In a recent discussion with Amy Goodman and Slavoj Zizek, Julian Assange describes the vision that he has for Wikileaks to provide a full historical archive. He stated:
It has been my long term belief that what advances us as a civilization is the entirety of our international record, the entirety of our understanding about what we are going through, what human institutions are actually like and how they behave.Assange described, in terms that are not so dissimilar to socialist realism, the method of collecting, not just some stories, but all stories. The narrative about civilization bounds his observations here that something like an entirety is possible. Not just an individual or two highlighted for a special narrative or spotlight and then taken as representative, but all individual stories and cases, exhaustively compiled. The fantasy of entirety is powerful and compelling--since it still takes place here as a countermeasure, as a negative, dystopian aspect of critical work. The fantasy of entirety is maintained by another idea that goes without saying in this discussion: the idea that representation, or the ability to be representative, is not longer a necessity in such a model. This is a compelling, if Brechtian moment, because it returns us to considerations about what constitutes the nonverbal and the impact that such modes of production can have on relations in society.
Assange goes on to discuss how the idea of entirety is related to communication, and although it seems at first like he posits an ideal of open communication, it is not necessarily clear that this is what he means (although he might, and he might make this clear elsewhere). But here, the emphasis seems to be on the impotence of speech, itself, as action:
Once we’ve gotten that type of volume and concretize and protect the rights of everyone to communicate with each other, which – to me – is the basic agreement of civilized life. It is not the right to speak. What does it mean to have the right to speak if you’re on the moon and nobody is around. It doesn’t matter. Rather the right to speak comes from our right to know.The two of us together, someone’s right to speak and someone’s right to know, produce a right to communicate, so that is the grounding structure for all that we treasure about civilized life, and by civilized I don’t mean industrialized. I mean people collaborating not to do the dumb thing. To, instead, learn from previous experiences and pool with each other together to get through the life that we live in a less adverse way.
Assange contrasts civilized life with industrialized, but the negative example does more to indicate that the discontents of industrialization are also close at heart to those of civilization. His vision is grand, and one of hope: that civilization will win out over barbarism, the dumb thing. He emphasizes collaboration and pooling, actions which would not be possible on the moon. But I think behind these more overt calls for transparent collectivity, there is the implication that forms of communication that take place on the moon, ones that are decidedly nonverbal, might however be the forms that constitute the right to communicate. In other words, the right to communicate would be about communicating things that are not necessarily understood to be communicable, things which cannot be said, perhaps, or which are more effective not as said things but as shown things.
