under the Weimar Republic (Tooze, 2001). In his view, statistics offered the Weimar Republic a new, attractive and credible language for government. Theodore Porter for his part has shown how the use of quantitative language also goes hand in hand with a transformation in the bases of authority of the expert, in this instance the statistician (Porter, 1995). To what extent can one speak of socialist statistics in the case of the USSR?

At first sight, what is striking is the difficulty that political leaders and managers of the TsSU had in defining a new conceptual framework specific to state statistics, both in the 1920s and 1930s (the period of formation of the Soviet system) and subsequently. Marking a break with the pre-revolutionary economic management systems, planning had to have a quantitative language and new tools, radically different from those of statistics nourished by 19th century scientific representations and the bourgeoisie.

Accounting seemed to provide this new language that Soviet Russia needed to construct a quantification system serving the construction of communism. In reality, statistics was never abandoned, even if its existence was hotly contested in the period of formation of the Soviet system. The expression “socialist statistics” was used to refer to a different way of producing figures from the way that capitalist countries produced them. However, although we can speak of socialist statistics, it is not so much to refer to a specific theory, concepts and tools, but rather to a set of uses of them, which, depending on the period, were reinterpreted and adjusted to the objectives set by the political plan of the leaders of the Soviet state.

Against this backdrop, the Soviet statistician was caught between two poles: heroes of science, or engineers of figures in the service of the authorities. A way of resolving this dichotomy consisted in the state restricting the role of the statistician to a primarily technical role in a Directorate of Statistics or a computational centre, without any expectation of a scientific role, which was entrusted to various research institutes (on the Soviet organizational system of science after the Second World War, see Graham, 1993; Krementsov, 1997). This transformation of the status of the statistician is inseparable from a conception of quantification adapted to a planning model, but also a form of state where power was exercised in an authoritarian manner and figures were considered a propaganda tool.

The authority of the expert statistician was no longer based on his independence vis-à-vis the political leaders. On the contrary, the components of his professionalism were defined by the latter. The expert was kept at arm's length from the authorities, but at their disposal. The part
of his work that was closest to the population, such as data collection for censuses or household budget surveys, was until the 1970s placed under the political control of the Party, being included in the sphere of civic activities.

## NOTES

1. Source: XIII s''ezd VKP (b), Stenograficheskii ochet (XIIIth Congress of the Communist Bolshevik Party of Russia (b), Shorthand report), p. 130.

2. A new copy of this handbook was edited each year from 1930 to 1936. One of its editors, Boris S. Iastremskii (1877-1962) was a mathematician specialized in the field of probability calculation. From 1918 to 1933 he headed the Department of Statistical Methodology of the TsSU. He became a member of the Party in 1931. The other editor, Valentin I. Khotimskii (1892-1939), was a former student of Aleksandr A. Chuprov and was specialized in the field of the probabilities. Although he was close to the Party he never became a member. After teaching mathematics from 1924 to 1927 at the Plekhanov National Institute for the National Economy, he became a researcher in the mathematical section of the Communist Academy. He directed it until 1932 and then was appointed at the head of the controlling sector of the Gosplan for Russia. In 1935 he was appointed at the direction of the Statistics Department for Population and Health of the Directorate Accounting for the National Economy (TsUNKhU), that was in charge of the organization of the 1937 and 1939 demographic censuses. The TsUNKhU had replaced the TsSU in 1930. V. I. Khotimskii was arrested in 1937 during the Great Purges. Most statisticians taking part in the organization of the 1937 census were arrested and put in prison. V. I. Khotimskii died in 1939.

3. The Plekhanov Institute for the National Economy was re-formed in 1924 in Moscow. It had a Department of Statistics.

4. The Institute of Red Professors was created in 1921 in Moscow. It was placed under the authority of the Central Committee of the Party.

5. Vladimir N. Starovskii (1905-1975), was recruited as a statistician to the TsSU in 1925. He became a member of the Party in 1939 and was appointed to the direction of the 1939 demographic census after Stalin had rendered void the results of the 1937 census. After being Deputy Director of the TsUNKhU in 1939 and 1940, he was appointed to the direction of the new TsSU when it was re-formed in October 1940. He remained in this function until he died in 1975. From March 1941 he was also vice president of Gosplan.

6. The TsUNKhU replaced the TsSU in 1930. Valerian V. Osinskii (1887-1938) was a member of the Bolshevik Party since 1907. Immediately after October 1917 he was director of the State Central Bank and president of
The Supreme Council for the National Economy. After 1918 he fulfilled various leading functions. In 1926 he was appointed head of the TsSU to give a new political direction to the Central Statistics Administration. He was replaced in this function in 1928. A few years later he was appointed head of the new TsUNkhU. He was arrested in 1937 during the Great Purges and executed in 1938.

7. See RGAE, f. 1562, op. 1, d. 749, ll. 138–154.

## REFERENCES

Anisimov, S. (1968). S pomoshchiu obshchestvennykh inspektorov (With the help of civic inspectors). *Vestnik statistiki*, **49**(5), 73–74.

Blum, A., & Mespoulet, M. (2003). *L'anarchie bureaucratique. Statistique et pouvoir sous Staline*. La Découverte.

Boiarskii, A. I. (1968). Issledovanie sotsial'nykh yavleniy i gosudarstvennaia statistika (The study of social phenomena and state statistics). *Vestnik statistiki*, **49**(3), 14–21.

Brian, E. (1989). Statistique administrative et internationalisme statistique pendant la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle. *Histoire & Mesure*, **4**(3–4), 201–224.

Cadiot, J. (2007). *Le laboratoire impérial. Russie-Urss 1870-1940*. CNRS Editions.

Desrosières, A. (1985). Histoire de formes: statistiques et sciences sociales avant 1940. *Revue française de Sociologie*, **26**(2), 277–310.

Desrosières, A. (1988). Masses, individus, moyennes: la statistique sociale au XIXe siècle. *Hermès*, **2**(2), 41–66.

Desrosières, A. (1998 [1993]). *The politics of large numbers: A history of statistical reasoning*. Harvard University Press.

Desrosières, A. (2002). Three studies on the history of sampling surveys: Norway, Russia-USSR, United States. *Science in Context*, **15**(3), 377–383.

Elisseeva, I. I. (2003). *Sotsial'naia statistika* (Social statistics). Finansy i statistika.

Gigerenzer, G., Swijtink, Z., Porter, T. M., Daston, L., Beatty, J., & Krüger, L. (1989). *The empire of chance*. Cambridge University Press.

Graham, L. (1993). *Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A short history*. Cambridge University Press.

Hirsch, F. (1997). The Soviet Union as a work in progress: Ethnographers and the category nationality in the 1926, 1937 and 1939 censuses. *Slavic Review*, **56**(2), 251–278.

Holquist, P. (2002). *Making war, forging revolution: Russia's Don Territory during total war and revolution, 1914-21*. Harvard University Press.

Iastremskii, B. S., & Khotimskii, V. I. (1931). *Teoria matematicheskoi statistiki* (Theory of mathematical statistics). Sotsekgiz.
Iastremskii, B. S., & Khotimskii, V. I. (1936). *Statistika. Osnovy obshchei teorii* (Statistics: The founding of a general theory). Soyuzorguchet.

Kornai, J. (1996). *Le système socialiste. L'économie politique du communisme*. Presses Universitaires de Grenoble.

Kotz, S., & Seneta, E. (1990). Lenin as a statistician: A non-Soviet view. *Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 153*(A), 73-94.

Krementsov, N. (1997). *Stalinist science*. Princeton University Press.

Kruskal, W., & Mosteller, F. (1980). Representative sampling IV: The history of the concept in statistics, 1895-1939. *International Statistical Review, 48*(2), 169-195.

Lenin, V. I. (1955). *Pol'noe sobranie sochinenii* (Complete works), 55 volumes (5th ed.). Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury.

Maksimova, V. N. (1996). Iz vospominanii (20-30e gody) (Extracts of my memories, 1920-1930s). *Voprosy statistiki, 77*(10), 78-87.

Mespoulet, M. (2001). *Statistique et révolution. Un compromis impossible (1880-1930)*. Presses Universitaires de Rennes.

Mespoulet, M. (2002). From typical areas to random sampling: Sampling methods in Russia from 1875 to 1930. *Science in Context, 15*(3), 411-425.

Mespoulet, M. (2008). *Construire le socialime par les chiffres. Enquêtes et recensements en URSS de 1917 à 1991*. Ed. de l'Ined.

Mespoulet, M., & Blum, A. (2003). Le passé au service du présent. L'administration statistique de l'Etat soviétique entre 1918 et 1930». *Cahiers du Monde russe, 44*(2-3), 343-368.

Osinskii, V. V. (1932). *Chto znachit uchet* (What accounting means). Soyuzorguchet.

Popov, P. I. (1918). Organizatsiya gosudarstvennoe statistiki (The organization of the State Statistics Administration). In RGAE (Ed.), *f. 1562, op.1, d. 28*.

Porter, T. M. (1986). *The rise of statistical thinking, 1820-1900*. Princeton University Press.

Porter, T. M. (1995). *Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life*. Princeton University Press.

Sapir, J. (1997). La guerre civile et l'économie de guerre, origines du système soviétique. *Cahiers Du Monde Russe, 38*(1-2), 9-28.

Sbeglov, N. (1967). Nashi dobrovol'nye pomoshchniki (Our voluntarily inlisted assistants). *Vestnik statistiki, 48*(11), 61-64.

Stanziani, A. (1998). *L'économie en révolution. Le cas russe, 1880-1930*. Albin Michel.

Starovskii, V. N. (1936). *Azbuka statistiki* (The ABC of statistics). Soyuzorguchet.

Starovskii, V. N. (1960). Sovetskaia statistitcheskaia nauka i praktika (Soviet statistical science and practice). In V. N. Starovskii (Ed.), *Istoria sovetskoi*
*gosudarstvennoi statistiki. Sbornik statei* (The history of Soviet State Statistics. Collection of articles). Gosstatizdat.

Stigler, S. M. (1986). *The history of statistics: The measurement of uncertainty before 1900*. Harvard University Press.

Studenski, P. (1958). *The income of nations*. New York University Press.

Thévenot, L. (1994). *Statistique et politique. La normalité du collectif*. *Politix*, 25, 5-20.

Tooze, A. (2001). *Statistics and the German state, 1900-1945: The making of modern economic knowledge*. Cambridge University Press.

Vanoli, A. (2002). *Une histoire de la comptabilité nationale*. La Découverte.

Vestnik statistiki. (1978). Uchet i gosudarstvennaia ochetnost' – pod kontrol' obshchestvennosti (Statistics and national accounting under the control of the activity of the mass organisations). *Vestnik statistiki*, 59(12), 67-70.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>
# The People’s Algorithms: Social Credits and the Rise of China’s Big (Br)other

Tong Lam

In 2013, just a few months after Chairman Xi Jingping came into power in China, the government declared that the country was entering a new era and launched a project called “the Chinese Dream” (Zhongguo meng). In order to realize this dream of “national rejuvenation”, the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a set of guidelines aiming at the cultivation of what it referred to as “core socialist values” that it divided into three respective categories: national goals (prosperity, democracy, civility and harmony), social goals (freedom, equality, justice and the rule of law), and individual values (patriotism, dedication, integrity and friendship) (Gow, 2017). The making of state-defined “civilized” (wenming) and “high quality” (gao sushì) political subjects for the newly enounced social and economic order, in short, is an integral part of the so-called Chinese Dream.

Almost immediately, propaganda slogans began popping up everywhere, from giant LED billboards on main avenues to the pages of

<footnote>T. Lam (✉)
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
e-mail: tong.lam@utoronto.ca</footnote>
school textbooks. Predictably, Western observers immediately contrasted the Chinese Dream with the American Dream, pointing out that while the Chinese version might have borrowed a concept from the United States, it focuses on collectivism rather than individualism (Kai, 2014). Implicit in their argument is not only just a criticism of authoritarianism's and nationalism's suppression of individual aspirations but also an embrace of a certain belief in the ability of the autonomous individual to exercise reason that is thought to be fundamental to the operations of the market and democracy. China, in their estimate, needs to unleash that potential if it is to fully align itself with the Western economic and political order and become a true global leader.

This narrative deploys a certain moral filter to make sense of the world and human behaviour and has a long genealogy traceable to the Enlightenment. And in spite of the recent financial crisis and repeated electoral catastrophes in liberal democracies on both sides of the Atlantic, the foundation of that moral conviction has remained largely unshaken. The recent critique of fake news, alternative facts and misinformation (all of which have been made possible by the deployment of politically motivated computer algorithms and analytics) is heavily grounded in the insistence on the importance of real facts and the human capacity to reason.¹ Yet in the face of popularist political division and even violence fed by data-driven technology and the feedback loop in our post-truth world, it has become clear that the notion of self-determination and self-governance of the autonomous individual is being called into question (Rahwan, 2018).

This essay equally questions the adequacy of this view of human capacity, especially in the contemporary digital landscape, by examining the recent introduction of the social credit (shehui xinyong) rating system in China. As a new technology of governance, the social credit system is intended to track and calculate the social credit scores of every Chinese citizen and organization based on their activities and performance. Significantly, this government-mandated big data and surveillance project involves more than just the mining and processing of data by the state and corporations; it also seeks to compel individuals and groups to regulate themselves tirelessly based on the social and ethical order sanctioned by the state. Under such practices of state-led neoliberalism, the government uses social engineering interventions—the idea of the social credit in this case—to promote the ideas of marketization, social harmony, innovation, entrepreneurship, the rule of law, and other state-defined “core socialist values”. By subjugating the everyday to neoliberal logics
and normalizing its citizens through self-regulation, postsocialist China is moving away from the older socialist system of surveillance. In doing so, it has also given up on the dream of creating enlightened and critical citizens once cherished by Chinese intellectuals and revolutionary vanguards a century ago. Instead, it edges towards a posthuman world where citizens are fast becoming calculable and mouldable data subjects.²

Of course, Chinese citizens are not alone in their subjugation to sophisticated digital surveillance, as it has been demonstrated by Shoshana Zuboff's (2019) study of surveillance capitalism in market democracies. Yet the ubiquitous and conspicuous way in which the everyday activities of the individual are being tracked and regulated by a single party-state with an explicit agenda of behaviour modification is unprecedented. Moreover, whereas surveillance capitalism focuses primarily on capital accumulation, the Chinese social credit system also includes a political and ideological dimension that cannot be subsumed completely under the logic of capital. As such, Big Other—the “instrumentarian power” enabled by the vast surveillance infrastructure for herding and moulding society as suggested by Zuboff (2019)—is even bigger in China. Given the resilience and strengthening of the authoritarian party-state, one can even refer it to as Big (Br)other.³

## THE EARLIER CHINESE DREAM

The desire to reform the thought of the individual is at least partially rooted in China's looming existential crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century. When the multi-ethnic Qing empire led by the Manchu ethnic group (1644–1912) repeatedly suffered major military defeats and setbacks in political and institutional reforms in its final decades, many Han Chinese intellectuals came to believe that the failure of the empire was due to its inability to create a unified body politic to counter the encroachment of foreign powers. The prominent intellectual Liang Qichao (1873–1929), for example, argued that the Chinese nation emerging out of the crumbling empire was in dire need of an organic society. According to him, the prerequisite to forming such a society was to create national citizens who were motivated and enlightened. Those who led the top-down revolution that ultimately toppled the dynasty also shared this view. Sun Yatsen, the revolutionary leader and “father of the republic”, also famously castigated the disorganized and disunited state of the Chinese nation (Lam, 2011, p. 9). Underlying this line of reasoning
was a fundamental shift in the political logics of the state from that of the Manchu-led dynastic empire to the Chinese nation. Political legitimacy, similarly, was now derived from the people rather than from the imperial lineage and divine sources.

When the new republic disintegrated soon after its establishment, most intellectuals blamed the top-down approach to political change. They further emphasized that if China wanted to institute a modern political order, creating a functional society with politically awakened citizens was critical. Thus, during the 1910s and 1920s, many Chinese intellectuals spoke of the need to create a “new culture” based on science and democracy. They vernacularized language for the masses and carried an education campaign to the countryside with the hope of turning the nation’s mass population into new citizens, making this period a sort of Chinese enlightenment (Lam, 2011, pp. 38–45; Schwarcz, 1986). Yet, owing to the political imperative of the time, the idea of turning individuals into enlightened citizens quickly gave way to the idea of producing a people who would adhere to the newly declared social and political order that was seen as vital to the survival of the nation. Being politically aware, in this new context, was to acknowledge the priority of the collective over the individual.⁴

Immediately after the Second World War, unsurprisingly, officials and academics of the Nationalist government also began to contemplate how to put the population under surveillance as part of the national reconstruction project. Nevertheless, it was only after the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 that the dream of engineering the new citizen on a large scale became possible. Among other things, a system of household registration was put in place, subjugating individuals, workplaces, schools, neighbourhoods and so forth, to a new administrative order legible to the surveillance state. While such a system was no doubt partially drawn from practices used in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, scholars have also noted that the Chinese population was put under surveillance in the imperial era (Lu & Perry, 1997). The social surveillance system in twentieth-century China can thus be seen as a case of the modern bureaucratic state appropriating both native and foreign ideas for its state-building needs. This essay takes up one aspect of this vast surveillance network, the personal file or dossier system (*renshi dangan* or *geren dangan*), as it offers a meaningful departure point for understanding the significance of the new social credit system in the era of big data.
PERSONAL DOSSIERS

In many ways, the specific idea of putting the behaviour and thought of the individual under constant surveillance followed directly from the way in which party cadres were managed within both the Communist Party and the Chinese Nationalist Party (Huang, 2002). After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, ideology was seen as key to the Communist Party's consolidation of its control of the government and the country. In 1956, the Party issued a set of guidelines regarding the management of the personal files of its cadres (Huang, 2002). Soon, the system was expanded to cover all urban residents. At a time when Communists were struggling to bring the country under their firm control amid heightening Cold War anxiety, one main purpose of the more elaborated surveillance system was to identify and eradicate the so-called class enemies and foreign spies. Thus, seeking more than to just discipline the docile bodies of the people in order to prepare them to mobilize for war and economic production, the state now also strove to monitor and reform their minds in order to secure the revolution. In other words, as China transformed into a "dossier society", it departed further from the aspirations of creating the free-thinking new citizens the intellectuals of the turn of the twentieth century had hoped for.

Generally, the personal dossier for urban residents is created when a child enters the school system and tracks his or her character, attitudes, performance and social relationships. Although Chinese citizens have no direct access to these files themselves, these dossiers literally follow them throughout their lives, leaving no temporal and spatial gaps. During the socialist era when a large segment of the Chinese society was organized into work units (danwei), the local unit was responsible for the updating and storage of the dossiers. In schools, for example, student dossiers were kept up-to-date by teachers. Likewise, in workplaces, individuals were evaluated periodically by supervisors and peers. To a certain extent, the Chinese socialist dossier system was similar but not identical to its counterparts in the Eastern Bloc. For instance, in East Germany, unlike in China, information about targeted individuals was collected by recruited informants and secret state agents, and those records were centrally managed by the Ministry of State Security commonly known as the Stasi.⁵
The Chinese dossier system was a central pillar in the social surveillance system of the party-state, as it allowed the state to monitor the moral character, work ethic, ideological leanings and social relationships of its urban citizens, workers, students, not to mention its own cadres.⁶ Furthermore, the content of these dossiers was often an important factor in determining the individual's eligibility for opportunities and benefits such as transferring to a better school, promotion, better housing or admission to the party.⁷

In short, even if the tracking of the individual through the dossier was only part of the larger surveillance infrastructure, it was an important one.⁸ And the idea of having a dossier trailing the life of a citizen like a shadow, deciding his or her individual fate based on past behaviours and attitudes, certainly invokes the menacing imagery of Big Brother. Still, this sort of imagery may have overlooked the nuances, failures and contradictions of the system in practice. Not only were most rural citizens or the so-called peasants not subjected to the dossier system, but calling in personal favours, exacting revenge and seeking leniency were conceivably always part of the game for those who were. In the film *The Lives of Others* (*Das Leben der Anderen*) that depicts the surveillance programme in former East Germany, for instance, the Stasi agent assigned to monitor a subversive writer ends up empathizing with his subject and eventually refuses to properly report his illegal activities. In postsocialist China, ideological control is more relaxed and so the ability of the system to keep track of individual citizens' thoughts and behaviours has probably become even less effective.⁹

Indeed, the end of the socialist era in 1978 and the subsequent introduction of a mixed economy have produced new challenges for the dossier system. Since the 1980s, a growing portion of the population has not been employed by traditional work units, such as government or state enterprises. The non-government workforce has become even bigger since the 1990s due to intense privatization. In order to address the changing social and economic order, talent exchange centres (rencai jiaoliu zhongxin) with field offices in cities all over China were created. Among their many functions, these government-run centres are responsible for keeping files on urban residents who do not work for state-assigned work units. Under this new system, urban residents outside of the state employment system, along with their employers, such as private or foreign corporations, are required to make sure that their files are properly maintained by the relevant local field offices.
When these field offices first opened in the early- to mid-1980s, they
only served a relatively small number of workers who were in high
demand—normally experts or workers with foreign language skills—who
worked for foreign companies or were part of Sino-foreign joint ventures.
However, because more and more workers are no longer working for
the government or state enterprises, these talent exchange offices have
evolved into general employment centres for the public. Meanwhile, the
dossiers maintained by these offices have begun to function as a kind of
resume for school and employment and even as evidence when it comes
to individuals' entitlements to social insurance and social security benefits
(Wang, 2011, p. 27).

How does a surveillance programme that was initially designed to
enable political and ideological control interact with the country's
emerging new social and economic order? This is a central question that
Chinese officials and policy thinkers have been grappling with (Edin,
2003). As relocation, job changes, business closures and restructuring
have become common occurrences, so too has the misplacement and
loss of dossiers, filing errors and other management mishaps. Since such
occurrences have direct impacts on the livelihoods of affected individ-
uals, disputes over the accuracy of the information in the dossiers have
been on the rise. Policy thinkers are unsure whether they should classify
these as labour disputes, administrative mishaps or civic disputes, as each
of these categories has different legal ramifications (Wang, 2011, pp. 27–
28). The stakes are certainly high, since any mishandling of these cases
could contribute to social discontent and political instability.

SOCIAL CREDIT

Although the rise of the social credit system is not directly linked to the
erosion of the original function of the personal dossier system, it does
represent the latest attempt to create new citizens by the state. In fact, the
idea of placing the moral character of each citizen under surveillance jibes
with neoliberalism. The new focus, however, is no longer on ideological
purity for political purposes but on trustworthiness as a basic condition
for economic efficiency, because trustworthiness is thought to be vital
to minimizing economic risks and facilitating transactions. Chinese policy
thinkers share the belief of advocates of rational choice and game theory
that economic development proceeds apace with the level of social trust
(Liu, 2016, pp. 30–39; Zak & Knack, 2001). In this context, trust is
more than an emotional or psychological issue; it is also an important
economic variable. The key question then is how to turn trust into social
capital, and how to turn social capital into quantifiable and calculable
social credit. And it is in the light of this imperative of converting trust-
worthiness into creditworthiness that the constant surveillance of the
moral character of the individual is thought to be highly relevant and even
critical in establishing and maintaining the neoliberal social and economic
order (Zhongguo Guowuyuan, 2014, 2015).

The social credit idea first began to circulate around 2000. Prior to that
time, this concept was only mentioned rarely, even though the experiment
with marketization had accelerated in the 1990s. Since 2000, however,
thousands of articles mentioning this concept have appeared in maga-
zines and academic journals, mostly in finance-related fields but also in
governance.¹⁰ Nevertheless, it was not until 2014 that a detailed outline
of the new system, called the “Planning Outline for the Construction of a
Social Credit System”, first came to light (Zhongguo Guowuyuan, 2014).
Jointly released by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist
Party (the highest administrative body of the Party) and the Chinese
State Council (Zhongguo Guowuyuan) (the highest administrative body
of the central government), the document reveals a central initiative
of the government’s ongoing effort to “strengthen and innovate social
management” (Zhongguo Guowuyuan, 2014). As part of the proposed
thirteenth five-year plan (2016–2020), the planning outline stipulates in
no ambiguous terms that credit is the foundation of all market operations
and that a market economy is essentially a credit economy. Moreover,
it further argues that the social credit system is vital to the functioning
of the socialist market economy and to social governance. In so doing,
it lays out the rationale for radically economizing and financializing the
social world in an unprecedented way.

Needless to say, the idea of using quantifiable data to rate the cred-
itworthiness of an individual or an organization is neither new nor
unique in China or elsewhere. Yet unlike in countries with well-established
credit infrastructures, Chinese credit rating agencies often have difficulty
tracking rural residents, migrant workers and students. Moreover, while
the cash economy is increasingly replaced by app-based direct transfer
and payment platforms such as WeChat and Alipay (Liu, 2016, p. 169),
these methods of payment do not contribute to establishing credit in
the conventional sense. Therefore, as the planning outline points out,
the existing credit rating system in China is sporadic and fragmented
at best. From the perspective of the government, the system misses the
opportunity to piece together different databases and the different plat-
forms consumers use to construct a fuller picture of individual citizens,
organizations and society at large.

With this in mind, the newly introduced social credit system is designed
to deliver an aggregated, albeit not necessarily total, information system
that emphasizes uniformity, consistency, comprehensiveness, accuracy,
efficiency and up-to-dateness. It tracks the creditworthiness of citizens,
enterprises, institutions and even government agencies using a uniform
framework. In order to facilitate the implementation of the new system,
the government has also started to introduce new laws, regulations and
standards for the social credit system that were intended to be fully imple-
mented by 2020 (Zhongguo Guowuyuan, 2014, 2015). Just months
after the outline was published, the development of a system of national
unified social credit codes was named a top government priority. These
codes, not to be confused with credit ratings themselves, are standard-
ized identification numbers assigned to all citizens and organizations.
Such a nationwide system of standardized credit codes is to facilitate
the sharing and exchanging of credit information among governmental
agencies, enterprises and social organizations.

Significantly, even if the installation of a social credit system for tracking
individuals meticulously and constantly may sound like an Orwellian
nightmare, the rationale of the system is generally not articulated in
negative and repressive terms. More often than not, it highlights the
importance of generating incentives to reward good behaviour. The
language of the planning outline echoes that of the media's and Chinese
social scientists in their frequent comments about the lack of morality
in Chinese society, revealing anxiety about how a lack of morality and
trust will harm the market economy and social stability (W. Zhang & Ke,
2003). The goal of the social credit system is, according to the planning
outline, to "build mechanisms to incentivize the keeping of trust and to
punish the breaking of trust" (Zhongguo Guowuyuan, 2014). An ideal
social credit environment, in other words, will "encourage people to be
sincere, keep trust, promote morality and uphold courtesy". Therefore, in
line with previous attempts to cultivate moral and "civilized" citizens for
the nation, social credit is meant to promote civic virtue and patriotism
in order to foster a "harmonic society" (hexie shehui), which has been a
state slogan for the past decade.
A central concept underlying the emerging incentive structure is the so-called natural person (ziran ren) that appears multiple times in the document (Zhongguo Guowuyuan, 2014). While the concept is certainly linked to the rights discourse of the Enlightenment, its immediate context is actually game theory in economics, which is paradoxically predicated on a dark vision of humankind, namely, that the individual is nothing but calculating, distrustful, suspicious and so forth (Brown, 2015). Still, despite this negative view, in modern economics, the natural person is nonetheless adorned as a “rational” being who makes “self-interested” decisions based on incentives. This conception of the human being informs public choice theory, which uses economic theories to address social and political problems. Under this logic, the purpose of governing is to provide incentives to reward individuals who behave in ways consistent with the objectives of the state and punish those who don’t.

Economists have long argued that a sound credit system promotes the smooth functioning of the market (Bartels, 1964). In a way, the Chinese social credit system takes the idea of credit rating to a new level. By evaluating and establishing the creditworthiness of all citizens, businesses and organizations, the system is trying to make individuals and groups accountable for their actions by subjugating their behaviours to calculable economic and financial logic. In so doing, the government hopes to rein in the perceived growing culture of fraud, selfishness and callousness that are regarded as the most prominent problems of the postsocialist era. The social credit system is regarded as a way to help safeguard social order and build “social sincerity” and a “sincerity culture” (Zhongguo Guowuyuan, 2014). Once the social credit system and the national social credit codes are in place, the official newspaper *China Daily* predicts, it will “let credit weigh in for malfeasances and lawbreaking” (Shehui xinyong daima [Social Credit Codes], 2015).

In addition to emphasizing the construction of credit for the “natural person”, the planning outline also discusses the importance of including businesses, institutions and government agencies in the same social credit system. Just like individual citizens and consumers, businesses, social organizations and government agencies must also be evaluated by people and other organizations in order to gain respect and credibility. As if the invisible hand of the market will magically solve all problems, the planning outline specifies that the construction of the credit infrastructure will help to strengthen healthcare services, lead to better hygiene and birth control,
deliver safer food, reinforce scientific and technological development, generate stronger environmental protection and bring improvements in many other sectors. Above all, it will help to construct and maintain social and political stability. This is like a form of credit fundamentalism, similar to free market fundamentalism, that believes an omniscient credit system will save China from social discontent, instability and other perils.

It is also important to point out that as much as the government is trying to use the social credit system to instil the so-called socialist core values, such as a “harmonic society”, “Chinese virtue” and “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, it is not promoting a brand of Chinese exceptionalism. Among the keywords, such as “sincerity”, “trustworthy”, “amity” and “patriotism”, that can be found throughout the planning document, there are also explicit references to the desire to integrate the so-called Chinese “socialist market economy” with the global market economy. For instance, it maintains that a positive credit infrastructure will promote corporate responsibility, a productive and efficient workforce, and a transparent and accountable government, all of which, it maintains, are crucial for China’s global competitiveness (Zhongguo Guowuyuan, 2014). After all, at the most fundamental level, the logic of economizing society through quantification is to break down and replace the old order with a self-proclaimed universal order that can be rendered in numerical and deeply statistical terms (Asad, 1994).

## THE TOTAL INFORMATION SYSTEM

The dream of establishing a total information system, of amassing data and acting on this data, is not without precedent. In 1965, for example, a group of US social scientists and statisticians proposed establishing a national data centre in order to facilitate the storage, sharing and processing of large datasets owned by the government for use in carrying out research, designing social programmes and making policy decisions. However, the proposal was not adopted as it was vigorously opposed by the public and the US Congress precisely on account of the fear that this would lead to the infringement of privacy and the creation of an Orwellian dossier society (Kraus, 2013). Similarly, in the mid-1950s, some anthropologists and psychologists came up with the idea of a “database of dreams”, where everyday human dreams, life stories and wandering thoughts could be stored and then made available for analysis (Lemov, 2015). In the end, the idea of totality in all these proposed and
imaginary projects is more like a fantasy, and that fantasy has long been
replaced by the more effective idea of networked information, which is
explicitly manifested in the design of the internet that emerged during
the Cold War. Driven by the fear of a nuclear apocalypse, architects of
the system emphasized not just the importance of constant and real-time
communications that the information network made possible, but also
the necessity of its decentralization so that the entire system could not be
incapacitated by a single strike (Naughton, 2016).

In his analysis of the decentralizing nature of networked surveillance, Roger Clarke (1988) has characterized such practice as “dataveillance”. Writing long before the rise of the social media, he argues that the kind of surveillance based on the mining of data linked by networked information technologies is far more powerful than the Orwellian totalitarian state, since the monitoring and analysis of the data trails take place constantly in linked and automated local processes. By now, obviously, the phenomena observed by Clarke has already saturated our everyday life. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that tech giants today, such as Amazon, Google and Facebook, know many of us better than we ourselves and that they are in some respect more powerful than the government.

The traditional sense of surveillance or the ubiquitous Big Brother
trope is therefore no longer adequate to describe the digital landscape
of the twenty-first century. In his discussion of the rise of the “expos-
itory society”, Bernard Harcourt (2015) argues that it is not just that
our physical and online activities are being tracked constantly. It is also
that we have become very eager to share our information in exchange for
convenience, security and social belonging. To put this in lay terms, we
are constantly posting and liking on social media in order to be liked and
stay relevant. Similarly, we give out our most private information from
secret login questions to biometric data in exchange for security. In this
brave new world, we need to check in with the surveillance machine inces-
santly, and we have to constantly turn ourselves into spectacles for others
to consume. In our desire to exhibit ourselves, we are like the incarcer-
ated subject in Jeremy Bentham’s classic panopticon who wants to be
seen rather than just watched (Harcourt, 2015; Horne & Maly, 2014,
pp. 110–142). In essence, we are both watching Big Brother and wanting
to be watched.

If big data in the neoliberal age has altered our sociality in fundamental
ways, it has equally transformed our practice of knowledge. In particular,
the implication of the total information system is far more consequential
than that of the total archive. Whereas “archive fever”, as Jacques Derrida (1998) puts it, is driven by the desire to collect and hoard in anticipation of the future in a vague sense, the modus operandi of surveillance capitalism is not simply to collect but also to calculate, analyse and act on those data in or near real time for capital accumulation, which, among other things, has the effect of creating infinite behavioural feedback loops. We may know nothing about computer algorithms and learning machines that we are helping to train, but they know us. Moreover, they guide and shape us in the process.

The Chinese dream of creating a standardized and aggregated, if not total, information system of its population is no different in this regard. Arguably, this dream is readily shared by both the government and tech conglomerates even if their interests are different. For tech giants, this is surveillance capitalism par excellence as mining data of the everyday will allow them to reach a much larger segment of the population that is not covered by traditional credit rating organizations (Chai, 2015). For the one-party security state, the potential access to these otherwise dispersed and unconnected databases provides a new capacity to govern that has been unthinkable until now.

Indeed, even at this moment, the degree of Chinese internet companies' penetration into the everyday is already more pronounced than that of their non-Chinese counterparts. The messaging and payment app WeChat is the ultimate example that offers a glimpse into the future that is now. Introduced in 2011 by Tencent, China's largest internet company, WeChat developed the first cross-platform instant messaging service. It has since evolved into an app that functions as a clearinghouse for a wide range of online activities, including shopping, travel, banking, messaging and much more. In a way, it is like the combination of WhatsApp, Facebook, Google, Amazon, eBay, Expedia, Uber and a dozen of other commonly used platforms in a single app. In 2016, WeChat alone had at least 700 million subscribers, over 90% of which were in China (The New York Times, 2016). These days, as China becomes increasingly cashless, urban and even rural citizens cannot conduct most of their daily activities smoothly without using the app. In theory at least, the information collected by Tencent along with Alibaba, Baidu and other major online platforms together can provide a detailed picture of their users, including their movement, finances, reading habits, health conditions, social networks and so forth.
Critics of surveillance capitalism are deeply concerned about the erosion of freedom, democracy and privacy that has resulted from big corporations' amassing of data of their users with little transparency and government supervision. In China, however, criticism of this sort is generally muted because heavy-handed state surveillance has always been the norm, and that the boundaries between the private and public domains have always been blurry. In short, even though there is no evidence yet that the government is planning to incorporate commercial databases for its social credit calculation, there is no doubt the potential is tremendous and tempting. Furthermore, despite their occasional reluctance, most Chinese citizens, especially Han Chinese who are educated, urban based and affluent, are supportive of the initiative because they believe that social credits will bring them security, convenience and prosperity (Kostka, 2019; Lee, 2019). All in all, while the social credit system is not a total information system, it is a system that seeks to deepen the reconceptualization the human and the everyday in the hegemonic economic and financial order.

## THE FUTURE NOW

In late 2016, more than two years after the Chinese State Council published its planning outline on the implementation of the social credit system, the British science fiction anthology series *Black Mirror* premiered an episode called “Nosedive”, which tells the story of a woman who was not allowed to board a plane due to her recently reduced social credit score. Somewhat predictably, the spiralling narrative ends with tragedy.¹¹ Although there is no indication that the dystopic science fiction was inspired by China’s emerging new reality, and that the two cases have some crucial differences, the parallels are still uncanny.

Many media reports have noted the resemblance between China's social credit system and *Black Mirror's* dystopia. Unsurprisingly, the undertone of some of these observations is built on a long history of viewing China as an exotic and fearsome Other. In response to this renewed Cold War rhetoric, some critics (including some of those who had initially contributed to the sensational reporting mentioned above) have started to offer new “corrective” views, emphasizing that the official intention of the system is to guide morality, promote trust and facilitate law enforcement. In short, they contend that this is just a Chinese version of data-governance, and therefore the hysteria about the coming
dystopia is unwarranted (Develle, 2019; Matsakis, 2019). Some have further pointed to the fact that the implemented system so far is only local, fragmentary and partially digital (Horsley, 2018). Lost in the back and forth between the persistent Sinophobia and the insistence on evaluating China's situation in its own terms, however, is a recognition of the growing convergence between postsocialist China and market democracies in spite of their many differences. All nuances and differences aside, the logic of financialization, capital and the security state are actually the shared underpinning of today's expanding surveillance infrastructures in various nations.

That the future as fantasized by a British science fiction should so closely resemble the emerging everyday reality in contemporary China is therefore astonishing and yet unsurprising. After all, the “unimaginable” is able to appear in the science fiction precisely because it is imaginable and even desired in certain contexts. Already in early 2015, just months after the State Council had issued its comprehensive guidelines for constructing the social credit system by 2020, the financial wing of the tech giant Alibaba introduced the beta version of its own personal credit rating system, Sesame Credit (Zhima Credit). In 2020, Tencent has also launched its own credit scoring system based on WeChat transactions, even though the system so far is more like a loyalty reward programme (Hu & Guo, 2020). Meanwhile, with at least four hundred million users across the various platforms maintained by its subsidiaries, the Sesame Credit programme has been quick to collect participants’ information such as personal identity, credit history, contractual reliability, behaviours and social relationships. Based on this information, participating users are assigned with social credit scores that are visible to others (Shu, 2014). Some users even see the advantages of displaying high social credit scores in their dating profiles. Users with high credit scores are also offered perks, such as faster loan approvals and faster check-in at some airports (Hatton, 2015; Kostka, 2019).¹² In short, the social credit platforms introduced by tech giants have been gamified with rewards that are designed to modify behaviour.

These commercial social credit platforms are not related to the system implemented by the government, however (Daum, 2017). And it remains unclear whether or how commercial social credit platforms are linked to the larger surveillance state (Ahmed, 2019). But even if commercial platforms such as Sesame Credit and Tencent Credit remain unconnected to
the government's system and even if user participation remains voluntary, the story for the government-run social credit system is entirely different. Soon after the planning outline had been announced, authorities at every level started to develop and implement their corresponding social credit infrastructure. For instance, in Chongqing municipality, local districts drew up blacklists of individuals and organizations whose conduct they regarded as "seriously untrustworthy", lists that they intended to share with all other government agencies at least within the municipality (Cqnews.net, 2017). Similarly, major transportation services, such as China Rail and many Chinese airlines, have reportedly created their own blacklists, leaving millions of individuals no longer eligible to use some of their services (Chin & Wong, 2016; He, 2019). Social credit scores have crept into many other aspects of life—for instance, people who switch jobs too often as well as people who do not visit their elderly parents often enough have lower scores (P. Wood, 2018; Zhang, 2019). Although local implementation of the social credit programme has been rather uneven, one wonders when and how far the central government will further standardize and centralize the social credit system at the national level.¹³

For now at least, unlike the *Black Mirror* story, national social credit scores do not exist, and there is also no indication that social credit scores will become viewable by the general public like those gamified social credits run by tech conglomerates. Yet, ultimately, a “loyalty programme” run by the state, especially an authoritarian state, will certainly lead to rewards (and punishments) that are far more consequential. Moreover, as decentralized practices of dataveillance, social credit programmes managed by local governments and tech giants have together substantially economized and financialized Chinese society by making citizens and consumers credit conscious, as well as turning them into mouldable data subjects.

## BIGGER THAN BIG OTHER

The social credit system is a technology of subjectivity and citizenship that seeks to calibrate and modify the behaviour of individuals and groups, compelling them to align themselves with the state-sanctioned social, economic and political order. At one level, by using reward and punishment to instil responsibility and self-regulation, the government is exercising its power through what Foucault refers to as “the conduct of
conduct” (Gordon, 1991, p. 48). As Foucault argues, “to ‘conduct’ is at the same time to ‘lead’ others (according to mechanisms of coercion which are, to varying degrees, strict) and a way of behaving within a more or less open field of possibilities. The exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome” (Foucault, 1982, p. 789). No wonder so many Chinese citizens, especially middle-class Han Chinese who have benefited tremendously from China’s uneven but rapid economic growth, are willing to accept or even embrace the idea of social credit as a way to ensure their economic prosperity. For them, high social credit scores are their tokens to become “civilized” and “high quality” citizens as defined by the state (Tomba, 2009).

Moreover, the Chinese social credit system is part and parcel of a state-led neoliberal model of development and governance. After all, neoliberalism is never just a set of laissez-faire practices. Behind the facade of the free market is always a political and legal structure created and guaranteed by state power.¹⁴ In China, that very market ecology is maintained by a strong party-state that prioritizes economic growth and political stability. The emerging social credit system that seeks to economize and financialize the social world is therefore a political instrument as much as an economic one. In particular, using governing algorithms, predictive analytics, big data profiling and so on, the system meticulously tracks, archives, calculates and moulds the activities of all citizens and organizations. If the dossier society of the socialist era saw China moving away from its earlier dream of cultivating critical and enlightened citizens, the mandatory social credit infrastructure in the postsocialist era takes it even further away from that dream by producing calculating individuals who are nothing but normalized and optimized for the state-defined order.

Politics and security are therefore equally central to China’s social credit system. By design or not, the social credit infrastructure has been unfolding together with an array of mass surveillance technologies with profound political and security ramifications. Driven by the imperatives of one-party rule, domestic stability, geopolitical ambitions, nationalism and capital accumulation, the party-state has introduced unprecedented technological measures to manage its population (BBC, 2019). Such technologies include an all-encompassing CCTV network with growing facial and gesture recognition capabilities, the collection of genetic and biometric information especially in the ethnic minorities areas, and the monitoring of online activities, as well as other forms of mass surveillance
and censorship (Churchill & Delaney, 2019; Leibold, 2020). Granted that many of these practices can also be found in liberal democracies, as in the controversial cases of dataveillance linked to the National Security Agency (NSA), Cambridge Analytica and Palantir that have come to light in recent years, the totality of them and the aggressive way through which they have been weaponized in China is still far more menacing (Burke, 2020; Cadwalladr & Graham-Harrison, 2018; Steinberger, 2020).

With social credit systems of various kinds operating at all levels, China's Big (Br)other is indisputably more overt, ubiquitous and powerful. Even at this initial stage, what makes these social credit systems particularly ominous is that the practice has already amplified the existing systematic state violence against vulnerable individuals such as the poor, non-Han minorities and political dissidents by subjecting them to additional scrutiny and discrimination. As such, "dispossession by surveillance" as described by Zuboff (2019) has taken on yet another layer of meaning.

Nonetheless, to highlight the differences in scale and intensity between China and market democracies is not to demonize China as the Other by returning to Cold War rhetoric. In fact, if the idea of everyday surveillance by the government and tech giants as implicated by China's rising social credit ecology feels dystopian and yet strangely familiar, it is only because we have already seen and experienced fragmentary versions of it. From Brexit to Trumpism, mass surveillance and behaviour modification through digital infrastructures operated by corporations and states has been a vital force in disrupting the old liberal order, unleashing a new wave of popularist and extremist politics that is heavily driven by algorithm-generated disinformation and misinformation. The old sense of the autonomous political subject has thus become increasingly limited if not altogether antiquated. Similarly, instead of creating politically aware citizens, the Chinese one-party security state has now resorted to the production of data subjects susceptible to digital control and manipulation based on pre-inputted parameters and algorithms. Thus, in spite of the many differences between China and market democracies, the two sides converge significantly in how their corresponding surveillance infrastructures have produced a new mode of governing paradigm that, as Zuboff argues, replaces "the engineering of souls with the engineering of behavior" (Zuboff, 2019, p. 376). In short, as human behaviours are increasingly shaped by computer algorithms and feedback loops, we drift toward becoming essentially posthuman (Hayles, 1999; Käll, 2017). If
this trend continues, then we may indeed finally (and tragically) reach the end of history.

**Acknowledgements** I would like to thank participants of the workshops on quantification studies held at the Institut d'Etudes Avancées de Nantes in 2015 and the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan in 2016 for their comments on the initial ideas of this paper, especially when there was hardly any attention given to China's emerging social credit system at the time. The paper has also benefited from feedback from the 2018 Historical Studies of East Asia Workshop at the University of Toronto and the 2019 Dialectic of Private and Public Knowledge in Early Modern Europe Workshop at the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. I also extend my thanks to the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, especially members of the Quantification Focus Group, who I worked with during my fellowship residence in 2013–2014.

## NOTES

1. In critiquing of the “real” fact as an unqualified concept, I do not mean to promote nihilism or to suggest that reality does not exist but rather to emphasize that facts are always mediated. For a discussion why facts remain important in this context, see Bruno Latour (2004).

2. According to the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a data subject is a person whose personal data is subjected to be collected, stored and processed by digital technologies. See Käll's (2017) discussion, especially in the posthuman context.

3. Zuboff also argues that instrumentarianism and totalitarianism are like “two species of power” (2019, chap. 12). While pointing out the cultural, political and institutional differences between China and the West, she nonetheless concludes that the technological trajectories of both are strikingly similar. While I agree that these are two sides of the same coin, my contention is that the Chinese state, which represents a brand of authoritarian neoliberalism with growing global geopolitical ambitions, seems to occupy a space in between these two modes of power. China’s Big Other (see Zuboff, 2019, chap. 13), therefore, could be characterized as Big (Br)other.

4. In a sense, it was as if the impulse of liberal governmentality had taken an authoritarian turn. According to Mitchell Dean, “authoritarian governmentality differs from liberalism in that it regards its subjects’ capacity for action as subordinate to the expectation of obedience” (Dean, 1999, p. 209).
5. The scope of Stasi's surveillance was nonetheless vast. At the time of the collapse of East Germany in 1989, the agency employed approximately 91,000 full-time staff and 300,000 informants, and it had over six million personal files. See https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Stasi_still_inotonage_of_Stasi_files, accessed 1 October 2016.

6. However, it is worth noting that given the way these dossiers were managed in socialist China, the vast rural population who did not work in factories or collectivized farms were generally neglected by the system.

7. Despite the prevalence of these dossiers, very little is known about the operations behind them in the socialist era, and there has not been any in-depth scholarly analysis of them. Nonetheless, some individual dossiers, including high profile ones, have been leaked. Those of high profile individuals provide a glimpse of what was recorded when an individual in question was under intense scrutiny. For example, see Duo (2007).

8. For example, these dossiers were also used by the Public Security Bureau (PSB) for its household registration programme, known as the hukou system, which restricted the mobility of citizens. Household registration determined where individuals were allowed to live or work or attend school, and the dossiers on Chinese citizens contained information that could be used to support or deny any request for transfer and relocation.

9. For example, whereas personal files in the earlier period tried to document the individual's "thought" meticulously, reform-era personal files often contain only simple and generic statements, making differences between individuals indiscernible and hence the files unusable (see Sun, 1994, p. 88).

10. A quick search of the term “social credit” in China Academic Journals, the most prominent and comprehensive database of Chinese publications, is revealing. Throughout the 1990s, there were only about two dozen essays, mostly on the subject of finance, that mentioned the concept of social credit in passing. In 2000 alone, however, there were more than forty articles that did. Moreover, for the first time, social credit appeared in the titles of six articles, suggesting that more in-depth discussions of social credit had begun to emerge. Since then, social credit has become a frequent topic, with several hundred articles either focusing or mentioning the concept each year. Moreover, starting in 2014, there are over a thousand such articles published each year. Many of them were direct responses to the publication of the central government's planning outline.

11. “Nosedive”, which is based on a story by Charlie Brooker, was directed by Joe Wright. It was first screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2016 and premiered on Netflix on 21 October 2016, as the first episode of the third season of Black Mirror. See Black Mirror https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/70264888, accessed 5 June 2020.
12. Much has been written about our willingness to feed details of our lives to big data projects. For example, see the discussion of the idea of the quantified self in Swan (2013) and Simanowski (2016).

13. Needless to say, there is no doubt that the system will continue to evolve beyond 2020 based on new requirements and technology. See www.chinalawtranslate.com/en, www.chinalawtranslate.com/social-credit-mou-breakdown-beta, and www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/credit-regulation. Accessed 10 June 2020.

14. As David Harvey (2005) has observed, the so-called market reform started in 1978 under the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping has to be understood in the context of the global advance of neoliberalism.

## REFERENCES

Ahmed, S. (2019, May 1). *The messy truth about social credit*. https://logicmag.io/china/the-messy-truth-about-social-credit/. Accessed 25 October 2020.

Asad, T. (1994). Ethnographic representation, statistics and modern power. *Social Research*, *61*(1), 55–88.

Bartels, R. (1964). Credit management as a market function. *Journal of Marketing*, *28*(3), 59–61.

BBC. (2019, May 2). *China's Xinjiang citizens monitored with police app, says rights group*. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-48130048. Accessed 5 May 2019.

Brown, W. (2015). *Undoing the Demos*. Zone Books.

Burke, C. (2020). Digital sousveillance: A network analysis of the US surveillant assemblage. *Surveillance and Society*, *18*(1), 74–89.

Cadwalladr, C., & Graham-Harrison, C. (2018, March 17). Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major breach. *Guardian*. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election. Accessed 10 April 2019.

Chai, H. (2015, June 9). Mainland credit-rating network takes shape. *China Daily*. http://www.chinadailyasia.com/business/2015-06/09/content_15274221.html. Accessed 1 July 2015.

Chin, J., & Wong, G. (2016, November 28). China's new tool for social control: A credit rating for everything. *Wall Street Journal*. https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-new-tool-for-social-control-a-credit-rating-for-everything-hing-1480351590. Accessed 1 May 2017.

Churchill, O., & Delaney, R. (2019, July 16). *How WeChat users unwittingly aid censorship*. https://www.inkstonenews.com/tech/how-unwitting-users-wechat-aid-chinese-messaging-apps-blacklisting-sensitive-messages/article/3018830. Accessed 20 December 2019.
Clarke, R. (1988). Information technology and dataveillance. *Communications of the ACM*, **31**, 498–512.

Cqnews.net. (2017, June 17). *A social credit system network is under construction in Chongqing in 2017*. http://cq.cqnews.net/html/2017-06/14/content_41933782.htm. Accessed 10 June 2018.

Daum, J. (2017, December 24). *China through a glass, darkly*. https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/china-social-credit-score/. Accessed 23 April 2019.

Dean, M. (1999). *Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society*. Sage.

Derrida, J. (1998). *Archive Fever: A Freudian impression*. University of Chicago Press.

Develle, Y. (2019, May 28). *Time to stop comparing China's social credit to Black Mirror*. https://medium.com/wonk-bridge/time-to-stop-comparing-chinas-social-credit-to-black-mirror-6e54dc98cec8. Accessed 25 October 2020.

Duo, G. (2007). *Youjian yi ce yiluo di dangan* [The surfacing of yet another missing personal file]. http://mjlsh.usc.cuhk.edu.hk/book.aspx?cid=6&tid=157&pid=2989. Accessed 1 October 2016.

Edin, M. (2003). State capacity and local agent control in China: CCP cadre management from a township perspective. *The China Quarterly*, **173**, 35–52.

Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. *Critical Inquiry*, **8**(4), 777–795.

Gordon, C. (1991). Governmental rationality: An introduction. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), *The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality* (pp. 1–51). The University of Chicago Press.

Gow, M. (2017). The core socialist values of the Chinese dream: Towards a Chinese integral state. *Critical Asian Studies*, **49**(1), 92–116.

Harcourt, B. E. (2015). *Exposed: Desire and disobedience in the digital age*. Harvard University Press.

Harvey, D. (2005). *A brief history of neoliberalism*. Oxford University Press.

Hatton, C. (2015, October 26). *China ‘Social Credit’: Beijing sets up huge system*. BBC News. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-34592186. Accessed 10 May 2017.

Hayles, N. K. (1999). *How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics*. University of Chicago Press.

He, H. (2019, February 18). China's social credit system shows its teeth, banning millions from taking flights, trains. *South China Morning Post*. https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/2186606/chinas-social-credit-system-shows-its-teeth-banning-millions*. Accessed 10 April 2019.

Horne, E., & Maly, T. (2014). *The inspection house: An impertinent field guide to modern surveillance*. Coach House Books.

Horsley, J. (2018, November 16). China's Orwellian social credit isn't real. *Foreign Policy*. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social-credit-score-isnt-real*. Accessed 25 October 2020.
Hu, Y., & Guo, Y. (2020, June 8). *Tencent launches credit scoring system based on WeChat purchases*. https://www.caixingglobal.com/2020-06-08/tencent-launches-credit-scoring-system-based-on-wechat-purchases-101564336.html.
Accessed 25 October 2020.

Huang, X. (2002). The birth and development of personal file [Kexue guifan de Zhongguo gongchandang ren de renshi dangan gongzuo]. *Journal of Changsha University, 16*(1), 93-94.

Kai, J. (2014, September 20). The China dream vs. The American dream. *The Diplomat*. http://thediplomat.com/2014/2009/the-china-dream-vs-the-american-dream/. Accessed 2020 May 2015.

Käll, J. (2017). A posthuman data subject? The right to be forgotten and beyond. *German Law Journal, 18*(5), 1145-1162.

Kostka, G. (2019). China's social credit systems and public opinion: Explaining high levels of approval. *New Media and Society, 21*(7), 1565-1593.

Kraus, R. S. (2013). Statistical déjà vu: The National Data Center proposal of 1965 and its descendants. *Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality, 5*(1), 1-37.

Lam, T. (2011). *A passion for facts: Social surveys and the construction of the Chinese nation state, 1900-1949*. University of California Press.

Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. *Critical Inquiry, 30*(2), 225-248.

Lee, C. S. (2019). Datafication, dataveillance, and the social credit system as China's new normal. *Online Information Review, 43*(6), 952-970.

Leibold, J. (2020). Surveillance in China's Xinjiang region: Ethnic sorting, coercion, and inducement. *Journal of Contemporary China, 29*(121), 46-60.

Lemov, R. (2015). *Database of dreams: The lost quest to catalog humanity*. Yale University Press.

Liu, X. (2016). *Woguo shehui xinyong tixi jianshe wenti yanjiu* [A study of China's social credit system]. Zhishi chanquan chubanshe.

Lu, X., & Perry, E. J. (Eds.). (1997). *The Danwei: Changing Chinese workplace in historical and comparative perspective*. M. E. Sharpe.

Matsakis, L. (2019, July 29). *How the West got China's social credit system wrong*. https://www.wired.com/story/china-social-credit-score-system/. Accessed 25 October 2019.

Naughton, J. (2016). The evolution of the internet: From military experiment to General Purpose Technology. *Journal of Cyber Policy, 1*(1), 5-28.

Rahwan, I. (2018). Society-in-the-loop: Programming the algorithmic social contact. *Ethics and Information Technology, 20*(1), 5-14.

Schwarcz, V. (1986). *The Chinese enlightenment: Intellectuals and the legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919*. University of California Press.

Shehui xinyong daima [Social Credit Codes]. (2015, March 13). *China Daily*. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2015-03/13/content_19801380.htm. Accessed 4 June 2017.
Shu, C. (2014). *Data from Alibaba's e-commerce sites is now powering a credit-scoring service*. http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/27/data-from-ali babas-e-commerce-sites-is-now-powering-a-credit-scoring-service/. Accessed 10 December 2016.

Simanowski, R. (2016). *Data love: The seduction and betrayal of digital technologies*. Columbia University Press.

Steinberger, M. (2020, October 21). Does Palantir see too much? *New York Times Magazine*. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/2010/2021/magazine/palantir-alex-karp.html. Accessed 2025 October 2020.

Sun, L. (1994). Qianlun gaigekaifang xingshi xia de renshi dangan guanli gongzuo. *Tianfu xinlun*, 5.

Swan, M. (2013). The quantified self: Fundamental disruption in big data science and biological discovery. *Big Data*, 1(2), 85–99.

*The New York Times*. (2016, August 6). *China, not Silicon Valley, is cutting edge in mobile tech*. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/technology/china-mobile-tech-innovation-silicon-valley.html. Accessed 1 May 2017.

Tomba, L. (2009). Of quality, harmony, and community: Civilization and the Middle Class in Urban China. *Positions: Asia Critique*, 17(3), 591–616.

Wang, L. (2011). *Laodong zhengyi caisu biaozhun yu guifan* [Standards for labour dispute arbitration]. Renmin chuban she.

Wood, M. (2018, August 28). *In China, your credit could depend on how often you visit your parents*. https://www.marketplace.org/2018/08/20/china-your-credit-could-depend-how-often-you-visit-your-parents/. Accessed 10 April 2019.

Zak, P. J., & Knack, S. (2001). Trust and growth. *The Economic Journal*, 111(470), 295–321.

Zhang, P. (2019, April 4). Chinese workers could lose social credit for switching jobs too often. *South China Morning Post*. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3004704/chinese-workers-could-lose-social-credit-switching-jobs-too*. Accessed 10 April 2019.

Zhang, W., & Ke, R. (2003). Trust in China: A cross-regional analysis. *William Davidson Institute Working Paper No. 586* (p. 22).

Zhongguo Guowuyuan. (2014, June 14). *Guowuyuan guanyu yinfa shehui xinyong tixi jianshe guihua gangyao* (2014–2020 nian) de tongzhi [Planning outline for the construction of a social credit system (2014–2020)]. http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/2014-06/27/content_8913.htm. Accessed 4 June 2015.

Zhongguo Guowuyuan. (2015, June 11). *Guowuyuan guanyu pizhuan fazhangaigewei deng bumen faren he qita zuzhi tongyi sheihui xinyong daima zhidujianshe zongti fangan de tongzhi* [The state council's approval of the development and reform commission and other departments on the overall plan for the establishment of a unified system of social credit codes on
legal persons and other organizations]. http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/con tent/2015-06/17/content_9858.htm. Accessed 1 April 2017.

Zuboff, S. (2019). *The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power*. Public Affairs.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>
# Accounting for Who We Are and Could Be: Inventing Taxonomies of the Self in an Age of Uncertainty

*Uwe Vormbusch*

Over the last decades, we have witnessed a further advance in quantification. In particular, the rise and spread of digital self-quantification, indicates new taxonomies of the self which (re)frame the human body, everyday practices, emotions and desires. During earlier waves of quantification, particularly from the nineteenth century onwards, accounting and an accompanying “trust in numbers” (Porter, 1995) proliferated at the heart of the economy, the sciences and the state. During the neoliberal era, numbers and calculation have come to fundamentally reframe public services, altering established norms of the common good, “corrupting” the intentions and knowledge of professional actors (Crouch, 2016).

Since the 1980s, calculative tools associated with New Public Management—international educational comparisons (such as PISA), and other

<footnote>U. Vormbusch (✉)
Institute of Sociology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences,
FernUniversität Hagen, Hagen, Germany
e-mail: uwe.vormbusch@fernuni-hagen.de</footnote>
forms of performance measurement, ranking and rating—have gradually
expanded into not yet economized fields of public life, such as education
and health, transforming not only the way these work, but also the very
objectives they are pursuing. The human body and mind have not been
exempted from these developments. Quite to the contrary: these have
been a privileged object of quantification from the very beginnings of
modern science, most notably in medicine (Foucault, 1973) and statistics.

The early Foucault (1975 [1995]) placed the body centre stage in his studies of power—see here, for instance, Foucault’s analysis of Bentham’s Panopticon as well as his writings on disciplinary society more generally. Later, Foucault revised the somewhat hierarchical notion of discipline by drawing attention to the interplay of power, knowledge and the self, focusing on “technologies of the self” (Foucault, 1988b). Since newly emerging forms of (digital) self-quantification rely on a quantified self-observation far more than earlier practices of self-observation (see for instance diary writing), they seem to be a good case in point for the study of new advances in quantification.

This is not to say that earlier instrumentations from the clinical gaze
to statistical classifications and incentive pay systems are not related
to subjectification processes and identity politics (see e.g. Espeland &
Stevens, 1998). Nevertheless, the new movement in self-quantification
indicates a considerable shift in agency. A growing part of the population
in western capitalist societies is beginning to engage in new practices of
quantified self-observation, thereby moving quantification beyond early
aspirations, for instance aspirations aimed at putting a value on humans’
competencies through marking (e.g. Hoskin & Macve, 1994).

From the measurement of sleep behaviour, physical and sexual activity, the evaluation of changing moods and labour productivity to the sharing of these data on the Internet, a wide range of calculative self-practices have emerged, validating Miller's (1992) early dictum that accounting as a mode of governing is as much about the calculated, as the actively calculating self. In this context, the Quantified Self movement (in the following: QS) is the most commonly known network of self-trackers and self-quantifiers. The official objective of QS "is to help people get meaning out of their personal data" (http://quantifiedself.com/about/, Accessed 16 July 2019). Patterns and orders of the self are to be discovered, which hitherto have been hidden within the muddy waters of everyday practice. Thereby, the self shall become aware of the hidden undercurrents of everyday practice, precisely those regularities which are
governing life without being visible for somebody living in a state of unquestioned familiarity with oneself. The self is called to reconstruct these undercurrents from the aggregated data obtained by systematically observing his or her everyday activities and whereabouts. Lupton (2016, p. 49) rightfully notices that the normative literature about self-quantification and self-tracking is above all pointing to the “ethical responsibility to achieve this authentic self”, which “involves delving beneath the surface in order to uncover the hidden desires, drives and motivations that the psyche harbours”.

In a first approach, self-quantification can be understood as the attempt to free ineffable corporeal experiences from the sphere of pre-reflexive and pre-predicative knowledge by formally representing and articulating them—in charts, numbers and algorithms, which can be shared, compared, publicly discussed and, eventually, optimized. Therefore, self-quantification presupposes the invention of specific taxonomies targeting body and life: inner sensations bound up with the living body as well as external circumstances and activities that have to be recorded and written down in order to reflect and act upon them. What is more, it is not just individual numbers and calculations that are thereby created. Individual datasets can be, and actually are, linked to other people’s datasets, giving birth to entire systems of calculation, or rather “taxonomies of the self”.

This chapter explores these taxonomies in the making drawing particular attention to the diversity of representational forms and moral conflicts involved. Digging into exploratory variety, playfulness and ambiguities are important in order not to misunderstand this emerging form of governing the self as a ‘juridical’ form of power. For what makes power powerful:

> [...] is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression. (Foucault, 1980, pp. 118–119)

Therefore, the chapter’s main focus is on the motives, practices and desires as well as the emerging instrumentation in the field. Showing how something as manifold, ambiguous and unique as the self might have a specific empirical worth requires certain agreements about how to measure and formally represent it, a process commonly dubbed as
“commensuration” within the sociology of valuation and evaluation (see Espeland & Stevens, 2008; Fourcade, 2011; Lamont, 2012). From here, some general conclusions about self-quantification and contemporary capitalism are drawn. In doing so, the chapter intends to keep a balance between the economic, cultural and moral dimensions of quantifying the self. This implies a theoretical approach, which is equally sensitive to Foucauldian studies of accounting and governing as well as a more practice-oriented approach related to the “sociology of critique” (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006 [1991]). In this respect, this chapter might be considered an attempt to simultaneously apply exactly those two research perspectives on quantification that are giving this volume its theoretical appeal. We should not forget that the sociology of quantification always had its roots in both sides of the Channel.

While British critical accounting research, from the 1980s onwards, often followed a Foucauldian trajectory, French conventionalists were simultaneously leaving Bourdieu and Foucault behind by highlighting the practical capabilities of individual actors enmeshed in conventions (Desrosières 2011; Diaz-Bone & Salais, 2011; Diaz-Bone & Didier, 2016; Thévenot in this volume). At the intersection of these two frameworks, self-quantification emerges as a contemporary “institution of the self”, not displacing but co-existing with established technologies of the self, such as religious confession, therapeutic and psychoanalytic approaches to identity and authenticity (Noji & Vormbusch, 2018). Consequently, self-quantification is as much a reaction to economic uncertainties and the ambiguities of individual worth as it is a cultural and ethical revolution, offering new foundations for a self which is more or less missing internal principles for action and orientation (see already Riesman, 1950).

While much research quite rightfully stresses the new potential for surveillance that QS-tracking offers (Whitson, 2013) and draws attention to accompanying forms of coercion, alienation and social-psychological pathologies (e.g. King et al., 2018; Lupton, 2015, 2016; Ruckenstein & Pantzar, 2017), it is also worthwhile to consider the ambiguities, ambiguities and contradictions associated with the practice of self-quantification. Sharon, for example, criticizes the polarized nature of the debate about self-tracking for health and asks how following a practice-based approach to self-tracking “can open up new spaces for the enactment of solidarity” (Sharon, 2017, p. 117). Likewise, Nafus
and Sherman (2014) stress the systematic tension between autonomy and
subordination within the Quantified-Self movement:

QS also does not escape the constructs of healthiness embodied in the
devices that they use, inasmuch as those are the dominant constructs with
which participants must wrestle. But wrestle they do. [...] They interact
with algorithms not as blind, mindless dupes, but as active participants in a
dialogue that moves between data as an externalization of self and internal,
subjective, qualitative understandings of what the data means. (Nafus &
Sherman, 2014, p. 1793).

In this perspective, self-quantifiers, at least the early adopters within
the QS movement, are not uncritically adopting new technologies and
data. Instead, they appear to be capable and reflexive actors, deliberately
inventing and manipulating technology in order to explore who they are
and could become. This sheds light on a more general point highlighted
by Diaz-Bone and Didier (2016). Reconstructing the influence of Michel
Foucault on the sociology of quantification, they argue that Foucault “did
not see that there are actually different statistical techniques and that it
makes a difference. He linked statistics, all statistics, mainly to neoliberal
Governmentality” (Diaz-Bone & Didier, 2016, p. 15). Alain Desrosières,
to the contrary, was very aware “that different modes of quantification
are associated with different modes of government” (ibid.), meaning that
specific compromises regarding quantification, and thus “investment in
forms” (Thévenot, 1984), solidifying the quantitative opportunities as
well as related social power relations, would make a difference.

CORPOREAL ACCOUNTING
WITHIN IMMATERIAL CAPITALISM

The QS movement gained considerable public attention in the U.S. for
the first time around 2007. At that time, this movement could be called
a kind of “grassroots quantification” movement. Obviously, there must
have been more than just new technologies, such as mobile phones
and the Internet to let self-quantification as an assemblage of practices
unfold. Indeed, the emergence of self-quantification draws heavily on
long-established discourses, such as discourses on the “sovereign self”
(Miller, 1992) and liberal forms of governing (Foucault, 1981 [1976]),
on economic transformations, such as the emergence of the network
economy and the rise and spread of self-employment, both closely linked to new orders of justification, such as the “project city” (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007), and radical political reforms commonly dubbed “neo-liberalism”, all of them preceding the QS movement by decades. Therefore, to understand the emergence of self-quantification, we have to take several interlinked processes into account.

Self-quantification is of great interest to the analysis of contemporary capitalism, because it is in this context that the individuals themselves are beginning to transform their body, their idiosyncrasies, their biographical experiences and—particularly important—their imagined futures in terms of quantified and comparable assets. By inventing the very categories and technologies by which an individual’s manifoldness is made comparable and measurable, self-quantification constitutes nevertheless an indeterminate and malleable relay between the culture and economy of new forms of capitalism, be it “flexible” (Sennett, 1998), “cognitive” (Boutang, 2012), “emotional” (Hochschild, 1983; Illouz, 2007; Neckel, 2005a, 2005b), “corporeal” (Moore & Robinson, 2016; Smith & Lee, 2015) or “immaterial” (Vormbusch, 2008, 2009, 2012) capitalism. In these new forms of capitalism, immaterial capabilities are the most relevant source for competitiveness and profit, yet, there is still no agreement about how to commensurate subjectivities, let alone reliable methods to empirically measure and evaluate them. Both the economics of conventions as well as actor-network theory (ANT) share the idea that such commensuration requires an active “investment in forms” (Thévenot, 1984) in order to make things common and commensurable. Callon (1998, p. 6) complements this point by asking:

> In order to become calculative, agencies do indeed need to be equipped. But this equipment is neither all in the brains of human beings nor all in their socio-cultural frames or their institutions. What is it then?

For Callon, this equipment can be found in the prostheses rendering actants into calculable and calculating agencies. Some of those prostheses equipping the modern self with calculative powers are outlined later in this chapter. But actor-network theory’s assessment might be judged unsatisfactory when it comes to the moral dimension of the “finishing process” by which humans are being made into subjects. If we view contemporary capitalism not only as an economic system but as a life-form, we have to take into account the moral conflicts that arise
when human agency is being made up by powerful inscriptions, such as new “taxonomies of the self” provided by practices of self-quantification. Later, we will analyse these conflicts as moral conflicts, rather than merely as conflicts of interest.

Examining the cultural significance of such “corporeal accounting” (Vormbusch, 2015) goes beyond traditional approaches to the study of accounting which have “largely focused on aspects of calculative practices subject to formal organization” (Vollmer et al., 2009, p. 2). It mirrors Didier’s interest in “social spheres pretending to remain free from numbers” and in presenting this as a myth no longer suitable within modernity (see Didier’s contribution to this volume). In doing so, we have to look for an accompanying shift in agency, since such practices of valuation seem to rely (even) more on the active engagement of the self than others. Whereas accounting in organizations has above all been analysed in its subjectifying capacities (see e.g. Miller & O’Leary, 1994; Mennicken & Miller, 2014), allowing formal organizations to control and to mobilize subjectivity in their favour, self-quantification, at least at its beginnings, has been driven by actors outside the context of formal organization, in their life-world and in the public sphere. One of the constitutive aspects of the QS movement, in particular, is its members’ belief in the empowering capacity of self-quantification. As far as I can see, the claim of being recognized as unique as opposed to the way the self is treated within established social institutions (health care is one frequently cited example in this context) is fundamental for the QS movement, leading to the movement’s critique of modern institutions as alienating, dispassionate and overall inappropriate for the demands of highly individualized actors within late modernity. Consequently, measuring oneself as being unique (“N=1” is one paramount element of discourse here, indicating that the only relevant reference point for measurement should be the individual) is one crucial promise within the QS movement.

In an unexpected turn in how quantification is regarded by the individuals themselves, it no longer appears to be a threat to how individuality is socially understood, constructed and experienced (such a critique would be in line with classical critical theory). Rather than threatening the integrity and incommensurability of the self, quantification is now warmly embraced as its central source. But it may well turn out that applying metrics to core attributes of one’s (and everybody else’s) self might as well erode the uniqueness and incommensurability of those who are striving for precisely that. The QS movement may just as well manifest itself as a
governor’s dream: the dream in which subjects are striving to invent the very categories by which they can be best sorted, managed, activated and moulded in whatever way imaginable. In this sense, the QS may emerge as an exceedingly malleable self; a self always falling short; an unsatisfied self, striving for a better version of him—or herself through calculative means. On the other hand, the subjects engaging in self-quantification are motivated and mobilized by dreams that are just the reverse: namely to evade dispassionate and distorting social institutions which are perceived as being ignorant of and negating these subjects’ concrete individuality.

This chapter analyses practices of self-assessment and self-optimization, which have previously been limited to small circles of “self-trackers” and “self-quantifiers” and are currently gaining currency within wider society, last not least, due to the increasing popularity of wearables, the Internet of Things and an ever more digitally connected lifestyle. The initial consideration for our empirical research was that self-quantifiers are, above all, confronted and required to cope with new forms of economic and cultural uncertainty—two fundamental traits of contemporary capitalism.¹ Coping with uncertainty in this context means the calculative quest for discovering the very categories by which the plurality of individual skills and capabilities as well as the plurality of the cultural forms of living can be inscribed into common registers of worth, thereby offering a specific answer to the complexities and ambiguities of life in late modernity (Vormbusch, 2016). The chapter seeks to shed light on some of the contradictions and ambivalences of these new taxonomies of the self: on the one hand, self-inspection through self-quantification might offer new possibilities for self-knowledge, control and emancipation, and could therefore be considered as a form of “enabling accounting”. On the other hand, self-quantification threatens to subjugate ever more aspects of individual life by extending instrumental rationality to hitherto incommensurable and incalculable entities: the living body, the self, emotions and desires.

## CALCULATION AND THE LIVING BODY

It is not the first time that the body becomes the focus of technologies of the self. Social forces acting upon and through the body are evident at least since the works of Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. In a nutshell, notions of the “civilized body” (Elias), the “disciplined body” (Foucault) or the “body as capital” (Bourdieu)
highlight its relevance within historically variable regimes of social domi-
nation. In contrast, in early phenomenological thought (Merleau-Ponty,
1962) the “living” or “fleshly” body as belonging exclusively to oneself
was perceived to be the only possible approach to the world. Here, the
analytical priority is shifted from the body as product and mediator of
social practices to the body as the only possible foundation of perception
and action. The living body relates *my-self* to everybody and everything
else, and simultaneously discerns *my-self* from everybody else, it is “my
point of view upon the world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 70). It is due
to my living body that every possible experience in the world is related
to my specific position within this world. The living body is the origi-
nator for any possible lived experience and remembrance. It is actively
performing, processing and shaping our experiences. In phenomenology
the living body is the unavoidable precondition of self-perception as well
as the perception of others (Alloa et al., 2012).

Obviously, there is a strong contrast between the concepts of the
living body and embodied experience, on the one hand, and the domi-
nant view of calculation as an objectified body of knowledge, on the
other. Quantification is intimately related to the instrumental domina-
tion of nature and the social world, an observation, which Adorno and
Horkheimer (2002 [1944]), drawing on Max Weber, pointedly expressed,
and which was later reformulated by poststructuralism. The opposite pole
of possible experiential reality represents—at least within the phenomeno-
logical school of thought—our living body as “the bearer of the zero
point of orientation”, as a fundamental way of being in the world. In this
perspective, the living body, as the mediator of every possible percep-
tion, is impossible to objectify. It cannot be measured and calculated
in the same way that other “things” are being measured—not without
losing its inherent qualities as an experiencing and experienced living
body. The differentiation between “being a living body” and “having a
body” (Plessner, 1970) therefore points to the limits of social rationaliza-
tion. That which cannot be measured, which is always something unique
and incommensurable, cannot become the object of formal optimization
and instrumental rationality. At least not until now. The current explosion
of technically mediated practices of self-quantification points to the
historical variability of such a differentiation. It reveals that the distinction
between body and living body is nothing ontological as in classical
phenomenology, but socially malleable.
Whereas phenomenological thought is built upon the idea that no
cognitive representations are possible without the living body actively
performing affects, postures and body-environment schemes, the QS
movement seems to rely on calculative forms objectively representing the
body as a system of determinants. Whereas phenomenological thought
regards inner sensations such as emotions, pain and hunger as being
without extension, even without any dimension (Schmitz, 2009, p. 71),
in the field of QS, measures and measurement procedures are invented
for recording, articulating and “writing” them. What has been enclosed
within the body shall be formally represented and made operable. But
a multitude of transformations must be performed before these can be
attributed to the living body. Keeping this in mind and referring back
to the seminal works of Elias, Foucault and Bourdieu, the key question
that arises is how such a “calculated living body” (a contradiction in itself
from a phenomenological point of view) can be brought into existence
at all; and how it is related to forms of governing within contempo-
rary society. In what ways is the calculation of the living body making
up specific subjects? And, conversely, what does this tell us about our
contemporary societies?

THE QUANTIFIED SELF

The QS movement is a global network of self-trackers, self-quantifiers, entrepreneurs, developers and users of mobile and internet-based technologies of self-inspection. It consists of individuals, collective meetings, websites for comparing data and developing metrics, small start-ups and big corporate players from the telecommunications, sports and health industries. It also consists of specific objects that are shaped and introduced into the field by various actors. These objects include material devices, such as mobile phones and wearable sensors and computers, as well as immaterial objects, such as algorithms, apps, and data connections. The self-ascribed motto within the field reads “self-knowledge through numbers” (http://quantifiedself.com/about/, Accessed 16 July 2019).

By systematically quantifying their self-observations, individual users
are striving for new insights regarding their bodily, mental, psycholog-
ical or social status. This includes health data, food records, records of
emotional ups and downs, including depressive episodes, sleep behaviour,
digestive and sexual habits, the menstrual cycle as well as everyday
patterns of movements and whereabouts more generally. Through
measurement, the quantified self is exploring his or her possibilities in new ways, opening up new perspectives on who one could be and how to get there: thus, the quantified self is, at least to a large extent, an epistemic self (Noji & Vormbusch, 2018). QS meet-ups are regionally concentrated in western capitalist metropoles (located in the U.S., Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand). Its protagonists—based on our observations, since no reliable data exist—often share a similar educational background and habitus (they are academically educated, technologically apt, prevailingly male, in their twenties and thirties).

Whereas the latest numbers show the active membership of QS (as a social movement and a community of practice) to be somewhere around 40,000 people worldwide, market surveys, such as the study by Grieger (2016), conclude that about 21% of the population in Germany is tracking at least one aspect of their lives on a regular basis. Whereas the latter figure might exaggerate the actual extent of the phenomenon, the first figure is equally misleading, because the social relevance of self-quantification reaches far beyond the inner circle of expert users who actively participate in a global community and who were the primary target group of our research.

Two aspects must be considered here: first, the social relevance of QS is not based on its widespread incidence, but on its character as a global laboratory for inventing new lifestyles and forms of ethics based on technologies and new taxonomies to live them. QS reflects as well as transcends contemporary capitalism by criticizing it. In this sense, today's practices of self-quantification might very well echo the metamorphosis of the Parisian Bohemia at the turn of the century: once despised by bourgeois morality, nowadays a blueprint for the “new spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007). Second, and directly associated with this, we can already observe a profound transformation of QS from an early “community of practice” (Wenger, 1998) to a mass-market populated by consumers, start-ups and the giant enterprises of the consumer, sports, and telecommunication industries. Self-quantification is on its way to becoming a constitutive part of the digital economy. This latest development is not the focus of this chapter; rather, it is the invention of the taxonomies that preceded it.

For QS-activists, quantification is their method of choice to unveil the undercurrents of corporeal experience and everyday practice. Florian Schumacher, one of the protagonists within the QS movement in Germany, summarizes the main aspects as follows:
We are prevented from monitoring ourselves in a neutral way by protective mechanisms which evolved in the course of our evolution. Therefore, keeping a record of themselves serves for many people the purpose of observing changes or maintaining the motivation to achieve self-defined goals. The externalization of relevant information and its impact on our awareness evolves into a sixth sense allowing us to discover things lying hidden. (Interview with *Die Welt*, 12 October 2013, see http://www.welt.de/gesundheit/article120826726/Ein-sechster-Sinn-um-Verborgenes-zu-erkennen.html, translated by the author)

This is how one of our interviewees put it:

> [...] Having the feedback cycle was really important. Having something to indicate you are stressed at the exact moment when my body was feeling stressed allowed me to see and make connections that I was never able to make before.

Making intangible emotional states visible (“allowed me to see”) which are normally hidden to the self implies performative effects, meaning that the represented feeling may to a certain degree be an effect of the representational device or procedures themselves. This is suggested by the following quote from another interviewee, although this chapter will not elaborate on the discussion of performativity any further (but see Callon, 1998):

> What I really need is a stress alert system. I need something to tell me when I’m feeling stressed. [...] Another thing that was pretty neat about setting up the stress alert system is: I started to learn how my body felt when that light was red.

Self-Quantification relies on technical artefacts, such as activity wristbands, body sensors, smartphones and internet-based diagnosis algorithms. Particularly within sports, the hardware sales of sensors, “smart” (connected) shoes, are on their way to becoming mass-market products and most producers are trying to establish a proprietary world of experience around this form of “connected sport” (see e.g. Nikeplus). Increasingly, practices of self-quantification are affiliated with gamification applications—partly to address motivational issues, partly in the course of establishing new products and markets. Some observers point
to the close relation between gamification applications and surveillance (Whitson, 2013). The integration of self-quantification into larger systems marks a clear break with the original intentions of QS, which surfaced as a form of reflexive monitoring of the self with the objective of healing oneself from chronic diseases and obtaining knowledge about one's own emotions and activities. From the beginning, one of the main topics of the QS movement was the care for the self and the living body.

A large number of the show-and-tell presentations on the global as well as local QS-conferences (https://quantifiedself.com/show-and-tell/) give an account of how people were experiencing long-term suffering without their suffering being institutionally recognized, let alone cured within the established medical system. QS at this stage represented an effort to radically switch from the established procedures of being classified and observed as an object within conventional medicine, where corporeal experiences are residuals or even disturbing variables to technically mediated practices of observation and treatment. The QS presenters, in this context, report healing from diseases commonly considered incurable, such as Crohn's disease. These healings are attributed to an often makeshift kind of self-observation based on numbers and quantification, leading to self-medication and radical redirection of nutrition and other living habits. From a rigorous methodological viewpoint, we are talking not about “big” but rather “dirty data” here: often there is no consistent control of how data are obtained and processed leading to a lack of validity and reliability and a kind of “makeshift-quantification”. Nevertheless, these achievements have led to a systematic critique of how people are treated within the established medical systems and to increased calls for including personalized data into the diagnostic process as well as medical treatment (see for example http://quantifiedself.com/2012/04/talking-data-with-your-doc-the-doctors/).

The perceived objectivity and neutrality of calculation (Miller, 1992) as opposed to ineffable corporeal states play an important, even if not uncontested, role in this context:

> And to comprehend myself [...] you can no longer trust yourself; there actually are so many scientific studies such as the Dunning-Kruger-effect from 1999, proving [...] you are having a systematic bias when assessing yourself. That is, one cannot rely on one's feeling any more in different cases. [...] For me, it is beside my subjective sense, I am interested in
an objective perception toward myself, namely facts. There are quantifiable values and I can compare them and I can interpret and judge this completely decoupled from my personal feeling.

Various aspects of what Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) called the “New Spirit of Capitalism”—for instance, autonomy, authenticity, self-realization and networking—are pronounced characteristics of the field. QS in this respect may well be interpreted as being related to a “networked capitalism” built upon flexible networks of auto-entrepreneurs, who are competing and cooperating simultaneously. It is tied up with specific practices of making oneself visible through the web-based sharing of personal, intimate and performance data. It represents a field, which when encompassing the “community of early adopters” had the characteristics of a pioneering network. Meanwhile, there has been an intensified collaboration between users and developers of such self-quantifying technologies. Start-ups, industrial conglomerates and transnationals such as Google, Apple and the likes are investing and building networks in order to create new products and markets, thereby transforming the field.

In the following, we will describe the new taxonomies that are emerging, linking corporeal action and bodily enclosed experiences to accounting procedures. Thereby, the living body as the sensually given, pivotal point of being within the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1962) is being (re)framed and transformed.

## WELL-BEING, PERFORMANCE AND EMOTIONS AS CORE ISSUES OF LEIBSCHREIBEN (WRITING THE BODY)

How is self-tracking actually performed and what effects does it have on individuals’ self-perceptions? In stark contrast to the natural sciences, particularly medical science, the emerging forms of representing the self are to a considerable degree produced by lay actors outside of formal organizations.² The emergence of innovative *bodynotations*³ indicates an entirely new operative scripture for writing the body. We are calling these emerging forms of representing the body *Leibschreiben* (Vormbusch & Kappler, 2018), hereby adapting the basic idea of accounting as a “writing of value” (Hoskin & Macve, 1986) to a certain degree. Alas, within post-structuralist accounting research a resilient concept of the embodied self as well as a concept of human reflexivity is lacking. Unlike poststructuralism, our approach tries to account for both: the sensations of the
living body as experienced by concrete individuals, on the one hand, and the emergence of an operative scripture as a form of writing the body related to social discourses, on the other hand. Furthermore, the justification practices constitutive of the actors involved are regarded as a missing link between these two levels of analysis, necessarily preceding the establishment and institutionalization of any operative scripture.

The Foucauldian strand of accounting research (for an overview see Roslender, 1992) investigated how established forms of reading and writing underwent fundamental transformations from the twelfth century onwards. Double-entry bookkeeping in this regard represented one major manifestation of the transformation of writing more generally; more specifically, it represented the “capital form of writing” (Hoskin & Macve, 1986). If we consider accounting as a specific technology within the broader transformation of writing and representing, then self-quantification can be regarded as one form of accounting for the self, as a form of “writing the self”, reflecting the above-mentioned changes within contemporary capitalism.

Empirically, there is a wide variety of motives, techniques, programmes, apps, suppliers and objects assembled in the field. We encountered people who are measuring nutrition, physical activity and sleep, depressive periods as well as all kinds of emotional sensations they had throughout the day, some of them tracking their dreams, some of them stressing the importance of sharing their data, some opposing exactly this. As can be expected, there is a fishbowl of narratives, from the *empowerment* discourse (health as a personal “activity” and a “competence”) to the *new spirit of capitalism* (sharing data to “connect to people”; sharing as the “new normal” of a new imagined society). In a first step of our analysis at least three distinct discursive and practice-fields within QS emerged: well-being, performance, and emotions (see Kappler & Vormbusch, 2014; Vormbusch & Kappler, 2018).

*Well-being* refers to the very beginnings of the QS-movement and smoothly connects to contemporary discourses of patient empowerment, public health and, more generally, the “wellness syndrome” (Cederström & Spicer, 2015; Davies, 2015). Many early self-quantifiers were personally affected by chronic diseases, and the public presentation and sharing of their experiences and calculative cure still is a much-appreciated part of every QS gathering. A fundamental critique towards the established medical institutions, types of treatment and forms of knowledge (as expert knowledge distinct from the lived experiences and circumstances of sick
people) went along with this. One of the main triggers underlying the movement therefore was a specific approach towards the “care of the self” (Foucault, 1988a) and the search for self-determined ways of healing on the basis of buried linkages between everyday practices and experiences, on the one hand, and the evolution of one’s illness, on the other.

The second dimension, performance, refers to the ongoing transformation of work, particularly the “delimitation of work” within neoliberal work regimes, its deregulation and subjectification (Bröckling, 2002; Pongratz & Voß, 2003). From this point of view, quantifying the self might be interpreted as a form of subjectifying self-improvement of individual capabilities and human assets with regards to the market and the unrestrained performance requirements that exist within organizations and markets. In this dimension, self-quantifiers are exploring in what specific ways their capabilities might conform to market demands, including moulding themselves with regard to these perceived demands. Critics of these developments have argued that such a delimitation of work is associated with pathological forms of character formation within late modernity, with a tendency of getting “lost in perfection” (King et al., 2018).

The third dimension, emotions, refers to several processes within the social world which have been labelled either in terms of a shift of values from material to “postmodern” immaterial values, such as autonomy, self-realization and participation (Inglehart, 1971), or in terms of an “experience society” (Schulze, 1995), or in reference to the “commercialization” of emotions within emotional work (Hochschild, 1983). Neckel (2005b) argues that the modern subject is engaged in a specific form of boundary work caught up between conflicting social requirements: “social discipline”, on the one hand, and “social informalization”, on the other. Within the field of QS, emotions are not only an important reference point for increased self-awareness, but also a central element in self-presentations (“show and tell!”). Within contemporary capitalism, the awareness and management of emotions has become a major part of these subjects’ cultural capital.
# THE EMERGING TAXONOMIES OF THE SELF

## *Inventing Representational Forms*

Self-quantifiers are exploring a wide variety of different techniques, representational formats and devices for rendering their selves visible, comparable and manageable. These include narrative formats, such as diaries shared on the web, fully manual or semi-automated forms of measurement and personal feedback, ordinal and metric measures, formal representations and artistically interpreted data (such as graphs⁴ or even paintings based on aggregated calculations). In particular, emotions are crucial for self-quantifiers, but only loosely coupled to conventions of how to formally represent them. In contrast to the established fields of writing value (corporate reporting, state statistics, bookkeeping, accounting) the representational forms in the field of *Leibschreiben* are still variable, malleable and non-standardized.

This is why apps such as *Mood Track Diary*, T2 *Mood Tracker* or *Worry Watch*, all of them easily available on Google Play Store or iTunes, are using quite different ways of “writing” emotions, some of them relying more on graphs, some on colour, some emphasizing the particular context in which specific emotions occur. Currently, the writing of emotions still relies on highly experimental networks of objects, calculations, visualizations and narrations. Following a social-constructivist approach to technology studies (Bijker et al., 1987), we can see that there are quite a lot of social groups participating in the creation of relevant techniques, and there is an equally high interpretative flexibility with regard to these techniques and the objectives of measuring. Similarly, one can also see a wide range of representational practices—starting with simple excel-sheets through the very popular diet apps right up to sophisticated apps demanding agency of their own as to whether and when the human actor is to give data input. In the latter case, the shift in agency from the human subject to internet-based applications is justified by two objectives: first, the elimination of subjective distortions during measuring (particularly a tendency of “measuring only when feeling good”), second, an increase in convenience and a resulting perpetuation of the individuals’ motivation for measuring in the course of everyday life.

For example, the application *mood 24/7* (https://www.mood247.com) requires a periodical input of how a person feels by sending him or her an automated message as a call to action, inquiring: “On a scale of
1 to 10 what was your average mood today?” The accumulated longitu-
dinal data are then visualized in a chart which can be shared with other
users as well as medical doctors (mood 24/7 was initially developed in
the context of the treatment of depression). Therefore, the application is
serving the two-fold goal of objectifying data as well as furthering perpet-
uation by shifting agency towards the device. Similarly, but more detailed,
the application Track Your Happiness (https://www trackyourhappiness.
org/) is sending different questions several times a day. Preferably, the
individual shall answer to these at once:

[...] so you get a text and then you go to a little app on the phone and there you have a slider board, with a zero to hundred happiness scale. And then usually they start off with how happy you are, and then it lasts until you answered a series of additional questions. Questions like whether you are inside or not, whether you have to do something, or you want to do it, your actual activity on what you are doing, we have a lot of categories, and then and so on. And so, you do it fifty times now, and you set the parameter to about three or four times a day, minimum. And you are supposed to go through that as responsibly as possible.

Apps such as *Mood 24/7* or *Track Your Happiness* are trying to objec-
tify the measurement of mood and emotions by putting the app in control
of the time of measurement and by standardizing stimulus and response.
Thereby, the measurement of mood shall be made independent of the
mood of the responding person and the context in which this person
is located at the time of measurement. But objectification and better
comparability have downsides as well:

I was planning to get rid of all the stuff because I am working and
this programme pops up and I think "aaaawww", sometimes I am really
annoyed by my own programme, yeah, so sometimes I don't mind and
sometimes when you are really into something, but sometimes, if I do not
feel like, I don't fill it in.

The obvious problem is that the average answer's quality deteriorates
depending on whether the situation seems inappropriate for giving input
(such as having lunch with colleagues) or the subject "not feeling like
it". As a consequence, devices automatically measuring the emotional
state are being developed, such as the *FaceReader* (http://www.noldus.
com/human-behavior-research/products/facereader). The *FaceReader* is
able to “read” and subsequently write facial expressions using seven basic emotional states. The current combination of these emotional states is entered into a two-dimensional grid, wherein the horizontal axis represents a continuum of emotional valuing, running from pleasant to unpleasant, whereas the vertical axis represents an activity dimension (active to inactive).

Generally, there is substantial disagreement in the field about how to represent the hidden inner state of emotional affairs, hitherto inaccessible to standardized measuring and quantification. The applied representative forms vary to a great degree, combining elements of text with numbers and graphs. The respective advantages and disadvantages are the topic of controversial discussion. Sticking to the topic of emotions, here is a quote from a self-quantifier trying to measure “happiness” and writing a kind of fortune diary which he shares with others on the web:

> [...] I also feel very reductionist if I would do it by numbers, so if I would score it. So I am just curious if other people have experiences with things that are a bit more elaborated than a number, but not as free flow as words or things.

> The structure does not help you with emotions, because it is a structure, you do not need a structure but a flow.

In contrast to institutionalized fields of measuring, the absence of a structure is seen here as an advantage for measuring happiness. On the one hand, there obviously is a reluctance to “score” emotions; on the other hand, the interviewee is looking for a kind of middle ground: representative formats not as free as the “free flow of words”, but “more elaborated than a number”. On the one hand, self-quantifiers are striving for formal knowledge about their emotional experiences and quite often mistrust their own emotional sensations; on the other hand, some of them feel reluctant to formalize it too rigidly. Whatever they are experiencing, it should not be “reduced” or corrupted by the use of numbers. Analytically, emotions within cultural capitalism have to be rationally cultivated. From a participant’s perspective, they shall not be simply subsumed to the logic and rigidity of measurement and thereby stripped of their complexity and richness. Such contradictions are well known from other fields of measuring, but they are more pronounced and more difficult to address when it comes to measuring inner state of affairs of the living body which have neither dimension nor extension.
Fortune diaries are another, more text-based approach for representing experiences and emotions. They can be shared via twitter, Facebook or other social media, thereby adding new possibilities of ordering and representing emotions, such as peak moments of happiness or sadness, which are built into the respective platforms:

> [...] then wound up with a lot of private twitter accounts, that has kind of become the closest thing I am doing to journaling now. [...] I had it since spring 2008 and I was doing a twitter study, and I had this whole archive and it was really interesting because the things in the sidebar contains all the years and stuff, it has got little bars of how many tweets there were in each month, and the peaks were [...] when something really sudden was about to happen [...]. And the other peaks were like things that were awful and very sad [...]. And the peaks were when it worsened and when there were changes. And so there is this weird thing it ended up with being a very graphy, mood graph thing, I didn't realize that I was creating it as I did it. It just came out of my user statistics, and it came out of my journaling.

Sometimes, new and innovative forms of representing emotions emerge as an unintended bricolage, composed of different actor-actants (in this case, the user and twitter as a platform providing a graphic representation that was not initially directed towards emotions) and different symbolic systems (narrations as well as graphical representations for the measurement of “peaks” and “changes”). One could argue that QS as a network of post-traditional communities (Hitzler et al., 2008) explores possible ways of measuring and writing health, happiness and performance and thereby forms a global laboratory for doing so. Currently, the most common level of quantification for writing happiness is the use of ordinal scales. Often, for this purpose not only numbers are used, rather these are supplemented by graphical symbols and emoticons such as smileys or visual arguments such as colouration (indicating specific feelings such as red for warmth and tenderness, etc.). The following quote demonstrates that the use of these symbols should not be reduced to a mere assisting function. Quite to the contrary, they are a key means for the inner approval of feelings:

> [...] and then I have this slider, which goes from zero to... I think it is actually divided in the middle, so you get five points to the left and then that is the best mood, for example, and to the right, and it is a good
mood. And I also have this little smiley feedback. So, I put the slider and then I can see the smiley and [it] helps me to adjust, I think "No, not *that* happy, or...", you know, so that gives me kind of feedback to see, if I scored right on the scale. [...] it is just on the continuum happy versus not happy.

Above all, the visualization of an emotion (the smiley) can evoke a sense of coherence between measurement and corporeal experience. In this case, a culturally codified symbol of feeling is serving as a mediator between the inner state of affairs and a metric scale, bridging the missing points of contact between these two. Obviously, this is pointing to questions regarding the epistemological relations between ordinal/metric values and iconic representations ("...No, not *that* happy") as being built into the programme and thereby decontextualized and fixed. While the contribution of formal representations such as graphs and icons to the production of knowledge is an important strand of research within the field of science and technology studies (Jones & Galison, 1998; Latour, 1998; Lynch & Woolgar, 1988), the relationship between formal representations and emotions has not yet been equally explored.

## Moral Conflicts in Quantifying the Self

The tentative exploration of the self within QS involves deep moral uncertainties. Drawing on an example of a woman trying to quantify her baby's well-being, the ethical cleavages of self-quantification become apparent. Not entirely convinced by the belief held by some quantifiers that corporeal knowledge compared to quantified metrics should be regarded as inferior knowledge, this person is in an inextricable conflict. She is in deep worry for her baby. She is worried that he might not be sleeping enough ("He must sleep more and that is why I am using this app"). She is worried that she might not be there for him sufficiently ("that he is not getting enough of me"). And she is worried that he may not get enough food ("and when he slept in the meantime, then I know that it CANNOT BE hunger"). Therefore, she began using *Babytracker*, an application that can be downloaded via *itunes*. *Babytracker* is marketed for "busy parents" allowing them to "track everything from your baby's last feeding to that first smile". Parents get various screens showing a summary of events and activities directed toward the baby, in addition to several further screens with personal analytics regarding sleeping and
feeding patterns, time-weight graphs, etc., including the possibility to
share these data with other parents either via a company-run database
or other cloud solutions like Dropbox or iCloud.

Being aware of her concerns, the mother is trying to calm herself
down by saying: “Children are self-adjusting somehow”. She qualifies her
quantifying of the baby quite drastically:

Such an app is the exact opposite. It is not ‘live and let live’, trusting
that things are just fine and that he will be sleeping and that he is getting
enough of me in any case, but it [using the app, added] is above all to
control.

Later in the interview she adds:

In the end everything is getting much more complicated [by measuring
it, added]. And much more stressful and it doesn't help you at all. And
therefore ... because it gives you the impression you can control it ... but
a baby's sleep cannot be controlled.

Despite this latter statement the interviewee continues to give her account
about how she is feeling by saying:

And I hope that when having another baby, I think I will use this [the app,
added] definitely again, because there have always been those moments
when I was feeling helpless.

On the one hand, the interviewee is acknowledging a baby's general
self-sufficient condition by expressing that “a baby's sleep cannot be
controlled”. With these words, she is referring not only to her child but
rather to any baby's sleep or even more to the point: she is referring
*first and foremost* to “any baby's sleep” and this should at least in theory
include her own. On the other hand, she is drawn to the suggestion of
control implied by measuring when saying:

Data really help next to nothing. It's above all to know, okay, I am in
control now and for example, okay, he isn't sleeping throughout the night
anymore and he isn't sleeping enough during the day either ... now I am
going to take some steps ... yes there is an idea, my plan has just begun
... He must sleep more and that is why I am using this app.
On the one hand, the self-sufficient condition of babies and their practical routines do have a major moral significance for the interviewee. Her statement “a baby’s sleep cannot be controlled” does not only tell the obvious; it is not only an observation of a baby’s external condition and behaviours. It is also a moral statement about how things *ought to be* in general. That is why she is not addressing her own baby here, but rather every baby in the world. Her firm belief points to a state of affairs that should normally not be touched. On the other hand, her troubles caused by not being able to control what is going on are strong enough to override this feeling and to insert a new kind of device into the situation by measuring, thereby scraping the incommensurability (Espeland & Stevens, 1998) of her baby and her baby’s sleep.

Obviously, this is not to say that she does not love her baby as a unique being and hers. But in the course of quantifying new possibilities for evaluating her baby in comparison with other babies (whose parents are also using *Babytracker* or similar devices) emerge, for example assessing his sleep, food intake, and attention. In this, as well as in the case of measuring moods, moral conflicts about if, when and how to measure qualities hitherto unquantified are emerging. The reluctance to score emotions (to “feel very reductionist if I would do it by numbers”, see above) and the fear to corrupt one’s authentic corporeal sensations as well as the anxiety to interfere with the autonomy of other living beings (as in the last case) are exemplary for what is at stake here. Drawing a line between commensuration and the still incommensurable for self-quantifiers in some crucial areas therefore arises not only as a technical problem, but rather as an everyday moral challenge.

*Quantifying Performance: Alternative Measures, Rational Planning and the Deficiency of Corporeal Sensations*

Another example draws on the quantification experiments of a passionate triathlete and is situated in the field of performance. Here, we find a variety of measures regarding physical performance. Moreover, this example shows the relationship of these key performance indicators with strategies for not only performing, but rather rationalizing sports performances, in this case triathlon:

> And this is interesting with triathlon. There is ... sounds a little casual, but if you know this threshold value and the distance, you can just as well say,
I am having a Watt-device here. I am adjusting as if having an autopilot. I would like to wind this exact capacity, then you simply wind one, two or five hours this capacity and you know that you are not losing too much power to reasonably finish the competition.

In a previous section of the interview, the interviewee already characterized the taking of his pulse as being much too imprecise for his purposes. Unlike taking your pulse, Watt values can simply and directly be recorded at the bicycle's spindle. In contrast to the generally delayed pulse values, Watt measurement therefore results in a kind of "instant feedback". In combination with the given distance it is possible to perform cycling as if being on "autopilot". It is only so that he can "reasonably finish the competition". Even more than the Watt-value, another performance indicator ($VO_{2max}$) is allowing him to measure his physical fitness comprehensively and to make projections, thereby introducing notions of the time value of performance:

> And what it [a 'smart' running watch from one of the main manufacturers, added] also can do, it aggregates everything I do into one measure or key performance indicator, one KPI and this is the $VO_{2max}$. This means okay how much oxygen can my body process per minute and per kilogram, and this really is the core measure for performance in the field of running. And what is really cool, you are provided with projections, straight from the watch: okay, how fast can I run this Marathon now and this is quite precise. ... Thus, how fast I can run is depending on my lung volume.

To summarize, the interviewee is objectifying his bodily experiences and his sense of effort by framing it, firstly, in terms of the expended Watt-value during a competition, which, secondly, relies on $VO_{2max}$ as the key performance indicator aggregating relevant parameters into one master-measure. This objectified bodily experience is the basis for the reframing of the body as a rational and improvable machine and for the development of related rationalization and optimization strategies.

In the following example, another notion commonly held by self-quantifiers becomes apparent: the notion of the deficiency of embodied experience.

> What really is absolutely interesting: when I wake up in the morning and I feel absolutely whacked and I am about to give up and get me a sick leave, I don't feel like working and I don't feel like anything. Then the
device says I shall really take off today and then I am stepping outside and start running and really after some rounds I realize: This is really going to work, the body is really there. But the mind is saying otherwise.

Similar to the above sketched experimental forms of representing emotions, the performative capacity of representing the inner state of bodily affairs is obvious: only by “doing otherwise”, that is by ignoring the sensations of his living body, the interviewee arrives at a state of affairs in accordance with the performance projections based on the measurement and evaluation of the collected data. Here, a second line of transformation of inner sensations by calculative means is observable; one that has been discussed above and concerns the translation of inner sensations into numbers and figures in order to formally represent them: the emphasis was on finding adequate, that is at the same time “exact” as well as “rich” and therefore necessarily blurry, indicators for bodily sensations. In the case just discussed the approach is shifting towards an “objectification” by framing the emotional state with the help of calculations which are then taken for granted. At the very least, these calculations are being given more credibility than the interviewee’s experienced feelings. The interviewee is following an attitude quite popular with self-quantifiers: that numbers and data are “true” in a deeper way than bodily sensations and feelings. This is also expressed by another interviewee:

> There is a measurable value and I can compare this value and I can interpret and assess this value completely decoupled from my personal feelings.

Such a fundamental “trust in numbers” (Porter, 1995) corresponds with the feeling that “sometimes my body is playing a trick on me”. This way, bodily sensations are framed as uncertain and unreliable—in contrast to the capacity of calculations to unequivocally represent and project the true state of affairs. Obviously, there is a great potential for alienation here: the starting point is not to delicately draw out how to translate inner sensations without corrupting them (as in the case of mood tracking), but rather to accredit to numbers and calculations a higher significance when it comes to the most intimate thing humans are made of: their living body. Admittedly, this rather orthodox approach relying on the “mechanical objectivity” of numbers and calculations (Daston & Galison, 2007) is not uncontested within the self-tracking community.
CONCLUSIONS

It is not at all by chance that new forms of calculating and valuing
the self are emerging today. Rather, it can be considered a response to
the experience of an increasing uncertainty in the culture and economy
of advanced capitalist societies. Quantifying the self is as much about
the self as a subject competing in markets, as it is about the cultural
indeterminacy of today's forms of living. Both aspects are nourishing a
comprehensive incertitude. Almost a century ago, Frank Knight (1964
[1921])—assuming that in a dynamic economy there is a great deal
of imperfect knowledge of the future—distinguished between “risk” and
“uncertainty”. The former he reserved for situations where the prob-
abilities for specific outcomes are, at least in principle, calculable. The
latter describes “true uncertainty” within settings “not susceptible to
measurement” (Knight 1964 [1921], p. 232). Knight, as an economist,
believed that only true uncertainty “accounts for the peculiar income
of the entrepreneur” (ibid.). Today, in a world where the realm of the
calculable and the realm of the incalculable are simultaneously expanding,
true uncertainty spreads, not only “ontologically”, but empirically. Lifted
into public consciousness with the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the
2008 world financial crisis more recently, it might even be the most
fundamental experience for a significant fraction of today’s global popu-
lation, forming their relation to the world, contributing to the rise of
anti-modernist movements and political parties, thereby posing existen-
tial threats to democratic governing. Against this backdrop, quantifying
your self seems to promise one possible answer to the challenges humans
are facing today. It is not a random one, but one connecting the social
incertitude triggered by Knightean “true uncertainty” with the calculative
means provided by classical modernity.

*Cultural uncertainty*, to be more exact, is related to the principal
openness and plurality of forms of living that require ongoing assessments
with regard to who I am. Rosa (2016, p. 43) argues that individuals
are not able to determine the inner core of their identity, since it has
always been elusive. This seems to be even more so under the condi-
tions of an accelerated, permanently shifting modernity. Paradoxically,
these ever-shifting conditions solidify into a fairly constant pressure to
carve out an authentic and socially recognizable identity. Consequently,
we are observing a kind of *identity squeeze*: the more the foundations
of a robust identity erode, the more the subjects are occupied with the conditions for establishing it. On “slippery slopes” (Rosa, 2016, p. 691) the self is confronted with the urge not only to be oneself (that is, to be authentic), but also to discover ever more—fundamental and hidden—aspects of oneself in order to carve out what is essential and valuable about oneself.

Thévenot (in this volume) points out that calculation is about the “linkage between counting and counting on”. In this sense self-quantification is about the individuals’ concerns about what is left to count on when external pillars of the self are deteriorating. Obviously, it is less about what can be *found* as about how the inner pillars of the self can be *negotiated* and stabilized. It is about establishing a calculative truth about oneself which is only true in relation to a world which itself is constituted by numbers (see Salais, 2012, pp. 58–60, on the position of a constructivist realism). Therefore, QS can be seen as a datafied and technically mediated exploration process, whereby individuals try to give meaning to their life under the condition of losing touch with what Berger and Luckmann (1967) called a “natural attitude” towards themselves.

In exactly this sense, self-quantification represents a historically novel “institution of the self” (Hahn, 1982; Noji & Vormbusch, 2018) in the context of an extensive de-naturalization of the familiar world. It supplements established ways of reflecting on and caring for the self, such as the diary, the autobiography, and later various shades of therapeutic intervention. Certainly, its appeal is to be consistent with, if not the logical extension of, the evaluative cultures of contemporary capitalism and modernity itself. Measured and mediated by epistemic objects (see Knorr Cetina, 1999, 2007) such as smartphones, algorithms and apps, ever new angles on the living body and its everyday course of action are created. This ongoing exploration process is not a mere reflex of the actors’ social positions and habitus, as could be argued in line with Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology. And it would be just as incomplete and misleading to reduce self-quantification to self-optimization, since in many ways there is no fixed relation between ends and means. What self-quantification is for its participants has to be carved out in social practices and is (as of today) open for multiple meanings.

Self-quantification is as much about the actors’ position in the social space as it is about defining who they are and who they ought to be. Nevertheless, it is not only about cultural uncertainty within late
*modernity*, but as much about economic transformations within modern *capitalism*. It is about the growing importance of self-employment, unfettered and “delimited” work requirements; deregulated and often precarious forms of work, project work and “work on demand”. In brief, it is about the deterioration of supporting institutions which had assured long-term security for citizens in Fordist societies. A feeling of economic insecurity has become relevant also for the highly qualified and educated fractions of the workforce—precisely the group investing in new forms of quantifying their selves. “Real” uncertainty in this context manifests itself in particular as uncertainty about the worth of one’s immaterial capital, and even more fundamentally about the *notion of worth* applicable to immaterial capabilities.

Institutionalized forms of calculating value in the economy are increas-
ingly undermined by the emergence of so-called immaterial values
(Eustace, 2000, 2003), and regular financial crises demonstrate the
performative quality of value which is progressively detached from its
material basis. This increasing uncertainty concerning the “value of
goods” (Beckert & Aspers, 2011) can be regarded as the manifestation
of a fundamental shift in the value basis of contemporary capitalism. As
knowledge moves to the centre stage of today’s economies (as different
scholars as Peter F. Drucker and André Gorz argue), and as the “flexible
self” (Sennett, 1998), the “enterprising self” (Bröckling, 2002) and the
“manpower entrepreneur” (Pongratz & Voß, 2003) are becoming the
foundation for competition and profit-making, from a functionalist view-
point, new taxonomies are needed that are able to frame and calculate
living subjectivity.

In earlier works I have argued that the valuation of immaterial capital
bound up with the self is performed as a form of quantification that simul-
taneously relies on objectification as well as subjectification (Vormbusch,
2012). In other words, in order to get a grip on immaterial forms of
capital (such as communicative skills, motivation and aspiration) the form
of calculation itself has to change. Human Resource Management's latest
incarnation, “people analytics” (see Goodell King, 2016; Rasmussen &
Ulrich, 2015) and the QS movement have one thing in common: the
quest for universally applicable orders of worth for subjectively bound
and bodily enclosed forms of capital. It is only by inventing mundane and
often conflicting forms of categorization on a micro-level that such new
regimes of worth may solidify, and which might then, eventually, traverse
the boundaries between the familiar world and the economy.
This is not to say that individuals are consciously striving to make their immaterial capital measurable and correspondingly valuable, or that there is a direct link to “objective” capitalist needs for value realization. This would be functionalist thinking. It is rather argued that a specific social disquiet in advanced capitalism evokes two interlinked exploration problems: explorations regarding the market relevance of the subjects’ immaterial capital as well as explorations regarding the hidden undercurrents of their identity. Promising a specific answer to the complexities and contradictions of life in *late modernity* therefore relates closely to the invention of those registers of worth that *capitalism* functionally relies on.

In this sense, self-quantification is an emerging form dealing with the social incertitude constitutive of modern societies. It is about the quest for those qualities of the self, which are regarded as important within the economy and culture of contemporary societies and which cannot be derived from orthodox notions of value. QS therefore is a multifarious social praxis, creating new meaning, which punctuates and shifts the margins of, and boundaries between, economy and culture, and economic and cultural value.

Obviously, this does not simply mean the discovery of subjective qualities already present (and only hidden), but the creation of new forms of representing (and thereby generating) these qualities by creating the context, the observation apparatus (taxonomies) and the normative anchoring which brings them to light as new entities. Making things accountable is bringing them into existence in new ways, and this applies to corporeal accounting, too. In this sense, QS may be seen as a gigantic, globally dispersed laboratory wherein people are investing in new forms, by which the plurality of their individual skills and capabilities, their concrete diversity of living, their uniqueness and incommensurability are being made common and comparable.

Through self-quantification, the human body emerges as a new social entity. Since the turn of the millennium, the living body took centre stage as an object of technological malleability, epistemological deconstruction and social visions to exceed the established boundaries of the human. The living body, far from having ever been something given and uncontested (see the works of Elias, Foucault and Bourdieu), since then became quite a new recipient for questioning, evaluation and improvement. Currently, there is quite a momentum of forging the body into a new object of knowing, as well as the body being one of the core relays for social utopias (see the relevant debates from genetic engineering to transhumanism, see
also Lam’s contribution to this volume). From a Foucauldian perspective this can be understood as the formation of a new proliferating field of force, suggesting new possibilities for the constitution of a productive subjectivity well suited for the new capitalism—and cutting off others. Here is not the place to discuss in detail the adequacy of a Foucauldian framework when it comes to self-quantification. Obviously, this article is only selectively leaning on such a framework, trying to bypass some of its problems.

Particularly, in order to avoid the equation of discourse and praxis this contribution is drawing more heavily on a participant perspective than Foucault normally did (see also Reckwitz, 2002). In accordance with the sociology of critique (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006 [1991]), self-quantification can be seen as a deliberative praxis of competent actors. Exploring the cultural and economic qualities of the self by creating an abstract space to compare them, and at the same time extending the margins of accounting in this way, necessarily includes moral conflicts and justifications. Particularly, extending these margins of accounting (Miller, 1998) beyond the hitherto incalculable implies “ethical consequences that are often neglected” (Espeland & Yung, 2019, p. 239). Moreover, judgements about how to do things “right”—or to criticize them as being done the “wrong” way—not only refer to discourses but also to technologies, instrumentations, calculative schemes, formal representations, material (e.g. food) or immaterial (e.g. apps, algorithms, icons) things simultaneously. In this sense, actors are indeed “equipped” (Callon, 1998, p. 6), but this equipment and its practical deployment are in no way normatively neutral.

Both the Foucauldian and the pragmatist approaches have been criticized regarding their stance towards power and domination. Foucault has been accused of ignoring human agency; the sociology of critique has been criticized for ignoring the historically specific restrictions limiting the very possibility for critique (e.g. Celikates, 2006, 2009). We regard QS as an investigative praxis by which new forms of how people relate to each other and new meanings are created *without* neglecting hegemonic discourses (such as empowerment and the hailing of individuality as part of a neoliberal notion of freedom, or activity and connectionism as part of a “network city”). It is only when shifting the analytical angle towards the participants’ agency and their capacities of critique that the diversity of their responses to the growing economic and normative uncertainty
in today's societies can be acknowledged. By criticizing the shortcomings of how individuals are treated within the established institutions of contemporary societies, and simultaneously embracing some of their central discourses, self-quantifiers are still bringing something new to these societies, hereby confirming the fundamentally dynamic properties of contemporary capitalism (see Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007). Summing up our fieldwork, what kind of critique is then articulated within the QS network of early adopters?

Regarding the *epistemic order*, any form of *subjective* knowledge is rejected, be it bound up with the living body or obscured within the muddy waters of everyday life. Regarding self-trackers' psychological disposition, every form of cognitive abstinence, apathy or naïve familiarity with oneself is rejected. In this regard, self-quantifiers are turning the "project city's" social activity imperative (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007) inwards, relentlessly exploring what is going on with them. Any idleness and unexamined "business as usual" is dismissed. Above all, a person's *worthiness* is related to the truthfulness and sincerity one has towards him- or herself, towards the meaning of one's personal data, and the consistency with which data are transformed into action, even if this leads to discomfort and considerable strain. The underlying *ontology* is best described in terms of a cybernetic world, within which various entities, be it humans or machines, are connected through feedback loops which are objectified, permanent, preferably immediate, and quantitative.

Self-quantification operates as a relay between the institutional dynamics of capitalist change, on the one hand, and cultural dynamics, on the other. It is varied in its particular empirical shape but consistent in connecting the individuals with newly emerging orders of worth, evaluating their performative, emotional and practical capabilities by establishing new taxonomies of the self. "Accounting for who we could be" surely is no new motive within modern societies' institutional framework. But self-quantification deserves its designation as "accounting" more than the casual "skinny jeans" tracking, or Benjamin Franklin's crude moral bookkeeping. It is deepening the everyday and therefore intimate joints between the economic and the cultural dynamics of modern capitalist societies, highlighting the importance of new forms of creative calculation for capitalist dynamics. As of today, self-quantification is still made up of a diversity of actors, devices, instrumentations and discourses about the self. Considering the growing investments of corporate actors,
start-ups and state agencies, it is not unlikely to turn out as a social innovation “through which something that stands normally outside market exchange comes to be attributed an economic (monetary) value” (Fourcade, 2011, p. 1723). But quantifying, economizing and marketizing are quite different technologies (Kurunmäki et al., 2016) with quite different outcomes regarding participation and democracy. And self-quantification, as has been shown, is more than just plain economizing. A lot will depend on if and how “voicing concern and difference” (Thévenot, 2014) from a plurality of positions will remain relevant when self-quantification becomes a major component of emerging digital capitalism.

## NOTES

1. The article draws on the findings of the research project “Taxonomies of the Self” (http://www.fernuni-hagen.de/soziologie/lg2/Forschung_English.shtml) funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The project follows the methodological principles of Grounded Theory (Strauss, 1987) and has been conducted by Karolin Kappler, Eryk Noji and Uwe Vormbusch. In total, more than 100 different datasets have been collected and analysed, from qualitative interviews and participatory observations up to group discussions with self-quantifiers, software engineers and start-ups.

2. This holds true at least for the active participants of the QS-movement this article is focusing on. However, the balance between professionalized lay actors and formal organizations is just about to tip in favour of the latter.

3. The term notation originally refers to varying codifications of how to transcribe utterances and gestures of interviewees in the field of qualitative research. In our context, it indicates the various experimental forms by which inner sensations as well as physical reactions are “transcribed”, written down and formally represented by the actors in the field.

4. See, for instance, Alberto Frigo's website: http://2004-2040.com/25_ar.htm, Accessed 19 July 2019.

## REFERENCES

Adorno, Th. W., & Horkheimer, M. (2002 [1944]). *Dialectic of enlightenment*. Stanford University Press.

Alloa, E., Bedorf, Th., Grüny, C., & Klass, N. (Eds.). (2012). *Leiblichkeit: Geschichte und Aktualität eines Konzepts*. UTB.

Beckert, J., & Aspers, P. (Eds.). (2011). *The worth of goods: Valuation and pricing in the economy*. Oxford University Press.
Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1967). *The social construction of reality*. Doubleday.

Bijker, W. E., Hughes, T. P., & Pinch, T. (Eds.). (1987). *The social construction of technological systems: New directions in the sociology and history of technology*. MIT Press.

Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, E. (2007). *The new spirit of capitalism*. Verso (French edition, 1999).

Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (2006 [1991]). *On justification: Economies of worth*. Princeton University Press (French edition, 1991).

Boutang, Y. M. (2012). *Cognitive capitalism*. Polity Press.

Bröckling, U. (2002). Jeder könnte, aber nicht alle können. *Konturen des unternehmerischen Selbst. Mittelweg, 11*(36), 6-26.

Callon, M. (1998). Introduction: The embeddedness of economic markets in economics. In M. Callon (Ed.), *The laws of the markets* (pp. 1-57). Blackwell.

Cederström, C., & Spicer, A. (2015). *The wellness syndrome*. Polity Press.

Celikates, R. (2006). From critical social theory to a social theory of critique: On the critique of ideology after the pragmatic turn. *Constellations, 13*(1), 21-40.

Celikates, R. (2009). *Kritik als soziale Praxis: Gesellschaftliche Selbstverständigung und kritische Theorie*. Campus.

Crouch, C. (2016). *The knowledge corrupters: Hidden consequences of the financial takeover of public life*. Polity Press.

Daston, L., & Galison, P. (2007). *Objectivity*. MIT Press.

Davies, W. (2015). Spirits of neoliberalism: ‘Competitiveness’ and ‘wellbeing’ indicators as rival orders of worth. In R. Rottenburg, S. E. Merry, S.-J. Park, & J. Mugler (Eds.), *The world of indicators: The making of governmental knowledge through quantification* (pp. 83–306). Cambridge University Press.

Desrosières, A. (2011). The economics of convention and statistics: The paradox of origins. *Historical Social Research, 36*(4), 64–81.

Diaz-Bone, R., & Didier, E. (2016). Introduction: The sociology of quantification—Perspectives on an emerging field in the social sciences. *Historical Social Research, 41*(2), 7–26.

Diaz-Bone, R., & Salais, R. (2011). Economics of convention and the history of economies: Towards a transdisciplinary approach in economic history. *Historical Social Research, 36*(4), 7–39.

Espeland, W. N., & Stevens, M. L. (1998). Commensuration as a social process. *Annual Review of Sociology, 24*, 313–343.

Espeland, W. N., & Stevens, M. L. (2008). A sociology of quantification. *European Journal of Sociology, 49*(3), 401–436.

Espeland, W. N., & Yung, V. (2019). Ethical dimensions of quantification. *Social Science Information, 58*(2), 238–260.
Eustace, C. (2000). The intangible economy impact and policy issues. *Report of the European high level expert group on the intangible economy*. European Commission.

Eustace, C. (2003). The PRISM report 2003. *Research findings and policy recommendations*. European Commission Information Society Technologies Programme, Report Series No. 2. European Commission.

Foucault, M. (1973). *The birth of the clinic*. Tavistock.

Foucault, M. (1980). Truth and power. In C. Gordon (Ed.), *Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings* (pp. 1972–1977). Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (1981 [1976]). *The history of sexuality, Volume 1: An introduction*. Penguin Books. First published as La Volonté de savoir (Éditions Gallimard, 1976).

Foucault, M. (1988a). *The care of the self*. Vintage.

Foucault, M. (1988b). Truth, power, self. In P. H. Hutton, H. Gutman, & L. H. Martin (Eds.), *Technologies of the self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault* (pp. 9–15). University of Massachusetts Press.

Foucault, M. (1995 [1975]). *Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison*. Vintage Books.

Fourcade, M. (2011). Cents and sensibility: Economic valuation and the nature of “nature”. *American Journal of Sociology*, *116*(6), 1721–1777.

Goodell King, K. (2016). Data analytics in human resources: A case study and critical review. *Human Resource Development Review*, *15*(4), 487-495.

Grieger & Cie. (2016). Quantified Wealth Monitor (2016). *Potenziale für die Monetarisierung von Self Tracking- und Kunden-Daten*. https://www.splendid-research.com/quantified-wealth.html. Accessed 22 March 2017.

Hahn, A. (1982). Zur Soziologie der Beichte und anderer Formen institutionalisierter Bekenntnisse: Selbstthematisierung und Zivilisationsprozess. *Kölner Zeitschrift Für Soziologie Und Sozialpsychologie*, 34(3), 407–434.

Hitzler, R., Pfadenhauer, M., & Honer, A. (Eds.). (2008). *Posttraditionale Gemeinschaften: Theoretische und ethnografische Erkundungen*. VS Verlag.

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). *The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling*. University of California Press.

Hoskin, K., & Macve, R. (1986). Accounting and the examination: A genealogy of disciplinary power. *Accounting, Organizations and Society*, *11*(2), 105–136.

Hoskin, K., & Macve, R. (1994). Writing, examining, disciplining: The genesis of accounting's modern power. In A. G. Hopwood & P. Miller (Eds.), *Accounting as social and institutional practice* (pp. 67–97). Cambridge University Press.

Illouz, E. (2007). *Cold intimacies: The making of emotional capitalism*. Polity Press.
Inglehart, R. (1971). The silent revolution in Europe: Intergenerational change in post-industrial societies. *American Political Science Review*, 65(4), 991–1017.

Jones, C. A., & Galison, P. (Eds.). (1998). *Picturing science producing art*. Routledge.

Kappler, K., & Vormbusch, U. (2014). Froh zu sein bedarf es wenig ...? Quantifizierung und der Wert des Glücks. *Sozialwissenschaften Und Berufspraxis*, 37(2), 267–281.

King, V., Gerisch, B., & Rosa, H. (Eds.). (2018). *Lost in perfection: Impacts of Optimisation on culture and psyche*. Routledge.

Knight, F. (1964 [1921]). *Risk, uncertainty and profit*. Sentry Press.

Knorr Cetina, K. (1999). *Epistemic cultures: How the sciences make knowledge*. Harvard University Press.

Knorr Cetina, K. (2007). Culture in Global Knowledge Societies: Knowledge Cultures and Epistemic Cultures. *Interdisciplinary Science Review*, 32(4), 361–375. DOI:10.1179/030801807X163571

Kurunmäki, L., Mennicken, A., & Miller, P. (2016). Quantifying, economising, and marketising: Democratising the social sphere? *Sociologie Du Travail*, 58, 390–402.

Lamont, M. (2012). Toward a comparative sociology of valuation and evaluation. *Annual Review of Sociology*, 38, 201–221.

Latour, B. (1998). How to be iconophilic in art, science, and religion? In C. A. Jones & P. Galison (Eds.), *Picturing science producing art* (pp. 418–440). Routledge.

Lupton, D. (2015). Quantified sex: A critical analysis of sexual and reproductive self-tracking apps. *Culture, Health and Sexuality*, 17(4), 440–453.

Lupton, D. (2016). *The quantified self: A sociology of self-tracking*. Polity Press.

Lynch, M., & Woolgar, S. (Eds.). (1988). *Representation in scientific practice*. MIT Press.

Mennicken, A., & Miller, P. (2014). Foucault and the administering of lives. In P. S. Adler, P. du Gay, G. Morgan, & M. I. Reed (Eds.), *The Oxford handbook of sociology, social theory, and organization studies: Contemporary currents* (pp. 11–38). Oxford University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). *Phenomenology of perception*. Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Miller, P. (1992). Accounting and objectivity: The invention of calculating selves and calculable spaces. *Annals of Scholarship*, 9(1–2), 61–86.

Miller, P. (1998). The margins of accounting. In M. Callon (Ed.), *The laws of the markets* (pp. 174–193). Blackwell.

Miller, P., & O'Leary, T. (1994). Governing the calculable person. In A. G. Hopwood & P. Miller (Eds.), *Accounting as social and institutional practice* (pp. 98–115). Cambridge University Press.
Moore, P., & Robinson, A. (2016). The quantified self: What counts in the neoliberal workplace. *New Media and Society, 18*(11), 2774–2792.

Nafus, D., & Sherman, J. (2014). This one does not go up to 11: The quantified self movement as an alternative big data practice. *International Journal of Communication, 8*, 1784–1794.

Neckel, S. (2005a). Die Marktgesellschaft als kultureller Kapitalismus: Zum neuen Synkretismus von Ökonomie und Lebensform. In K. Imhof & T. Eberle (Eds.), *Triumph und End des Neoliberalismus* (pp. 198–211). Seismo.

Neckel, S. (2005b). Emotion by design: Das Selbstmanagement der Gefühle als kulturelles Programm. *Berliner Journal für Soziologie, 15*(3), 419–430.

Noji, E., & Vormbusch, U. (2018). Kalkulative Formen der Selbstthematisierung und das epistemische Selbst. *Psychosozial, 41*(2), 16–34.

Plessner, H. (1970). Lachen und Weinen. *Philosophische Anthropologie* (pp. 11–171), S. Fischer Verlag.

Pongratz, H. J., & Voß, G. G. (2003). From employee to ‘entireployee’: Towards a ‘self-entrepreneurial’ work force? *Concepts and Transformation, 8*(3), 239–254.

Porter, T. M. (1995). *Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life*. Princeton University Press.

Rasmussen, T., & Ulrich, D. (2015). Learning from practice: How HR analytics avoids being a management fad. *Organizational Dynamics, 44*(3), 236–242.

Reckwitz, A. (2002). Toward a theory of social practices: A development in culturalist theorizing. *European Journal of Social Theory, 5*(2), 243–263.

Riesman, D. (1950). *The lonely crowd: A study of the changing American character*. Doubleday (together with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney).

Rosa, H. (2016). *Resonanz: Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung*. Suhrkamp.

Roslender, R. (1992). *Sociological perpectives on modern accountancy*. Routledge.

Ruckenstein, M., & Pantzar, M. (2017). Beyond the quantified self: Thematic exploration of a dataistic paradigm. *New Media and Society, 19*(3), 401–418.

Salais, R. (2012). Quantification and the economics of convention. *Historical Social Research, 37*(4), 55–63.

Schmitz, H. (2009). *Kurze Einführung in die Neue Phänomenologie*. Verlag Karl Alber.

Schulze, G. (1995). *The experience society*. Sage.

Sennett, R. (1998). *The corrosion of character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism*. W. W. Norton and Company.

Sharon, T. (2017). Self-tracking for health and the quantified self: Re-articulating autonomy, solidarity, and authenticity in an age of personalized healthcare. *Philosophy and Technology, 30*(1), 93–121.

Smith, N., & Lee, D. (2015). Corporeal capitalism: The body in international political economy. *Global Society, 29*(1), 64–69.
Strauss, A. L. (1987). *Qualitative analysis for social scientists*. Cambridge University Press.

Thévenot, L. (1984). Rules and implements: Investment in forms. *Social Science Information*, 23(1), 1–45.

Thévenot, L. (2014). Voicing concern and difference: From public spaces to commonplaces. *European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology*, 1(1), 7–34.

Vollmer, H., Mennicken, A., & Preda, A. (2009). Tracking the numbers: Across accounting and finance, organizations and markets. *Accounting, Organizations and Society*, 34(5), 619–637.

Vormbusch, U. (2008). Talking numbers. *Economic sociology: The European Electronic Newsletter*, 10(1), 8–11.

Vormbusch, U. (2009). *Controlling the future - Investing in people*. Paper presented at the Research Seminar of the Accounting Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE, 4 February 2009, https://www.academia.edu/9774942/Controlling_the_Future_-_Inv esting_in_People.

Vormbusch, U. (2012). *Die Herrschaft der Zahlen: Zur Kalkulation des Sozialen in der kapitalistischen Moderne*. Campus Verlag.

Vormbusch, U. (2015). *Corporeal accounting and the third advance of quantification*. Paper presented at the IAS-Nantes Workshop on Quantification, IAS-Nantes, April 2015. https://www.google.de/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjKsKL3nLjSAhWGnBoKHTBTBHIQFgghMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.iea-nantes.fr%2Frtefiles%2FFile%2FAteliers%2F20150428-Quantification%2Fvormbusch_corporate_accounting.pdf&usg=AFQjCNHF4M-3CraSzbRt2MGbTNWoQgEY-A.

Vormbusch, U. (2016). Taxonomien des Selbst: Zur Hervorbringung subjektbezogener Bewertungsordnungen im Kontext ökonomischer und kultureller Unsicherheit. In S. Duttweiler, R. Gugutzer, J.-H. Passoth, & J. Strübing (Eds.), *Leben nach Zahlen* (pp. 45–62). Transcript.

Vormbusch, U., & Kappler, K. (2018). Leibschreiben: Zur medialen Repräsentation des Körperleibes im Feld der Selbstvermessung. In T. Mämecke, J.-H. Passoth, & J. Wehner (Eds.), *Bedeutende Daten* (pp. 207–232). Springer VS.

Wenger, E. (1998). *Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity*. Cambridge University Press.

Whitson, J. R. (2013). Gaming the quantified self. *Surveillance and Society*, 11(1/2), 163–176.
**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_8.png" /></figure>

# Quantifying Inequality: From Contentious Politics to the Dream of an Indifferent Power

Ota De Leonardis

Inequality is a subject that is being talked about a great deal these days. Large quantities of data and figures provide us with unequivocal evidence of the huge disparities—in income, wealth, and so on—that characterize contemporary global capitalism. This trend towards polarization is all the more evident when we view it from a historical perspective, as Thomas Piketty (2014) has so masterfully done. The figures speak eloquently, but what do they refer to? What do we mean exactly, by “measuring inequality”?

It is a well-known fact that over the course of modern Western history in general, and of capitalism (and anti-capitalism) in particular, the notion of inequality has acquired a relational meaning that refers to power relations between unequal people. It could be argued that the history of the construction of this meaning began with the long

<footnote>O. De Leonardis (✉)
Department of Sociology and Social Research,
University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy
e-mail: ota.deleonardis@unimib.it</footnote>
struggle against the “high/low” dualism of the mediaeval Christian tradition through the process of secularization.¹ And in this process we might recognize a crucial turn in the “symbolic form” of the Modern Perspective, which provided the cognitive tools for linking the “high” and the “low” together and endowed this link with a political character, through Machiavelli and then Hobbes especially.² The French Revolution, which reciprocally gave equality a political status, also represents an important moment. Then, of course, Hegel’s *Herr und Knecht Verhältnis* (Master-Slave Dialectic) shaped the framework within which inequality meant a bond of domination constituting both the dominator and the dominated, that conferred an intrinsic dynamism on the social order. There followed the rise of capitalism, from Marx onwards. The capital/labour relationship came to be the main point of reference for inequality, associated as it was with exploitation and the private appropriation of socially produced wealth. For more than a century, inequality became the central critical issue in the labour movement and in the anti-capitalist—and indeed anti-imperialist—conflicts.

My aim in this chapter is to show the shift in the semantic field of inequality that has taken place over the last forty years or so. Owing to this shift, the meaning of inequality as a (historical) bond of domination and subjection is being obscured. In the current discourse on inequality and its magnitude, the (political) reference to power relations has become weaker and weaker, and inequality as defined by quantification now tends to designate a distributive difference, a gap, a disparity: a distance, and no longer a tie.

To this end, I will, in the following, identify some crucial steps in this semantic shift within the changes that have affected the vocabulary of welfare in Italy (but under pressure from Europe) over the course of some forty years. I will dwell in particular on the *dispositif* of the threshold—first of all the poverty threshold—and on the multiplication of thresholds in the field of welfare. I will look at the influence that the syntax of the threshold has exerted on the reconfiguration of this field, and draw some conclusions regarding the effects on the semantics of inequality—two in particular.

In the first place, “threshold” is a spatial metaphor which particularly shapes social spaces with divisions and separations. This made me focus on space and analyse the spread of space-based technologies of separation in the current governance instrumentation at both local and global levels. Here, I will identify the dynamics of inscriptions of inequality
in space, and the emergence of a “spatialized” configuration of the term. “Inequality translates into distance”, as Richard Sennett (2006, p. 55) argued. Once inscribed in space, this distance, especially the one between privileged and deprived people, represents the negation of any relationship between them, and all the more so one of domination.

Furthermore, the syntax of thresholds is fundamentally numerical, quantitative, and calculistic. Distances correlate to measurements: they acquire reality to the extent that they are measured. My investigation into the semantic shift from inequality to distance involves numbers. Inequality, being shaped by quantification and measurements, designates the alignment of unequal positions along a linear sequence. Being flattened out, it loses its political significance. Paradoxically, the spotlight on quantitative data illuminates in the tiniest detail how enormous the imbalances are, but the quantitative format reduces inequality to a linear variance, and obscures vertical power relations.

On the way, quantification will emerge as a part, albeit a salient one, of a wider process of symbolic change in which inequality is being reconfigured as distance. In this process, as we will see, words and spatial choreographies come into play together with numbers, as well as interweavings, assonances, and interdependencies amongst these symbolic registers. This perspective on quantification involves two choices of a methodological nature. Here, firstly, I will look at quantification through the influence that it exercises when conferring meanings to the issues it applies to, that is, by analysing numbers as a language—a (situated and historical) “*langage du rapport à la réalité*”, as Desrosières has put it (Desrosières, 2008, ch. 2). Secondly, quantification is framed within a broader context in which various other languages are at work, so that an investigation can be made of its role (its format and uses) in the symbolic institution of society in a given historical-social context: as part of a “thought style”, to use Mary Douglas’s (and Ludwig Fleck’s) expression.³ When seen from the—indirect, and from the outside, so to speak—perspective adopted here, quantification acquires a significance that is as expressive as it is instrumental: together with tools for knowledge and action, it appears to provide visions as well.

In my conclusions I shall propose some hypothetical remarks about the visions implied by the quantification of inequality, as they seem to express the dream of a domination free from any link with the dominated, morally indifferent and cognitively ignorant towards her/him.
WORDS: THE SEMANTICS OF POVERTY
AND THE SYNTAX OF THE THRESHOLD

The political history of inequality to which I referred above culminated in the development of the welfare states in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. They were the expression of the commitment to reinforcing the social bases of democracy after the devastating experiences of totalitarianism, world wars and mass slaughter, as Alain Supiot has shown in his masterly reconstruction (2010; in a similar vein see also Ken Loach's movie "The Spirit of '45"). Moreover, this development was also stimulated by the challenge posed to European countries by the Soviet Union's collectivist model. Thus labour regulations and systems of social protection were instituted, through different institutional architectures and to different degrees, in the period known as the "*Trente glorieuses*". The welfare state emerged as a political compromise—a deal—between capital and labour (as was still being argued in the literature of the 1970s, for example by Ian Gough [1979]). And the issue of inequality developed within a framework of collective responsibility that called for a redistribution—firstly in relation to labour—not only of goods but also of powers.

The "crisis of the welfare state", officially announced in Italy in the early 1980s, opened a period of welfare restructuring (which is still under way, whether presented as "reforms" or as "modernization"). At that time, my theoretical interests focused on the forms and conditions of institutional change, which I investigated in relation to both the cognitive and normative dimensions, and my main area of research was welfare institutions and policies. It was in this field, therefore, that I began to look more closely at the changes in the vocabulary of welfare used in Italy at both local and national level, from the 1980s onwards, and broadening my focus to include the European Union's social programmes as a crucial source (De Leonardis, 1998, 2000).⁴

*Shifting Words*

I pointed out that certain words had fallen out of use in the current language of the welfare arenas, whilst new ones were being adopted without encountering any significant resistance. After all, the new words expressed good intentions: "the fight against social exclusion", for instance—how could anyone object to that? As I explored these shifts, I
noted (1) the speed of the change and the apparent self-evidence of many of the terms in circulation, with no need for explanation or justification; (2) the sappy rhetoric that dominated discussion; and (3) the reiteration of certain lines of argument that were virtually identical in the various contexts, one highly authoritative source of this being Europe (the European New-speak). This suggested to me that the welfare arena had been subjected to a massive investment in language whilst at the same time "conflicts over the vocabulary" (Fraser, 1989) had attenuated.⁵

We do things with words, as John Austin reminds us: all the more so when they are being used in the official language of a policy or a regulatory system, and therefore have normative force. From this perspective, I focused on the emerging words related to the semantic field of inequality that redefined welfare problems and goals and accompanying discussions on the institutional architecture of welfare (see Fig. 5.1).

<table><caption>**Fig. 5.1** Examined semantic shifts</caption><tbody><tr><td></td><td>Inequality and:</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>oppression</td><td></td><td>poverty</td></tr><tr><td>exploitation</td><td></td><td>social exclusion</td></tr><tr><td>subalternity</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>rights and voices</td><td></td><td>needs and means</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>deservingness</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>responsibility</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Those affected:</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>protesters</td><td></td><td>victims</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>An issue for:</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>contentious politics</td><td></td><td>humanitarian engagement</td></tr><tr><td>antagonism</td><td></td><td>tolerance</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Inequality versus:</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Equality</td><td></td><td>fairness</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>parity</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>proximity</td></tr></tbody></table>
The map (see Fig. 5.1) sums up in an impressionistic fashion the semantic shifts I noted.⁶ I paid special attention to the term “poverty”. After its eclipse in the golden age of the welfare state, where the term denoted a residual phenomenon, “poverty” reappeared in Italy as a category during the 1980s and acquired a central position in the vocabulary—at least as much as in reality. As I pointed out then, “as the subject of poverty acquires increasing significance in welfare policies, it triggers a change in their vocabulary [...] [P]overty becomes the central framework that shapes policy choices [...] no less than scientific research” (De Leonardis, 2000).

In the semantics of poverty, “needs” replace “rights” as the main referents to identify persons vis-à-vis institutions and policies. Indeed, as the issue of poverty came to the fore, references to rights as essential attributes of (social) citizenship dwindled away, and virtually disappeared from the discourse. The term “needs” took their place, and was aligned with the “means” to satisfy them (and the relative “means tests”) provoking an overall reconfiguration of the semantic field of welfare. Moralization and quantification were emerging together as the main drivers of this reconfiguration.

## Moralization

As regards moralization, it could be noted that the needs/means pairing was leading to defining and evaluating welfare issues more in moral than in political terms, more in the vocabulary of judgement on personal responsibility than in that of the law regarding the rights one is entitled to. After all, we already know that this is the role that the category of poverty has played in the moral order of capitalism in general and in the history of labour regulations in particular, since the “primitive accumulation” laws against vagrancy, and then recurrently. The moralizing significance of the poverty issue came into play, for instance, in relation to the urban plebs of Haussmann’s and Hugo’s Paris representing the “question sociale”. Poverty was seen as being associated with moral degradation, criminality and vice, and approached as the matrix of the “classes dangereuses” (Castel, 1995, quoting Chevaliers). The moralizing mark of poverty crops up again and again in the labour movement’s battles for social rights, and particularly when the category of the “unemployed worker” was being constructed. Looking at Britain in the early 1930s and 1940s, Noel Whiteside (Whiteside, 2015; but see also Salais et al., 1986)
accurately identified the place occupied by “the opprobrium heaped onto the idle poor”, whose “demoralization” was assumed to threaten Britain’s economic performance (Whiteside, 2015, p. 153). Together with “[...] free enterprise and [...] the efficacy of financial instruments to address risk”, this moral stigma constitutes that liberal “collective faith” which is implied in the moral order of capitalism. “All features”, Whiteside (2015, p. 153) opportunely adds, “that have proved extremely durable”, as shown by the moralizing process of welfare in Italy promoted by the poverty issue from the 1980s onwards. Once again, at its core lies the great divide between the deserving and the undeserving poor, making access to welfare benefits dependent upon assessment of the recipients’ deservingness.

It is precisely here, in the assessment operations, that the complementary drive of quantification comes into play in the semantics of poverty reconfiguring welfare matters, values and policies. The deservingness principle operates a division between claimants, which must be justified on scientific grounds promising objectivity. The (moral) judgement on the claimant’s deservingness requires scientific evidence grounded on proofs and tests.⁷

## The Threshold

The key tool for scientific assessment and measurement of poverty is the threshold, the poverty line dividing the poor and the not-poor. The scientific division it establishes intersects with the moral division between the deserving and undeserving poor. Fixing the threshold is an integral part of the very definition of poverty, as well as of the policy instrumentation in this area. In the widespread debate on the definition of poverty that developed during the 1970s, issues concerning the categorization of poverty were bound up with both measurement and justice issues, concerning criteria and choices: What indicators are pertinent? Indicators related to income, consumer baskets, or “necessities” taking up Rown-tree’s budgetary approach again? What components should be included, with what scales of equivalence? Whether and how should temporal variations be considered, or the size of the household, or poverty perception, and so on? Discussions hinged on what criteria and what tools should be adopted for determining the poverty threshold, in other words how and where the line should be drawn, how to determine the standard below which life is lived in a condition of poverty.
Of special interest in this respect is the distinction between an “absolute” and a “relative” notion of poverty, which opposed Amartya Sen to Peter Townsend, both key figures in this debate.⁸ It was Townsend who, basing the determination and measurement of poverty on the notion of “relative deprivation”, dictated the terms of the issue, also in the vocabulary of Europe.⁹ Sen has criticized the “relative” definition of poverty arguing that “ultimately poverty must be seen to be primarily an absolute notion” (Sen, 1983, p. 158). There is, says Sen, an “irreducible absolutist core in the idea of poverty” (Sen, 1983, p. 159), which becomes visible from the perspective of capabilities. Capabilities themselves are absolute, if we mean by this term the universal value of the eminently human quality of agency they assess: what constitutes “a derived and variable element” are, instead, the commodities necessary for this quality to flourish. In other words, the determination of poverty based on capabilities raises a question of universal absolutes, whilst taking “a relative form in the space of commodities” (Sen, 1983, p. 161). “Even with exactly the same absolute shortfall [...] a person may be thought to be ‘poorer’ if the other poor have shortfalls smaller than his. [...] Quantification of poverty would seem to need the marrying of considerations of absolute and relative deprivation even after a set of minimum needs and a poverty line have been fixed” (Sen, 1979, p. 293).

This argument underpins the proposal of compromise Sen advances (Sen, 1983, p. 161): “There is no conflict between the irreducible absolutist element in the notion of poverty (relating to capabilities and the standard of living) and the ‘thoroughgoing relativity’ to which Peter Townsend refers, if the latter is interpreted as applying to commodities and resources”. This proposal, which was rejected by Townsend at the time, was eventually taken up again in an operation that closed the controversy: The Copenhagen Declaration, emerging from the 1995 UN Summit, where Townsend was again a protagonist, makes room for the “absolute poverty” sustained by Sen, and interprets the compromise he proposes by establishing a “two-levels definition”. Does this mean everything is settled? Not really. The fact is that in this outcome, the term “absolute” has changed meaning and consequently the compromise in question does not fully correspond to Sen’s intentions and reasoning. Here, the term “absolute” defines the manifestation of poverty in extreme forms consisting in “severe deprivation of basic human needs” (UN, 1995, para. 19). “Absolute” has become a synonym of “severe”. Assuming the existence of an “absolute poverty” has made it possible, in
this official context, to take into account Sen’s perspective on poverty in cross-national measurements and comparisons. At the price, however, of a banalization that makes it equivalent to the lowest level on the scale of poverty, that of subsistence.¹⁰ It should, however, be remembered that Sen himself was perfectly clear:

> The characteristic feature of ‘absoluteness’ is neither constancy over time, nor invariance between different societies, nor concentration merely on food and nutrition. *It is an approach of judging a person’s deprivation in absolute terms... rather than in purely relative terms vis-à-vis the levels enjoyed by others in the society.* (Sen, 1985, p. 673; first emphasis added; second emphasis in original)

Thus, absoluteness defines not so much a type or degree of poverty but an approach, and specifically an approach that does not consider comparisons to be exhaustive for the purpose of defining poverty. Which is precisely the claim of a relativist approach.¹¹ The “absolutist” core Sen insists on has nothing to do with its comparative aspect: it is politically determined. The “absolute” opposed to the “relative” by Sen in this definition calls into play a third term to which the relativities of the comparisons are anchored: terms of reference fixed through political compromises on conflictual issues about ends and values. In the comparative perspective on poverty, the terms of reference are instead determined from within, and emerge from the comparisons themselves. The acceptable level of poverty—expressed in the poverty line—is established by means of comparisons between the poorer and the less poor.

Even absolute poverty, banalized as we have seen, has become congruent with this comparative logic. In the end, it is the relative approach that has prevailed, and fixed a comparative frame for the whole set of categorizing, research, measurements, rankings etc. for determining poverty, which meanwhile has continued to develop. This, then, is the format for knowledge that condenses into the figure of the threshold and constitutes it as the central informational basis—Sen’s “informational basis of judgement in justice”¹²—on which policy choices in the field of poverty and welfare are based.
*Visibility and Obfuscation*

Framed by the threshold, attention is focused on what is happening around the borders, and on how to measure marginal differences, variations, transitions, and suchlike, with important consequences for the definition and treatment of poverty. Here, we draw once again on Sen, who discussed this in his latest book co-authored with Drèze on India (Drèze & Sen, 2013, see specifically ch. 7). On the one hand, attention focusing on thresholds entails a bias towards targeted, differential responses to poverty or inequality issues, which tend to fuel “extremely divisive” effects, segmentation, and dynamics of “exclusion and divisiveness” (Drèze & Sen, 2013, p. 191).

On the other hand, in this way attention is diverted from the substance of the issues, from what is happening below, beyond the poverty line. Concerning the poverty line that was officially established in 2011 in India, Sen and Drèze (2013, p. 189) point out that the ensuing public debate has concentrated on the threshold and the dire level that was established, whilst “missing the main point”: The fact that, “even with this low benchmark, so many people are below it – a full 30% of the population, or more than 350 million people” (Drèze & Sen, 2013, p. 190). In other words, “the terrifying yet hidden nature of mass poverty – its enormous size – has been quite lost” (ibid.), and, as a result, completely ignored. The threshold is a device that fixes a measurement of poverty. And this measurement, a number in fact, whilst giving poverty great public visibility and attention, equally seems to produce effects of obfuscation. From studies on quantification, we are already aware of this type of effect and, in general, of the selective nature of numbers in giving an account of the phenomena they measure. In the case in question, the measure of poverty shaped by the threshold obscures other crucial information on poverty itself—including, of course, other quantitative data (amongst which the percentage of people who do not have a toilet available: around 50%). From Drèze and Sen’s arguments in the following chapters, the impression is given that what is obfuscated and neutralized, is “the grip” of the inequality between “the privileged and the rest” in India today, its enormity, its “outrageousness” (Drèze & Sen, 2013, p. 279). And “the dominance of the privileged” in terms of voice in public reasoning (Drèze & Sen, 2013, ch. 9) is fortified by a systematically diverted attention creating “blind spots” on social failures that are as invisible as they are
serious, like the blind spots that are indeed created when attention is focused on the poverty line.

The threshold constitutes a key device for responding to the need, mentioned above, to give scientific grounds to the definition of poverty. By providing measurement criteria and the resulting standards it makes such definition a correlation of its measurement (specifically in comparative terms, as we have seen). As I noted at the time, when reasoning on the growing popularity of this category in the field of welfare, “the bureaucratic passion for categorisation [...] is being replaced by a computational passion that translates all the issues into terms of measurement” (De Leonardis, 2000, p. 95). I shall now add that the poverty line appears to be a central syntactical element for this translation, precisely because it is a line that establishes a binary code—in/out, above/below, yes/no, 1/0—as a basic frame for public knowledge and action. In this way the poverty line aligns the category of poverty—both in its cognitive and normative values, both as a public issue and as the object of policies at all levels of governance—with its quantitative format.

We shall return later to the paths opened up by this investigation, in order to examine the role played by quantification in reconfiguring inequality. To conclude here the argument on the semantics of poverty, we must look back again at the association between the quantitative format established by the threshold and the equally powerful drive of moralization. And we must emphasize the fact that dynamics of division are triggered by both the moral divide between the deserving and the undeserving poor, and the numerical separation enacted by the line’s binary code. All in all, the semantics of poverty, when observed at close quarters, implicitly denies the promise that had justified the centrality of the “poverty issue” in the welfare field in Italy. Poverty supposed to be an all-encompassing notion overcoming the—widely criticized—category-based welfare system, was as such surrounded by a universalistic aura, whereas a non-universalistic regime of justice was starting to be established just through the category of poverty. A justice which, according to the quantitative parameter of poverty, subjects the welfare claimant to judgement, weighing up needs and means, selecting and awarding prizes and punishments. In the tangle of moralization and quantification a sort of “bookkeeping justice” is to be glimpsed, weighting the benefits granted against the contributions that people make to society understood as a “shared venture”.¹³
SPATIAL CHOREOGRAPHIES:
FROM INEQUALITY TO DISTANCE

The figure of the threshold encourages us to follow another line of inves-
tigation into the semantic change in inequality and the role played by
quantification: “Threshold” is clearly a metaphor, and a spatial one as it
draws a dividing line—in/in/out, above/below, etc.—according to a binary
code. Coming across a spatial metaphor at the heart of the knowledge
infrastructure on poverty might not be so important, were it not for its
assonance with a more general trend towards forms of “spatialization” in
the governance of social issues. All the more so since dividing and sepa-
rating—as the poverty line does—appear to be, as we shall see, a quite
common tendency enacted by these forms.

On the subject of space, space and power, and space as a fundamental
lever of governance, a vast body of research is available. Accumulated
throughout the history of the disciplines devoted to it,¹⁴ this patrimony
has extended its ramifications into the whole corpus of the social sciences.
And from Foucault onwards it has been re-investigated and amplified.
Because of its symbolic power shaping social organization and confer-
ring an order on it, space emblematically represents a technology of
governance that acts indirectly and “at a distance” (Miller & Rose, 1990).

What we learn first and foremost from this background is the basic,
preliminary indication that “space” is not “place”, as Gieryn (2000,
p. 489) has noted. Space is to be “more properly conceived as abstract
geometries (distance, direction, size, shape, volume) detached from mate-
rial form and cultural interpretation [...]. Space is what place becomes
when the unique gathering of things, meanings, and values are sucked
out” (Gieryn, 2000, p. 465).¹⁵ We should therefore consider firstly that
the generative potential of space operates on the territory in the same way,
that is by abstraction, as a map does; and secondly that the language of
this abstraction is a mathematical, or more precisely geometrical language,
once again the language of numbers. As I anticipated, this must be taken
into account first and foremost when investigating the current processes
of “spatialization”, i.e. the diffusion of spatial frames in addressing social
matters, in both cognitive and normative terms, and the growing recourse
to space-based technologies in governance at both global and local (city)
level.¹⁶

Well in advance Foucault (2001) noted these trends postulating that
whilst, “[T]he great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know,