Psychoanalysis – mags neg General 1NC
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Impact – NeolibProtection of corporate data from the state assumes that the desire for privacy from the state is legitimate in all forms --- that reinforces neoliberalismMeyers 6/16/14 --- Masters of Public and International Law candidate, University of Melbourne (Zach, “Autonomy as a Fantasy”, Taylor and Francis Online)//trepka The Lacanian Other is therefore not identifiable as such, but represents the ‘symbolic order’ itself: the inscrutable regulatory structures through which we communicate, recognise others, and that allow us to identify ourselves as individuals. The concept of the Other appears a useful concept to help explain the mechanical, systematic collection and use of personal information in ways that form our identity and our way of interacting with others – and the law that regulates this behaviour. We are not capable of identifying desire in this ‘Other’: the collection and regulation of data is bureaucratic, divorced from normal social interactions and desires.73 The Other is the system that imbues personal information with value, that sees it as capable of being disclosed, disseminated and traded. From the perspective of the subject, the concept of the Other seems to have a dual role in data protection law – reflecting both the over-arching regulatory structure for data protection and the ‘regulated entities’ that seek personal information. In terms of the regulatory structure, the Other reflects the nature of law itself as a system that does not itself have desire, but purports to support the desires of individuals. Indeed, Lacan suggests if there is a single question offered by the Other to the individual, it is ‘what do you want?’ 74 – so that apparently desires that arise ‘autonomously’, such as the desire for privacy, invariably strengthen the symbolic systems they appear to resist. Žižek, for example, describes how capitalist systems speak to individuals by encouraging and driving their desire for privacy, drawing on Lacan to describe how: when we try to preserve the authentic intimate sphere of privacy against the onslaught of ‘alienated’ public exchange, it is privacy itself that gets lost. Withdrawal into privacy means today adopting formulas of private authenticity propagated by the contemporary cultural industry.75 In terms of the regulated entities, the concept of the Other reflects the select type of entities that Australian data protection law intends to ‘control’. It is typically only federal government agencies and large enterprises that are regulated by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).76 Yet, importantly, the Act protects the inscrutable nature of these entities. At the Act’s centre is a strange silence: its emphasis on regulating the way in which personal information is used, without ever casting judgement on why regulated entities seek personal information and the business models which require it (in other words, why it is desired – which is always assumed to be a legitimate desire). Indeed, the very first National Privacy Principle reveals this gap by providing that ‘an organisation must not collect personal information unless it is necessary for one or more of its functions or activities’.77 There is no over-arching rule in the Act to determine whether the functions or activities that an organisation decides to undertake are themselves desirable, even if those activities require large-scale and intrusive collection of personal information. The Australian Law Reform Commission (‘ALRC’) has refused to recommend further rules to address this absence, noting only that: It is implied that the activities and functions pursuant to which agencies and organisations collect personal information must be lawful. It also is implied that collection pursuant to those functions must be lawful.78 Of course, in few cases is the ‘lawfulness’ of collection of personal information by commercial organisations regulated outside the Act (which is precisely where one would expect its lawfulness to be regulated). Further, the principle actually facilitates the inscrutable nature of data collection, by enabling the collector to claim that it has no desire for information; it may argue that personal information is only collected because it is ‘necessary’ to do so. The reason why the collection is necessary is deferred, to be addressed (if at all) in some other law. The fact that, for a private organisation, the ‘necessity’ is precisely the result of the organisation’s own commercial decisions and voluntary activities somehow eludes the scope of the Act. If ‘desire’ is at all relevant to data collection, then, it is only the desire of the data subject to its own personal information. Like in the fort-da game, the Other merely sets up a framework for the subject to negotiate and reflect its own desires. The Act sets up a regime that centres (with few exceptions) on the volunteering of personal information by individuals themselves, providing that, where reasonable and practicable, ‘an organisation must collect personal information about an individual only from that individual’.79 The assumption in this principle appears to be that collection should (where reasonable and practicable) be with the consent of the data subject – that is, the data subject must want to allow the information to be collected. The focus on the desire of the data subject then creates an ‘economy’ of personal information. The Act creates a regime whereby the release of an individual’s personal information to an organisation is described implicitly as being (except in limited circumstances) the result of their own desire. The Act then provides avenues for the individual to seek to recover control of that personal information through rules restricting the use or disclosure of the information,80 and being entitled to demand access to the information.81 Although the Act does not provide for the full ‘recovery’ of the information – it only provides for the destruction of personal information by the data collector ‘if it is no longer needed for any purpose for which the information may be used or disclosed’82 – the economy of personal information the Act creates nevertheless has strong resemblance to the fort-da game. The Act purports to – and does – regulate the inscrutable ‘Other’, setting out conditions for the disclosure and recovery of personal information. However, the economy of desire the Act creates (because the Act and the regulated data collectors are after all part of the bureaucratic institutional structure – that is, part of the Other) is predominantly a desire of the subject of that personal information. 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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