillance, loss of privacy, identity theft, lurking, fraud, scams.... Ideology itself, in Dean's argument, has been fundamentally altered under the regime of technoculture. Communication is the new ideology; it has survived the most recent crash of Silicon Valley stock options and taken the place of production.... Dean speaks with an intelligent and important analytic voice about the seductions and dangers of the wired, media-drenched universe. In this universe, the rule of law has morphed into the rule of artificially manufactured public opinion, and what is not publicized does not exist.