Ellen Rooney. "A Semi-Private Room"

7/28/2019 Ellen Rooney. "A Semi-Private Room"

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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.html


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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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


24/30


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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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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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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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.

Works Cited Alcoff, Linda. The Problem of Speaking for Others.Cultural Critique 20 (Winter 199192):532.

Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.Lenin and Phi losophy andOther Essays. New York: Monthly Review P, 1971. 12786.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Soc ial Cr itique of the Judgment of Pure Taste. Cambridge,Mass.: Har vard UP, 1979.

Calhoun, Craig, ed. Habermas an d the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1997.

Daniels, Richard, w ith Lisa Blasch and Peter Caster. Resisting the Corporatization of theUniversity. White and Hauck 6184.

Daston, Lorraine. The Academies and the Unity of Knowledge: The Disciplining of theDisciplines. differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10:2 (1998): 6786.

Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation . NewYork: Schocken, 1985.

Fish, Stanley. Professional Correctness: Literar y Studies and Poli tical Change . Oxford:Oxford UP, 1995.


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Fleming, Marie. Women and the Public Use of Reason.Meehan 11738.

Fraser, Nancy. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary SocialTheory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.

Gallop, Jane, ed. Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonat ion . Bloomington: Indiana UP,1995.

. Femini st Accused of Sexual Harassment. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.

Habermas, Jrgen. The Structural Transformat ion of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into aCategory of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.

Johnson, Barbara, ed. The Pedagogical Imperative. Yale French Studies 63 (1982).

Landes, Joan, ed. Femini sm, the Public and the Private . Oxford : Oxford UP, 1998.

MacKinnon, Catherine. Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: Toward FeministJurisprudence. Signs 8.4 (1983): 63558.

McCarthy, Thomas. Practical Discourse: On the Relation of Morality to Politics. Calhoun5172.

Meehan, Johanna, ed. Femini sts Read Haber mas: Gender ing the Subject of Discourse. NewYork: Routledge, 1995.

Negt, Oskar, and A lexander Kluge. Public Sphere and Experi ence: Toward an Analysis ofthe Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Nikolchina, Miglena. The Seminar: Mode demploi : Impure Spaces in the Light of LateTotalitarianism. differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13.1 (2002): 96127.

Poovey, Mary. The Twenty-F irst Century University and the Market: What Pr ice EconomicViabil ity? differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 12:1 (2000): 116.

Posner, R ichard. Public Intellec tuals: A Study in Decl ine . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP,2002.

Riley, Denise. The Right to Be Lonely. differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Stud -ies 13.1 (2002) : 113.

Robbins, Bruce. The Phantom Public Sphere. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Roof, Judith, and Robyn Wiegman, eds. Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity.Urbana: U of Ill inois P, 1995.

Rooney, Ellen. Form and Contentment.Moder n Language Quarterly61:1 (2000): 1740.

. Seductive Reasoning: Pluralism as the Problemati c of Contemporary LiteraryTheory. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

Rosen, Jeffrey. The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America . New York:Knopf, 2001.

Semiprivate. The American Heritage Dictionary. 1976.

Semiprivate. Oxford American Dictionary. 1980.

Semiprivate. The Oxford English Dictionar y. 1971.


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Sinfield, Alan. Faultl ines: Cult ural Materiali sm and the Poli tics of Dissident Reading.Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.

Spivak, Gayatri. Can the Subaltern Speak?Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture .Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana : U of Illinois P, 1988. 271313.

Warner, Michael. The Mass Public and the Mass Subject. Robbins 23456.

White, Geoffry and Flanner y C. Hauck. Campus, Inc.: Corporate Power in the Ivory Tower.Amherst: Prometheus, 2000.

Ellen Rooney. "A Semi-Private Room"

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Transcript of Ellen Rooney. "A Semi-Private Room"