Dark Matters by Simone Browne

Author:Simone Browne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2015-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURES 3.4 AND 3.5. Mendi + Keith Obadike, Blackness for Sale (2001). Courtesy of the artists.

Branding Biometrics

Information machines are the sole means of vision in digital visual culture, but as the body itself becomes socially defined and handled as information, there is even more at stake in paying attention to the incursions of machines in everyday life and the forms of resistance available to us.

—LISA NAKAMURA, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet

Paul Gilroy observes that where previously the idea of race was produced as that which is anatomical, where a certain and essential truth was said to be written on the body, scopic and microscopic regimes of seeing (for example, genomics, ultrasonography, neuroimaging, computed tomography) are laying bare the previously unseen at increasingly intimate scales.61 The highly mediated production of racial discourse through scientific method that relied on cultural production, representation, myth, and colonial project making and where the intention was “to make the mute body disclose the truth of its racial identities” has been augmented by technologies of seeing that have the minute as their focus. Gilroy suggests that “the observational habits that have been associated with the consolidation of today’s nano-science might also facilitate the development of an emphatically postracial humanism.”62 My intervention here is not meant to negate this potentially progressive moment that Gilroy alerts us to, but to claim that unlike the technological advances of, say, ultrasonography and other body imaging technologies, with certain biometric information technologies and their attendant “observational habits” this potentially postracial humanism is elided. Instead, with biometrics it is the moments of observation, calibration, and application that sometimes reveal themselves as racializing.

If, as Gilroy suggests, the pseudoscientific enterprise of truth seeking in racial difference can be more fully comprehended through the Fanonian concept of epidermalization,63 how can epidermalization, as a concept, be made useful at a scale of the body made biometric? I suggest here that we come to think of the concept of digital epidermalization when we consider what happens when certain bodies are rendered as digitized code, or at least when attempts are made to render some bodies as digitized code. By digitized code I am referring to the possibilities of identification that are said to come with certain biometric information technologies, where algorithms are the computational means through which the body, or more specifically parts, pieces, and, increasingly, performances of the body are mathematically coded as data, making for unique templates for computers to then sort by relying on a searchable database (online or one-to-many/1:N identification/answering the questions: Who are you? Are you even enrolled in this database?), or to verify the identity of the bearer of the document within which the unique biometric is encoded (offline or one-to-one/1:1 verification/answering the question: Are you who you say you are?). Popular biometric technologies include facial recognition, iris and retinal scans, hand geometry, fingerprint templates, vascular patterns, gait and other kinesthetic recognition, and, increasingly, DNA. Biometric technology is also used for automation (one-to-none/answering the question: Is any body there?), for

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