The Novel and WikiLeaks: Transparency and the Social Life of Privacy

What can fiction tell us about privacy? Thirty years ago, in The Novel and the Police (1988), D. A. Miller suggested that we can intuit the privacy of literary characters as "an integral, autonomous, 'secret' self," one "whose ultimate meaning lies in the subject's formal insistence that he is radically inaccessible to the culture that would otherwise entirely determine him" (162, 195). In this essay, I propose a shift away from thinking about privacy, in fiction and the world, as concerned with an individual's interior, toward thinking about it as something that inheres in interpersonal and group interactions. This view of privacy becomes especially visible as both a formal feature and a thematic concern in recent novels that take up WikiLeaks as a topic, novels that try to square the competing ideals of governmental transparency and individual privacy. By attending to the ways that two contemporary novelists describe information flow between characters, we can grasp privacy as a facet of our social and information networks.

A rich thread in literary scholarship shows how the history of privacy reflects a history of the liberal self, arguably starting with Miller's influential study. More recently, David Rosen and Aaron Santesso have traced the intellectual history of modern privacy to nineteenth-century romantic and liberal conceptions of the self, particularly in the writings of William Wordsworth and John Stuart Mill that influenced Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis's landmark 1890 essay on privacy as the domain of an "inviolate personality," a curiously self-contained notion of the self (Rosen and Santesso 115–17). As Lauren Berlant, Deborah Nelson, and Simone Browne have shown, debates about privacy are also highly politicized arguments about which spaces, individuals, and activities deserve to be afforded privacy considerations in the law; Nelson and Browne have traced the contested histories of which individuals and social groups have been afforded rights to privacy. For Berlant, the right to privacy has been differentially afforded, on such bases as race, class, and gender, to proper rather than improper activities and demographics; privacy law, she contends, "devolves privilege on … secure domestic interiority [and] a structure of protection and identity" (381).¹ Deferring these political questions about privilege and vulnerability until my conclusion, I analyze how we might imagine a defense of privacy as activity, a defense that eschews the models of classical liberal selfhood, opacity, or property.

Such an approach follows a thread in legal scholarship on privacy in which media and information technology have been driving forces of change. Although privacy is in part a matter of administrative law (for compliance with, for example, HIPAA regulations), tort law surrounding privacy has, historically, traced the changing spaces and situations in which we can expect to enjoy privacy. Changes to those protections have been conservative in the sense that privacy protections are based in legal precedent about the uses of media technologies. Protections for privacy have kept up with the ways that new media technologies have changed the spatial dynamics of communication for over a century (in cases on photography in public, public telephone booths, video rental records, and now cloud storage and encrypted mobile devices).² Tort law has marked the conventions that circumscribe which forms of information about us should receive the protections granted to private property or contractual agreements, including intrusion into one's affairs, disclosure of embarrassing facts, public misinformation about a subject, and appropriation of a subject's likeness (Prosser 384, 389).³

What social aspects of privacy remain constant despite those shifting technological and spatial boundaries? Legal theorists have made several inroads on this question, starting from Alan Westin's classic definition of privacy as the "claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated" (7). Helen Nissenbaum has proposed that this definition entails a claim to what she calls "contextual integrity," the expectation that the various contexts in which we share information will work as we expect them to (2).⁴ Both focus on information management, allowing us to describe privacy as an activity, a control...