This is the second and final part of my comments after reading Marie Moran’s book “Identity and Capitalism” (2015). (v.2 small typos corrected)
Before continuing it is necessary to emphasise that, precisely because the notion of Identity is contingent and historical, and because it has specific new content since the second half of the past century, I do not believe anything “essential” or “intrinsic” can be attached to it. “Identity” does not refer to the “nature” of an individual or a human group, because it is relationally and subjectively determined.
In rejecting any “essentialism” on this matter I agree with Ms Moran, especially when she writes:
“The widespread and deeply entrenched failure, with the few notable exceptions mentioned here, to recognise that identity is to all intents and purposes a new word–or more exactly, an old word used in new ways–rather than one that has simply and unproblematically increased in usage, reveals another, important set of assumptions that are key to the historical argument of this book. That is, the widespread assumption that the word identity always meant what it means now reflects and is the product of a deeper, underlying belief that that to which it refers– ‘identity’ as we now know it–always existed. This is the consensus view on identity: it tells us that identity concerns have always featured in human societies, but that in contemporary, Western societies, these concerns have come to matter more, trumping alternative political, social and cultural concerns; that where identity was once peripheral, it is now central, and where it was once neglected, it is now prioritised–‘in fashion’ so to speak. Where these dominant readings differ is on the extent to which they view the movement of identity from periphery to centre, from neglect to priority, as a product of ‘real’ social changes, or a new social scientific and popular fascination with all things identitarian. This understanding that identity, somehow, always featured, itself rests on the more basic assumption that the experience and expression of identity is a universal experience and expression; that ‘having an identity’–whether stable and unchanging or complex and fractured–is a basic and constitutive element of the human condition.” (Page 27, Kindle Edition)
In the context of Information Security and Identity Management it is easy to see that “underlying belief” described by M. Moran. In our professions, with increasing intensity since the start of the 21st Century, we use the term “identity” as if it had a natural or settled definition. This can be observed especially when in management consulting and Information Security contexts the word is used as a “flag” or “key” term which is expected to be transparent to the participants. Phrases like “Identity Management is a key business concern” or “Identity Management is fundamental for business organisations” are nevertheless merely symbolic and only serve to show how “up to date” the speaker is, while at the same time they hide the fact that –in our industries—there is no agreement about the content of such expressions.
Writing this as a witness of the evolution of Identity Management in the past 22 years I see that the use of the term has intensified, in an uncritical way. And despite successive changes in the “meaning of Identity,” the usage has been informal and imprecise. Originally the term was linked to “user management”, but then it became associated with information assurance and regulatory compliance, and later with “business effectiveness” and so-called “digital transformation.” At the bottom of these shifts in definition lies a question which the Information Technology professions have never answered: If “Identity” refers to the individual, how is it then that every concrete implementation of Identity Management always refers to digital representations of Identity and not to the individual (the person) itself?
Conversely, if Digital Identity is the object of attention, how can the multiplicity of digital identities relate to an individual human person? This chasm is never closed in the technical and technocentric professions due to a particular tendency to operate at the level of consensual-metaphorical language, made up from “received” concepts which are never questioned. “Identity” is one of them.
Because we are discussing Capitalism as the context of Identity or Identity as it appears in recent history, it will be good to refer the reader to something I wrote a while ago, a text which will show that I do not address Capitalism critically for the sake of scoring ideological points. The text in question can be found here: https://carlos-trigoso.com/2018/07/09/capitalism-and-socialism-are-not-systems/ –and it will allow me to avoid a very long argument, while at the same time will help to focus on the subject of “Identity Management” illuminated by Ms Marie Moran’s work.
If the reader cares to refer to that article, she will see that I do not focus on “identity” in a political sense, especially not in the sense of “identity politics.” In fact, the critical stance of Ms Moran in respect to “identitarian” and “identity politics” is a very important and brilliant aspect of her book, which led me to interesting insights into my own research area. “Identity and Capitalism” shows how all varieties of identity politics –however contradictory they may appear– are not only complementary between them but also fundamentally dependent on the common context of global Capitalism.
Marie Moran is clear when she anchors her thinking to the idea of the “social logic” of Capitalism. Here are some key parts of Ms Moran’s approach:
“The notion of a social logic of Capitalism likewise does not rest on the assumption that the capitalist economy is separate from these social institutions, but enables us to see how each may depend on and in part create the other, often in contingent ways that cannot be predicted by a determinist theory in an a priori fashion. In addition, rather than remain at the level of structural analysis, it particularly emphasises the practical ways in which people themselves are integrated into a capitalist way of life that, in the process, shapes these other social institutions, such as marriage or political democracy. In effect, then, the social logic of Capitalism provides us with a means of exploring how other cultural and social formations are articulated to, or linked with, the political economy of Capitalism. Of particular relevance to this study, it offers a means of exploring how different ideas and practices can either promote or challenge a logic of capitalist accumulation and social class division, even where these are not, on the face of it, explicitly pro-capitalist or even ‘economic’ ideas or practices.” (Page 72, Kindle Edition)
In very refreshing and conscientious manner, Ms Moran explains something superficial observers will miss: the fact that the immediate praxis and thinking of social actors may be positioned “against” Capitalism or Globalism (in various forms and with different intensities) but will nevertheless be still complementary, *functional* to the historical flow of Capitalism . To emphasise this key insight, I would say that functionality and complementarity are present in all segments of the ideological spectrum. Ms Moran continues:
“People who live in a society organised according to a Capitalist logic will come to think and behave in a way that legitimates this logic and ensuing structure–not always and inevitably, but habitually, as they reinforce and reproduce this logic in their everyday actions. It is entirely possible that people may not believe or rationally accept Capitalism’s promises but instead may resent living in and under Capitalism yet continue to perpetuate this social logic in their ordinary lives. They may recognise its exploitative nature and uneven distribution of wealth, ‘success’, poverty, and ‘failure’, but remain structurally positioned to be unable to do anything about it. What people can do in Capitalism depends primarily on what they have, not on their justifications. Contrary to Boltanski and Chiapello’s claim that ‘Capitalism needs a spirit in order to engage the people required for production and the functioning of business’ because ‘these people cannot be set to work and kept working by force’ (2005a: 485), it seems that ‘these people’ may just have no other choice, at least as they see it, or because it has been integrated into their lives in such a practical, common sense way, that it does not even appear to be a choice. Against accounts of the spirit of Capitalism, I suggest that the assumption that Capitalism works and is sustained by the degree to which people believe and invest in the promises of Capitalism (security, excitement, justice) misses something about the power of Capitalism , which is located in its institutionalised, habituated logic, rather than a rational belief in its promises. Rather than see the ‘spirit’ of Capitalism as the primary causal force within Capitalism, we should instead recognise that these narratives and justifications are themselves activated by the social logic of Capitalism. At the same time, we need to recognise that many of these discourses and justifications are deliberately perpetuated and mobilised by powerful actors who stand to benefit from legitimation and intensification of capitalistic processes.” (Page 77, Kindle Edition)
Confronted with Ms Moran’s argument, we should not become distracted with political inclinations. It is clear that “Identity and Capitalism” is a critical book. That is a very welcome characteristic in the current times where true debate is lacking. Nothing should make us miss the key point the author is making, a point decisive for the theory of Identity: concepts of self and identity –as produced in the current historical context– are not “ideas” or “beliefs” but practices, forces which are operative precisely because they are a matter of habit and not of rationality or reflection. An unquestioned consensus at once determines our existence. In the space of Information Security and Identity Management, we can see one of the manifestations of “habituated logic” by which “Identity” is presumed as something already known or defined, so much has it become part of our life that we lose any critical capacity over it.
It is crucial therefore to uncover and detail the essence, the nature of those legitimating institutions and habits which constitute the ground of Capitalism. To do that I will return to the practice and theory of Identity Management. As mentioned in the first part of this comment, our “problem of Identity” appears with the multiplication of intermediations and the elongation of the chain of mediators. In the final stages of that process, machine mediators and virtual mediators created and controlled by software, fully abstract the individual and “identity” becomes “data.” A more detailed analysis of this process is here : https://carlos-trigoso.com/fundamental-conceptions-of-information-as-applied-to-identity-logistics/the-context-identity-becomes-data/
I refer the reader back to a previous passage where I described how Identity Management and Information Security remain oblivious to the abysmal gap between “identity” and the reality of “digital identity.” Here I can be more precise and say that our professions ignore that gap and are unable to reason about it because of those mediations, and under the separation of the individual from her/his representation.
Addressing that process of separation requires seeing Identity as an historical product originated alongside the adoption of technology. The technocentric discourse disallows that and stops us from comprehending Identity as a result of history. This then leads all Identity Management discussions to assume Identity is a constant, a fixed meaning, and to ignore its deep problematic character.
It is important to understand the notions of “intermediation” and “mediators in the chain of representation.” In principle, intermediation is something common in human activity in general. Human societies are structures of intermediation, but there are differences of degree and articulation. Specifically, under the conditions of global capitalism, intermediations are part of the global dissemination of the consumer society. At the same time, the globalisation of exchanges (markets) directly determines the logical and physical extensions of the networks of human activities, to the point that these become remote, faceless and ultimately indistinct.
We cannot analyse here the economic or social aspects of generalised intermediation of human exchanges, but it is important to point to a key aspect relevant to our discussion of Identity Management. Intermediation and the “extension of the chain of mediators” lead to the anonymisation and de-materialisation of the consumer.
This phenomenon is so pervasive and has taken over the world to such an extent that it is easy to misinterpret it. Observers have (correctly) pointed to the generalisation of markets, the homogenisation of consumption, and the valorisation of information and time, also showing how the main business models of Internet organisations have transformed the consumers into “prosumers” which are given “free services” in exchange for their life-time. All of this is true. But critics have generally underestimated how the same process constitutes a blocker of accumulation, as the increase of mediation, the “dematerialisation of production” and the homogenisation of the consumers also mean that global, internet-focused Capitalism, cannot ultimately integrate the producers and has less and less control over the human person (the individual), and how effectively it hovers over a mass of slices and fragments, of virtual representations of the particular living and breathing worker-citizen.
The alarming prospect of a world controlled by the “artificial intelligence” agents of large Internet corporations, the shock caused by the rapid erosion of privacy, did not allow us to see how the same process effectively also constitutes a radical, growing and inescapable problem for business, trade, government and human exchanges in general.
The process is not unidirectional though: by stages and cycles, “digital Capitalism” does integrate vast populations seemingly gaining control over individuals to the point that some observers see there the realisation of a new historical stage of “biopolitical” control. The trend towards the use of biometric access mechanisms appears as a proof of the need or at least the desire to “control” the human body.
I do not follow that train of thought. The trend and the impulse are real, but the more these materialise, each capital, each business organisation obtains a smaller and smaller slice of life-time from each worker-citizen. The more these processes expand and penetrate human exchanges, the greater becomes the fragmentation of identity (manifest in the dispersion of digital identities).
It is not too bold to predict Digital Capitalism (or whatever it may be called in the near future) will never be able to establish a “single identity” for each human being, not even using biometric technologies. The introduction and application of these will soon show how the various biometric aspects which can be captured or recorded from the human body are insufficient to “pinpoint” or “link” the individual person (either alone or taken together). The literature showing how biometric measures alone may be less secure than the traditional authentication factors is growing and we see how we are moving into a situation where we will have more digital credentials and not less than before. And this is not because the digital data may be incorrect or limited, but because the Person is not a biological entity. And it will always escape and must escape the “digital sphere.”
This dissemination, globalisation, and intermediation of capital has a clear correlate in the virtualisation of the consumer. Here is where the Information Security and Identity Management specialists could have some advantage, precisely because the entire “Identity problem” in our area is this fragmentation, this de-composition and virtualisation of Identity.
Other professions may not see the situation from that angle. For most, the “problem” will appear differently; for example as a threat represented by anonymous attackers (“hackers”), as criminal activities of identity fraud operators, as the “dark Internet,” cyber terrorism, “enemy state actors,” “persistent advanced threats,” and dozens of other real or perceived problems in the digital sphere. But while seeing all these phenomena “outside” of the “good” and “legal” activities of digital interaction, naïve observers will fail to recognise that all are a product of intermediation too, all determined and enabled by the same technologies which constitute the digital sphere.
In any case, even if the reader does not agree that Capitalism is an historical product, and perhaps believes that Capitalism is a “natural” form of society and will never disappear, “Identity and Capitalism” will be valuable to understand what it is and where it might be going. For the Information Security and Identity Management specialists, in turn, this book may be useful to widen our perspective and see beyond the conventional “truths” we deal in.
It would be already a crucial step to recognise that generalization of mass consumption and atomisation of the consumer constitute self-defeating social outcomes. The more consumption is levelled and globalised, and the more the individual is reduced to an abstraction, albeit decorated with “individual” choices which are only choices pre-selected by global production, the clearer it becomes that these trends lead to a paradoxical situation: The more global and viable the market becomes, the less substantial the consumer results, the more hidden it becomes behind a veil of digital identities.
In our profession we see clearly how the same person appears under multiple “personas” to public and private organisations, also showing multple “digital identities” to each one of institutions. The same individual appears with several “identities” within her or his own social environment!
What is this historical ground on which Identity is atomised and fragmented? I call it “the ground of work as value.” I tried a first definition in the article I referenced near the beginning of this post (https://carlos-trigoso.com/2018/07/09/capitalism-and-socialism-are-not-systems/ ). I marked out how this “ground of work as value” was generated and consolidated by contingent historical processes which preceded Capitalism and did not follow a “logic” of Capitalism or any linear “laws” of history leading to the accumulation of capital.
When addressing this, it is good to remember that -in terms common to all Classical Schools of political economy–, Capitalism has as its fundamental condition the total separation of the working population from any direct means of life. This does not mean only separation from the “means of production” –sometimes narrowly defined– but of all means of life (extending to the human and non-human ecosystems. Contrary to the usual observation that “private property” is the key institution of Capitalism, it is important to note that it is neither the only nor its main institution. The literature showing how public property and State intervention are essential to Capitalist “accumulation” is vast. We can say also that neither money nor trade nor even Capital itself are the essential or primary institutions of Capitalism. All of these have existed in many forms in different periods and regions of the world.
What is truly necessary for our current Global Capitalism is this historical era is mass separation, displacement and locking-in of the majority of the population, not only away from the means of production, but also of the means of life in general, something which also means the atomisation of large populations so these are politically, organisationally impotent, disenfranchised.
It is for this reason that I speak about “Identity in the Post-National Era” so to reflect that I am not talking about an “economic system.”
The separation, expropriation, and displacement of populations from their ancestral lands, regions, ecosystems, cultures, states (something which did not happen in one stage only but through centuries of successive layers of loss, war, invasion, colonisation, depopulation, cultural destruction and conquest) created a globalised population. This is what I mean when I use the expression “the ground of work as value.”
Current capitalist structures and practices could not exist without this mass of homogenised consumers-workers, which is the present working class. It does not consist anymore of impoverished industrial or agricultural workers, but it is nevertheless dispossessed and constrained on the “ground of work as value”, the historical ground where compulsive work appears as the “source” of value. This includes all segments of society which are structurally compelled to work, independently of their “social position,” “level of consumption,” or any “technical division of labour.”
It is clear Ms Moran knows this when she writes in the above-quoted paragraph that people “remain structurally positioned to be unable to do anything about it.”
These behaviours are habitual and compulsive because, for this displaced, homogenised, uprooted population (within existing temporal and spatial conditions) it becomes impossible to return to a state of autonomy and self-sustainability or to regain a status of freedom from the “ground of work.” The naturality of Capitalism –as Ms Moran correctly writes— is not based on its effectiveness or the way it satisfies needs, but arises instead from the sphere of *understanding* that, outside of its operation, however bad and tortuous, life is not possible.
Hegemony, then, rests not on “rationality of economic calculus” but on “understanding,” on acquiescence, on pragmatic, empirical, pre-rational acceptance of the given conditions. Hegemony arises not from satisfaction but from entrenched loss and fear.
Ms Moran writes:
“Leaving aside for a moment the (misleading) claims these theorists make about ‘identity’ specifically, what these accounts nonetheless convincingly tell us is that this period of modernity oversaw a significant shift in conceptions of selfhood, such that one’s position in society was determined increasingly by socially defined norms and roles, including one’s position in the social division of labour, rather than by nature or myth, as was the case in the Enlightenment and pre-modern eras respectively. It is worth noting also the immense formative power and role of Capitalism –and what I have been calling the social logic of Capitalism –and not just modernity, in these shifts (Meiksins Wood, 1997). It was primarily the logic of capitalist development, both social and structural, that entailed the closure of the commons, the mass movement of people together into large urban spaces and the structural segmentation of people according to social class–crudely, distinctions between capitalists and workers, and within that, between productive (male) and reproductive (female) workers. In England in particular, the ‘birthplace’ of industrial Capitalism, this was all harnessed by the capitalist ‘ideology of “improvement”’. As Meiksins Wood remarks, this was ‘not the Enlightenment idea of the improvement of humanity but the improvement of property, the ethic–and indeed the science–of productivity and profit, the commitment to increasing the productivity of labour, the ethic of enclosure and dispossession’ (1997: 548).” (Page 93, Kindle Edition)
And then, armed with that historical perspective, she complements:
“Thus the demise of class politics is linked in these accounts, not only to the attack on communism by the political elite, but also to its de facto rejection by the US majority who saw Capitalism as better able to answer their (increasingly individualised and consumer-oriented) needs. Certainly, at this time, in the ‘Fordist’ societies of 1950s and 1960s America in particular, participation in the social logic of Capitalism seemed to be paying dividends.” (Page 103, Kindle Edition)
Marie Moran finds the original supersession of “class politics” as rooted in a new stage of individualisation:
“This chapter has argued that the emergence of identity politics should be considered a watershed moment in the history of modernity–as an attempt to realise the unfulfilled promises of equality and freedom for all, in a way which utilised to significant political effect historically persistent ‘essentialist’ notions of selves and groups. Indeed, the life-span of the highly self-conscious active identity politics was relatively short, for no sooner did identity politics ‘proper’ emerge than they were met with a series of radical and sustained challenges, both at the level of the politics at which they were fought, and at the level of the political and philosophical theory which sustained them. It now is the case that this, lively and powerful form of identity politics no longer exists. As Nicholson (2008: 4) writes, ‘Identity politics seems now to be largely dead, or, at minimum, no longer able to command the kind of public attention that it did from the late 1960s through the late 1980s.’” (Page 125, Kindle Edition)
And the author continues:
“Thus, we see that while the notion of personal identity offered a means of asserting difference, it nonetheless encouraged participation in the practices of mass consumption which had homogenising rather than heterogenising effects. This ambivalent, even contradictory, attitude towards mass consumption is also traced by Frank (1997) in his analysis of advertising during this post-1950s period. The whole tone of this advertising was to mock and challenge the dull conformism of 1950s consumerism with a vision of the new, ironic, cynical, rebel consumer–though as he convincingly shows, this rebel consumer purchased as much as his/ her conformist predecessor. Frank’s argument is that the ‘counter-culture’ of which this ‘cool consumer’ formed a part was not merely incorporated into ‘business culture’ but had developed in tandem with it from the outset. In a similar way, ‘personal identity’ offered a colourful alternative to the perceived greyness of the mass society: the possibility of being ‘different’–of ‘having an identity’–must have seemed very attractive indeed. However, the idea of identity did not in fact offer an alternative to mass consumer society but rather, a means of promulgating it. The ‘identity’ that was marketed as different was also, in fact, mass produced, and offered a way for Capitalism to sell vast amounts of consumer goods to those who bought desperately into the need to stand out from the masses.” (Page 138, Kindle Edition)
Precisely so: In Information Security and Identity Management we can clearly see these pseudo Identities, which are “marketed as different” but in reality are “mass produced.”
Marie Moran then rounds up the explanation:
“The problem is that where corporations seek to sell on a ‘global market’, they must manufacture products with universal appeal, a process requiring what global advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi refer to as ‘world cultural convergence’, namely, ‘a belief in the convergence of lifestyle, culture, and behaviour among consumer segments across the world’ (Robins, 1991: 29). This world cultural convergence is accomplished by ‘targeting the shared habits and tastes of particular market segments at the global level, rather than by marketing, based on geographical proximity, to different national audiences’ (1991: 29). This is what Hall suggests we refer to as ‘the global post-modern’: ‘Cultural flows and global consumerism between nations create the possibilities of “shared identities” – as “customers” for the same goods, “clients” for the same services, “audiences” for the same messages and images – between people who are far removed from one another in time and space’ (1992: 302). While Hall presents this in terms of the construction of ‘shared identities’, arguably what is in fact happening here is that corporate entities are actively deploying the very idea of identity in order to market to – and in part create – different target groups on a global scale. The underlying assumption here is presumably that individuals are less likely to respond positively to marketing based on simple demographics, such as age or location, than to marketing which targets and reinforces a ‘personal identity’ to which they are already attached. The notion of identity thus enables marketing to large, geographically diverse groups of people whose tastes are broadly the same, whether they identify as ‘emos’, ‘hipsters’, ‘career girls’, ‘yummy mummies’, ‘surfer dudes’, ‘outdoor adventurers’, or whatever else. But what consumers are invited to do is to choose a ‘personal identity’ from a set of prefabricated available identities, rather than simply to be unique individuals. That is utterly functional to mass production in a way that true individuality is not. Furthermore, in this way, one can articulate and ‘construct’ one’s putative personal identity in complete dissociation from local and other traditional binds, in a manner that is deeply useful to corporations, as it permits the same set of products to be sold worldwide.” (Page 144, Kindle Edition)
In the terms of Information Security and Identity Management, the *new* and current “problem of identity” is not the problem of individuality, but the problem determined by the functionality of “available identities” which differ and ultimately do not represent the individuals. In following the path described by Marie Moran, corporations approach a situation of further detachment of the natural person from the atomised digital representation, a process which cannot be compensated with even more technology, for example through the adoption of biometric mechanisms of authentication, as I described earlier.
The Information Security and Identity Management specialists, as well as Marketing and Customer Management specialists should reflect on the limitations which appear when the problem of identity, accelerated by technology, is then addressed with more technology only to discover new levels of remoteness and fragmentation of the person.
But our author knows this and quotes one of her sources:
“As Slater explains: ‘modern Capitalism involves the extension not of real diversity but rather of a single dominating form, the commodity form, which renders all diversity equivalent, all equal as discrete exchangeable or calculable objects’ (1997: 115). This was the case in the organised Capitalism and mass culture of the 1950s and 1960s, and remains the case in the neoliberal, post-Fordist Capitalism that prevails today.” (Page 154, Kindle Edition)
In other words, the problematic of Capitalism has not changed, and cannot change because at its root it has the contraposed forces of separation of the individual from the context which could underpin her/his individuality, and on the other the reduction of the individual to an abstract quantifiable, digitally represented “instance” of life.
Moran reaches the end of her argumentation:
“The relationship between the idea of identity and Capitalism, then, is far from predetermined. In the current historical period, there are progressive uses of the idea of identity, but the ‘personal’ sense is dominant, and dovetails with the social logic of Capitalism.” (Page 179, Kindle Edition)
By historicising Identity and its categories, Ms Moran has made a great contribution. As for my own thinking, aside of highlighting the idea of the “ground of work” which is nothing but the historical base of the compulsion to work, and –aside of marking out how atomisation and homogenisation of the consumer lie behind the “Identity problem”– my comments do not contradict the work of Marie Moran, which I recommend to any curious mind but especially to my colleagues, so they lift their eyes and see the “Identity problem” for what it is: a social product and not a universal condition, a problem which is recent and concrete, social, historical, and therefore will never be solved by technical means.