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August 24, 2003
This resource is courtesy of Lawrence Solum. What caught my eye was this paper on Richard Rorty.
Why so? Well, I have been thinking about the way "political" blogs act to loosen up the entrenched public/private distinction. I mentioned this briefly in this response to Ken Parish's recent paper on bloggers as monitorial citizens. By this he meant that bloggers act as fire alarms in the public sphere. Tis a long way from republican citizens. I want to use this post to show that blogging opens up a world of different kinds of intellectual practice.
Ken does not mention the sexblogs that transgress the sexual conventions in public life as political ones. He concentrates on a narrow understanding of 'political' blog, and so he does not consider the challenges to the normalizing routines of liberal society in the name of self-expression, self-creation and self-exploration. This is a different kind of politics, and it is obscured by Ken's tacit use of the liberal private/public distinction. Many blogs challenge this distinction and this opens up ways for bloggers to be more than fire alarms. There is a lot of subversion going on in those challenges to the sexual conventions that are taken for granted in the public sphere.
I want to introduce Rorty in order to open up Ken's limited idea of bloggers as fire alarms. Rorty is useful/relevant to this issue of private/public. He endeavours to reconcile the political liberalism in the public sphere with personal self-expression in the private sphere through a pragmatic public/private distinction. I have considered Rorty's views on this distinction before, especially in this post. A postmodern liberal society (one without foundations) is one in which change and improvement is achieved by reform and persuasion through the free and open encounters of linguistic practices within the marketplace of ideas. The aim is to create a decent liberal society in which public institutions do not humiliate and which allows a romantic sense of self-creation.
The public /private distinction allows this. Hence its strength. In our private lives we can be as self-creative, irrationalistic and aestheticist as we like:--we can explore the world S/M bondage of a Robert Mapplethorpe if we so desire. Or we can trangress sexual taboos, if we hold that these activities are important to the self-perfection of our subjectivities.
It is not a free for all. Rorty would draw the line at some forms of irrationality --being a sexual slave---as these cause harm to others, but that would then involve some sort of argument about consent. On Rorety;s We do need to be sensitive to whether self-creation leads to cruelty, or whether the sexual domination/submission (D/M)acting out involves us creating a character indifferent to the cruelty towards, and humiliation of, others
Now these D/M activities that are done in our private time are incompatible with justice and solidarity in the public sphere, as this romantic form of self-creation through the transgression of sexual taboos involves inflicting pain and humiliation on others. So Bataille's ethos redemption through mutilation and ecstasy may bne okay for the private sphere, but not for the public sphere. Hence we have different vocabularies for the private and public sphere. For Roty we need to avoid fusing them into one vocabulary and allow them to exist side by side.
It's a radical public private split. The logic of Rorty's position allows an incommensurability of vocabularies with their different understanding of right and wrong, good and evil. This is being a liberal ironist. As such, we recognize that the strong poets and creators in the private sphere can provide us with new vocabularies that spill over into the rest of society. Robert Mapplethorpe is a good example.
All of this amounts to Rorty more or less redescribing John Stuart Mill for a post modern society. Mill, remember, divided human activities into the private ('self-regarding') and the public ('other-regarding'). He argued that only the latter are properly subject to legal attention, and deployed the harm principle', to argue that the law should not be used to prohibit harmless immorality.
But what does that mean? Is Mill saying that some activities are private and therefore harmless, or that some activities are harmless and therefore private? I have assumed the former interpretation in that "private", "self-regarding" and consensual conduct---such as adult homosexuality, pornography/ obscenity, prostitution, blasphemy, gambling, drug use, suicide, etc--- for liberals is the realms of private subjectivity and autonomy and so must must be freed from the "overreach" of criminal sanction and law. The emphasis here is a libertarian one as it is on protecting private self-creation from the dictates of pubic morality.
Not everyone is comfortable with Rorty's reworking of the liberal private-public. Critics have launched a variety of criticisms on the degree/extent of Rorty's separation of the private morality public morality divide. The divide is not as stark as he makes out.
One problem is that Rorty overlooks the interrelation between the two spheres that is so evident with sexuality, such as safe sex and AIDS. Or with the recent censorship of depictions of sexuality in films such as Ken Park on the ground that they cause offence in the public sphere. As the editorial of Senses of the Cinema points out, the Board of Review and the Office of Film and Literature Classification Board imposed a Refused Classification on:
"Ken Park a critically praised 'art film' that has already been shown in many countries – for its supposedly non-simulated scenes of underage sex. Ken Park's RC status raises important questions concerning classification processes, how censorship legislation is defined and interpreted, and the overall conservatism of the classifiers, as well as the current guidelines regarding what can and cannot be shown at Australian film festivals."
When it comes to sexuality the private public distinction is looks pretty fuzzy.
Another line of criticism displaces the libertarian side of the equation to focus on private self-creation over flowing into the public. It holds that the private public distinction is undermined because some groups---ie., young men--do not want to keep their mode of fulfillment private. And what used to be written for women's is now being written for public consumption.
Another criticism is along the lines of poetic self-creation being less a withdrawal from politics and more a masculine, individual self-assertion that overflows into the public sphere. A private life lived in opposition to public sexual taboos is a direct challenge to the public morality. The danger here is that the particular private fantasies of men can involve the public humiliation of women and so undermine liberal public morality. Some of the stuff on public porn site sites is dam brutal as it is all about power being exercised over women by men full of hate and payback.
I have not explicitly stated these criticism in terms of moral conservatism that holds that pornography is dangerous, in that it causes people to do really bad things that they wouldn’t have done otherwise. Nor have I specifically mentioned feminism. Feminist arguments highlight the way the liberal public/private distinction within liberalismis not just a domain of individual freedom. The private realm, can and is, one of oppressive power relations for women, and so we have the whole area of domestic violence being opened up. Rorty's liberalism serves to obscure the reality and pervasiveness of the "gendered harms" affecting women.
But I have done enough to fuzz up the liberal private /public distinction and throw it into question. Now, to be fair to Rorty, the very point of making the private public distinction is to block the ironic romantic self-creation going public and becoming a public sexual politics. D/S performances, S/M routines or being a sexual slave should remain domesticated and only be a part of our private life. Desire is contained. But, for Rorty there is nothing wrong with being the way we are; in fact we should go on with our self-creation and becoming autonomous.
Rorty would add, individual self-fulfilment is not necessarily connected to public morality; individual good is not necessarily related to the public good. The use of 'necessarily' here means that there is both a flow of desire between the two spheres, and some sort of a filtering going on rather than the construction of a wall. Filtering is necessary because there is some nasty stuff out there on the Internet; stuff based on intrinsic harm being done to the participants under the guise of being sexual stimulation for individual pleasure.
If you want to put it starkly liberty needs to be caged. So how do romantic individuals engaged in sexual trangression of public moralities and conventions as a form of self-fulfillment filter the nasties? What sort of filter can be used?
Dirty Whore Online explores the private public filter. She says:
"It makes me confused when people draw a direct cause and effect correlation between someone having pornography and committing a sex crime. The porn may have provided additional stimulus or reinforced feelings, but it did not cause the crime. The pedophile did not fondle the little boy because of his collection of kiddie porn – he had the collection of kiddie porn because he was interested in fondling little boys… and eventually did so. Ignoring the interest wouldn’t have made it go away."
She goes on:
"...porn... can make the lines between acceptable and unacceptable behavior fuzzy. For example, some relatively mainstream porn has tended toward misogyny lately...I have mixed feelings about those. Humiliation and rough sex turn me on, so I find some portions arousing. On the other hand, these attitudes are growing too prevalent for my taste and I don’t like what that says about our society. Call me a snob, but there’s a very wide chasm between a smart woman with strong self esteem [submiting] to rough treatment because it turns her on, and a silly, insecure girl who doesn’t think she deserves anything better, just as the feminist, sweet man who sometimes lets his dark side come to the surface during sex is the antithesis of the abusive lout who hates women."
Rorty's reason for arguing for the private/public distinction is because he wants to defend the claim that liberal society is the best kind of society for achieving individual liberty and autonomy. Hence it is an argument to block the left's criticism of liberal society.
So what has all this to do with blogging, citizenshipand fire alarms? Well, it reinforces Tim Dunlop's point that we need to shift away from considering bloggers as public intellectuals to viewing the
"... the practice of blogging...as one that allows for a different understanding of what we traditionally understand as the category of "the" intellectual or the "public" intellectual."
Our understanding of citizenship is being opened up with blogging. Bloggers are deciding what the public issues that concern them are. As the example I've used here----sexuality----indicates, what is a matters of public concern is quite different to what is decided upon by our newspapers. So new issues are being put on the table; new ways of writing are being worked out; and new ways of challenging the blocked media arteries of the public sphere are being thrown up. New kinds of cyber citizens are in formation.
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I enjoy your blog. I just wanted to reclaim my last name, which is Solum.