A number of people have said to me that the argument against the government's foolish ID cards scheme cannot be won on a philosophical basis. We ought to oppose them on the basis that they will not achieve the things claimed and that they will be, at best, an expensive folly. This is probably true, but my objection is philosophical. Regardless of what the latest proclaimed 'benefit' is (which changes more often than John Reid changes jobs), the ID card scheme - or more specifically the National Identity Register [NIR] (which is the real objectionable part of this scheme) - is designed so that the state can link all our information, track our movements, habits etc. and, more importantly, effectively sanction our right to an identity. On what level should this be objected to if not 'philosophically'? The state and various authorities already know plenty about us, but at least we notionally have some kind of choice at the present. The NIR appears only to be a small step to some, but to me it appears a giant leap towards an insidious 'soft' authoritarianism.
Henry Porter might be accused of ranting about this over-much (and often is) but his article in today's Guardian is a good summary of almost every objection to this evil folly, from the philosophical to the financial.
Philosophically, he says:
"In a free country I believe that every human being has the right to define him or herself independently and without reference to the government of the time. This, I believe, is particularly important in a multicultural society such as ours. The ID card and NIR require and will bring about a kind of psychological conformity, which is utterly at odds with a culture that has thrived on individualism, defiance and the freedom to go your own way."
Spot on. What's more he is right about useful idiots like David Goodhart ('philosophically' in favour - see his recent Prospect article), who seem to become more and more authoritarian in their outlook every day. For the rest of Porter's Guardian article, click here.
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While Porter is deluding himself that English society is "a culture that has thrived on individualism, defiance and the freedom to go your own way" rather than a washed up ex-imperialist power with a history of murderous expolitation and half-arsed monarchical tyranny (and his 'genetic' opposition to ID cards says buckets about his commitment to multiculturalism), you're absolutely spot on about philosophical opposition.
It's not only philosophical, it's properly political. The 'expensive folly' argument is exactly the sort of managerial evasion of politics that both Labour and Tory governments have engaged in since Major. On all fundamental questions about the political organisation of society, major political parties are agreed and 'politics' becomes merely a question of implementation. Opposing ID cards on 'philosophical' grounds properly is also opposing them politically.
Moreover, political and philosophical opposition has a duty to be clear on the grounds of opposition. 'Green' NGOs exhibited a particularly disgraceful moment in their anti-GMO campaigns when they indiscriminately used any argument they could against GM foods, including the most ridiculously frankensteinian anti-scientific piffle, in an unprincipled attempt to sway 'public opinion'.
But given that we don't live in a free society, and everyone has limits to their tolerance of others' freedom, what, really, are the philosophical and politcial grounds of our opposition?
That's a good question and there is level to where my objection is quite instinctive and I am trying to work out philosophically and politically, if you will, what that means. To some extent it all depends on what one means by 'freedom' and whether it really can exist in society. It's a bit early on a Saturday morning for me, but I start with the assumption that it is not a role of government to legitimise my right to an 'identity'. This might seem a bit rich in some ways coming from a semi-Foucauldian. My individuality may well be constructed and produced by power like everyone elses. That is intensified perhaps by modern requirements for identity, registration, examination and documentation in all sorts of areas from driving to owning a TV. At present however I can choose to withdraw from those requirements. That might limit my ability to participate in certain things and do a certain things, but if I wish to become an isolated hermit or 'melt away' into a crowd, I can. These are perhaps extreme examples, but the logic of the NIR and the ID cards scheme is that I will no longer be able to do that. I may not be the author of my individuality but I lose the ability to at least present my own story. That argument is not well formed and I will think about it a bit more.
Further, and certainly philosophically, I object to my identity being defined as a series of fields on a database, separated from my body, removable from my possession (this is where so called Identity theft, which at present means 'a credit card number', might actually become a reality) and the property of a nebulous 'authority'.
Sorry for the ramble, I am still waking up...
Go with your Foucauldian instincts. There's not much about your 'identity' that isn't expressed in the discourse of industrial capitalism (your 'race', your address, your profession) and I don't think you have any more right to remove your identity from industrial capitalism than you have to take running water, canned food or public transport away with you. If you lived outside this world, you'd have a different kind of identity altogether, one like whakapapa, unrecognisable to us.
More importantly, don't you think that the information about you that the government wants to collect is fairly rudimentary compared to the amount of data about you that is commoditised by market research? What you buy with your loyalty card, where you go with your Oyster card, what you see at the NFT with your membership discount. All this information is chaotically collected, loosely regulated, and stored in more database fields than it's wise to attempt to imagine.
Where state legislation does exist to control it, it's generally for the good: while British Intelligence will sell you to the Americans faster than their own grandmother (or perhaps slightly slower than that if you're fair of skin), EU legislation puts significant barriers on the transfer of personal data between EU territory and the USA (the NFT can't tell MOMA what films you like), because the USA has nothing approximating data protection legislation.
(On a very practical level in my job at the moment, I'm trying to spec a system for email marketing where personal data that we have 'captured' remains accessible and under the control of the people from whom we have captured it, as is more or less required by British data protection legislation. It's something that's more or less instinctive to me as a web developer, and slightly less instinctive for marketing professionals.)
Politically then, do we have to ask whether there's a meaningful difference between the way the state wants to deal with our subjective 'identity', and the way the market wants to deal with it?
A much more proper philosophical problem is your objection to your subjective identity being separated from your body. Without getting too poststructural about it, isn't this going on all the time? Aren't we constantly creating information flows about ourselves online (check that little last.fm rss widget lurking in the corner of your blog: what is that saying about you?), externalising our identities and existing less as monads to other monads than as an interlocking web of preferences and experiences. As MoaB points out (somewhere), there's a keenness in the air these days to advertise ourselves, whether through elegant XFN or the teenagers'-bedroom of myspace, a keenness that's suspicious, as if we're out to do the work of the surveillant assemblage for it.
Honestly, I'm beginning to think identity cards are the least of our worries.
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