The Biopolitics of Sensation, Techniques of Quantification, and the Production of a “New” Sensorium

Abstract

The Biopolitics of Sensation, Techniques of Quantification, and the Production of a "New" Sensorium Mark Paterson (bio) Through rapidly developing and increasingly portable technologies of measurement we have become accustomed to devices that perform biometric data collection, that beam geolocation data via social media platforms and cloud-based services to produce heat maps of metadata. There is even a curious experiential aesthetic involved in responding to visual and haptic cues glimpsed on screens and felt on wrists, with a continuous feed of nudge, admonishment, or praise during waking hours and the reward of time-compressed graphs of tracked sleeping patterns during the night. Of course, fun can be had by gaming the persistence of the surveillance system for the sake of art, producing large-scale art installations with self-tracking data like Laurie Frick's Floating Data, Walking Patterns (2014; see Urist 2015), which displayed her walking patterns as building-size metal cutouts for all to see, or more prosaically Claire Wyckoffusing Nike+ GPS to draw penises and space invaders on maps with its Draw Running function (Parkinson 2014). But the focus of this paper is neither on the supposed ubiquity of technologies of self-tracking or biometric data collection, per se, nor on the direct or indirect use of data for artistic production. Instead, my argument considers the ways in which such technologies have begun to trouble popular imaginaries of the "natural" body, including some of the physiological processes underpinning and regulating bodily activity, and hence reconfigure the sensorium. Once visible only to scientists or medics, streams of data and new forms of graphical inscription now seem to be erupting from the previously [End Page 67] uncharted, unmeasurable interior of the body. Graphs, pulses, and a whole host of numerical data, including heart rate, steps, and distance, are now widely accessible through portable monitoring devices such as Fitbit, Android Wear, and Apple Watch. The roots of the recent quantified self (QS) movement arguably lie in scientific forms of rationalization that occur in modernity, that productive cultural-historical period that responded to the increasing industrialization of the body, a time incidentally in which Walter Benjamin remarked on the complex training of the human sensorium. Scholars such as Parisi (2011), Lupton (2016), and O'Neill (2017) have looked to historical precedents for the scientific measurement of diverse kinds of bodily activity, with O'Neill looking specifically at portable apparatus in the nineteenth century, such as the pulse-measuring sphygmograph, first invented in 1854 but made portable by Étienne-Jules Marey in 1863. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is twofold. First, complementing this renewed interest in the wake of the quantified self, it furthers the historical reach to better understand a nineteenth-century framework that, along with producing instruments of measure, also sought to establish the sensorial norms of human populations through physiological experimentation, and which brought forth a series of highly specialized tools and equipment specifically for the recording and measurement of variable and ill-defined somatic sensations. To this end, a series of related historical slices (or more aptly, "samples") of such biosocial apparatuses for the measurement and normalization of sensation are offered in the first half of the paper. Second, differing from the straightforward historical narrative of the rise of quantification in terms of the accumulation of data about the body and sensation, the paper suggests how conceptions of hitherto underresearched and invisible "natural" bodily sensations become quantifiable, and therefore, visible, and consequently how the new techniques of measurement thereby "produce" a collective sensorium. The necessity to isolate and determine certain somatic data, especially with regard to pain and touch, become progressively decoupled from specific sense organs and consequently more imbued with aggregate criteria of normality, abnormality, and deviance. Yet it is in the area of aesthetics and entertainment where techniques for measuring the data of sensation have been leveraged to reflexively engage and feed back into the new postnatural sensorium. Inevitably, with the new [End Page 68] measurability and therefore scientific rationalization of previously indistinct sensations such as touch, pain, and fatigue, for example, this problematizes the assumed nature of a "sense" or "sense modality" in the first place. What seems self-evidently "natural," the sensate body...