IDENTIFYING WITH NUMBERS: A PHILOSOPHICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTICAL READING OF SELF-IDENTIFICATION

Abstract

The need to identify, name, count and categorize predates the rise of technology. With the wearable device, our relationship to numbers is far more complex: data flows back and forth amongst devices, consumers, companies, institutions, and networks. One might purchase a self‐monitoring device for self-control or self‐enhancing under the allure of the ability to self‐manage. On the other hand, for self-care, to be the doctor of one’s own ailments. Nonetheless, measurements associated with insights on the self do not end at self‐improvement goals. In the quest for anything providing the possibility for self‐guidance, numbers are attributed mythological weight, carrying the promise embodying one’s own divine authority. Is this tied to an underlying dream to prolong life and master death? This essay presents a wide-ranging review of literature on self‐tracking device, in terms of running and shame to explore how behaviour tied to technology plays out moral or ethical constraints, dilemmas and fear of dying. Data doubles are examined in relation to Lacanian psychoanalysis and the mirror stage as formative of self‐identity, which is presently little acknowledged in relation to self‐tracking. The contributions of Etienne-Jules Marey to the concepts of the body in relation to time are also brought to the fore. The aim is to raise questions about the philosophical and psychoanalytic causes that drive habits of self‐quantification beyond identity, including internal obligations to divinity, knowledge and reality.