The Aesthetics of Secrecy in Contemporary America

A Conversation

Abstract

This “conversation” explores questions which first appeared during the Snowden era, a time when the stakes surrounding — and the theoretical resources for — thinking about secrecy had more clarity than they seem to now. Returning to earlier work, Potolsky and Birchall consider ways to update their accounts of the aesthetics of secrecy for a world shaped by the explosion of online conspiracism and by renewed urgency surrounding questions of race, gender, and identity. There has since been a dramatic shift in the ways that we conceive secrecy, the form that it takes, and how we think about the dichotomy of public and private. The “conversation” is built out of four questions posed by the authors to each other, with revised answers forming the basis for this discussion.