Tamar Sharon

From data fetishism to quantifying selves: Self-tracking practices and the other values of data

This article foregrounds the ways in which members of the Quantified Self ascribe value and meaning to the data they generate in self-tracking practices. We argue that the widespread idea that what draws self-trackers to numerical data is its perceived power of truth and objectivity—a so-called “data fetishism”—is limiting. Using an ethnographic approach, we describe three ways in which self-trackers attribute meaning to their data-gathering practices which escape this data fetishist critique: self-tracking as a practice of mindfulness, as a means of resistance against social norms, and as a communicative and narrative aid. In light of this active engagement with data, we suggest that it makes more sense to view these practitioners as “quantifying selves.” We also suggest that such fine-grained accounts of the appeal that data can have, beyond its allure of objectivity, are necessary if we are to achieve a fuller understanding of Big Data culture.

Posthuman Subjectivity: Beyond Modern Metaphysics

This chapter explores the implications of posthumanist subjectivity via a discussion on subjectivity in the work of some important precursors of non-humanist posthumanism on subjectivity, such as Heidegger, Levinas and Deleuze, to methodological and radical posthumanists like Latour and Haraway. The human being is conceptualized here not as an independent and autonomous entity with clear cut boundaries but as a heterogeneous subject whose self-definition is continuously shifting, and that exists in a complex network of human and non-human agents and the technologies that mediate between them.

Let's Move Beyond Critique—But Please, Let's Not Depoliticize the Debate

Many of us have by now grown weary of the endless onslaught of new applications and gadgets for tracking and, somehow, improving aspects of our lives that we did not know were a problem. “App fatigue” may finally be upon us. But that is no reason not to take seriously the impact of the long arm of quantification into areas of valued human activities, such as intimate and romantic relationships—the focus of Danaher and colleagues’ article (2018). These authors want to subject the relatively new practice of relationship tracking to ethical inquiry, by identifying and scrutinizing the main objectives to this practice in the literature on self-tracking, and using this analysis to develop a roadmap for future research. This is an important goal. The problem is that Danaher and colleagues do not actually engage in a serious manner with the critical literature on self-tracking—and in so doing depoliticize a practice that cannot be dissociated from the larger political economy of datafication in which it is taking place. While I agree that critiques of self-tracking that reduce this practice to a disciplining and disempowering tool of neoliberal agendas need to be nuanced, this requires first a sober understanding of what that critique is responding to. Furthermore, the most compelling way to do this is to turn to the empirical reality of self-tracking. This is something that a growing number of social scientists, (empirical) ethicists, and philosophers are doing, so that the road map that Danaher and colleagues would like to see set up might already be implemented. As Danaher and colleagues claim, self-tracking has received a predominantly bad rap in the social sciences and humanities literature in the past decade. Why? Most of this literature (which is by now a much richer body of work than Danaher and colleagues acknowledge) draws on Foucauldian perspectives, making it particularly sensitive to the disciplining and disempowering effects of self-tracking. Rather than fulfilling their promise of empowering users, critics argue that self-tracking creates new moral obligations, the contours of which are set not so much by oneself as a free subject, but by others, such as public health authorities and commercial app developers. These critical assumptions certainly should not be taken for granted. But they must be seriously engaged with before being dismissed. Yet, by neatly isolating eight objections to relationship tracking, what Danaher and colleagues effectively do is fragment the broader sociopolitical landscape in which self-tracking takes place to the point that it eludes them as a consistent whole. For example, one of the most prominent objections raised against self-tracking is what we can call the reductionist critique, or what the authors call “the measurementmanagement objection.” The reductionist critique holds that the quantification of experiences and behavior is an inherently reductionist process. Danaher and colleagues fail to grasp the core of this critique: applied to relationship tracking, this critique would not primarily take issue with how “pleasant” or “distracting” tracking might be, as Danaher and colleagues claim. This would indeed hardly merit critical outcry. Rather, the core of this argument is that selftracking works on the basis of categories that act as proxies for complex and rich phenomena—“calories” as proxies for “health,” “mood scores” for “mental well-being,” “number of thrusts” for “good sex.” This involves two risks, according to critics. First, these proxies easily come to represent the definitive truth about the categories they set out to represent. Second, they become privileged over more subjective, intuitive ways of knowing (Lupton 2015). This reductionist critique cannot be meaningfully dissociated from what Danaher and colleagues call “the neoliberalization objection,” and to which they give short shrift as the “tendency of technologies to privatize, and make individuals responsible for, what are at base more structural social problems” (16). This is indeed one dimension of the “neoliberal project” that critics have taken up. And as Danaher and colleagues argue, if this neoliberal objection is

Towards a Phenomenology of Technologically Mediated Moral Change: Or, What Could Mark Zuckerberg Learn from Caregivers in the Southern Netherlands?

Kamphof offers an illuminating depiction of the technological mediation of morality. Her case serves as the basis for a plea for modesty up and against the somewhat heroic conceptualizations of techno-moral change to date—less logos, less autos, more practice, more relationality. Rather than a displacement of these conceptualizations, I question whether Kamphof’s art of living offers only a different perspective: in scale (as a micro-event of techno-moral change), and in unit of analysis (as an art of living oriented to relations with others rather than the relation to the self). As a supplement and not an alternative, this modest art has nonetheless audacious implications for the ethics of surveillance.

Towards a Non-Humanist Posthumanism: The Originary Prostheticity of Radical and Methodological Posthumanism

We can now begin to take a closer look at radical and methodological posthumanism as the main candidates for a non-humanist alternative to dystopic and liberal posthumanism. These approaches develop alternative frameworks that move beyond the essentialism inherent in instrumental and substantive models of technology that inform dystopic and liberal posthumanism. Radical posthumanism argues for a reflexive model of technology, in which technologies are both seen as the product of human creativity and a force that shapes human existence, i.e. technologies are determinative of human experience, though not deterministic. And methodological posthumanism introduces the key concept of technological mediation, which implies that technologies are active mediators of how humans experience the world and how humans act, transforming ourselves and the world in the process.

Technologically Produced Nature: Nature Beyond Schizophrenia and Paranoia

Using the “schizoanalytic” framework of Deleuze and Guattari, this chapter takes a closer look at radical posthumanism by focusing on how this approach analyzes assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and their implications for the concept of nature. In radical posthumanist readings, the “schizophrenic” tendency of assisted reproduction to deconstruct the concept of nature is seen as constantly coming up against and being captured by legislative and discursive strategies that “re-naturalize” nature. I argue that this re-naturalization, or reterritorialization, implies a new flexibility with which notions like “biogenetic relatedness”, “nature” and “parenthood” are being employed by users of these technologies. And furthermore, that this flexibility indicates new conceptualizations of fundamental categories that are not being adequately accounted for by radical posthumanist discourse, in which deconstructive and disciplining trends coexist and intermingle quite peacefully.

A Cartography of the Posthuman

This introductory chapter offers a comprehensive mapping of posthumanist discourse along three axes of differentiation: an optimistic/pessimistic axis, a historical-materialist/philosophical-ontological axis, and a humanist/non-humanist axis. It is argued that this last axis of differentiation, where humanism refers to a radical separation between human subjects and technological objects, is the most consequential one. Using these axes, four broad types of posthumanism are identified: “dystopic posthumanism”, “liberal posthumanism”, “radical posthumanism”, and “methodological posthumanism”.

From Molar to Molecular Bodies: Posthumanist Frameworks in Contemporary Biology

This chapter steps back from the technological realm and takes a look at how the humanist dualist paradigm is also being challenged in current biological research, particularly in molecular biomedicine and evolutionary biology. A possible shift in these disciplines attests to this, from a “molar” formulation of the body or organism, understood as a self-contained, unified organic whole, distinct from its environment, to a “molecular” body or organism, understood as a fragmented assemblage made up of transferable and translatable parts that depends much more on interactions with its surroundings. This biological form of originary prostheticity complements its anthropological counterpart that was articulated in Chap. 4.

The Human Enhancement Debate: For, Against and from Human Nature

This chapter reviews the state of the ongoing debate between dystopic and liberal posthumanists on enhancement technologies, with a closer look at the explicit and implicit arguments advanced by each regarding some specific technologies like preimplantation genetic diagnosis, the use of psychopharmaceuticals for mood and cognitive enhancement, and genetic engineering. In broad terms, dystopic posthumanism subscribes to the moral claim that human enhancement is intrinsically wrong, and the political claim that it should be banned or restricted. Liberal posthumanism, conversely, holds that enhancement is neither intrinsically wrong nor unusually dangerous, and should generally be permitted. On both sides, the arguments that support these claims abound, and can be grouped into three categories: social, technical and methodological arguments.

New Modes of Ethical Selfhood: Geneticization and Genetically Responsible Subjectivity

In this final chapter, a mediated posthumanist perspective that incorporates each of the important aspects of various approaches that have been discussed – the non-humanist basis of radical and methodological posthumanism, the schizoanlaytic framework developed by Deleuze and Guattari, and the Foucauldian approach to ethical subject-constitution – is used in an examination of new genetic technologies.