Oblivion & opacity

real Gs move in silence and whatnot

In Lowry Pressly’s book Oblivion, he outlines a notion of privacy that he argues exists outside of the ideology of information that was embedded in social media technologies of the 2010s. Privacy, as we’ve come to know it presently, indicates that certain kinds of information ought to be protected from visibility or from being processed. What Pressly offers instead is a definition of privacy that makes the non-existence of such information possible. This definition hinges on his concept of oblivion, which he defines as “A form of the unknown that, unlike what is secret or hidden, is essentially resistant to articulation and discovery: its limits do not concern who knows what, but instead what can be known”.

Oblivion is maintained through various social norms pertaining to privacy. In the first chapter, Pressly remarks how this notion of privacy was historically tied to two phenomena: first, that of private property in the seventeenth century. Privacy was spatially contingent, meaning that it related to the crimes of burglary or breaking and entering.

The second definition was tied to the conception of the self and emerged during the enlightenment. Moving away from beliefs such as individuals being a result of biology or God, selfhood became widely considered as something to be molded and shaped by oneself. Thus, privacy was necessary in order to be free from the scrutinizing gazes that were judging and sizing up the personhood of others. Privacy was a space a person could experiment and play, to test out different ways of being without having to be held responsible for her silliness or worry about ostracization. A breach in privacy then, was not to divulge secret or hidden information, but a violation of one’s agency and ability to create oneself in line with her will. These two conceptions, Lowry insists, was not only reserved to the bourgeoisie, but extended to the working class as well:

«Notwithstanding that most privacy advocates in the archive are bourgeois, if only because theirs were the concerns that made it into print, the value of privacy for which they argue is not that of the walls of the private home that keep the urban moil at bay. Rather, privacy was thought to be something in which everyone had an interest solely by virtue of being human.»

This, however, does not take into consideration the limited conception of the human at the time, which Sylvia Wynter deftly addresses in her essay Mistaking the Map for the Territory. Quoting George Lamming, it says: ‘The Rights of Man’ cannot include the ‘Rights of the Negro’ who had been institutionalized discursively and empirically, as a different kind o’ creature to ‘Man’.

This may then see the emergence of a third kind of privacy that appears concurrently with that of private property and enlightenment cultivation of the self. In the book Dark Matters, Simone Browne seeks to expand surveillance studies by incorporating black epistemologies, that is, ways of knowing that would ensure the safety but also the dignity of racialized individuals. Here, to be known is not merely the eradication of the possibility of oblivion, but a direct existential threat.

Browne offers the term dark sousveillance, which are counter measures deployed by racialized individuals to protect themselves from violence and dehumanization. Like privacy, these, too, were various social norms; singing songs that discreetly alert others of the presence of slave catchers, setting up traps to slow them down, “keeping your running shoes nearby” if an opening for escape appeared. There were many ways of being seen that would end in death, like the infamous Book of Negros, a reference index of self-emancipated slaves used to return people to their oppressors. These social norms needed an intimate understanding of the prevailing surveilling apparatus enough to evade them.

In Lowry’s brief mention of Browne, he attributed her discussion of privacy to hiding. But hiding, Lowry argues, is not the same as privacy. To hide implies the existence of information that one wishes to obscure from an inquirer. To hide implies the inevitability of being discovered, which puts the one in hiding in perpetual anticipation towards the moment of exposure. This is, as he explains, associated with a positive thrill when kids play hide and seek, but with terror in life threatening situations, like that of slaves evading capture. Thus, for Lowry, the kind of privacy that Browne addresses inevitably does not address privacy a la oblivion, but rather that of hiding — a state that one inevitably enters due to the tyranny of a powerful inquirer.

I think Lowry is wrong here. Sure, the stakes are heightened, but the inclination is the same; to maintain one’s sense of humanity. Perhaps it’s useful to see it through Eduard Glissant’s classic essay on opacity. Glissant was responding to the attempts of former colonial subjects forging identities post-independence, where distancing from the identity of oppressors was imperative. Glissant, however, argued that the very premise of a fixed identity belongs to the very European rationale many were trying to escape. That fixedness does not allow a person to be unaccounted for, to exist outside the limited scope of explicit language and logic. Glissant ends the chapter with the rallying cry: “We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone”.