Numbered Lives by Wernimont Jacqueline;

Author:Wernimont, Jacqueline;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: self-tracking; feminism; life hacking; performative; technology; media archaeology; lifelogging; pedometer; FitBit
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2018-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

To Know Thyself Is to Know Thyself in Action

The know thyself imperative embedded in much QS discourse is old and has always entailed the monitoring of actions.25 According to the classical Greek author Pausanias, “know thyself” and “nothing in excess” were maxims brought to Delphi by the seven sages.26 Though enduring, this push toward self-knowledge and self-management has undergone significant change since Pausanias gave his first tour of the temple at Delphi, including shifting toward ever-greater quantification. While a certain kind of moral and ethical motivation drives every use of Delphic aphorisms—they were originally styled as “maxims useful to the life of men”—those at work today are deeply imbricated in the more modern logics of Western capitalism and patriarchy. Twenty-first-century exhortations to know thyself perform mediations that are still about making an individual legible to a polity or community, but instead of monumental inscriptions, the media are now clip-on discs, smart jewelry and watches, and the apps and mobile devices with which they communicate. Rather than inscriptions in stone presiding over a large central gathering space, the media by which we are meant to know ourselves are now attached to individual bodies, creating a pervasive and perpetual mediation not seen before. As opposed to Apollo governing the good life, we have corporations exhorting us to find ourselves in the data that we give them.

This shift from the inscribed temple to the wristband was neither sudden nor necessary; instead, it involved several other media transformations that included tools that look more like wheelbarrows, personal notebooks, and pocket watches. First in this lineage is the decidedly textual media of the manuscript, and in particular the books of life writing (meditation books, journals, spiritual exercises, and more) through which Western authors sought to gain self-knowledge. Such life writings allow us to see the ways in which a Judeo-Christian tradition of narrative accounting transmuted into the actuarial tables seen in chapter 2 and eventually became modern activity tracking. While contemporary engagements with big data and sleeker, sexier tracking bangles may seem to be a long way away from those first life writing media, the second section of this book details the history that spans the gap. As with mortality tracking, the history of activity tracking entails accretions of media types, including narrative texts, tables, mechanical devices, digital devices, and cloud computing. Along with new media for tracking human activity, we see shifts in the kinds of activity tracking considered valuable. While the media proliferate and there is change in relative usages of media types, there is surprising continuity in the underlying goals. Across the history of activity tracking, each media is involved in rendering an account of a life well lived, or at the least, in reshaping individual and collective behavior in the name of the good life. Each of these mediations occurs between a body in everyday action and social and political evaluations of those actions. In the early modern period in particular, embodied action has a more consistently obvious spiritual cast. As

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