Taming bodies, alluring affects

Il Mulino - Rivisteweb Roberta Sassatelli Taming bodies, alluring affects (doi: 10.1423/85548) Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia (ISSN 0486-0349) Fascicolo 4, ottobre-dicembre 2016 Ente di afferenza: Università statale di Milano (unimi) Copyright c by Società editrice il Mulino, Bologna. Tutti i diritti sono riservati. Per altre informazioni si veda https://www.rivisteweb.it Licenza d’uso L’articolo è messo a disposizione dell’utente in licenza per uso esclusivamente privato e personale, senza scopo di lucro e senza fini direttamente o indirettamente commerciali. Salvo quanto espressamente previsto dalla licenza d’uso Rivisteweb, è fatto divieto di riprodurre, trasmettere, distribuire o altrimenti utilizzare l’articolo, per qualsiasi scopo o fine. Tutti i diritti sono riservati. TAVOLA ROTONDA The Quantified Self Roundtable on and with Deborah Lupton discutono Anthony King, Federico Neresini, Roberta Sassatelli, Deborah Lupton The collective self by ANTHONY KING In The Quantified Self, Deborah Lupton explores a fascinating, important and potentially disturbing aspect of contemporary existence; the proliferation of digitalized micro-technologies which track, record and monitor individual performance and activity. One of the more remarkable developments in the last two decades has been the appearance of easily affordable devices, like mobile phones, watches or GPS trackers, which plot the location, speeds, motions and, sometimes the bodily functions, of their users. Lupton is absolutely right to draw our attention to these remarkable apparatus and their potential effect on our personal agency and our self-identities. Lupton documents five modes of digitalized tracking: «private (confined to individuals’ consensual and personal objectives), pushed (where the initiative for self-tracking comes from an external agent), communal (which involves sharing personal information with other), imposed (which involves the imposition of self-tracking practices upon individuals by other actors and agencies) and exploited (where people’s personal data are used or repurposed for the managerial, commercial or research benefits of others)» (Lupton 2016, 142). The last two are particularly significant for Lupton notes the connection between the rise of digitalized tracking technologies and an emergent neo-liberal order. On this account, micro-sensors of the self do not offer the liberation, which they claim, but on the contrary aim to generate the kind of subordinate and monitored self whose performances accord with the interest of global capital and attendant states. She shows how in many cases these devices allow multinational companies and governments to record and, in some cases, even predict behaviour. Here Lupton is performing an important service. Her work brings Elias’ concept of RASSEGNA ITALIANA DI SOCIOLOGIA / a. LVII, n. 4, ottobre-dicembre 2016 796 Anthony King, Federico Neresini, Roberta Sassatelli, Deborah Lupton the civilizing thesis, the Frankfurt School’s argument about the culture industry and Foucault’s idea of the panopticon into the XXI century to show how new configurations of power have re-constituted the self, often accentuating control over the apparently ever more affluent and free consumers. She documents a surprising new form of modern bondage. In mapping this new self, Lupton aims, of course, to contribute to contemporary currents in social theory and above all to the growing concern with non-human artefacts and entities and with the rise of «human-non-human assemblages». The theoretical orientation of this book is, therefore, very much in line with Bruno Latour’s ActorNetwork Theory and, more recently, with Celia Lury’s concept of the prosthetic self (1997). In this emergent paradigm, Durkheim’s work on the collective is seen as increasingly obsolete; indeed, Latour has sought to institute Gabriel Tarde as the true father of a digital, XXI century sociology (Latour et al. 2012; Latour and Lepinay 2009; Latour 2010; 2005; 2002). On this account, the self is not a product of social conditioning alone; individual agency is not generated purely out of the human collective, an interactional force generated between people. Rather agency is a contingent construction in which individuals utilize and, indeed, fuse with available «actants» – artefacts, things, technologies – to produce distinctive kinds of performances. On this account, things have equal status with human agents and are able to channel, augment or even constitute social action. Digitalised micro-technologies facilitate the emergence of «new hybrid beings»: «Several different types of assemblage are configured via the interaction of humans and non-humans. One such assemblage is the human-body-device-sensorsoftware-data configuration that is generated when people use a digital device to monitor and measure their physical activity» (Lupton 2016, 40). Even more strikingly: «Humans have become nodes in the Internet of things» (ibidem, 136). Lupton avoids the charge of technological determinism here by arguing that, while digitalized artefacts have the potential to transform human agency, these assemblages are always contingent and open-ended: «An important element of sociomaterial studies is the acknowledgement that the assemblages that come together when humans and nonhumans interact are fragile and open to change» (ibidem, 75). Humans and digital artefacts mutually accommodate and «afford» each other. There is little doubting the relevance and perceptiveness of Lupton’s work. She has presciently identified developments which are of immediate importance to sociology today. It is also clear that, unlike some of the scholars she cites, she is careful about attributions of causality and she always avoids determinism. Nevertheless, despite the evident merits of her work, it is possible to employ her analysis as a starting point to consider whether these new digital micro-technologies for all their innovativeness are as ontologically novel as Lupton and The Quantified Self. Roundtable on and with Deborah Lupton 797 other seems to presume and, above all, whether they mark a new era of social agency. Without in any way detracting from Lupton’s work, some skepticism might be appropriate about the revolutionary implications of digital technology for the ontology of the self. A brief examination of elementary human tool-use might help us avoid hyperbole here and, to this end, it may be worth considering one of the most famous western artworks: namely, Michelangelo’s David. Naturally, the statue is based on a Middle Eastern Bronze Age myth. It does not depict a real historical person. Yet, the sublime figure of David illustrates an important point about human agency and tooluse. Unlike, his heavily armoured opponent, Michelangelo’s David is naked. He is armed only with a small strap of leather, his sling, which he clasps by his waist in his right hand while his left hand, resting on his shoulder, cradles the small pebble which will ultimately slay Goliath. Yet, David’s agency is transformed by the simplest piece of technology; a belt of leather and a stone. He is able to kill even the mightiest enemy at range as a result of this device. Michelango’s point, of course, is that the truly transformative capacity of the human being resides in rationality, understanding and virtue, as opposed to the dull bestiality of Goliath; humans are self-transcending beings. With the aid of the very smallest artefacts, they can transform themselves and their agency through their intelligence and bravery. David is a Biblical figure of dubious veracity. Yet, documented examples of primitive warfare demonstrate the same point – if rather more prosaically. From the earliest hunter-gathers to Napoleon Chagnon’s Yanomamo in Brazil, human tribes-people have killed each other very effectively armed with nothing more than stick and stones. Yet, fashioned into weapons, these sticks and stones have multiplied the lethality of bare, un-accommodated humans so that they can kill in numbers and at ranges which would be impossible with their naked hands. In spite of their almost miraculous powers, the digital micro-technologies which Lupton analyses are ultimately only the latest version of the universal human capacity to make and use tools to extrapolate and multiply their agency. Digital technologies empower just as David’s sling and stone did. It would seem unwise to draw an ontological distinction here between the Bronze Age David and the XXI century app user, even though the remarkable capacity of digital micro-technology is recognized. Lupton focuses of course, not primarily, on forms of technology which extend human agency but rather those which monitor and record it. Again, there is little doubt that the data-collecting capacity of contemporary digital technology is unique. It is able to record individual activity with a hitherto un-dreamt of precision and scale. Yet, once again, caution is required. In medieval Europe, penitent Christians, monks, nuns and priests used to use rosaries to count out their prayers. They could absolve their sins and cleanse their souls by praying. Penitence 798 Anthony King, Federico Neresini, Roberta Sassatelli, Deborah Lupton was thoroughly and accurately quantified and the good Christian self was constituted through this recorded performance. Even today, Catholic priests absolve the sins of their congregation during Confession by recommending a specific number of prayers a day. Quantified penance is not restricted to the Christian tradition. In Buddhism, prayer wheels serve a similar function, recording the soul’s submission; each cycle of the wheel brings the individual closer to Nirvana. Clearly, in each of these cases, the cultural context and the meaning of the religious practices are quite different to the XXI century consumer; the kind of agency generated – what is expected of and by members of a devout community – is distinctive. Yet, the watches which now record the number of paces which an individual has taken in a day – and therefore recording their «fitness» – seem to constitute a secular equivalent of these long-established traditions of religious mortification. Just like the prayer wheel, the pace-recorder or, indeed, heart monitor assess and affirm individual virtue, ranking each in a social hierarchy of worthiness. Recording repetitious action is deeply ingrained human activity which does not require digital technology. Aligning today’s micro-technologies of the self with prayer wheels and rosaries opens up an alternative sociological perspective on contemporary digital devices. Like increasing numbers of sociologists today and influenced by Latour’s later actor network theory, Lupton adopts a broadly individualist position on these new technologies. For her, the individual self is constituted by its private interaction with technology. This interaction is certainly «fragile and open to change». The self is not determined and constituted by the technology. It is a mutual process of accommodation, generating human-non-human agency. Nevertheless, the individual is the node in a web of things, attaching itself to and being attached to artefacts. Yet, it is not clear that viewing selfhood from such an individualist perspective is optimal. When individuals use digital devices to monitor themselves, they are not creating a unique and independent self-hood for themselves. On the contrary, these devices explicitly draw the individuals who use them into a collective of practitioners who are unified by common reference data. They employ the measurements and standards provided by the devices and utilized by other users to judge themselves. The popular app Strava is used by communities of cyclists to rank themselves each other on their daily rides. They award each other «kudos» points for fast rides. In other words, the decisive relation for the digital technology user is not with the apparatus itself – that is only a medium – but rather with other humans users who determine the significance and status of the results obtained by their devices. Lupton herself notes that as a result of these new artefacts notions of privacy have changed and that personal data is normally displayed on social media. Digital micro-technologies are only meaningful, there- The Quantified Self. Roundtable on and with Deborah Lupton 799 fore, insofar as they connect the individual into a community of fellow users who rank, affirm or criticize performances. The data only become socially meaningful insofar at it is shared and users develop their selfhood only in relation to this audience of fellow-users. Individuals cannot know the significance of the data for their own performance without being able to compare themselves with others. In themselves, performances are arbitrary and meaningless; they are triangulated and significant only against other users and other performances. As Wittgenstein noted in a situation of individual rule-following – or totally personalized digital-data following – no one would know what constituted following a rule. In such a situation, anything would pass as following or rule – or, indeed, not following a rule. The data, which was being recorded, could be taken to mean anything about the self. Moreover, in many cases, although the web theoretically creates an infinitely anonymous community, in practice, studies of the web show that users are clustered into communities, the core members of which actually know each other personally. Face-to-face contacts between genuine acquaintances, colleagues and friends provide the embodied and moral point of reference by which each is judged. The cyclists who use Strava are normally grouped into clubs, the members of whom know each other very well and cycle together weekly. Digital technologies of the self rely upon human users forming themselves into recognizable – and recognized – social groups. These social groups ultimately bequeath a sense of self-hood to other users by reference to their documented performances; they are rated as good or bad, normal or abnormal selves. In this way they are constituted as social agents and motivated to act appropriately. The social community has not in any way been displaced by a «human-non-human assemblage»; the distinctively human social collective remains always at the heart of the process, morally, practically and ontologically. Users collectively decide how to use technology and what its significance is for their relationships, their communities and their shared practices. Of course, the social practices and the morphology of the social groups in which humans are now engaged are empirically distinctive; they are often globalized and transnationalised – or localized in quite new ways. Sociologists have to plot this uniqueness with the greatest care – while also recognize the ontologically continuity of human social existence. If the true reference point of even the most sophisticated digital technologies is other human beings and the community of users in general, then in opposition to Latour et al. assertation that Durkheim is dead, his account of the self discussed in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life remains a valuable and important resource for understanding new digital technology. There, in his celebrated chapter on the soul, Durkheim outlines a sociology of selfhood. The self, on 800 Anthony King, Federico Neresini, Roberta Sassatelli, Deborah Lupton this account, is not an intrinsic property of the person nor is agency generated by individuals simply acquiring new properties through by their use of things. Rather, individual self-hood is a property of the group, donated to the individual by fellow group members. The soul is understood to be a small piece of the totem – the sacred mana invested with power by the clan – broken up and ingested by the individual during the effervescence of the ritual: «the soul is nothing other than the totemic principle incarnate in each individual» (Durkheim 1976, 248). Having participated in the ritual and been recognized as a member of the clan, aborigines are expected to act in certain ways prescribed by the totem, which they have internalized: «the individual soul is only a portion of the collective soul of the group» (ibidem, 264). Above all, they are expected to help and cooperate with other clanspeople who they regard as special. Their «soul» (selfhood) demands that they behave morally and they are assumed to have a soul insofar as they behave in line with group norms. Individuals’ sense of selfhood is dependent upon their status within the group and their relationships to others. It is a referential and relative property not an intrinsic essential one. Instructively, physical objects, which act as badges of group membership, are often employed to denote selfhood. Tribespeople actually understand certain objects to possess their soul and to direct their actions. The existence of objectified souls in primitive social groups seems to be ontologically and functionally comparable with iphones, digital watches and other micro-devices which link their users into their social networks, telling them what they should do and be. In both cases, we are dealing with memory machines of social membership which have a moral purpose. Lupton has a refined sociological eye. She has perceptively identified the proliferation of new forms of technology and she is right to be concerned with their social implications. Her discussion of these new technologies is replete with interest; not least she recognize the insidious political implications of these apparently liberating technology. There is much to admire here then. However, at certain points, Lupton is perhaps over-impressed by new digital micro-technologies. Empirically they are extraordinary. Yet, in sociological terms, they do not represent a profound ontological transformation. On the contrary, they are employed by communities of users whose basic methods of group formation, maintenance and membership is little different from aboriginal tribespeople using sticks, stones and animal skins to survive. The Quantified Self. Roundtable on and with Deborah Lupton 801 The hyprid assemblages of self-tracking practices by FEDERICO NERESINI Devices for monitoring, measuring, and recording individual data devoted to orienting behaviours have been available for a long time: clocks and scales represent two paradigmatic examples, but it would be possible to list many others, such as thermometers, school reports, a wide range of tests, just to mention a few. But, if the quantification of the self is not a novelty, the development of digital technologies has introduced radical transformations in these practices, making the processes faster, expanding the possibilities of monitoring, making data available both to their producers (i.e. those to whom they are referring) and to other people with whom they are shared. Before the era of digital societies, collection and recording of data about bodily functions and individual activities were, on the one hand, realized less accurately and less frequently (manually on paper or on a PC), and, on the other hand, delegated to experts and to institutions, and therefore hardly accessible to their producers. So, it is thanks to the digital technologies currently available that self-tracking – as maintained by Deborah Lupton (2016, 2) – «involves practices in which people knowingly and purposively collect information about themselves, which they then review and consider applying to the conduct of their lives». The self-tracking practices derive then from the combination of three actions (monitoring, measuring and recording) performed by a subject who is pursuing a goal, using digital technologies which allow them to collect, register and visualize data more easily and quickly than in the past. These data are often shared, mainly on the web, so that they can also be utilized by others with different aims compared to those of the initial subject (ibidem, 4). Framing in this perspective the self-tracking cultures, Lupton can show both the features they have in common with pre-existing practices, and the new aspects which turn them into an innovation, and into an interesting object for sociological inquiry. As a consequence, her reflection aims to examine «the influences, discourses, technologies, power relations and systems of thought that contribute to the phenomenon of self-tracking, the ways in which this phenomenon is spreading from the private realm into diverse social domains, and the implications of the self-tracking phenomenon for the politics of personal data, data practices and data materialisations» (ibidem, 1). Thus, there emerges already from the first pages one of the main virtues of Lupton’s work: to show very clearly that the innovation represented by the digital technologies for self-tracking is grafted on and is able to grow thanks to pre-existing practices (what is called 802 Anthony King, Federico Neresini, Roberta Sassatelli, Deborah Lupton «pen and paper self-tracking»). This could appear trivial, but that is not the case, especially in a social context – like ours – in which technology is usually regarded as a magic apparition and interpreted within a linear model, perfectly summarized by the motto of the Chicago World Expo 1933 «Science finds, industry applies, man adapts». As it is well-known, the linear model of innovation looks indeed at the technological novelty in terms of an isolated episode which bursts into everyday life, transforming it suddenly. Thus it conceals the fact that innovation can emerge and proliferate only within the social context of everyday life: we cannot have the digital self-tracking without the «pen and paper self-tracking». Observed from this perspective, it becomes also clear that self-tracking actively contributes to the success of digital technologies at large, for example pushing the diffusion of smartphones through the self-tracking apps, and therefore being at the same time an effect and a cause of their affirmation. Nonetheless, the definition of self-tracking adopted by Lupton seems to suggest a focus on the subject and on her/his conscious action that orients the following analysis, favouring a perspective from the individual to the collective («from the private realm into diverse social domains»), so that the opposite ends up staying in the background. This emphasis on the subjects could be the reason why the reflection developed throughout the book tends to recognize only occasionally the agency of the technological artefacts used by the self-trackers, i.e. their direct involvement in the construction and maintenance of the wide range of assemblages within which the self-tracking practices take shape and succeed (ibidem, 40-41). Lupton seems therefore to offer few elements to better understand how much the simple existence of self-tracking devices and their modus operandi are decisive both for their diffusion and for orienting the practices in which they are implied in one way rather than another. In other words, it is not easy to grasp the active participation of the technological artefacts in the context of those assemblages, even if Lupton does point out the «vitality» of data ceaselessly produced by the self-tracking practices «by virtue of the fact that they circulate, enact new forms of knowledge and are purposed and repurposed in many different ways. In other words they have their own social lives, which are quite independent of the humans who originally generated them» (ibidem, 5). But still, on this occasion, assigning a pre-eminent role to the human actors tends to overshadow that of the technological artefacts. Another relevant aspect that goes along with the argument proposed by Lupton concerns self-tracking as a further expression of the increasing interest in the body – if not even a real obsession – which marks out late modern societies, and therefore as an expression of the peculiar body-identity nexus we can observe within them. It is not by chance that the study recently conducted in Finland by Ruckenstein is The Quantified Self. Roundtable on and with Deborah Lupton 803 cited, from which it emerges that self-tracking is attractive particularly among those «who were already regular exercisers or had an interest in monitoring technologies […], as they already had a predisposition to monitoring, measuring and comparing and wanted to be challenged by their biometric data» (ibidem, 34-35). From this point of view, it could be interesting to interpret self-tracking as a contemporary form of inner-worldly asceticism, according to the classical Weberian definition. Lupton herself, after all, seems to suggest in some passages this possibility, for example when she states that «in a world in which risks and threats appear to be ever present, the certainties promised by the intense monitoring of the self-tracker may be interpreted as a means of containing risk and controlling the vagaries of fate to some extent» (ibidem, 77). In Weberian theory, indeed, the disciplined and methodical conduct of life, which reaches its acme in Calvinistic puritanism, is pursued with «the purpose of overcoming the status naturae, to free man from the power of irrational impulses and his dependence on the world and on nature. It attempted to subject man to the supremacy of a purposeful will, to bring his actions under constant self-control with a careful consideration of their ethical consequences» (Weber 1920, 118-119). It would not be too hazardous to imagine that, if Max Weber were living now, he would have identified self-tracking as a perfect example of rationalization of the human body through technological means, an attempt to overcome the «natural» limits through an awareness never seen before and made possible by the development of technoscience. Therefore, as well as the Weberian inner-worldly ascetic having the goal of achieving a methodical control over his conduct of life, the selftracker depicted by Lupton (2016, 82) is looking for an «entrepreneurial self-optimisation» and for «self-knowledge as a means to achieve it». Weber, of course, recognizes the relevance of the inner-worldly asceticism mainly as a cultural root of modern capitalism, while his reflections seem less explicitly oriented toward the comprehension of its ethical consequences for the bodily dimension of the modern subjectivity. Anyway, also taking into account what has been suggested by Bryan Turner (1984), this Weberian intuition can be fruitfully linked to Michel Foucault’s analysis of modern knowledge as power able to be exercised through the discipline of the body and of the diffusion of a «consumption ethic» which results in «calculating hedonistic choices» (ibidem, 18). The «rationalization of desire» – citing Turner once again – realized by the self-tracking via the increasing accumulation of data and of knowledge concerning the body represents, therefore, the turning from the extra-world to the inner-world asceticism, a transformation to which corresponds the passage from working on the body as a means to working on the body as a goal. 804 Anthony King, Federico Neresini, Roberta Sassatelli, Deborah Lupton Making reference to Weber gives also the opportunity to stress another aspect highlighted by Lupton: the reflexivity of the late modern condition and the relative consequence – apparently paradoxical – by which the same reflexivity, on the one hand, produces an increasing knowledge about society and individuals and, on the other hand, derives from this knowledge more and more uncertainty. This is what happens also in regard to the body and its relationship to identity, both because the power of technoscience – as already pointed out by Weber – is not useful for the problem of meaning, and because the continuous exercise of reflexivity increases the feeling of being «inadequate», reminding each of us of the constant exposure to the risk «of failing to acquire the shape and form one wished to acquire, whatever that form might have been; […] failing to stay flexible and ready to assume shapes at will, to be simultaneously pliable clay and accomplished sculptor» (Bauman 1995, 112). The possibility for the subject to have full control of her/his life and body turns out to be hence unreachable: the illusion of having it at hand turns quite easily into the disappointing awareness that this control moves ever just a little bit further away with respect to the real possibilities of the subject. Such awareness could be regarded as another element, together with others described by Lupton, useful for understanding why many self-trackers give up, even if they had embraced this practice with great enthusiasm. This apparent paradox is fuelled, furthermore, by the effects stemming from the technological artefacts used within the self-tracking assemblages. Thus, the idealized control over the body that the selftrackers try to achieve finds another limit in the control that the devices exert over utilizers themselves, so that they realize both the risk of becoming «addicted» (Lupton 2016, 80) and the effects produced by the «numbers» over their minds and moods. Here we find another contradiction that it would be interesting to analyse in greater depth, for instance exploring the relationship between the idea of «reactivity» to measures proposed by Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauders (2007) and the affordance deriving from the agency of the technological artefacts. What is reported by Lupton suggests such a direction of inquiry, especially when she observes one self-tracker’s experience that «[i]nstead of the pleasure of eating or preparing food, Williams found that he was focusing on how better to shape his eating practices to suit the apps» (ibidem, 81). Lupton’s book still offers many other insights to be discussed, beyond those already addressed. Among these, I would like to consider two more. First, another contradiction is suggested, that between, on the one hand, the flattening in the categorization of the variety of social life and individual experiences as a consequence of quantification, and, on the other hand, the creativity demonstrated by the self-trackers when they are using devices, when they are managing and visualizing their The Quantified Self. Roundtable on and with Deborah Lupton 805 data (ibidem, 109-110). This opposition raises a question which can be framed as follows: to what extent do the scripts and the agency of artefacts leave freedom of action and interpretation by the persons using them in self-tracking practices? Such a question could be usefully addressed by considering the dichotomy proposed by Bruno Latour (2005, 39) between «intermediaries» and «mediators», where the first are defined as «what transports meaning or force without transformations» so that «defining its inputs is enough to define its outputs»; on the contrary, «mediators transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning of the elements they are supposed to carry». Hence, if the assemblages which allow the self-tracking practices are observed assuming the prevalence of intermediaries, then the contradiction described by Lupton still remains unsolved; but if self-trackers and their devices are considered as mediators – i.e. actors capable of agency – then the contradiction becomes only apparent. In this perspective, Actor-Network Theory could strengthen even more what Lupton (2016, 40) suggests in saying that «several different types of assemblage are configured via the interactions of humans and digital nonhumans». Second, Lupton stresses that self-tracking can also be interpreted as a process of prosumption on online platforms and apps, and therefore it «can be viewed as a form of work». Tracking too produces data that become «a commercial benefit of other actors and agencies» (ibidem, 118).This recalls the debate that recently has been aroused by the proposal for a «universal digital income», to be regarded as a redistributive measure of the digital labour realized by the subjects – often unwittingly – acting merely as web-users (Cardon and Casilli 2015). The argument on which the proposal relies seems to be quite simple: since each web-user produces data which can be transformed in value by others, why don’t we grant to the web-users – i.e. all citizens – the possibility of sharing such profit in the form of a «universal citizenship income»? It would be a duty for the State, of course, to ensure this redistributive measure through a tax levy on companies that exploit the data produced by web-users. Self-tracking clearly belongs to the whole range of practices which could legitimize the creation of such a citizenship income based on web activities, showing very clearly the full integration of digital technologies in everyday life, their naturalization which makes them a taken-for-granted participant in our networks of interaction. In this perspective, self-tracking represents a relevant instance of a broader transformation, which changes digital technologies from the condition of a means for accessing citizenship rights to that of a basic element of those rights as a constitutive element of social interaction and subjective identity. 806 Anthony King, Federico Neresini, Roberta Sassatelli, Deborah Lupton Taming bodies, alluring affects by ROBERTA SASSATELLI Knowledge of oneself is precious in many cultural traditions. We may consider that its modern Western rendering is germane to selfsurveillance and discipline. As such, it is inevitably intertwined with power, and indeed with action rather than mere speculation. As Michel Foucault (1982) has shown, self-surveillance is a fundamental mode of subjectification – both as we become subject to identification and as we become subjects of it, actively taking part in various forms of self-governance and self-monitoring. He individuates modernity fundamentally ambivalent nature in such a duality: we are both subjected and subjects, obliged – as it were – to become subjects for ourselves and the others via self-objectification and the ceaseless application of disciplinary techniques to ourselves. This fundamental dynamic has taken various shapes. Disciplinary institutions of the onset of modernity, like the prison or the psychiatric hospital, where dominated by public concerns for the population as a whole, they were typically state marshalled. In consumer capitalism, these institutions have left room to commercial disciplinary institutions, such as the fitness center, which are organized around individual consumers’ desires and increasing individualization (Sassatelli, 2016). Today, digital technologies, notably self-monitoring apps, represent perhaps a third wave in such long term process, with portable devices installing disciplinary technologies directly onto the individual body, and with embodied subjects all the more vigilant and willing to submit what were once perceived as personal, and even sacred, provinces of themselves (health, body performance and affects) to self-monitoring quantification. Individualization and medicalization accompany the historical trek of self-surveillance. Together they form an analytical triangle which has been central to Deborah Lupton’s scholarship (i.e. see Lupton 1995; 2013). A distinguished sociologist who has long specialized on bodies and health, in her new book The Quantified Self, Lupton (2016) works through the many facets of self-tracing technologies by offering a plethora of detailed and nuanced examples. This is very timely: the book not only reads well, it also offers a first systematization which allows the reader to navigate in a complex ever-changing field addressing a fascinating list of phenomena initially driven by companies such Amazon, Apple, Samsung e Google. Bodies or better, embodied selves, are clearly invested by self-tracking technologies, their boundaries and visualizations re-worked, the relation between self and body re-organized, the singularity of the body itself is placed into question, new ways of forming communities are established, new forms of diffuse The Quantified Self. Roundtable on and with Deborah Lupton 807 control marshalled. Such phenomena arguably need a shift in perspective. More than ever we can now say, with Georg Simmel (1950), that to start from the individual is just one amongst the choices available to sociologists in their heuristic repertoires. The relational moment – how self relates to self, to artefact and to others – becomes a fertile starting point: thematizing relationships becomes a way to consider the shaping of subjectivity as «what is individual is not necessarily subjective» (Simmel 2010, 120). This is a broad dynamic in consumer capitalism, as authors such as Arlie Hochschild (2012), have noticed: we increasingly use impersonal means and devices to reach personal goals in the affective domain and we work hard in order to re-appropriate these means and devices largely by re-working on what they offer us to enhance relationships with others and the communities we form as well ourselves, our feelings and bodies. Sociologists are thus invited to think again how they consider the individual, the subjective, the intersubjective and, indeed, how do they stand in relation to objectified forms of culture. While in pre-digital times, the human body had been invested with forms of bureaucratization that might have solicited physical resistance and struggle on the part of the disciplined subject, here instrumentality and discipline become, I like to suggest, softer: taming bodies by enticing subjective affects. Interestingly, Lupton discusses the example of Morris, who holds a blog about what may be called a total camera experiment: in the blog he uses and comments on six months of automatic snapshots taken via a mini-camera clipped onto his clothes throughout the day. Lupton reports that Morris has felt less lost in the city, less anonymous and more part of a community through his blog and his reflection on the systematic visual monitoring of his days. For Lupton (2016, 111-2) his narratives «are affective responses to everyday interactions, responses based on the interpretation of the content of images», they show that self-monitoring can go well beyond rationalization, counting or numbers; on the contrary people may «respond emotionally to the data they generate from self-tracking». If the quantified self is also first and foremost a feeling embodied self, the very value of the embodied self is established via its narrativization, increased reflexivity, shared documentation: the creation of an ever more self-possessed identity which projects coherence and awareness. Authenticity is in this case the discovery and maintenance of continuity, of controlled positioning, of documented self-placement that deploys context (and selected others) as witness of one’s own reality. While I do not find this in sharp discontinuity with the way the modern self has established itself around the notion of autonomy, we may ask whether a new form of reflexivity is developing, and how does it stand in relation to the very modern ideal of individual autonomy which entailed a relatively self-contained self. 808 Anthony King, Federico Neresini, Roberta Sassatelli, Deborah Lupton In an earlier paper, Lupton (2013) discussed the links between the therapeutic ethic and the development of new self-tracking technologies noting that the vast majority of the literature tends to have triumphant accents, placing emphasis on the potential for empowerment for all, allowing them to take responsibility on their bodies. Already in that paper, Lupton instead shows that self-tracking or the quantified self do have ambivalent potentials. New self-tracking technologies solicit not only issues of autonomy but also of equality and access. The diffusion of self-tracking devices has invested the human embodied self, working through desire in what appears a free, liberated market for those who can. And as a famous advertisement recalls, «you» – i.e. all of you – «can do it!». However, how available are these technologies to the whole of the population? Reflexive individualization which sustains the increasing offer and demand for self-controlling devices, is unevenly distributed across the social structure in the Global West, as Piere Bourdieu and others have recalled. And even more so if we consider the entire globe. These technologies and communities are, presently, quite uneven in terms of access, and upcoming research should in fact focus on this issue to consider the varieties of subjectivities which are going to populate our future social world. Lupton offers some elements to evaluate the different outcomes of modes of self-monitoring in terms of empowerment – these are partly function of the corresponding public and the relations established thereof. She notes, as many sociologists have in the past, that communitarian publics seem to offer more scope to active subjectivity than centrally controlled publics yet the question is how broad and inclusive such communities can be, or, conversely, how chosen and privileged their members? Are we witnessing the emergence of a communitarian democracy or the consolidation of a community-based digitally sophisticated aristocracy? As it is well known, when trying to look at self-disciplinary techniques of an empowering variety, Foucault (1984) turned to ancient Greece, where practicing the self was not at all for everyone, but only for the noble, male citizen. On the contrary, centrally controlled publics are often mass publics, uniting different generations, citizen and migrants. Studies about these media have however shown that, contrary to the fears of the Frankfurt School, creativity and even reflexivity accompanied the fruition of radio and television. There, like with digital media, the support of immediate interaction communities is fundamental. More generally we need to consider generational divides. In countries like Italy, we know riches are concentrated in the hands of the older generations. Yet digital literacy is not. And this will be of the essence for participation in potentially empowering digital communities. Perhaps having more money is the only way the elder can survive the new digital age and they will trade it off to subsist rather than rule. The Quantified Self. Roundtable on and with Deborah Lupton 809 Much of the argument of the book concerns the plasticity of the embodied self, begging the question of the role of social science into the cyberculture of plasticity. Over two decades ago, Donna Haraway’s (1991) work ventured on the terrain of «cyborgs». Such reflections have now become widespread. In Haraway, the «cyborg», as a «hybrid of machine and organism», is at the same time a «creature of reality» and a «creature of fiction», an «imaginative resource». As such, it worked as political platform to rethink the boundaries between the artificial and the organic. The utopia is with us now. Commanding work on the self, on the capacity to translate feelings and perceptions into structured technical quantities assisted by a shared vocabulary, subjects learn to consider their body not as it looks or feels through the language of ordinary life, but through ever more sophisticated indicators (typically coming from the disciplinary regions of medicine and psychotherapy). In their speaking before and despite us (Goffman 1963), bodies maintained something of the sacred. Something which could not be pinned down and escaped our will. Disenchantment has proceeded hand in hand with the development of self-monitoring technologies which are able to instruct the consumer on how to create spontaneity, boost fun, produce collective effervescence. The reader is left to wonder whether they are indeed part of a (social-scientific) self-fulfilling prophecy, the mundane technical incarnation of a sociological eye which has long told us that we are first and foremost moldable, the result of how we organize practice through material and symbolic devices. As suggested, the growing trend towards self-monitoring through technological means does create a space to start thinking of human bodies in ways that cast doubt on how we have long considered individuality, naturality and spontaneity. It would be easy to cry for jet another epochal turn in consumer capitalism and subjectivity formation. Lupton is more cautiously careful, and suggests both continuities and discontinuities. As she reckons the monitoring and the quantification of aspects one’s body and self are not new: «[p]eople have been recording their habits and health-related metrics for millennia, as part of attempts at self-reflection and self-improvement» (2016, 9). Digital technologies and the creation of online communities with the possibility of sharing data online about one’s own bodies, performances, feelings, experiences are on the contrary «indisputably new». Websites such as the homonymous The quantified self (http://quantifiedself.com/) do represent an important novelty, a meeting point between consumers, experts and producers on a model which, for example, furthers what had already been developed by fitness platforms. Their services – which offer apps spanning from sleep, mood, fitness, goals, social relations, etc. – invite consumers not just to monitor themselves but also to participate as producers of knowledge, and effectively become «prosumers» (Ritzer 2010). The gianus-faced nature of prosumption could not be clearer to 810 Anthony King, Federico Neresini, Roberta Sassatelli, Deborah Lupton Lupton. As she reckons, it is the value of the data that prosumption produces which «explains why services such as social media platforms and apps are offered for free» (Lupton 2016, 43). The collection of such big data increments the power of the collector, while changing the contours of property rights and enlarging the commodity frontier in the global information economy. And this is so whatever added value to the consumer they may provide – be it «support for the changes» one wishes to make, or «becoming more aware» of one’s own capacities and desieres (Lupton 2016, 77). I guess the lesson we learned from Foucault, that we can always resist, but we can’t resist all, is very clear here. One may use quantification to run against insurance companies or demand new welfare options, yet «self-tracking becomes performative» (ibidem, 113): it tames embodied subjects through their capacities and feelings. To conclude, let’s take a step back. Lupton indicates that her work should be read on the backdrop of the current debate on the bureaucratization of late-modern subjectivity. The instrumentalization of the body and its bureaucratization is evident: the conversion of performances, experiences and capacities in numbers makes bodies, their activities and feelings more readable and comparable and therefore – so we hope or fear – more controllable and changeable. Subjects are told that it is possible, normal and moral to take responsibility for their bodies and that this can, indeed, be both a technical and a fun matter. The link to broader trends in consumer capitalism, such as healthism and performative body self-surveillance, is apparent. Since a few decades, consumer capitalist societies have been described as inviting individuals to joyfully take responsibility for their bodies and to invest in body maintenance and enhancement in order to increase efficiency and perform culturally appropriate self-presentation. The body has long been said to become the «visible carrier of the self» (Featherstone 1991), the finest «consumer object» subject to endless triumphant, commercially mediated rediscovery (Baudrillard 1992). Much emphasis has thus be placed on purposive individual stylization of oneself and one’s own body through consumer devices and services addressing the surface of the body (cosmetics, surgery), its depth (fitness, exercise) and its foremost inner dimension (psychotherapy, coaching). In this vein, Anthony Giddens (1991) is well known to have offered a view of commercial individualization which revolves on the notion of «body projects»: the idea that in late or high modernity the self becomes a reflexive and secular project which works on ever refined level of body presentation. The embodied self may be felt as a commodity itself, with «self-actualisation [being] packaged and distributed according to market criteria» (ibidem, 198). In this vein, the quantified self is just the last incarnation of the bureaucratization self of consumer capitalism. The Quantified Self. Roundtable on and with Deborah Lupton 811 For all their emphasis on individuality, self-tracking devices need to be normalized to work properly. Here we get to an important set of issues, indeed. Just like in fitness training we do find a long tail of exercise and fitness enthusiasts that border on fitness addiction, there are signal that self-tracking apps may produce quite addictive results. This is essential and could be the subject of further exploration. Indeed, self-awareness of one’s own attachment to a practice, service, gadget, or else, is no salvation. On the contrary, it has been recognized as one of the diagnostic features for addiction in exercise and eating disorders. Of course, the issue here is not to draw a clear line between committed self-trackers and addicts. It is rather to show that the quantified self is not, and must not be, predicated on unconditional increases, uncontrollable willpower, and untamed advantages. It is rather conditional to self-governed appropriation, which does require the validation of a community or a social network. The technical reveals itself once again as a poor substitute for relations, individual autonomy being a performance that is accomplished with the support of a community which is always in the making. Response: cohabiting with our lively data by DEBORAH LUPTON I thank Anthony King, Federico Nersini and Roberta Sassatelli for their generous comments about The Quantified Self, and for stimulating me to think further about the topics and theories I addressed in the book. I am not the only social researcher to find the phenomenon of digital self-tracking (often referred to as «the quantified self») intriguing. All of a sudden, the sociological and anthropological literature on self-tracking is rapidly expanding. This is because self-tracking is at the crux of many of the classic areas of investigation of these disciplines (self and social identities, community, social institutions, power relations, politics, government, embodiment) yet involves very new digital technologies, the impact of which on human lives has yet to be fully explored. Some of the questions and issues my interlocutors raise work to provide further depth to current sociological thinking on self-tracking, including incorporating some theorists, like Durkheim, Simmel, Goffman and Weber, who are not mentioned in the book or by many other social researchers working on analysing self-tracking. The key issue that Anthony King raises is that of whether the new digital technologies to which I refer in the book are distinctively different in enhancing the capacities of human bodies. He provides 812 Anthony King, Federico Neresini, Roberta Sassatelli, Deborah Lupton the example of humans using objects as sticks and stones as effective weapons in warfare to argue that humans have always interacted with nonhumans to extend the possibilities of their bodies. I have no quibble with this. Indeed, I note in early pages of the book that self-tracking is not a new practice. Humans have collected details about themselves and used this information to reflect on their lives since ancient times. While these details may simply have been committed to memory, the use of pen-and-paper, as in writing journals, diaries or simply lists, is a time-honoured method of self-monitoring. I do attempt to show in the book, however, that there are several key differences between these older forms of technological use and contemporary forms that have major implications for how people are understanding themselves, their bodies and their communities; and beyond this, how institutions are learning about people and exploiting this knowledge. One difference is that digital devices for self-tracking offer the opportunity to greatly expand the possible data points that people can collect about themselves, and they often do this automatically, requiring little-or-no human intervention. Another is that technologies such as apps and wearable devices or smartphones provide feedback to self-trackers in the form of nudges, alerts or notifications. Unlike a paper journal, technologies such as the app on one’s smartphone or tablet computer, a wearable device or a smartwatch give feedback in the form of text messages, sounds or haptic sensations (vibrations or buzzes). They are responsive and directly interventionist technologies, in other words, that «talk back» to users, providing support, motivation, encouragement – or even nagging or admonitions. Thus, for example, the Apple Watch includes a movement sensor that automatically monitors how much its wearer has sat, stood up, moved around or exercised. The Apple Watch website describes the watch as «a faithful sidekick… it even congratulates you for a job well done». The Watch also admonishes the user: if it senses that the user has not moved in the past hour, she or he is delivered a «time to stand» message (using both sound and text) and haptic notification (vibration). Apple represents the Watch as taking the place of a personal trainer in providing these kinds of support, encouragement, motivation and feedback. To disagree with King, I do not argue that self-tracking technologies are mostly focused on monitoring and recording human agency rather than extending it. Many self-trackers use these technologies precisely because they understand them as facilitating agency. A further aspect of self-tracking I wanted to emphasise in the book is the ways in which people attempt to use it to establish a sense of control over their lives and to perform a certain ethical kind of selfhood: the rational, entrepreneurial, self-responsible citizen. This is not in itself a new idea, of course. Its provenance can be traced back to the ancients and then to Christian concepts of the importance of controlling and disciplining The Quantified Self. Roundtable on and with Deborah Lupton 813 the body. In the book I employ Foucauldian theory in outlining the intersections of technologies of the self and government established in the promotion and performance of this ideal citizen. Both Nersini and Sassatelli draw attention to Weberian theories of rationalization and bureaucratization in further highlighting these elements of selftracking. Self-tracking discourses often do evoke a rationalized form of consumption that also encourages the generation of a productive and virtuous worker. The tacit underpinnings of the morality of Protestantism established by Weber are clearly evident in self-tracking technology developers’ and enthusiasts’ support of the value of self-knowledge and self-reflection in the interests of improving the self. Another new aspect of contemporary digital self-tracking technologies is that drawing on machine-learning capabilities and algorithmic manipulations, these technologies can create unique knowledges about their subjects, and use these knowledges to make predictions. They reflect not only what people have done, but infer what they (or others like them) might do in the future. Federico Nersini suggests that more research and theorising could be undertaken on how the technological artefacts that human use for self-tracking shape, constrain or promote certain forms of action. He draws on Latour’s work in proposing using the concept of mediators, or technologies that modify or translate meanings of the elements they carry, to extend the ideas about the sociomaterial nature of self-tracking assemblages I propose in the book. This is indeed an interesting question, particularly in relation, for example, to how algorithms and data materialisations work to translate the material about humans that is collected from self-tracking devices, rendering this material into particular forms of digital data assemblages. I appreciate King’s observations about how Durkheim might be employed in theorising the social elements of self-tracking in relation to shared or collective identities. There is much to further consider in terms of how the distributed forms of selfhood documented by self-tracking activities and other ways of interacting online can shape and influence not only how people think of themselves, but also how they situate themselves in relation to others, and how others perceive them. Sociologists need to start thinking about and theorising the aggregated identities that big data configure and what the implications of these aggregated identities are. What could Durkheimian theory begin to contribute to understanding the movements and entanglements between small data and big data? Beyond these issues of selfhood and shared identity are questions about how internet developers and companies – and particularly the empires of Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon – come to shape identity profiles and use these profiles for their own purposes. It is often proposed that these and other internet companies that collect and algorithmically manipulate people’s personal information know more 814 Anthony King, Federico Neresini, Roberta Sassatelli, Deborah Lupton about people than they know about themselves. The data they collect and manipulate reflect a certain version of people back to themselves. In many cases, these digital data identities are created and used in various ways, often without people’s knowledge. As such, these digital data assemblages have their own social lives that can shape people’s life chances and opportunities. Where Durkheim theorises identity as a shared property of the small social group of which people are a part, in response to self-tracking we may need to start to see some forms of identity as a shared property of the internet empires and the multifarious industries that are profiting from the harvesting of the personal information traces that people leave whenever they are using digital technologies. It is the internet empires that may now possess people’s souls – and profit from them. As I emphasise in the book, the biovalue of the information generated from digital self-tracking technologies is a new property of personal data. Small data – the details people configure about themselves when engaging in digital self-tracking – inevitably become big data if they are transmitted to the computing cloud. Once they are transmitted to the cloud, people lose control over their information, and these details become subject to reuse and repurposing by potentially many actors and agencies. These data can be combined and recombined with not only other people’s data but also with other personal data generated by the same individual, to create ever-more detailed profiles about these individuals. These data assemblages can tell many stories about people; stories that they may not want others to know. Details about one’s self and one’s body that were remembered or written down, confessed and recorded using the rosary beads to which King refers, or even entered into spreadsheets on one’s computer, did not possess this vitality. They remained static, hidden from view, under the full control and possession of their owner. It is for these reasons that I have suggested elsewhere that in theorising the ontology of personal data assemblages we might draw on Donna Haraway’s concept of companion species. I argue that personal data assemblages, like Haraway’s companion species (for example, pet dogs), live alongside humans and co-evolve with them. They are hybrids of human and nonhuman, nature and culture. Our lively digital data assemblages can tell us narratives about ourselves, but they always are inevitably only partial and sometimes misleading in emphasising some aspects of our selves over others. Self-trackers may struggle with recognising how these data assemblages relate to their bodies and selves. They may find the stories these assemblages tell to be convincing and satisfying, but may also respond to them with boredom, frustration, shame, guilt or disappointment. Living alongside these assemblages can be challenging and difficult. The Quantified Self. Roundtable on and with Deborah Lupton 815 Where to from here? Since completing The Quantified Self, my research interests in self-tracking have moved towards empirical work. I have developed a research program that I have entitled Living Digital Data, which builds on the conceptual bases established in the book to examine the ways in which people engage in self-tracking and how they respond to the data that they generate. Inspired by new materialism and non-representational methodologies, in some of these projects I am attempting to focus less on discourses and more on practices, habits and routines. One such project focuses on cyclists who monitor their trips using digital devices. As well as interviews with participants about their practices, it involves video-recording them preparing for their trips (including the participants showing how they attach selftracking devices to their bicycles or their bodies) and undertaking their cycling journeys. Drawing on the digital sensory ethnographic methods developed by one of the collaborators on this project, Sarah Pink, this method was developed as a way of observing what people do as well as talking to them about what they do. Here a self-tracking device (a mini-action camera attached to the cyclist’s helmet) worked also as a research device. There is much more work to do as well in understanding the phenomenology of people’s encounters with their personal digital data assemblages. As part of the Living Digital Data program, I have also developed the concept of «data sense» to encapsulate the entanglements of human senses, digital sensors and the process of human sense-making that takes place when people generate personal data and incorporate them into their lives. The term «living digital data» is an attempt to acknowledge both the liveliness of digital data assemblages and the experiences of living with and alongside these assemblages. REFERENCES Bauman Z. 1995 Life in Fragments. 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