Ghost in the Wire

For now at least, I want to put any discussion of policy implications into abeyance, and instead think a bit about privacy and media. As a blogger watching the whole tired Ivan Tribble affair, as someone who routinely publishes online by signing his own name rather than a pseudonym, I am acutely aware of the dangers that exist in publishing online. I have provided information to credit companies, have listed books I own and music I like, have disclosed personal information, (for example: my forthcoming daughter), and so on and so fourth, ad absurdum, all online. But whatever the novelty of the Internet, whatever the uniqueness of blogging, this ability to self-confess has been around a very, very long time. The ability to self-confess in a way that moves beyond the transitory, ephemeral conversation-and-memory combo has been around since the acculturation to literacy. Even blogging, for all its celebrated newness, can be seen more as a completion and a perfection of the typewriter, the first technology to fuse the act of composition with the act of publishing for a mass audience.

Blogging is at this point a somewhat battered and banal example of what many see as a more pernicious confession and collection of information that removes from the individual the power to resist authoritarian impulses (be they governmental or corporate), which at least theoretically rely upon information control and knowledge over and interpellation of their targetted subjects. And the many who see this aren't wrong, necessarily. But it occurs to me that the concern might well be alleviated if we followed Lanier's suggestion or parallel loss: that nullifying some of the force of any "right to privacy" means also nullifying that force for all sorts of actors that claim a privilege via it, from the individual citizen to the corporation to the government. If we had as much information and (and this is a hugely crucial componenet) information-processing as did these larger and more complex organizations, it may be that privacy would turn out to no longer be a necessary check on the authoritarian principle.

Which isn't to say that privacy wasn't a useful bulwark, back when the media ecology by which we interacted with our social and political world looked very different (say the previous two centuries). But it may be that progressive responses need to, you know, "progress" along with the social and technological conditions that make manifest the world around us. Derrida has made the argument, in a number of different places, that new telecommunications technologies like email and the web constitute an archive that makes even more undecidable the already contested line between public and private. Theoretically, as notions of publicness shift from Enlightenment-based (Habermasian) models and towards models predicated on the technologies of circulation (Michael Warner and Dilip Gaonkar provide examples of this perspective), even the dialectical opposition that helped structure publicity in the public/private model no longer seems to be necessary if offering ways to theorize our subject-positions.

There is a risk that this theoretical overture gets overextended, and/or that it gets coupled with certain concepts that lend a juridicality and a politics to these models that might properly be deemed fascistic. Some examples of that already exist, and I've been working on a paper to that effect for a while, some of which I may post when I feel that the argument has added a bit more muscle to its frame. But this risk doesn't surface because of the dissolution of privacy but rather because of the improper excess of publicity, and if we are going to seriously entertain the possibility of imagining the "public" non-dialectically, then the one (publicness) doesn't necessarily coincide with the loss of the other (privacy) unless extra theoretical or practical work is being done.

Derrida's response - we cannot really call it a "solution" - is to speak of the secret, rather than the private, and to do so explicitly as a philosophical/political strategy. He writes:

Why elect the word 'secret' to say this? The choice is not insignificant: it is a strategy, in a definite philosophical scene, that wishes to insist on separation, isolation. Between this secret and what is generally called secret, even if the two are heterogeneous, there is an analogy that makes me prefer the secret to the non-secret, it clearly has to do with not-belonging; I have an impulse of fear or terror in the face of a political space, for example, a public space that makes no room for the secret. For me, the demand that everything be paraded in the public square and that there be no internal forum is a glaring sign of the totalitarianization of democracy. I can rephrase this in terms of political ethics: if a right to the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space.

Obviously, parsing the distinctions between a right to privacy, to some concept of the private, and the right to the secret, whatever uncanny is signified by that choice of term, is a difficult proposition. It's worth exploring, but not here, not in passing, as it were. As John Caputo explains, channeling Derrida, the secret is simply that there is no secret.

Before purging and delimiting the secret per se, we might want to approach the diminution of the private by thinking about the place of the demand and the claim of any right. The Enlightenment model demands a right to privacy, the authoritarian model (no, I'm not cleanly bifurcating those two names, just using them for convenience), demands a right to the non-secret. In other words, the authoritarian model claims the authority to declare when the secret can/will no longer be kept secret. Does one really need to claim a right to the secret in order to withstand this "totalitarianization," or is it enough to refuse any right to the non-secret, and not posit a competing right that sits opposite (where else could it be?) the authoritarian demand? Or can we be satisfied with the political act of delimiting and deconstructing the secret, of exposing the fact that, as Derrida posits elsewhere, "a secret doesn't belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place."

This Unheimlichkeit goes by different names, surely, and Derrida will eventually even speak of of it as a divine conscription, such that God "is the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not from the exterior... a witness that other cannot see, and who is therefore at the same time other than me and more intimate with me than myself." This quasi-theological heuristic may be productive for some, less so for others, but the pairing of the secret and the mysterium tremendum should at least highlight how potentially non-juridical, non-legalistic is Derrida's conception of the secret. The private on the other hand, operating as it does dialectically (against the public) and legally (as a demand for a right to privacy, a grounding for the force and rule of law), is hardly what we might term religious.

I'm not sure I want to follow Derrida here, other than to sympathize with his rhetorical choices, as I suspect the "private" is at this point burdened by an economy and a history that makes its salvation somewhat difficult, to say the least. But I'm not sure if, at the end of the day, the "secret" offers a better chance of negotiating the datasphere than does the "private." It's something that I think that academics and progressive political types will need to think about over the next few years, most likely with increasing urgency. The Internet, complete with Web 2.0, is not going to get any more private any time soon, but it may force us to rethink community, and to rethink the "essence" of belonging, in such a way that we may code a digital scene in which the secret is freed from the presupposition of community. Perhaps a religious intonation isn't really necessary if, with the distrubuted agency of smart mobs and creative commons communities, the data sphere (and the law) become properly public, which is to say, open.