[Reader-list] TOWARDS A THEORY OF THE PERSONAL: IF Post 5

[inder salim]

On 7/8/07, ARNAB CHATTERJEE <apnawritings at yahoo.co.in> wrote:
>
>           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
> I'll start deploying the paradigm I've proposed.
> 1. Personal as pre-private : A theoretical detour
>           Notice that when we were revisiting the
> etymological meaning of private and public, we didn't
> 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 character's 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
> audience—in communicative complicity. Armed with this
> one insight as a flicker , now we are able to expand
> on the distinction theoretically:
>
>
>             Here we are approaching then—a 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 Parent's 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 I've 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 doesn't 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
> person's 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
> orunless we are ready to mess up, in the most
> unphilosophical manner, the precondition of a
> definition with the definition itself.
>
>
>   1.2   Now, if I'm 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 B—even 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, it's 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 somebody's 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
> person—they 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 I've outlined above. But instead as a
> provocative sample I want to submit before you as I've
> 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
> I'm aware of our Shuddhabrata Sengupta's celebration
> of Sen's book in Outlook but because I "know" the
> compulsions on us to be   politically correct while we
> write or speak  in the media, I'm granting him the
> benefit of doubt; and if he still holds on to  his
> celebration of Sen's 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 Nandy's 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 be—I'm afraid, appropriated in Sociology with an
> unprofessed naivete. Classical identity questions were
> not brought to solve role conflicts. Put briefly, the
> fact that I'm a father at home, and an officer at the
> office does not entail I've 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, you've 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, you'll
> 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. I'll answer: the person. And if
> it is that then I'm 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 Singh's 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 she—Khuswant
> laughingly tells us--  excelled in greedy, regular
> copulation.  With Khuswant someday she took to
> confessing her sins, "Oh my God, I'm 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 day—Sunday
> or Monday, they were usually engaged and Comparative
> Religion didn't disturb their contextual fall.
> Khuswant was lying and the 'nun' was riding him—Saint
> 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
> nationalist—Khuswant 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
> Chatterjee's 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., I'm a
> feminist outside and a masculist inside—but still it
> is me and I'm either and neither of them) and the
> question of personal agency is a better—theoretically
> correct replacement of identity, when would you pose
> the question of identity?" And here --thanking this
> serious reader I'll 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 well—she is self conscious, aware and
> her ego is intact—this 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 won't 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 don't know, I've 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 expression—that 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
> 'avowal'—but that's 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 shows—I guess—also 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 I'll start
> deploying the paradigm I've proposed.
> 1. Personal as pre-private : A theoretical detour
>                Notice that when we were revisiting the
> etymological meaning of private and public, we didn't
> 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 character's 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
> audience—in communicative complicity. Armed with this
> one insight as a flicker , now we are able to expand
> on the distinction theoretically:
>                           Here we are approaching
> then—a 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 Parent's 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 I've 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 doesn't 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
> person's 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 I'm 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 B—even 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, it's 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 somebody's 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
> person—they 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 I've outlined
> above. But instead as a provocative sample I want to
> submit before you as I've 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
> I'm aware of our Shuddhabrata Sengupta's celebration
> of Sen's book in Outlook but because I "know" the
> compulsions on us to be   politically correct while we
> write or speak  in the media, I'm granting him the
> benefit of doubt; and if he still holds on to  his
> celebration of Sen's 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 Nandy's 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 be—I'm afraid, appropriated in Sociology with an
> unprofessed naivete. Classical identity questions were
> not brought to solve role conflicts. Put briefly, the
> fact that I'm a father at home, and an officer at the
> office does not entail I've 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, you've 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, you'll
> 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. I'll answer: the person. And if
> it is that then I'm 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 Singh's 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 she—Khuswant
> laughingly tells us--  excelled in greedy, regular
> copulation.  With Khuswant someday she took to
> confessing her sins, "Oh my God, I'm 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 day—Sunday
> or Monday, they were usually engaged and Comparative
> Religion didn't disturb their contextual fall.
> Khuswant was lying and the 'nun' was riding him—Saint
> 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
> nationalist—Khuswant 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
> Chatterjee's 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., I'm a
> feminist outside and a masculist inside—but still it
> is me and I'm either and neither of them) and the
> question of personal agency is a better—theoretically
> correct replacement of identity, when would you pose
> the question of identity?" And here --thanking this
> serious reader I'll 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 well—she is self conscious, aware and
> her ego is intact—this 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 won't 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 don't know, I've 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 expression—that 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
> 'avowal'—but that's 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 shows—I guess—also 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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