If there is any driving force that collects this weeks readings together, perhaps it is that the old models/entities of public(ity), private and surveillance are no longer adequate for discourses about both the past and present. I found Hortense Spillers’ use of body as opposed to private person most interesting in this regard.

In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Spillers makes clear that the concept of private person and space does not operate for the captive and societies marked by captivity: “the name by which I am called in the public place render an example of signifying property plus” (65). Public space might not be composed of just private persons but of human property, owned bodies, as well. “But this body, at least from the point of view of the captive community, focuses a private and particular space, at which point of convergence biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic and psychological fortunes join” (67). Body then replaces private person as an operational analytical term when relating a person to the public. Such a replacement is necessary when analyzing a slave system where “genetic reproduction becomes, then, not an elaboration of the life-principle in its cultural overlap, but an extension of the boundaries of proliferating properties…’slavery exists where the slave class is reproduced through institutional apparatus; war and market’…’femininity loses its sacredness in slavery’ then so does ‘motherhood’ as female blood-rite/right… the captive female body locates precisely a moment of converging political and social vectors that mark the flesh as a prime commodity of exchange” (75). “Public” institutions, such as the market or government, are then infiltrated and crossed not by private persons but captive bodies. I would as how does the distiction between private person and body operate in todays regime of publicity and surveillance? How are bodies made exchangeable and how can they be used to resist encroachment on the “private sphere?”

Can we relate Spillers captive body to stalder’s “data body” and to his reconfiguration of society from public/private to “networks underpinned by digital information and communication technologies… [where] the characteristics of each node [body?] are determined primarily by its connections” (122)?

To add to Josh’s inquiry, how can the body configure critically into Keenans discourse about the “opening of the distinction between inside and outside, private and public, self and other, on which the house of the human is built… “ (124). Where is the body when society is reduced to the exchanges of gazes, “a machine for looking itself” (122)?
posted by chr15 at 8:35 PM

In “Privacy is not the antidote to surveillance,” I thought it was interesting that Stalder described the recording, analysis and storage of cell phone/credit card use, doctor appointments, government interaction, etc., as a “picture” that continues to grow “finer and fatter” (120) – as if our ‘data doubles’ and ‘shadow bodies’ are forming an alternate, increasingly accurate image of what constitutes us, a la Dorian Gray.

What I don’t think I follow is how Stalder makes the leap from privacy as “informational self-determination” – an individual’s ability to govern the collection of her/his data – to the spatial description of privacy as a “bubble” of personal space, “space under the exclusive control of the individual” (121). Are these two descriptions analogous? Further he writes of the “bubble theory” as “unworkable” and outdated, citing the formation of network societies wherein connections are privileged and “isolation is an undesirable option” (122). His point is well taken and, I think, well founded; but isolation from the network and the notion of spatial privacy are two very different things – interrelated, to be sure, but certainly not equatable.

Am I reading him too literally, here? Or is this an actual complication?

Regardless.

In “Windows: of vulnerability,” Keenan writes of the house on the hill: “Does it look, like an eye, or does it simply figure, look like, the eye…? Does the eye of the house… frame a view for its occupant, overlooking, as they say, the canyon that it dominates? Or does the window open the house out, let light in, invent the interior and expose its occupant to the intrusion of an uncontrollable exteriority?” (122, his italics, my boldface)

Further: “What if the opening of the aperture that allows sight were to become uncontrollable, if the regulated light that makes seeing possible were to overexpose the interior—which it opens—to the exterior against which it defines itself? The opening risks the more violent opening of the distinction between inside and outside, private and public, self and other, on which the house of the human is built… The Garcia house runs this risk, without letting us decide whether its foundations have finally given way” (124-5).

What interests me about these passages is their relevance to our discussion/reading regarding the seeming reciprocity between interior/exterior, public/private, self/other, as each term in these supposedly oppositional binaries is not only dependent on the other, but also defined by the other – invented as it were. With this notion of uncontrollable intrusion or overexposure, the rather disposable or insignificant role Keenan applies the individual in regards to the giving-way of foundations, is intriguing. "The inhabitants of the eye might even become strangely incidental, their 'views' oddly irrelevant, occupying as they do nothing but a machine for looking itself" (122). Without a long shot of house tumbling down the hill in flames, where are we left in this process? As hostages, it seems: "Neither absent nor captive, I am in public a 'hostage' of the other" (136). Blanchot/Levinas: "it is the other who exposes me to unity... I am not indispensable; in me anyone at all is called by the other. The responsibility with which I am charged is not mine, and because of it I am no longer myself" (136).

More: Any ideas about the Derrida notion of the twilight of an eye? Or Keenan's use of the term "hyperbolic" on p.126, when discussing the importance of the "threat that the hyperbolic admission of light poses to looking as such," in reference to the 'horizontal windows' of Le Corbusier? Hyperbolic as in excess (hyperbole) or in mathematical terms (hyperbola) as in the cutting of planes, intersections, cones, etc. I would love to simply jot this down to excess (if only because the math thing is confusing), but Keenan seems to be leaning towards intersection/coincidence/separation when writing, "the length and horizontality of Le Corubusier's window band cuts across the human form and disfigurees it, mutilates the upright installation of the one who stands" - as well as the references to vulnerability, wounds, destruction, breaching, etc. And how are the ellipses being used in this article? As windows themselves? As pauses, or points for reflection? As interruptions? An attempt at bridging the gap?
posted by josh_g at 4:00 PM