TIII. Quandaries of Agency for the Informational Construal of Privacy

I cannot, of course, delineate exhaustively the whole constellation of values and practices that are freshly under contest in this still inaugural moment of emergence and consolidation in the era of digital networked media, and can at best concentrate my attention on a few conspicuous, and I hope definitive, dimensions of the problematic of privacy in this uniquely dangerous and promising moment. And so, in this dissertation I will focus my attention especially on the sense of privacy as a capacity for secrecy.

In the incomparably rich figure of secrecy in particular I find the lens through which best to illuminate what I take to be the three chief registers of the discourse of privacy: the desire for more control over the terms in which personal information circulates in public, the desire to maintain the integrity of the body against violation, and the desire to secure recognition of relations of legitimate ownership.

Although I am keenly aware of the deep differences in the histories, assumptions, experiences, problems, and capacities in play in the enjoyments of and threats to each of these diverse registers of personal privacy, what emerges more conspicuously for me, and what I hope to convey more forcefully in the larger argument of this dissertation, is that in each domain of the subject of privacy under discussion there recurs a certain definitive ambivalence. I began this piece by asserting that the subject of privacy is a crucial figure through which we have come to articulate and negotiate agency in an era of radical technological transformation. The association between privacy and technology is now clearer, I hope. As for the ambivalence that plays out in each of the domains of the discourse of privacy that preoccupy this dissertation, I maintain that it is an expression of an ambivalence at the heart of agency itself.

James Boyle has written that “information is the only resource of [American] civil society that is ‘supposed’ to be distributed in an egalitarian manner; it is the only resource where both microeconomics and the First Amendment seem to push in the direction of free availability and transmission.” On the other hand, he points out, “the idea of privacy is remarkable both in the way it puts control over information – as opposed to any other resource –- at the heart of personhood and in its degree of support for state intervention to give citizens actual control over this resource even when they cannot purchase such control in the marketplace.”

Since one of the consequences of the expanding significance and penetration of digital networked information and communication technologies into everyday life is that we are coming to see ever more of the furniture and experience of material life as themselves decisively characterized in informational terms, it is clear that what Boyle intends to name as exceptional, namely, that “only” information is “supposed to be distributed in an egalitarian manner” is already potentially quite radical in its sweep and in its implications.

It is, however, his next point that I want to dwell on here. Boyle goes on to write: “We see the strength of these embedded – and potentially contradictory ideas of information in each new area of regulation. What we lack is a sense of the connections between the different ideas.” In the argument that follows I maintain that what Boyle has diagnosed as essentially an unresolved contradiction at the heart of the informational construal of privacy (namely, that information wants to be free, but that people, to be free, must have a measure of control over personal information) is better conceived as a productive ambivalence whose interminable negotiation actually constitutes the field itself in which the agency or proper “personhood” of the technoconstituted subject of privacy must always paradoxically make its play.

“How can it be,” asks Judith Butler in The Psychic Life of Power, “that the subject, taken to be the condition for and instrument of agency, is at the same time the effect of subordination, understood as the deprivation of agency?” Through the negotiation of this paradox of subjecthood, a paradox registered in the very term “subject” –- a figure both of empowerment and subordination -– I diagnose a recurring disavowal of interdependency and intersubjectivity that exacerbates the experience of the subject of privacy as a subject of threatened agency, and so I hope I can more successfully convey the reality and extent of the crisis in the intelligibility and efficacy of the liberal subject that has underwritten the urgency of most discussions of privacy hitherto.

But before I go on to sketch the itinerary of the dissertation in greater detail I want first to linger a bit longer over each of the two terms on which these arguments about the subject of privacy will depend most crucially –- that is to say, privacy and the subject.

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