The practices of QS reveal a specific hermeneutic of the self, based on the subtle choices made by individuals in the collection, dissemination and interpretation of data.
The optimistic argument would be based on the opposition between the way Big Data works (n = all; sample covering the entire population) and the way QS works (n = 1; sample covering a single individual). In QS, each individual works on his or her own data, questioning it on two levels. The first involves the appropriateness of the data in relation to established categories, and contributes, for example, to the individual's own understanding of 'health' which does not necessarily correspond to that of the medical institution. The second is to question the automation of data processing, making decisions about its relevance on a case-by-case basis, and sometimes putting it on hold.
This would result in an idiosyncratic approach, and the impression of the emergence of the very categories according to which the data is understood, categories which do not boil down to what is imposed on the subject from outside. In this sense, these QS go beyond the disciplinary paradigm developed by Foucault: here, the internalisation of the norm is no longer simply dictated by a top-down process, but is initiated by the subject himself. One might see in this movement the missing link between individual practices and increasing digitisation, an outline of “reterritorialization” that gives a personal meaning to digitisation.
But do these idiosyncratic “norms” offer any real potential for emancipation? What are the effects of this process on subjectivity?
We argue that the technical understanding of the body by the subject is extended by the incorporation of these data into itself. The feedback loop goes from algorithmically processed data and its visualisation to the effects on the body. The body is incorporating what the data shows, of the user's behaviour is modified according to the patterns in the data. It's literally a matter of translating data into sensations.
As with any transduction operation, the two terms – the living body and the processed data – influence each other, and the body also turns into something else. Through this transduction, the incorporation of data bears the trace of digital processing. This amounts to imposing the logic and syntax of this processing on the bodily subjectivity. This syntax of the quantification of the qualitative values (i.e. of sensation) constitutes a metric of itself in which "the semantic components become digital", to use the expression employed by Deleuze and Guattari in their 1975 lecture on increasing computerization. As they also note, all syntax is a system of order and constraints on the possible. We can see, then, from the horizon of QS practices, that the field of what is felt by subjectivity is exclusively delimited by the measurable and the digitisable, even if it is processed in an 'autonomous' way by the individual.
We need only think of the example of the feeling of happiness - the fact of thematising and making explicit that we are happy by interpreting the data - effectively depends on its incorporation. It is not pre-existing 'happiness' that is revealed by data analysis, but the very category of happiness that is produced by the digital syntax at work.
But the crux of the problem seems to lie elsewhere. The assumption that the norms born of these practices are not imposed from above, that “incorporation” at work is not that of a “disciplined” body in Foucault's sense, is actually misleading. It fails to take into account the shift from the disciplinary regime to the regime of control or modulation, which was foreshadowed by the last Foucault and developed by Deleuze. The distinctive feature of the modulation regimes to which the neoliberal individual belongs is precisely that they do not impose norms. On the contrary, they institute an operating regime that makes the individual responsible for and entrepreneurial of himself, while at the same time modulating, through power mechanisms, what may or may not constitute the horizon of that individual's practices. In the QS, this modulation takes the form of self-metrics based on digital syntax, leading to the establishment of an immanent, individualized 'norm' which loses its normative character in favor of the modulation of the individual and his or her “machinic enslavement” (Guattari). This individual standard, a 'small variation' that certainly gives the impression of a nascent standard and autonomy, is nonetheless subject to the “devices” that define its contours. As Guattari notes, "you can only state anything about your desire, your life, insofar as it is compatible with the computer machine of the system as a whole [...]".
What we have here, then, is a specific mode of reterritorialising the existential territory that is the body itself. This mode is correlated with what we call the 'granularisation' of behaviour, in the dual sense of an 'individual norm' and the now digital syntax of its understanding, brought about by the advent of 'societies of control’.
