Accounting for Who We Are and Could Be: Inventing Taxonomies of the Self in an Age of Uncertainty

by | Oct 12, 2021 | Research Publications

Author(s):

  • Uwe Vormbusch

Abstract:

Self-trackers are confronted with economic and cultural uncertainty as two fundamental traits of late-modern capitalism. Coping with uncertainty in this context means the calculative quest for discovering the representational forms by which the plurality of individual capabilities as well as the plurality of the cultural forms of living can be inscribed into common registers of worth. Drawing on Foucault as well as the Sociology of Critique, this paper emphasizes the moral and cognitive conflicts accompanying the emergence of self-quantification and points to the contradictions and ambivalences this involves: self-inspection as a form of enabling accounting and emancipation, on the one hand, versus an extension of instrumental rationality to hitherto incommensurable and incalculable entities, on the other.

Documentation:

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78201-6_4

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