The public-private issue is quite a real one here, I think,
not because there is any natural distinction of these two
realms -- we all know how historically and culturally specific
our constructions of privacy (and therefore of a certain
sort of publicness) are -- but because there is a real question
how _useful_ the separation may be in our work and our lives.
I think it's reasonable to claim that academic disciplines
and their subcultures require, in how they have become
constituted historically, a certain artificial separation
of the fully public domain (e.g. conference talks, publications),
the semi-private domain (e.g. essential gossip about the
relationships among individual researchers, e.g. who was
whose student, who hates whose guts, etc.) that is still
actually necessary to be a full participant (i.e. a central
rather than peripheral one), and the fully private domain
(e.g. who sleeps with their graduate students, whose
father was an alcoholic) that we generally do not consider
relevant knowledge needed for participation in the intellectual community.
On the other hand there are lots of fuzzy areas, and the
boundaries change and get contested historically. Is it relevant
that Foucault was gay? what kind of sex he liked? Is it relevant
that some particular feminist theorist is also a lesbian? Or that
some sociologist came from a very poor family? or from an abusive one?
The more we know, the more potential connections we can make,
but we may not have a _right_ to know these things, or the person
who must pay some price to make them public may not be willing to
do so.
At a deeper level of analysis, we can critique the very nature of
academic inquiry in terms of its separation of ideas from lives.
To the extent that ideas are portable and appropriatable, to the
extent that we want to make use of them for our own purposes, we
have our own criteria for judging their usefulness quite apart
from their origins; we do not really need to know their sources.
But to the extent that scholarship is an integral part of the
activity of a community, and has consequences in that community,
we have a certain responsibility to set and abide by standards
of disclosure (e.g. about the ethics of how we obtained our
data, or about who funded our research). To the extent that
scholarship is also an integral part of our lives, we need to
consider how our lives shape, and distort, our scholarship,
for our own sake, and perhaps also for the sake of those others
who trust our work, or who suffer its consequences. I even wonder
sometimes if I have some obligation to the biographer I hope
I never have, or the posterity who is probably not going to be
interested, to provide an account of the private-public connections.
Standards change. Someday, as already for some people today,
private matters can be relevant to public ideas in ways we
do not generally acknowledge at present. Many scholars keep
careful archives of their data and their notes. Should accounts
of our lives find a place also in these archives? And as Gordon
points out, 'our lives' are inevitably also the lives of others.
All autobiography is collective biography, from one partial
viewpoint (usually). I, too, am grappling with these questions
and have no final answers. JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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