Sharon Daniel
Visitor
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the Public/Private divide and Political Subjects - 2006/05/10 13:29
First, I’d like to thank Alice for her introduction and for providing a focus for this dialogue. I am interested in how each paper engages subjective evidence or self-referentiality in relation to collective production. I am also extremely glad to be in an international, or possibly trans-national, dialogue around what Alice has called “the public and private divide” and “the question of self-determination”. I’m interested in how our situated-ness (in terms of nation-states and in relation to globalized economies and information spaces) affects our sense of public/private. Not only how the state regulates behaviors and imposes norms but also how ‘we’ as citizens or denizens fail to take responsibility for what we know. If ‘Information’ is “ that which reduces uncertainty,” (Claude Shannon) and “that which changes us,” (Gregory Bateson) then ‘denial’ is that which protects us – and the public secret.
In her post Joline Blas has posed the question “Is there a relation between public secrets and private property”. Certainly. Where, traditionally, we have understood the political subject through the figure of the citizen of a sovereign nation-state -- in our world at this moment the figure of the citizen is eclipsed by that of the consumer—the most powerful minority in a world population dominated by other figures: the refugee, the homeless, the prisoner, the HIV positive, the addict, the squatter, the internally displaced, the migrant, the impoverished, queer, black.. These figures – regarded as marginal – have, as Giorgio Agamben says, “become now the decisive factor of the modern nation-state by breaking the nexus between human being and citizen.” In Agamben’s analysis – the state can only assert its power and affirm itself by separating “naked life” or biological life from its “forms-of-life” or social and political agency – reducing the subject to a biological entity a – bare life preserved only as an expression of sovereign power – This is the purpose of the prison and the detention center, the role of the displaced persons camp, the homeless shelter, the concentration camp… For Agamben, intellectuality and thought – which I see as equivalent or necessary to “self-representation” and self-articulation” - are forces that reunite life to its “form” – its identity, subjectivity, political agency and power of choice.
Each of our three papers addresses self–referentiality, storytelling, dialogism and collective self-representation (all methods for collecting subjective evidence that emerges from the private or personal) as means of resistance. As critic Catherine Stimpson points out, "Doing Cultural Democracy demands...the incessant recognition of the moral, cognitive and cultural lives of others …" Any adequate expression of the condition of contemporary culture requires that a plentitude of voices speak directly from widely differing contexts about their own socio-ideological situations. What I know from speaking with the addicts and incarcerated women is that they not politically enfranchised and their statements are not acknowledged as information -- either in Shannon’s sense or in Bateson’s sense. Theirs is information that must be ignored, denied, repressed -- otherwise someone would have to do something about it. I am interested in discussing how subjective data that emerges from the voices of the disenfranchised – prisoners, drug addicts, immigrants, refugees – these are the denizens – the new political subjects – the majority can attain the status of public information.
Walter Benjamin wrote -- “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.” “The state of exception is the temporary suspension of the rule of law that is revealed instead to constitute the fundamental structure of the legal system itself” [Agamben] – Consider the current political movement around immigration, guest workers, and detention -- consider Guantanamo and the permanent “global war on terror” -- post-Katrina “reconstruction” and like three strikes and your out and the California state prison media ban – emergency measures in the “war on drugs” and the “war on crime” that violate human and civil rights. How could we not think that a system that can no longer function at all except on the basis of emergency would not also be interested in preserving such an emergency at any price? ---This is the nature of the Public Secret.
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