Book Review: How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person, by Colin Koopman

AuthorDavid J. Gunkel
Published date01 October 2021
Date01 October 2021
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720982274
Subject MatterBook Reviews
Book Reviews 873
limitations of violence as a regenerative force. Surely, the various theoretical
traditions discussed in the book did not all naïvely expect violence to solve
the problem of the social bond and the moral foundations of society in its
entirety. How did they understand the scope and limits of redemptive vio-
lence? How does the figure of redemptive violence intersect (or cut against)
the new theories of solidarity that emerge throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury? And how do these authors and traditions deal with the tensions and
contradictions between the conceit that redemptive violence “incarnates”
the social bond (a theological locution that recurs throughout the book) and
conceptualizations of shared democratic agency that regard it not as a capac-
ity instituted in a single founding moment but as a set of practices that are
learned and established over time? In sum, Duong’s stimulating book raises
a whole series of questions about the relation between the political theology
of redemption and the rise of social theory in the nineteenth century. Yet if
redemptive violence is to be taken seriously as a conceptual category, and if
it has the historical and theoretical scope that Duong assigns to it, then both
its political-theological and social-theoretical dimensions need further elab-
oration. How do the various traditions that underwrite violence’s redemptive
claim grapple with the classic soteriological problems in the Christian tradi-
tion concerning the agency, instrumentality, finality, and temporality of
redemption? And what are the theoretical implications of conceptualizing
social integration and solidarity as effects of violence, not just in terms of
the mystification of violence but for thinking society, social cooperation,
and collective action?
How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person, by
Colin Koopman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019, 270 pp.
Reviewed by: David J. Gunkel, Communication, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb,
IL, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591720982274
The title to Colin Koopman’s book recalls N. Katherine Hayles’s pivotal con-
tribution from over two decades ago, How We Became Posthuman.1 It also
follows a similar analytic procedure and trajectory, demonstrating not how a
prefabricated concept of the human being—the self-assured Cartesian subject
of modern philosophical and political thought—came to be subjected to data,
but how this presumptive subject has already been the subject of data. Or as
Koopman succinctly describes: “We become constituted, and not merely
mediated, by our data. There is no essential self beneath all our data from

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