TV. Let Alone

Like liberty, a concept with which it shares a comparable elusiveness in formulation while exerting a comparable force in the liberal imagination, the concept of privacy will be deployed in even the most straightforward accounts in two primary senses -– one “negative,” one “positive” -– the relations of which to one another are profoundly troubled. As we have seen in the interplay of the informational and decisional construals, discussions of privacy typically weave unpredictably between negative and positive conceptions, with uncertain consequences to their ultimate coherence. In its “negative” sense, privacy delineates the need for a freedom from interference, often more particularly a freedom from conspicuous exercises of power on the part of states or other socially organized authorities. And in its “positive” sense, privacy is said to express unique or even definitive forms of individual dignity or integrity, or to affirm contingent cultural values against public challenge, for example specific understandings of property ownership or the proper role of personal reputation.

And so, Ferdinand Schoeman proposes an analogous formulation in his book Privacy and Social Freedom. “Privacy,” he writes, “has two aspects: ‘privacy from’ and ‘privacy for.’ The ‘privacy from’ aspect suggests restrictions on others’ access to a person. But typically there is this other dimension to the concept, the ‘privacy for’ dimension. For instance, I am accorded privacy from most others vis-à-vis my domestic life so that I may form deep and special relationships with family or friends.” In other words, privacy for Schoeman would secure persons from unwanted interference (a negative sense) importantly just so it could thus promote definitive interpersonal associations (a positive sense). Typically, I argue that there is a key, even constitutive, ambiguity (usually disavowed) between privacy as a register of the anxieties occasioned by the insecurity, permeability, and proneness of individual bodies to frustration, humiliation, and error and privacy as a register to the contrary, via the “fruits of the body’s labor” and the “promptings of conscience,” say, of the capacities of individual bodies for creative expressivity, intimate association, and legitimate possessiveness.

Further, especially the putative neutrality, and so the desired universal provocation of assent, and so the imagined foundational force of primarily “negative” conceptions of privacy (or, as it happens, liberty) will typically rely for their intelligibility and efficacy on disavowed, contingent “positive” formulations the assumptions and conclusions of which are less evident and sure by far than those of any thin and broadly affirmed intuitive negativity.

Consider, for example, that Louis Brandeis’s definitive and celebrated formulation of the right to privacy surely threatens quite as much as it secures in its pithy negativity, unless it is buttressed by a host of positive formulations. The whole formulation, once again, is this: “[T]he right to be let alone [is] the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” On its own, already, “to be let alone” is at once a promise of autonomy, sovereignty, and individual integrity, but so too a vivid evocation of isolation, vulnerability, and neglect. While Brandeis has provided in Olmstead’s formulation of the right to privacy as “the right to be let alone” probably the most influential of the negative formulations of privacy, he has immediately thereafter qualified its negativity with the positive (and quite contentious) formulation of privacy as “the right most valued by civilized men [sic],” and, more extraordinarily still, has in fact bolstered his definition as well with the positive formulation of the right to privacy as “the most comprehensive of rights” -- quite possibly the most imperial of the positive formulations of privacy on record!

Such reversals, I maintain, are hardly exceptional, but practically define the discursive field of the private as such. Patricia Boling points out that the term Private is “adapted from [the] Latin privatus (past participle of privare, to bereave, deprive, dispossess, rob), withdrawn from public life, deprived of office, peculiar to oneself.” From this Roman evocation of peculiarity to our own modern valorized individuality, from this deprivation of office and agency to our own expression of agency and demand for control, from this withdrawal from public life to our own embrace of the supports of intimate association, from theft and dispossession to private property and self-expression, from the paralysis and seclusion of bereavement to the celebration of autonomy and agency: In The Human Condition, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt states the obvious when she points out that “[w]e no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word ‘privacy’.”

“In ancient feeling,” writes Arendt, “the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself, was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of something.” While I do not want in my own account of privacy to deny or disavow this “privative trait of privacy” I do want to propose, in a move that may initially seem a bit paradoxical, that the modern discourses and practices of the subject of privacy can constitute profoundly productive privations, relinquishments or deprivations of ready intelligibility, narrative coherence, confident control, certain prediction which often enough might yield an enjoyment of privacy even as they otherwise exact the cost of real and mourned losses. In Arendt’s words, “[t]his is not merely a matter of shifted emphasis.”

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