Spectacles of Secrecy

At the CIA’s New Headquarters Building in Langley, Virginia, there stands a massive sculpture called Kryptos, commissioned by the agency and installed by artist James Sanborn in 1990. The theme of the sculpture, according to the CIA’s website, is “intelligence gathering,” and those taking the virtual tour can go on to learn that Kryptos is composed of huge copper panels on which “are inscribed several enigmatic messages, each written in a different code.”¹ The sculpture, then, is meant to represent not only intelligence gathering but also the professional holding of secrets. Despite having stood for over twenty years, as of this writing only three of the four panels have been decoded. Such lingering mystery is unusual in our age of information, when anyone can jump on Wikipedia and learn that there are communities of amateur cryptographers poring over the sculpture’s codes, and that subtle references to Kryptos were worked into the jacket art of the best-selling conspiracy novel of our time, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.² It is the secret itself that fascinates, an enigmatic message that seems deeper and more important because of its connection to U.S. power. But why might a U.S. intelligence agency imply its power by displaying an emblem of secrecy, and why might such a phenomenon be especially interesting to fiction readers and writers (“Have you learned about us in the movies or from books?” asks the CIA website’s “Kids’ Zone”)?³

Timothy Melley’s The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State offers a powerful way of thinking through phenomena like Kryptos, which exist in what he calls “the paradoxical openness of the covert state” (2). One way to read The Covert Sphere is as an extension of Melley’s first, excellent book, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (2000), in which he influentially argued that the cold war frame encouraged what he called “agency panic,” the sense that one’s personal autonomy was compromised by shadowy forces connected in one way or another to U.S. power. If Empire of Conspiracy took the X-Files approach to literary and cultural studies (insofar as postwar U.S. power encouraged conspiratorial fears which in hindsight may have been overblown), in The Covert Sphere, Melley demonstrates that the Fox Mulders of the world ought to be vindicated in their fundamental belief that one of the controlling features of the cold war was that the U.S. was, after all, up to all sorts of shady dealings. This observation is not exactly groundbreaking in and of itself, but what it has to do with literature is the heart of the book and its greatest strength: Melley shows us that fiction—in book, film, or television form—has come to dominate the average person’s understanding of the realms of espionage and other covert action, which means, he argues, that fiction has a privileged place in the covert sphere, and therefore in postwar U.S. culture more broadly.

Like “agency panic,” “the covert sphere” is a pithy, portable concept that literary and cultural critics will no doubt be turning to in order to make sense of the postwar world. Noting that “the covert sector has increasingly become a version of the state itself,” Melley defines his central concept like this:

The covert sphere is a cultural imaginary shaped by both institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state. … The covert sphere is not a set of government agencies, nor is it what Michael Warner so usefully calls a “counterpublic.” It is an array of discursive forms and cultural institutions through which the public can “discuss” or, more exactly, fantasize the clandestine dimensions of the state. … It is a cultural apparatus for resolving the internal contradictions of democracy in an age of heightened sovereignty.

(5)

If the covert sphere is best explained as a cultural imaginary, and this imaginary...