Secrets

In Defacement, Michael Taussig writes extensively about the phenomenon of "public secrets" – the things everyone knows but nobody talks about. Many times, as he shows, it is hard to draw the line between "true" secrets – knowledge that some people hold and purposely withhold from others – and these public secrets. It appears that in many societies around the world, men impersonate spirits and gods in public performances which the women are supposed to "believe", though many times the anthropologists documenting the rituals have a hard time accepting that the local women are really duped. More than once, outsiders (usually missionaries) have exposed the secret, thus bringing about temporary havoc. But interestingly enough, the ritual is often shortly reinstated, and within a few years everybody plays their part – the men performing, the women professing to believe – as if no secret had ever been exposed.

I read Taussig's book shortly before setting out for my fieldwork, without thinking that it would be particularly relevant. It was actually when I started considering what to write for this blog that his discussion popped up in my head. As I wrote in my previous (short and apologetic) post, for the last week I have been working in what I termed a "light industrial facility" here in Ashdod. Since the place where I work is rather unique, at least for the city, if I gave any details of the kind of work I do, anybody interested enough could easily figure out what facility it is. If I write about practices that might fall under the vague heading of "worker resistance" – which I certainly intend to do – and if anyone from the management finds out about the blog, this might expose my fellow workers to some kind of retribution. And that worries me.

That's a lot of ifs; and yet I want to be responsible and try to think ahead. In this context there's a big difference between my final thesis and this blog. The thesis will be a coherent piece, in which I can balance ethical issues with the theoretical and descriptive points which I find important to go into. I can also devise relatively elaborate methods of disguising my field and informants. And of course, not many people will ever read my thesis. The blog, on the other hand, is ongoing, unstreamlined and public.

Of course, it may be presumptious of me to think that after one week in a workplace I know anything that the bosses don’t know about what their employees do behind their backs. This is where Taussig comes in: in a sense I am sure they must "know", but part of the game here, like in those societies he discusses, is that in another, more public sense, they do not know. For example, as far as the workers are concerned, management does not know that some of the time they are only pretending to work.

One of the few things that makes me stand out from other workers is my inability to keep up this pretense. So long as I have work, I stay on my feet working relatively efficiently, as far as I can tell. When the work runs out, though, I sit down. I have already been upbraided for this by a fellow worker. "At least stand up", he tells me.

"Why?" I reply, "I don't have anything to do."

"But what if somebody from management sees you."

"If I have work to do, I'll work. If I don't, I'll sit down and rest, and then when I have work I'll do it better. What's the problem? This isn't the army."

His silence in response made it clear that at least in this performative sense, there is no difference between the army and this place.

Does the management really "not know" that when we don't have work, we don't work? Do they really think that we don't notice that some tasks are urgent, while others are bullshit jobs given us just to keep us busy? The truth is that the demand for our labor power fluctuates quite a bit throughout any given day. Sometimes they need us working hard, other times they don't need us to work at all. We are employed in the understanding that so long as we are told to keep coming in, we will be kept at work all day, and in any case it wouldn't make sense to send us home in the middle of the day only to call us back later if we were needed. Our labor power is cheap enough to keep it idling for relatively long stretches. Yet no less than our role is to work, management's role is to keep us working, and when a manager sees a worker relaxing on company time, she has to do her best to get her back to work; otherwise she would not be what she is.

That we do in fact relax, ease up, slow down and stop working all together some of the time is therefore not a secret that workers keep from managers, but a public secret that everybody is invested in keeping up. If, like those missionaries in Papua, I explode the secret –by conspicuously resting in front of management, or by writing publicly about it here after having specified where I work – I will probably do no damage to its long-run viability. In the short run, however, I may provoke some repressive response from management, either towards me or, worse, towards my fellow workers.

But public secrets do not explode so easily, even temporarily. The child has to scream that the emperor is naked before any concerned adult hands are clapped over his mouth. So yes, anybody interested in doing so will probably be able to infer my place of employment from this blog soon enough, and inform management of their employees' theft of company time. But this anybody would have to be interested in exposing this public secret as well, even more interested than I am; and in fact, nobody is that interested.

I will continue to report on "resistance", then, because it is one of the most fascinating phenomena in my field. For the reasons given above, though, I have no interest in exposing and provoking (two sides of the same coin), so I will not, for the time being at least, say exactly where I work. The secret remains, and remains public; I have become complicit in it, and that's all right with me.