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Notes

Moeller (2021) You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity

Header image: KF in Dall-E

Moeller, H., & D’Ambrosio, P.J. (2021). You and your profile: Identity after authenticity. Columbia University Press.

Identity enables us to accept the face we see in the mirror as our own. We need it for coming to terms with the “grotesque mask” that we see there, which cannot be stripped away. We must identify with this face so that it does not appear to us as “an outrageous disguise,” or if so, then just for a moment. When we leave the bathroom, we need to trust that the image we project expresses our thoughts and feelings quite naturally, and we need to prepare ourselves for the fact that everyone else will take this face to be precisely who we are.

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TOURISM

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.” ― G.K. Chesterton

[taken from Iftody (2013) [KF: the profilic tourist sees/stages how they wish to be seen]

  • Perhaps he does not understand, being a middle-aged European, how tourism, along with all society, has changed—and how it is moving on from an older, “bourgeois” paradigm of “authentic discovery” to a new “democratic” one of profile-building exercise.
    • Apparently our middle-aged European friend did not yet understand the joy of tourism under conditions of profilicity.
  • Tourism today means taking part in a public performance—like going to a show, a parade, or a protest.
  • I travel to make my trips part of my profile, to actualize the “profilic” potential of tourism. It is a demonstration to myself and to others that I, too, am a traveler.
  • By projecting my travels to others, I curate my identity—

READ: D’Ambrosio, P. J., & Moeller, H. (2019). From authenticity to profilicity: A critical response to roberto simanowski and others. New German Critique, 46(2), 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-7613218

  • In earlier times, identity was typically assigned by the social roles one was born into. (gender, tribal or ethnic identity, social class, profession, religion.)
  • In modernity, society became more dynamic…The conception of the social role as a “mask” covering up one’s true identity became a prime metaphor along with the newly emerging quest for what now seemed to be the foundation of identity: authenticity.
  • Today, society has switched almost entirely to second-order observation. This means, in line with sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s usage of the term, we do not simply look at people or issues directly but rather at how they are seen publicly by others. To judge a restaurant, we look first at its reviews on Yelp!…
  • We have developed the ability to judge products in terms of brands, and people in terms of their profiles. We observe first how things are seen.
  • We form identity through curating profiles. Profiles are images of ourselves presented for second-order observation. By looking at them, others can see how we like to be seen as being seen.
  • In a society where we need to interact with people whom we have no time, no desire, and no need to know authentically or sincerely, we often know one another through profilicity. This works.
  • Where second-order observation is pervasive, profilicity is the most advanced identity technology. In many areas of society today, being successful, or simply being, relies heavily on profilicity. We are in it together.
    • KF: section bounces off Air BNB “superhost” and Chinese social credit system
    • KF: prolific profilicity
  • How should it be possible to publicly present a political cause, or a social critique, without at the same time curating one’s personal profile and without using capitalist communication tools and platforms?

The way in which individuals and collectives pursue identity is an integral part of the way society functions. People, including the readers and writers of this book, shape their identity by proffering profiles and then hoping for their social validation. This is “profilicity.” Political organizations, economic corporations, and nation-states all make use of it. In a society where profilicity has become dominant, individuals and social systems apply it in their everyday operations. Identity work, in the form of work on our profiles, is the real issue.

  • Is a merely authentic concern for a cause, or purely sincere commitment to it, really possible? The nineteenth-century German philosopher Max Stirner suspected any dedication to a cause to be an inauthentic form of self-denial. Truly authentic people would have no cause at all other than their own self, he stipulated.18 We suspect something different: the more intensely one identifies with a cause, the more “self-ish” the cause becomes.
  • If climate change or civil rights should turn out to be no longer an issue, the identity of those identifying with these causes would be undermined and deflated. One’s profile—built and maintained with sometimes a lifetime of effort, and in which one is thus deeply invested—would lose its social validity and become obsolete.
    • KF: People going “all in” – the necessity of certainty – like our “causes” represent elements of our financial portfolio (they represent elements of our identity portfolio) – our identity portfolio is devalued if our causes are seen to “lose” – [Trump V Dems]
  • The higher the degree of identification with a cause, the more one’s identity itself becomes one’s real cause.
  • Morality has commonly been understood in terms of being or doing good. Under conditions of profilicity… morality consists largely in communicating what is right: what we say is the morally most visible and significant aspect of what we are and what we do.
  • In authenticity, along with its inward turn on the quest for identity, a shift from role ethics to an individualist ethics takes place.
  • A regime of authenticity requires constant concern with and emphasis on uniqueness, creativity, and autonomy. One must not only strive for these values but also voice one’s support for them. Otherwise it is difficult to find recognition, to distinguish oneself, and to accrue moral value of one’s identity.
    • KF: It’s not enough that you believe it or actually do it, you have to SAY it!
  • Profilic morality consists in proclamations complying with a targeted public opinion.
  • Profiles are addressed to a larger, personally unknown public—to the “general peer.” Unlike in sincerity, where those whom one knows best are in the privileged position to confirm one’s identity, in profilicity those whom one does not know personally count the most.
  • a crucial difference between authenticity and profilicity and their respective ethics: authentic morality appeals to the inner conviction of individuals, whereas profilic morality appeals to the judgments of second-order observation.
  • The ethics of profilicity is concerned with the presentation of the self, and it is this presentation that requires curation. The superior person is the one whose opinions…collect the most likes.

FROM BRAND TO PROFILE

  • Virtue speech is an essential feature of identity work on one’s profile. Without a moral dimension, the profile of a person or of an organization appears incomplete.
  • The notion of “branding” is becoming increasingly dated. It is too one-dimensional and static (Tesla / MAC = “lifestyle”)
  • Today, employees are required to perform identity work alongside their managerial and manual responsibilities. They display the identity of their company, which in turn becomes part of their own profiles. The profile symbiosis between employers and employees is increasingly obvious in almost every sector of the capitalist economy, including university education. ““diversity statements”
  • All identity modes are necessarily paradoxical—and they are useful not despite but precisely because of this characteristic… we inhabit bodies we did not chose, are subject to all kinds of psychological experiences that are in large part beyond our control, and need to enact multiple persona that are often in contradiction with one another.
  • Social media users validate each other’s profiles. These profiles are quite worthless, however, without validation feedback loops; on their own they simply have no validity.
    • KF: truthiness determined by likes – if enough people are watching, you may have to “walk the walk”: at the very least, you must continue to “talk the talk”
  • As projections, they are in need of being reflected and perceived to become real.
    • KF: As projections, they need a surface / screen on which they can be displayed, or the image disperses into the light spectrum
  • In today’s academia, for instance, papers not cited by other scholars count little on one’s

Profilicity is not new. It existed long before the internet and did not succeed because of social media. To the contrary, social media propelled itself to the center of capitalism by exploiting the potentials of profilicity. By providing platforms for the production of profilicity for almost everyone, social media accumulated an enormous amount of financial value, outperforming almost every other sector of the economy.

2 PROFILICITY

  • Postmodernist philosopher Judith Butler sees human identity as multifarious, without a defining essence. We continuously reconstruct our identities in response to what circumstances we find ourselves in. In her book Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Butler also explores ethical aspects of her take on selfhood.
  • Identity is assumed and communicated in presenting incomplete and partially uncontrollable accounts of who we are to others.
    • KF: think, recreation in Kathmandu. Also, “presenting” above speaks to active revealing – cf. RTBF where we “are presented” [/revealed]
  • just as the theater provided a rich metaphorical toolkit for Erving Goffman’s analysis of the presentation of selfhood, we find the realm of social media, where profilicity undoubtedly flourishes, to be a valuable terminological reservoir.
  • Modernity: For Luhmann, modern society emerged between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe when a shift took place from a basic social division into strata such as “nobles” and nonnobles to the divisions of different “function systems.” These systems, such as politics, law, economy, education, academics, and mass media, all fulfill their respective functions in society and establish their own structures and types of communication.
  • [See pic] Second-order observation. As opposed to seeing and being seen directly, second-order observation sees something, or oneself, as being seen. It observes something, or oneself, indirectly, by observing it from the perspective of other observers [the difference between the attention and tension in the faces of the 2017 audience as opposed to the relaxation and joy of the 2010 spectators]
  • “You get your information on the facts merely by looking at what others have to say about it.”
  • “We no longer need to know what the world is like once we know how it is being seen and once we are capable of orienting ourselves in the realm of second-order observation.”3
  • The observation mode of today’s academics parallels that of contemporary theme park goers.
    • KF: How do I look? V How am I being seen?
  • Rather than being a case of mass narcissism, the concern with one’s self-image and profile reflects first and foremost the social proliferation of second-order observation. It has taken hold in all social systems, including the “intimacy system” of personal relations.
  • simply accepting that one’s own image emerges only through the observations of others.
    • KF: but not identity?
  • The notion of second-order observation can well be regarded as founded on the “Copernican Turn” that Immanuel Kant intended to implement in philosophy.
  • Kant’s Copernican turn was in essence a plea to switch from first-order observation to second-order observation in philosophy. Rather than focusing right away on the world that we want to understand, we need to start investigating the faculty by which we understand the world in the first place. This is, for Kant, the meaning of “critique”: a reflection on how something can be known—or “seen.”’

Second-order observers are highly critical. Once we realize that we do not watch the world directly but as it is presented to us, we are in a position to question how and why it is presented in the way it is being presented. This is not really possible in the mode of first-order observation where the world appears as a matter of fact. In second-order observation, facts are replaced by presentations of facts.

  • A photo needs to be taken from a specific point of view and can show only so much. It can show only one specific spot at one specific time. And this means it can show something only by not showing something else.
  • Under conditions of second-order observation, a critical awareness of perspectives evolves.
  • Full-fledged second-order observation is not linear or circular but network-like or “rhizomatic,” to use a metaphor coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
  • Second-order observation is pervasive throughout contemporary society. Profilicity is a technology for achieving identity under its conditions.
  • The general peer resembles the general will, or volonté générale, in that it does not refer to any actual and particular individual but to a transpersonal collective. Jean-Jacques Rousseau coined the notion of the volonté générale in order to indicate something other than the mere sum of the individual preferences of particular persons.

Social Validation Feedback Loops: Sean Parker; attention; dopamine; addiction

  • Ultimately, the “vulnerability” they homed in on was the human need to build identity—and to do so under postsincere and postauthentic conditions.
  • By providing a platform for the general peer to assemble, social validation feedback loops could take off.
  • Facebook and other social media sites flourish because they provide new technology for social-psychological identity formation.
    • KF: social media (ab)users

Accounts: Bank / social media

  • As Judith Butler points out in Giving an Account of Oneself, personal accounts also assign responsibility. By becoming an account holder, one becomes accountable just as much in social media as in banking.
  • If you want to make a lot of money, or exert a lot of control, you should become a provider of accounts.

Account – leading to PROFILE

  • A profile is an obviously selected and edited form of self-presentation that is undertaken for the sake of self-presentation.
  • Profiles are identity projections that are communicated under conditions of second-order observation.
  • In a highly differentiated society, profiles need to be highly differentiated as well. To achieve identity in various social areas, professional and private, competence in profile diversity is necessary.
  • Precisely because of this split between “sense value” [meaning] and “information value,” mass media and social media work unlike many other systems, such as law or academia….Information immediately destructs itself and needs to be replaced by new information. And so many websites are now feeds.
    • The web feed is the pacemaker of contemporary life.
  • Given the close ties between profilicity and social media, this means that personal identity, too, must be fed.
  • ¯\(°_o)/¯ Just as humans have a biological urge to affirm and extend themselves by passing on their genes, they seem to also have a social urge to pass on their memes to others.
  • Under conditions of profilicity, identity work takes on features of casting. The focus is less on how to play a preassigned role well, and more on how to choose wisely which role to play…And particular markets, for instance, the academic job market, may well value the public profile and profilic fit of an applicant higher than his or her professional skills.

Curation

  • Formilan and Stark [unpublished manuscript – 2018] use a highly pertinent word to describe the kind of identity work that goes into constructing and presenting personas. Personas are “curated.” Under conditions of profilicity (Formilan and Stark call it “projected identity”), a persona is “intended as a test put out into the society and continuously revised, updated, refined. Out of this process, identity develops as a curatorship” (9).
  • Importantly, while taking care of an exhibition in such an encompassing way, a curator remains, to use Goffman’s term, “back stage.” This signals a distinctive distance between what is exhibited on the “front stage” and the exhibitor who works behind the scene. A curator is not an exhibitionist exposing himself. The person is, by definition, distinct from the persona. In this way, as Formilan and Stark highlight, “curation is ultimately a non-authenticity process” (9).
  • Despite the attachment and identification involved and acknowledged in exhibitions, authenticity is, in a strict sense, never intended in curatorship. It is therefore nonauthentic but not inauthentic.
  • The notion of curatorship is pertinent for understanding profilicity because it expresses nonauthenticity rather than inauthenticity. Persons manage their personas and profiles, are emotionally invested in them, and are constantly involved in staging their presentation. Personas and their profiles are exhibited like public works of art; they must be taken care of, cared about, and cared for.
¯\(°_o)/¯
  • In a sincerity-based society, the social persona of an individual is determined by available social roles. Multiple personas are possible—daughter, mother, Christian, shopkeeper—but they all ought to correspond to patterned roles.
  • In an authenticity-based society, everyone is expected to find or create their own original self. multiple personas are possible…but these personas are all supposed to be rooted in the same true self.
  • Under the conditions of profilicity, there is no presumption of “some core identity” informing all personas.
  • In a highly differentiated society, such dedication to a supposedly unified underlying self is no longer functional or even credible. Instead, people are required to develop the flexibility to adapt to different “working environments.”
  • Nor are they psychopathological schizophrenics. Formilan and Stark write: “It is then crucial to stress that, although projected identities entail multiple personas, they are not fragmented identities, since that phrase could suggest that there is some core identity that has been broken into pieces that might or might not be put back together” (11).
    • KF: compartmentalization – as in a submarine
  • Profilic personas, unlike role-based or self-based personas, should not be considered fractured simply because they are multiple and flexible. Their multiplicity and flexibility do not reflect a broken self or a shattered ethos but rather a form of identity adapted to highly diverse society.

Transparency, or Algorithms: The Mirrors of Profilicity

  • the value of transparency has come under attack by a powerful countervalue: privacy.
  • Alongside the increasing presence of surveillance in everyday life—from airport security to traffic cameras—an increasing awareness of and discomfort with surveillance took hold, and “transparency” lost some of its good name.
  • Han; Zuboff;
  • [Dropped in the middle of a chapter!] Maybe, given the social and technological developments of recent decades, it no longer makes much sense to speak of human beings as “autonomous individuals”; and maybe we must realize that we exist in a highly complex society and are embedded deeply in its social networks. Therein control, especially by the single individual, is limited. How we look and what we think and feel are highly contingent upon the lifeworld we inhabit, and it seems much of these aspects of life are simply not up to us. Maybe they never were.
  • [But…] But this perspective also implies a nostalgia for the authentic self and an idealization of “individual autonomy,” neither of which can be fully realized—or ever could have been. This false memory, the desire to “make the self great again,” is blind to the shift toward profilic identity.
  • The functioning of surveillance society cannot really be understood if it is measured against the ideal of authenticity. Instead, the rise of surveillance society should be seen in connection with the rise of a different identity technology. For better or worse, surveillance is applied so widely and functions so efficiently today, not because it impedes authenticity but because it works so well along with profilicity.
    • KF: “We are the Borg. Existence, as you know it, is over. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile.” (VOY: “Scorpion“)
  • Critics of surveillance society, like Frank Pasquale and David Lyon, use the term “reputation” to describe what emerges from data analyses of people’s behavior.33 Pasquale writes, “In ever more settings, reputation is determined by secret algorithms processing inaccessible data” (14). However, the term “reputation” is misleading. It connotes a sincerity context where an individual has a more or less coherent and stable reputation and is known in a similar way to all members of a community. In profilicity, however, specific contexts or “settings” produce very different profiles… Unlike in sincerity, algorithms are not at all interested in a person’s overall “reputation” in their communities.
    • KF: Boo! What about our social reputation? Among “specific” and “general” peers alike?
  • p. 75 Profilicity allows for a rather different understanding of privacy than authenticity. From an authenticity perspective, surveillance is aimed at peeping into the private sphere of an individual, or into the core self, in order to discipline or manipulate it. But algorithms are not interested in authentic individuals; they do not want to know who one really is, beneath what their actions reveal about them.
    • KF: Boo! What about our social reputation? I’m not concerned about algos – I cannot combat big data but I can try to manage how people – actual meatbags – encounter me online.
  • FFS: Surveillance complements exhibition—exhibition to the general peer. It is there for a purpose; namely, to facilitate identity assembly in the mode of profilicity. Profiles need to be observed, and surveillance technologies do this very well and on a massive scale. With their help, individuals can see how they are being seen. They get access to and insights into their observers and can enter into validation feedback loops with the general peer. They learn how to present themselves so that they are seen in ways they desire.
  • “The other thing about me is that I give zero-fucks about anything, yet I have a strong opinion about everything. Even topics I am not informed on,” says Hannah in season 6, episode 1, of Girls.
  • Originally, Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century, and especially Immanuel Kant, envisioned a future society where human reason would rule. Every intellectually “mature” person would make use of their critical capacity, judging and deciding for themselves. If only provided with a public forum for exchanging ideas and views, rational individuals would collectively figure out what is good and right, better and best, and thus a truly democratic and free society would emerge. What is good, democratic, and free are here all grounded in reasonable judgments and rational exchange. This pattern of belief was carried on well into the twenty-first century by thinkers, including Jürgen Habermas, who came close to being the unofficial state philosophers of modern liberal democracies.
https://twitter.com/bamafangrl/status/1155293759929835520
  • LOL: Alas, it turned out that the real internet world in the twenty-first century was not as much populated by Kants as by Hannahs from Girls.
  • Profilicity is democratic, and democracy is profilic.
    • KF: consider arguments against abstaining from voting for ethical reasons
  • Smollett; Swift in a “culture of competitive wokeness”;
  • Woke: Since it alludes to “awakening,” however, it also evokes religious connotations. Indeed, “competitive wokeness” can be understood, as Salam says, in the context of a “theology” of liberalism—although since this “theology” has no God and is therefore not literally a theology, it is best classified as a secular or civil religion.
  • Under conditions of second-order observation, speech acts, but not unspoken acts, are accountable—when thinking of an “account” in the profilic sense outlined earlier. Through an account we post virtuous observations to the general peer and thereby join the ethos of the general peer. Virtue speech is accountable as virtue once it is fed into a profile of an account. This is how profilic virtue is made.
  • No candidate who is interested in getting or keeping a job at a university that demands such a [diversity] statement would dare to disclose any potential disagreement with this value. Therefore the function of the statement cannot really be to find out how sincerely or authentically committed someone is to diversity.
    • Diversity statements need to be understood in the context of profilicity rather than sincerity or authenticity.
  • While their sincere or authentic commitment to diversity cannot be tested, their competence in casting themselves as diversity supporters is indeed tested.
  • “One can only become the leader if he is capable of manipulating how he is observed,” Niklas Luhmann (2013)

National Profile Building: The German Culture of Remembrance

  • Through their etymological connection with “mind,” the English words “remembrance” and “reminiscence” depict memory as “bringing something back to mind.” The German word Erinnerung for remembrance, however, has a remarkably different etymology and connotations. Unlike “re-,” the prefix “er-” does not denote “bringing back” but rather a goal-oriented process or an intensification. What is more, “innerung” implies something deeper than a purely intellectual act—it suggests an encompassing internalization. Erinnerung does not simply mean to think of something again, but quite literally (especially for Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit) to make something that is external also internal, to make the objective also subjective, and thereby to make it one’s own and to possess it. It means internalizing elements of history, thereby shaping one’s identity.
  • Paradoxically, in this case identity work is based on generating pride not through the memory of glory and triumph, or of perseverance, but through accepting abject shame and admitting utmost guilt. This act of accepting almost unacceptable shame and admitting almost inadmissible guilt quite ingeniously recycles shame and guilt into a form of postheroic grandeur.
    • Thus, according to Assmann, immigrants to Germany seem to have two options to identify with German Erinnerungskultur: either they identify by proxy with the victims of the Holocaust, or they take on historical responsibility for a substitute genocide in the history of the nation or culture they stem from.

Mac; branding; Klein

  • Having worked in academia for decades, the authors of the present book have come to the conclusion that double-blind peer review can bring out the worst in people, including, sometimes, ourselves.
  • One diligently curates one’s profile day by day, yet the decisive breakthrough never happens—which can get to one in the long run. Identity value steadily crumbles and feelings of hopelessness creep in.
  • NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF PROFILICITY
  • The Keynesian beauty contest illustrates the dynamics of Instagram and other platforms, where the reality of second-order observation—that is, the reality of profilicity—is manifest.
  • mass media dumbed down and enslaved people by leading them to “amuse themselves to death” (in Neil Postman’s phrase).
  • Similar to what Sherry Turkle and others wrote four decades later about social media technologies,75 Baudrillard’s point, put in slightly different words, was that TV and radio make us “alone together.”

De Saussure; semiotics;

3 SINCERITY

  • “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity,” Zuckerberg says moralistically.
  • PEACHES AND ONIONS
pink and white garlic on white surface
red fruit

  • Rosemont paraphrases David Hume, “replacing ‘perception’ with ‘role,’…I never can catch myself at any time apart from a role,
    • China’s suicide rates were one of the highest in the world in the 1990s; however, by 2011, China had one of the lowest suicide rates in the world…Between 1990 and 2016, suicide rates in China fell by 64%, making China the #1 country in the world in suicide reduction…China is one of the few countries in the world that has a higher suicide rate by women over men.
  • The predictability of Hans’s life in his village was so encompassing that he never thought about his own identity.
  • According to Fukuyama, identity politics arose out of the modern idea that there is an “authentic self buried deep inside us” and the fear that “society doesn’t give it adequate recognition.”19 Thus “the problem is not how do you bring the individual into compliance with society, the problem becomes how do you change the society. Society is wrong and the inner self is right” (Ezra Klein Show).
  • Identity politics is nothing more, Lilla says, than a “pseudo-politics” which only serves to unravel the state. With it, “citizenship dropped out of the picture” and “the only meaningful question became a deeply personal one: what does my country owe me by virtue of my identity?” (67). This “turn toward the self” (111) and the devaluation of the “democratic we” (133) are a result, Lilla argues, of a “hyperindividualistic culture in which personal choice and self-definition have become idols” (136).
  • Trump represents neither the sincere statesman-like father of the nation nor the rugged individual whose every utterance reveals his authentic inner self and convictions. Instead, he embodies a political triumph of profilicity. He says what he says because it furthers his profilicity-based popularity, not because it is authentic. His audience doesn’t care that he uses phrases only to please them—they are still pleased!

4 AUTHENTICITY

Life isn’t about finding yourself, or finding anything. Life is about creating yourself. —Bob Dylan

  • Bobbie Carlyle Self Made Man, 1996
  • “Be yourself: It didn’t occur to me at the time that, in the name of independence and originality, I was, in fact, adopting someone else’s persona, a prefabricated cultural type”
  • KF: Foucault – Butler 601 essay
  • as Elena Esposito puts it, “nothing is as unoriginal as the desire to be original.”17
  • The paradoxical character of authenticity is threefold: (1) authenticity is learned from others; (2) authenticity has to be recognized by others in order to count; and (3) everyone is expected to be authentic in recognizable and thus necessarily similar ways.
  • As Marshall McLuhan said: “The medium is the message.”22 A “thank you” text pales in comparison to looking someone in the eye and expressing gratitude. A father who used to spend hours talking to his baby daughter confesses to Turkle that he now mindlessly rocks his second child while checking his email and scrolling through Instagram.
  • To understand and cope with this new type of identity curation a new and more complex conceptual framework is needed. We cannot merely copy or carry forward the semantics of authenticity in a dualistic struggle between losing and finding identity…people can find “themselves” in the new media and in profilicity. They might lose their authenticity, but they find their profilicity.
  • a vocabulary of profilicity.