Lecture by Gerald Raunig at the presentation of Open #19

“Post-privacy”, “postfordist privacy”, “Privacy 2.0”: privacy – and with it its partner that has so often been believed lost, the public – seems to be currently undergoing an astonishing renaissance, even if it is only in the form of lamenting its loss. Volume 19 of the journal Open opens up a heterogeneous field of positions ranging from the juridical defense of privacy in the so-called information society, to the proposal of withdrawing into a post-privacy no-man’s-land, all the way to the various versions of resistance in a situation in which private and public seem to have become indistinguishable.

Theories of the implosion of the old opposites of private and public are not new. Here I only want to mention three of the many approaches representing theses of this kind:

1. As a central concept of liberalism, privacy is only given in combination with property, i.e. an exception, outside of which the relation between private and public tends to irrelevance, at least since the power formation that Michel Foucault calls “pastoral power”. In an excellent essay in the current edition of Open, the French-Italian philosopher and sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato develops this line of argumentation. He writes: “For ‘pastoral power’ or ‘biopolitics’, ‘privacy’ or ‘private life’ never existed, except for the rich. The only actual private thing in modernity is private property.” (20)

2. In the context of second-wave feminism, in the early 1970s feminist theorists and artists used the slogan “the personal is political” to call attention to the way that the dualism public – private has always followed a twofold patriarchal logic since antiquity. Insisting on the personal as political indicates this double logic of exclusion and at the same time seeks to promote an emancipatory component in the blurring of private and public.

3. Finally, post-Operaist theorists have pointed out since the early 1990s that the public sphere has been moving from the political into the realm of production, thus becoming “depoliticized” in a specific sense. The Italian philosopher Paolo Virno, for instance, speaks in his essay “Virtuosity and Revolution”, published in 1994, of production assuming the structure of the public realm by increasingly taking over the modulation of social cooperation. Whereas social cooperation, coordination and communication are only carried out in the area of work, the dimension of the public as political action and cooperation vanishes. Especially against this background, however, Virno and others see an opportunity for politicization in a different moment of the “private”: specifically in the becoming-public of thinking, of the nous, the intellect, in the emergence of a public intellect, a general intellect, or, as I would add, a transversal intellect.

Without seeking to disentangle this back and forth between private and public, personal and political, I want to emphasize that it makes less sense at this point to cling to the old parameters of classical political theory. Instead, it is necessary to develop our conceptual imagination bringing new concept proposals to light. Before I make this kind of concept proposal and thus dive right into the depths of the history of philosophy, the starting point for my reflections on what comes “after” or “beyond” privacy – or what has already come – is initially found in a highly topical, but at the same time very reduced meaning of “privacy”.

As a concept, privacy increasingly appears in the limited meaning of data protection and confidentiality. Specifically against the background of a growing interest in social networks, a new discourse on the impending loss of privacy is emerging. It starts with the phenomenon of profiling and storing personal data. Here privacy is intended to provide an answer to the question of how this data can be protected from access by others: this means first of all protection from state repression of individuals, but then also – Amazon probably knows more about me than the state – protection from the valorization of accumulated personal data by businesses. In light of the increasing predominance of state surveillance programs as well as the commercial misuse of personal data, these are problems to be taken seriously. At the same time, however, these are hardly varying repetitions of the same one-sided narrative of decline as the lamentations either of the downfall of the public or that of the private in ever new combinations. And these narratives are often even less sophisticated than the surveillance society science fiction motifs from 1984 or Brave New World, which were just sufficient to stir us up a bit as young secondary school pupils in the 1970s.

Just as these analyses underestimate current structures of desire and modes of subjectivation in social networks, ideas of resistance based on them are often insufficiently complex. If the focus is on the impending misuse of private data, the idea of radically refusing individual expression and communication may seem to suggest itself. However, this has not only the charm, but also the problems of retro-perspectives, such as that of the withdrawal of the artist into seclusion or the researcher into the ivory tower. Or: Big Brother Awards are certainly amusing, but they reduce complexity down to the diabolization of states, corporations or even individual persons. And when outraged users called for a Quit Facebook Day on May 31st, then the only reason that it was not a completely unsuccessful media strategy was because it did not come anywhere near the streams of desire that make Facebook such a Pied Piper.

The point then is to contrast one-sided perspectives of an endangered privacy in need of defense with a more complex image: one that 1. does not overlook the patriarchal logic of invoking the private and the public in a neoliberal setting as well, which 2. takes into consideration the components of subjectivation and the involvement of the desiring subjects, and which, finally and 3. is capable in this way of developing appropriate dispositives of resistance in the constant exchange of conceptual and social machines.

What does it mean when a desire spreads that seems to correlate specifically with the voluntary abandonment of all privacy? What does it mean, if people are not simply forced in social networks to dispose of their data and that even for the economic purposes of others, but when they develop a veritable compulsion to “de-privatization”? Taking the example of Facebook: the problem of the business model Facebook is not only in the valorisation of unpaid work, in the purported identification of users for advertising clients or in the incomprehensibility of the privacy policy and the privacy settings of Facebook. The underexposed side of social networking is the strange desire to publicly communicate, to share one’s data, to share oneself.

This compulsion, this desire is based first of all and primarily on the urge to come into the light of the virtual sociality, on an urgent necessity of visibility , which is linked with a new idea of privacy as deficiency. Deficiency, however, a lack, literally being de-prived of something, has always been inherent to the concept of the private. In antiquity it was the lack of an office, a lack of publicity, a lack of possibilities for political agency. In the sociality of contemporary social networks privacy becomes a problem, because it implies invisibility, being cut off from the vital nerve of social networks . Then privacy in social networks is secondly also a self-understanding that works like a confession, a kind of permanent confession before a smaller or larger community of the faithful. And thirdly, manifestations of virtual exhibitionism, the manic display of life, are also manifestations of a “Teil-Zwang”. The German word “teilen” here has the twofold meaning of self-division and of sharing. It is – and here I come to the central concept of this lecture – a desire for dividuality, a dividual desire.

Maurizio Lazzarato writes in Open: “Instead of touching individuals as legal subjects ‘capable of voluntary actions’, capable of transferring right and delegating their power to representatives, capable of assuming the magistracies of the polis, pastoral power is aimed at ‘living subjects’, their daily behaviour, their subjectivity and their conscience. * Pastoral power, like its successor*, the ‘police’ of the raison d’etat and the welfare state, deals with details, intervenes in the infinitesimal, in the molecular of a situation and a subjectivity.” (21)

According to Lazzarato, this still growing economy of souls is a “molecular model of power relations, which produces multiple fractal divisions and hierarchies that are more subtle and more mobile than those of traditional oligarchies of wealth and birth” (23).
“Multiple (self-) divisions” brings us closer to the arrangement of concepts that I am aiming for. The concept of division indicates the tension with another central concept of liberalism, the in-dividual. Pastoral power relations function not only through the interpellation of the individual, through individualization, control and regulation, but go beyond that. They produce not only individuals, “indivisible” particles that are incessantly individualized; they also produce dividuality.

The “division” generally does not – or not only – function, as in the specific case of Facebook, in the sense of the unauthorized seizure of personal data by states and businesses, but in the desire of the data producers for dividualization, in a kind of voluntary sharing, of self-determined self-division.

Gilbert de la Porrée and the Invention of the Dividuum

Gilbert de la Porrée (Gilbertus Porretanus, approx. 1080-1155), bishop of Poitiers, was one of the most important logicians and theologians of the first half of the 12th century. This position resulted not least of all from the fact that Gilbert was probably the first Christian theologian of the Middle Ages, who was able to acquire more extensive knowledge of Aristotelian writings. Although his extant work consists only of commentaries, his “teaching” received considerable attention through the influence of his “pupils” around the mid-12th century. Against the background of theological and inner-church conflicts, Gilbert was politically persecuted and charged with heresy, at the instigation of Bernard de Clairvaux, by the papal consistorium of Paris in 1147 and another consistorium after the Synod of Reims in 1148. However, and unlike Abelard, for instance, Gilbert was not condemned during his lifetime. His controversial position on ecclesiastical politics along with his complex argumentation and an unconventional style gave Gilbert an infamous reputation, which predominated well into the 19th century: August Neander’s Allgemeine Geschichte der christlichen Religion und Kirche History of the Christian Religion and Church still described him as a “man of unclear, confused, abstruse manners of representation” in 1845.

Gilbert became well known primarily through his commentary on the Christian philosopher of late antiquity and Aristotle translator Boethius. In Gilbert’s second prologue to Boethius’ first tractate De Trinitate there is a passage that not only raises several issues about the concept of individuality, but also introduces the concept that is a central issue for us here. Gilbert writes:

Sepe autem diversa numero singularia secundum aliqua eorum, quibus sunt, conformia sunt. Ideoque non modo illa, que sunt, verum etiam illa, quibus conformia sunt, unum dividuum sunt. Ac per hoc neutrum illorum, quibus conformia sunt illa que sunt, individuum est. Si enim dividuum facit similitudo, consequens est, ut individuum faciat dissimilitudo.

First, I would like to concentrate on the last part of the last sentence: the sequence individuum … dissimilitudo seems sufficiently clear, dissimilarity correlates with the individual. Here – long before the alleged invention of the individual in the Renaissance – the notion of an individual is presented, which is internally “indivisible” and externally dissimilar, distinct from all other individuals. It is the further development of the Greek a-tomos, “atom”, for an indivisible single being, which was not yet limited to the human personality in the understanding of Antiquity. The individual is a whole, a one, something not randomly composed. It is something of its own; it has – as Gilbert emphasizes – the characteristic of evincing no similarity. It is, in a sense, incomparable.

For our question, however, it is the first part of the sentence that is interesting: “If similarity makes the dividual, then consequently dissimilarity makes the individual.” Gilbert introduces a concept here that is probably his invention: the dividual. Even though the individual for us seems to be the conceptual starting point for the development of the dividual, logically and ontologically the dividual precedes the individual.
As the first sentence of the Latin quotation describes, singularities (as numerically different) share their forms with other singularities in terms of several things through which they exist. unum dividuum is then both: that which is, and that through which this being – Gilbert would write: this subsistens – “conforms”, i.e. shares its form. Here it becomes clear that dividual is not to be understood as a universal, as might be conjectured in the context of the dispute of universals in the 12th and 13th century. The dividual is not one-sidedly opposite the individual as something universal, but is one of Gilbert’s terms that thwarts the dichotomy of that which is individual and that which is universal, introducing a new dimension, in which that which something is and that through which it is are related to one another.
Gilbert writes that similarity correlates with the dividual, that indeed similarity produces the dividual. The dividual thus has one or more components that constitute it as something divisible and, at the same time, link it with other dividuals that are similar in their components. The point here is similarities, specifically in relation to only some components. conformitas, conformity, does not imply sameness, total uniformity or adaptation, but rather con-formity, a specific compliance in form, the sharing of formal components. This con-formity, which is simultaneously multi-formity, constitutes the divisible as unum dividuum.

More well known and more consequential in the history of philosophy than the invention of the dividual, is Gilbert’s differentiation of individuality, singularity and personality. With Boethius, the concepts of the singular and the individual are still used congruently. With Gilbert, on the other hand, it becomes clear that the concept of singularity has a different and broader field of application than that of individuality. Singularity is basically the foundational concept that is Gilbert’s starting point. Somewhat earlier in his Boethius commentary, before introducing the dividual, Gilbert writes: “We want to distinguish …: A property of something is called ‘singular’, ‘individual’ or ‘personal’ for a respectively different reason. For everything that is an individual is singular, and everything that is a person is singular and individual, but not every singularity is an individual, and not every singularity or every individual is a person.”
Whereas individuality and its component of dissimilarity emphasizes the respectively being-different, the demarcation from everything else, the singularity is always one among others. If the concept of individuality thus tends towards the construction of the closing off of the self and the other, singularity emphasizes the plurality and the con-formity of all that is. According to Gilbert, singularities are 1. more than individuals, 2. inherently plural, constituted by manifold components, and 3. open for association and concatenation due to their con-formity.

Nietzsche’s Dividuum as an Effect of Pastoral “Self-division”

Even though the singular was not so radically understood as the foundational concept of ontology for a long time after Gilbert, it still developed into a perennial theme in the history of philosophy – in contrast to, in exchange with or confused with the terminology associated with individuality and individual. At the same time, every trace of the dividual vanished after the 12th century. It came up again – ephemerally, but efficiently – in Friedrich Nietzsche’s first attempt at a rigorous critique of morality: in the second main section of the first volume of Human, All Too Human (published 1878), morality is introduced as the structure of the “community of the good”, as the firm “ground of ruling tribes and castes”, upon which something like a “common sense” could first arise – from the beginning as a criterion of exclusion. This structure, well ordered through both compassion and enmity, is confronted with a wild disorder. Nietzsche does not intend to understand the masses ordered by the difference between good and evil at this point solely as a “swarm of subjected, powerless people”. The result is the dual image of a self-governed community of the good and its wild, subjected and excluded counterpart.

As one of the many constitutive fallacies from the world of morality, Nietzsche also problematizes the individual, showing how - with a little imagination - it could lose its totality and identity on the axis of time. He emphasizes the moment of temporal change, and with it the constructedness of an unalterable character and the unalterability of the individual altogether. He sees the idea of the character being unalterable as being the fault of the fact that “during the brief lifetime of a man, the effective motives are unable to scratch deeply enough to erase the imprinted script of many millennia.” Following from this, Nietzsche’s mental task consists of imagining that an eighty thousand-year-old man must contain several individuals.

Even though these fictive approaches to a temporal unleashing of the individual certainly correlate with the more spatial concatenation figures of dividuality, with Nietzsche the appearance of the dividual is carried out entirely in the logic of morality, specifically “morality as the self-division of man”. The dividuum appears here as a rather colorless inversion of the individuum, as a pure effect of morality. Yet the examples of dividuality Nietzsche uses are such that certainly require the individuum of the disciplinary society and its highly gendered features; for instance, an author who wishes to be annihilated by another author “presenting the same subject with greater clarity and resolving all the questions contained in it”, or the “girl in love”, who wishes that “the faithfulness and devotion of her love could be tested by the faithlessness of the man she loves”, or the soldier, who “wishes he could fall on the battlefield for his victorious fatherland”, or the mother, who gives her child the sleep she deprives herself of. In all of these cases, man divides his essence and sacrifices one part of it to the other. This is the place where the dividuum tending towards self-division appears as a component of morality; and the moral of the story is: “In morality man treats himself not as individuum but as dividuum.”
This statement could also be interpreted with a dark sentence from Novalis from the encyclopedic material he assembled in 1798/99: “The true dividual is also the true individual” , appealed to as undivided and indivisible, and yet all the more forced towards “self-division”. As an aspect of pastoral power, morality is based less on government through repression than through conducting the voluntary and “self-determined” division of the self, and at the same time on a desire that longs for and brings about this self-division.

Dividuality and Con-division

Yet I could also tell the story quite differently, something like this: in discussions with friends and colleagues , recently we have more and more frequently run into the limitations of concepts of community, commune, the common, communism and commonism. Against the background of this deep-rooted problem, I thought about conceptual alternatives that express both components as well, separation and sharing, like the French term partage or the German Teilen, but express them explicitly.

Around the same time, I translated a few smaller texts by Paolo Virno from Italian into German. In several places I ran into a word that was initially unfamiliar to me. By tripping this way in the translation process, I became aware of its conceptual components, an insight that would probably not have been accessible to me without this tripping in a foreign language: condivisione is not a particularly strong word; in everyday Italian it stands for “shared use” and “relationship”. Yet its components, as I quickly realized, were almost exactly those that I had been revolving around for some time. con-divisione means both, and it expresses both explicitly and with the necessary differentiation: the con- indicates the composition, the concatenation, the sharing, whereas divisione indicates the fundamental separation and division of singularities.

But the second part of the word con-divisione also sparked a conceptual memory. In his “Postscript on the Societies of Control” in 1990, Gille Deleuze described the transition from disciplinary societies to societies of control, among other things, with this sentence: “Individuals have become ‘dividuals’.” Disciplinary societies are marked by forms of enclosure with relatively clear boundaries, whereas societies of control are characterized by constantly deforming forms. Whereas disciplinary societies distinguish themselves by counting individual bodies, the signature of the society of control is “the code of a ‘dividual’ material to be controlled”. Instead of the disciplining of bodies, this involves “a gas” that “opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within”. In other words, this is obviously where the Nietzschean “self-division” returns. “Individuals have become ‘dividuals’, and masses become samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’.”

What becomes evident here is possibly also a contemporary foundation for the insight that the dividual has led a shadow existence over the course of centuries in the history of philosophy and is now coming more into the light. The ephemeral notes from Novalis and Nietzsche could be interpreted as a glimpse, an early indication of an imminent actualization of the dividual. Without wishing to uncritically accept the somewhat schematic Deleuzian representation of the transition from disciplinary to control regimes , it can still be assumed that indications of dividualization have been significantly increasing with post-fordist modes of production since the late 20th century. With the background of Gilbert’s concept of the dividual, perhaps we could even go so far as to regard the statement “individuals have become dividuals” not as a linear development, but rather as an accumulation of modes of governing. Individuals no longer function only as individuals modularized by disciplinary regimes, but also function at the same time as modulating dividuals: as hamsters no longer in a wheel, but rather in a Kafkaesque Möbius strip, permanently condemned to production.

But it would not be Deleuze, if social transformations were only to be found on the side of the self-modulating forces of government and self-government: “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.” Instructions on what these weapons are to consist of, however, are not to be found in the “Postscript”. Yet, ten years earlier, Deleuze and Félix Guattari had already set out in search of a new “dividual scale”. In the Refrain plateau of A Thousand Plateaus they note a serious difference between German and Latin/Slavic Romanticism. German Romanticism is consequently distinguished by perceiving natal territory as hermitage, its heroes were mythic “heroes of the earth”. “As in the lied, everything in the territory occurs in relation to the One-Alone of the soul and the One-All of the earth.” Deleuze/Guattari contrast this German relationship between the individual and the universal with a different version of Romanticism in the Latin and Slavic countries. Instead of being hermitage, here the territory is inhabited by a “nomadic population that divides or regroups, contests or laments, attacks or suffers”. The hero of this desert is not a hero of the earth, but is related to the “One-Crowd”.

Of course, this dualism certainly does not correspond to the entirety of concrete musical practices, such as the unequal pair Wagner and Verdi. Deleuze and Guattari also point out that there was not necessarily more or less nationalism on one side or on the other. Instead, they are interested in the musical micropolitics relating orchestration and instrumentation: the orchestration-instrumentation changes, and with it the role of the hero’s voice, depending on whether the musical forces are determined more by the One-All or enter into an exchange with the One-Crowd. Deleuze and Guattari contrast the “relations proper to the Universal” with group individuation. For this second type of musical relationships and to designate intra- or intergroup passages, they propose the Dividual: “The sentimental or subjective element of the voice has a different role and even a different position depending on whether it internally confronts nonsubjectified groupings of power or nonsubjectified group individuation, the relations of the universal or the relations of the ‘dividual’.”
The relationships of the group individuations and the One-Crowd are the unum dividuum, divided among many con-forming singularities. Its revisions overflow not only the Romantic era, but also the “high culture” context of “serious music” (Debussy, Bartok, Berio), in which Deleuze and Guattari situate it: into all the territories of music and sound, from Free Jazz to techno, even into the sound of everyday life and the white noise of urban space – and naturally also into other arts, especially their contemporary forms.

And even more: the dividual inhabits not only the hetero-cosmoses of art, the anthropological investigations of Melanesian cultures or the schizo-analyses of multiple personalities. It permeates the fields of economy and sociality as well. It is a matter of situativity, which perspective one assumes with respect to the dangerous proliferations of the dividual – whether the concept of the dividual is used as a description of the most recent capitalist transformations or as components of social struggles, which – depending on political and theoretical preferences – precede capitalist modes of production or engage them in hand-to-hand combat.
Particularly in this ambivalent rising tide of dividualism between new forms of pastoral (self-)government and the search for new weapons, the question of an offensive concatenation and its terminology appears all the more urgent. This means that my proposed neologism, condivision, becomes a term for a concatenation of singularities, which not only names their exchange, their mutual reference, their association with one another, but also impels it. In condivision, the dividual component, the division, does not indicate a reduction, but rather the possibility of an addition, an AND. Singularities and their concatenations become in condivision. It is not necessary for a community to emerge first, in order to achieve the recomposition of previously separated individuals, but instead the concatenation and the singularities are co-emergent as the condividuality of condividuals.

Thanks to Nikolaus Linder, Isabell Lorey, Michaela Ott and Drehli Robnik for essential suggestions, discussion and exchange.

Translation Aileen Derieg