Extimate Sociality II: 'Personal' Emotion

I interpret the Tardean idea that we can only get a clear sense of events, political or natural, through mimesis building from the smallest point of the events occurence, ('the first serf to put down his spade'), to mean that we can study the unsaid in discourse quite directly through jurisprudical change. What for example did the ban around 2006 of cigarettes around campuses say about society in general and its possible evolution. It is curious to imagine this new form of extimate sociality (sociality beyond intimacy) also from a jurisprudical point of view, keeping in mind that the jurisprudical is not linear, consider the repeal of the entire edifice of American law constructed through the Roe vs Wade decision. While in the previous post on the matter I traced the emergence of extimate sociailty through a series of large events, notebandi, metoo and the lockdown, here I argue that the extimate politically is represented well by the incursion of the legal upon the private and the personal. However seriously we take Kant's notion of a Public as the contribution of Enlightment thought in many ways the same set of values also poduce the private, the home, the nuclear family, as a unit of sociality. In fact, the legal edifice associated with democratic systems was born precisely at the interface of the birth of the private. The personal of course is much harder to speculate on historically, and one can only assume its emergence with the emergence of the diary, and even the episolatory novel. The private however was instantaneously subject to exposure. THe larger constestations in Marxist theory can also be seen in many ways as a means to delimit the ambit of the private, and of course in Marxist praxis, the personal. 

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This obsession with externalizing and voiding the personal entirely can be seen in many ways to be the governing dictum of much self-improvement ideology, which underlies the entire sphere, for example, of podcasts the right and left are attuned to, of course Joe Roegan and co on the one hand but also on the other the entire gamut of policy and theory podcasts that have expanded across the internet. THere is always an emphasis on a 'complete externalization' of the individual. The remnants and traces of the felt, of emotion of feeling must all be canalized to a higher purpose: god, the cause, or art. 

The private too is necessarily censored, and visibilized at the same time. Consider the general threshold crossed around the world involving parents and school teachers beating children, this is enabled by making the child an active political subject, that has the right to make legal claims against the private. The private in many ways emerges as a the real of power, of control. It is the site of a contestation, what political and economic rights can one make a claim to or against.  

In many ways it would probably be argued that the events that commoditize social exchange through apps, like dating apps etc. expand the realm of the private. 

In the time I have spent in villages around the country I was always struck with how the personal so constantly approached the public. In many ways the space for private ownership of resources is limited in villages. This also creates the basis of community, of shared upbringing of children, of collective expressions of art and ritual, and also the permanent and close to irreplacable structring of hierarchies. The Village Public Sphere, consisting of organizations such as the panchayat, the mahila mandal, chai shops where local and national news is exchanged and debated, the chowpal etc. I found in many ways was far more attuned to the expression of personal emotion. In fact while rhetoric and polemic are of course mastered for specific contexts, it is at the level of the personal being expressed in a public domain that much of the fuel of daily social exchange is met.

 It would be simplistic to say 'the same is not the case for the city', no, here instead I am comparing the rural to the digital, to digital sociality, which is constructed through a series of negotiation points concerning the expression of the personal. Drawing from the first post in this series, it is precisely this that brings into play terms (ragebaiting, ghosting etc.) that attempt to re-negotiate how the personal is expressed. It is the sheer anonymity of the circumstance that makes the exchange fragile and also volatile. 

The private and the personal, the public and the political, form the nexus of a kind of emerging social reality. 

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The anime series Psycho-Pass presents a technologically mediated social order in which interiority and personal emotion is rendered visible, measurable, and governable. Set in a near-future Japan governed by the Sibyl System, the narrative imagines a society where mental states are continuously monitored and quantified, using special devices built even into police guns, as “psycho-pass” values, producing a “crime coefficient” that determines the likelihood of an individual committing criminal acts. Law enforcement does not wait for crime to occur; rather, it intervenes preemptively based on emotional and psychological conditions. The series thus stages an extraordinary sociological and philosophical experiment: what happens when emotion, intention, and subjectivity are fully externalized into a system of governance?

At the center of the narrative stands Akane Tsunemori, a young inspector whose moral clarity and commitment to justice bring her into tension with the very system she serves. Initially naïve yet ethically grounded, Akane becomes the site through which the viewer experiences the contradictions of the Sibyl regime. Her counterpart is Shinya Kogami, an “enforcer,” a former inspector whose own crime coefficient rose after a traumatic investigation, reducing him to the status of a latent criminal employed by the police to hunt others like himself. 

The world of the series draws explicitly on modern political philosophy, especially the work of Michel Foucault. The Sibyl System represents the culmination of disciplinary and biopolitical governance. Foucault’s analysis of modern power in Discipline and Punish famously describes a shift from sovereign punishment to disciplinary surveillance, where power operates through continuous observation. As he writes, “Visibility is a trap.” The panoptic principle functions by making subjects internalize surveillance, transforming external control into self-regulation. In the society of Psycho-Pass, this logic is intensified: surveillance does not merely observe behavior but penetrates psychological life itself. The soul becomes the site of governance.

In the first season of Psycho-Pass, the lead villain, Shogo Makishima, emerges as a disturbing embodiment of the philosophical tension between personal autonomy and moral accountability. Unlike others in this hyper-surveilled society, Makishima has an anomalous crime coefficient—so low that it can't be predicted or detected by the Sibyl System. This makes him a ghost within a system built to measure and suppress latent criminality. In his calm, calculating demeanor, he is the dark mirror of Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov, in his celebrated essay, theorizes a radical individualism: some individuals transcend moral law, he suggests, and therefore do not feel guilt when committing a crime. Makishima, too, is driven by a similar logic: he is not merely a murderer; he is a philosopher of crime, a man who believes that his acts affirm his freedom beyond the constraints of societal judgment.

In the show, his disdain for the Sibyl System is not merely an ideological rejection; it is a refusal of what he calls the "comfort" of moral calculation. His crimes are not expressions of simple sadism; they are provocations, invitations to see beyond the mask of quantified emotion. In a chilling echo of Raskolnikov’s logic, Makishima suggests that crime is a form of self-creation, a refusal of the moral herd. And just as Raskolnikov’s theory drives him toward murder, Makishima’s detachment from guilt is the engine that propels him to orchestrate chaos.

When we look at the crime coefficient in this light, it is no longer a neutral indicator; it is a battleground for moral autonomy. Makishima shows that, like Raskolnikov, he operates outside the system; he commits crimes not out of insanity but out of a cold, deliberate assertion of freedom. Yet, this freedom is haunted.  Psycho-Pass turns this philosophical tension inside out: what Raskolnikov kept in the realm of the private psyche now becomes a public performance of calculation. And in this transformation, the crime is not a rupture in the social order; it is its own perverse logic, a refusal of both guilt and redemption.

Makishima is the villain we need, unlike Crime and Punishment's Raskolnikov he is not tormented by what he does. For the most part Makishima produces life-death game scenarios in which he employs people similarly disposed, criminals with high ideals, who's ideals override their guilt, to kidnap and torment victims and eventually kill them. Towards the end however, as seen in the picture above Makishima actually kills himelf, and while earlier his crime coeffeicient was low but not 0 (indicated by the colour 'light blue') when he kills his coefficient lowers even further becoming pure white. He is the only one in the system that has a completely absent psycho-pass. 

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The different configurations of the personal-private::political:public are subject to transformation. They are organized through discourse, whin a speaker addresses a listener which produces a product. Each of the four configurations described below also produce one of the four variables as the underlying truth of the configuration. The starndard configuration is that of modernity, a speaker addresses the political as a public, that is we see here the limits of the standard notion of the public sphere. The private is produced as a product of this address, that is in modernity, following the standard Kantian definition, produces the private as a result of a politics of public address. From here we move to a rights based configuration to that of capital and finally to the centre for liberal power, the university configuration. 

So in the rights based configuration, with a single rightwards recursion of the terms the personal becomes the point of address. Thus one speaks of in a rights based discourse the rights of the individual, this is a standard evolution from the initial configuration of modernity. In the capitalist configuration, the private addresses the personal. That is the private is constructed as a point of politics by the intervention of the personal. Here we see the public becomes a mere by-product of the process. Curiously it is in the configuration of capital that politics itself becomes an overwhelming truth in every scenario. here we can see the small jurisdprudical incursions of the law on previously sanctioned private modes of possession and behaviour. Finally in the university configuration, the political itself becomes the point of address, it lays complete claim to the private and the personal is a mere by-product of the process. The sense of public-ness becomes the overriding truth that leeches all personal expression from the public sphere. 

Psycho-Pass however imagnes a fifth configuration, and in fact posits it as the standard configuration for a new modernity. In many ways our world today with its vast extimate spaces separating the intimate, is built from the declensions following this fifth configuration: the therapeutic. 

While the Sybil system is fundamentally a standardization of a rights based configuration, where the personal addresses the public to produce politics, here the public is short circuited, and the personal becomes visciuosly addressed to the political. The inner personal realm of emotions becomes directly political, literally in the sense of being subject to the law and death by police encounter. In this scenario the public is a sort of wasteland of encounter based politics, whether this be proliferating lynchings and public disorder situations, or daily interactions that are constantly mediated by therapeutic rules: you cant feel too much, too much feeling is jouissance. 

Daily life is given to scenarios that control the intimate: personal feeling. Instead what proliferates is a vast and barren landscape of distance between persons: the extimate.

My argument here is hardly however that modernity is a natural configurations, it is just the underlying default of discourse following European colonialism. The personal is a construction of enlightment (or just pre-enlightenment) poliitics as much as the public and private are. However under the regime of the therapeutic it is the personal itself which becomes the centre piece of politics. This highly volatile connection between the personal and the political I am arguing here produces an entirely different range of possiblities. If as Sheldon Pollock argues the rasas were often argued by pre-colonial south asian scholars to go even beyond the 9, then here we have completely new spheres of affect. 

It is not merely that the personal is simply subject to scrutiny under the therapeutic configuration, it is also that it becomes an-other, a point of total outwardness, the stretches and limits of which become hard to concieve, though I will attempt to do this in the next piece in this series.