TVI. Private Nodes in the Net

In the dense literary essay The Tremulous Private Body, Francis Barker conjures up in the person of Samuel Pepys –- the English Restoration-Era diarist and later President of the Royal Society -– the very emblem of a presumably quintessential modern subject of privacy. It is the tableau of the “private citizen in a domestic space, over against a public world,” which Barker then proceeds to decry somewhat wonderfully if histrionically as “merely one of the grossly structural features of a historical settlement… acceded to by means of an extreme and bloody effort,” to whit, “[t]he broad process of transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production… and the rise of the modern state [which] provide the general co-ordinates within which the reformulation of the subjectivity appropriate to them can be mapped.”

Although Arendtians might be expected to sympathize with the critique of what Barker describes elsewhere as “the private and privative place to which modernity has increasingly allotted the subject, in a lonely, self-apprehensive, and usually troubled existence at the apparent centre of a febrile ‘consciousness’” I note, to the contrary, that Arendt herself was quite careful in fact to disassociate the modern figure of the private individual from the terrible Greek figure of the solitary individual, whose “life spent in the privacy of ‘one’s own’ (idion), outside the world of the common, is ‘idiotic’ [by which she means, literally, speechless, meaningless] by definition.”

For Arendt, “[t]he emergence of society –- the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices, from the shadowy interior of the household [of antiquity] into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen.” In societies for which political legitimacy requires among other things the effective administration of public welfare, withdrawal from a public so redefined into private life should no longer be mistaken either for a personal recourse into the perniciously depoliticized patriarchal privacy of the oikos (the household or “domestic sphere”) of antiquity with which Barker and many of the more forceful critics of the discourse of privacy seem still importantly to identify it. Arendt goes on to amplify the point: “The decisive historical fact is that modern privacy… was discovered as the opposite not of the political sphere but of the social, to which it is more closely and authentically related.” The personal is, after all, the political. And it is in this context as well that I would read Donna Haraway’s rather oracular suggestion from her extraordinary and influential “Cyborg Manifesto” (to which I will return in the next section) that, “[n]o longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg [her provocative figure of a transhumanoid hybrid of organism and machine] defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household.”

In opposition to Francis Barker’s Pepys, I believe that Hannah Arendt provides her own image of the quintessential subject of privacy in the Preface to another of her books, Between Past and Future -- the figure of “He” from a vividly evocative parable by Franz Kafka. In the parable, “He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both.” This scene, in Arendt’s explication, “is a battleground on which the forces of the past and the future clash with one another; between them we find the man… who, if he wants to stand his ground at all must give battle to both forces.” To this, she then adds the intriguing complication: “However, the fact that there is a fight at all seems due exclusively to the presence of the man, without whom the forces of the past and of the future, one suspects, would have neutralized or destroyed each other long ago.”

The predicament of the man in Kafka’s fable is emblematic of what Arendt takes to be a predicament of the modern subject more generally. “The task of the mind is to understand what happen[s],” she writes immediately after quoting Kafka’s parable in its entirety, “and this understanding, according to Hegel, is man’s way of reconciling himself with reality.” In this connection recall that for Arendt the task of political philosophy, and the task she sets herself in particular in the Prologue of The Human Condition is to “think what we are doing.” This concern with the practical and discursive field of agency, this concern with the connection of action and judgment in the figure of the modern subject -- both the disclosure of the subject through the doing of deeds in public, and crucially the reconciliation of the subject to the world of deeds through their meaningful judgment –- preoccupied Arendt’s entire life’s work (on the very day of her death the first page of a manuscript entitled “Judging” was found in her typewriter, planned to be the final volume of her Life of the Mind, itself intended as the complement to and so completion of the gesture begun twenty years earlier in the writing of The Human Condition, for which her personal title was Vita Activa, “the life of action”).

That the predicament of the nameless characters in a parable are read as evoking a more general human quandary is hardly provocative, but it is interesting that Arendt is at pains to insist that even in his namelessness and lack of descriptive detail Kafka’s man is concrete, particular, and embodied: “a ‘he’ as Kafka so rightly calls him, and not a ‘somebody’” (although it is hard not to wonder if Arendt would have drawn just the same lesson of Kafka’s insistence on “the full actuality of… concrete being” here had the figure been “she” -– but I’ll treat that quibble as beside the point). In any case, it could not be clearer that Arendt’s subject is anything but “the disembodied cogito, with its absolute emphasis on the essentiality of thinkingness rather than corporeality… the private subject… [as c]onstituted over against a public world… in isolation from others… and from itself,” which is the harrowing figure of the subject of privacy in Francis Barker’s account. And these deep differences in their two formulations are all the more striking in that the scene through which Arendt would designate the most essential experience of agency for her own subject of privacy is precisely the one that would confirm Barker’s worst suspicions: namely, the scene of judgment and spectatorship.

“His dream” writes Kafka of the man in the parable, “is that some time in an unguarded moment -– and this would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet –- he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other.” David Lloyd and Paul Thomas begin their important recent book Culture and the State (a book explicitly indebted in several of its formulations to Arendt’s work) with this cautionary note: “It has become a virtual commonplace of postmodernity that we inhabit a society of the spectacle. But if, in some analyses, the spectacularity of the public sphere that engages the modern subject is the sign of a new and unprecedented alienation of that subject from active participation in political life, it is important not to forget the extent to which the figure of the spectator has historically been the exemplary, even heroic, type of political subjectivity.” Arendt admits that Kafka would little likely hold out much hope that the man of his parable would ever find his way to the promotion to spectatorship of his dream, suggesting “he” will more likely die instead of “exhaustion, worn out under the pressure of constant fighting… aware only of the existence of this gap in time which, as long as he lives, is the ground on which he must stand, though it seems to be a battlefield and not a home.”

But Arendt wants to draw another lesson from Kafka’s parable than he likely would himself, and has in mind a different proposal and fate for its subject. Both the occasion for forces that would otherwise cancel each other out and the point at which those forces intersect, Arendt suggests an elaboration of the scene in which Kafka’s subject is not so much promoted from “the fighting line,” as deprived of it. And it is this privation itself which produces the vantage from which “he” will “umpire” the forces of antagonism (of which he is still one himself). “The two antagonistic forces are both unlimited… the one coming from an infinite past and the other from an infinite future,” she writes, “but… they have a terminal ending, the point at which they clash,” in the person of the subject himself. And from the collision of these infinite forces she proposes, naturally enough, would emerge a “resultant diagonal whose origin would be the point at which the forces clash and upon which they act.”

To clarify the image, and so possibly make Francis Barker’s horror complete, Kafka’s fighting-line comes in Arendt’s reading of his parable to suggest almost a Cartesian co-ordinate grid. And the subject, buffeted by flows of force that do not so much traverse the axes of this grid as actually constitute them, sometimes contends along with his antagonists on the fighting-line and sometimes instead assesses the scene from the resultant diagonal, but never, in Barker’s repeated and castigatory phrase, “over against” but always instead immersed within the world of the grid itself, never abstracted or apart from it.

Now, in the strange and strangely wistful conclusion of her reading of Kafka’s parable, it seems to me Arendt re-enacts “the man’s” own moving but hopeless pining after “a night darker than any night has ever been yet,” when she insists so carefully and at such great length that “the imagery I am using here to indicate metaphorically and tentatively the contemporary conditions of thought can be valid only within the realm of mental phenomena. Applied to historical or biographical time, none of these metaphors can possibly make sense.” For the inhabitants of the information era, reading her words half a century after they were written, the scene she has staged to evoke the situation of the modern subject is far from impossible, but reproduces instead one of the most commonplace even ubiquitous situations of everyday contemporary life.

The subject of privacy conjured up in Arendt’s reading looks to me like nothing so much as a node in a network: the subject surfing the internet on a desktop computer, publishing a document online or clicking on a hypertext link; or the user of a mobile phone, in conversation with someone on another continent in another time-zone, or playing a game of chess displayed on the phone’s tiny illuminated square of screen with that distant other, or interacting instead with a freely-distributed open source chess program; or a citizen whose location is tracked by satellites, or captured as an image snapped at random by another phone, or by a street-corner surveillance camera on a network feed; or a consumer accessing an account balance on an ATM, or paying for fuel with a credit card number at the station, or scanning groceries at a self-serve check-out; or a patient whose prescription is transmitted from their doctor to an unknown pharmacist for a re-fill, or whose medical history is accessed from a public database by an paramedic on-site at a disaster; or soldiers co-ordinating an offensive maneuver by means of radios and satellites, or activists converging simultaneously upon a protest site by means of the same; or a designer articulating the form of a chair or a toothbrush with a CAD/CAM program to have it instantiated in molded plastic by a robot assembly line on the other side of the planet and then offered for sale in a catalogue that arrives soon after unsolicited at her door.

“Action and speech,” yet again, the conjuration of the field of agency (Arendt’s literal phrasing refers here to “their agent-revealing capacity”) “go on between men [sic]” and “constitute, in the word’s most literal significance, something which is inter-est, which lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together.” In this premonition of the era of digital networked information and communication technologies, Arendt describes, again in The Human Condition, the world of private individuals “acting and speaking to one another” as the co-creation of an at-once intangible but real and worldly “’web’ [my emphasis] of human relationships,” a “reality… no less bound to the objective world of things than speech is to the existence of a living body.”

In his “Introduction” to the recent book Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape, Philip Agre defines the subject of privacy as inextricably political in precisely this Arendtian sense of producing and maintaining a world of relationships among agents. “Privacy issues,” he writes, “pertain to the mechanisms through which people define themselves and conduct their relationships with one another.” And in a spirit with which I of course quite sympathize, he lists among these mechanisms first of all, “technologies.”

“Those who raise concerns about privacy,” he goes on to say, “propose, in effect, to challenge the workings of institutions. Disputes about privacy are, among other things, contests to influence the historical evolution of these institutions.” By now it should be clear at least that these disputations have preoccupied many practical and institutional discourses, from the law, to literature, and to theory. In the next and final section of this Introduction I mean to return briefly to the stakes that are driving these disputes, to an elaboration of the idea of the subject and to the crisis of that subject’s agency, conjured up both in fears of impotence and fantasies of omnipotence, exacerbated by contemporary technological developments the final significance of which remain profoundly and disturbingly uncertain.

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