As human beings, we have created tools which have enabled us to colonise and utilise the planet in a way which is particular to our species. The tools we have used have changed over the years as we have developed and learned how best to exploit our surroundings. Our basic needs, however have not; like our earliest ancestors we must seek shelter, water, food and warmth. And, like our ancestors, we attach meaning and identity to the objects that we use or adorn ourselves with.
In an article for New Scientist, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller draws comparisons between the possessions found with the frozen remains of a man – Otzi – who lived over five-thousand years ago and the everyday essentials that we modern humans carry with us. These tools for survival differ tremendously, but carry the same fundamental meaning. Take first for instance Otzi’s longbow and the debit cards we carry, both are tools for acquiring food. Secondly, Otzi’s axe and position high in the mountains – both are ways of ensuring safety and security,these are comparable to the keys which we use to lock ourselves and our possessions within our houses.
I now wish to focus on a lost and found object – a company I.D. badge consisting of four plastic and paper objects inside a plastic sleeve, here is a breakdown of these objects:
Plastic name badge with photographic identification, number and company logo.
Plastic card with name and some sort of electronic device.
Gym membership card.
‘RCM Pocket Guide’ fold-out paper emergency instruction booklet.
In reference to the article cited earlier, we can see these objects as tools; for instance the electronic device attached to one of the plastic cards here may have been used to gain access to a building or to log one’s movement. We see here the development of technology as metal keys become plastic micro-chipped cards. The photographic ID card has significant meaning as a record of one’s existence and as a means of separating oneself from others possibly as a symbol of status or proof of one’s entitlement to certain privileges. To quote Geoffrey Miller:
‘Given modern supermarkets, hospitals, police and armies, the true analogies are the debit card, the health-insurance card, the driver’s licence and the passport. As physical objects, they are just shards of paper and plastic, hardly enough to swat a fly. But as identity technologies, they tap into all the threats and promises offered by a vast system of finance, medicine, security and governance.’1
Questions of control and surveillance come into play here as objects that we carry with us everyday track our movements and activity in our surroundings. For instance the oyster card that is obligatorily carried by London citizens, when registered online, one’s movements around the city are logged and can be accessed on the transport for London website. So the promises – of a better, easier, freer existence – that Miller refers to may also be the thing that repress or endanger us. Indeed the thought of the current level of surveillance utilising the technologies that humans have created is a scary one, with George Orwell’s dystopian society envisaged in 1984 increasingly seeming like a prediction of the future.
We see Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics come into play here, as articulated in Society Must Be Defended. According to this idea, the individual becomes merely one in a wider population which can be effectively regulated and controlled as an individual. With the emergence of biopolitics, the population becomes ‘a new body, a multiple body’2: neither an individual body, nor a society.
It is interesting to consider the significance of the photographic identification on this object, and of the frustration of the owner for having lost an object like this. Indeed in our contemporary society, one is not seen to truly exist without objects such as this, as well as passports and driver’s licences. So the I.D. Object is a re-presentation of oneself, a self of which the key information, movements and almost every other aspect of life can be traced in a global infrastructure. It does not however tell anything of one’s own personal identity – the things which we consider to be more significant – like personality, tastes, desires and opinions. The I.D. Object is then purely a tool of surveillance.
If we view these objects of identification as physical re-presentations of the person or body – indeed all photographic evidence of the body is mere representation – we can draw comparisons with them and Katherine’s Stubbs’ description of the utility of the internet in terms of projected identity. As she writes in Telegraphy’s Corporeal Fictions; ‘…users could strategically misrepresent themselves to others online. For many, the internet stood as a potentially emancipatory arena, a space in which it was possible to experiment with selfhood.’3 In this case however, it the the person who creates the re-presentation of the body, and not the governing body.
On finding an object like this, one’s imagination runs wild as one speculates about the owner’s life. It seems impossible not to ask questions such as; Who was he? What does he do? Why and how did he lose this compacted technological profile of himself?
The fold-out instruction manual is particularly intriguing as it vaguely points to the profession of the person – some sort of security guard. But the instructions themselves simply make things more unclear. With imperatives like ‘In the event of an evacuation all battle boxes will be retrieved from Iron Mountain’4, one could romanticise this man as a keeper of national security; an enforcer of a predetermined order or infrastructure. Now the unidentified electronic device attached to the object and the company logo become all the more open to speculation (even searching the company name online did not shed any light on the operation, the website was equally as surrounded in intrigue).
To conclude I wish to turn to Bruno Latour, as he states ‘The bizarre idea that society might be made up of human relations is a mirror image of the other no less bizarre idea that techniques might be made up of non-human relations.’5
1 Miller, Geoffrey, The Bare Necessities, in Stuff ed. Alison George, New Scientist, 29 March 2014
2 Foucault, Michel, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, Picador, 2003, page 245
3 Stubbs, Katherine, Telegraphy’s Corporeal Fictions in New Media 1740-1915, eds. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003, page 91
4 LCH Clearnet, BCM Pocket Guide, Emergency Procedures
5 Latour, Bruno, Where Are The Missing Masses? The Sociology of a few mundane Artefacts, in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, eds. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, USA, 1992 page 162
