Privacy Rights/Philosophical Origins/Tradition contributions/Postmodernism
What have religious and philosophical traditions contributed to our understanding of this right?
Postmodernism
Postmodernists believe that society’s expectations and norms of society are merely products of the capitalistic marketplace and the aesthetics that are formed around them rather than looking at the historical foundations of popular culture. These theorists typically are very skeptical of these norms because of the problems they have caused within society and believe that a simple solution can fix all problems, as most modernists propose. Therefore, postmodernists simply describe the standard for privacy that society currently holds and do not propose any true remedies to the problems they might have with the notion of privacy. Specifically, Jean-Francios Lyotard, Frederic Jameson, and Michael J. Shapiro all describe the aesthetics of privacy that society currently accepts and identifies how unrealistic privacy is within the capitalistic marketplace. They remain skeptical about how private individuals can be private in the modern world by creating marketplaces that are designed to invade the private sphere to pursue their capitalistic interests. Postmodernists like Lyotard, Jameson, and Shapiro claim that the idea of privacy does not truly exist due to the monopolization of personal information by corporations and used to maintain power; therefore, the existence of a private realm is unnecessary. Postmodernists take the position that privacy within society might not exist due to the monopolization of information by corporations to pursue their interests. For example, in the book Inhuman by Jean-Francios Lyotard, the author notes that “Through innovation, the will affirms its hegemony over time. It thus conforms to the metaphysics of capital, which is a technology of time. The innovation 'works'. The question mark of the Is it happening?' stops. With the occurrence, the will is defeated. The avant-gardist task remains that of undoing the presumption of the mind with respect to time. The sublime feeling is the name of this privation” (Lyotard 1988, 107). Lyotard’s observation proves that with the existence of information, whether it be private or public, corporations have been able to monopolize such information and use it to their advantage. Privatizing all information solidifies the power dynamic between those in power and those who feed into their power since such information is used to pursue their interests. Lyotard would also argue that there might not be such an idea of private information in general since general information is already public, and anyone or company can have access to this information to again use it for themselves. Due to this, he challenges the idea of the private realm even existing because of the way that information is easily accessible. However, Lyotard might also point out that the only privacy that exists within society is the privacy of the corporations that take all public entities and claim them and privatize them. He points out that culturally significant objects are also privatized by corporations, who then profit off of the nation’s sp. Lyotard would conclude that privacy only exists for the corporations who use the personal information around them to turn profits for themselves and their interests. Furthering this sentiment, Frederic Jameson wrote “The definitive answer will come, of course, with the conception of a "logic of naturalism" that informs the other half of his title. For the moment there remains the nagging feeling that all this does come down to the "self" after all, and that the desperate or passional fantasies of productionism, romance, slavery, masochism, the gold standard, and hoarding or spending are all somehow attempts to square the circle and come to terms with the antinomy of the self as private property. This is nowhere affirmed as such, yet the theoretical or interpretive void in the endless chain of homologies somehow draws the reading mind toward what we may call the existential (if not the psychoanalytic) solution: the ontological priority of explanations in terms of the self over all the other levels. This is, in general, the fate of philosophies without "content" (in the Hegelian sense of the word), and in particular of philosophies that seek to exclude content as such: a kind of Lacanian "foreclusion" in which content is reintroduced back from the outside in the form of some compensatory and generally psychoanalytic bottom line (as in Tel Quel and some places in Derrida), the materials of the "self" proving more serviceable in the completion of a formalist system than the materials of history or the social” (Jameson 1997, 198-199). Like Lyotard, Jameson is skeptical of the private condition of the individual and whether it is a true institution within society or there for the aesthetic that society has created behind it. Unlike Lyotard, Jameson would say that the idea of the private is created for the formation of the “self”, prioritized and valued because of society’s significance. Jameson claims that the concept of the “self” is not as important as people have made it out to be, and so it feeds back into the aesthetic of society rather than having any real significance. Jameson also claims that this sense of privacy stems from the media that pushes it forward to accommodate corporations pursuing their own interests. This sense of self is further broken down by society in which people are categorized and assigned labels that again have no meaning and disregard any sense of privacy and self that society values so deeply. Jameson would also claim that the increase in media technology makes any sense of privacy difficult to achieve and maintain because people can share their information across multiple platforms and therefore share that information with the corporations around them. Postmodernists, like all theorists, tend to describe what is in society and by, doing so, challenge the view of the world that most people hold without questioning the norms and possible solutions to the problem described. When applying postmodernity to political theory, Michael Shapiro noted that “One can, in short, render boundaries innocuous by speaking unproblematically about "public" and "private" spheres, the "work place," "recreational space," and so on. What is left of the political process in this model is primarily a policing function that consists in the prevention of intrusions from one institutional setting to another. Clearly, there is a significant operation of power and authority in the production of those domains whose inviolability Walzer seeks to preserve. His version of the liberal discourse depoliticizes modernity's contemporary ground plan and serves as a legitimation rhetoric. It distributes discursive assets to those who control the flow of goods, commitments, and, in general, all valued outcomes” (Shapiro 1992, 94). Part of addressing the issue of privacy again realizes the state of society, which Shapiro argues is this state of maintaining whatever power an individual may have or be able to own. To add to this notion, Shapiro would say that society already blurs the private and public boundaries to pursue their social actions and agenda. He concludes that there cannot just be two distinct realms that people can adhere to, especially because he claims that there is no end to history in which this is possible. He continues this argument with the claim that even if there were space for this sort of dichotomy, it would not matter because of the ability society should have to extract the political tendencies from each realm rather than regulating them. Shapiro adds to the sentiments of Lyotard and Jameson in that all three recognize the power dynamic that any aspect of privacy adds to society. Shapiro adds that this privacy aspect solidifies the power dynamics that again allow the rich to get richer and others to remain in their place. This causes postmodernists to try and reimagine the private sphere in order to dismantle and restore the power relations between the people and the corporations that have monopolies on privatized information. In addition, Jameson wrote that “We have touched briefly on property relations in the postmodern in a previous chapter; suffice it to say now that in itself, private property remains that dusty and drearily old-fashioned thing whose truth one used to glimpse when traveling in the older nation states and observing, with Mr. Bloom's "grey horror" that sears the flesh, the hoariest antique forms of British commerce or French family firms (Dickens remaining the most precious imperishable afterimage of the juridical exfoliation of these entities, unimaginable crystalline growths like some cancerous Antarctica)” (Jameson 1997, 320-321). Essentially, Jameson proposes that society does away with the notion of private property because it reinstates the aesthetics and the history that have created the present problems. However, Jameson’s answer to privacy is quite complicated because in other works, he explains that the government needs to protect the individual’s privacy from monopolies. It must be noted that postmodernists do not usually favor a solution in general because they believe that society is more complicated than any solution can fix the problems at hand. Therefore, Jameson and the others reflect on the realities of privacy and the state of society without any solid remedy to the problems they propose. However, there seems to be some consensus that the notion of privacy should be abandoned or dismissed until society can remedy the problems already present in society. For Jameson, it seems to be the case that the private life is something he believes is worth preserving, but he understands that the condition of the private life is diminishing and might not be realistic to maintain. For example, Jameson holds that the media is the reason for an individual’s lack of privacy since the media advertises products using private personal information corporations know will appeal to the consumer. Jameson’s assertion that there can be no sphere of privacy comes from the sentiment that society is based on the capitalistic marketplace in which corporations try to make as much money as possible and obtain as much information about the population as possible. The key to understanding the postmodernist perspective is the realization that this skeptical view prevents any theorist from developing a solution to the problems they describe. They have read and concluded that modernists believe they can solve all the world’s problems with their theories without looking at the implications or analyzing the world on a different level that questions the popular culture norms that dictate all decisions individuals make. For that reason, they propose no definitive solutions because they do not see the point in making decisions when the aesthetics and the norms of society have already been so deeply rooted in society. Therefore, making definitive decisions about things such as privacy is only there to describe the current state in which they exist, if they even exist. In the matter of the private realm, postmodernists would conclude that the existence of a private sphere does not exist based on the premise that the capitalistic society will monopolize private information for its benefit.
REFERENCES:
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press Durham. 1997.
Lyotard, Jean-Francios. The Inhuman Reflections of Time. Stanford University Press. 1991.
Shapiro, Michael J. Reading the Postmodern Polity: Political Theory as Textual Practice. NED-New edition. University of Minnesota Press, 1992. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttsg7v.