We're a bit like the third-person narrator of a novel....He's the one who decides what will what will happen and the one who does the telling, but he can't be challenged or interrogating. Unlike a first-person narrator, he has no name and he's not a character, therefore we believe and trust him; we don't know why he knows what he knows and why he omits what he omits and keeps silent about what he keeps silent about and why it is that he can determine the fate of all his creatures, without once being called into question. It's clear that he both exists and doesn't exists, or that he exists but, at the same time, cannot be found, He's even undetectable. I'm speaking about the narrator, mind, not the author, who is stuck at home and is not responsible for anything his narrator says; even he can't explain why the narrator knows as much as he does. In other words, the omniscient third-person narrator is an accepted convention, and the average reader of novels doesn't usually stop to ask why the narrator takes the floor and doesn't relinquish it for hundreds of pages, droning on in that invisible man's voice, that autonomous external voice that comes from nowhere...Well, we're something similar, an accepted convention, just as one accepts and doesn't object to chance, as one accepts and doesn't dispute accidents or coincidences, illnesses, catastrophes, events fortunate and unfortunate. We can stop a disaster from happening, but rather as a sudden change in the wind direction can save a boat, or a fog can conceal the pursued from their pursuers, or a snowfall can erase the footprints of the former, disorienting the latter and their dogs, or as a black night can stop someone in their tracks and black their view. Or just as the sea parted to make way for the Israelites, then closed again on Pharaoh's army following behind them in order to destroy them. That's what we are, and we really don't represent anyone. Javier Marías Berta Isla (2018) translated by Margaret Jull Costa (2018), p. 119
Regular readers of Marías know (recall) that he has a perhaps excessive fondness for self-referentiality and intertextuality which used to be called postmodern. The settings are often Oxford and Madrid. He also often presents narrations in which spies and secrets play significant role. The passage is quoting a spy-recruiter/handler in the midst of the act of initial recruitment, if not entrapment; the quoted passage is expressed in a pub, The Eagle and Child, in Oxford. The listener (Nevinson) is a Madrid born student at Oxford. So the quoted passage can be used as a key to interpret the novel, which -- I note -- shifts between different third and first person narrators.
Here I am interested in going in the other direction, and use it to reflect a bit on the nature of spies in liberal democracy. To be sure, the quoted passage makes no such restriction, and you, my dear reader, need not do so either if you so wish. Okay, with that out of the way, let's do some stage-setting. First, I take it that in the passage, "average reader of novels" stand in for the public in a democracy. Not any citizen (or non-citizen) -- because not everybody reads novels --, but those that read the papers, sign petitions, and may even call representatives from time to time.
Second, I take it that the author stands for the government. The government is often taken to be the author of the actions of spy agencies, but the whole point of having spies is to allow the government to deny, plausibly, responsibility for actions she does not want to be held accountable for. And, in fact, governments are, themselves, often, as we have been reminded during the last few years, on a need-to-know basis lest they accidentally or deliberately reveal state secrets (or valuable assets) or are infiltrated by other countries' spies. And, third, spooks are taken to be like third-person narrators.
Now, the first crucial point to make is that the actions of spies are somehow authorized by the government, but that in so doing they do not represent the government. The functionality of this to government and spooks is pretty obvious so I won't belabor that. But in virtue of being nameless and characterless, the spy simply cannot play the metaphysical, moral, legal, and political role(s) of being a (institutional) person that can held be held accountable or represent. Without a name, there is no object or person to play such roles.
There is not nothing, of course, because spies do produce (inter alia) intelligence. Strikingly, their epistemic authority does not rely on the methods or causal story that produces their utterances. All of that is black-boxed in the way that miraculous, learning algorithms spit out stuff. (If you look inside the box all you see is a string of computer code.)* This is also the conceit of the novel, where the life of the spy is left mostly invisible and recounted strictly in terms of the effects on his family and love life. Neither his actions nor his inner life are disclosed.
This is, of course, profoundly unsettling for democratic legitimacy and accountable because it suggests that true, as opposed to ritual, oversight and accountability of intelligence agencies is not really possible (unless one has one's own spies, and then infinite regress looms). For, in a non-trivial sense there is no there, there. I think something similar is happening with oversight of central banks where what they do, and how they do it, and when they do it, has become illegible to parliaments and governments. All that's being tracked are effects, many of which not at all attributable to anything--these days even central bankers (who have a name and are held accountable in some sense, but who are primarily authorized to do stuff), admit they are clueless about the so-called transmission mechanisms (here's the ECB: "The transmission mechanism is characterised by long, variable and uncertain time lags." Take a look at the accompanying chart.) Spies leave traces, but one can't tell if they are dummies or not.
This much is familiar enough. But, the sting in the passage is not the assumed paraconsistent ontology ("he both exists and doesn't exists"),** but the thought that the shapeless (viz., spies) is constitutive of political life and so while changeable (particular "conventions" are not eternal after all), indispensable to states in the way that any novel to count as a novel must have an implied narrator.
As an aside, the mechanisms of such kind of constitutive devices are central to the aesthetics, and political theory, pursued by Stanley Cavell and his school. So, I don't mean to suggest the claim is novel to Marías. I also think there is an interesting question whether what is claimed in the quoted passage is really true of novels. It's not impossible that by now there is an avant-garde version of the novel that has dispensed entirely with the shapeless narrator (even as a mechanism to be denied or refuted or mocked), but that has not shaken our stereotype of the nature of the novel.
One may wonder why spy agencies are not a dispensable convention. Perhaps, it is mere self-interest or a useful consoling-to-spies-professional myth that they are indispensable the way numbers are to science? For, one may be tempted, if one has any liberal faith left, to think their existence is a by-product of the global order, which, while not perhaps a Hobbesian state of nature, is full of potential and real enemies. So, if this were right, sleuths are not intrinsic to states, but just a contingent fact of the absence of world-government or federation.
But if we stipulate a benevolent Kantian world federation on liberal principles with no enemies, it is still likely that spying follow naturally. For, the possibility, real or imagined, of anti/non liberal enemies of the state cannot be ruled out. Democratic theorists do often rule out illiberal citizenry by fiat, but we are not interested in them here. And such enemies, even if we stipulate that they are a minority, need not play by liberal rules. So, for the state to be possible over time it, it must have ways to protect itself against enemies who cannot be bought off and are, in principle, not persuadable.
That is, while the category of the (domestic) enemy of the state lends itself to great abuse, to not acknowledge its possibility, is to put the state at great peril with no chance to correct. Once one has had that thought, a secret reserve/force becomes a live thought. The justification of having unaccountable, unrepresentative forces is to destroy enemies of the people (cf. Pharaoh, Israelites, etc.) Of course, in reality that may be worse than the problem it is purportedly solving. And if one is small, poor, and insignificant enough, one may well decide, reasonably, that one must make do without uncontrolled, invisible forces.
That is to say, a state without enemies has no need for secret agents. But such a state would then deny the founding myths that secure its legitimacy.
*The comparison is inexact because learning algorithms make testable predictions and can be matched up with each other.
**Because the poems byT.S. Eliott are a major leitmotif in the novel, I quote the Four Quartets' "Burnt Norton" on love :
To the best of my knowledge Four Quartets are not quoted in the novel, but I may have missed a few allusions.
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