SECRET THEORY



Generalities

  
Fig. 59
"Im Westen nichts neues".		   As it were, modern Western society, since WW II, has been increasingly preoccupied with the technologies and politics of information. Today, it is largely admitted that information is the common denominator of almost any human activity, be it scientific, technical, economical, social - or even psychological, religious or artistic. That nothing should be inaccessible to the global information network (the "media", in the widest sense of the word), seems to be the basic - albeit tacit - presumption of the present state of "culture". However, there are - and must necessarily be - certain practises which, by their inherent nature, tend to elude - if not actually resist - the general demand on information (x > 0 °). Thus, despite the diffusion (and dilution) of pornography within practically all spheres of human expression, love is still the pursuit of a secret - and, consequently, a secret pursuit. Similarly, the activity hitherto known as "art", remains essentially an investigation of the secrets of existence - and, therefore, an essentially secret activity. To create a work of art is, obviously, to produce an object, the signification of which can only be partly brought to light at any given moment. In this sense, the work of art contains a secret - although, on the other hand, the artistic gesture is, evidently, different from the trivial act of simply concealing something, without producing a signof this concealment. Thus, there is a intimate relation between art theory and secret theory - to the extent that the artist, being necessarily an art theorist as well, might reasonably be considerered a "secretist", a secrete practician, and a secret theorist as well. Whether art theory and secret theory be, in fact, one and the same thing, we shall, however, leave to posterity to decide.

The problem of secret theory

Art theory must be an artistic theory, and the art theorist must be an artist (indeed, the theoretical disciplines of grammar, logic and rhetoric are arts in the Antique or Medieval meanings of the word). By the same way of reasoning, secret theory must be a secret theory, and the secret theorist must be, indeed, a secret theorist. On second thought, though, this demand seems to severely threaten the very idea of theory: the aim of any theory is, of course, to make something known; how can there, then, be a secret theory?

  Fig. 58
Producing a secret in a society based on surplus information can be regarded as terrorism.
Fig. 60
Countdown.		  

The secretiveness of theory as such

Obviously, any theory might be said to contain a secret, in a trivial sense, since no actual theory says "everything" about its object. In this sense, secret theory might be said to be a secret theory in the same way as any other theory: it does not say "everything", neither about the secret as such, nor about any particular secret in question. But this consideration - apart from being trivial - jeopardizes the argument of 7.1: if secret theory is secret only in the general sense applicable to any theory, then secret theory is not secret in a distinctivelysecret way, comparable to the way in which art theory is - or at least should be -distinctivelyartistic.

The secret in art theory (I): Does the work of art contain a secret?

Let us, once again, consider the example of art and art theory. Surely, it might be said that any work of art contains a secret; but if this is to be more than just another way of stating that the work of art is, in fact, a work of art, then we should like to know, more specifically, where this secret is supposed to reside. In the art object as such?This seems unreasonable: the art object is an absolute unity of appearance in which all elements participate equally; thus, a non-appearant element would simply be a non-element. Of course, it can be argued, for instance, that e.g. the canvas (or even the reverse side) be the "secret" of any painting, but this again is trivial: any visible object has hidden parts or portions, any visible object contains a certain amount of darkness. Indeed, one might argue that any visible object is in fact a work of art; if, however, we are to accept the presence of a secret as a distinctive feature of the work of art, the general secretiveness of objects is not sufficient.

The secret in art theory (II): Does the artist contain a secret?

Even more preposterous is the idea that the secret of a work of art should somehow be resident within the artist. Evidently, the artist knows something about the work of art that no one else does (the painter knows, for instance, how the canvas looked before he started painting), but in the same way anybody else might know something about the work of art that the artist doesn't know (for instance, the painter is not likely to know if I am watching his painting at any given point of time; I am). A more interesting hypothesis would indeed be that the artist knows less than anybody else about the work of art and the presumed secret within it: this would seem to be a reasonable motive for his creating it.

 		  Fig. 61,62,63 and 64
Shadow moving in artificial light at BUNKER secret site.
Fig. 65

Fig. 66
Secret practice. In the attempt to uncover a hidden object, one inevitably covers up a certain amount of hitherto obvious phenomena. In the attempt to hide an object, conversely, one evitably uncovers a lot of hitherto hidden structures. In the attempt to trace a ritual, one inevitably finds oneself performing one. 		 

First and second order secrets

In the case of secret theory, the facts are curiously similar. The maker of a secret will obviously know more about the secret before and even during its presentation as such. But as soon as the secret is presented to a society of the uninitiated - and this, clearly, is a necessary condition: a secret which is not presented to someone who, at the same time, is ignorant of the secret's content, is not a secret to anybody, and therefore not a secret at all - the secret maker loses his privilege. In fact, he can no longer know if any other than himself has come to know the secret (whether by guessing, by "leaks" in the secret maker society, by telepathy, or by any other means, is here of no consequence) or not. The secret mayin fact remain secret; but whether this is reallyso, can no longer be known for sure. By presenting what we might call the first order secretto the society of the uninitiated, the secret maker has, at the very same time, presented a second order secretto himself: whether the first degree secret is found out or not, will from now on be an impenetrable secret to him (of course, if the secret is actually found out, this may be revealed to him, and hence be no longer a secret. But this is not the point: the point is that as long as the secret maker keeps the first order secret, there is, from hispoint of view, no reason to believe that the second order secret should not be kept just as scrupulously by the first order uninitiated; or to put it yet another way: as long as the second order secret is not revealed, there is no way of knowing whether the first order secret is actually kept, and conversely: in the very same moment as the second order secret is revealed, the first order secret ceases to exist as well).

Secret algebra

The algebraic symbol indicating a secret is, traditionally: x

The presentation by a secret maker S of a secret x to an uninitiated community C at the time t0 might accordingly be written: p(S, x, C, t0), S, x and C being logical variables (assuming the Boolean values 0/1, interpretable as "absence/presence"), t being a real time parameter.

p can be treated as a mapping onto a (discrete) subset of IR, thus defining a (non-continuous) scale of secret values. In particular, the secret minimal conditions

(S = 1; x = 1; C = 1) imply the equations:
p(0, 0, 0, t) = 0    
p(1, 0, 0, t) = 0    
p(1, 1, 0, t) = 0    
p(1, 0, 1, t) = 0   for all t
p(0, 1, 0, t) = 0    
p(0, 1, 1, t) = 0    
p(0, 0, 1, t) = 0    


The expression p(1, 1, 1, t ) assumes (cf. The BUNKER secret as a history device ) two fundamental values:

    0 for t < t0
p(1, 1, 1, t) =      
    2 for t > t0