35 civic privacy

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Democracy also requires places that are private, hidden from view, unmarked on the map. These are spaces of hiding from the state——places that give the externality of civil society its physical presence. I call such places spaces of “civic privacy¹.” At its most basic level, civic privacy is performed by the curtain on the voting booth, where privacy assures the anonymity of the voter, freeing her from personally directed political reprisal. But the right to hold meetings in private opens up a shared space of privacy. Society decides not to use its x-ray, spy satellite, radar imaging on this or that place, conversations are not recorded, and some meetings not constrained by the visible presence of surveillance. While public space is generally perceived as the space of democratic action, actually, places of civic privacy and public-ity co-articulate the working space of democracy. But we have to be very careful in determining where and what types of hiding can be legitimated.

The “right to privacy,” is a right that can only be legitimately exercised within a civil society: no other locations support this right; it does not exist within the state nor the marketplace. “Official secrets,” “black projects,” “covert operations,” and “trade secrets” are compromises made to purchase a localized strategic advantage of certain information against the designs of enemies and competitors. The grudging acceptance² of these practices should not be confused with the granting of a “right to privacy.” All information within the state or in corporations should be accessible to outside oversight organizations, and usually the courts fulfill this role (although, in Japan, the courts do not have an active history of doing so). The lack of oversight organizations in Asia Pacific nations, such as Japan, supports a “culture” of hiding, and marks a weakness in civil society's purview vis-à-vis the state or the market throughout the region.

What about openness within civil society? Above I noted that civil society is the arena for places and practices of “civic privacy.” Civic privacy is a necessary moment in a process of articulating views that are external to the state. The privacy protects individual participants against personal reprisals. Apart from this type of privacy, civil society organizations should reflect the same internal level of openness and transparent decision making that they expect of the state. The very issues of delegation³ and representation that are often the focus of reform agendas brought by civil society organizations against the state are also active within civil society organizations themselves. Alexander Kluge's (1988) work on the process of democratization of production for a counter-public sphere gives us a good example of a reflexive attempt to marry theory and process within an organization.

However, today, even an acknowledged “right of privacy” does not ensure absolute civic privacy. The general conflict between the desired protection of individual member privacy and the need to be inclusive, to openly recruit members, generally means that a civil society organization cannot today assume that the contents of its meetings are actually unknown to the state⁴.

A civil-society group can expect that its “private” meetings are not subject to public-sphere media distribution, and that the state's use of its information about private meetings is constrained and monitored. Laws that protect the state against organized efforts to overthrow it are legitimated as strategies against the potential of violence against the nation's citizenry, but they also serve the interests of the state against the citizen's rights of civic privacy, and these must be subject to external (e.g., legal) review.

¹Civic privacy is secured as the right to form a barrier against panoptic intrusion. Civic privacy creates a condition of externality to the state. Civic privacy is absolutely vital to the creation of a public sphere, to the maintenance of democratic society, and to the welfare of individual life projects. Many of the debates over social policy today (abortion rights, euthanasia, domestic violence, censorship) are really attempts to reset boundary conditions between state intrusion and civil privacy. We can only understand these debates fully when we comprehend their social geographical consequences. Civic privacy is also often used as an alibi for other types of hiding, so we have to be very careful about this notion. For example, the notion that a government organization has a right to privacy is a mistaken use of this concept.

²This acceptance is warranted through a discourse of shared advantage. National corporations (an increasingly anachonistic term) are represented as working in the interest of the national good. Therefore we all benefit when new technology is kept secret from “foreign” competitors.

³Bourdieu's arguments are sanguine here: “This process of concentration of power in the hands of delegates is a sort of historical realization of what is described by the theoretical model of the process of delegation. People are there and speak. Then comes the party official, and people come less often. And then there is an organization, which starts to develop a specific competence, a language all of its own. (Mention might be made here of the way the bureaucracy of research develops: there are researchers, and there are scientific administrators who are supposed to serve the researchers. Researchers do not understand the administrators' language, which may be bureaucratic 'research budget', 'priority'. etc.—and, nowadays, technocratic-democratic 'social need'. They immediately stop coming and their absenteeism is denounced. But certain researchers, those who have time, do stay. The rest of the story is easy to predict.) The party official (permanent) is, as the term suggests, the person who devotes all his time to what is, for others, a secondary or, at least, part-time activity. He has time, and he has time on his side. He is in a position to dissolve all the prophetic, that is, discontinuous struggles for power into the tempo of the bureaucracy, into that repetition that swallows up time and energy. It is in this way that delegates secure a certain concentration of power and develop a specific ideology, based on the paradoxical reversal of their relation with their mandators whose absenteeism, incompetence and indifference to collective interests are denounced, without it being seen that this indifference is the result of the concentration of power in the hands of the party officials... (1991, 218)"

⁴Anti-Vietnam war protest meetings I attended were always assumed to include government informants, and the meeting organizers were often at a loss to find tactics to organize public demonstrations that might surprise the local police. Usually, on the day of a demonstration, the police tactical squad would arrive at the demonstration's “secret” starting place before the organizers did. This also led to increasing acrimony, disorder, and (perhaps justified) paranoid behavior at organizing meetings.