TI. Privacy As Technocultural Problematic

Legal, theoretical, and popular contests over the meaning and capacity of individual agency repeatedly make crucial recourse to the subject of privacy. And this connection is never more forceful than in those moments when we confront the bewildering contemporary technological transformation of our capacities. As examples of this ever more conspicuous reliance, consider the importance of claims about personal privacy in court decisions and in popular discussions concerning the use of reproductive technologies or the threat of ubiquitous electronic surveillance.

By the "subject" of privacy I mean to refer to two sets of problems at once. In the first place, I refer to privacy as a general topic, a familiar constellation of values, questions and problems in law, in critical theory, and in public policy. Although privacy as a category is widely affirmed and as a right passionately defended, I will show that just what privacy is thought to consist of, depend on, and indeed what it is good for are all matters of debate and general perplexity. And I will argue that these confusions are particularly vexed in the present moment, that they have been brought into crisis by the pressures of recent and ongoing developments in reproductive technology and genetic medicine, electronic textual production and publication, ubiquitous surveillance, and the convergence of these developments in digital networked information and communication technologies.

But when I speak of the subject of privacy I mean to refer in the second place, as well, to the subject as an ethical and political agent -– to the figure of the problematically autonomous, continent, rights-bearing, property-inhering, reasonable, and responsible sovereign subject of the liberal imaginary. I will argue that this liberal subject, such as it is, is significantly constituted through what I describe as discourses and practices of privation. And I propose that both the productive powers and the customary limitations of these operations of privation have likewise transformed, especially through the emergence in recent years of digital networked information and communication technologies, the so-called "new media."

In what ways has our sense of privacy as a capacity for secrecy or for the selective disclosure of information transformed in the new landscape of digital networked media? To what extent is the range of such secrecy expanded by the encryption of information, and to what extent diminished by the application of “panoptic sorts,” data mining, and networked computer profiling? How is our sense of privacy as a capacity for improvisation and experimentation in relative obscurity transformed in the new landscape of digital networked media? To what extent are opportunities for such obscurity expanded by the availability of pseudonymous online gaming and discussion environments, and to what extent diminished by ever more ubiquitous surveillance?

If privacy is a figure through which we register both the urgency of our need for and worries about threats to our bodily integrity and autonomy, what can it mean then when we are exhorted by contemporary authorities waging a so-called “War on Terror” to relinquish a measure of privacy in exchange for greater security? Just what kinds of subjects are imagined to be consoled, just what understanding of agency is presumed to be consolidated by these promises of security at the cost of privacy?

And how has the cheap digital reproduction of texts, and the easy instantaneous global publication and distribution of such texts on digital networks altered the traditional conditions of print-publication that traditionally rendered “copyright” a sensible institutional location for the negotiation of social disputes about the value of texts so disseminated?

I argue in what follows that both the sense and significance of privacy is produced and ritually reproduced by technologically mediated public practices that are undergoing profound and ongoing change. And while there are many discourses and figures available through which to think fruitfully about the dignity and agency of subjects, their problems, conditions and consequences – individuality, personhood, sovereignty, citizenship, authorship, and so on -– I have chosen to focus here on privacy above all. This is because I believe that the discourse of privacy is uniquely freighted with concerns about the threats to and promises for agency introduced by the technological developments in particular that interest me.

What will count in the first place as a subject’s enjoyment of privacy is profoundly constituted through the vicissitudes of technological development. Donna Haraway has proposed, for example, that “[t]echnologies like video games and highly miniaturized televisions seem crucial to the production of modern forms of ‘private life’”. Philip Agre has suggested in turn that “[a] secure telephone line is arguably a precondition for the establishment of an intimate relationship, an interest long regarded as a defining feature of human dignity.” And Sherry Turkle has offered a range of theses concerning the way human-machine interactions, and computer-mediated “virtual” and pseudonymous human interactions have radically transformed our experiences of selfhood and our sex/gender identifications in the most intimate ways imaginable. (And I suppose that now is as good a time as any to belabor the obvious and point out that among the discursive registers of privacy I find provocative one is that we denote by the term “privates,” our genitalia.).

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