TIX. Secrecy and the Subject of Privacy

To be sure, the subject of privacy has its little secrets.

And so: We have the subject who is the one who represents a privileged site of agency in her definitive difference from the objects she instrumentally deploys, and who is at one and the same time the subject who is the one subordinated to an overbearing authority in a sovereign-subject relation that uneasily resembles the very instrumental relations that otherwise obtain between that subject and her objects. Certainly, this sort of paradox will represent a particularly galling humiliation to the precarious pretensions of any sovereign self-image of agency.

But against this humiliating paradox we can propose a complementary and remediative one: In relinquishing the aspiration for an agency that is modeled on a sovereign pretense to omnipotence, might we be not so much diminished as actually empowered? Accepting the measure of vulnerability, unpredictability, and interdependence that is the price of admission into a public life among our peers, might we not so much lose control, as gain the world?

Now, I have maintained that it is to the subject of privacy in particular that we should turn to best understand the special quandaries posed for agency by technological development, and especially by the recent convergence of biotechnologies and media technologies into digital networks. I concentrate my attention here on a few relatively familiar developments which highlight what seem to me to be the three most decisive dimensions of the subject of privacy as they are emerging (and diverging) in the pressure of recent and ongoing developments in digital networked information and communication technologies: namely, obscurity, security, and private property.

In each of these registers, an attachment to the assumptions of sovereign conceptions of agency will decisively weight the rhetorical terms through which we understand the problems posed to privacy by contemporary technological developments. And I am especially interested in the ways in which the discourse of privacy considered above all as a kind of secretiveness seems to be a particular provocation to sovereign figurations of agency and to their special dilemmas.

While secrecy withdraws information from public circulation, it is curious that this effective effacement appears not so much to obliterate information as to substantiate it. Secrets, somehow, are things we have and we keep.

This image of secrecy manages at once the figurative embodiment of information as well as the figurative substantiation of the one whose agency depends on a capacity to decisively articulate information’s flows. And while “secrecy” is the concealment, withdrawal, and effort to control information, we will also speak of “secreting” an object, setting it aside, stashing it, or hoarding it away, as well as of “secretions” in which the substance of our bodies perspires into the environment. From secretive privation, then, comes a curious hoped-for shoring up of substance, a holding back that constitutes at once control, continence, ownership (as in Locke’s notorious justification for the institution of private property as originating in a fabulous mixing of once unusable land with the “sweat of the brow” of laborers who initially cultivated it).

What if much of the real substance of the dread registered in discussions of the ways in which emerging technologies provide occasion for violations of privacy simply derives from their freighting with sovereign conceptions of agency we all might in any case do quite well without? And what if the hyperbolic dreams that are indulged in many technophilic discussions of the ways in which privacy might be perfectly protected, radically strengthened or extended through recourse to emerging technologies sing to the tune of this selfsame sovereignty?

Against any discourse that figures the withdrawal from public life into privacy as a gesture that promises finally and for true to secure the boundaries of such a sovereign self, I will want to propose instead a discourse that would reactivate the privative dimension in privacy as the relinquishment altogether of such delusive self-punishing pretenses to sovereignty.

Go to Next Section of Pancryptics
Go to Pancryptics Table of Contents