PLEASE CONFIRM YOUR IDENTITY
- by Flora Löffelmann
“Please confirm your identity.” At the most inconvenient times, this message pops up, seemingly only to annoy us. Usually, it catches us off-guard when we are just trying to quickly check our emails or unwind to some TV shows or films (1) . It reveals, once again: No, the algorithm does not care. In the form of a computer voice spelled out on a screen, it dares to ask us the most basic question. “Of course I am who I’m supposed to be – who else would I be?”, we silently scream at the screen. Yet, reluctantly, we once again obey the law of data – only those who give, get – and enter our details without further ado.
What does the computer want from us? A confirmation that we are the same we were the last time we logged in. After all, identity stems from sameness – but who is “the same”, and in which respects? Let’s take a closer look at the concept of “identity” the computer’s question implies. What is this “identity” the computer assumes we can so easily confirm? Basically, it’s about the relationship between you – physically present in front of your screen – and a bunch of data that is stored someplace and represents “you”: name, place and date of birth, sex. With emerging technologies there are, of course, way more data snippets that can be linked to you. Whether you track your sleeping habits or menstrual cycle via an app or use a supermarket’s benefits card – all of these add up to what, data-wise, represents “you”.
Concerning the relation between the physical “you” and the data stored someplace else, your virtual identity can easily be identified as the result of a process of data collection. But how about your personal identity? Isn’t it something you feel and perceive, and, most importantly, live? Isn’t identity something that is truly “yours”? If we follow traditional humanist (2) conceptions of identity, there is something at the core of all human “selves”, which is human nature. This essentialist (3) point of view implies the idea of some sort of authenticity (4) one can attain through self-help books and meditation. The connotation: If there is a core, we can unveil it, get close to it. It also implies that we can gradually defer from it, be untrue to it, betray it, making the attainment of our “most authentic self” ultimately a life-long project with a high risk of failure.
By the late 1970s, the philosopher Michel Foucault (5) shifted this subject-centered concept of identity by suggesting that it is in fact social institutions like schools, hospitals and prisons which influence what we conceptualize as good or bad behavior, desirable or undesirable. The “self”, formerly deemed independent from the outside world, is unmasked as always embedded in a complex network of power relations which influence not only what we do, but also what we are capable of doing. In a more language-centered approach, the linguist John L. Austin (6) , in his “speech act theory”, focused on what we actually “do” when we use language: Naming things has a big influence on how we experience them, and “performative utterances” (7) can in fact will things into existence.In an expansion of both Austin’s notion of performativity of language and Foucault’s emphasis on institutions and the regulative function of their specific discourses, philosopher Judith Butler 8 , in the early 90s, coined the notion of a cultural construction of identity. In Butler’s view, everything we do is performative: In every instance of our lives, we re-iterate (9) actions and words that produce the phenomena around us – as well as ourselves, our “identity”. This implies that “we’re all doing drag, all the time”(10) , to quote RuPaul, famous host of RuPaul’s Drag Race. The idea that we can never not perform debunks the idea of a “core” human identity that is uninfluenced by what
surrounds us, since we are all just reiterating notions of identity – gender identity, in Butler’s main argument – we picked up along the way.
How do we still make sense of ourselves? According to Butler and others, we establish our “identity” by telling stories of ourselves or by reflecting about things we experience. (11) This makes identity something which is very contextual, fluid, and, maybe most importantly, social. Identity, thus, is not something that can be fixed to a “core” of some sort, but emerges as a result of the processes of naming, identification and classification that happen to us or that we actively perform throughout our lives. (12)
Where does this short history of identity from a philosophical perspective lead us concerning the computerized utterance “Please confirm your identity”? I would suggest we take Butler’s notion of every action’s performativity very seriously. Just like a human agent asking the same question would, the computer calls our identity into question by asking us to “confirm our identity”. (13) But in doing so, it simultaneously helps establishing it. The computer becomes an “other”, a conversation partner, providing a snippet of interaction that helps form a sense of who we are. “Of course I am who I’m supposed to be – who else would I be?” – Our initial reaction to the computer unveils that it has already worked: For a short moment we have no doubt that we are, in fact, who we are supposed to be. And that’s actually a pretty rare thing.
Footnotes:
(1) I love to look up movie lists but rarely have time to watch them, but here’s one featuring films about queer women of color I am dying to see: https://www.bitchmedia.org/post/10-films-featuring-queer-women-of-color-lesbian-bisexual-movies. And here’s a list of New Queer Cinema films, I saw most of them during a uni class and would love more people to talk to about them! https://www.vulture.com/article/new-queer-cinema-movies.html
(2) If you want to know more about humanism and the alternatives that exist to it, check out this interview with philosopher Cary Wolfe: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/opinion/is-humanism-really-humane.html.
(3) To get more familiar with essentialism and what it implies, you can check out this collection of articles:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/essentialism.
(4) For more information on philosophy’s long history concerning the question of authenticity, see:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authenticity/.
(5) For those who want to get into Foucault, I can recommend reading the 1975 book Discipline and Punish, published in English in 1977. But you have to be aware: it’s showing you things you will not be able to unsee! Also great: The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and The History of Sexuality (1976).
(6) Austin is also a fun author to read. His 1962 How to Do Things with Words is a classic.
(7) Examples of performative utterances are all the sentences that include verbs such as promise, name, bet, agree, swear, declare, order, predict, warn, insist, declare or refuse.
(8) You might be familiar with some of Butler’s key concepts such as the performativity of gender (and sex!) from her most famous books, the 1990 Gender Trouble and the 1993 Bodies that Matter. I can also highly recommend reading her political philosophy books such as the 2010 Frames of War which was influenced by the 2001 9/11 attacks and their global political aftermath. Although this may seem like a lifetime ago, her writing about vulnerability and grievability as core human values provides a useful lens to look at today’s politics.
(9) Meaning: To repeat with a slight alteration. It was the French philosopher Jacques Derrida who first coined a philosophical use of the term “iteration” in a lecture titled “Signature, Event, Context” in 1971. Derrida is a super interesting theorist to read, also because of his his very peculiar use of language: He always looks at different sides of each word and its use in different contexts, which leads to many AHA-moments. You might have also heard of his iconic method, deconstruction, which aims at destabilizing hierarchies by showing that they are the product of long processes of social construction, and not “natural”.
(10) Full quote: “The deeper level of drag is all about, you’re born naked and the rest is drag. And that’s political, it’s very punk rock, it’s very radical. It’s this idea that you are not your body. You are an extension of the power that created the whole universe. That’s drag. We are all God in drag. […] And that is a radical thought for most people to envelope, because the ego says, ‘No. I am whatever it says on my driver’s license”. https://www.thewrap.com/rupaul-explains-why-we-are-all-god-in-drag/.
(11) Stewart Hall calls this process “narrativization” in his 1996 essay “Who needs ‘Identity’?”: “[Identities] arise from the narrativization of the self, but the necessarily fictional nature of this process in no way undermines its discursive, material or political effectivity, even if the belongingness, the ‘suturing into the story’ through which identities arise is, partly, in the imaginary (as well as the symbolic).” (Hall 1996:4)
(12) If you ask yourself how agency or moral responsibility are still possible when the “self” is manifold and fluid, you should take a look into Butler’s 2005 book Giving an Account of Oneself. By drawing on Theodor W. Adorno’s notion that ethics is only possible if it can be made one’s own, therefore necessitating an “I” of some sorts, she demonstrates that, by recognizing our relational condition, an ethical life is possible.
(13) This point is tricky, since one could argue that, ultimately, it’s a human who programmed the computer to ask the identity question. Nevertheless, I think that, in the moment of computer-human-interaction, we do not necessarily reflect on these preconditions. Rather, studies show that humans tend to “humanize” their technological companions anyways: ”People not only can but do treat computers, televisions, and new media as real people and places. Studies demonstrate that people are ‘polite’ to computers; that they treat computers
Sources:
Austin, John L. (1962): How to Do Things with Words. The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Butler, Judith (1990): Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel (1977): Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison.
Hall, Stewart (1996): “Who needs ‘Identity’?”. In: Hall, Stuart/ Du Gay, Paul (Eds.): Questions of Cultural Identity. London/Thousand Oaks/ New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Reeves, Byron (1996): The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New
Media Like Real People and Places. Stanford/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.