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Tuesday, June 08, 2004

Private/Public, Mores/Ethics

I am busy these days working on my dissertation, an analysis of the politics of privacy (which is freighted with other considerations in the liberal imaginary, like dignity conceived as autonomy or as a kind of bodily self-determination, and also the idea of legitimate private possessiveness), especially as these politics are emerging under pressure of the ongoing convergence of digital networked media and biotechnologies.

Anyway, part of the strangeness of the project for me is that rather than locating my own meditation on the "liberal subject" (as commonplace a preoccupation as you could ask for in a humanities dissertation these days, I know), in "authorship," "citizenship," or any number of other places one could think of, my own focus on "privacy" seems puzzling in a feminist like me, since feminism has critiqued the very idea of the private realm as perniciously gendered.

What is powerful about the feminist slogan "the personal is political" is how handily it repudiates all the moves that historically "naturalized" the many ways women have been institutionally exploited by calling these operations pre-political, personal, family, "private matters."

Privacy has of course been conceived historically through the figure of the oikos or household, always imagined as secured and withdrawn from the public demands and rewards of the polis, and this usage reverberates into many of the political discourses of privacy to this day. But it seems to me there are other models on offer now to think through what privacy means to modern people.

For example, I think that the very widely affirmed liberal value of a robust separation of Church and State ultimately arises from an understanding of the private and the public that doesn't derive from an oikos/polis distinction.

The point of the Separation is not, for one thing, to denigrate spiritual life, but precisely to create a space in which the innumerable forms of religious faith, spiritual practice, and personal projects of self-creation (including the many marvellously atheistical and aestheticized ones) can flourish alongside one another. And this space is not a household, but instead a more intimate kind of public space, a community of affinity, one that can solicit but never compel membership.

Part of what I am trying to get at here might become clearer when I point out that I personally think it is important to distinguish morals and ethics.

Morals (eg, "mores") are norms through which you identify with particular communities and disidentify with others. These communities always have outsides against which they define themselves.

Ethics, on the other hand, involve norms that aspire to universal assent. Humanism is such a framework, and there are others, anti-humanist, post-humanist, otherwise.

It is right to be skeptical about whether or not ethical norms actually ever attain universality, or whether in fact they amount simply to morals with delusions of grandeur. But I think it is still an important conceptual innovation to distinguish norms which contain the assumption of us/them as against norms which aspire (even if only contingently, strategically, or what have you) to universal assent.

I suspect that just as oftentimes people who claim to be mobilizing ethical claims are in fact are making very provincial moral ones, it is also true that those who would claim that only moral norms exist still leverage certain moral claims on the idea of norms that aspire to a wider assent than that of particular contingent communities to which they explicitly belong. For one thing, since one belongs to innumerable moral communities at once, most of which are constituted through norms that compete with one another, it is helpful to have an ethical clearinghouse to help adjudicate among them. Definitely I would disagree with the view that either morals or ethics are reducible to, subsumed within, or prior to the other.

So, I guess what I am meandering toward here is the suggestion that part of the project of secularization has involved the wayward and somewhat bumbling shift of the politics of privacy from a celebration of sheltered spaces provisionally secured from the demands of public life through a "depoliticized" exploitation of women and others, to the celebration of the role of personal projects of self-creation in the midst of communities of peers. Central to this rearticulation of the politics of privacy has been the emergence of the Separation of Church and State as a pillar of civic order for the liberal imaginary.

Clearly, I need to just finish this damn dissertation asap.

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