Governing through Biometrics

The Biopolitics of Identity

B. Ajana

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349340477, 9780230321618
• eBook ISBN: 9781137290755
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Social Sciences

Managing identity through biometric technology has become a routine and ubiquitous practice in recent years. This book interrogates what is at stake in the merging of the body and technology for surveillance and securitization purposes drawing on a number of critical theories and philosophies.

1

Biometrics: The Remediation of Measure

This book is about the biopolitics of biometrics. Its first chapter will, therefore, address these two components as a way of laying the ground for the remaining chapters and explicating the key theoretical framework that underlies this project. The first section of the chapter is primarily concerned with defining ‘biometrics’. Instead of limiting the term to its technical definitions, this section proceeds by placing biometrics within a historical context and highlighting some of its genealogical referents that have also been historically involved in measuring the body for identification purposes. The second section of the chapter turns the discussion towards the concept of ‘biopolitics’. It provides a critical overview on the origin and development of this concept with particular reference to the works of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Nikolas Rose whose different accounts inform much of the internal workings and theoretical framework of this book.

Remediating measure

Apart from biometrics’ technical definitions, outlined in the ‘Introduction’, there are other ways by which one can define and, at the same time, historicise and thereby problematise what biometrics is.For instance, biometrics can also be described as a form of ‘new media’, or more precisely, as a form of ‘biomedia’ that transforms the body into machine-readable codes while also encouraging the ‘biological-as-biological’¹ (Thacker, 2004: 7). Biomedia, as Thacker (2004: 13) proposes, are ‘not simply about “the body” and “technology” in an abstract sense’. They rather indicate a situated ‘interdisciplinary cross-pollination (biological computing, computational biology)’ (ibid.) whereby the biological and the technological are seen to be ‘mediating’ each other: the biological ‘informs’ the technological and the technological ‘corporealises’ the biological. This situatedness that is characteristic of biomedia is precisely what makes the latter more than a concept and a technology, but the ‘conditions’ in which both ‘the concept (recontextualising the biological domain) and the technology for doing so (e.g. bioinformatics tools) are tightly interwoven into a situation, an instance, a “corporealization” ’ (ibid.). In formulating biomedia as such, Thacker is attempting to take the argument beyond two familiar tropes: first, beyond the limitation of technology to the notion of the ‘instrument’, the ‘tool’ in which the essence of technology is considered as that which comes from the ‘outside’ and remains distinct from the body; second, beyond the McLuhanite take on media technology as being the ‘extension’ of man, a functional supplement to the human body. In opposition to these tropes, and also beyond the utopian simulacra of bodily displacement/replacement, biomedia, according to Thacker, ‘do not so much configure technology along the lines of instrumentality [ … ] although an instrumentalization of the biological body is implicit in the practices of biotechnology’ (ibid.: 14), nor do they articulate a unilinear and dichotomous relationship between the technology and the body wherein one can function as the substitute or the extension of the other. Instead, they gesture towards an irreducible interconnectedness between the two that supersedes the ‘juxtaposition of components (human/machine, natural/artificial)’ (ibid.: 7). Here, Thacker is seeking to problematise the dividing slash that stands between these categories, and which has, for so long, served as a means of organising the Western humanist thought.

Of course by now, and with all the developments that have taken place within the realm of techno-science and other related fields with regard to the problematisation of the relationship between the biological body and technology, Thacker’s attempt may hardly seem unconventional. Yet, the ‘thirdness’ of instrumentality and extension to which Thacker is alluding through the formulation of biomedia is more than a mere reiteration of the same familiar debates and problematisations. It rather underscores a crucial and unique feature that hinges mainly on the question as to how biomedia conceive of the body – technology relationship. Thacker’s answer suggests that the singularity of biomedia lies in the fact that, to some extent, biomedia do not conceive this relationship – they are not concerned with fixating (at least not once and for all) what may be entailed by the dash separating ‘body’ and ‘technology’. Instead, they are more interested in establishing conditionalities and facilitating operativities that are intrinsically ambivalent, contingent and situated. This way, the biological does not disappear into the technological, nor does the technological remain purely technological:

In biomedia, the biological body never stops being biological [ … ]; it is precisely for that reason that the biological body is inextricably ‘technological’. This does not, of course, mean that there are no technological objects involved, and no techniques or specific practices. Quite the contrary. But it is how those techniques and technologies are articulated in these biotechnological practices that makes this a unique situation.

(ibid.)

So, by regarding biometrics as a biomedium, we are led to consider this biotechnology less as a tool and more as a process, less as an instrument and more as an act through which various techno-bodily mediations come into being. Moreover, this process of mediation through biometrics also puts into question the status of the ‘body itself’. For rather than emphasising an ‘external’ mediation between body and technology (as is the case with other (bio)technologies whereby techniques and processes are applied to the body from the ‘outside’ – for example, piercing, tattooing and cosmetic surgery), biometrics renders the body itself as both the ‘medium’ (the means by which ‘measurement’ is performed) and the ‘mediated’ (the ‘object’ of measurement). In doing so, biometrics creates the ‘zone of the body-as-media’ (Thacker, 2004: 10) where the biological and the technological are merged together.

Body-as-media

In Remediation: Understanding New Media, Bolter and Grusin (1999) illustrate how the body functions as a medium and is itself subject to mediation. They locate this dual process in what they term ‘remediation’. Although their illustrations focus mainly upon specific technologies, such as bodybuilding and cosmetic surgery, which seek to reshape the exteriority of the body while rendering the latter as the medium of aesthetic expressions, their overall suggestion remains a case in point vis-à-vis the technology of biometrics as well. According to the authors, ‘a medium is that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real’ (ibid.131: 65).² Correlatively, ‘[i]n its character as a medium, the body both remediates and is remediated. The contemporary, technologically constructed body recalls and rivals earlier cultural versions of the body as a medium’ (ibid.: 238).

In this sense, for Bolter and Grusin, neither the body nor technology can be considered in isolation insofar as they are both embedded in their institutional milieu (socio-cultural, economic, historical, etc.) and maintain a relation of continuity towards their earlier versions. The ‘real’ in the name of which the process of refashioning takes place is nothing other than the myriad collections of social, cultural, psychological and political arrangements and experiences that remediation (of body and technology) seeks to capture and respond to. At the same time, however, neither the ‘materiality’ of the body nor the ‘technicality’ of technology can disappear into their social constructions. By adopting such a view, the authors take us all the way back to some earlier debates on media technologies, precisely those relating to the epistemological clash between the technological determinism of Marshall McLuhan (in which agency is entirely attributed to technology) and the social constructionism of Raymond Williams (in which social needs, practices and purposes are seen to be the primary drivers behind technological change and developments). Nevertheless, Bolter and Grusin’s restaging of such polarised debates is not meant to valorise or debunk either of them – as this often leads to the reductive discourse of ‘all or nothing’ as Kember (2006) argues (i.e. either technology is assigned too much agency or it is deprived from it altogether). It is rather an attempt to find a ‘third way’³ for rethinking and conceptualising the ‘networked’ relationship between the technological, the social and the body, quite apart from binary determinist attitudes:

In an effort to avoid both technological determinism and determined technology, we propose to treat social forces and technical forms as two aspects of the same phenomenon: to explore digital technologies themselves as hybrids of technical, material, social, and economic factors.

(Bolter and Grusin, 1999: 77)

It is precisely this hybridity, which the authors regard as an inherent feature in technology, that may add a crucial caveat to our definitions of biometrics and rescue the debate from both forms of determinism. For it is not enough to define biometrics only in terms of its technical aspect, nor is it enough to merely attend to its social and political constructions. Instead, it is necessary to consider how biometrics-as-biomedium remediates prior technologies of identification as well as prior social and cultural contexts. So let us now dwell, for a moment, on the concept of biometrics as remediation.

In locating biometrics within the notion of remediation, a fundamental question arises to the forefront: what is ‘new’ about biometrics? With the current hype surrounding biometrics, one often encounters a tendency of overstating the novelty of this technology and ignoring its complex history. There is, of course, something ‘seductive’ about the rhetoric of newness – or even ‘the no-longer-newness of the new’ (Kember, 2006), which is why many theorists associate the ‘new’ with the ideological narrative of Western progress and its attendant utopian/dystopian discourses (see, for instance, Baudrillard, 1983, 1990; Bolter and Grusin, 1999; Kember, 2006; Lister et al., 2003). This seductiveness is, in part, what conceals the genealogy of new technologies and obscures the historical continuity connecting them to older technologies. For these reasons, Bolter and Grusin (1999: 14–5) deflates the rhetoric of newness by maintaining that ‘new media are doing exactly what their predecessors have done: presenting themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media [ … ] What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media’. That said, one can argue that to address the newness of any given technology in terms of remediation is to articulate its relation to its ancestors both within a non-teleological historical perspective and beyond paranoid or utopian futuristic discourses. To do so with regard to biometric technology and identity systems in general, we need to first understand some of the mechanisms underlying the logic of identification, why and how identification became so intrinsic to the working of modern states and why it continued to infuse the ongoing technological attempts to fix identity to the singular body (Gates, 2005: 37–8).

Identification

According to Caplan and Torpey (2001: 1–2), ‘universal systems of identification are unthinkable without mass literacy and an official culture of written records’. They, therefore, relate the origins of individual identification techniques in Europe to writing itself and, hence, to the early medieval epoch that witnessed a radical transition from ‘oral’ to ‘written’ procedures.⁴ With the rise of this writing and recording culture, the documentation and registration of individual identities began to be established as an official mechanism for facilitating various transactions, such as taxation, bookkeeping and property ownership, and for monitoring the movements of travellers. By the sixteenth century, ‘new documents of origin and identity came to be demanded as a matter of course from ever expanding groups of people’ (Groebner, 2001: 16).

The origins of individual identification can also be linked to modern concepts of individuality, subjectivity and personhood that are central tenets of the Western humanist narrative (Caplan and Torpey, 2001: 2; Groebner, 2001: 16). To this end, the principle of individual identification cannot be separated from that of ‘individual identity’. Equally, ‘[i]dentification as an individual is scarcely thinkable without categories of collective identity’ (Caplan and Torpey, 2001: 3). Here, therefore, lies in the intimate and intertwined relationship between the logic of individual identification and the establishment of collective membership and citizenship rules. Membership, as a principle, is initially constructed and performed through modes of inclusion and exclusion whereby identity is conceived of in terms of dichotomies of self and other, of inside and outside, of belonging and alien and so on. These dichotomies are the means by which sovereignty attempts to resolve the tensions embedded within the dialectics of the universal (the ‘human’) and the ‘particular’ (the ‘individual’ belonging to a particular state), and provides the organising principle for individuated citizenship (Coward, 1999: 6). This is because ‘the citizen is the individual [and] individuality is both an expression of a claim to ontological universality and of ontological particularity’ (ibid.: 5). As such, creating reliable systems of identification in which individuals are distinguished from each other and assigned fixed identities became a necessity for all modern states and an essential aspect of their ‘state-ness’ (Torpey, 2000: 3). Yet, and as Gates (2005: 38) argues, ‘[o]ne enduring problem has been that of articulating identity to the body in a consistent way’. First, the ‘hybridity’, ‘instability’ and ‘changeability’ of both identity and the body make it difficult to accurately connect the two together. Second, the problem of human ‘fallibility’ and lack of objectivity makes the process of identification by human agents rather inefficient and unreliable. And, third, the monolithic amount of archival and administrative procedures needed to operate an effective identification apparatus exceeds the capacities of even the most organised systems (ibid.: 38–9). Therefore, governments and institutions have resorted to technology in order to control individual identities in the most accurate way.

Anthropometry

Some of the earlier and most notable examples of technologies of identification can be found in the developments that took place during the nineteenth century. The rationale behind these technologies was to create a criminal history by which the state could distinguish between first-time offenders and ‘recidivists’, and respond to the challenges posed by the increasing migration of individuals and the rapid urbanisation of cities (Cole, 2003: 2–3). Developed in the 1880s by the French law enforcement officer, Alphonse Bertillon, anthropometry is held to be ‘the first rigorous system for archiving and retrieving identity’ (Sekula, in Gates, 2005: 41). As Kaluszynski (2001: 123) explains, ‘anthropometry was not simply a new weapon in the armory of repression, but a revolutionary technique: it placed identity and identification at the heart of government policy, introducing a spirit and set of principles that still exist today’.

Anthropometry involved the measurement and documentation of individual bodies as well as the organisation of an identity storage system. It proceeded in two stages: description and classification (ibid.: 125). The first stage was based on the measurement of specific dimensions of the body (including height, head length, head breadth, left middle finger length, left little finger length, left foot length, left forearm length, right ear length, cheek width, etc.), which was also supplemented with a detailed and meticulous description of physical features, especially those of the face and head (Finn, 2005: 24).⁵ The second stage involved the recording of these measurements onto a standardised printed card and dividing each of them into small, medium and large categories. The completed cards were then indexed and filed according to which group they fell into so that when faced with a suspect, the police could record the obtained measurements onto a new card and compare them with existing ones for possible matching (Cole, 2003: 4). However, Bertillon’s system was only a means of negative identification, that is, ‘a method of elimination that could prove non-identity’ (Kaluszynski, 2001: 126). So, on its own, it was unable to achieve the forensic certainty it strived for. Therefore, Bertillon used ‘photography’ as a complementary procedure for creating the portrait parlé, a comprehensive identification card that allowed the personalisation of anthropometric data and the identification of criminal subjects (Finn, 2005: 24; Kaluszynski, 2001: 126). By mergi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Biometrics: The Remediation of Measure
• 2. Homo Carded: Exception and Identity Systems
• 3. Recombinant Identities: Biometrics and Narrative Bioethics
• 4. Identity Securitisation and Biometric Citizenship
• 5. Rethinking Community and the Political through Being-with
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index