A Genealogy of Quantifying Devices

Description

The current genealogy maps the early emergence (Entstehung) of self-tracking. Sinuous ties are traced through self-tracking to the developments of medical practices from 1770 to the near present day. These new connections enmesh self-tracking with the material (body), the relational (doctor-patient), the virtual (risk), and the temporal (historical situatedness). From these newly materialised associations a new descent (Herkunft), as an alternative process-philosophical history, is made actual. This new reality of self-tracking dislodges the established foundations of substance-oriented discourses. Consequently, the “self” of self-tracking is also displaced in the pursuits of process-philosophical alternatives. With commitments to process the self can not be an inert inner core at the heart of humanness. Instead, the self is produced as something that is always more than one; as something that exists in multiple states and flocks in many directions, such as: a consumer, a producer, and a user, the well, ill, and at risk. Evidently, the self of self-tracking is a morphological makeup of multiform processes. In the present presentation, the self of self-tracking is embellished into the broader discourses of posthumanism and transhumanism.

Period	9 Jun 2015
Event title	Neoliberation: The Self in the Era of New Media
Event type	Conference
Location	London, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	National