The Privacy of the Self in a Culture of Exposure

By Josh Cohen
This essay was originally published the the HA Journal, volume IV.

We’ve seen controversies and anxieties around privacy explode in recent years. The proliferation of scandals around media intrusion have become an increasingly urgent focus of public debate in the United Kingdom, facilitated in particular by the Leveson inquiry into the culture, conduct, and ethics of the British press. Especially since the Snowden revelations, these anxieties have run alongside an increasingly fierce debate over the scope of state and corporate intrusion and control over our private data.
 
Much of the debate and commentary on privacy issues in recent years has rightly been focused on these phenomena and the legal, political, and techno- logical dilemmas they raise. But framing the debate in terms of the ways state and non-state agencies are menacing our privacy rights risks simplifying our complex and ambiguous relationship to our privacy. To portray the private self today merely as the victim of malign external forces is to ignore the many daily ways in which we collude in the erosion of our own privacy.

Only if we attend to how intricately the technological and the political are bound up with the psychic and cultural dimensions of private life can we discern how we are at once victims and perpetrators of its erosion. This ambiguity might shed some light on how muted and uncertain public under- standing of, and protest against, state and corporate surveillance has been. These offenses against privacy are all too continuous with the intrusive culture in which we have come to live and breathe. Perhaps it’s hard to generate real outrage against a phenomenon with which we have become so complicit. We are increasingly swept along by a drive toward total and permanent visibility that is closing down the spaces in which a private self can preserve and cultivate itself. An imperative, no less powerful for being tacit, coaxes us into dragging every region of our selves—the selves of others as well as our own—into the light. “Privacy is for paedos,” Paul McMullan, a British tab- loid journalist, notoriously remarked at the Leveson Inquiry, in response to a question about his intrusive techniques. “Fundamentally,” he elaborated, “no one else needs it. Privacy is evil...it brings out hypocrisy.”

If we’re to confront the contemporary crisis of privacy head-on, we may just need to recognize how much, for all its pantomime villainy, McMullan’s statement runs with, rather than against, the grain of our culture. Our avid consumption of and demand for the perpetual drip-feed of reality TV, celebrity gossip, and the more ordinary forms of continuous self-revelation on social media hints at how privacy—the existence of a region of life with- drawn from the pubic gaze—has precisely become an “evil,” an obstacle in the way of our right to know whatever we want about whoever we want.

Nowhere is this tacit conviction played out more than in our relationship to celebrities. By intruding into their bedrooms, bodies, and bank accounts, the media and its consumers—that is, more or less, all of us—seek to penetrate and destroy not simply the privacy of a select few, but as McMullan hints, privacy itself. The very existence of a life unseen is a scandal to be eliminated at all costs. In our frenzied peeping into the lives of others, then, we play out the belief that with a sufficient glut of light, nothing will remain unknown to us.

Psychoanalysis hints that this war on the unknown in the other might be a displaced rage against the unknown in myself. It intimates in us depths and excesses of love and hate, vulnerability and rage, fear and voraciousness that we neither can nor want to know about. It insists that my inner life always exceeds any known quantity, and that this un-knowability is a fundamental human predicament, a truth of every human time and place.

Different histories and cultures will bear the burden of this truth very differently. Our own culture of tacitly coerced self-externalization demands that we view our self as reducible to its external manifestations, to the pictures we can take of it, the data we can share about it, reducible, in short, to the self we can put on display. Social media facilitates the sharing of our deepest personal intimacies, from birth to sex to grief. We are enjoined to create and broadcast “lifelogs,” rolling updates of some, or even all, of our lives.

Far more than one of many arbitrary diversions of contemporary life, the lifelog is the purest distillation of the relationship we’re forging with our own privacy. Under the name “Quantified Self,” lifelogging is taking on the dimensions of a distinct tendency and philosophy of our own moment. Its basic premise is that we can employ a limitless array of technologies, scaled to the minute dimensions of our everyday lives, to resolve the essential problems of selfhood, bodily and mental.

Wearable wristbands or smartphone apps measure, monitor, and share the data of our daily bodily and neurochemical lives—cholesterol, mood swings, and no doubt soon enough, our serotonin and dopamine levels—as though the self were reducible to this sum of numbers. Some loggers use wearable cameras to record and instantly upload to the Web every detail of their waking lives. Such experiments in radical transparency show a zeal to dispose of any excess or remainder in the self, to perceive ourselves as indifferent instances of a generalized calculus.  
But this is to assume, along the lines of the chillingly resonant tech executives at the center of The Circle, Dave Eggers’s 2013 novel of our dystopian present, that privacy can simply be abolished by a sufficient glut of transparency. Psychoanalysis would suggest otherwise. The private self cannot be reduced to the circumscribed spaces that we typically speak of as “private”— the home, the bank account, the hard drive, the external tokens of what we might call “bourgeois privacy,” the privacy of what I do or do not own. We don’t, after all, cease to be private when we leave these spaces and enter the public realm—not even, in fact, when we broadcast our every waking moment to the world. The private self isn’t some discrete entity we can leave behind, but a perpetual presence, concealed and revealed in the minute aspects of our being. Walking, smiling, speaking, writing, joking, eating, weeping, listening—our private self is diffused in all the ways we express it, and so it is not reducible to any of them. It is concealed not so much behind as in the face we show the world.

I see the two worlds that I occupy—the literary and the psychoanalytic—as intrinsically at odds with the imperative of permanent visibility governing our culture. Not that this imperative was born with the advent of tabloids and the Internet. The Scarlet Letter, one of the most powerful and prescient stories of the private self and its exposure, locates the conflict between the need to conceal and the drive to unmask the self in Puritan New England. Ushered onto the scaffold for bearing a child adulterously, Hester is paraded, the embroidered scarlet A glaring from her chest, before a baying crowd. The beadle proclaims ‘“the righteous Colony of Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine.”’ Holding her baby, shaming evidence of this iniquity, Hester is forced to bear “the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes.”

But the glare of a thousand eyes and of the sunshine itself fail to ensure the triumph of Boston’s pious light over Hester’s corrupted darkness. On the contrary, Hawthorne notes, “in the face of her lush beauty, the world was only the darker.” Her inner self is rendered more, not less, obscure by the drive to unmask it. For all the penetrative force of its thousand eyes, for all its concentrated focus on her heart, the crowd cannot see what it is looking for.

Just how far is the profane glare of today’s TV cameras and telephoto lenses from the pious light of Hawthorne’s Puritan crowd? Do they not share the same zeal to purge the self of its secrets, the same hatred of the self ’s dark recesses? Our culture, I suggest, is as heavily policed as Puritan Boston’s by beadles dragging our iniquity into the sunshine.

Literature, as the example of Hawthorne suggests, allies itself with Hester over the beadle, with the preservation of the self ’s essential ambiguity over its enforced transparency. We turn to literature as an antidote to the quantification of the self, for a sense of the inner life in excess of any laws, metrics, or principles under which it could be subsumed.

It’s in this sense, I would argue, that the defense of privacy is tied to the defense of imaginative life. At the end of 2014, an international group of writers drafted a petition decrying the escalation of state surveillance and calling for an international digital bill of rights.

Why, we might ask, should writers have any more distinct contribution to make to this debate than, say, florists, or basketball players? In one sense, they don’t, insofar as privacy is an essential dimension of any and every human life, to which no one has any more right than anyone else, certainly not by virtue of profession. But if privacy has become such an urgently live issue for writers, it’s because privacy is the air that imagination breathes.

At stake in the incursions of the state, the media, and corporations into our everyday lives is the right to an inner life as much as to the protection of our personal data. A self coerced into permanent visibility will come to feel con- strained not only in what he can say but, eventually, in what he can think and imagine. In externalizing the self, a surveillance society—not only the persecutory monitoring of the totalitarian state envisioned by Orwell but also the more tacitly imposed, pseudo-benign mutual monitoring of our social media culture—threatens our interiority, our right to a private self that ensures that we can never be fully transparent, to others or to ourselves.

In a culture driven to render us ever more transparent to one another, literature and art may be among the few spaces in which to keep hold of this understanding of the private self. Without an implicit claim to privacy, to an external and internal room of one’s own, there can be no literature.

From the earliest days of the psychoanalytic movement, literature and psychoanalysis have shared a mutual fascination (and, no doubt, mutual suspicion). I see the source of that mutual fascination as their shared sense of the essential privacy of the self. Each strives for a deep knowledge of the self, but premises that striving on a recognition of its limits. What I can know about myself or anyone else is conditioned by what I can’t. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud famously speaks of “the navel of the dream, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown.” It is the spot where the mastery of the analyst runs aground, when she recognizes that something in the dream “has to be left obscure.”

Freud’s intuition of this spot of obscurity, I suggest, has a peculiar and urgent resonance at this juncture in history. In a culture of coerced visibility that assigns meaning only to what can be seen and measured, how is this region of obscurity in our dreams and in our selves to be valued and protected?

Notes
Dave Eggers, The Circle (London: Penguin, 2014) Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (London: Penguin, 1983 (1850)) Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 5 trans. and ed. J. Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001)