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A Semiprivate Room
Ellen Rooney
differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Volume 13, Number
1, Spring 2002, pp. 128-156 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dif/summary/v013/13.1rooney.html
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dif/summary/v013/13.1rooney.htmlhttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dif/summary/v013/13.1rooney.html7/28/2019 Ellen Rooney. "A Semi-Private Room"
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A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13.1 (2002)dif ferenc e s :
ellen rooney
A Semiprivate Room
I am not inside anything.
Im not outside it, ei ther.
(Riley 6)
preface
Joan Scott titled the 2000 conference where the paperscollected in this issue of differences were initially presented together
Feminism and the Shift ing Boundaries of Public and Private. The workof the participants repeatedly stressed the uneven, wavering, mutable
quality of those boundaries, the phantasmatic nature of our obsessive
reinvestments in their regularity and regeneration, and the uncanny
power that the binary public/private has to make things of interest simply
disappear, as Judith Butler observed. The semiprivate room is one such
lost site: though it insistently emerges in multiple forms, it repeatedly slips
out of view as the powerful opposition of private to public is reinscribed.
The semiprivate figures neither an inside, nor an outside, but the con-scious practice of drawing boundaries in a field neither the private nor
the public can anticipate or guarantee.1
the semiprivate room
The classroom is a semiprivate room. As such, it is a site of
the peculiar intimacies and coercions, the self-revelations and decisive
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d i f f e r e n c e s 129
constraints, that characterize a space neither public nor private, both
exclusionary (perhaps even exclusive) and impersonal. As a workspace,
the classroom necessarily entails a relation to the unfamiliar, the as-
yet-unknown, the potent ial ly diff icult. Its very existence test ifies that
common sense is not enough and that ordinary language is what we speak
at home. In other words, the semiprivate room is one site of the disciplines.
As a formand every discipline is first of all a form of discourseit figures
critical discourse in a mode that does not participate in the celebratoryinvocations of information, access, and speed (quantity) that so dominate
our historical moment. While we congratulate ourselves for our mastery
ofinformation technologies, the semiprivate room persists as another
scene.
I propose that we adopt the semiprivate as a figure of critique
that exposes the enabling presuppositions of our commonplace under-
standing of public discourse and defamiliarizes powerful myths concern-
ing its limits and its modes. As a trope, the semiprivate room enables usto rethink our understanding of the work of rhetoric in our so-called
public discourses and to reconfigure the relations among reading,
rhetoric, interpretation, and argument in the field of political discussion
proper. Such a reconfiguration may of necessity involve a disciplinary
clash, one that perhaps can be read as a contentious revision of the
suspiciously smooth transition Habermas narrates in The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere when he recounts the shift from a
literary public sphere to a political one (4356). But it is part of the burdenof my argument that the conflict among disciplines is a powerful and
productive effect of their semiprivate practices, one that we should not
seek to rationalize away or to distribute definitively across the boundary
that opposes public to private.
My essay will seek rather to displace the public/private oppo-
sition by elaborating the figure of the semiprivate as a unique location,
one that is not graspable simply as a combination of or compromise
among elements drawn from the familiar spheres of public and private.Ultimately, I want to suggest that the discursive practice proper to the
semiprivate room can figure the collective discourse of the public sphere
and serve as a critical resource for rethinking the practices of civil society.
Insofar as the possibility of critica l exchange is an essential component of
any public sphere, however it is defined, the practice of a contemporary
critical publicity may itself derive from the semiprivate: a field of
acknowledged exclusions rather than porous flows, a site that we know
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130 A Semiprivate Room
not primarily as a set of protocols or rules, or as a content or datum, but
as a form of rhetoric and a mode of address. Such a proposition obviously
involves a certain impropriety in the face of commonplaces about what a
public discourse ought to be. It entails, for example, a reevaluation of the
problematic of pluralism, its professed universalism and its ineluctable
exclusions. But before beginning to unpack my sense of this possible
discourse, its critical possibilities and modes of address, let me linger for
a time in the semiprivate.My American Heritage Dictionary tells me that the adjective
semiprivate means shared with usually one to three other hospital
patients. The definition proper is followed by an example of use, so
the entire entry reads: shared with usually one to three other hospital
patients: a semiprivate room. This use of illustration is not a feature
that characterizes most of the definitions in the American Heritage. (In
this respect, it differs, for example, from the OED.)2 I notice, for instance,
that semipermeable, semi-precious and semper fidelis (this last sem - isa different root) appear on the same page with the semiprivate; each is
defined, but none is illustrated with a phrase or a sentence. I take this
special emphasis on the exemplification of the semiprivate, its explicit
restr iction to the rooms of hospital patients, as a sign that this adjective is
not widely used in American English to characterize other sorts of spaces
or relations. My usage is thus, in some sense, a nonstandard one or a
neologism, a kind of semiprivate joke. This circumstance precisely suits
my purposes. The semiprivate room spawns neologisms.Although it is common for peopletraveling to conferences or
for pleasure or bothto share rooms, they typically refer to their shared
accommodations in hotels or inns as doubles or triples or even shares, not
as semiprivate. This is due to what I have called the peculiar intimacy,
quite dif ferent from the intimacy of friends or lovers or siblings who share
a room, that marks the semiprivate as a dist inctive locale. A semiprivate
room in a hospital, for example, is exclusive, with obvious constraints on
entry (and for that matter egress) and sometimes rigid protocols governingthe timing and even the personal character of visitors. And yet it is also
an open or public space, one in which strangers are proximate and
inevitably interact and where only the very rash (or the very gravely ill)
would assume any real privacy or conf identiality: after all, a text detailing
ones bodily functions hangs in a folder on the door, which often stands
ajar.
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d i f f e r e n c e s 131
Yet the commonal ity of those who share such a room is at best
partial, as the term semiprivate announces; semi - of course means half,
partly or partially. Indeed, the semiprivate room always has a wholly
contingent or accidental aspect. To remain with the example of the
hospital room for a moment, we note that patients are assigned empty
hospital beds more or less as they arise, at random. Their common room
has been configured by public interests in an indifferent public process,
partly economic, partly epidemiological, part ly cultural. Private interestsare not part of this processor at any rate, the private interests of the
patientare not a factor that is taken into account. 3
Nonetheless, in some very broad sense, these accidental room-
mates do share an ontological condition: the semiprivate room shelters
strangers who have in common the quite particular neediness that brings
them there, in close proximity to each other and, crucially, available to
a host of other people, most of them strangers as well. In the case of the
hospital room, these other people include visitors (not excepting visitorsto the other patients), nurses and doctors, aides and orderlies and,
sometimes, students. The semiprivate is in this respect a structure that
regulates and facilitates a certain mode of attention. It is a discipline and,
as such, it entails a mode of address.4
The particular quality of this disciplined or disciplinary
address also marks the semiprivate of the classroom. Both sites are
marked by an operation of power-knowledge that has become familiar to
all of us: a certain discourse or contract of cooperation and compromisereigns, although it is always and everywhere vulnerable to renegotiation,
even as coercion, legal and physical, remains a real possibility. The
avenues for this coercion flow in many directions, which is not to say that
the semiprivate room is an egalitarian space. There is always a ruling
authority, so recognized, in the semiprivate room, but it is not lodged
in a sovereign body, and the questioning of authority is also a regular,
indeed, essential, feature of its disciplinary practice, a critical mode of
the subjectivity that operates there. Opinion and the clash of opinionsare critical elements here, too. (And so we seek second opinions.) 5 Some
quantum of fear or anxiety accompanies this clashing of opinion, along
with desire and hope, of course, and real dangers are by no means
completely absent, whether from the intrinsic situation of those present
their prior conditionsor due to the specific procedures undertaken
during their stays. Testing is only one we might name. Ultimately, the
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132 A Semiprivate Room
occupants of this space may even threaten one another. The semiprivate
is not a utopian space; its partialities have costs.
The economy of the semiprivate room is also marked by a
peculiar part iality. Commodity relations are hardly banished: by now no
one in the U.S., at least, needs to be told that health care and education
are growth industries. Yet public money is inevitably at stake in the
construction of the semiprivate room, and a direct financial or economic
relationship among its inhabitants is not generally the rule (though thereare some who argue that this should change).6 Teachers are of course
paid; teaching is a job. Indeed, unions and strikes are more and more
likely as forms of academic dissent.7 However, the student rarely pays
his teacher directly; and even in those important instances where an
adult works and studies and pays her own tuition bills, those payments
generally do not cover the full cost of maintaining the semiprivate room
that houses studyand they most definitely do not create a relation of
employee and employer between teacher and student, despite energeticefforts on all sides to retool students as consumers. While the semiprivate
room enables power and fear to flow in every direction, even as it
repeatedly breaks down and reestablishes figures of authority, direct
economic exploitation is not the most salient form of power here. The
injuries of class have a more significant if more elusive force.8
In the last few passages, I have tried to loosen the semantic
restr iction of the semiprivate to the space of the hospital and to enumerate
qualities that also describe the semiprivacy of the classroom. A publicspace marked by essential exclusions; a familiar enclosure where the
unknown or unfamiliar is a required and indeed welcome presence; a site
of fundamental individual (and indeed individualizing) urgency and crisis
where a certain impersonality and vulnerability to public scrutiny is the
structuring principle of even the most deeply felt personal experience; a
temporary enclave where everything that happens is overheard: this is a
semiprivate room.
The urgency and individual crises of the semiprivate roomare the consequences of the trial that is built into any experience of
learning, the consciousness of unavoidable transformation and the risk
of failure to which everyone in the semiprivate room is subject. The
pleasures and the dangers of the encounter with the unfamiliar that the
semiprivate room prescribes are simultaneously a matter of personal
formation, of subjects coming into discourse as individuals, and a matter
of a generalclassexperience.9 This formative experience is ineluct-
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ably etched with standardizations, regularities, and disciplines that are
in no conceivable sense personal or unique, which is perhaps only to say
that they are linguistic and that private language is an oxymoron. As
Denise Riley observes, language goes with us into the house (4)and
back out again. The pun of disciplinarity announces the coercion of the
semiprivate room but also its intimacy, the discipleship that binds its
cast of players, however random or arbitrary the process that initially
draws them together. Paradoxically, seemingly coercive and indifferentdiscipline forges individual subjects and particular, sometimes beloved,
objects. The relations among these individuals are never merely personal,
but always also exemplary; the objects they attend to are the product of
their interactions rather than ready-made; and these interlocutors speak
in neologisms, which form the bases for their critical discourse.
I am aware of the reductions involved in the pages above as
a description of any classroom, even if we limit this description to the
United States or to the university. I have bracketed a host of questionsabout the specificity of disparate classrooms, about public and private
schools, rich and poor districts, elementary schools, graduate schools,
trade schools. In this sketch, economics, the state, intellectual culture,
teacher-training, ideological interpellation, and bodies inscribed with
all their differences are subordinated to a general proposition: that is,
in a space that straddles and deforms the public-private distinction in a
particular, even peculiar way, a certain critical practice is possible. This
semiprivate critical encounter or disciplinary practice, and the forms ofaddress, appropriation, and exchange that emerge in its field, provide us
with the means to a critique of the discourse of the public sphere. While
my account is stripped down and in that respect reductive, I do not think
it is necessarily idealist or idealizing. The semiprivate room is no little
eden, free of conflict, resentment, or anger, and my intention is not to
romanticize, etherealize, or even to celebrate it, any more than one would
celebrate the semiprivate hospital room. I am interested, though, in the
way it works. Indeed, I am not ultimately concerned with the classroomper se, save as a universally familiar (in the U.S.) tropeone that enables
us to nominate the semiprivate as a figure for critical discourse, a critical
discourse that is by no means limited to the academy, to the university, or
the school. The semiprivate room clar ifies the sense in which the academy
has never been an ivory tower and yet suggestively hints at the reason for
the enduring power of the epithet.
Andrew Ross has observed that the academy is a massive
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134 A Semiprivate Room
public sphere in itself, involving millions of people in this country alone,
and so the idea that you break out of the academy into the public is rather
nonsense (qtd. in Fish 118). This observation seems unassailable to
me. The university is a workplace, as are all schools. These workplaces
are per se no more isolated from the general field of the public (in its
common sense meaning) than any others: law firms, fast food restaurants,
publishing houses, airlines, hog farms, car factories, and so forth. These
workplaces and their products differ in myriad crucial ways, of course,but not in that some are de facto more public than others. Furthermore,
the forms of discourse raised up in the university restlessly travel: There
are no private intellectuals (Fish 117).
Yet, as the parodic notion of the ivory tower hints (and my
elaboration of the figure of the semiprivate above tries to make explicit),
the academy wields critical principles of exclusion, and this exclusivity,
this insistence on limits (on the form of the discipline), structures its
modes of address at both a practical and a theoretical level. Without thispractice of limits, the enabling transformation that is essential to any
classroom praxis (a college lecture, a grade school protocol, a seminar)
would be unthinkable. Indeed, the conf iguration of the semiprivate room
as I have briefly sketched it here effectively puts into question one of
the mantras of the polemic against the academy and its specialized
knowledges, a mantra often spoken by academics accusing other
academics of being hopelessly constrained by disciplinarity, the mantra of
accessibility. Whereas the traditional polemic on behalf of the academicas public intellectual berates her for speaking in tongues, reveling in a
jargon that is useless to civil society, that is, for her inaccessibility, I
propose to read the inaccessible as both a lure and an indispensable
border. In the dynamic moment when the lure of the not-yet-known draws
its public across the threshold into the semiprivate room, the possibility
of critical discourse takes flight.
in lieu of a frame:
are you taking this class?
As a semiprivate room, the classroom depends on public
support, embodies public policy, and is shaped by public opinion. Yet it is
by no means a freely entered space: not just anyone can walk into your
classroom and take a seat. Those individuals who take a class (in every
sense of the verb) both recognize and help to elaborate the practices of a
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d i f f e r e n c e s 135
kind ofpublic exclusion, an inaccessibility that gives the semiprivate
room its form and format and makes it a familiar if peculiar space where
an encounter with the unfamil iar is the norm.
The impersonal intimacy that is established among a teacher
and the students who take her class in this part ially closed, but arbitrari ly
populated, semiprivate space creates an opening for the as-yet-unthought.
This is the precondition, the disciplinary ground, for any pedagogy
whatsoever and, I would submit, for critical discourse itself.10
(I use theterm disciplinary here in its most abstract and, indeed, inclusive sense;
chemistry, philosophy, and anthropology are all disciplines insofar as they
produce theoretical objects, methodologies, and knowledge-claims and
thus distinguish themselves from other disciplines. But so is sculpture.)
The semiprivate room and the impersonal intimacy it engenders enable
the formal specificity without which there can be no critique, indeed,
without which discourse has no purchase, no reality ef fect, and becomes
essentially uncriticalno matter how ironically worldly or luridlyreferential it is; no matter what its contentmay be. The semiprivate room
supports, even seeks outthough in practice it can never guaranteethe
new thought, where new may sometimes indicate merely the previously
unknown (the multiplication tables, the state capitals, how to read) and
at other times the genuinely original, new objects of knowledge and
theoretical paradigms, new arguments and modes of thought. This is a
disciplinary space where access is radically redefined, where we find an
impersonal intimacy in the form of something like an inside joke (Gallop,Pedagogy23), in the form of something we had never thought of before, a
new reading. Thisformalexperience, rather than any imaginable content,
is the critical essence of the semiprivate room.11
The forms of discipline, address, and reading at work in this
space figure an alternative to the models of public discourse that have
animated previous polemics on behalf of the public intellectual at work in
civil society and many historical accounts of the heyday of the bourgeois
public sphere. If the semiprivate can defamiliarize our contemporarymyths of public discourse, it is primarily thanks to those forms, which
constitute its specificity and the particular contribution it could make to
debates in the public sphere proper, rather than to the content that might
emerge from the work of its would-be public intellectualsno matter how
elegantly recuperated by an accessible idiom.
The proper understanding of the public sphere and its
phantoms has of course been the topic of seemingly endless debate. In
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136 A Semiprivate Room
the United States, as recently as five years ago, the status and nature of
the public intellectual was of enormous concern, both inside and outside
the academy.12 Whether in the mode of cultural critic or scientific expert,
university intellectuals were eagerly seeking wider venues for their work
and polemicizing on the importance of their public roles, even as the
demand for content in the entire range of media outlets exploded.13
Rapidly shifting currents have displaced the most intense polemics on
this issue, but this shift occurred before anyone satisfyingly answered thequestion of what defines the public intellectual. Academic intellectuals
have opinions, of course, as well as particular expertise, for example,
about alcoholism, or extinction rates, or dating Renaissance paintings. But
insofar as there exists a public debate on issues of general importance,
the public sphere suffers no shortage of opinion makers, and there are no
grounds for the argument that the opinions of academic intellectuals are
per se superior to others and therefore essential to public debate (Fish;
Robbins; Sinfield). But if the university is itself a public sphere, andthere are no private intellectuals, what does it mean to offer the figure
of the semiprivate, abstracted from the practice of the classroom, as a
critique of our current ideologies of the public sphere or civil society?
What particular value in its disciplinary forms or modes of address can
underwrite an effort to extend them, to encourage a public larger than
our current enrollments to assert the idioms of the semiprivate in the
realm of civil society? If the semiprivate is a space where accessibility is
redefined, where a form of impersonal intimacy enables critical thought toseek out the unfamiliar, to displace the already known, and thus to read,
it is still the case that the classroom has been a highly specific and even
fixed locale. How can this figure reach beyond its familiar precincts to
disrupt our hegemonic account of a porous and freewheeling market in
unfettered information or to reorient our dreams of a practical discourse
of the universal (McCarthy 51)? Does the fact that the public, so- called, is
overwhelmingly composed of people with some first-hand experience (for
good and for ill) of the classroom as a semiprivate room offer an avenue forthis intervention? How is the power of the semiprivate to reanimate our
public discourse bound to its standing as a field of readings, a hermeneutic
intervention?
In December of the year 2000, it was possible to write of our
epoch as one that announced itself in contradictory idioms. We lived in
a moment of crises in public discourse, crises in education, crises in the
realm of privacy. In the U.S., the list of ills was pure clich: an apathetic
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electorate (seemingly resolute in its passivity even in the face of the
Supreme Courts unprecedented intervention in the electoral process),
a petty and gossip-driven media, a corrupt political elite, and a vulgar
popular culture; general hysteria on the subject of academic standards,
on preventing school violence, on admissions to elite nursery schools;
anxiety about the security of our dna records, our financial records, even
the records of our purchases of records, cds and books. The realm of
civil society was depicted as suffering terminal decay in narratives thatoriginated in all corners of the political spectrum.
But, in the U.S. context, this discourse of crisis coexisted with
an equally clichd counterdiscourse of prosperity and peace, innovation
and stability: rising productivity, rising literacy rates, rising rates of
homeownership, rising surpluses, rising numbers of web-pages, rising
employment. Explicitly economic indicators were woven together with
accounts of intellectual and intersubjective networking to suggest a
democratic revolution in public discourse troped as information tech-nology. Both the crises and the golden opportunities had particular,
academically inflected forms for those who work in universities in the
U.S.: distance-learning, Napster, the networking of basic research and
academic publishing, course web pages and chat rooms, the corporate
university. But the distinctiveness of the university and of the situation of
academics was not as remarkable as the way in which both were willy-
nilly engaged with the popular terms in which the myths of access and
the fantasies of utopian inclusion in the new civil society proliferate.The academy, too, dreams of a kind of universal pluralist flow in which
everyone anonymously and instantaneously bathes, and all markets
(especially the markets in ideas, in culture) are free. There is some
expectation that this free- flowing knowledge will also make us rich, but
frictionconflict understood as inhering in the production of knowledge
as suchwas dismissed as a twentieth-century problem, an old economy
worry.
Late in the year 2001, the landscape has changed beyondrecognition, not only because of the horrific September attacks on the
United States, but because of recession, corporate fraud, deficit spending,
and the nature of the American administrations response to the threat
of terrorist attacks to come. Privacy, technology, ethnic profiling,
globalization, freedom of movement, and the market itself all remain
dominant topics and figures for our collective life; but with the rapid and
dramatic change of so many fortunes, the art iculations among these terms
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138 A Semiprivate Room
have twisted and in some instances even reversed. And yet, the utopian
celebration of free markets and free movement and its concomitant
vision of critica l exchange as a matter of flow and data has not entirely
been vanquished, which is testimony to its deep roots. Despite grotesque
evidence of corporate fraud, many voices warn against the darker specter
of re-regulation; the current scandal is a corporate one, not a political one,
these commentators insist. No political response is warranted. Watching
a television commercial enjoining Americans to travel that intercuts travelindustry cheerleaders with shots of George Bush defying terrorism, one
could be forgiven for having the impression that freedom to vacation was
the single most dearly held value in the U.S.
The idiom of the semiprivate room pointedly interrupts these
tropes of flow and simultaneity. As a figure, the semiprivate room defamil -
iarizes the standard metaphors that govern our narratives of public dis-
course across the fields of politics, media, culture, and intellectual debate.
At the same time, it resonates with the ongoing strugglein academicwork and in our culture at largeto question accepted definitions of
private and public, and with them the crisis view that civil society has
withered in the shadow of the commodity.14 The semiprivate is thus also
a polemic, a critique of the myths of contemporary publicity as the flow
of data, but also of our allegedly failed attempts to protect the virtues of
the public sphere or to reinvent them in new and effective forms.
The figure of the semiprivate intervenes in part by insisting
that any typology of the social spaces of critical exchange must confrontthe question of form. The varied and sometimes utterly incompatibleforms
of public exchange that characterize civil society today are themselves
a positive argument for its potential critical force. (That people discuss
an infinite variety ofcontents in their web chat rooms is of no particular
weight.) The figure of the semiprivate clarifies the way in which form
constrains and enables by virtue of its power, never absolute, but never
trivial, to include and to exclude. This power is of course not fixed. The
work of form is only revealed in the act of reading, and just as no theoryis ever fully adequate to a textual instance, no subject position ever
fully realized in any individual, so no formal feature stands as the full
expression of a text before reading has set it into motion. The art iculation
of form is itself the task of reading; form emerges as such from readings
work (Rooney, Contentment 2931). On this view, reading is a transitive
verb, a practice of rhetoric and argument that takes up a text (any text) and
represents it in an interested, or as Althusser puts it, a guilty manner;
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reading is thus of necessity intentional, that is, polemical, and textual form
is its medium. And, despite grim accounts of the death of civil society and
of rational-critical argument, reading is everywhere in profusion in our
historical moment.
This is emphatical ly not to say that such reading is unfettered:
the semiprivate room figures the situatedness of reading, its inescapable
location in an untranscendable site. But it is this site that gives it its
persuasive power and ratio, even as it sets limits to both. In this respect,the figure of the semiprivate room is as incompatible with the Haber-
masian narrative of universal reason seeking expression in the arguments
of a rational-critical discourse addressed to a formless humanity (85) as
it is hostile to the cyberplot of universal code amassing in the data pools
of a technocratic discourse addressed to a disembodied globality.
Disciplinarity is an economical term for the particular fetters
or limits that structure readings, whether within the university or without.
The discipline is easily the universitys most perspicacious institutionalform.15 But disciplines are dynamic forms, constantly renegotiating their
boundaries and investments, constantly revising their objects and
methods, and constantly vulnerable to what Derrida has called the
paradox of the message transformed by the addressees (8586). Dis-
ciplinarity is in this respect a form that travels well beyond the disciplines.
The disciplines open out to their publics, not in terms of their contents,
but as powerful figures for contestatory and open-ended debate, for an
embrace of the unfamiliar that is never formless, but that incessantlycelebrates the logic of the supplement, of reading as a never-ending
project. The academic discipline thus presents an exemplary instance
of the logic of the semiprivate room, a space of production, exchange,
and conflict. This explicitly bounded space, limited in a critical and
untranscendable manner, requires us to acknowledge its impersonal
terms of engagement as exclusive and thus as peculiarly intimate, that is,
as semiprivate, and to attend to its unavoidable figuration of the subject
of address.Every form of (social) discourse entails a specific mode (or
modes) of address. Address is thus an element of form. As a strategic
gesture and a symptom, it reveals the investments and constraints of a
particular discursive practice, even as it lends that practice coherence,
persuasiveness, and the appearance of unity. There are of course many
ways of conceiving the problem of address; for my purposes, address
is fundamentally a rhetorical effect, a trope. Address must rhetorically
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140 A Semiprivate Room
constitute unanticipated subjectivities, proffering new positions to actual
readers or empirical audiences. And address inevitably imposes exclusions
in its projection of a reader/a reading. The addressee is never simply a
mirror image of an already existing reader. Given that it cannot simply
reflect its audience, its literal readership, every address is necessarily a
gamble, an open-ended gesture that always risks failure: readers may
refuse to be addressed, may attack (or ignore) the addressor, and will
without exception transform not only the message, but its mode ofaddress as well, all in the simple process of taking it up. Every address is
thus also a reading, and as such, it is inevitably reread.
Ultimately, the practices of reading and address that character-
ize the figure of semiprivate intervene against what I have elsewhere
described as an essentially pluralist mystification of public discourse
that is particularly powerful in the United States.16 This pluralist
hegemony theoretically celebrates the universal reader and the author
who addresses her. But in practice, pluralism enforces the exclusion ofany position that foregrounds the possibility (or the necessity) of exclusion.
This pluralist problematic of general persuasion thus imagines a
universal community in which every individual is a potential convert,
vulnerable to persuasion, and then requires that every critical utterance
aim at the successful persuasion of this community in general, that is, in
its entirety. No intervention that begins with the insight that exclusion is
the theoretical and political ground for all forms of public discourse,
hegemonic and counterhegemonic, can function within this pluralistproblematic. Pluralism renders the irreconcilable divergence of interests
within the critical community an unthinkable form of discontinuity
(Rooney, Seductive 5).17 Within the pluralist problematic, the absent
or excluded term is exclusion itself. Any discourse that challenges the
theoretical possibility of general persuasion, that takes the process of
exclusionthe form of the semiprivateto be necessary to the production
of meaning and publicity, is effectively barred.
Obviously, many of the current polemics on behalf of access,celebrating information as flow, confusing data with knowledge (or even
with argument), and eagerly seeking to market knowledge and render
learning as a process of information retrieval, share the fundamental
assumptions of this pluralist model of universal persuasion. This is not,
however, to say that the computer per se, as a technology, bears the burden
of our current euphoria or that the semiprivate room is an anachronism,
a retreat from the very terms of engagement with the present. It is to say
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that a certain kind of critical discoursefundamental to civil society
and visibly at work in the classroomis impossible in a pluralist space
that excludes exclusion, celebrates frictionless access, and forgets the
critical power (intellectual, political, and intimate) of the enclosure, the
form of discourse and discipline. It is, of course, crucial that entry into
the semiprivate room never be a matter of essential qualitiesI am not
covertly mounting a campaign for invidious exclusions or separatism.
But the semiprivate room is one that must be actively entered (or leftempty). The semiprivate must manufacture the fiction of a provisional
inside, imposing a form of engagement that is set into motion by a
mode of addressnot by means of a reflection, an echo or a miming,
but by a projection, a call, an apostrophe, a seduction: the work of the
semiprivate.
not in public:
feminism and the intimate sphere
The figure of the semiprivate room, as I have been elaborating
thus far, must inevitably engage the animated debates on democracy and
the decline of civil society, critical theory, and participation, where the
meanings of privacy and ofpublicity in all of its senses have been so
carefully examined. Perhaps most salient to my discussion is the argument
about what exactly ought to count as the public in the phrase public
sphere. This question is unavoidable insofar as I hope to extend thefigure of the semiprivate and to resist the suggestion that this trope is in
essence merely another turn on the form of publicity. There is of course
no consensus on the meanings of the couple public/private. From some
perspectives, which we might gingerly call classic, the public sphere is the
site of citizenship and free debate, as opposed to the state; in Habermass
words, the public sphere is the sphere of private people come together to
form a public. This view has been subject to intense scrutinycelebrated,
dismissed, extended, critiqued, recuperated. InFeminists Read Habermas,a range of feminist thinkers concede the limits of what even the late
Habermas offers in the way of a discussion of gender, yet conclude, in the
editors words, that his discourse theory is one of the most persuasive
current reflections on politics and moral and social norms (2).18 None-
theless, for many speaking in quite common feminist idioms, the public is
precisely the world of labor and the state, while the private is the domestic
or the family, only in living memory genuinely subject to the rule of law.
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142 A Semiprivate Room
As Catherine MacKinnon puts it: the private is everything women have
been equated with and defined in terms ofmens ability to have (635).
At the same time, in both the lingua franca and the technical idioms
of capitalist democracy in the U.S., the private is nothing more or less
than the market, and the public is merely the state and its interfering,
tax-mad bureaucrats. (This is of course an idiom entirely familiar to the
early capitalists Habermas describes.) The classic paradigm has also
been challenged by work that emphasizes the existence of a pluralityof public spheres, some of them in conflict with the bourgeois public
sphere of Habermass model and historical narrative; work that addresses
alternative public spheres and frequently champions counterpublics
(Negt and Kluge) has at the very least complicated and qualified
Habermass original analysis.
I am persuaded by Bruce Robbinss suggestion, in his survey
of these contradictory views, that publicity is a quantity appearing in
the market as well as the state, and in numerous spots in between;consequently, no sites are inherently or eternally public (xv). This
view obviously offers encouragement to my suggestion that the figure of
the semiprivate might reach beyond the classroom, outside the academy,
and across the binary of private and public, into a nominally public sphere
where public is taken only to mean beyond the confines of the university
and the disciplines it shelters (in every sense of the term).
This commonsensical deployment of the term public does not
exhaust my proposals connection to this critical work, however. Thesemiprivate is not a compromise formation, a middle term blending the
public and the private as they have been theorized historically; indeed,
the terms in which I have tried to elaborate this figure have little in
common with the critical vocabulary of democratic participation, private
persons coming together, and the art of rational-critical public debate
that marks debate, post-Habermas. There are, however, two terms vital
to the operation of the figure of the semiprivate that seem to me also
to be crucial to feminist work explicitly addressed to the Habermasianconceptualization of the public sphere: exclusion and intimacy. This
is hardly surprising, given that feminist discourse offers us so many
privileged instances of the critical and essentially uncertain operations
of reading and address that I have linked to the figure of the semiprivate.
The figure of address has long been an element of the work of feminist
theory.19 Like many of its political and intellectual allies, feminism has
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made little progress in its anxious struggles with the question ofWho Can
Speak?(as a recent title put it);20 the resulting shif t in focus away from the
identity politics that underlie the problem of speaking for (Alcoff) has
renewed interest in a politics of address that may take us further than our
efforts to conjugate race, class, and gender have thus far. In this respect,
certain t raditions of feminist discourse stand for me as exemplary of the
semiprivate. Their contending modes of address preclude it from evading
the question of exclusions, and its practices of reading insist, at their best,on the impersonal intimacy and the formal situatedness that characterize
the figure of the semiprivate. Indeed, feminist theories have repeatedly
converged on the figure of the semiprivate: in both the affirmation and
the critique of identity politics; the interrogation of the (phallocentric)
universal; the complex articulations of personal criticism; and the
intricate analyses of feminist pedagogy.21 By virtue of its continuous
engagement with and displacements of the opposition of public and
private, feminist discourse has anticipated the figure of the semiprivatein myriad ways.
But to return to the more immediate question of the public
sphere as such: the feminist critique of Habermas is not one. There are
decidedly different degrees of dismissiveness and engagement with his
model even in the work represented, for example, in a collection such as
Feminists Read Habermas. Marie Flemings Women and the Public Use of
Reason stands out for the way in which it brings together the problem of
exclusionwhich every feminist commentator addressesand the tropeof intimacy, which has not been as extensively examined. Fleming teases
out the contradictory claims that Habermas has made in the aftermath of
criticisms that his original work underestimated (119) the significance
of both plebian and gender exclusions from the fundamental structure of
the bourgeois public sphere. In Flemings view, Habermass conclusion
that he can nevertheless retain the basic outlines of his original analysis in
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is a mistake, the result
of an ongoing misrecognition of the challenge of his feminist readers andof the nature of his own analysis. She then decisively links Habermas s
misplaced confidence to his original claims concerning the category of
the intimate.
Fleming reminds us that Habermas interrupts his historical
analysis of the development of the discourse of public and private when
he arrives at the question of the specificity of the bourgeois public use
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144 A Semiprivate Room
of reason. At this point, he has recourse to a structural rather than a
historical analysis and, simultaneously, to the figure of gender. As Fleming
observes, in his argument,
the bourgeois public use of reason was not, in essence, a
continuation of the salon-based, rational- critical public debate.
According to Habermas, bourgeois subjectivity was structur -
ally tied to a concept ofhumanitythat originated as a feeling
ofhuman closeness in the innermost sphere of the conjugalfamily. Thatclosenesswas apparently related to the perma-
nent intimacycharacteristic of the new type of family life (in
contrast to the playfulintimacy of the urban nobility). (122)
This remarkable claim situates genderand gendered intimacyat the
very crux of the bourgeois recuperation of publicity and is untroubled by
the fact that the permanent intimacy of this human closeness conceals
both the social subordination and economic dependence of women andchildren. Fleming stresses that this explanation requires not only a
detour to a structural argument, but also a temporary departure from
the discourse of public and private. Habermas now distinguishes between
thepublic(in its literary and political forms), theprivate (economic) and
the intimate (conjugal family) (122). While this complicating gesture
admittedly takes place in plain sight in Habermass text, Fleming argues
that the significance of Habermass point that there is a transfer of
experience from the intimate to the public sphere gets lost as he noweffaces the intersection of the intimate and public (123). Rather than
conceding, in response to his critics, that the exclusion of women from the
public use of reason was both structurally constitutive of the bourgeois
public sphere (125)22 and deeply destabilizing of his fundamental analysis
and linking those facts to this peculiar eruption of a gendered category
of the intimate, Habermas insists that it was precisely the bourgeois
experience of intimacy that nurtured theprinciple of inclusiveness that
is for him the hallmark and the absolute or transhistorical justificationof the bourgeois model of the public sphere (despite its frankly admitted
shortcomings in historical practice).
In Flemings view, Habermas not only concedes but actually
privileges the informal (non-legal) regulation ofinternalfamily relation-
ships (131), genuinely private relationships. (Marx and Engels are cited
as authoritative precursors in this regard.) As a consequence, the view
that the intimate sphere is basically resistant to the logic of public and
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d i f f e r e n c e s 145
private is implicit in the argument of The Structural Transformation
(131), and Fleming suggests that this view has also dominated the work of
Habermass critics. The ideas of the private and intimate have generally
been run together, while the private sphere has been conceived to
include everything that is a non-public matter (133). The intimate sphere
has been lost as a category, but its effects cannot be forgotten. Its structural
association with a dependent femininity and with the definitively non-
public underwrites the masculinism of the public sphere as suchthiseven in recent work that explicitly chastizes the actually existing public
sphere for its great but merely historical error, the exclusion of women.
Turning back to the figure of the semiprivate, we can see
that Flemings reading illuminates its critique in two ways. Retrieving
the intimate from the twin realms of the family and of permanence, the
semiprivate simultaneously revises the very meaning of exclusion. The
semiprivate room is emphatically not a room of ones own in the home
of ones family. The cadre that gathers in the space of the semiprivate iscontingent, impermanent, only partially identified with one another, in
some respects, wholly antithetical to the permanently bound and legally
protected intimates that make up the normative family. Rather than grieve
over the exclusions that enable and constrain it, the semiprivate makes
active use of its partialities, accidents, and historical limits in order to
generate critical exchangean impersonal intimacy.
In the tr ipartite version of Habermass narrative, the intimacy
of the (conjugal) family, which is finally excluded from the workingmodel that lives on in the Habermasian tradition, is supposedly a space
of personal autonomy, of purely affective relations and of the end of
historyintimacy flourishes there as the expression ofhuman being
per se. While it may nurture the subject that eventually reasons in the
bourgeois public sphere, intimacy has no properly public function, no
direct recourse to publicity, despite what Fleming calls its transference
to the public sphere (123), and the notion of exclusion within the field of
the intimate or of exclusion as simultaneously the cause and effect of whatwe call intimacy is unthinkable.
By contrast, the figure of the semiprivate draws exclusion and
intimacy into a close but uneven relationship with one another. While
Fleming ties the constitutive exclusion of women to their status in the
intimate, the semiprivate forces us to recognize the productive relation
between exclusion and intimacy, as well as to see that today intimacy
is abroad, roving beyond the confines of the conjugal family and
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146 A Semiprivate Room
functioning in an impermanent, even impersonal, and often playful
publicmode. Intimacy is not then simply undone by its movement outside
the family or by contact with the juridical or with the formality marking
the public sphere. In its new register, it figures the possibility of critique
from a position that eschews the myths of universality and the purely
human.
This is the position that Habermas is unwil ling to think, even
when his text points to its possibil ity. As Flemings reading makes clear,he acknowledges not simply the role of the int imate sphere, but of women
themselves, as part of the historically prior literary public sphere, in
establishing the protocols of the public sphere proper. Womens essentially
dependent and subordinate status did not apparently prevent them from
serving as the support for the elaboration of the public sphere in the
world of letters that is eventually translated into the political public
sphere, or even as agents in that world. And yet, when Habermas comes
to describe the social- structural t ransformation of the public sphere, thatis, its degradation, he cites the loss of genuine autonomy and real authority
that men (as bourgeois and as patriarchs) have suffered in the twentieth
century as a major factor in their incapacity to sustain the discourse of the
public sphere. Men become women, but they retain none of the powers that
the women of the intimate sphere and the literary public wielded; not only
the public sphere, but the intimate sphere that engendered it, is destroyed.
The subject of publicity has lost his formative context.
Perhaps by rethinking all the forms of intimacyand thehistorically marked exclusions that ground it and thus give it form as
the purely privateoutside the telos of universal reason, we can imagine
another context and other forms. Impersonal intimacy makes possible the
semiprivates welcoming embrace of the unfamiliar and its appetite for
the stranger: the unfamilial partner sets the scene of critical exchange
and work, the forms of argument and confl ict, the limits of reading. The
semiprivate room does not represent the wholesale abandonment of what
Michael Warner has called the structure of self-abstractionbut it doesimply its radical reorientation and another rhetoric of subjectivities.
Warner s The Mass Public and the Mass Subject characterizes
the self-abstraction that is a condition for public address in just such
terms of defamiliarization and de-identification: We adopt the attitude of
the public subject, marking to ourselves our nonidentity with ourselves
(234). According to Warner, this unrecognized strategy of impersonal
referencethe text addresses me even as it also addresses no one in
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particularis a ground condition of intelligibility for public language
(235), where the validity of what you say in public bears a negative
relation to your person (239). He is interested in the vast range of
everyday life [that has] the reference of publicity and more specifically
in the mass cultural public sphere and mass public subjectivity
(24243ff). In that respect, his attention is turned distinctly away from
the figure of the semiprivate. But Warners work does disclose the multiple
forms of publicity and the de-rhetoricizing stratagems in which publicityencodes itself, tracing what he calls the specific rhetorics of personhood,
which, in the context of the public sphere, are rhetorics of disincorporation
(239). Finally, his analysis of the subject of mass publicity traces the
contradictory movements of identification and alienation, movements
that are revealed in part by what he calls the intimacy of [. . . ] collective
witnessing. For Warner, this intimacy is a consequence of the way in
which our own desires are in most cases [. . .] public desires, even mass
public desires, from the moment that they were our desires. [. . . O]urdesires have become recognizable through their display in the media;
and in the moment of wanting them, we imagine a collective consumer
witnessing our wants and choices (242). This collective witnessing has
intimacy, in Warners view, because subjectivity itself, including minor-
itarian subjectivity, is founded in this field of choice, despite (or perhaps
because of?) the fact that it also a field of brand names.
If critique can emerge (perhaps can only emerge) from the
exclusive yet impersonal intimacy of the semiprivate, it must then beacknowledged that self-abstraction is at best a partial and positional
achievement, a reading without guarantees. The semiprivate room makes
such an acknowledgement public, the explicit theme of its language
of critique. What Warner calls the unrecognized strategy of address
The text addresses me and It addresses no one in particular is
structurally unrecognizable in the classic formulation of the bourgeois
public sphere, precisely because the rhetorical problem of address is by
definition elided (everyone had to be able to participate [Habermas37]). The semiprivate room speaks directly to this problem of address
and confronts a field of heterogeneous addressees that may no longer be
adequately named a mass public. It thus situates argument in a shift ing
relation of address, where an impersonal (nonconjugal, impermanent,
nonoriginary) intimacy can in principle be readindeed, can only be read.
It locates in that semiprivate reading the rhetorical ground for critical
intervention.
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coda: in seminar
A blunt spatial metaphor supports the figure of the semiprivate
room: the semiprivate is a matter of location, of boundaries, of entries and
exits, and negotiated forms of framing and exclusion. But the semiprivate
is also always a problem of translation, and the term itself is by no means
easily transplanted to other languages or contexts. Even in English-
speaking countries, the semiprivates meaning and usage (where it is
used at all) are far from uniform. This linguistic difficulty announces a
parallel concern: that the figure delineated of the semiprivate room may
actually exist only in very particular, even eccentric, locales.
Drafted for delivery at another site, the original version of my
essay bore a subtitle, so that it read: A Semiprivate Room, or, who do
you think youre talking to? In American English, this latter expression
is idiomatic, aggressive, more than slightly aggrieved. In the form of a
question, it in fact asserts that you are talking but that you don t know towhom. In revising and retit ling my paper, I again confronted its idiomatic
quality and considered seriously whether its basic tropethe figure of
the semiprivate roomwould travel well or usefully address the broad
theoretical topic of our conference: feminism and the shifting boundaries
of public and private.
I obviously retained the trope, but I considered my paper a kind
of experiment in address, which is to say that I was prepared for it to fail
rhetorically, not to translate. Miglena Nikolchinas stunning account of thework of the Seminar in talking out the regime in Bulgaria puts this anxiety
of translation (and its lingering hint of a hierarchy of transmission) firmly
to one side: while linguistic and translation problems were debated in
the minutest possible details, the idea of language never disturbed our
conviction that, in writing and speaking Bulgarian, we inhabited the same
dimension as the texts that we read (in whatever language) (11516). In its
place, Nikolchina puts the question of how, through a curious move that
reversed the actualization of theory into the terror of total itarianism, theend of totalitarian terror took a theoretical turn (97). She thus returns
us to the place of the reader, neither inside nor outside.
In reart iculating the seminar, Nikolchina reiterates its practical
refusal ofhierarchies, borders, or compartmentalized zones (115). She
stresses the way in which, in this world of thorough transmittability,
we could overhear anything and imagined ourselves overheard [. . .] from
any given point in the continuum (97). She recounts the multiplicat ion of
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d i f f e r e n c e s 149
the seminars centers and its other-than-official status: what was going
on could not fit into the temporal, spatial, and ideological limitations of
institutions and expanded into private spaces (100). The promiscuous
closeness of the seminar meant that the boundaries between the private
and the public were blurred (100). The seminar inhabited an impure
border between private and public: academic structures and, more
importantly, the function that the regime ascribed to intellectuals were
privatized, and private life [. . .] was expropriated and all but erased
(113). The seminar pursued the work of the semiprivate.
But, if the seminar assailed boundaries and borders and talked
through the incommensurable, it simultaneously occupied a particular
political ground and faced a totalitar ian regime with its own terroristic
practice of discourse. The power of talking in seminar was appropriated
directly from that regime, indeed, was cultivated in the very space the
regime had imposed and in response to one of its forms of terror:
What made it possible to bring about the demise of a regime bytheory (if we assume that this is, indeed, what happened) was
the very structuring of the regime as total discursive control.
Discursive control secures the prerogative of a particular
discourse to emanate reality. The surest way for a discourse to
be reality is through enforcing itself as the only discourse there
is. (97)
Nikolchina demonstrates the way in which the seminar occupied theprivate/public borderland and enlarged its field as the regime reached
its breaking point precisely by taking the implications of the terroristic
imperative of discursive control literally: the seminar was possible
because of the premises it shared with the regime it was undermining: the
belief in unassailable discursive power (98). Turning the fundamentalist
impulse to enforce itself as the only discourse, the one discourse, back
on itself, the seminar inhabited the discursive machine it was trying to
outwit (9798). The seminar mimed the regime, as Nikolchina observedin Bellagio, expecting words to be things and things to be words. When
somethings talked about for too long, / It usually turns into reality
(Stanev qtd. in Nikolchina 96).
To turn the question with which I began back upon Nikolchinas
account of the seminar: how does the figure of the seminar translate?
how can it be read into a context where the regime seems to attribute
no power to intellectuals or their discourse, where the celebration of the
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150 A Semiprivate Room
pluralistic multiplication of languages is the official line (however uneven
its application may be)? I do not think that these questions are merely
symptoms of a desire to collapse all our examples into a single, totalizing
figure, or of my indif ference to the historical and political specificity of
the instance Nikolchina presents. On the contrary, the current political
climate in the United States gives these questions a pointedness they
lacked just one year ago. The official discourse remains one of pluralism
and multiplicity, and the administration insists that it is only terrorists
who promote a fundamentalist and monolithic discourse, who have
only one way of seeing the world, and who would make the world one
by attacking freedom itself, which is to say, by attacking plurality and
difference. The terrorists will have one. But the administration has
simultaneously assailed its critics as disloyal and reconfigured political
debate as an attack on the unity essential for the defense of the home-
land, for domestic security. Nikolchinas intricate unraveling of the
vulnerability of discourse to discourse i lluminates this scene.The discursive context that I have outlined as the ground of the
semiprivate room is not one in which the strategy Nikolchina describes
can powerfully intervene. But there is a vital point of contact between the
seminar and the semiprivate room in the matter of thinking language.
The semiprivate room insists that nothing can be taken literally: its
formal practices (of exclusion) function precisely to establish the figures
by which a particular reading moves forward. As the example of the
disciplines makes clear, the semiprivate room produces its objects. Butat just that conjuncture, Nikolchinas account of the seminar resonates,
for the work of the semiprivate room also presumes belief in discursive
power. In its very different context, this means recognizing the figural ity
of all of our words and of our reality as well. The semiprivate is the area,
almost unnameable, where metaphorical description bleeds into the non-
metaphorical (Ri ley 3) and the possibility of shielding the real from its
figures recedes.
To close with one last question: how is it that two radicallydif ferent contexts, engendering (semantically) opposed strategies (literal -
ism and figuration) should both come to the crux of the private and the
public, seeking there another term that cuts across its oppositions,
inner/outer, masculine/feminine? In lieu of an answer, a renewal of
the questions: how is our every effort to think language-making (and
language as making) bound to the opposition we call public and private
and thus, perhaps, to sexual difference? how will the confounding of that
opposition lead our reading of language onto a new terrain?
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d i f f e r e n c e s 151
ellen rooney is Associate Professor of Modern Culture and Media and English at BrownUniversity. She is the author ofSeductive Reasoning: Pluralism as the Problemati c of Con-temporary Literary Theory(Cornell University Press, 1989) and is currently at work on abook entitledA Semipr ivate Room.
Notes 1 I would like to thank Joan Scottfor inventing a conference onFeminism and the ShiftingBoundaries of Public and Privateand for inviting me, and all of the
participants at the conference,both for their critical readingsof the semiprivate and for therichness of their own returns tothe problematics of public andprivate. I am also grateful toMonique Roelofs for providing anearlier forum for this argumentand for her critical commentary,and to Eli zabeth Weed, whoheard the semiprivate roomand imagined a futu re for it.
2 The OED offers as its firstexample ofsemiprivate areference to the playBlackMacap Violet, which refers to asemiprivate throughfare (1876).Semipublic is an older termin the lexicon, appearing in theEdinborough Review in 1804.The Oxford American Dictionaryignores the U.S. referent of thehospital, defining the semiprivatesimply as having some privacybut not fully private. This isnot a term that t ranslates easily,even into the languages closestto English.
3 Private interests in the alternativesense of private business interestshave, as is well known, intrudeddefinitively into this space in the
United States in recent years.This founding ambiguity in theconcept of privacy will return tohaunt us below.
4 The discipline that I intendto emphasize here is that ofthe semiprivate room, not ofmedicine as such, the latterhaving a f ield of play that includesbut is hardly limited to the
semiprivate hospital room. Thedisciplinar y field that extendsfrom the clin ical spaces Foucaultexplores in The Birth of the Clinic(a text that is not one of his most
frequently sited works, at leastin the U.S. context) to the muchwider sphere of professional ismitself, where an enormousbody of feminist scholarshiphas addressed the effectivemarginal ization of femalepractitioners in the course of theprofessionalization of medicine,is quite another topic.
5 Nothing about this process is
simple, of course, whether inmedicine or in the classroom.Recent news items and a recentbook on the problem of the secondopinion in medicine suggest thatthis much-vaunted strategy forinsuring ones health and safetyis more problematic than anidealizing medical mythologysuggests. At the same time, theproblem of medical errors and the
deaths and injuries apparentlycaused by them each year hasalso received both media andpolitical attention (as well asattention from doctors andhospitals themselves), and theexplicit public support for seekingout a second opinion has grown.In the classroom, of course, acertain quantity of material isalways presented as mere fact,
and the tyrannical teacher who isnot really interested in studentsopinions appears regularly inthe compilations of teacherevaluations published at Brown.On the other hand, there can beno such thing as disciplinarit ywithout the cultivation ofdifferences of opinion; thepractice of classroom discussionis one of its institutional forms.
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152 A Semiprivate Room
6 This is true even ofprivateschools at all levels and of tradeor technical schools. Part ofthe apparent stalling of theprivatize education movementin the United States may well bethe spectacle of financial lossesin the privatized health careindustry, both in the hospital andthe hmo sectors. But there alsoseem to be inherent diff iculties.
Despite the sums of moneyinvolved, the increasingly explicitpolemic for education as jobtraini ng, and the absolute reignof marketing and advertisingideologies over the presentationof schools of every kind totheir potential consumers,the paradigm of educationresists complete assimilation toany business model currently
available. One area that isparticularly vulnerable,however, to corporate models(and corporate investment)is research funding, especiallyin bio-medical and computingfields. See Mary Poovey andRichard Daniels for two recentanalyses of the current situation.
7 In the United States, the National
Labor Relations Board ruled in2000 that teaching assistantsat private universities areemployees with a protected rightto organize. A segment of theteaching assistants at BrownUniversity have recently voted onthe question of affi liating with theuaw for the purposes of collectivebargaining. The ballots have beenimpounded while the University
appeals the nlrb decision thatauthorized the election. TheModern Language Associationnewsletter of 2001 reports themembers approval of a resolutionsupporting unionization foruniversity employees. Nurseshave long been unionized in manyU.S. hospitals, and physicians maynot be far behind.
8 The figure whose work may beof most interest in this respectwould be P ierre Bou rdieu; despi teits tendency to regress towardsa straightforwardly economisticconception of class, the notionof cultural capital powerfullycaptures the tensions at workhere.
9 See, for a range of examples,
Althusser, Gallop, and Johnson.
10 If space permitted, I would hereelaborate the dif ference betweenthis claim and Habermass view,in which the bourgeois publicsphere established the public asin principle inclusive (37) andthus founded a genuinely criticalpractical discourse. Habermascelebrates the historical and
social process through whichthe issues discussed becamegeneral not merely in theirsignificance, but also in theiraccessibility: everyone had tobe able to participate (37); thisis the basis, in his view, for thebourgeois public spheresprin-ciple of universality, its ideal oftranscending social hierarchiesin the name ofcommunication
and understanding betweenpeople in their common qualityas human beings and nothingmore than human beings (34).Many scholars have criticizedthis analysis, both as history andas political theory, but most havenot taken the additional stepof arguing t hat exclusion itselffounds critical practice preciselyby locating and orienting it in a
field of subjects, none of whomcan hope to embody humanbeingper se (29). This is anargument I pursue elsewhere.
11 From this point of view,homeschooling is an oxymoron, acontradiction in terms preciselybecause the intimacy of theprivate home is too intense, even
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in the coldest domestic scene, forthe critical relation privileged asthe form of the semiprivate.
12 Last month, law and economicspolemicist and Federal AppealsCourt Judge Richard Posnerentered the conversation,in a manner of speaking, bypublishingPublic Intellectu-als: A Study of Decline. The
books main contribution to thediscussion, beyond its list of theone hundred most importantpublic intellectuals in theUnited States (Posner is numberseventy-seven), may be to havedefinitively discredited empiricalmethods of disclosing the impactof any intellectuals work in thepublic sphere. A number of thepublic intellectuals on Posners
list are dead.
13 See, among the legion ofpossibilities in both polemicaland more historical idioms,Seyla Benhabib, Craig Calhoun,Michael Berube, Stanley Fish,Nancy Fraser, Henry Louis Gates,Jr., Jrgen Habermas, Stuart Ha ll,Bruce Robbins, Edward Said,Gayatri Spivak, Cornel West;
the 1998 mla Presidential Forumon Nice Work: Going Public(Elaine Showalter); the entiregestalt of cultural studies, fromBirmingham to Illinois; andfeminist work of virtually everystripe.
14 The contemporary discussionin the U.S. that takes up thecategory of the private or the
private/public distinction isastonishingly wide-ranging andtouches upon all facets of life,from the mapping of the genometo popular culture (Big Brother,Survivor, and Temptation Island,of course, but also The TrumanShow and Pleasantvill e), frompolitical lifeor perhaps I shouldsay, politicians lives (Monica
Lewinsky, the spate of revelationsconcerning congressmen,the model marriages of thepresidential candidates in2000)to Internet security,webcasts of all k inds, pr ivacylaw and, always, abortion rights,homosexual rights, the separationof church and state. A recent workintended for a popular audienceis Jeffrey Rosens The Unwanted
Gaze: The Destruction of Privacyin America. The current projectof mounting a homeland defensehas intensified these argumentsin light of facial recognitiontechnology, ethnic profil ing, anddomestic surveillance, thoughthe argument has been ratherone-sided thus far.
15 See Lorraine Daston, who argues:
the structure of our own worldmap of knowledge [is] clearlydominated by the disciplines, andthe moral economy of scholarlylife [is] equally dominated by thedisciplines (68).
16 See Rooney, Seductive Reasoning,especially 163.
17 The current political climate, in
which the At torney General ofthe United States flatly accuseseven his mi ldest Congressionalcritics of giving aid and comfortto terrorists plotting attacks onthe country and many accept thepremise that war requires thesuspension of normal part isandebate on a whole range of issues,illustrates the most extremeform of pluralist universalism.
Even those conflicts that havehistorically been the mostopenly acknowledged (andinstitutionalized) are nowruled out of order. That sucha capitulation would in itselfamount to a concession toterrorism (the terrorists willhave won) is a perspective thatseems to be gaining adherents.
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154 A Semiprivate Room
18 See also Joan Landes , ed.,Femini sm in the Public andthe Private and Nancy Fraser,Unruly Practices.
19 See feminist film theory by LauraMulvey and Mary Ann Doane;the entire range of feministscholars who have appropriatedAlthussers paradigm ofinterpellation; critical work on
the problematics of race and classby Kimberl Crenshaw, CherreMoraga, Saidiya Hartman, andWahneema Lubia no; and recentbooks by Judith Butler, JaneGallop, Barbara Johnson, GayatriSpivak, Patricia Williams, andessays by Ann duCille, DeborahMcDowell, and Chela Sandoval,among others.
20 See Roof and Wiegman. For theparadigmatic investigation of thisimpossible question, see Spivak.
21 In the manuscript from whichthis ar ticle is drawn, I look closelyat the problematic ofpersonalcriticism, a discourse that hasdeveloped within femin ist literaryand cultural studies. I analyze itsfrequent tendency to fall short of
the impersonal intimacy thatI am here attributing to otherfeminist work. Space does notpermit a full discussion of thispoint here, but I would stressthat personal subject matterdoes not necessarily indicatethat personal criticism is athand; it is the explicit privilegingof the category of experienceand a persistent unwill ingness
to take the personal as a text (anon-authoritative example) thatdistingu ishes personal criticismand opposes it to the figure ofthe semiprivate as I am seekingto elaborate it. The semiprivateand its operation of addresscannot be assimilated to theworkings of personal crit icismor, for that matter, to the logic ofidentity politics, both of which
have prominent feminist avatars;indeed, the discontinuities amongthese related problematics areof critical interest.
22 I should note that Flemingqualifies here by distinguishingbetween two types of constitutiveexclusionsnot veryconvincingly, in my v iew.
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