Privacy and Shame: A Response to Renata Salecl

IN her discussion of the exposures of privacy in contemporary culture, Renata Salecl presents a broad vista that comprises legal and commercial as well as psychoanalytic and aesthetic perspectives on privacy. In pointing out the historical variability of the social construction and eventual legal protection of privacy, she stresses the impact of developing communication and surveillance technologies on the growing demand for protective measures and devices against intrusions into what could be regarded as the private sphere of the individual. She calls attention to the ambivalent fascination with the possibility of being watched by others that is to be seen both in the perverse enjoyment of selfprotection against their gaze and in the instances of voluntary self-exposure in talk shows, reality television, home video, and the Internet. The paper cites certain trends in contemporary art as evidence for the same disregard of the inner freedom and bodily integrity of persons. In this connection, it discusses the exhibition “Sensation” of young British art from the Saatchi Collection at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. When the show opened in 1999, the publicity department of the museum found it fit or funny to advertise it with a “health warning” that spoke of the same ambivalence in declaring that “the contents of this exhibition may cause shock, vomiting, confusion, panic, euphoria, and anxiety.”1 Self-exposure and exposure to, or protection against, offensive sights or noise, behavior, or speech raise the question of the legal status of privacy: is it an elementary, inalienable human right, or Privacy and Shame: A Response to Renata Salecl BY ANNA WESSELY SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Spring 2002) a kind of personal possession of which one may dispose as one thinks fit? The argument, developed by Renata Salecl, relies on Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the empty subject to show that it is not the individual possession of a personal identity that the right to privacy aims to protect. On the contrary, what it does is to help the subject cover up for the lack of an identity and masquerade its imaginary subjectivity with various symbolic insignia. Respect for another person’s privacy is, in this interpretation, actually prompted by the anxiety the subject experiences in regard to this lack in another (in the Other). This lack is that untouchable secret of the subject that must be protected from public exposure. Respecting another person’s privacy is an imaginary relationship to the status that the Other assumes in the ideological world of language (the realm of the Symbolic), where subjects are subjected and deceived into feeling and presenting themselves as “whole and certain of a sexual identity.”2 The alleged “inner freedom” of the individual is thus merely an ideological mask that conceals its deprivation (castration) and subjection as the price it had to pay for subjecthood. The genetic link between deprivation and privacy is no mere psychoanalytic speculation but also a fact of etymology. The label “private” is, in all its various uses, associated with privilege in the sense of depriving others of access or participation, whether by virtue of immunity from interference or by preserving exclusive secrecy. Raymond Williams suggests that the concept of privacy is a record of the legitimation of a bourgeois view of life: the ultimate generalized privilege, however abstract in practice, of seclusion and protection from others (the public); of lack of accountability to “them”; and of related gains in closeness and comfort of these general kinds. As such, and especially in the senses of the rights of the individual (to his private life or, from a quite different tradition, to his civil liberties) and of the valued intimacy of family and friends, 10 SOCIAL RESEARCH it has been widely adopted outside the strict bourgeois viewpoint (R. Williams, 1985: 243). Such a wide adoption of the concept is most evident in historical research. Barrington Moore, for example, suggests, in an essay that surveys the history of privacy from hunting bands to Internet users, that “it seems safe to posit at least a desire for privacy as a panhuman trait” (Moore, 1998). The more privacy and individuality are perceived to be endangered, the more will even serious historians like Georges...