[Reader-list] Personal as pre-private,pre-public!!!
ARNAB CHATTERJEE
apnawritings at yahoo.co.in
Sat Jun 30 19:34:20 IST 2007
Dear Readers,
Sorry for being a bit late but
for reasons even you would surely recognize and
consider my apology with sentimental biology that's
needed.
Youll remember where we parted: the
promise was to begin with the history of the personal.
I had made a short detour charting this history in
telegraphic terms-from the monarch to the dictator --
taking Gandhis desire as drive. And now after so much
of empirical historical lesson I think the choices are
pretty clear : people wanting to interpret the world
would go for so called democracy, liberalism and so
forth; people wanting to change the world would go
for either Fascism or revolutionary Communismthere is
no other way, perhaps. And my version of pure politics
will inform as a rider over this that any person or
programme can cheat or made to deceive: morality does
not come with a warranty. And this failure being
irreducible, it was illuminated by Hegel when he said
that there are two ways to achieve a moral world :
utopia or terror. Even such a grand deontologist
philosopher as Kant uses a phrase like moral
terrorism and proposes a terroristic conception of
history; but Hegels copula is more illuminating.
Terror rejects an immediate place; utopia regulates a
non-placethey can never, never be estranged. And with
Fascism and communism it is more futile to undertake
such an exercise. But you might have noticed a sharp
difference : while in Fascism you have dictatorship in
the person-al form, in Marx you have dictatorship of a
whole class even if universal or not. Now, if it is a
collective whole embodied in the one person of the
monarch -- which is the dictatorial example of the
first, it is basically the group personality of the
class that could act as the dictatorial unity,
reflective of a single will, in the second case. Now,
my intention this time is to refer the reader to an
extension of my argument stated previously. First is
the person taken as a singular-collective; the second
is a collective-singular. First is the spontaneous
natural personality; the second is an artificial
personality masquerading as a legal fiction whose
origins have been traced back to the Roman Law.
Ill come to the second when I deal with the
Hiralal Haldar -- Mactaggart debate. In this post Ill
address only the first partthat too a bit
cryptically.
(1)
RECEIVED HISTORY
The public/private binary -whose historical roots have
been traced to classical Greece acquired its modern
meaning through the mediations of medieval Roman Law
and 18th century Europe. Aristotle made a distinction
between household (oikos) and the space of the city
state (polis) where through deliberation (lexis) and
common action (praxis) a shared, common and in a loose
sense public life beyond bare essentials or
necessities was sustained. The private realm of
necessities (subsistence, reproduction) was the
household. Therefore property, and the art of
acquiring property was considered a part of managing
the household (Aristotle, 1988: 5) and participation
in the polis was restricted by ones status or rank as
a master of oikos.
In the medieval age in Roman Law one encounters terms
like publicus and privatus but without the standard
usage (Habermas, 1996:5) because everything
public/private ultimately resided in the person of
the monarch (more on this latter.) However, in Roman
Law-the first systematic legal document-- the privacy
of the home (domus) was sanctioned ( Black, 1988: 593)
and Roman Law itself was private law in that it
would have application only for individuals or
relations of coordination. Public law would administer
affairs of the state or relations of domination. But
similar to the Greek city state, it was the status of
the individuals that determined their participation in
the medieval public sphere. We enter modernity when
men entered the realm of contract from that of
status, from duties to that of rights ( 18th century
enlightenment and the French revolution remain the
canonical examples). Formal equality of persons was a
prerequisite of such a contract. Particularly, at the
break of the medieval age, in the wake of civil or
commercial law in 18th century Europe, a democratic
climate was created where apparent equality of all
before the law and the market was preempted. And the
public sphere was thus -in a sense-- opened to all.
This meant the formation of public opinion through the
media ( enabled at that time by the advent of print
capitalism) and institutionalization of state
sovereignty which would rest, henceforth, with the
people or the public. A new category of legitimacy was
created. This also engendered the rise of civil
society where the subjects would fulfill two roles at
the same time: as a property owner or bourgeois he
would pursue his private interests and as a citizen
in the public sphere he would bear equal rights
granted by the state. This also-- as a part of the
public sphere, ensured the separation of society
(family) from the state and that the state would not
intervene in societal matters and expectedly, privacy
would be located in the societal realm hence forth.
(Separated from the state, classically, the church was
the first private to have imparted the secular colour
so characteristic of modernity.) The state would
ensure privacy, but would not intervene; its closest
analogy was the market: the state would ensure a free
market by itself not intervening in it and the free
market was not only of commodities but a great market
place of ideas and exchange of opinion in which,
irrespective of birthmarks and the stink of status
anybody could participate. The modern public sphere
had arrived. It was just a step further when Marx
would denounce universal suffrage and invoke the
proletariat as the class with universal suffering
(Marx, 1983:320) and would mock this artificial
equality of publics before the law and the market
(alleging that they masked real inequalities) and
thought of smashing the private /public divide by
abolishing private property- which he thought was at
the core of this suffering. The rest is history and
its repetition. No wonder that the public/private
divide has been considered as the core of our modern
existence.
ONE OR TWO WORDS ON HOW THE PERSONAL LOST ITSELF IN
THE PRIVATE
An interesting part of recent academic discussions is
while there is a growing interest in the public and
the private, critical discourse on the personal nearly
draws a blank. (The state of the personal is somewhat
dubious and absent in all classic European discussions
--even in Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt .)
Although Habermas does cursorily refer to the
process through which the modern state apparatus
became independent from the monarchs personal
sphere, he rarely engages with it (Habermas 1996,
29). For instance here goes this recognition in the
form of a footnote to one of his famous articles: "The
important thing to understand is that the medieval
public sphere, if it even deserves this recognition,
is tied to the personal. The feudal lord and estates
create the public sphere by means of their very
presence." (Habermas 1974, 51) But the personal
sphere of the monarch-and what it means in the western
tradition is somewhat available in G.H Mead from the
standpoint of a social behaviorist. Mead meticulously
charts the components of this personal sphere where
the people within the same state can identify
themselves with each other only through being subjects
of a common monarch
. (Mead 1972, p.311) Mead traces
the phenomenon to the ancient empires of Mesopotamia
and observes, It is possible through personal
relationships between a sovereign and subject to
constitute a community which could not otherwise be so
constituted
. In the Roman Empire through the
mediation of Roman law, Mead notes, while the
emperor-subject relationship was defined in legal
terms, through sacrificial offerings made to the
emperor-the subject was putting himself into personal
relationship with him, and because of that he could
feel his connection with all the members in the
community.
It was the setting up of a personal
relationship which in a certain sense went beyond the
purely legal relations involved in the development of
Roman law. (312) In India considering the King's
person as sacred, it was assumed that he had influence
over crops, cattle, rain and general prosperity. So
again, the subjects, in order to relate to cattle, the
mediation of the King was involved in a metonymic
gesture-through whose presence, people could relate
and be present to themselves. (Hocart 1927, 9)
Personal is that which predates both the public and
the private and what is historically interesting is to
discover when and why the collapsing of the personal
and the private began. For this last instance - we can
borrow from Max Weber the diffused origins of the
Public Law-Private Law distinction, which as Weber
shows was once not made at all. Such was the case
when all law, all jurisdictions, and particularly all
powers of exercising authority were personal
privileges, such as especially, the prerogatives of
the head of the state.
[Who was] Not different
from the head of the household. (Weber 1978, 643).
This world of the personal or as Weber calls it
patrimonial monarchy forms the prehistory of the
private /public distinction and again I repeat that
what is historically interesting is to discover when
and why the collapsing of the personal and the private
began to which todays feminists are but victims.
Habermas therefore does away with a vast repertoire.
So far Arendt is concerned, commentators have tried to
make a case out of the feminist energy generated by
the latters personal -previously having been at
pains to argue that the political and the personal
during Arendts celebration of feminist moments later
had become the public and the private.
With the emergence of womens liberation a decade or
so after The Human Condition appeared, the relation
between the political and the personal moved to
the forefront of politics, and this eventually took
the form of the public and the private (Zaretsky
1997, 214) with their corresponding emphasis on
personal life becoming a third challenge to the
liberal dichotomy (214) (ref. endnote 1) : really a
queer mix up in history. The reason perhaps is that we
tend to have a mix up between the private and the
personal and this is its contemporary moment(Nothing
could be more explicit an affirmation than from a
feminist superstar: Catherine Mackinnon, The private
is the public for those for whom the personal is the
political. (Mackinnon 1992, 359). This easy and
historic conflation of personal as private is perhaps
not the end of the story.
In the western history itself there is also a
suppressed narrative (suppressed because it does not
suit the liberal project) where the two are not the
same; in fact they two cannot be the same. But first
Ill take the opportunity to narrate how the
personal/private coalescence occurs and then I shall
try to excavate if the personal could be recuperated.
Then is it possible to appreciate
the fact that the appearance of the personal through
the sieve of the private is basically an historical
maneuver ?
This major point then needs mention:
the qualitative leap when personal came to be
identified with the private. Now, private property is
as old as Greek antiquity: Aristotle had argued in
favour of and Plato had wanted to abolish private
property. That is not the point; the first signs were
available in the natural law (or natural rights)
tradition and despite a lot of caveats, one of its
representative voice still remains John Locke. In this
tradition property, for the first time, is placed in
the person :
Though the earth, and all inferior creatures be
common to all men, yet every man has a property in
his own person. This no body has any right to but
himself. The labour of his body, and the work of
his hands, we may say are properly his. Whatsoever
he
hath mixed his labour with, and joined it to
something that is his own, and thereby makes it his
property
that excludes the common right of other
men (Locke, (1690) 1982 : [Sec. 27.]130).
His property or private property when derives from
personal capacities of labour, the first motivated mix
up between the personal and the private occurs. And
then having had its eighteenth century initiation, it
became a cornerstone of liberal theory where property
becomes an attribute of personality. If you take away
property from me, I become a non-person because
(private) property is in my person. Here there is
natural ownership before there is a legal ownership.
Here is a classical example in Hegel, Not until he
has property does the person exist as reason (Hegel,
(1820) 1991: 73). Hegel goes at length to show how
property is required to supersede the mere
subjectivity of personality(73). In fact this is the
personal in Hegel invested with some kind of immediacy
but lacks in content i.e. Hegels abstract
personality in order to become concrete and objective
awaits a trick:
Since my will, as personal and hence as the will of
an individual [des Einzelnen], becomes objective in
property, the latter takes on the character of private
property
(77).
This would be picked up by liberal capitalism and now
onwards property being in person and that which makes
objective, tangible personality possible, private
becomes the realm of liberty, reprieve and freedom.
Marx would fall heavily on all of this and in fact
this discourse finds its final resolution in Marx
only. His argument was just the reverse: in a society
without private property, the personal selves of men
freely blossom to enter the true realm of freedom.
Therefore this hyphenation between the private and the
personal is more an ideological investment necessary
for liberal history than a structurally indispensable
relation.
RECOVERING THE PERSONAL IN LOCKE, HEGEL, MARX AND OUR
TIMES
Now, having presented the anatomical, bare rudiments
of how the personal looses itself in the private, here
Ill extrapolate how it could be recovered and allowed
to have a safe passage. Given the force of history, it
would be wise to start with Locke.
LOCKE
For Lockes allergy towards communal or collective
ownership, (see Macpherson, C.B. 1972, 197-221.) But
even in Locke it is possible to find an other
discourse of the personal besides property and the
private dominion. While discussing property as an
extension of the person, and particularly Adams
property as private dominion which is supposed to
have arisen from Gods grant or donation and that
of fatherhood from the act of begetting Locke
meditates on how this divine donation was made
personally to Adam to which his heir could have no
right by it. (Locke1982, 60-61) Locke argues that
even if it belongs to the parents personally,
after their death, their property does not go to the
common stock of mankind but is inherited by their
children as heirs because human have a natural
propensity to continue their creed (62). This power of
begetting in another formand that what roots
continuity- founds inheritance. The point relevant to
our case, is, this personal belongingness is a
middle-term that appears with some autonomy and
mediates person and propertyseen as an extension of
each other in Locke. And the mutual-extension argument
because, I guess, in itself cannot explain
inheritance, Locke is taking recourse to a different
premise; the personal appears to give a language to
this premise.
HEGEL
As established earlier, the reading that entails Hegel
as a canonical case where the personal private mix up
receives the force of an argument, is not wrong and as
rendered by Marx, it carries an immense sway with it.
But it is as well possible to discover in Hegel a
curious personal impatient not to be suppressed by the
interested world of the private. Take for instance
the distinction between real property and personal
property that could be traced to the Roman Law from
which Kant borrowed his interesting theory of rights
and where we find personal appearing with a rider
personal rights of a real kind. Hegel made a
critique of Kants formulation; drawing on that
critique, let me here try to illuminate the
distinction which I think was unconsciously made by
Hegel himself.
Deriving from the Justinian Roman legal division of
right into rights of persons, things, and actions,
Kant in 1797 had proposed, taking into account the
form of the rights, a threefold division, a right
to a thing; a right against a person; a right to a
person akin to a right to a thing . (Kant 1999, 412).
The first is a property right, the second is a
contract right, and the third is a personal right of
a real kind (Hegel 1991, 71); in other words, it is a
right about what is mine or yours domestically, and
the relation of persons in the domestic condition
[including]
possession of a person. (Kant 1999,
426) like the rights of spouses over one another, the
rights of parents over their children etc. The third
is the most interesting because it resembles what
today we call Personal Laws supposed to distribute
private affairs within a household. And this is what
Hegel attacks; Hegel thinks that the division is a
confusing one; secondly, while family relationships
form the content of personal rights of a real kind ,
in actuality family relationships are based on the
surrender of personality. (Hegel 1991, 72) Hegel
further notes that
For Kant personal rights are those rights which arise
out of a contract whereby I give something or perform
a service
Admittedly, only a person is obliged to
implement the provisions of a contract, just as it is
only a person who acquires the right to have them
implemented. But such a right cannot therefore be
called a personal right; rights of every kind can
belong only to a person
(73)
What is interesting in Hegels engagement -relevant to
our project is the way he extricates the personal
from being stamped with the badge of household rights
or the power to accomplish a civil contract ( See
Endnote 2) in brief personal right not masquerading
as a private right. In brief, what Hegel may have
argued here could be that there are no personal
rights of a real kind. But let us underline this
binary: Personal vs./ and real, which is significant
and requires of us to reiterate that a distinction
between real property and personal property was
strongly a feature of English Law. Real property was
that which had some degree of geographical
fixity.[Reeve, 1986, 80-81] In order to examine this
distinction in the form that it is found in a 1827
tract I think the notions of the personal still could
be recovered in a very different sense. In personal
property the general rule is, that possession
constitutes the criterion of title;
hence the vendor
of personal chattels is never expected to show the
origin of his right.
[but] real property like land
is held not by possession but by title requiring the
production of documents. (Mathews 1827, 27). Please
note the somewhat loose coverage that personal
property requires compared to real property. Now if it
is pointed out that personal property does have
property as a signified even if in a loose sense, it
may be rebutted by saying that in the same text
Mathews goes on to mention peculiarities personal
or as to how personal disability may be enough to
repel the presumption of a grant. (14) Does this
personal call for documents or is a means to
establishing a title? No, in fact these are blatant
uses appropriate to our cause existing in a legal
tract meant to discuss property personal or real.
MARX
The common knowledge now that the key to understanding
modernity is the public/private divide and a
corresponding failure to find a way beyond the binary
would findif considered carefullyan approval with
dignity in Marx because Marx curiously is a symptom of
both: he said for the first--"the state is founded
upon the contradiction between public and private
life" (Marx, 1961, p.222) and for the second : "if the
modern State wished to end the impotence of its
administration it would be obliged to abolish the
present conditions of private life. And if the State
wished to abolish these conditions of private life it
would have also to put an end to its own existence,
for it exists only in relation to them." (p.223) Now,
throwing in the fact that private property is just a
singular and an isolated moment in the discourse of
private life, Marx's agenda --I guess- looks readily
defamiliarised here.
Marx would fall heavily on all of this and in fact
this discourse finds its final resolution in Marx
only. It is not a fact that in a system without
private property and a sanction against unlimited
appropriation all are non persons and there would be
nothing personal. Therefore this hyphenation between
the private and the personal is more an ideological
investment necessary for liberal history than a
structurally indispensable relation. Let us document a
few discursive fragments where this collapsing has
been done away with. Now, notwithstanding the will to
go beyond private/public divide, it may rightly be
asked, could Marx be used to endorse the personal that
I'm proposing? Yes! And choosing only one instance --
love , we may document this flower unfolding in Marx.
"Assume man to be man and his relationship to
the world to be a human one: then you can
exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc...
if you want to exercise influence over other people,
you must be a person with a stimulating and
encouraging effect on other people. ...If you love
without evoking love in return that is, if your loving
does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living
expression of yourself as a living person you do not
make yourself a beloved one then your love is impotent
-- a misfortune" ( cited in Geras 1990, 14).
Isn't this the personal in Marx -- which --I'm sure
--he would willingly exclude from the domain of
private life he wanted to abolish for history? I
think the reader agrees.
A CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLE
Marx apart, curiously, the Human Rights
discourse does have, it may be pointed out, a phrase
like personal property. What does it qualify? In
fact it endorses the distinction that we are making
between the personal and the private. A theorist of
such rights comments, By personal property I mean
individual ownership and control of possessions such
as clothing, furniture, food, writing materials,
books, and artistic and religious objects.
Considerations of personal freedom provide strong
reasons for instituting and protecting personal
property. These reasons are related not to production
but to the requirements of developing and expressing
ones own personality. Ownership of personal property
is a matter of personal liberty, not a
production-related right ( see endnote 3) .(Nickel
1987, 152)
Therefore it is possible to attempt a historical
reconstruction of the personal where the personal
could be said to have filtered through the monarchical
metonymy right down to human rights discourses via
Roman Law, Kant, Hegel and English Common law. While
the prehistorical personal comes to be contaminated by
the private, the human rights discourse is significant
in its attempt to do away with this conflation. While
it tries to do away with the infiltration,
genealogically it perhaps proves the point that there
was this contamination or over determination.
CONCLUSION
I conclude with a sense of disgust. I could share 1/6
th of the material I've amassed. This is not
surprising since there are whole books on each of the
strands to which I've referred. Consider Roman Law :
Read Duff's Personality in Roman Private Law or
Richard Tuck's path breaking works on Natural Rights
and Natural Law debates on themes surrounding that
what I'm trying to pursue. A further limitation is
I've bound myself to narrating bits of western history
of the personal and left out our own cultural
cognitive histories of the personal. Let that be some
time else. Nevertheless,with this our narrative of
historical recovery or historical demystification of
the personal reaches a benchmark and awaits if the
personal-private distinction can be theoretically
grounded as well. Well pursue that in the next
postearly next month. Thank you.
ENDNOTES
1. For consideration of the failure of this appraisal
in its true light and that the personal-private
distinction could be read unto Arendt, judge the
following comments of Craig Calhoun, Arendt would
never endorse social engineering and, against such
threats, certainly would protect privacy. Even more,
she would protect the personal and the distinctive
from absorption into the impersonal. But she would not
assimilate the notion of the personal to that of the
private as Zaretsky does. (Calhoun 1997, 237). The
point is if it could be correct for Arendt, it could
be correct for Habermas as well.
2. Carole Pateman does not agree that Hegel is
successful in his attempt and according to her he is
rather limited to transcending just one part of the
Kantian argument which saw personal right, among
others, in the manifest act of pointing out this is
my wife where a thing is, accidentally, a person. (
Pateman1996, 212-213). But I disagree with Pateman and
reiterate that there is a moment of personal in Hegel
which precedes the contamination of property.
3. The ownership of means of production is called in
this discourse private productive property (Nickel
1987, 152).
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