The Aadhaar or Unique Identifi cation Numbers initiative of the Government of India presages a new model of biological citizenship as much as it announces the arrival of India as a technological society, one where social problems such as meagre public distribution systems and primary health services are solved through technical means. Through a series of propositions about the increased use of biometrics for identification purposes, the cultures of surveillance that centre in and around the body are explored.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the National Seminar on “Cultural Studies in the Indian Context”, department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh, 2-3 March 2012.
The title of this piece obviously glances in more than passing ways at Ray Bradbury’s classic 1969 “I Sing the Body Electric” (Bradbury himself takes it from Walt Whitman). But hopefully it moves beyond electricity to something that generates more charge: biometrics.
Triggered by the immediate context of the Aadhaar/Unique Identification Numbers (UIDs) initiative of the Government of India, this article offers a few propositions about the increased use of biometrics for identification purposes. Its concern is less with the ethical issues of biometrics – that is another paper – than with the cultures of surveillance that centre in and around the body.
In the post-9/11 world, surveillance has increased to degrees unimaginable outside a science fiction novel. Studies have shown how within a few weeks of the terrorist attacks, almost 17 bills were introduced in the United States Congress, including measures to tighten immigration, visa, and naturalisation procedures. These bills – this is significant – allow tax benefits to companies that use biometrics, and check employee backgrounds (Zureik and Hindle 2004).
The issue of identity and identification with which biometrics is incontrovertibly bound up demands some clarification right away. In a surveillance society, we are not seeking identity as much as an authentication of a claimed identity. ID cards are not meant to identify you, but to validate your claim that you are who you say you are. We therefore need to understand that surveillance works not with a concept of identity (which is individualised, and embodied in the person) but with identification. Identity is how I perceive and describe myself (“I am…”); it is a narrative that I tell myself. Identification, on the other hand, is about an external validation of this narrative: “You are…”. If for instance I claim to be a faculty member at the University of Hyderabad, I must validate this claim by producing a document that asserts I am who I claim to be.
At this moment in techno-history, biometrics includes fingerprints, ultrasound, fingerprinting, iris scans, hand geometry, facial recognition, ear shape, signature dynamics, voice recognition, computer keystroke dynamics, skin patterns and foot dynamics. Future biometrics, or second generation biometrics, will include neural wave analysis, skin luminescence, remote iris scan, advanced facial recognition, body odour, and others. Currently passport controls, banking, social welfare, criminal investigation, state controls all operate through biometric identification procedures.
The poetics of surveillance is visible in the state’s rhetoric of recognition and identification, in the discourses of security and welfare that merge into one, as well as the discourse of mobility and “easy access”. Cast as humanitarian, welfarist, proactive and authoritative, the new cultures of surveillance ride on the body.
In this note is a series of 10 propositions on contemporary biometric cultures of surveillance. The conclusion addresses the problematic question of biological citizenship in the age of biometrics.
(1) Rematerialised Bodies: I begin with an argument I made in a recent essay on participatory surveillance (Nayar 2011). Biometrics, I argued, can be seen as a response to the increased “dematerialisation” of the human, so that we become merely online creatures, with even social interactions “reduced” to electronic communications and few face-to-face meetings; the body returns as the foundation of the human. The rematerialisation of the body, albeit within structures of surveillance, constitutes an interesting step in embodiment technologies.
(2) Mathematicisation: With biometric identification processes and technologies, the human body is also reconfigured differently: I am me plus my data set inscribed into the UID or any card I might be asked by the State to carry. Thus, while the body remains the centrepiece, so to speak, of the processes of identity, it cannot any more be separated from the data set this body has generated for a machine. The body has been rendered into a set of numbers which must accompany the body at all times. All bodies are, in this account, mathematicised. Biometrics also means that one cannot ever be disassociated from the database of the body.
(3) The Somatically Legible Subject: Biometric technology produces, in Richard Nash’s words, a “somatically legible subject” (2011: 47). What this means is that everybody is at once treated as unique in terms of their biological data and yet fitting into a larger data set of what all bodies are. That is, biometric is positioned at the intersection of the frailties, uniqueness and singularities of a specific body even as what is measured is common to all bodies.
This somatically legible subject is one who acquires two key characteristics once the data set has been prepared:
Cultural legitimacy through the incorporation of that body’s socially, technologically and state-approved set of parameters – iris scans, for example – into the larger demographics. As the “Strategy Overview” document of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI 2010a: 1) states:
In India, an inability to prove identity is one of the biggest barriers preventing the poor from accessing benefits and subsidies…
A clear identity number would also transform the delivery of social welfare programs by making them more inclusive of communities now cut off from such benefits due to their lack of identification. It would enable the government to shift from indirect to direct benefits, and help verify whether the intended beneficiaries actually receive funds/subsidies. A single, universal identity number will also be transformational in eliminating fraud and duplicate identities, since individuals will no longer be able to represent themselves differently to different agencies. This will result in significant savings to the state exchequer.
What I am proposing here is that it is the body’s specific – biological – characteristics are what enable it to be fitted into a larger social domain as a “poor body”.
This is what I am referring to as cultural legitimacy where the biologicals determine, ascertain and validate the access to resources, and where the biologicals approved as determining factors alone can be counted.
Corporeal integrity is achieved through the compilation of data sets, even if the body exhibits wear and tear, ageing, or injury. The parameters used in biometrics are the ones that supposedly, in biomedical terms, do not change with age. What I therefore argue is that a certain corporeal integrity is ensured at least in the form of the consistent data set that is prepared and which only uses those biologicals that do not alter and remain coherent even as the rest of the body changes with age and the environment.
(4) Body Privacy: It is fascinating to see that just when there are increased, and often acrimonious debates about privacy invasions – the furore against Facebook’s face recognition software is a recent case (Raphael 2011) – by the media and others, the so-called technologies of surveillance invade the privacy of the body. This is, in a sense, a double paradox. These technologies directly alter the notion of corporeal integrity outlined above through their invasive techniques. And, they develop alongside a key concern of privacy. On the one hand, due to the technology, there is more socialising, collaboration and exchange with perfect strangers – with volunteered parting with information –and yet the concern with privacy has never been as high as it is now.
Relatedly, the private sphere of the body is no longer private (if, of course, there is any merit in this state of privacy). If the skin is the first home we occupy, and which we constantly refurbish and regrow, then biometrics breaks down the borders of inside and outside. Indeed, the outside world can now be negotiated safely only if one is willing to exhibit the inside of the body to these machines and monitors. Our interface with the world is no longer defined by skin colour (as Frantz Fanon and other postcolonial critics discovered vis-à-vis racism). It is the revelation of the inside, letting it outside, so to speak, that allows us to interface with the world. This leads me logically to the next point.
(5) The Culture of Eversion: The issue of “revealing” one’s identity has acquired a whole new dimension. As debates and quarrels over the veil continue in western society – with countries like France claiming that in a free and democratic society, there cannot be veiling of the face – biometrics offers an entire new domain for this debate. The face, along with the fingerprint, has been one of the oldest biometric measures (photography changed the way the face would be used, just as the impression of the monarch’s face on currency created the first culture of celebrity that relied on the transmission of the visual image). To cover the face has been, Lucas Introna and David Wood (2004: 178) note, seen as a sign of implicit guilt in western societies.
With the new biometrics, the face is not the key mode or site of revelation. The question of the veiled face does not arise because biometric identification procedures delve deeper into the body. With genetic testing kits now available for less than $120, DNA sampling is also slowly but steadily becoming a part of the biometric process. Thus what stands revealed, is exposed, is not the face alone but the very internal schema of the body. I propose, therefore, that biometrics is a process of eversion where the body is turned inside out. (The term comes from mathematics where something can be turned inside out without creasing, and from marine biology where some forms of animal life expel their entrails in defence.)
(6) Biometric Borders: I entirely concur with Louise Amoore’s (2006: 337) argument that the “body itself is inscribed with, and demarcates, a continual crossing of multiple encoded borders – social, legal, gendered, racialised”. The biometric border is thus the portable border par excellence, carried by mobile bodies at the very same time as it is deployed to divide bodies at international boundaries, airports, railway stations, on subways or city streets, in the office or the neighbourhood (p 338).
(In fact, commentators have noted that countries like South Africa have been biometric states for sometime now, documenting citizens, and those who were likely to be troublemakers. The earliest known use of biometric surveillance in South Africa was, incidentally, deployed to track labourers in gold mines (Breckinridge 2005).
(7) Mobile Borders: What this implies is that mobility itself is interestingly poised with these new technologies. Access to, escape from, and diversion from any path is now documented by the body revealing its passage to whatever checkpoints exist. Similarly, geographical or territorial borders are marked on the body when it crosses (the “beep” of recognition when the immigration officer’s device records you have arrived at the border, the electronic tag on prisoners and parolees, etc). It is possible, in other words, to prepare for the coming of a body well in advance because the progress of this body is marked and recorded – not unlike the “Old Cumberland Beggar’s” progress in Wordsworth’s poem of the same title – through various points and scanners. The border is not out there, it directly connects to something within the body, just as the body negotiates with the border beneath the level of conscious engagement. Whether you can cross a border or not is inscribed into your very body. The border’s access points are buried in your body. (On cross-border migration and biometrics, see Ross 2007.)
(8) Epidermalisation: I would now like to forward the suggestion that there is something akin to branding in the way biometrics works. Historically, cattle and slaves, prisoners and criminals were branded. It marked what the African American critic Hortense Spillers (2003) called the “theft of the body” because the slave’s body was resignified as the property of the white man. The slave could not escape and could be easily identified by the numbers. (The most horrific reminders of this remain the numbers tattooed on the concentration camp inmates in Nazi Europe.) While biometric technologies are not the same as branding, there is something interesting going on here. Biometrics do not insist on inscribing a number/design/signature on the body under surveillance.
Instead, it assumes that the body is always already inscribed with telltale markers and marks. The numbers, codes and signs are already within the body – what the technology does is to bring these to the surface. Thus biometrics remains within the larger ambit of branding in that it constructs the body as a site of enunciative practices. The difference is in the nature of the inscription.
Branding codes the body as belonging to X or Y. Biometrics decodes what is already inscribed in the body and then identifies it as belonging to X or Y structure/class/population. Just as the brand “speaks up” the identity of the bearer – brands are essentially stories that the product/commodity carries upon itself – the biometric data revealed when we pass through a scanner “pronounces” our identities. Branding cuts into the skin, biometrics brings to the surface – epidermalises – what is inside.
(9) Roots and Revelations: Biometrics is only one component of a whole plethora of technologies that return us to the body – rematerialise it – and its identity in very different ways in this age of electronic dissemination and dematerialisation. Related technologies that enable one to identify one’s genealogy and ancestry have become fairly commonplace. In the United States (US), television shows like African American Lives (hosted by Henri Louis Gates, Junior, no less), Who Do You Think You Are?, Faces of America, etc, have been hugely successful. Tracing the ancestry and family history of African Americans has mushroomed into a very profitable business as well.
One can acquire an ancestry kit, use some saliva and discover one’s genetic roots. African ancestry offers an “Ancestry Certificate” at the end of the check. The new genetic determinism that this suggests ends up reiterating the older biological determinisms that governed racial profiling and stereotyping, but occasionally also throws up surprises (as happened when quite a few of the company’s African American clients discovered that there was some white ancestor in their blood as well). More importantly, those who discovered their roots broadcast their racial selves in what has come to be known as the “roots and revelations” culture (Nelson and Hwang 2012).
(10) A New Convergence Culture? Media theorist Henry Jenkins spoke of a convergence culture where multiple functions converge into one device. Here there is a new form of convergence emerging. Bodies merging with machines is now more or less a 1970s thing (with prosthetic implants and Schwarzenegger-cyborgs). But we see a different order of convergence where the subject composed on screen in the form of zeroes and ones constitutes, also, my body and my personality. There is something inherently troubling in assuming not only a convergence between my iris or my DNA and my overall “personality” but also in the way the digital subject (the body as data) and the flesh-and-blood subject converge. A good summary of this goes as follows (Mordini and Massari 2008: 494):
Biometrics also allow the use of physical identifiers in the digital world. In other words, biometrics permit the use of human modalities for personal recognition in relationships between digital subjects (e g, between humans and devices, documents or services, and among digital representations of humans).
What emerges from these propositions is a surveillance state where biology and biological features constitute the “core” of identity and identification. Increasingly, apparatuses of identification and recognition are put into place where one is under constant monitoring through ambient devices, from the closed circuit television (CCTV) in public places to the scanner where thumbprints are recorded. It is not yet clear whether biological identification of the multiple hues I have outlined above will be a substitute for ethnicity, religious or caste identities, but what is surely obvious is the triumphal march of the body as the be-all and end-all of a legitimate or illegitimate status in the social order.
For instance, biometrics has been at the forefront of draconian policing and surveillance measures in the pursuit of greater “homeland security” in post-9/11 US. As a commentator noted, biometrics enabled the state to identify individuals from/at a distance and in real time (Gates 2006: 418) even as they “fetishised” the faces of “Arab terrorists” by linking facial recognition to the continuous streaming of the faces of suspects on TV and other media screens. In other words, biometric surveillance constructed particular identities as legitimate or illegitimate in American society. It popularised some faces – and, more troublingly, some kinds of faces: Arab, bearded, dark-skinned – as “unAmerican” or “anti-American” by linking biometric identities to the parade of faces for identification on screens and in the mass media.
More importantly, it is also possible that such DNA and biometric identification systems are used to harass particular communities within the nation. When African Americans in the US army refused to submit themselves to DNA testing in 1996, it was on the grounds that such data could be used to extend the racial discrimination against blacks. Native American soldiers refused to participate in genetic testing as well, offering the justification that the sacredness of their bodies would be violated when put into test tubes and on shelves for strangers to examine. In both cases, incidentally, the US government penalised the soldiers (Nelkin and Andrews 1999). Their refusal to participate in biometric identification clearly situated them as dysfunctional members of the American military! In other cases (South Korea) potential immigrants – specifically migrants returning from China – were documented through biometrics to verify their “authenticity” as family members of citizens, or for the labour force. Biometrics here determined not only their belonging to clans, families and relationships but also their entitlement to labour and wages (Kim 2011).
Biometrics, therefore, marked the arrival of a whole new kind of citizenship: biological citizenship. The UID in India is a move in this direction as well.
Biological Citizenship
Cultures of surveillance constitute, in their biometric manifestation, a new order of biological citizenship. Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas (2005: 440) define biological citizenship as “citizenship projects that have linked their conceptions of citizens to beliefs about the biological existence of human beings, as individuals, as families and lineages, as communities, as population and races, and as species”. Citizens, Rose and Novas argue, increasingly understand themselves in biological terms, and see themselves as possessing “biovalue”. Biometrics foregrounds their biovalue by constantly calling upon their bodies to identify, present, validate, show their ethnic membership, lineage and familial ties, all on one ID card.
“Biovalue” here is not only the investment biotech companies and the state make in bodies and DNA, but also the value we come to recognise about our bodies: they give us the legitimacy of citizenship, of access to welfare and, as noted in the preceding section, a sense of “authentic” belonging where our membership in particular families, ethnic groups or clans is legitimised because of the “reading” of our biometric data. Thus, in one sense, in the technologically overdetermined modes of social interaction and communications, the body is rematerialised through biometric data that records us as legitimate users of the technologies that help us belong to families and communities. The social order does not quite fragment in the technologised age; instead, it reconfigures itself and brings the body back into the picture.
Here is an old race and ethnicity question: does this epidermalisation of identity even if coded into “neutral” machinery and databanks, recall an older system of social order based on skin colour, physiognomies and notions of “pure” and “impure” bodies? Will this excessive corporealisation bring back debates about origins and authenticity of the kind that has resulted in everything from deprivation to genocide? (If the African American story of the pursuit of origins and DNA roots outlined above is any indication then yes, it would.)
While the UID declares that the Aadhaar guarantees “identity, not citizenship” (UIDAI 2010a: 2), it remains unquestionable that your iris is your future. As the Strategy Overview cited above states (UIDAI 2010a: 6):
For governments and individuals alike, strong identity for residents has real economic value. While weak identity systems cause the individual to miss out on benefits and services, it also makes it difficult for the government to account for money and resource flows across a country. In addition, it complicates government efforts to account for residents during emergencies and security threats.
This is biological citizenship, where the genetic code, the iris, or even the way you move might enable or hinder your access to services and the state. Such biological citizenship has an interesting consequence: it converts India into a technological society. Andrew Barry (2001: 2) had argued a decade ago, that a “technological society is one which takes technical change to be the model of political invention”. Social problems are deemed to have technical solutions. Biometrics-determined biological citizenship embodied as UID assumes that social and political problems are resolvable through technology. In the UIDAI document above, it is stated that access to welfare and state services is facilitated by having a UID. If we were to take India as an immediate instance, the UIDAI assumes that the unique biometric data facilitates the poor’s access to say, grain or health. It thus offers technological hubris as solution to a problem that has consistently plagued this country: its horrifically meagre public distribution systems and primary health services (UIDAI 2010b).
The poetics of surveillance shifts the ground of the debate: by focusing on the need for a number, it elides the absence of efficient delivery mechanisms for grain or medical services. It is almost as though it was only the lack of a UID that prevented the government from providing healthcare!
This also means that biology rather than contexts, upbringing or social locations will determine our insertion into welfare, labour or political units/networks. We are branded by and coded into a network which gives us rights and responsibilities. Building on the points made in the preceding section about mobile and biometric borders, the larger question would then be of mobility: does our mobility across systems and networks depend on our biometric identity being “cleared” for it?
Scholars have warned that technologies of surveillance relying upon biometrics have not been investigated for their own creators’ assumptions and prejudices. Thus the facial recognition technologies employed are flawed in the sense they are racialised technologies. Simone Browne (2010) in a perspicacious study on biometrics cites authorities who question the use of these devices. A quote from a report by Nanavati et al (2002) is worth citing in some detail (cited in Browne 2010: 137):
Nanavati et al note that facial scan technology may produce higher F[ailure] T[o] En[rol] rates for ‘very dark-skinned users’, not due to ‘lack of distinctive features, of course, but to the quality of images provided to the facial-scan system by video cameras optimised for lighter skinned users’ … In this way, the technology privileges whiteness, or at least lightness, in its use of lighting. This same logic of prototypical whiteness is seemingly present in earlier models of iris-scan technology that were based on 8-bit grayscale image capture, allowing for 256 shades of gray but leaving very dark irises ‘clustered at one end of the spectrum’.
Browne (2010: 135) argues:
[P]rototypical whiteness is one facet of the cultural and technological logic that informs many instances of the practices of biometrics and the visual economy of recognition and verification that accompany these practices. Practices here are taken to include research and development (R&D), applications, and governmental rationalisation. Digital epidermalisation is the exercise of power cast by the disembodied gaze of certain surveillance technologies (for example, identity card and e-passport verification machines) that can be employed to do the work of alienating the subject.
Biological citizenship also works towards another consequence. First, it minimises the body into a set of numbers, thus erasing the complicated nature of identity itself. Second, this same set of numbers then offers the potential, and possibility, of expansion, of being used for various purposes. The UIDAI, remember, is supposed to be multipurpose. The UIDAI (2010a: 4) states:
The UIDAI envisions a balance between ‘privacy and purpose’ when it comes to the information it collects on residents. The agencies may store the information of residents they enrol if they are authorised to do so, but they will not have access to the information in the UID database. The UIDAI will answer requests to authenticate identity only through a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ response.
The Demographic Data Standards and Verification Procedure (DDSVP) Committee Report of the UIDAI (2009: 4) mentions that the UIDAI
proposes to create a platform to first collect the identity details and then to perform authentication that can be used by several government and commercial service providers.
It does not specify who/what these commercial service providers are. Data stored in such databanks offers the potential of monitoring various individuals in multiple domains, a process now known as “dataveillance”. This means that the biometric data collected could be appropriated for other functions, a phenomenon called “function creep”, where data collected for one purpose might end up serving an unintended or even unauthorised purpose. With ambient intelligence technologies – where the hardware for monitoring people is not always visible but absorbed into everyday settings, and “intelligence” is distributed around us constantly – our bodies are perpetually interfaced with the environs. When, for instance, our house starts recognising my footfalls or the door my voice/face, we see the ambient intelligence “networked” with my body, and biometrics becomes merged into the setting (environs) of the body.
The moral of the story is: in the age of multiveillance and function creep, guard your body with care. It is your passport to survival.
References
Amoore, L (2006): “Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror”, Political Geography, 25(3): 336-51.
Barry, A (2001): Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (New York: Athlone Press).
Breckinridge, K (2005): “The Biometric State: The Promise and Peril of Digital Government in the New South Africa”,Journal of Southern African Studies, 31(2): 267-82.
Browne, S (2010): “Digital Epidermalisation: Race, Identity and Biometrics”, Critical Sociology, 36(1): 131-50.
Gates, K (2006): “Identifying the 9/11 Faces of Terror”, Cultural Studies, 20(4-5): 417-40.
Introna, L D and D Wood (2004): “Picturing Algorithmic Surveillance: The Politics of Facial Recognition Systems”,Surveillance and Society, 2(2/3): 177-98.
Kim, J (2011): “Establishing Identity: Documents, Performance, and Biometric Information in Immigration Proceedings”, Law and Social Inquiry, 36(3): 760-86.
Mordini, E and S Massari (2008): “Body, Biometrics and Identity”, Bioethics, 22(9): 488-98.
Nash, R (2011): “Joy and Pity: Reading Animal Bodies in Late Eighteenth-Century Culture”, The Eighteenth Century,52(1): 47-67.
Nelkin, D and L Andrews (1999): “DNA Identification and Surveillance Creep”, Sociology of Health and Illness, 21(5): 689-706.
Nelson, A and J Won Hwang (2012): “Roots and Revelations: Genetic Ancestry Testing and the YouTube Generation”, in Lisa Nakamura and Peter A Chow-White (ed.), Race after the Internet (London and New York: Routledge), 271-90.
Rose, N and C Novas (2005): “Biological Citizenship”, in A Ong and S J Collier (ed.), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell), 439-64.
Ross, J C (2007): “Biometrics: Intersecting Borders and Bodies in Liberal Bionetwork States”, Journal of Borderlands Studies, 22(2): 77-96.
Spillers, H J (2003): Black, White, and in Colour: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Zureik, E and K Hindle (2004): “Governance, Security and Technology: The Case of Biometrics”, Studies in Political Economy, 73: 113-37.
