Lupton, D. (2019) Data selves: more-than-human perspectives. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity.

I am not sure when I started following Deborah Lupton’s blog or how I came across it but as we were preparing the installation for Pic London, I read her post about the forthcoming publication of her book Data Selves in my WordPress app. The word ‘assemblage’ stood out as one of the other artists, Josh Phillips had mentioned it several times. I wrote about it here and mentioned a discomfort with the word as it felt like an adjective that was being used as a noun. I have become used to the word now and it no longer jars every time I hear it. (I am not sure why I felt annoyed by the word – irrational irritation perhaps.)

Whatever the reasons, the work our group constructed, A rumour reached the village (2019) might be described as an assemblage of many smaller assemblages. There is something fractal about the ‘village’ of things we constructed. And so after reading Lupton’s blog, I ordered her book and am glad to have read it now, not only because it seems so relevant to my overall inquiry in which I am attempting to make sense of the way in which digital culture is changing the structural nature of existence, but because it led me to Karen Barad’s work. Actually, Barad had been mentioned to me before by another of my Pic London collaborators, Rowan Lear. But her name only sunk in while reading Data Selves.  

I expect I will need to investigate Barad further for CS and BOW but in the meantime here are some quotations from Lipton’s book with page numbers that could come in handy.

• “Popular representations of these personal data and their futures often lean towards polar extremes.” (4)
• “lively data” and “these data can continue to be lively even once the human they refer to is dead” (6)
• “function creep”  – tech used in ways that go beyond their original purpose. (8)
• Surveillance Capitalism (8)  – see https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook
• “predictions that are made by data analytics can result in predictive privacy harms, in which people can be categorized against within certain social groups” (8) (See end of book where she talks about the limitations of data analytics – how our paranoia that too much is known about us prevents us from seeing how basic and limiting the categorisations can be (124)
• (13 – NB pa) Personal data blur and challenge many of the binary oppositions and cultural boundaries that dominate in contemporary Western societies.
• Rather than user – exister Amanda Lagerkvist (2017)
• “In new materialism, the poststructuralist emphasis on language, discourse, and symbolic representation is enhanced by a turn torwards the material: particularly human embodied practices and interactions with objects, space and place.” (15)
• “Braidotti (2018) terms ‘critical posthumanities’, in which the concept of human exceptionalism is done away with. This more-than-human approach sees human bodies as extending beyond their fleshy envelopes into the physicalenvironmentt, while the environment likewise colonised human bodies” (15)
• “If we view personal digital data as manifestations of vitality, as recording, monitoring and influencing human lives, generating biolvalue and indeed as essentially part of humans, then they become part fo the domain of biopolitics.” (15)
• “Feminist new materialists celebrate the renewal and liveliness of the capacities that human-nonhuman assemblages generate at the same time as identifying the ways in which these capacities can be closed off or limit the freedoms and potentials of some people or social groups or generate harm for the more-than-human world, as in environmental degradation, global warming, species extinction, pollution and climate change.” (17)
• “While digital data assemblages are often conceptualised as immaterial, invisible and intangible, I contend that they are things that are generated in and through material devices (smartphones, computers, sensors), stored in material archives (data repositories), materialised in a range of formats that invite human sensory responses and have material effects on human bodies (documenting and having recursive effects on human flesh (19)
• See quote by Koro-Ljungber et al. 2017; Taylor et al. 2018) NB
• Diffractive methodology  – making entanglements visible. Barad suggests a diffractive approach is “good to think with”. (21) I agree. (Also 29)
• More-than-human rather than posthuman (22) good para over to 23 – “interconnected and trans-agential.” Life, or vitality is not seen as possessed by any individual actor, but rather as constantly generated” (24)
• Line about Caterisan dualism between mind and body (but see Alan Jasanoff (2018) for this too)
• Animism – (25) quotes Haraway ” human ontologies must be understood as multiple and dynamic rather than fixed and essential (Bhavnani and Haraway, 1994)
• Haraway’s ‘composite’ theory (26) See my own comments in BOW A2. (tentacular thinking)
• Barad – “humans don’t know about the world because they are observing from outside it. They know about the world because they are inseparably part of it” (27)
• Re agential cuts (29) And “Photographs make agential cuts that produce life forms rather than simply documenting them. “It is a way of giving form to matter” (Kember and Sylinska 2012:84) See 45 Years in lit review. more about agential cuts here: https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/a/agential-cut.html – “Any attempt to impose meaning and order” […] “inevitably part of the matter it seeks to preserve or document” . Link this to Flusser and apparatus  – what he says about photographers (funny!)
• Thing power and enchantment (30) “strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence and aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience” Quoting Jane Bennett (2001 and 2009) – compare this to OOO Graham Harmen
• Page 31 – assemblage “function of grouping of different things in an assemblage, each operating in conjunction with the others (including humans)” (Bennett 2004: 354)
• 32 – Bennett recognises “mass-produced commodities as possible sites of enchantment” NB para
• 33 – others working in technological design …recognise “humans invest digital devices with animistic or magical properties” See Marx and use-value.
• 39 “death is more of a continuum” see page 40 too (Re mummies text)
• 42/43 Summary about human and non-human entanglement inc. data and machine.
• Liquid metaphor “data sweat” (Melissa Gregg 2015) ; data leaking, emerging from within the body to outside  – reveal ambivalence to data as it moves between “high value and useless – or even disgusting – waste product” (Abjection) 46
• 53 uncanny valley, not quite right, see Mario Klingman – my blog S&O
• 57 – Good Kristeva quote re creepiness, abjection.
• 59 – Dirty data, “What matter is considered dirty or clean?” – attitudes can be related to underlying fears and anxieties about loss of control. Rowan Lear suggested the following after I posted a picture of the mould produced by her yeast started in the collective work and a picture of this section of the book – https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/against-purity?fbclid=IwAR1W0EQEaOOzd4jWd1Knp2iBmyse8bB22tN6sM0GayAg7o33KF1KyVo-Yj0
• 63 – emphasis on all senses, not just visual “data physicalisations” See http://dataphys.org. Plenty of artists listed who are making alternative to visual art drawn from data
• 68 NB – bias/visual data materialisations  – instead list artists making “multisensory, unconventional and surprising” materialisations
• Doing Data chapter – less than critical of some of the neoliberal ways in which data is enmeshed with people’s lives, potentially making them more rather less neurotic. Little critical analysis, more reporting of her data about how this affects people who use the data.
• Sharing and exploiting data  – caring/intimate surveillance concerns 103

The first section of the book is probably the most useful to me as it expresses ideas that I have found while reading about systems, a move away from mind-body dualism and digitisation’s impact on our perception of a less fragmented world. It is one of many books and articles which follow on from Kathryn Hayle’s posthuman book which has been so influential for me. I am inundated by such essays on Academia since reading a number of them. I like the sensible and pragmatic relationship Lupton has with data and technology even though she doesn’t seem all that critical of some aspects of data monitoring which strike me as nuts/unhealthy/hellish such as the constant surveillance of babies breathing – this kind of thing is very telling about our society and I could probably write a thesis on it alone.