Moving Armies of Stop Signs

Abstract

Most work on the public-private division concerns itself with identifying the lines between both and the historical developments that shifted this line. These contributions provide an aerial view that pays little attention to the interactional micropolitics of privacy. The present article uses a pragmatist approach to analyze the local negotiation of privacy and publicity. It relies on scholarship on “accounts” and “aligning actions” to view “privacy-work” as an attempt to remove actions from having to account for them in a specific social group and “publicity-work” as a converse attempt to draw them out by demanding that actors account. Thus, I will understand privacy as whatever is hidden, situationally, behind “moving armies of stop signs” for alignment demands.