Towards A Theory of Rhetorical Privacy

Charles Woods | Texas A&M University-Commerce

Introduction
What is rhetorical privacy? Discourse in rhetorical studies—historically and ongoing—
note the uncertainty of binaries operating in communication and across cultures in relation to
truth, identity, and materiality. One faux binary that has been studied but needs renewed attention
is the relationship between privacy and surveillance. These concepts, of course exist on a
continuum. Renewed interest in these topics is galvanized as we navigate living in a world with
Coronavirus, alongside the widespread adoption of emerging technologies like artificial
intelligence (AI), and in response to the passage of oppressive legislation regarding bodily
autonomy in many states in America. As if this triad of reasons was not enough to consider a
theory rhetorical privacy now, we might look, not far, but simply out our university office
windows and unto the student encampments where in recent weeks the idea of privacy has taken
on new meanings following the “unprecedented assault on student’s rights” via surveillance
(Andrade-Rhoades, 2024).
There is not a singular definition of privacy, instead conceptualizations of privacy are
contextual (rhetorical), and rely on complex histories and legalities. In fact, the multitude of
complex attempts to define rhetoric refrain the complex attempts to define privacy, illuminating
the importance of studying these in concert. Further complicating definitions of privacy include
the digital realm, and the liminal space many of us inhabit in between the digital and physical.
Rhetoricians Estee Beck and Les Hutchinson Campos (2021) explain, “one of the problems with
defining privacy–especially within legal reform–is the utter disharmony in views about the many
distinctions of discretion due to varying subject positions and life experiences” (6-7).
Importantly, we can’t set surveillance aside in discussions of privacy, but we can establish a
tactical privacy as essential to a rhetorical privacy.
I attempt to situate the rest of this presentation in rhetorical history and in recent digital
rhetorics scholarship. I request forgiveness up front for the survey-style approach to content as I
consider how rhetoric has engaged with the uncertainty of privacy and investigate the rhetorical
histories and theories which have influenced the construction of the privacy-surveillance
continuum today. I will demonstrate a theory of rhetorical privacy defined by the privacy
aesthetic. My talk is separated into three parts: tyrannies, collisions, and aesthetics. Then, I offer
a brief conclusion.

Part I: Tyrannies

Focusing on privacy in Greco-Roman rhetorics, we land swiftly on Aristotle’s two

spheres of life, polis, or public sphere, and the private sphere, oikos, connected to homes and
domestic activities. This duet configuration rooted in subjugation has not been without critique,
and deservedly so: bodies are not property. Property. Property is where we find Cicero on privacy
as he outlines principles of justice to include respect of people’s private property and common
property. Cicero wrote “the men who administer public affairs must first of all see that everyone
holds on to what is his, and that private men are never deprived of their goods by public acts”
(Cicero, 1913). Today, the relentless persistence of and pursuit for digital data collection has
resulted in a blending of the private and public sphere, of private and common property.
Rhetorician Heather Suzanne Woods’s (no relation) recent book, Threshold: How Smart Homes
Change Us Inside and Out is a stark reminder that we are constantly “living in digitality”
regardless of whether we are in public or private life (Woods, 2024). This necessitates a theory of
rhetorical privacy.
Cicero’s rhetoric was the primary influence on rhetoricians like St. Augustine of Hippo in
the Middle Ages as rhetoric settled in the church alongside the expansion of Christianity. James
A. Herrick writes in The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction: “the Church
eventually came to control virtually every aspect of public and even of private life” (Herrick,
132-33). St. Augustine’s contributions to rhetorical theory arrived alongside the expansion of
Christianity, but also at a moment of movement from orality to written discourse for rhetoricians.
Pagan roots of rhetoric and the utility of rhetoric for Christianity troubled St. Augustine for he
sought a singular truth apparent through God. Truth in concert with privacy reveals tension
because there is not a singular privacy, we know; of course, we also know there is not a singular
truth. Moreover, the movement to written discourse prompts discussion of the written legislation,
policies, and terms of service documents which outline privacy in relation to our employers,
technologies, and, ultimately, extend to the widest margins of our networks and attach to the
horizons of our assemblages.
Important to discussions of privacy are issues related to identity, like gender, race,
socioeconomic status, and their intersections. Issues with and conceptualizations of privacy are
gendered when the private sphere is located as more feminine and thus inferior to the public
sphere (Cohen, 1992). Feminists have long critiqued this illustration claiming the impossibility of
privacy and offering reconstructions of privacy as essential (DeCew, 2015). This critical
intersection of identity and privacy is heightened, as Emily Winderman and Atilla Hallsby (2022)
note, as we embark on a Post-Roe, Dobbs-dominated era, and with an uncertain Supreme Court.
Scurrying from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance we find a change in that women are more
active in rhetoric—although it is still male dominated. But what can we learn from studying
privacy in the Middle Ages, particularly with gender in mind? Like other rhetorical scholars, we
might consider the work of Christine de Pizan as essential to understanding the role of women
during this time, as well as the shifting dichotomy between public and private. We might ask:
what does a virtuous privacy look like today? What is interesting is that Pizan, as an early
Humanist, is writing on the brink of sweeping reform to liberal education in Europe. It seems
that, with the sights outside our windows and the passage of oppressive legislation, many
educators—from elementary to secondary to higher education—are working on the brink of
uncertain educational reform. Some of our peers in states like Florida and Tennessee and Texas
are already living through it.

Part II: Collisions

Who is the audience of a privacy policy? Consider the privacy policy for X or Tik Tok. Is
it any user? Is it all of us—or, better yet, does it even matter since the documents are written for
protection not persuasion even if they are persuasive (Beck 2016)? As I alluded to earlier, a
theory of rhetorical privacy must consider unique intersections between the development of
rhetorical studies in education and changing attitudes about privacy in American culture. For
example, the Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis (1890) essay, “The Right to Privacy,” arrived
alongside the development of the earliest writing curricula in American universities during the
period of Reconstruction. Indeed, in American society, many trace privacy and the right to it to
the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well as the liberal renderings proffered by the likes of
John Locke (1690) and, later, John Rawls (1997).
When I ask about the audience of a privacy policy, I concede that it makes sense that the
writers of these policies are composing for Chaim Perelman’s and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s
(1969) universal audience, reasonable in their rationale that they want to get online, post their
photos and updates, and generate valuable metadata in aggregate. Although, when we agree to
terms of service, might we consider if such agreements are what Jurgen Habermas (1992)
describes as intersubjective agreements. Our evaluation, then, must focus on if the arguments in
the policies are presented fairly for different stakeholders, and for this, we must turn to language
and design. How does the design of the policy support and/or work against the stated values of
the company/data collecting body? Is user consent positioned as a value within the design of the
policy? What, if any, design elements help to balance asymmetrical power structures embedded
in privacy policies? And how can the discourse born from answering and re-answering these
complex queries help us towards a tactical privacy that Kenneth Burke (1966) might explain as
“rotten to perfection,” and a part of the struggle inherent to the human condition.
A theory of rhetorical privacy helps us identify and overcome post-modern renderings of
power asymmetrical in their systemizations. It allows for us to consider, as Foucault (1977) does
with Jeremy Bentham (1995) panopticon, the power of surveillance to manage societies,
populations from a panoptic perspective; it pushes us to consider the Deleuzian (1990) control
society as rhetorician Anthony Stagliano (2024) does so strikingly in his work with what he calls
disobedient aesthetics rooted in an understanding in the ancient Greek metis, or a cunning
wisdom. With a theory of rhetorical privacy, the vectors of power supported by privacy erosion
via unethical surveillance are illuminated with the aim of justice in their inevitable dismantling.
As I mentioned earlier, discussions of privacy inherently involve discussions of surveillance, and
there are the concessions of surveillance. For example, surveillance can be good for individuals
as well as communities: community policing (surveillance) often yields positive results for all
stakeholders. In the digital sphere, we might consider, as rhetoricians Jim Brown, Jr., and Becca
Tarsa (2018) do, how the doxing of internet trolls is a positive outcome of surveillance. In line
with this understanding, the questions become about the surveillant and the surveilled.
A part of understanding where and how and why it’s important to understand the
collisions of rhetoric and the theorization of privacy over time is understanding the intersections
with our rhetorical interests today. Rhetorician Ben Wetherbee (2023) briefly critiques collective
phantasia, or imagination, around COVID-19 as risking “ethical concerns about [medical]
privacy.” Of course, the right to privacy regarding reproductive justice remains a stalwart in
privacy dialogue in America, which rhetoricians Jessica Enoch and Cheryl Glenn (2023) detailed
recently in their centennial reflections on suffrage scholarship. Jean Bessette (2020) explains how
our expectations for privacy—and work, care, and play—in the home have evolved recently.
And, within the realm of digital rhetorics, we can look to rhetoricians like Woods, Beck, Brown,
Tarsa, and Stagliano, but also to John Gallagher’s (2020) attending to algorithms and audiences,
and Damien Smith Pfister’s (2020) rendering of algorithms as imposing ant-like efficiency logics
on users to help us better understand a digital rhetorical privacy. Ultimately, I am unable to resist
aestheticizing everything as I work towards this theory of rhetorical privacy.

Part III: Aesthetics

In a forthcoming piece in Communication Design Quarterly, Charles Woods and Gavin P.

Johnson (2024) define “post-surveillance” as an “affective orientation highlighted by users not
only expressing collective surveillance apathy regarding the implementation of New surveillance
technologies with the intention of bodily control but also a willingness to participate in practices
that aid in the expansion of global surveillance infrastructures” (p. #). We detail a
postsurveillance era defined by collective surveillance apathy regarding the emergent data
infrastructures of our global society and digital lives, emphasizing the temporal element of
surveillance and stopping just short of detailing a post-surveillance culture that exists across time
and space and accounts for people’s interlocking attitudes, beliefs, and values about, and
ideologies, epistemologies, and aesthetics regarding surveillance. A theory of rhetorical privacy
exists in this post-surveillance culture highlighted by The Privacy Aesthetic.
In her work, artist Dinie Besems explores privacy as a luxury and how we divulge
devices into our private spaces, and designer Jesse Howard values privacy in the redesign of
digital technologies. In coordination, artist Tijmen Schep (2016) outlines eight (8) principles
coalescing around security and authenticity: (1) privacy first, (2) think like a hacker, (3) collect
as little data as possible, (4) protect the data, (5) understand identity, (6) open the black box, (7)
turn the user into a designer, (8) technology is not neutral. The Privacy Aesthetic I describe aligns
with these 8 principles to contend with privacy erosion caused by constant privacy slippage. The
Privacy Aesthetic also includes an attunement to the oblique ubiquity (Boyle, 2024) of rhetorics
of privacy and surveillance; recognition of ToS documents as the most influential genre in the
world (Woods, 2023); cognizance of the intersection of “the body” and “the digital”1 as essential
for new surveillance technologies to maintain their influence; and, consideration of the
importance of space (e.g., geo-location) regarding data collection.
Michel Foucault (1967/1984/1994) conceives us “at a moment when the world is
experiencing…something less like a great life that would develop through time than like a
network that connects points and weaves its skein” (p. 175). The Privacy Aesthetic is an
orientation “now appearing on the horizon of our concerns, of our theory, of our systems” and it
maintains “a history, and one cannot fail to take note of this inevitable interlocking of time and
space” (175-6). A theory of rhetorical privacy centering the privacy aesthetic extends digital
rhetorics toward a post-digital rhetoric emphasizing the necessary recovery of an aesthetic
perspective (Hodgson, 2017). Furthermore, rhetorician Casey Boyle (2024) argues, “as the field
moves the needle of inquiry well beyond ways humans use symbolic language for
communication, whole waves of thinking call us to surrender head-on modes of engagement in
favor of sideways means of knowing and elliptical ways of being and moving” (p. 68). A theory
of rhetorical privacy valuing the privacy aesthetic in design of privacy policies favors “sideways
means of knowing” and “emphasizes elliptical ways of being and moving” and offers a renewed

1 Blurring humanity and technology is a post-humanist concern, certainly, but fully articulating the influence of
post-human technologies beyond biometrics is beyond the scope of this essay.
approach to overcoming inequity on the privacy-surveillance continuum–which is initiated in
terms of service documents.

Conclusion
Today, I have asked you to consider everything save for how privacy circulates.
Ultimately, a theory of rhetorical privacy helps us better understand the privacy-surveillance
continuum in relation to what rhetoric does: test ideas, assist advocacy, distribute power, discover

facts, shape knowledge, and build communities. So, I will leave you with this thought: if privacy
is rhetorical, how does privacy help us test ideas and discover facts? Consider the influence of
the Belmont Report on your own work. How does privacy assist advocacy and distribute power?
Consider asking a woman in a state like Texas. How does privacy shape knowledge and build
communities? I believe rhetoricians are well poised to continue to contribute to conversations
about the privacy-surveillance continuum particularly now, in an uncertain moment highlighted
by restorative justice, post-truth, and automation because communication, legislation, and
understanding of what it means to maintain a rhetorical privacy within a post-surveillance culture
is uncertain, ambiguous.

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