The exposure of privacy in today's culture - Part I: Public/Private The Distinction

Social Research, Spring, 2002 by Renata Salecl

TODAY it seems to be a universally accepted thesis that people have less and less privacy and that new technologies allow new invasions into people's private lives. However, when we complain about our endangered privacy, we often forget that the idea of privacy is a distinctly modern phenomenon and that contemporary understanding about the protection of privacy has evolved not despite new technologies, but because of them. Historians who deal with the issue of privacy like to point out that writing, as one of the earliest technologies, enabled forms of private communication that did not exist before. And with the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, the idea of privacy took on unprecedented dimensions. The prosperous middle class began to build houses with separate rooms for family members; telephone lines allowed for direct, private communication; radio and television brought entertainment into private homes; and the mass production of cars saw private travel become widely available. The newest technological advances in the forms of personal computers, the Internet, wireless devices, biological engineering radically expanded privacy while simultaneously also allowing for new forms of intrusions into it. Among the fastest growing businesses are those that provide new forms of privacy protection. If Orwell were to write 1984 today, his Big Brother would surely have found a twin sibling in a Big Protector. Or maybe Orwell would have simply taken the name of one of the existing privacy protection companies, such as Anonymizer, IDecide, Disappearing, Hushmail, Zip Lip, or Zero Knowledge.

However, if we now have great concerns about protection of privacy, we also have an expanded exposure of privacy. Some have found an entirely new form of enjoyment in being overtly concerned that someone is constantly watching; others are constantly trying to develop new devices to expose their private life to the public; and still others love to observe these exposures. Before analyzing these trends, let me first look at how psychoanalysis perceives the problem of respect of privacy. My concern will not be the privacy of the analytic session, but that something untouchable in the subject that has to be protected from public exposure.

When we speak about privacy, we often claim that someone's privacy has to be respected or that one needs to honor the privacy of another. How would psychoanalysis explain this logic of honor and respect? Freud dealt with the issue of respect when he discussed the problem of female shyness, which he linked to the lack: the absence of a phallus in women. By being shy, a woman tries to cover up the lack and avert the gaze from it. However, this shyness has in itself a phallic character. So it can be said that the very lack of the phallic organ in a woman results in the phallicization of her whole body or a special part of the body; and covering this part of the body has a special seductive effect.

There is no significant difference between women's shyness and their honor: "The respect for women means that there is something that should not be seen or touched." Shyness and respect both concern the problem of castration, the lack that marks the subject. The insistence on respect is a demand for distance, which also means a special relation that the subject needs to have toward the lack in the other.

Freud thought that woman is the subject who actually lacks something, which means that in her case castration is effective. As a result of this, the woman has Penisneid (penis envy). In psychoanalytic practice, women's "deprivation" appears in many forms: as a fantasy of some essential injustice, as an inferiority complex, as a feeling of nonlegitimacy, as a lack of consistency or a lack of control, or even as a feeling of body fragmentation. The Freudian solution for this "deprivation" is motherhood.

For Jacques Lacan, women's relation toward the lack is much more complicated: femininity's trouble is not simply linked to having or not having a penis. The lack concerns the subject's very being--both a man and a woman are marked by lack, but they differently relate to this lack. A woman does not cover up the lack by becoming a mother, since for Lacan the problem of the lack cannot be solved on the level of having but on the level of being. Motherhood is not a solution to a woman's lack, since there is no particular object (not even a child) that can ever fill this lack.

Respect, therefore, concerns the subject's relation to the lack in the other, which also means that respect is just another name for the anxiety the subject feels with regard to this lack. The respect for the father, for example, needs to be understood as a way in which the subject tries to avoid the recognition that the father is actually impotent and powerless--that there is nothing behind his authority. Here we come again to the problem of castration. Lacan understands castration as something that is linked to the radical emptiness of the subject. The subject is nothing by him or herself; he or she gets all authority and power only from outside--from symbolic insignias. When we respect the father, we believe that the insignias have real power and thus we cover up the fact that the father is castrated, which means that he is himself an empty and powerless subject.