The National Security Sublime: On the Aesthetics of Government Secrecy

by Matthew Potolsky

Why do recent depictions of government secrecy and surveillance so often use images suggesting massive size and gigantic warehouses, remote black sites, numberless security cameras? Drawing on post-War American art, film, television, and fiction, Matthew Potolsky argues that the aesthetic of the sublime provides a privileged window into the nature of modern intelligence, a way of describing the curiously open secret of covert operations. The book tracks the development of the national security sublime from the Cold War to the War on Terror, and places it in a long history of efforts by artists and writers to represent political secrecy.

184 pages, Hardcover

Published March 26, 2019