Updating to Remain the Same by Chun Wendy Hui Kyong;

Author:Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong; [MIT Digital Book Services]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262034494
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2016-05-05T18:08:24+00:00

Keenan troubles this neat separation of private theorizing subject from actor on the street by asking, “what comes through a window?”9 How does the light, which makes possible human sight, also undermine the voyeurism it seemingly enables and encourages? The public, Keenan postulates, is glare and intrusion—it is the intrusion of everything other in the self. Further, he stresses, without the glare of publicity, there would be no intimacy, no politics, no subjects.10 To return to the earlier discussion of habit, habit is publicity: it is the experience, the scar, of others that linger in the self. Habits are “remnants” of the past—past goals/selves, past experiences—that live on in our reactions to the environment today, as we anticipate tomorrow. Through habit, we inhabit and are inhabited by alterity.

Although Keenan’s discussion of windows focuses on television, it seems to extend to the Internet; but personal computers do not merely retain and disseminate windows, they also explode them. Desktop windows, as Anne Friedberg has shown, are unwindow-like in their layered multiplicity and gravity-defying orientation.11 Further, these windows are like opaque one-way mirrors, for they reflect text back to the user, and the user cannot look beyond the screen to see who sees it. This unknowable reverse gaze—or its possibility—brings another dimension to the question, “What comes through the window?” As I argue in chapter 4, existing social media platforms reverse the position of public/private, because the subject who acts is increasingly on the inside rather than the outside. Subjects act publicly in private, or are ‘caught’ in public acting privately. This leads to anxiety about privacy and surveillance and to morally outraged attempts to ‘fix’ this boundary across the political spectrum, from slut shaming to Snowden’s leaks. It leads, that is, to what I call an “epistemology of outing”: the revelation of mostly open secrets to secure a form of privacy that offers no privacy. (As I discuss in more detail later, this epistemology of outing ruptures the foundational private/public divide described by Eve Sedgwick as the “epistemology of the closet.”)12

The next two chapters also explore the questions: What if, rather than trying to secure this window by screening its reversal, we refused this framing altogether? What would happen if users warily embraced, rather than hid or were hidden from, the inherently public and promiscuous exchange of information that grounds TCP/IP? What if they focused on creating and inhabiting public spaces online and offline, rather than accepting transparent bubbles of privacy which render them transparent? This next section reveals that such a reframing would move the focus away from protecting or condemning private subjects, who are treated as potential leaks, toward sheltering public subjects, whose actions are currently ‘privatized,’ that is ‘housed’ by states and corporations. It would end slut shaming and turn the debate toward the creation and maintenance of public rights. Within the United States, “public figures,” a category that includes those involuntarily thrust into the public eye, have no expectation of privacy.13 Against this logic of “consent once, circulate

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