Psychoanalysis – mags neg General 1NC
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- The very existence of “personal information” to collect induces anxiety, even if nobody collects it
Link – PrivacyPrivacy is based on an assumption of the autonomous, free self --- but this free self is formed only in relation to surveillance and desires the gaze --- makes surveillance inevitableMeyers 6/16/14 --- Masters of Public and International Law candidate, University of Melbourne (Zach, “Autonomy as a Fantasy”, Taylor and Francis Online)//trepka The Rationale for Privacy Privacy and Autonomy Since at least the early twentieth century, and particularly in the United States, a major justification for the development of privacy law has been the value of autonomy over how one’s personal information is disclosed and disseminated. Certainly, Warren and Brandeis’s seminal 1890 article on the right to privacy purportedly found privacy rights in the ‘inviolate personality’ and the ‘spiritual nature’ of humanity10 (leading many scholars to focus on dignity, rather than autonomy, as the foundation for privacy law). In my view, though, the conception of privacy they reached better reflects the value of autonomy than any inherent, inalienable aspect of human dignity.11 Warren and Brandeis were concerned only with ‘unauthorised’ dissemination of information. By this, they clearly meant that consent was central to the concept of privacy – indeed, their explicit intention was to ensure that ‘the law allows each person to decide the extent to which their thoughts and emotions are communicated’.12 Importantly, although Warren and Brandeis agreed that some matters were of such sufficient public interest that they could not be legitimately kept private, this proposition was put forward only in respect of those who had ‘assumed a position which makes their doings legitimate matters of public investigation’. Conceptually, their article proceeded on the basis that a right to privacy merely followed the principle of dominion over private property as a ‘right against the world’ (albeit in an ‘extended and unusual’ sense) – over which the individual has control – rather than a means of regulating individual behaviour to preserve dignity. 13 Concepts of privacy that relate it to a proprietary right, and that therefore focus on autonomy and control, have remained influential – hence William Prosser’s description of privacy as the ‘composite of the interests in reputation, emotional tranquility and intangible property’14 and Fried’s view of privacy as ‘the control we have over information about ourselves’.15 Reiman, too, has identified that privacy is ‘necessary to the creation of selves out of human beings, since a self is at least in part a human being who regards his existence – his thoughts, his body, his actions – as his own’.16 Reiman’s use of the language of property law to explain identity – ‘ownership’ over self, and an individual’s ‘moral title to his existence’17 – is particularly evocative. Some scholars have complicated this picture by recognising that autonomy is not necessarily ‘pre-existing’.18 These articulations of privacy suggest that individuals have an inherent ‘core’, which stands in contrast to their social existence19 – that is, there is a distinction between ‘intimate information’ over which a person has a right to privacy (a sphere of autonomy from external influences)20 and public aspects of identity over which there is no such right.21 While scholars acknowledge the role of social discourses and ideologies on individual identity, such scholars see these as an interference with the pre-existing individuality of each individual.22 Alan Westin, for example, has accordingly noted that ‘the most serious threat to the individual’s autonomy is the possibility that someone may penetrate the inner zone and learn his ultimate secrets, either by physical or psychological means’. 23 For Westin, as for most privacy scholars, privacy is therefore about ‘the claim of individuals, groups or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others’.24 Critiques of Autonomy Recent scholarship has challenged the concept of the autonomous individual. 25 This scholarship has come to acknowledge that no concept of privacy can achieve autonomy, and that the concept of autonomy itself is a fantasy. The first wave of this scholarship suggested that there is no ‘core self’ immune to dominant ideologies and social discourses,26 and that privacy may not only be desired but imposed as a means of exercising social dominance.27 The more fundamental challenge to the connection between autonomy and privacy came from post-structuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault, who argued that ‘surveillance is permanent in its effects’, so that individuals are ‘caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers’.28 As this body of work developed, Foucault came to understand identity as not only governed, but actually constituted, by dominant social ideologies. 29 A large body of work following Foucault created a radical critique of autonomy – a critique that questioned not only whether autonomy could be retrieved, but whether there was anything to retrieve at all – whether one’s identity (the very ability to seek to exclude others) was always already colonised by the public sphere. This poses a fundamental challenge to the idea of a ‘core self’ and its relevance to privacy by suggesting that a person’s ability to identify as autonomous, as capable of excluding others, is already a result of social relations. But if a person’s desires and identity are not just influenced, but created, by social norms, then what is left of autonomy for privacy laws to protect other than a fantasy? And how can the desire for privacy laws be explained if their ‘success’ brings us closer to acknowledging this fantasy for what it is? Reconciling Privacy with the Decentred Self This is a fundamental question that should have caused a significant rethink of the underlying purposes and justifications for privacy laws. But as Julie Cohen notes, ‘privacy scholars have seemed both unable and unwilling to generate a different theory of the self that privacy protects’,30 and most contemporary privacy theorists have not responded fully to these critiques. A small number of contemporary privacy theorists have attempted to reconceptualise privacy in a way that better reflects doubts over the ideal of autonomy. However, few have conducted the type of deconstruction of privacy laws that post-structuralist critiques suggest is needed. Laws to protect privacy are counterproductive --- identity is formed in relation to the external gaze, which makes surveillance inevitableMeyers 6/16/14 --- Masters of Public and International Law candidate, University of Melbourne (Zach, “Autonomy as a Fantasy”, Taylor and Francis Online)//trepka Psychoanalytic Approaches to Privacy It is at this point that, in my view, psychoanalytic theory – and particularly the work of Jacques Lacan – can contribute. This is not to deny the role of social relations in developing privacy norms, but it does recognise that, ultimately, the desire for privacy may be neither rational nor entirely explained by social relations external to the individual. Instead,Zizsuggest that an appropriate response to critiques of autonomy can be found by attempting to bridge the individual/social divide. As Butler notes, ‘the psyche is precisely what exceeds the imprisoning effects of the discursive demand to inhabit a coherent identity, to become a coherent subject’.39 By examining the psyche, psychoanalytic theory can explain the desire for autonomy and the relevance of privacy law to this desire in a way that is not necessarily wholly predetermined by social conditions.40 From Omnipotence to Autonomy Psychoanalysts adopt a similar scepticism to the idea of autonomy to that expressed by many post-structuralists. Freud41 paid significant attention to the lack of autonomy experienced during infancy and the trauma realised by an infant when the child’s mother is temporarily absent.42 The infant’s realisation that it is separate from the mother is understood by many psychoanalysts as being traumatic.43 For Lacan, this trauma is one connected with omnipotence: in the first months of life, Lacan notes that the infant incorporates feelings, needs and pleasures narcissistically, without recognising any clear boundaries between them – without being able to articulate them as desires or demands, experiencing ‘raw’, unstructured desire. In this state of primary narcissism, the infant’s mother provides it with what it needs and the infant identifies as the only object of the mother’s desire. But at a certain point the infant realises both that the mother is not always ‘there’ and that the mother is not ‘there’ only for the infant: she has her own desires, and cannot fulfil all of the infant’s desires. Bruce Fink describes the impact of this separation as there being: something about [the mother’s] desire which escapes the child, which is beyond its control. A strict identity between the child’s desire and [the mother’s] cannot be maintained; her desire’s independence from her child’s creates a rift between them, a gap … unfathomable to the child …44 The separation from its mother is therefore a traumatic experience for the infant, because it shatters its narcissistic self-understanding and forces it to recognise its lack of omnipotence. Although many dominant psychoanalytic theorists never addressed privacy expressly, the attention so many psychoanalysts have given to the development of individual identity by way of a traumatic separation from one’s mother has obvious implications for any theory of privacy. It suggests that each individual’s first experience of privacy (at least in its traditional formulation of being ‘left alone’) is something radically different to what most privacy scholars have assumed. As infants, we neither start life alone nor seek to reserve any right to be ‘let alone’. In the first instance, being ‘let alone’ and experiencing privacy are imposed. It is this state of privation – and the need to come to terms with the loss of omnipotence – that drives individuals towards a desire for autonomy, to be able to control this privation by being able to express desires for and as one’s self. Privacy, then, creates the desire for autonomy, rather than autonomy creating the need for privacy. The Myth of the ʻCore Selfʼ The disconnect between autonomy and privacy is reflected in Lacan’s work by the fact that an infant’s autonomy is never developed or achieved ‘in privacy’, or by the infant ‘withdrawing from society’, in the way contemplated by most privacy scholars who rely on the concept of a ‘core self’. While psychoanalysts differ in their views of how infants come to terms with the realisation of their loss of omnipotence, 45 for Lacan an infant begins working through this trauma at the ‘mirror stage’ of development – the time when the infant recognises an image of him or herself (that is, as a mental association with how the child sees others).46 In the ‘mirror stage’, the infant, despite being ‘beset by disobedient limbs and unrelated urges’47 – a terrible recognition of the loss of their omnipotence – acquires an ‘imaged and imagined, impression of … unity and oneness’, 48 an ‘ideal-ego’. The infant creates an imaginary sense of mastery and autonomy associated with its separate identity – that is, the infant begins to imagine that they are an ‘I’ capable of autonomy. 49 As Lacan notes, the development of the ego can be understood ‘as an identification, in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image’. 50 In other words, it is only by misrecognising one’s self – by identifying one’s self only as an object of another’s gaze – that one develops identity and comes to see one’s self as capable of autonomy. This suggests an ambivalence towards the concerns of privacy theorists who have described the sense of being objectified and under surveillance as deeply harmful. Floridi, for example, understands ‘a breach of one’s informational privacy as a form of aggression against one’s personal identity’,51 and mainstream psychology has long perceived a sense of privacy to be essential to a person’s mental health.52 Further, Lacan’s work suggests a scepticism towards claims that privacy protects an ‘authentic self’ – and particularly privacy as reflecting human dignity or as standing ‘in stark opposition to the expansive forces of the modern market, which reduces everything that comes within its grasp to a common medium of exchange’.53 Instead, his work suggests that, whatever the effects of self-surveillance, it is a necessary part of developing a social identity. For Lacan, self-identity is only achieved relatively; the very image of an ‘autonomous self’ is in itself a perception achieved by the child imagining itself as others see it, distancing itself from the reality of its ‘disobedient limbs’. Indeed, Lacan explains this dislocation precisely in terms of a feeling of being under surveillance, of having no privacy: ‘the gazeZizencounter … is not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me’.54 The irony, then, is that the desire for autonomy, arriving as it does to manage the anxiety caused by imposed privacy, functions only by reference to reference to others – which means its attainment, in a state of privacy, is always-already foreclosed. We desire to see ourselves as enclosed subjects with the ‘core self’ relied upon by most privacy scholars, but the very conception of self is recognised only through social and institutional discourse. Indeed, in Lacan’s work, the mirror stage ends when the infant shifts from identifying with the image in the mirror to the image of others – ‘the time at which the specular turns into the social’.55 This, of course, is a similar conclusion to those reached by other contemporary privacy scholars – Cohen, for example, notes that ‘the subjectivity that results from the processes [we normally associate with privacy] is predominantly intersubjective, informed by existing, socially situated conventions, practices, and ways of knowing’.56 It aligns well with the focus of Nissenbaum’s and Austin’s work on social conventions. Lacan’s work offers more nuance: it sees the sense of self as social, but never entirely socially determined, because there is still a sense of misrecognition when a person self-identifies as autonomous. Importantly, Lacan acknowledges that (self-)surveillance creates a feeling of loss as the infant moves on from its primary narcissism, losing omnipotence and seeking autonomy, and as its unstructured desires and experiences become subject to and mediated by social relations. Similarly, Jean Copjec, for example, has described the experience of a ‘moment of extimacy in which we discover an “overpopulated” privacy, where some alien excess adheres to us’.57 The ego itself is developed and constituted from social discourse at the end of the mirror stage – but there remains a remainder that is ‘left over’, never fully represented in discourse, and can only be felt as a feeling of loss to be regained.58 Judith Butler, for example, notes that this sense of loss rifts the subject, marking a limit to what it can accommodate. Because the subject does not, cannot, reflect on that loss, that loss marks the limit of reflexivity, that which exceeds (and conditions) its circuitry. Understood as foreclosure, that loss inaugurates the subject and threatens it with dissolution. 59 It is here,Zizsuggest, that an explanation of the desire for privacy can be found. True privacy is impossible --- social relations that govern society mean that people desire privacy repeatedly which means the aff will never be enoughMeyers 6/16/14 --- Masters of Public and International Law candidate, University of Melbourne (Zach, “Autonomy as a Fantasy”, Taylor and Francis Online)//trepka Applying Psychoanalysis to Data protection laws If privacy is always-already lost, the reason why it remains such a compelling legal issue is precisely the way it creates this threat of identity dissolution. For Freud (as for Lacan), individuals have competing drives both to repress and to repeat trauma in a vain attempt to master and overcome it.60 Similarly, for Lacan, the experience of losing omnipotence is both traumatic (because it is the infant’s first structured experience of loss) and compelling (because the loss must be repeated to be mastered). The trauma of the infant’s separation from its mother and the trauma of loss associated with the castration of entering into social discourse therefore results in attempts to constantly repeat loss and to overcome it by ‘achieving’ autonomy. But the loss of omnipotence is no longer recoverable because of the mother’s separation, and autonomy is always elusive because the infant’s ‘identity’ is dependent on being able to express its desires and demands in ways that are recognised by others. Accordingly, individuals not only repeat the act of being ‘let alone’, but desire to reclaim and reimagine the experience of loss as enabling of autonomy. Privacy comes to be desired and repeated. This understanding of the role of trauma and repetition to privacy is illustrated by Freud’s interpretation of a game he observed his grandson play during infancy as a way of dealing with the absence and return of his mother. As Freud describes it: what he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive ‘o-o-o-o’ [a sound Freud interprets as meaning fort, or ‘there’]. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ [‘here’]. This, then was the complete game – disappearance and return.61 Lacan and Freud both interpret the game as a compulsive repetition of loss, and reflecting a drive to master the realisation that the individual is separate(d) from others. 62 But two particular aspects of Lacan’s reinterpretation of the fort-da game have important consequences for information privacy. First, for Lacan, the game demonstrates how the mirror stage results in the infant’s entry into the structured social world (what Lacan terms the symbolic order) and the castration this entails. In doing so, the individual’s self-identity becomes bounded, transformed and mediated through social relations. For Lacan, the reel in the fort-da game therefore comes to stand in not for control over the mother (a desire for which could be ‘expressed quite simply in a cry’),63 but for the infant’s more profound sense of disconnection from its own body.64 The reel, then, is not ‘the mother reduced to a little ball by some magical game … it is a small part of the subject that detaches itself from him while still remaining his, still retained’. 65 Accordingly, by throwing the reel over the side of the cot, the child is attempting to establish autonomy, seeking to relate to and assert his influence beyond the cot, seeking an ‘answer to what the mother’s absence has created on the frontier of his domain – the edge of his cradle – namely, a ditch, around which one can only play at jumping’.66 There is necessarily a feeling of transgression associated with this game, with the infant pushing the boundaries of identity imposed upon it.67 Second, Lacan considers the fort-da game to exemplify the child’s acquisition of language as the key part of the castration needed to develop an ego, a sense of bounded self-identity: This object [the reel], being immediately embodied in the symbolic pair of two elementary exclamations [ie, fort and da], announced the subject’s diachronic integration of the dichotomy of phonemes, whose synchronic structure the existing language offers up for him to assimilate; the child thus begins to become engaged in the system of the concrete discourse of those around him by reproducing … the terms he receives from them.68 Lacan describes the castration as being an accession to law (represented by the father): a law that recognises the individual as bounded, as separate from the mother, and that requires the child to see its own self as a bounded individual before it can articulate its own desires. Like the child shunning its disobedient limbs in imagining they are an ego-ideal before the mirror, entry into linguistic systems is an alienating process – one which involves leaving behind an untamed ‘excess’ from the ‘wholeness’ of omnipotence, and taking up foreign linguistic systems ‘received’ from others. The very existence of “personal information” to collect induces anxiety, even if nobody collects itMeyers 6/16/14 --- Masters of Public and International Law candidate, University of Melbourne (Zach, “Autonomy as a Fantasy”, Taylor and Francis Online)//trepka Indeed, this explains the value of collecting personal information. The very value of personal information to marketers (and the very justification of marketers for doing so) disturbs our confidence in our own autonomy. It suggests that, rather than being autonomous, our future behaviour is fully predetermined by our entry into the social world. In this way, the information itself – along with its disclosure – becomes anxiety-inducing. Rather than confront the information itself directly, the preference is to suspend it between the fort and da, to perpetuate the dissemination and recovery of the information without ever addressing its real content or import. Indeed, Žižek would suggest that the forced confrontation with the content and importance of one’s own personal information is particularly violent: ‘perhaps the forced actualization in social reality itself of the phantasmatic kernel of my being is the worst, most humiliating kind of violence, a violence that undermines the very basis of my identity (of my self-image)’.87 Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.71 Mb. Share with your friends:
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