Assange and WikiLeaks: Secrets, Personas and the Ethopoetics of Digital Leaking
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21153/ps2015vol1no1art452Keywords:
Assange, WikiLeaks, secrecy, leaking, whistleblowing, rhetoric, genre, semiotics, information activism, persona, persona studiesAbstract
This article suggests a rhetorical orientation for some future work in persona studies. In this paper, I maintain that persona studies can usefully contribute to the close description of complexes of discursive events. In particular, I contend that persona studies can enhance efforts in the humanities to describe discursive events involving public figures who have achieved a degree of fame or notoriety. The descriptive purchase of persona studies is maximised, I argue, when we foreground its rhetorical and semiotic postulates.
To make this case, I read the figure of Julian Assange rhetorically. By focussing on questions of ethos and ethopoesis – the performative, discursive construction of full human character – I show that Julian Assange can be usefully read as a particular, digitally inflected instantiation of the persona of the information activist.
In this instance, persona studies helps us to read the constitutive relation between digital leaking and issues of secrecy and publicity, and to understand the fortunes of the figure of Julian Assange in terms of Assange’s particular performance of the persona of the digital information activist.
Downloads
References
ABC “Assange signs another book deal.” ABC Online. 2011. Web. Accessed 28 Feb 2015.
Allen, J. “Assessing the First Amendment as a Defence for WikiLeaks and Other Publishers of Previously Undisclosed Government Information.” University of San Fransisco Law Review 46 (2011-2012): 783-818. Print.
Assange, Julian and A. O’Hagan. Julian Assange The Unauthorised Autobiography. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2011. Print.
Assange, Julian. Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. New York and London: O/R Books, 2012. Print.
---. When Google Met WikiLeaks. New York and London: O/R Books, 2014. Print
Ball, J. “Exclusive: Former WikiLeaks employee describes working with Julian Assange.” The Daily Beast. 2013. Web. Accessed 28 Feb 2015.
Beckett, C. and J. Ball. Wikileaks News in the Networked Era. Cambridge: Polity, 2012. Print.
Benkler, Y. “A Free Irresponsible Press: WikiLeaks and the Battle over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate.” Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review 46 (2011): 311-398. Print.
Bergman, M. Peirce's Philosophy of Communication: The Rhetorical Underpinnings of the Theory of Signs. London and New York: Continuum Books, 2009. Print.
Birchall, C. “Cultural Studies Confidential.” Cultural Studies 21.1 (2007): 5-21. Print.
Bok, S. Secrets On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982. Print.
Brevini, Benedetta, Arnie Hintz and Patrick McCurdy, eds. Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.
Brock, George. “Julian Assange's rebellious life.” Times Literary Supplement, 2011. Web.
Brooke, H. “The Wikileaks 'hero' is actually morally bankrupt.” The Times. London. News International Trading Limited, 2011. Print.
Burns, J. F. and Somaiya, R. “Who is Julian Assange?” Open Secrets: Wikileaks, War and American Democracy. Ed. Alexander Starr. New York: Grove Press, 2011: 25-44. Print.
Cavell, S. The Claim of Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Print.
Colapietro, V. M. “C. S. Peirce's Rhetorical Turn.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 43.1 (2007): 16-52. Print.
Coleman, G. “Hacker Politics and Publics.” Public Culture 23.3 (2011): 511-516. Print.
Coleman, E. G. Coding Freedom: The Ethics and aesthetics of hacking. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013. Print.
---. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy The Many Faces of Anonymous. London and New York: Verso, 2014. Print.
Cook, J. “International Man of Mystery.” bookforum.com, 2011. Web. Accessed 28 Feb 2015.
Davis, M. (2010). ‘The Whistleblower.’ SBS Dateline, SBS. http://www.sbs.com.au/news/dateline/story/whistleblower Accessed 28 Feb 2015.
Davis, M. “Inside WikiLeaks.” SBS Dateline SBS, 2010. Web. Accessed 28 Feb 2015.
Dean, J. Publicity's Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithacan and London: Cornell University Press, 2002. Print.
Derrida, J. and M. Ferraris. A Taste for the Secret. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Print.
Domscheit-Berg, D. Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website. Victoria, Australia, Scribe Publications, 2011. Print.
Drake, P. and A. Miah. “The Cultural Politics of Celebrity.” Cultural Politics 6.1 (2010): 49-64. Print.
Dreyfus, S. Underground: hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier. Australia: Random House, 2001. Print.
Driessens, O. “Celebrity capital: redefining celebrity using field theory.” Theory and Society 42 (2013): 543-560. Print.
Ellison, S. “The Man Who Spilled the Secrets.” Vanity Fair, 2011. Web. Accessed 28 Feb 2015.
Ellsberg, D. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. United States: Penguin Books, 2002. Print.
Fowler, A. The Most Dangerous Man in the World. United States: Skyhorse Publishing, 2011. Print.
Fowler, E. “The Contingencies of Person: Studies in the Poetic and Legal Conceits of Early Modern England.” Diss. Harvard University, 1992. Print.
---. Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Print.
Freadman, A. “Uptake.” The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre. Ed R. Coe, L. Lingard and T. Teslenko. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2002: 39-56. Print.
---. The Machinery of Talk: Charles Peirce and the Sign Hypothesis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Print.
Frow, J. Genre. London & New York, Routledge, 2006. Print.
Goffman, E. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York, Doubleday, 1959. Print.
Greenberg, A. This Machine Kills Secrets: How Wikileaks, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information. United Kingdom, Virgin Books, 2012. Print.
Hacking, I. “The looping effects of human kinds.” Causal Cognition A multidisciplinary debate. Ed. D. Sperber, D. Premack and A. James Premack. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995: 351-383. Print.
---. “Inaugural lecture: Chair of Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts at the Collège de France, 16 January 2001.” Economy and Society 31.1 (2001): 1-14. Print.
---. “Between Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman: between discourse in the abstract and face-to-face interaction.” Economy and Society 33.3 (2004): 277-302. Print.
Harding, L. The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s most Wanted Man. Vintage, 2014. Print.
Hunter, I. “The History of Philosophy and the Persona of the Philosopher.” Modern Intellectual History 4.3 (2007): 571-600. Print.
Jónsdóttir, B. “Foreword Beyond WikiLeaks.” Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society. Ed. B. Brevini, A. Hintz and P. McCurdy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013: xi-xvii. Print.
Khatchadourian, R. “No Secrets: Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency.” The New Yorker, June 7, 2010. Print.
Keller, B. “The Boy Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.” Open Secrets: Wikileaks, War and American Democracy. Ed. Alexander Starr. New York: Grove Press, 2011: 3-24. Print.
Leigh, D. and L. Harding. Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy. Great Britain: Guardian Books, 2011. Print.
Lyne, J. R. “Rhetoric and Semiotic in C. S. Peirce.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 66.2 (1980): 155-168. Print.
Manne, R. “Julian Assange: The Cypherpunk Revolutionary” The Monthly (March 2011). Web. Accessed 28 Feb 2015.
Marshall, P. D. “Persona studies: Mapping the proliferation of the public self.” Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-170. Print.
Miller, C. R. “Writing in a culture of simulation: Ethos online.” The Semiotics of Writing: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on the Technology of Writing. Ed. P. Coppock. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001: 253-279. Print.
Moss, S. “Julian Assange: the whistleblower.” The Guardian. 2010. Web. Accessed 28 Feb 2015.
Munro, A. “The Descriptive Purchase of Performativity.” Culture, Theory and Critique. 53.1 (2012): 83-98. Print.
---. “Reading Austin Rhetorically.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 46.1 (2013): 22-43. Print.
O'Hagan, A. “Ghosting.” London Review of Books 36.5-6 (2014): 5-26. Print.
O'Hehir, A. “Alex Gibney: Julian Assange has become 'like those he despises'.” Salon. 2013. Web. Accessed 28 Feb 2015.
Peirce, C. S. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1931-58. Print.
Poitras, L. Citizenfour, Radius-TWC, 2014. Print.
Rojek, C. Celebrity. London, Reaktion, 2001. Print.
---. “Niccolo Machiavelli, cultural intermediaries and the category of achieved celebrity.” Celebrity Studies 5.4 (2014): 455-468. Print.
Rorty, A. O. The Identities of Persons. Berkley Los Angeles London: University of California Press, 1976. Print.
Rourke, A., et al.. ‘Who is Julian Assange? By the people who know him best.’ The Guardian 2012. Web. Accessed 28 Feb 2015.
Shirky, C. “WikiLeaks has created a new media landscape.” The Guardian. 2011. Web. Accessed 28 Feb 2015.
Short, T. L. Peirce's Theory of Signs. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.
Simmel, G. “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies.” American Journal of Sociology 11.4 (1906): 441-498. Print.
The Fifth Estate. Dir. B. Condon. Dreamworks SKG, Reliance Entertainment, Participant Media 2013. Film.
Thebes, M. “The Prospect of Extraditing Julian Assange.” North Carolina Journal of International Law and Commercial Regulation, 372011 (2012): 889-915. Print.
Turner, G. Understanding Celebrity. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004. Print.
Underground: The Julian Assange Story. Dir. Robert Connolly. Focus World, Network Ten, Sky Cinema, 2012. Film.
Wallace-Wells, B. “Julian Assange: A Ghost Even to Himself?” NYMag.com. 2014. Web.
We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. Dir. Alex Gibney. Jigsaw, Global Produce, Universal Pictures, 2013. Film.
WikiLeaks. Julian Assange: Statement on the Unauthorised, Secret Publishing of the Julian Assange “autobiography” by Canongate. 2011. Web.
WikiLeaks, Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt. 2013. Web.
Williams, R. Marxism and Literature. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Web.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
How to Cite
