Is privacy a privilege? : The Tribune India

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Is privacy a privilege?

This anthology of informative and challenging essays brings together a rich diversity of Indian and international philosophical and political perspectives on the knotty issues posed by the surveillance state and other agencies of control, and their threats to the ‘public sphere’.



Raj Ayyar

This anthology of informative and challenging essays brings together a rich diversity of Indian and international philosophical and political perspectives on the knotty issues posed by the surveillance state and other agencies of control, and their threats to the ‘public sphere’. 

‘Public sphere’ is a term invented by the critical theorist and philosopher Jurgen Habermas. It refers to the public spaces for critical discourse, and rational critique or contestation of dominant narratives of state and institutional authority. It is also a mediating zone between the domestic (the individual and her purely personal and familial concerns) and the state, between oikos and polis in ancient Greek. This volume points to the weakening of the oikos and polis binary in contemporary cyber contexts.

A key argument put forward in the opening papers of the volume by Bernard Stiegler, Howard Caygill and Shaj Mohan, exposes the bad faith of the ubiquitous surveillance state, and its creation of the meek unquestioning citizen, whose obsession with ‘security’, and feeling safe post-9/11, overrides any concern about curtailed freedoms, or about the state as snoop and invader of privacy.

The first section of the book argues that the Snowden-Assange revelations about the state’s game of endless spying, secrecy and encryption, do not reveal an occasional excess or abuse of state authority, rather these revelations point to a systemic state machinery of cyber snooping, privacy invasion, and watchdogging the citizenry. Such surveillance aims at totalitarian control and capitalist advantage, the latter by selling private information to corporate buyers. 

Howard Caygill outlines an interesting nexus, showing the connections between the state ‘arcanum’, committed to secrecy, and the manhunt, symbolised by US drone attacks, often on the innocent. 

According to Caygill and other contributors to the volume, the literary masterpiece that throws the arcane state and hunted individual binary into perspective, is Kafka’s The Trial. The Trial is the paradigm case of Josef K, victimised by a secret arcanum, to which he is forever denied epistemic access. 

Interestingly enough, Shaj Mohan’s paper — On the Relation Between the Obscure, the Cryptic and the Public, the so-called ‘life world’ of the individual disappears, in contemporary cyber contexts, where we voluntarily institute this life world in the corporate social media, uploading and transmitting what used to be private.

Subarno Chatterji’s essay on The Crisis of English Studies and the Public Sphere in India is worth reading. His paper takes us beyond the discussions of the surveillance state into a different domain, namely, the fate of English studies and other branches of the humanities, in the for-profit neo-liberal university. 

The neo-liberal university, committed to a corporatised model of higher education, suppresses spaces of dissent and creatively eccentric collegiality, and looks upon the humanities with suspicion — as a woolly, non-pragmatic endeavour at best, and as potentially subversive at worst. All this in the name of accountability and the profit bottom-line, as well the need to ‘groom’ students for their corporate future.

One misses the glaring absence of any reference to Not For Profit, Martha Nussbaum’s sustained and brilliant critique of the neo-liberal university, in Chatterji’s paper. There is an interesting introductory essay by Prof Sanil V, which brings together the plurality of perspectives in the volume.

Divya Dwivedi and Sanil V. have done a great job in compiling this anthology that addresses the threats to the public sphere from multiple directions. 

‘The public sphere’ is of special relevance in the contemporary Indian context, when the sphere in question seems to be under attack by a monolithic state narrative, one that confuses the signifiers ‘state’ and ‘government’, and confuses challenges to the latter, with a seditious attack on the former. 

The monolithic RSS narrative appears to push ‘nationhood’, and ‘nationalism’, in a rigid narrative that includes beef prohibitions, Hindu majoritarian ‘normalcy’, and the invocation and re-invigoration of a colonial ‘sedition’ statute.

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