Critical ethnography of the self

and injustice of the corporate control of daily search activities and the way that knowledge is being censored through Google’s advertisement models, personalisation and surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2015), which I will explain in the forthcoming chapters.

Following Alexander Galloway, the critical is defined as that which is ‘contestational’ to hegemony, such as Google Search. In The Cybernetic Hypothesis, Galloway attends to the problem of hegemony that is ‘not simply limited to a hierarchy of domination and

subordination’ but whether or not ‘certain claims about knowledge or reality are recapitulative or critical of the hegemonic position’ (2014:126). Moreover, he emphasises the ability to identify critique ‘as a specific shift in the relative value of recapitulative versus contestational claims’, with his ‘update’ of the Kantian question:

Is thought as such dictated by the regularity of an inherited structure, or is thought only possible by virtue of an asymmetrical and autopositional posture vis-à-vis the object of contemplation? Having inherited the computer, are we obligated to think with it? (ibid).

In Chapter 1 I explained how the ‘address office’ brought people together who had similar interests, organising their data in one place––a register or ‘Protocollbuch’. Nowadays, evidenced through the very act of conducting research, where the habit of searching––querying, clicking on links, reading and writing––is captured by computers instead of registers, it exemplifies what Foucault described in his text Technology of the Self (1994). The ‘technology of the self’

consisted of the ethopoeien that ‘means making ethos, producing ethos, changing, transforming ethos, the individual’s way of being, his mode of existence’ (ibid:237). The ethopoiein was in turn comprised of two forms, correspondence, not personal accounts but rather the ‘recurrence of discourse by the “citational” practice under the seal of age and authority’ and hupomnemata (ibid:271). With the former, I carry out correspondence with algorithms and conduct research, which also includes referencing the knowledge of others, as part of contemporary

communication circuits, merging online search with ‘re:search’, as shown in Chapter 3. The latter, hupomnema, was a personal archive in which one writes down what one has read and heard (or in my case, searched for) whilst preserving the ethos (ibid:237).⁷⁵

Foucault states that hupomnema has a ‘very precise meaning: it is a copybook, a note’ and this technology was ‘coming into vogue’ for ‘personal and administrative use’ in Plato’s era yet it was as disruptive to Greek society as the computer’s invasion of the private sphere is today (ibid:272). He enumerates that hupomnemata were the ‘technical and material framework’ from which writing and the self came about and that it didn’t matter ‘whether a text is written or oral’

because the problem concerned ‘whether or not the discourse in question gives access to truth’

(ibid). Hupomnemata and the ‘culture of self’ converge with the ‘government of the self’, with Foucault providing a historical comparison between ‘governments and those who managed enterprises’––writing down their administration in registers––to those among the ancients who

‘carried on this politics of themselves with these notebooks’ (ibid).⁷⁶ Harkening back to the registers in Chapter 1, the managing of oneself is carried out through these ‘new instruments’ in a ‘permanent relationship’ to oneself––‘one must manage oneself as a governor manages the

75 I was reminded of the Foucault’s warning in regard to the archive: ‘The archive is neither the sum of all texts that a culture preserves nor those institutions that allow for that record’s preservation. The archive is rather that “system of statements,” those “rules of practice” that shape the specific regularities of what can and what cannot be said’

(Foucault 1972:79-134).

76 Although Foucault cites earlier sources, it was commonplace in literary studies to recognize Montaigne as the

‘first great autobiographer’ (ibid: 276), who wrote about his fathers’ techne of oikos (Chapter 1).

governed, as a head of an enterprise manages his enterprise, a head of household manages his household’ (ibid).

Foucault emphasises the shift from the practice of ‘knowing thyself’ to the ethic of ‘taking care’

of oneself that developed ‘toward definite objectives such as retiring into oneself, reaching oneself, living with oneself, being sufficient to oneself, profiting by and enjoying oneself’

(ibid:274). He continues by stating

the principal work of art which one must take care of, the main area to which one must apply aesthetic values, is oneself, one’s life, one’s existence… It was a question of making one’s life into an object for a sort of knowledge, for a tekhne-for an art (ibid).

Thus the Technology of the Self was also a techne for an art, where the question of producing knowledge reappears fused with certain kinds of knowledge about oneself and is related to what Foucault defined as ‘truth games’. Whereas Foucault’s Technology of the Self refers to daily writing, for me it is searching––captured and annotated through the ‘mediality’ of

hupomnemata. Rather than notes, registers, ledgers or paper it is hupomnemata––computers (hardware) and their ubiquitous unseen interfaces (software), with which I searched as a ‘critical ethnography of the self’, simultaneously citing the works of other researchers.

Referencing Kittler’s ‘commands, addresses and data’ (1999), ‘prescriptive’ commands play an inherent part in the organisational aspects of this ‘critical ethnography of the self’. According to Ursula Franklin, the ‘prescriptive’ ‘is a whole set of social arrangements, characterised by the pervasive mechanisation of mass production, all bundled together in a single social system’

(1989). ‘Prescriptive’ technologies are then a practice, how it organises work and people

(1989:04), as it is an ‘important social innovation’ that commands, ‘because they are designs for internal compliance and discipline, order and obedience’ (ibid). Reflecting on the ubiquitous technologies of her time, Franklin links the action of typing on a word processor to a

workstation (office) with a system where ‘assignments can be broken up and timed’ and the

‘interaction between operators can be monitored’ (ibid). Moreover, prescriptive technologies

‘become normalised because everyone thinks there is only one-way of doing it’ (ibid).

Franklin deems this commandeering as ‘a seedbed for orthodoxy’ that makes those who participate enter into a milieu of external control where they become acculturated, which is analogous to the hegemony of Google Search today (and personalisation). Constantly receiving and subsequently clicking on links, as a personalised subject I govern myself voluntarily and constantly in a 24/7 field of operations. Because there were no colleagues readily available to answer my technical questions, I often consulted the ‘oracle’ (Google) on my personalised Apple computer for advice, or read manuals, visited websites or watched ‘how to guides’ and tutorials. I received recommendations (I allowed this in the Google settings) on YouTube and I incorporated personalised search results into my research, which I will discuss in forthcoming chapters.⁷⁷

77 Owned by Google since 2009, YouTube is a database, which can be searched and has its own recommendation algorithms that provide suggestions to users in the playlists. I watched the suggested ‘Eli the computer guy’ videos on YouTube who advised me how to search with Tor and TAILS on the Dark Net for Chapter 6.