[Reader-list] TOWARDS A THEORY OF THE PERSONAL: IF Post 5
ARNAB CHATTERJEE
apnawritings at yahoo.co.in
Sun Jul 8 18:24:40 IST 2007
TOWARDS A THEORY OF THE PERSONAL
Dear Readers,
After hinting at a historical
reconstruction of the personal as pre-private and
pre-public in my last post ( 30 June, 07), it would be
interesting to examine if the distinction can be
sustained theoretically as well. Here I shall pursue
it in a short and sharp manner.
In my subsequent posts I shall pursue how
personalist social work embodied these lessons in
colonial Kolkata; put briefly, in the coming posts
Ill start deploying the paradigm Ive proposed.
1. Personal as pre-private : A theoretical detour
Notice that when we were revisiting the
etymological meaning of private and public, we didnt
refer to person or personal. But if we had done so,
personal-private difference would be restored even in
that. Person deriving from old Latin persona meant
mask, particularly one worn by an actor; personal also
derived from the same persona. Now one reason for
wearing this mask was to enable the audience to
identify the characters personality, who - because
of the distance, could not always traverse it
visually. Therefore while private meant (often) a
solitary existence removed from the public life,
person or personal grew up in response to a collective
audiencein communicative complicity. Armed with this
one insight as a flicker , now we are able to expand
on the distinction theoretically:
Here we are approaching thena theory of
the personal. But because the personal appears lost
in the private, what is central to my work is the
distancing of the person-al from the private since,
having been embodied in the private it is used
interchangeably with the private as a similar register
of opposition to the Public. So before we begin let us
rehearse at the cost of uneasy boredom, the standard
usages that Private and Public have assumed: Public in
the west is built into the optic of the public
sphere- where public opinion is formed through the
mediation of publicity forms and is connected to
certain forms of representation, deliberation and
political authority. Private (sphere) follows by
entailing things that are not to be publicized in a
particular sense. Private is in opposition to the
public in the sense it suspends the formal equality of
all before law and entails things which will not be
shared with the public; in fact it opposes and
excludes the public and what wonder that the family
organized around private property, sex to that of
correspondence and conversation over telephone give a
content to the private and privacy.
So we begin by exploring the personal private
difference (1.1) and then chart it vis-a- vis the
public (2.2) to complete the triangle; (Endnotes are
in bracketed numbers ).
1.1 Let us then try at first to validate the
personal-private difference by deploying the best
contemporary classic discussion of privacy.
W.A Parents landmark paper titled
Privacy, Morality, and the Law ( Parent, 1983.)
published in the journal Philosophy and Public
Affairs is memorable for many reasons. One of them is
of course that he demolishes here all the classic
comfortable notions ( some of which Ive used above )
of privacy we had taken for granted. Here is a short
synopsis of his destruction: one, Privacy consists of
being let alone. Parent argues, there are
innumerable ways of failing to let a person alone
which have nothing to do with his privacy. Suppose,
for instance, that A clubs B on the head or repeatedly
insults him. We should describe and evaluate such
actions by appeal to concepts like force, violence,
and harassment (272); not the violation of privacy.
Two, Privacy consists of a form of autonomy or
control over significant personal matters. Parent
wonders at the example of a person who voluntarily
divulges all sorts of intimate, personal, and
undocumented information about himself to a friend.
She is doubtless exercising control
But we would not
and should not say that in doing so she is preserving
or protecting her privacy. On the contrary, she is
voluntarily relinquishing much of her privacy. People
can and do choose to give up privacy for many reasons
(273). Third, Privacy is the limitation on access
to the self. Parent retorts by saying if by access we
mean physical proximity or an exemption from snooping
or surveillance, then solitude or peace could be more
viable alternatives. But is peace or solitude privacy?
No, because
it confuses privacy with the
existential conditions that are necessary for its
realization. To achieve happiness I must have some
good luck, but this doesnt mean that happiness is
good luck. Similarly, if I am to enjoy privacy there
have to be limitations on cognitive access to me, but
these limitations are not themselves privacy. Rather
privacy is what they safe guard (275). Now having
demolished nearly all of the received definitions of
privacy, Parent comes out with a terse formulation of
his own definition of privacy which survives, and I
think quite plausibly, the above objections.
privacy is the condition of not having undocumented
personal knowledge about one possessed by others. A
persons privacy is diminished exactly to the degree
that others possess this kind of knowledge about him
(269). Parent adds, What I am defining is the
condition of privacy not the right of privacy (269).
Let us just take hold of the word personal in the
above definition. What is personal here is that which
is a prior condition of privacy. Personal may provide
the private or privacy with a content but personal is
not privacy. Nothing can be the condition of something
unless it is different from that which is being
provided with the condition by courtesy of the former
or unless we are ready to mess up, in the most
unphilosophical manner, the precondition of a
definition with the definition itself.
1.2 Now, if Im correct to argue the personal as
the theoretical (and not only historical) precondition
of the private, let me include here the other
indispensable algorithm of the binary: public and
expand this to a full formulation.
i) PERSONAL IS PHENOMENOLOGICAL, PRIVATE/PUBLIC ARE
POLITICAL : We are aware of the criteria for public
and private. Private/public are stable categories
which are defined by legal-juridical indexes and
people go to court for redress if they feel violated
(2). But genuine personal matters like that of love or
/and friendship (3) cannot be legislated and are not
subject of litigation. There is a unique uncertainty
and indeterminacy associated with the decision or the
destiny of a person in these cases (nobody knows
whether A loves Beven B does not) --which makes it a
phenomenological ( 4 )notion and not a political one.
ii) PRIVATE IS OPPOSED TO THE PUBLIC, PERSONAL IS NOT
: Personal unlike the private is not necessarily
opposed to the public. I might choose somebody to be
my lover, its my personal choice and I might want to
declare my choice to the public, this makes love a
personal relationship, and not a private one. Consider
more examples: When personal attacks are made in
politics they may not intrude into somebodys sacred
domain of privacy but are essentially directed against
a person and in this sense they are personal attacks.
I have a personal opinion and who stops me from
uttering it to the T.V interviewer ? But consider sex,
sex is private in the sense I cannot choose to have
sex in the public or consider private property which
is famous for its exclusion of the public.
iii) PERSON/PERSONAL ARE NOT SPHERES LIKE THE PRIVATE
AND THE PUBLIC: The interesting point is, while
public/private spheres are categories that are tied to
certain phenomenon; personal is a category that is
peculiarly tied to the person; there is no sphere
(5 ) which is or ought to be explanatively employed
here. ( Sphere, etymologically, is referred to an area
of activity and public/private arenas do refer to a
collection of actions whereas the personal refers to
the agency of these actions (6). We may be fathers in
our private sphere and officers in the public office,
but a person is not simply a father or an officer. We
might perform our public or private actions but a
person cannot be reduced to these actions. He is both
a father and an officer and more. A dangerous mafia
outside may be a caring father at home. That in the
agency of his person he combines these irreconcilable
roles or differentiates them and the way he does it
constitutes the personal agency of the person (See
CONCLUSION for a debatable clarification on this).
iv) PERSONAL IS BOTH PRIVATE AND PUBLIC AND/OR
BEYOND: Let us remember that in Indian law the
personal is defined as anything referring to a
personthey may be private matters or public affairs.
In this sense personal is both public and private. A
person at times is a private person or assumes
public roles. But as s/he belongs to both it can be
as well argued that s/he belongs exclusively to
neither. Or again, belongs to both by virtue of
crossing both these floors time and again. And as such
the personal becomes a third not reducible to the two
other registers. It is impossible to reduce it to
private/public functions because it is able to grasp
and escape both limits at the same time.
CONCLUSION
A lot can be talked about the implications
of the proposal Ive outlined above. But instead as a
provocative sample I want to submit before you as Ive
already hinted in ( above iii) why irreconcilable role
definitions are better described through personal
agency and not identity as proposed by Amartya Sen
et.al. This is also to confront and urge a rethinking
on the rubric of identity and identity politics to
day through the personal.
So yes, following from iii
above
.I start by asserting that personal agency and
not identity as Amartya Sen (Sen 2006) argues (and
Im aware of our Shuddhabrata Senguptas celebration
of Sens book in Outlook but because I know the
compulsions on us to be politically correct while we
write or speak in the media, Im granting him the
benefit of doubt; and if he still holds on to his
celebration of Sens argument, I hope there will be a
dialogue;).
To resume
personal agency and not
identity as Amartya Sen (Sen 2006) argues; neither it
is, I assume the issue of limited autonomy we enjoy
regarding our choice of temporality (for instance
past) as Dipesh Chakraborty pointed out as a
rebuttal of Ashis Nandys alleged excessive
voluntarism in regard to traditions. I think what
happens here is that a sociological register is being
mixed up with a (social) philosophical one. Role, role
taking, hypothetical role taking, role reversal etc
are all sociological determinants emerging in response
to the functional differentiation of society;
identity is a classical philosophical problem which
can beIm afraid, appropriated in Sociology with an
unprofessed naivete. Classical identity questions were
not brought to solve role conflicts. Put briefly, the
fact that Im a father at home, and an officer at the
office does not entail Ive two identities or multiple
identities here (and therefore I be tolerant about
others); Now (granting this technical mix up a
breather) given the classical formulation of identity
in philosophy (Partha Chatterjee did invoke it in
Princely Impostor) it is the question of
uninterrupted continuity that matters i.e., my sure
transition from this role to that role will sustain my
identity ( or unless the man who has undergone
functional abnormalcy or the so called mad have real
multiple identities). This will not be possible with
an absolute identification or total immersion in a
particular role or else, as we know, a Salesman, in an
economic delirium as if, will use the language of
selling love to his wife at home or an attractive
woman -- after having had (lets add this) domestic
confirmation, will be sure about seducing the Boss to
go up and up (for the latest elongated statement on
such matters, youve already seen Life in a Metro).
Now, that becomes only possible when there is a lack
of identification rather than identification as such.
This gives the power to feign and cheat others (as
told before, this is the governance by fraud which I
place before the governance by force or the
governance by consent) as well as subscribe to
purposive truthfulness. Now, we can guess why we do
not succeed with honesty in daily life, honesty as the
practical maxim of truth is based on a total positive,
normative identification with a norm or a rule; when
it promises rights, it offers them. But Hegel, youll
remember, defined fraud as giving the semblance of
rights rather than the rights themselves to the
recipient who has the mistaken contention all the
while that he is being offered the right thing. This
successful and enabling (!) lack of identification
could not be a place-holder for the phrase identity;
one could as well term it Dis-Identity or
Non-Identity. What we are rejecting then is an
absolute lack or an absolute identification with a
particular role, and given our everyday life, we
master or learn to master, more or less the
manipulation or maneuver of these and continue
without interruption; our corresponding success or
failure depends much on this. Now, who does this--
this is the question. Ill answer: the person. And if
it is that then Im perhaps right in using personal
agency (where identification, disidentification and
the manuevre are present in their rational and/or
irrational combinations) and not personal identity.
Identity when reduced to such sociological
questions of functional role assumptions has also
given rise to other misunderstandings sans Amartya
Sen: for instance toleration emerging from so called
multiple identities (!). The answer is, if there is
a constant lack of identification with each of my
roles (well again - wrongly identities), there is
a constant dis-identification at work (and why not)
with other similar or dissimilar people. Now to what
extent this would be tolerated and not is an empirical
question and cannot be solved philosophically or
predicted sociologically. (The case of Cho Seung-hui
and the Virginia Tech Massacre is a case in point.)And
when it comes to
such questions of national identity- Indian or not
there are more jokes to tell.
This is from Khuswant Singhs inventory
(though the theory is not there). It was about his
college days abroad where there was a girl in his
class from Pakistan taking courses in Comparative
Religion. An attentive first bencher she was a growing
Islamic nun sort of but out of the class sheKhuswant
laughingly tells us-- excelled in greedy, regular
copulation. With Khuswant someday she took to
confessing her sins, Oh my God, Im sinning but
hopefully Allah will forgive me, the temptations of
the flesh are too strong and my spirit, is so very
(and smooched another time) wet and weak. Khuswant
agreed! (or did he?).
Now, again on some other daySunday
or Monday, they were usually engaged and Comparative
Religion didnt disturb their contextual fall.
Khuswant was lying and the nun was riding himSaint
John; suddenly something came to her mind and she
told Khuswant, India and Pakistan can solve all their
problems like this in a day! A true
nationalistKhuswant gasping under her heavy weight,
could not but retort, Yes, with Pakistan always on
top!
Now, solve the identity riddle here with
all the registers present: nationality, nationalism,
religion, sex, hybridity and what not. Or do they
need to be present in a serious form? I agree but the
first trivia was generated with you posing these as
identity-questions. And with one of Sandipan
Chatterjees character we may now just stomp our foot
on the floor and scream, Sunlight!! Sunlight!! You
have reduced it to a bloody soap! Identity!!
Identity!! You have reduced it to bloody citizenship,
diaspora, Dalit, Muslim, Hindu and other brand names
and innumerable role and role conflicts.
Finally, the genuine and engaged,
attentive reader will ask, Well if you are correct
in saying identity could be posed to study the
process and not agency of continuity (e.g., Im a
feminist outside and a masculist insidebut still it
is me and Im either and neither of them) and the
question of personal agency is a bettertheoretically
correct replacement of identity, when would you pose
the question of identity? And here --thanking this
serious reader Ill give her an example of where both
these moments are present but where one will fail in
order to give way to another: Rakhi Sawant in a
recent interview to TOI tells about a nasty thing she
had had to do at the age of 13 in order to save her
penniless ailing mother from dying. And now after
having seen the ways of the world ( a Hegelian
phrase) she thinks there is nothing wrong in exposing
or indiscriminate sleeping when necessary. But at her
home she says she is in absolute command; there she
wears no revealing dresses and allows no fickle person
to come near. Now, if I say she combines these well in
her personal agency, you will have to agree; I will go
further and argue that her transition from this to
that is carried wellshe is self conscious, aware and
her ego is intactthis is the minimal identity trait
that could be included as an element of her person-al
agency. But now if I ask a substantive identity
question, Rakhi who are you? Are you the one who does
dirty dancing and sells sex at high prices? Or the one
who wont allow sex seekers inside your house (whose
interior you say you have made all by yourself)? Rakhi
will say, yes all of them and none of these: my
identity cannot be reduced to any of these even though
it runs through all of them. Then, who are you Rakhi?
I dont know, Ive never asked myself this question.
(Rakhi apart-- many kill themselves and yet so many
live without this question.)
Now, whether we shall allow this
classical formulation of identity to settle on its
un-knowability or following modern governmenatlity--
on its impossible and false enumerability, is the
question.
And here, my prayer is: let not
Sunlight be soap anymore. Thank you!
ENDNOTES
1. Parent excludes from his definition documented
personal information available in public or
institutional records.
2. In this sense let us not be misled by what goes on
by the name of personal laws, they are but remnants of
private or customary law.
3. The concrete act of the person can be understood
as a mere sum or a mere construct of such abstract
essences no more than the person can be understood as
a mere interconnective complex of acts. Rather, it is
the person himself, living in each of his acts, who
permeates every act with his peculiar character. No
knowledge of the nature of love, for instance, or of
the nature of judgment, can bring us one step nearer
to the knowledge of how person A loves or judges
person B; nor can a reference to the contents (
values, states of affairs) given in each of these acts
furnish this knowledge. But, on the other hand, a
glance at the person himself and his essence
immediately yields a peculiarity for every act that
we know him to execute, and the knowledge of his
world yields a peculiarity for the contents of his
acts (Scheler, 1973: 386).
4. Phenomenology is the discourse of subjective,
pure experience bereft of presuppositions and
preexisting categories. As a foundational science, it
posits, as Derrida is fond of describing it, a
principle of principles.
5. Just consider the special meaning that Habermas
alludes to the italicized word here, The principle
of the public sphere, that is, critical publicity,
seemed to lose its strength in the measure that it
expanded as a sphere and even undermined the private
realm. (Habermas, 1996) And from the quote itself, I
guess, it becomes clear as to why ---while Habermas
previously deployed the word sphere to refer to the
personal sphere of the monarch, the use was
distinctly unhappy.
6. Therefore when Wittgenstein called pain private I
guess he is a victim of a politically contaminated use
of an expressionthat is, one might hazard, his
liberal pain and not pain itself.
While
meditating on the metaphysical relationship between
work and pain, consider this from
Heidegger, If anyone would, indeed,
dare to think through the relationship between
work as the basic feature of being and pain
Then
pain would be the most intimate of gatherings.
(Heidegger 1956, 69-71) But this deep subjectivity, in
order to be successful should be located in the person
and not the sphere that is private ( and Wittegenstein
having ascribed, after an incorrect beginning where
pain was privately and inalienably owned and
epistemically known ( no one else can have MY pain
-which only I can know) to a no-ownership theory
of pain (ending though in a theory of inner
avowalbut thats a different story). In this sense
I would argue, pain is personal and not private. This
would clarify why even if the later -Habermas tried
to include the intimate sphere as the third beside the
public and the private, could not make any departure.
I think Hannah Arendt was right when she focused on
the failure of the creation of a deep private sphere
or the intimate sphere in trying to resist the rise
of the social. This amply showsI guessalso the
limits of the category intimate and why it fails
to move beyond the liberal binary.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Glock, Hans-Johann. 1997. A Wittgenstein Dictionary.
Blackwell Publishers: Oxford.
Habermas, J. 1996. The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of
Bourgeois Society, T. Berger (Trans.),Great Britain:
Blackwell Publishers & Polity Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1956. The Question of Being.
Transl. W. Kluback& J.T. Wilde. New York : Twayne
Publishers.
Parent, W.A. 1983. Privacy, Morality, and the Law in
Philosophy and Public Affairs. 12(4): 269-288.
Scheler, Max. 1973. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal
Ethics of Values. Transl. Manfred S.Frings & Roger L.
Funk. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Sen,, Amartya. 2006. Identity and Violence: The
Illusion of Destiny. Allen Lane:
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1953) 1995. Philosophical
Investigations. Transl. G.E. M. Anscombe. Blackwell :
Oxford.
-------------------------------------------------
TOWARDS A THEORY OF THE PERSONAL
Dear Readers,
After hinting at a historical reconstruction of the
personal as pre-private and pre-public in my last post
( 30 June, 07), it would be interesting to examine if
the distinction can be sustained theoretically as
well. Here I shall pursue it in a short and sharp
manner.
In my subsequent posts I shall pursue how personalist
social work embodied these lessons in colonial
Kolkata; put briefly, in the coming posts Ill start
deploying the paradigm Ive proposed.
1. Personal as pre-private : A theoretical detour
Notice that when we were revisiting the
etymological meaning of private and public, we didnt
refer to person or personal. But if we had done so,
personal-private difference would be restored even in
that. Person deriving from old Latin persona meant
mask, particularly one worn by an actor; personal also
derived from the same persona. Now one reason for
wearing this mask was to enable the audience to
identify the characters personality, who - because
of the distance, could not always traverse it
visually. Therefore while private meant (often) a
solitary existence removed from the public life,
person or personal grew up in response to a collective
audiencein communicative complicity. Armed with this
one insight as a flicker , now we are able to expand
on the distinction theoretically:
Here we are approaching
thena theory of the personal. But because the
personal appears lost in the private, what is central
to my work is the distancing of the person-al from the
private since, having been embodied in the private it
is used interchangeably with the private as a similar
register of opposition to the Public. So before we
begin let us rehearse at the cost of uneasy boredom,
the standard usages that Private and Public have
assumed: Public in the west is built into the optic of
the public sphere- where public opinion is formed
through the mediation of publicity forms and is
connected to certain forms of representation,
deliberation and political authority. Private (sphere)
follows by entailing things that are not to be
publicized in a particular sense. Private is in
opposition to the public in the sense it suspends the
formal equality of all before law and entails things
which will not be shared with the public; in fact it
opposes and excludes the public and what wonder that
the family organized around private property, sex to
that of correspondence and conversation over telephone
give a content to the private and privacy.
So we begin by exploring the personal private
difference (1.1) and then chart it vis-a- vis the
public (2.2) to complete the triangle; (Endnotes are
in bracketed numbers ).
1.1 Let us then try at first to validate the
personal-private difference by deploying the best
contemporary classic discussion of privacy.
W.A Parents landmark paper titled
Privacy, Morality, and the Law ( Parent, 1983.)
published in the journal Philosophy and Public
Affairs is memorable for many reasons. One of them is
of course that he demolishes here all the classic
comfortable notions ( some of which Ive used above )
of privacy we had taken for granted. Here is a short
synopsis of his destruction: one, Privacy consists of
being let alone. Parent argues, there are
innumerable ways of failing to let a person alone
which have nothing to do with his privacy. Suppose,
for instance, that A clubs B on the head or repeatedly
insults him. We should describe and evaluate such
actions by appeal to concepts like force, violence,
and harassment (272); not the violation of privacy.
Two, Privacy consists of a form of autonomy or
control over significant personal matters. Parent
wonders at the example of a person who voluntarily
divulges all sorts of intimate, personal, and
undocumented information about himself to a friend.
She is doubtless exercising control
But we would not
and should not say that in doing so she is preserving
or protecting her privacy. On the contrary, she is
voluntarily relinquishing much of her privacy. People
can and do choose to give up privacy for many reasons
(273). Third, Privacy is the limitation on access
to the self. Parent retorts by saying if by access we
mean physical proximity or an exemption from snooping
or surveillance, then solitude or peace could be more
viable alternatives. But is peace or solitude privacy?
No, because
it confuses privacy with the
existential conditions that are necessary for its
realization. To achieve happiness I must have some
good luck, but this doesnt mean that happiness is
good luck. Similarly, if I am to enjoy privacy there
have to be limitations on cognitive access to me, but
these limitations are not themselves privacy. Rather
privacy is what they safe guard (275). Now having
demolished nearly all of the received definitions of
privacy, Parent comes out with a terse formulation of
his own definition of privacy which survives, and I
think quite plausibly, the above objections.
privacy is the condition of not having undocumented
personal knowledge about one possessed by others. A
persons privacy is diminished exactly to the degree
that others possess this kind of knowledge about him
(269). Parent adds, What I am defining is the
condition of privacy not the right of privacy (269).
Let us just take hold of the word personal in the
above definition. What is personal here is that which
is a prior condition of privacy. Personal may provide
the private or privacy with a content but personal is
not privacy. Nothing can be the condition of something
unless it is different from that which is being
provided with the condition by courtesy of the former
or unless we are ready to mess up, in the most
unphilosophical manner, the precondition of a
definition with the definition itself.
1.2 Now,
if Im correct to argue the personal as the
theoretical (and not only historical) precondition of
the private, let me include here the other
indispensable algorithm of the binary: public and
expand this to a full formulation.
i) PERSONAL IS PHENOMENOLOGICAL, PRIVATE/PUBLIC ARE
POLITICAL : We are aware of the criteria for public
and private. Private/public are stable categories
which are defined by legal-juridical indexes and
people go to court for redress if they feel violated
(2). But genuine personal matters like that of love or
/and friendship (3) cannot be legislated and are not
subject of litigation. There is a unique uncertainty
and indeterminacy associated with the decision or the
destiny of a person in these cases (nobody knows
whether A loves Beven B does not) --which makes it a
phenomenological ( 4 )notion and not a political one.
ii) PRIVATE IS OPPOSED TO THE PUBLIC, PERSONAL IS NOT
: Personal unlike the private is not necessarily
opposed to the public. I might choose somebody to be
my lover, its my personal choice and I might want to
declare my choice to the public, this makes love a
personal relationship, and not a private one. Consider
more examples: When personal attacks are made in
politics they may not intrude into somebodys sacred
domain of privacy but are essentially directed against
a person and in this sense they are personal attacks.
I have a personal opinion and who stops me from
uttering it to the T.V interviewer ? But consider sex,
sex is private in the sense I cannot choose to have
sex in the public or consider private property which
is famous for its exclusion of the public.
iii) PERSON/PERSONAL ARE NOT SPHERES LIKE THE PRIVATE
AND THE PUBLIC: The interesting point is, while
public/private spheres are categories that are tied to
certain phenomenon; personal is a category that is
peculiarly tied to the person; there is no sphere
(5 ) which is or ought to be explanatively employed
here. ( Sphere, etymologically, is referred to an area
of activity and public/private arenas do refer to a
collection of actions whereas the personal refers to
the agency of these actions (6). We may be fathers in
our private sphere and officers in the public office,
but a person is not simply a father or an officer. We
might perform our public or private actions but a
person cannot be reduced to these actions. He is both
a father and an officer and more. A dangerous mafia
outside may be a caring father at home. That in the
agency of his person he combines these irreconcilable
roles or differentiates them and the way he does it
constitutes the personal agency of the person (See
CONCLUSION for a debatable clarification on this).
iv) PERSONAL IS BOTH PRIVATE AND PUBLIC AND/OR
BEYOND: Let us remember that in Indian law the
personal is defined as anything referring to a
personthey may be private matters or public affairs.
In this sense personal is both public and private. A
person at times is a private person or assumes
public roles. But as s/he belongs to both it can be
as well argued that s/he belongs exclusively to
neither. Or again, belongs to both by virtue of
crossing both these floors time and again. And as such
the personal becomes a third not reducible to the two
other registers. It is impossible to reduce it to
private/public functions because it is able to grasp
and escape both limits at the same time.
CONCLUSION
A lot can be talked
about the implications of the proposal Ive outlined
above. But instead as a provocative sample I want to
submit before you as Ive already hinted in ( above
iii) why irreconcilable role definitions are better
described through personal agency and not identity as
proposed by Amartya Sen et.al. This is also to
confront and urge a rethinking on the rubric of
identity and identity politics to day through the
personal.
So yes, following from iii
above
.I start by asserting that personal agency and
not identity as Amartya Sen (Sen 2006) argues (and
Im aware of our Shuddhabrata Senguptas celebration
of Sens book in Outlook but because I know the
compulsions on us to be politically correct while we
write or speak in the media, Im granting him the
benefit of doubt; and if he still holds on to his
celebration of Sens argument, I hope there will be a
dialogue;).
To resume
personal agency and not
identity as Amartya Sen (Sen 2006) argues; neither it
is, I assume the issue of limited autonomy we enjoy
regarding our choice of temporality (for instance
past) as Dipesh Chakraborty pointed out as a
rebuttal of Ashis Nandys alleged excessive
voluntarism in regard to traditions. I think what
happens here is that a sociological register is being
mixed up with a (social) philosophical one. Role, role
taking, hypothetical role taking, role reversal etc
are all sociological determinants emerging in response
to the functional differentiation of society;
identity is a classical philosophical problem which
can beIm afraid, appropriated in Sociology with an
unprofessed naivete. Classical identity questions were
not brought to solve role conflicts. Put briefly, the
fact that Im a father at home, and an officer at the
office does not entail Ive two identities or multiple
identities here (and therefore I be tolerant about
others); Now (granting this technical mix up a
breather) given the classical formulation of identity
in philosophy (Partha Chatterjee did invoke it in
Princely Impostor) it is the question of
uninterrupted continuity that matters i.e., my sure
transition from this role to that role will sustain my
identity ( or unless the man who has undergone
functional abnormalcy or the so called mad have real
multiple identities). This will not be possible with
an absolute identification or total immersion in a
particular role or else, as we know, a Salesman, in an
economic delirium as if, will use the language of
selling love to his wife at home or an attractive
woman -- after having had (lets add this) domestic
confirmation, will be sure about seducing the Boss to
go up and up (for the latest elongated statement on
such matters, youve already seen Life in a Metro).
Now, that becomes only possible when there is a lack
of identification rather than identification as such.
This gives the power to feign and cheat others (as
told before, this is the governance by fraud which I
place before the governance by force or the
governance by consent) as well as subscribe to
purposive truthfulness. Now, we can guess why we do
not succeed with honesty in daily life, honesty as the
practical maxim of truth is based on a total positive,
normative identification with a norm or a rule; when
it promises rights, it offers them. But Hegel, youll
remember, defined fraud as giving the semblance of
rights rather than the rights themselves to the
recipient who has the mistaken contention all the
while that he is being offered the right thing. This
successful and enabling (!) lack of identification
could not be a place-holder for the phrase identity;
one could as well term it Dis-Identity or
Non-Identity. What we are rejecting then is an
absolute lack or an absolute identification with a
particular role, and given our everyday life, we
master or learn to master, more or less the
manipulation or maneuver of these and continue
without interruption; our corresponding success or
failure depends much on this. Now, who does this--
this is the question. Ill answer: the person. And if
it is that then Im perhaps right in using personal
agency (where identification, disidentification and
the manuevre are present in their rational and/or
irrational combinations) and not personal identity.
Identity when reduced to such sociological
questions of functional role assumptions has also
given rise to other misunderstandings sans Amartya
Sen: for instance toleration emerging from so called
multiple identities (!). The answer is, if there is
a constant lack of identification with each of my
roles (well again - wrongly identities), there is
a constant dis-identification at work (and why not)
with other similar or dissimilar people. Now to what
extent this would be tolerated and not is an empirical
question and cannot be solved philosophically or
predicted sociologically. (The case of Cho Seung-hui
and the Virginia Tech Massacre is a case in point.)And
when it comes to
such questions of national identity- Indian or not
there are more jokes to tell.
This is from Khuswant Singhs inventory
(though the theory is not there). It was about his
college days abroad where there was a girl in his
class from Pakistan taking courses in Comparative
Religion. An attentive first bencher she was a growing
Islamic nun sort of but out of the class sheKhuswant
laughingly tells us-- excelled in greedy, regular
copulation. With Khuswant someday she took to
confessing her sins, Oh my God, Im sinning but
hopefully Allah will forgive me, the temptations of
the flesh are too strong and my spirit, is so very
(and smooched another time) wet and weak. Khuswant
agreed! (or did he?).
Now, again on some other daySunday
or Monday, they were usually engaged and Comparative
Religion didnt disturb their contextual fall.
Khuswant was lying and the nun was riding himSaint
John; suddenly something came to her mind and she
told Khuswant, India and Pakistan can solve all their
problems like this in a day! A true
nationalistKhuswant gasping under her heavy weight,
could not but retort, Yes, with Pakistan always on
top!
Now, solve the identity riddle here with
all the registers present: nationality, nationalism,
religion, sex, hybridity and what not. Or do they
need to be present in a serious form? I agree but the
first trivia was generated with you posing these as
identity-questions. And with one of Sandipan
Chatterjees character we may now just stomp our foot
on the floor and scream, Sunlight!! Sunlight!! You
have reduced it to a bloody soap! Identity!!
Identity!! You have reduced it to bloody citizenship,
diaspora, Dalit, Muslim, Hindu and other brand names
and innumerable role and role conflicts.
Finally, the genuine and engaged,
attentive reader will ask, Well if you are correct
in saying identity could be posed to study the
process and not agency of continuity (e.g., Im a
feminist outside and a masculist insidebut still it
is me and Im either and neither of them) and the
question of personal agency is a bettertheoretically
correct replacement of identity, when would you pose
the question of identity? And here --thanking this
serious reader Ill give her an example of where both
these moments are present but where one will fail in
order to give way to another: Rakhi Sawant in a
recent interview to TOI tells about a nasty thing she
had had to do at the age of 13 in order to save her
penniless ailing mother from dying. And now after
having seen the ways of the world ( a Hegelian
phrase) she thinks there is nothing wrong in exposing
or indiscriminate sleeping when necessary. But at her
home she says she is in absolute command; there she
wears no revealing dresses and allows no fickle person
to come near. Now, if I say she combines these well in
her personal agency, you will have to agree; I will go
further and argue that her transition from this to
that is carried wellshe is self conscious, aware and
her ego is intactthis is the minimal identity trait
that could be included as an element of her person-al
agency. But now if I ask a substantive identity
question, Rakhi who are you? Are you the one who does
dirty dancing and sells sex at high prices? Or the one
who wont allow sex seekers inside your house (whose
interior you say you have made all by yourself)? Rakhi
will say, yes all of them and none of these: my
identity cannot be reduced to any of these even though
it runs through all of them. Then, who are you Rakhi?
I dont know, Ive never asked myself this question.
(Rakhi apart-- many kill themselves and yet so many
live without this question.)
Now, whether we shall allow this
classical formulation of identity to settle on its
un-knowability or following modern governmenatlity--
on its impossible and false enumerability, is the
question.
And here, my prayer is: let not
Sunlight be soap anymore. Thank you!
ENDNOTES
1. Parent excludes from his definition documented
personal information available in public or
institutional records.
2. In this sense let us not be misled by what goes on
by the name of personal laws, they are but remnants of
private or customary law.
3. The concrete act of the person can be understood
as a mere sum or a mere construct of such abstract
essences no more than the person can be understood as
a mere interconnective complex of acts. Rather, it is
the person himself, living in each of his acts, who
permeates every act with his peculiar character. No
knowledge of the nature of love, for instance, or of
the nature of judgment, can bring us one step nearer
to the knowledge of how person A loves or judges
person B; nor can a reference to the contents (
values, states of affairs) given in each of these acts
furnish this knowledge. But, on the other hand, a
glance at the person himself and his essence
immediately yields a peculiarity for every act that
we know him to execute, and the knowledge of his
world yields a peculiarity for the contents of his
acts (Scheler, 1973: 386).
4. Phenomenology is the discourse of subjective,
pure experience bereft of presuppositions and
preexisting categories. As a foundational science, it
posits, as Derrida is fond of describing it, a
principle of principles.
5. Just consider the special meaning that Habermas
alludes to the italicized word here, The principle
of the public sphere, that is, critical publicity,
seemed to lose its strength in the measure that it
expanded as a sphere and even undermined the private
realm. (Habermas, 1996) And from the quote itself, I
guess, it becomes clear as to why ---while Habermas
previously deployed the word sphere to refer to the
personal sphere of the monarch, the use was
distinctly unhappy.
6. Therefore when Wittgenstein called pain private I
guess he is a victim of a politically contaminated use
of an expressionthat is, one might hazard, his
liberal pain and not pain itself.
While
meditating on the metaphysical relationship between
work and pain, consider this from
Heidegger, If anyone would, indeed,
dare to think through the relationship between
work as the basic feature of being and pain
Then
pain would be the most intimate of gatherings.
(Heidegger 1956, 69-71) But this deep subjectivity, in
order to be successful should be located in the person
and not the sphere that is private ( and Wittegenstein
having ascribed, after an incorrect beginning where
pain was privately and inalienably owned and
epistemically known ( no one else can have MY pain
-which only I can know) to a no-ownership theory
of pain (ending though in a theory of inner
avowalbut thats a different story). In this sense
I would argue, pain is personal and not private. This
would clarify why even if the later -Habermas tried
to include the intimate sphere as the third beside the
public and the private, could not make any departure.
I think Hannah Arendt was right when she focused on
the failure of the creation of a deep private sphere
or the intimate sphere in trying to resist the rise
of the social. This amply showsI guessalso the
limits of the category intimate and why it fails
to move beyond the liberal binary.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Glock, Hans-Johann. 1997. A Wittgenstein Dictionary.
Blackwell Publishers: Oxford.
Habermas, J. 1996. The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of
Bourgeois Society, T. Berger (Trans.),Great Britain:
Blackwell Publishers & Polity Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1956. The Question of Being.
Transl. W. Kluback& J.T. Wilde. New York : Twayne
Publishers.
Parent, W.A. 1983. Privacy, Morality, and the Law in
Philosophy and Public Affairs. 12(4): 269-288.
Scheler, Max. 1973. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal
Ethics of Values. Transl. Manfred S.Frings & Roger L.
Funk. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Sen,, Amartya. 2006. Identity and Violence: The
Illusion of Destiny. Allen Lane.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1953) 1995. Philosophical
Investigations. Transl. G.E. M. Anscombe. Blackwell :
Oxford.
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