Digital-image society has nearly eliminated legal and metaphysical privacy

Evidence

The philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle laments this absence of absence: “In today’s age, it has become intolerable to ‘withdraw ourselves,’ or else this withdrawal must be announced, scheduled, and registered, the secret garden is identified by a sign, which means that it is no longer secret.” If Roland Barthes could still conceive, in his reflections on photography back in 1980, of “private life” as “that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object,” then it seems clear that the 2020 vision of digital-image society preserves virtually no privacy, legal or metaphysical. The ego, the first construction, more and more staged, more and more managed, then brittleizes. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 92

Categorization

• XREF: Dufourmantelle’s ‘withdrawal must be announced and registered’ echoes the opacity-vs-transparency tension in Jane Eyre’s insistence on interiority; Barthes’ quoted view provides a dated baseline useful for the reader’s defense-of-mediation argument.
• DEFINE: Names ‘absence of absence’ and the submittable-secret as a distinct feature of immediacy culture.