Celebrations in Cities— privacy and intimacy

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Festivals play with the boundary between private and public in a manner that opens up both spheres to democratic rearticulation. The emotional release of festival arts is also a form shared emotional dialogue: a non-verbal articulation of dialogic democracy. To understand how this works, let us now look at notions of “private” and “public.”

Most places one encounters everyday that are “private” are not private as sites of civic privacy, but rather they are private in a more general sense of avoiding visibility/audibility for the purpose of rehearsal, or for “private” acts. Lavatories, bedrooms, closets, doctors' examination rooms, and executive suites are all backstages for later public behaviors, or places for secret decisions, or sites of actions that are not allowed “in public.” These spaces form a sequential space of individual privacy that make up the places where a “personal life” or a “private sphere” is constructed and lived.

These “back spaces” can be used as retreats from the visibility of public spaces, but they can also be places where certain activities are sequestered from public attention. But coding certain practices and spaces as “private only” has other, unintended, and also undesirable consequences for the public sphere.

The sequestration of emotional display from the public street is the most problematic, I believe, as this leads to a diskilling in emotional expression in public. As bell hooks noted:

“I think about how privacy is to connected to a politics of domination. I think that's why there's such an emphasis in my work on the confessional, because I know that in a way we're never going to end forms of domination if we're not willing to challenge the notion of public and private... if we're not willing to break down the walls that say, 'There should always be this separation between domestic space/intimate space and the world outside.' Because, in fact, why shouldn't we have intimacy in the world outside as well? (hooks 1994, 224).”

hooks's call for a re-joining of private and public points to the domination of “the private” and “the domestic” by “the public.” This is another reading of the sequestration of women into the domestic sphere, and it also notes the impoverishment of “the world outside” when intimacy, confession, and general emotional display is kept from this: emotions become incommunicable in public.

“Once solidarity becomes reflective, we can no longer establish once and for all the expectations of solidary groups. How we understand ourselves as a “we,” the expectations we have of ourselves and others, changes over time, varying with respect to our needs, circumstances, and understanding of what is necessary to secure the integrity of our relationships. What it means to stand by and take responsibility for another differs according to the context”
(Dean 1996, 40) .

Here I want to note that most of the recent work (following Habermas) on the problems of the public sphere stresses the return to a communicative public sphere. While in general agreement with the thrust of these arguments, I also feel that communication has been both instrumentalized and verbalized/textualized in the process. Are we really to suppose that the gestures which communicate our solidarity with others in public must be only or centrally verbal ones? I would also add that a continuing problem with our understanding of the public sphere is a lack of knowledge about its performative aspects. To be sure, Intimacy is first a connection to the body. Everything flows from this connection. Dean (1996) reminds us that:

“what has been lacking is an emphasis on communication as a primary vehicle of social integration. In the liberal tradition, achieving a “we” has been conceived as taking place in a founding moment, behind the backs of members. For classical republicans, the “we” is merely given, viewed in terms of a preexisting ethical consensus. In contrast, the communicative notion of “we” conceives the achievement of solidarity as an ongoing process of engagement and critique. This thus allows reflective solidarity to embrace the universal ideals necessary for democracy as it urges us to strive communicatively to engage with and recognize each and all as part of our “we.” (44).

This lack, as she only alludes to here, concerns the performance of achieving a “we.”

“Intimacy” and “confession” are also central to Giddens's (1994) description of lifeways in late modernity, and he is concerned about how the construction of gender is accomplished by de-emotionalizing the male gender and naturalizing of emotional skills of the female. The resulting un-natural imbalance in the skilling and the appropriateness of emotional expression loads obstacles to attempts at intimacy between genders. hooks's public confessions are admissions not of additions and obsessions (as Foucault's [See: 1990, 19] are), rather they are expressions of self-empowered feelings¹, and the sharing of these is very much implied in what Giddens² called “pure relationships,” which are the, for him, a hallmark of a new turn to intimacy in late modernity³.

Pure relationships are also what Dean (1996, 40) calls a conceptual “court of appeal”, and the most immediate one of several levels of potential social relationships. They form the ground for the most immediate “we.” These voluntary, autotelic relationships that ignore (while they replace) all other family, class and occupational (i.e., paternalistic, hierarchical, status derived) relations as the basis for shared identities. They are constructed within more general, reflexive projects of the self (See: Projects of the self/Projects of the state).

“...Friendship is mutual, social, and quasi-public. It is ecstatic in that its practice draws one out and towards a friend. Philia primes the bond, the among and the between. Marilyn Strathern has insisted how rare it is in modern Western societies to conceive of anything other than individuals and contractual relationships. Philia is based on trust. Trust is another virtue that has been almost entirely ignored in Western philosophy (with the exception of Hume)... Among other things, trust makes a non-war-like, agreed-upon disagreement --agon-- possible”
(Rabinow 1995, 19-20).

A pure relationship is built on a sharing of the strengths, skills, and emotions of the individuals involved, and is vulnerable to either a lack of sharing (a lack of intimacy) or to a failed expectation that all parties are worthy of trust. Such relationships resemble a certain ideal notion of “friendship.⁴” So I will use the term “friends” to speak of participants in a pure relationship (hereafter, a “friendship”).

Privacy, as a way of hiding unworthiness, or of avoiding intimacy, is not allowed in these friendships. It is this requirement of an ongoing (continually unfolding) publicly available, mutual confession that makes friendships a type of minimal public “sphere.” And the process of formation of these friendships has interesting parallels with the formation of larger civil society organizations.

Friendship is a relationship built between strangers. For each potential friend is first estranged from any outside status, and made to show a voluntary desire for intimacy, which reveals a self that is worthy of continuing trust. For example, a friendship between a daughter and her mother is possible only when their relationship as child/parent can be ignored (not an easy chore). The main rule in this relationship is a simple one: “No Secrets.” And the intimacy that results from friendship does not generate a need for privacy, there is no need to hide, everything can be discussed with (confessed to) others without shame.

So we've now returned full circle to hooks's idea of emptying out privacy into the public sphere. I would take this a further step and propose that we can imagine shared performances of confession in public as a means of consolidating a wider social friendship as an alternative to social movements based upon essentialized (imagined) commonalties. These events are themselves the commonalties, and shared participation provides both a time of intimacy and proof of trustworthiness.

There is a place for intimacy in public, and this I will call (trying to be consistent) “civic intimacy.” Civic intimacy is a practice that occurs when a certain type of crowd event allows for members of the crowd to temporarily achieve a controlled-decontrol of their emotions, and to speak (or yell) their minds in public. It is precisely the sort of event that Foucault (1979) was calling upon when he used the public execution to illustrate the power of the crowd. And it is also this type of event, or rather the level of democracy within such events that E. P. Thompson (1993) describes in the crowds of early modernity in England. Against the dark fantasy of “the crowd” turned mob, running amuck down Main Street, we need to imagine a crowd of friends, using the street to consolidate their friendships, and using their friendships as a basis for dialogic democracy.

¹An internet message I ran across recently carried this quote, “Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for truth.” Attributed to Benjamin Disraeli. I think hooks would agree here.

²“At one pole of the interaction between the local and the global stands what I call the 'transformation of intimacy'. Intimacy has its own reflexivity and its own forms of internally referential order. Of key importance here is the emergence of the 'pure relationship' as prototypical of the new spheres of personal life. A pure relationship is one in which external criteria have become dissolved: the relationship exists solely for whatever rewards that relationship as such can deliver. In the context of the pure relationship, trust can be mobilised only by a process of mutual disclosure. Trust, in other words, can by definition no longer be anchored in criteria outside the relationship itself—such as criteria of kinship, social duty or traditional obligation. Like self-identity, with which it is closely intertwined, the pure relationship has to be reflexively controlled over the long term, against the backdrop of external transitions and transformations. (Giddens 1991, 6)”

³This particular feature of Giddens's thesis about the shape of “late modernity” needs to be empirically examined in Asia Pacific locales. Pure relationships interrupt the types of hierarchical (paternalist or patriarchal) relationships I found to be quite common in Kyoto. Does this imply that Kyoto is not a part of “late modernity?”

⁴The near absence of studies of friendship in anthropology or sociology is not surprising, but needs some rectification. Once in Japan I confused an entire room full of strangers at a party when I introduced my spouse as my “friend.” When it later came out that we were (also) married, one visibly angry guest scolded me, and said, “your wife can never be your friend in Japan.” The idea of a modal form of friendship at the center of the individual's relation to the processes of late modernity has many problems, mostly in its univocality. But, as a probe into the amount of “democracy” in interpersonal relationships, it may have useful applications in Asia Pacific circumstances. Certainly “intimacy” or rather its lack is a major feature of the discourse over adult relationships in Kyoto. And, within the Korean community, the general practice of “passing” as Japanese alienates the Korean adult from achieving such a friendship with Japanese adults, or even with other Koreans (who hide behind their own Japanese masks). Profound memories of broken trust and a longing for intimacy are commonly heard within the Korean community.