Biometrics AFF

1ACBiometric technologies are used as a means of controlling and disciplining populations.Wong ‘13 [Jessica Chantelle Wong; “Risk-Management Approaches in the Post 9/11 Era: A Case Study of Security Provisions within the Context of the US,” Submitted as requirement for Master Thesis to Lund University, Department of Political Science Global Studies Program, Spring 2013, 34]

Charlotte Epstein (2007, p. 153) argues that, “the site of identification has shifted to the body”; in turn, this

indicates that documents in which individuals carry are not the subjects of verification, but their bodies. As a result, control is seen as exercised upon the individual body, “at the point of entry into the secured space, whether physical or logical” (Epstein 2007, p. 153). Epstein (2007, p. 153) connects this idea to Foucault’s notion of power in which at this point, “power “passes

through” individuals rather than “is applied to” them”. This is important in relation to US security policies implemented after

9/11 to securitize migration. In this case, the concept of biometric power can be seen as the regulation of mobilities through the function of statistics for the purpose of normalizing the population. ¶ Biometric power can therefore be interpreted as an operation of surveillance focused on the body. Epstein (2007) argues that this raises important questions in terms of the type of surveillance that is involved. For instance whether it is surveillance utilized to keep individuals in line or on the contrary, surveillance to protect (Epstein 2007, p. 153). Although both exert forms of control, the first relates between the individual and the governing authority, while the latter focuses on the security of the people. The biometric system appears to integrate both forms of surveillance. The concept of biometric borders can be understood as the process of regulating the population between the undesirable from the desirable .¶ These biometric databases act as a mechanism to differentiate between what is termed as, “positive enrollment”, which accounts for individuals that willingly give personal information and fall into the category of “trusted subjects”; conversely, “negative enrollment”, is not voluntary and occurs when an individual violates the law accounting for “questionable subjects” (Bolle, R. M., Connell, J. H., Pankanti, S., Ratha, N. K., & Senior, A.W. 2004, p.159).

Epstein (2007, p. 154) claims that if an individual must first be screened against the available data of questionable subjects before being considered a trusted subject, this organization relies on a, “fully operational disciplinary power”. This idea suggests that undisciplined individuals, that have been deemed “questionable”, have been filtered out by the process of negative enrollment, and assumes that “trusted” individuals are fully disciplined. Epstein (2007, 154) argues that, “A biometric system controls the movement of disciplined bodies in and out of a space, to protect both the space and the bodies within it”. This suggests biometric power as seen to promote both forms of surveillance. As Epstein (2007, p. 154) reasons, “it ultimately subsumes the punishing aspect of surveillance under the security objective, all the while relying centrally on the

successful operation of discipline”. As a result, this demonstrates the development of discipline into biopower where the technology of power, “does not exclude disciplinary technology, but it does...use it by sort of infiltrating it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques” (Foucault 2003, p. 242).

The use of Biometrics assumes a self-same subject, whereby one’s singular identity is authentic and unique. Simultaneously, the permanence and digitization of the subject disrupts the human by creating the idea of the physical body not only as a physical existence, but also as a digital comparison to the normative subject. Puliese ‘5

[Joseph Pugliese; “In Silico Race and The Heteronomy of Biometric Proxies: Biometrics in the Context of Civilian Life, Border Security and Counter-Terrorism Laws,” The Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2005,

25-26]

As I demonstrate above, the authenticating and identificatory logic of biometric systems is predicated on generating a template proxy of the subject. Encoded in this logic, however, is a series of contradictory, if not altogether aporetic,

effects that problematise liberal-humanist conceptualisations of both identity and the subject. The aporetic

logic of citationality that I drew ¶ attention to above, whereby the veridicality of a subject's re-enrolling template is adjudicated precisely by its failure exactly to coincide with the original enrolment template, inscribes univocal conceptualisations of identity and the subject with a heteronomous law of the self-same-as-other . ¶ Indeed,

the very status of the key signifiers of biometric identification and verification - uniqueness, authenticity and veridicity - are predicated on an unacknowledged dependence on the other: the self-same subject must generate a micrological series of citations- as -differentiations that de-totalise her/his identity, even as these citations-as-differentiations function to affirm the seeming univocality of identity. Operative here, in effect, is an aporetic logic within

which a 'true' and 'authentic' identity must simultaneously be, at the time of re-enrolment, non-identical to itself - in other

words, at some minimal level, the re-enrolling scan must appear as a'fraud' in relation to the 'original' enrolment template. ¶ The western legal category of the subject is founded precisely on the Enlightenment conceptualisation of identity as univocally self-same. As Stuart Hall argues, the Enlightenment subject is founded on the notion of a centred and unified individual 'whose "centre" consist[s] of an inner core which

first emerged when the subject was born, and unfold[s] with it, while remaining essentially the same - continuous or "identical" with itself- throughout the individual's existence. The essential centre of the self was a person's identity.'

87 Biometric systems of identification and verification are predicated on this Enlightenment understanding of the subject: the authorising logic of these systems is driven by the notion that, despite micro permutations, the empiricity of flesh (the iris, the face or the finger

print) encodes an identity that is continuous or 'identical' with itself throughout the subject's existence. Yet, within biometric systems, this logic must be underpinned, simultaneously, by a dissemination and decentring of self-same identity. This other,

heteronomous logic is perfectly encapsulated in the following biometric formula: 'Identification is often referred to as 1: N (one-to-N or one-to-many), because a person's biometric information is compared against multiple (N)

records.' 88

One-to-N or one-to- many names the manner in which the unitary identity of the subject is already invested with the law of the other (signatory citation as different in every instance); it is this heteronomy that ¶ guarantees the conditions of possibility for the self-same to be constituted as an identifiably

unique identity, even as it opens up the same to a movement of discontinuity and dissemination (across various institutional sites and biometric systems with every

instance of re-enrolment). ¶ I want to pursue this movement of discontinuity and dissemination of identity in the context of biometric technologies by attempting to

theorise biometric enrolment templates in terms of scattered 'body bits.' Biometric enrolment templates are not, effectively, 'body bits' at all:

they contain no biological material; rather, they algorithmically transmute corporeal features into digital data. However, this digital data is nothing if not a tropological version of a subject's body bits: no fleshly body, no biometric

template; decorporealised body bits are predicated on the corporeality of the subject's 'distinctive physiological characteristics.'

89 The very movement of translation from one to the other produces the rhetorical turn of tropology: biometric

templates are tropic proxies of the body, specifically, as I discussed above, they are synecdoches of the subject. ¶ This tropic turn must be seen as instantiating what

Emmanuel Levinas terms 'a denucleation of the very atomicity of the one.' 90 This process of denucleation of the atomicity of one-as-self-same has far reaching consequences in its effective solicitation of the Enlightenment conceptualisation of the legal category of subject. Not only does it disrupt the unique identity of the self-same subject by disclosing an 'irreducible category of difference at the heart of the Same'91; it opens up a

fundamental scission between the subject and the exercise of agency over their very body and their identity . I discuss the ramifications of this scission elsewhere, in an analysis of the biometrics of racial profiling and the global search for terrorists. I want, however, to reproduce some of the key arguments pertinent to this analysis. ¶

Biometric classification infringes upon the autonomy of many by sorting them into categories of “terrorist, criminal, unreliable or untrustworthy individual.” The drive for categorization allows one’s appearance to over-determine their will or intent.Laas-Mikko and Sutrop ‘12

[Margit Sutrop is a professor of Practical Philosophy, University of Tarty, Tartu, Estonia, and Katrin Laas-Mikko is a Graduate student, University of Tartu, "How Do Violations of Privacy and Moral Autonomy Threaten the Basis of Our Democracy?," Trames, 2012, 376-378]

Implementation of second-generation biometrics in security contexts is intended usually for massive surveillance (or

dataveillance); this means not only the monitoring of specific suspects, but placing all people who happen to be in public places under surveillance and scrutiny. It can be argued, that “… activities performed in public are explicitly being made public by the individual performing them, because the person would have the choice of doing something different and knows that he or she can generally be observed by others in public places” (ADABTS

2010). On the one hand it seems to be true that people can adapt their behavior under social control. But we have to admit that these kinds of technologies are more powerful than old (men-powered) systems and are accompanied by many new risks. As INDECT and ADABTS projects show, second-generation biometrics is integrated into larger surveillance systems, which make it easy to mine the data, to profile or match it by combining different data sources, and in this way to obtain additional information about the person. The biometrical data enables the creation of a profile of an identified person and to link other data to this profile. According to Helen Nissenbaum (1997; 2010), privacy in public places has to be protected, since in these kinds of cases of surveillance it is easy to transfer data from the context in which it was collected to another context and thus cause function creep. The main ethical concerns about the application of second-generation biometrics are related to issues of privacy, autonomy, and

equal treatment. Since this technology is used to survey persons’ behavior in secured areas and detect abnormal behavior and events, as a result huge amounts of personal data are processed and collected into databases . Thus there are risks of data leakage or access by unauthorized persons, which means overriding the data subject’s will about access and use of his or her data and therefore violating his or her privacy. How can privacy be violated if data is collected anonymously? Although in most cases the data collected will indeed be anonymous (the focus is not on Who you are but on

the question Which kind of person you are), the problem is that it will still be possible to identify persons on the basis of comparing their video pictures with those in large databases , already existing in several countries (e.g. in Estonia there are large databases of e-passport pictures). Is this a reason for concern? On the one hand we might indeed feel more secure if new methods are available for detecting

criminals and terrorists and thus proactively prevent attacks on our lives. On the other hand, there is an increased possibility of stigmatization and discrimination on the basis of false interpretation of biometric characteristics .

Behavior prediction based on the collection of biometrics and identification may lead to the social classification and stigmatization of the person, placing him or her automatically in some category such as terrorist, criminal, unreliable or untrustworthy individual, etc. In the case of second-generation biometrics, profiles are to be created about persons, and some people will be sorted out on the basis of different measurements of bodily behavior. Measurements form the set of the data that are ‘mined’ to detect the unique patterns for a particular person. Behavioral biometrics is the result of profiling, in which a certain kind of image is created and attached to the person, and then matched against data that

can be used to provide more complete profiles (FIDIS 2009b). The main problem with profiling, besides data protection issues, is that it contains a stereotype of a possible offender, and this stereotype can inherit content from stereotypes of groups against which there is popular prejudice – and which is not evidence-based (Detecter 2008). The surveillance, as

involved in behavioral biometrics, is according to David Lyon (2001) a form of social sorting, of categorizing persons and groups, which accentuates differences and reinforces the existing inequalities. We agree with Lyon that, unfortunately, these categories are seldom subjected to ethical inquiry or democratic scrutiny, despite their consequences for opportunities and choices in life. The reliability of these algorithms is under suspicion because of the high risk of a false error rate and a large number of fixed ‘false images’ of persons. “‘Behavior’ is a loose and socio-politically contingent concept,” as Juliet Lodge (2010:8) points out. She claims that “defining a certain type of behaviour as deviant or indicative of ‘risky intent’ leaves behavior subject to the arbitrary interpretation, political vagaries, politico-ideological preferences and goals in power /…/.” In this context, the following warning should be taken seriously: “Categories, descriptions and models are routinely imposed on individuals’ identity information. We know what

dramatic consequences the availability of labels like ‘jew,’ ‘hutu,’ ‘tutsi,’ and ‘white,’ ‘black’ and ‘colored people’ in administrative management systems can have

for those concerned” (Manders-Huits and van der Hoven 2008:2). In addition to this problem of stereotyping through arbitrary interpretation of deviant or risky behavior, another essential feature of behavioral biometrics is that it allows on-the-move authentication or behavior identification. Traits such as the dynamics of facial expression or gait can be captured and analyzed covertly without any physical contact with the person

and thus without his or her explicit knowledge and consent. Usually intentions are attributed to a person according to certain behavioral or physiological characteristics before this person has decided to do any harm. We agree with

Manders-Huits and van der Hoven (2008:5–6) that this is problematic because it violates the person’s right to be engaged in selfidentification, the core of a person’s moral autonomy. This argument follows from Bernard Williams’s (1973) idea that

respect for moral autonomy implies taking into account the other person’s self-identification: we ought to understand the other person’s aims, evaluations, attitudes, thoughts, and desires. In other words, if we assess the behavior of a person, we have to put ourselves in his shoes, taking into account his beliefs, motives and intentions, life projects, among other concerns. In the case of behavioral biometrics, identification of a person is performed from a third-person perspective without even attempting to interpret that person’s motives.

Thus, from the ethical point of view, we believe that the main problem with behavioral biometrics is that it does not make any attempt to take into account the person’s self-identification; the person’s behavior or physical characteristics are interpreted and viewed without any deeper knowledge of the person’s own point of view. Thus, it may well be that the person’s intentions or desires are misinterpreted.

The state surveils and categorizes biometric data to project threats upon bodies and justify states of exception through panic security.Kroker ‘6 Arthur Kroker is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory and Professor of Political Science at the University of Victoria “Born Again Ideology” http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=549

Slipping into the Bloodstream of the Body Politic In the new biometric state, the body, whether collective or individual, is the object of a double anxiety: intense fear about surprise attack from an always threatening, imminently dangerous external world; and ideological fantasies concerning the psycho-ontological threat within, whether in the form of unidentified political dissidents who have managed to slip undetected as sleeper cells into the bloodstream of the American body politic; or individual bodies of the traveling public which can never be absolutely eliminated as security threats because fantasies of uncontrolled mayhem, destruction, and apocalypse are so indigenous to the

production of the spectacle of the nomadic traveler. The sign-system of panic security has its privileged fetish objects --

scissors, shoes, belts, nail files -- just as much as it has an impossible dream: bringing out of concealment the hidden intentionality of the potentially threatening body by hyper-technological methods ranging from electronic pre-screening, biometric scanning -- humiliating, probing, stripping, and imaging. Maximal preventative deterrence for a guaranteed minimum of public security. The State of Suspicion "If you suspect it,

report it." Message on podium at press conference by British police, July 23, 2005 With this, we enter the era of the new biometric state: a form of bio-governance which systematically links primitive collective emotions of fear and anxiety with postmodern technologies of surveillance. While the aim of the new biometric state is to immunize itself from direct internal and external challenges by means of the creation of a bunker society fused together by fear; its ideological method is to foment in the mass psychology of the population a constant state of suspicion, both by reporting any "strange behavior" of others, and monitoring our own suspicious thoughts for possible signs of imminent subversion. In the citizen's army of the new biometric state, individuals are thus expected to play the role of the policeman without as well as the policeman within. Not content with the relative passivity and defensive nature of the bunker state or the state

of suspicion, the new biometric state also goes on the attack: it engages in preventative wars as ways of destabilizing potential sources of viral terrorism; and, finally, it becomes a bio-terrorist itself -- garrisoning the world; creating zones of extra-juridical, extra-constitutional incarceration; installing secret torture prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, Diego Garcia; seeking to "Git-moize" the outside world now, and probably the domestic population later. Quite literally, we live now under the terrorism of the sign of (absolute) security. Possessing no definitive limits because of the objectively limitless character of the psychological projections of fantasy, illusion, and anxiety upon which the dream of perfect security is

based, the signs of panic security can only expand in the future, exploding in relationship to the perception of imminent danger; taking possession of every orifice of the anxious body, collective and individual. So it is that we enter into the feverish, inventive imaginary of panic security where viral war replaces cold war, where the threat of terrorism substitutes for the menace of communism, where preventative security measures are presented as protection from surprise attacks, where traditional ideology is eclipsed by fears of viral invasion, and where Homeland Security is the new Body McCarthyism of the 21st century.

Biopower necessitates the absolute destruction of the population – genocide, racism, and nuclear and biological extinction are the endpoints of the biopolitical processFoucault 75 [(Michel, Philosopher) “Society Must Be Defended” LECTURES AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE, 1975-76. Accessed from Rebel Library Studies]

We are, then, in a power that has taken control of both the body and life or that has, if you like, taken control of life in general—with the body as one pole and the population as the other. We can therefore immediately identify the paradoxes that appear at the points where the exercise of this biopower reaches its limits. The paradoxes become apparent if we look, on the one hand, at atomic power, which is not simply the power to kill, in accordance with the rights that are granted to any sovereign, millions and hundreds of millions of people (after all, that is traditional). The workings of contemporary political power are such that atomic power represents a paradox that is difficult, if not impossible, to get around. The power to manufacture and use the atom bomb represents the deployment of a sovereign power that kills, but it is also the power to kill life itself. So the power that is being exercised in this atomic power is exercised in such a way that it is capable of suppressing life itself. And, therefore, to suppress itself insofar as it is the power that guarantees life. Either it is sovereign and uses the atom bomb, and therefore cannot be power, biopower, or the power to guarantee life, as it has been ever since the nineteenth century. Or, at the opposite extreme, you no longer have a sovereign right that is in excess of biopower, but a biopower that is in excess of sovereign right. This excess of biopower appears when it becomes technologically and politically possible for man not only to manage life but to make it proliferate , to create living matter , to build the monster, and , ultimately , to build viruses that cannot be controlled and that are universally destructive . This formidable extension of biopower, unlike what I was just saying about atomic power, will put it beyond all human sovereignty. You must excuse this long digression into biopower, but I think that it does provide us with a basic argument that will allow us to get back to the problem I was trying to raise. If it is true that the power of sovereignty is increasingly on the retreat and that disciplinary or regulatory disciplinary power is on the advance, how will the power to kill and the function of murder operate in this technology of power, which takes life as both its object and its objective? How can a power such as this kill, if it is true that its basic function is to improve life, to prolong its duration, to improve its chances, to avoid accidents, and to compensate for failings? How, under these conditions, is it possible for a political power to kill, to call for deaths, to demand deaths, to give the order to kill, and to expose not only its enemies but its own citizens to the risk of death? Given that this power's objective is essentially to make live, how can it let die? How can the power of death, the function of death, be exercised in a political system centered upon biopower? It is, I think, at this point that racism intervenes. I am certainly not saying that racism was invented at this time. It had already been in existence for a very long time. But I think it functioned elsewhere. It is indeed the emergence of this biopower that inscribes it in the mechanisms of the State. It is at this moment that racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States. As a result, the modern State can scarcely function without becoming involved with racism at some point, within certain limits and subject to certain conditions. What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what

must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as infe rior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a biological-type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain. This will allow power to treat that population as a mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of racism: to fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower. Racism also has a second function. Its role is, if you like, to allow the establishment of a positive relation of this type: "The more you kill, the more deaths you will cause" or "The very fact that you let more die will allow you to live more." I would say that this relation ("If you want to live, you must take lives, you must be able to kill") was not invented by either racism or the modern State. It is the relationship of war: "In order to live, you must destroy your enemies." But racism does make the relationship of war—"If you want to live, the other must die"—function in a way that is completely new and that is quite compatible with the exercise of biopower. On the one hand, racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and the death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type relationship: "The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are elim inated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I—as species rather than individual—can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate." The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degen erate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer. This is not, then, a military, warlike, or political relationship, but a biological relationship. And the reason this mechanism can come into play is that the enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries in the political sense of the term; they are threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the population. In the biopower system, in other words, killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race. There is a direct connection between the two. In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable. When you have a normalizing society, you have a power which is, at least superficially, in the first instance, or in the first line a biopower, and racism is the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed. Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State. So you can understand the importance—I almost said the vital importance—of racism to the exercise of such a power: it is the precondition for exercising the right to kill. If the power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist. And if, conversely, a power of sovereignty, or in other words, a power that has the right of life and death, wishes to work with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it too must become racist. When I say "killing," I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on. I think that we are now in a position to understand a number of things. We can understand, first of all, the link that was quickly—I almost said immediately—established between nineteenth-century biological theory and the discourse of power. Basically, evolutionism, understood in the broad sense—or in other words, not so much Dar win's theory itself as a set, a bundle, of notions (such as: the hierarchy of species that grow from a common evolutionary tree, the struggle

for existence among species, the selection that eliminates the less fit)— naturally became within a few years during the nineteenth century I not simply a way of transcribing a political discourse into biological terms, and not simplv a way of dressing up a political discourse in scientific clothing, but a real way of thinking about the relations be tween colonization, the necessity for wars, criminality, the phenomena of madness and mental illness, the history of societies with their i different classes, and so on. Whenever, in other words, there was a I confrontation, a killing or the risk of death, the nineteenth century was quite literally obliged to think about them in the form of evolutionism. And we can also understand why racism should have developed in modern societies that function in the biopower mode; we can understand whv racism broke out at a number of privileged moments, and why they were precisely the moments when the right to take life was imperative. Racism first develops with colonization, or in other words, with colonizing genocide. If you are functioning in the biopower mode, how can you justify the need to kill people, to kill populations, and to kill civilizations? By using the themes of evolutionism, by appealing to a racism. War. How can one not only wage war on one's adversaries but also expose one's own citizens to war, and let them be killed by the mil lion (and this is precisely what has been going on since the nineteenth century, or since the second half of the nineteenth century), except by activating the theme of racism? From this point onward, war is about two things: it is not simply a matter of destroying a political adversary, but of destroying the enemy race, of destroying that [sort] of biological threat that those people over there represent to our race. In one sense, this is of course no more than a biological extrapolation from the theme of the political enemy. But there is more to it than that. In the nineteenth century—and this is completely new—war will be seen not only as a way of improving one's own race by eliminating the enemy race (in accordance with the themes of natural selection and the struggle for existence), but also as a way of regenerating one's own race. As more and more of our number die, the race to which we belong will become all the purer. At the end of the nineteenth century, we have then a new racism modeled on war. It was, I think, required because a biopower that wished to wage war had to articulate the will to destroy the adversary with the risk that it might kill those whose lives it had, by definition, to protect, manage, and multiply. The same could be said of criminality. Once the mechanism of biocriminal was called upon to make it possible to execute or banish criminals, criminality was conceptualized in racist terms. The same applies to madness, and the same applies to various anomalies. I think that, broadly speaking, racism justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality. You can see that, here, we are far removed from the ordinary racism that takes the traditional form of mutual contempt or hatred between races. We are also far removed from the racism that can be seen as a sort of ideological operation that allows States, or a class, to displace the hostility that is directed toward [them], or which is tormenting the social body, onto a mythical adversary. I think that this is something much deeper than an old tradition, much deeper than a new ideology, that it is something else. The specificity of modern racism, or what gives it its specificity, is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies, or the lies of power. It is bound up with the technique of power, with the technology of power. It is bound up with this, and that takes us as far away as possible from the race war and the intelligibility of history. We are dealing with a mechanism that allows biopower to work. So racism is bound up with the workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power. The juxtaposition of—or the way biopower functions through—the old sovereign power of life and death implies the workings, the introduction and activation, of racism. And it is, I think, here that we find the actual roots of racism. So you can understand how and why, given these conditions, the most murderous States are

also, of necessity, the most racist. Here, of course we have to take the example of Nazism. After all, Nazism was in fact the paroxysmal development of the new power mechanisms that had been established since the eighteenth century. Of course, no State could have more disciplinary power than the Nazi regime. Nor was there any other State in which the biological was so tightly, so insistently, regulated. Disciplinary power and biopower : all this permeated , underpinned, Nazi society (control over the biological, of procreation and of heredity; control over illness and accidents too). No society could be more disciplinary or more concerned with pro viding insurance than that established, or at least planned, by the Nazis. Controlling the random element inherent in biological processes was one of the regime's immediate objectives. But this society in which insurance and reassurance were universal, this universally disciplinary and regulatory society, was also a society which unleashed murderous power, or in other words, the old sovereign right to take life. This power to kill, which ran through the entire social body of Nazi society, was first manifested when the power to take life, the power of life and death, was granted not only to the State but to a whole series of individuals, to a considerable number of people (such as the SA, the SS, and so on). Ultimately, everyone in the Nazi State had the power of life and death over his or her neighbors, if only because of the practice of informing, which effectively meant doing away with the people next door, or having them done away with. So murderous power and sovereign power are unleashed throughout the entire social body. They were also unleashed by the fact that war was explicitly defined as a political objective—and not simply as a basic political objective or as a means, but as a sort of ultimate and decisive phase in all political processes—politics had to lead to war, and war had to be the final decisive phase that would complete everything. The objective of the Nazi regime was therefore not really the destruction of other races. The destruction of other races was one aspect of the project, the other being to expose its own race to the absolute and universal threat of death. Risking one's life, being exposed to total destruction, was one of the principles inscribed in the basic duties of the obedient Nazi, and it was one of the essential objectives of Nazism's policies. It had to reach the point at which the entire population was exposed to death. Exposing the entire population to universal death was the only way it could truly constitute itself as a superior race and bring about its definitive regeneration once other races had been either exterminated or enslaved forever. We have, then, in Nazi society something that is really quite extraordinary: this is a society which has generalized biopower in an absolute sense , but which has also generalized the sovereign right to kill. The two mechanisms—the classic, archaic mechanism that gave the State the right of life and death over its citizens, and the new mechanism organized around discipline and regulation, or in other words, the new mechanism of biopower—coincide exactly. We can therefore say this: The Nazi State makes the field of the life it manages, protects, guarantees, and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people, but also its own people. There was, in Nazism, a coincidence between a generalized biopower and a dictatorship that was at once absolute and retransmitted throughout the entire social body by this fantastic extension of the right to kill and of exposure to death. We have an absolutely racist State, an absolutely murderous State, and an absolutely suicidal State. A racist State, a murderous State, and a suicidal State. The three were necessarily superimposed, and the result was of course both the "final solution" (or the attempt to eliminate, by eliminating the Jews, all the other races of which the Jews were both the symbol and the manifestation) of the years 1942- 1943, and then Telegram 71, in which, in April 1945, Hitler gave the order to destroy the German people's own living conditions.5 The final solution for the other races, and the absolute suicide of the [German] race. That is where this mechanism inscribed in the workings of the modern State leads. Of course, Nazism alone took the play between the sovereign right to kill and the

mechanisms of biopower to this paroxysmal point. But this plav is in fact inscribed in the workings of all States.

In order to disrupt the modern form of biopolitics, we return to an ethic of love and care in order to rethink the normative body and a politics of difference Saltes ‘13

[Natasha Saltes; “‘Abnormal’ Bodies on the Borders of Inclusion: Biopolitics and the paradox of Disability Surveillance,” Surveillance & Society, 2013, 69-70]

Given the varied use of disability surveillance, how can we resolve the paradox of promoting rights and preventing ‘risk’? In attempting to answer this question, I suggest not a departure from biopolitics itself, but a departure from the underpinning rationalization of eliminating abnormality and a return to ‘the hidden foundation of biopolitics’, which Ojakangas describes as ‘love (agape) and care (cura), “care for individual life”’ (2005: 5). In distinguishing between Agamben’s (1998) conception of biopower as ‘bare life’ and Foucault’s conception of

biopower as ‘optimizing life’, Ojakangas argues that the aim of biopower is not to reduce life, but ‘to invest life through and through’ (Foucault 1978: 139 quoted in Ojakangas 2005: 14). He identifies the hidden foundation of care and love as the origin of biopower noting that, historically, biopolitical processes were embedded in the state’s inclination toward power, but were nonetheless carried out with the aim of promoting the welfare, prosperity, health and happiness of the population. He recounts the origin of biopower, pointing out that it emerged not only in the modern state, but in Western religious ideology, namely ‘Judeo-Christian tradition[s] of pastoral power’ described in the metaphor of the shepherd watching over and protecting his flock (2005: 19). In his examination of biopower in the context of left politics, Hannah takes up

Ojakangas’ notion of ‘biopolitics of care’ remarking that ‘an affirmative biopower has at its core a biophilia, a love for living beings, that can be mobilized as a form of solidarity to help combat injustice and inequality, and to make the world a better place’ (2011: 1050 emphasis in original). However, Hannah recognizes that there are challenges in mobilizing and implementing an affirmative biopolitics. He refers to the dilemma that Esposito raises, noting that the protection of life is often carried out through

authoritative processes that at times produce ‘negative effects’ (2011: 1048). For Hannah, these negative effects can be attributed to a futurist biopower. As he describes it, a biopower oriented toward the future is similar to biopolitics aimed at preventing risk in that it seeks to ensure ‘the survival of the Same in the future, at the expense of an Other’ (2011: 1048). According to Hannah, biopolitics came to be viewed in a negative light due to historical events marked by racist practices, eugenics and Nazi ideology, which were carried out and rationalized under the

purview of ‘futurist investment’ (2011: 1048). However, as Hannah acknowledges, biopolitics does not necessarily need to abandon concern for the future. Rather, what it must abandon is the tendency to determine political qualification by measuring the value of life according to ontological norms. The notion that ontological ‘abnormality’ poses a threat to the welfare, prosperity, health and happiness of the population and therefore must be eliminated is contingent on the conception of ontogenetic norms and its association with productivity and progress (Finkelstein 1980; Oliver 1996; Davis 2006; Oliver and Barnes 2012). The emphasis on bodily norms is what drives biopolitical agendas and is what results in discrimination and exclusion of those deemed abnormal. For Ewald (1990), there is no innate relationship between normal and abnormal. He maintains that the establishment of norms is a relational process that often has little to do with biological variations and more to do with how difference is perceived in society and constructed and experienced as a ‘handicap’ (1990: 157). Ewald points out that ‘[i]f environmental requirements change, performance does too, and along with them the location of the boundary between normal and abnormal’ (1990: 157). Shifting the boundary between normal and

abnormal and uncovering the hidden foundation of an affirmative biopolitics requires rethinking the body according to normative standards within a biomedical and pathological context to thinking about the body ‘as a situation’ ‘lived’ and ‘changeable’ (Peuravaara 2013). In theorizing the body according to conceptions of disability and normality, Peuravaara (2013) contends that bodies are always situated and that situations are constantly changing, which invariably shapes the ‘lived body’. Peuravaara follows Moi (2005) in asserting that the ‘lived body is part of society without being a mere product of society’ (2013: 414).

Removing the experience of disability in the context of the lived body involves adopting a ‘politics of difference’ that rejects dominant practices of ableism and values ontological diversity (Loja et al. 2013: 191). It also requires rethinking spaces and the spatialization of difference (Kitchin 1998; Hansen and Philo 2009). If underpinned by the hidden foundation of care and love, biopolitical strategies can be used to promote rights

whereby disability surveillance, such as classifying and counting people with impairments, is not conducted as a means of exclusion, but to achieve inclusion and to improve the welfare of both individual and collective life.

Thus we advocate for an ethic of social flesh Social flesh is an ethical stance meant to incorporate care and love into sociality in order to disrupt the current means by which we view bodies. It achieves this by understanding the means by which we all are physiologically connected to each other and thereby disrupts the atomized vision of flesh present in the status quo.[Beasley and Bacchi, “Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future Beyond trust, care and generosity—towards an ethic of social flesh,'” 2007, 291-292]

Social flesh as a political metaphor involves an attempt to develop a new ethico-political starting place for thinking critically about politics, interconnection and sociality . In challenging neo-liberal conceptions of the autonomous self/citizen and the thin eviscerated sociality this account invokes, it highlights human embodied interdependence and brings together the socio-political and embodiment . But what does this mean for undertaking social analysis? What

techniques might such a political metaphor bring to bear? These are questions that we expect to consider in more detail in future publications. Nevertheless, at this early stage we can see some methodological possibilities. In the Australian context we have suggested in previous work on citizen bodies how social flesh might be deployed at the level of policy analysis. In particular we have identified distinctions made between those deemed to be controlled by their bodies as against those conceived as having control over their bodies (Bacchi and Beasley, 2002). These distinctions are associated with differing levels of institutional intervention for people accessing Australian health services. Women accessing health services linked to reproduction will be cast as ‘controlled by body’ (hyperembodied), whereas women accessing cosmetic surgery will generally be perceived as decision-making, autonomous

‘consumers’ in command of their bodies (hypo-embodied).4 Significantly, distinctions between those constituted as having control over their bodies and those conceived as controlled by their bodies may transpose on to gender distinctions (as

in the case of reproduction), but the lens of embodied sociality is not another synonym for gender . Women may be constituted, alongside men, as autonomous consumers (as in the case of cosmetic surgery). The work of Martin Levine in Gay Macho (Levine and Troiden, 1998)

provides another instance in which the political impact of differentiated body status does not entirely line up with gender difference. Levine’s work points to the constitution of certain forms of masculinity, indeed hyper-masculinity, as hyper-embodied. Hence, far from signifying the invulnerable atomized masculine self, gay macho is deemed an instance of ‘controlled by body’, in this case subject to ‘sexual addiction’ and requiring professional

therapeutic intervention. Manhood is not always able to claim the status of an untouchable integrity and is not always therefore aligned with the sovereign subjectivity of modernity. Emily Grabham’s application of our work on citizen bodies and social flesh to ‘intersex citizenship’ reveals a related dynamic . Paralleling the ways in

which reproductive women are reduced to the body and as a result subjected to higher degrees of government oversight/intervention in their decision-making, ‘the child who cannot be identified at birth as “either” male or female

becomes their body . . . rendering them a physical site that is open for an unusual level of intervention by medical practitioners and family’ (Grabham, 2007). In these examples the ethico-political ideal of social flesh provides a significant point of departure for investigating forms of governmentality undertaken by the state, as well as those arising in professionalized institutional settings, interpersonal contexts and in relation to the citizen/self . This starting point enables us to imagine progressive democratic directions for the

future. Democratic directions The political vocabulary of social flesh has significant implications for democratic visions. Because it conceptualizes citizens as socially embodied – as interconnected mutually reliant flesh – in a more thoroughgoing sense than the languages of trust, care, responsibility and generosity, it resists accounts of political change as making transactions between the ‘less fortunate’ and ‘more privileged’, more trusting, more caring, more responsible or more generous . Social flesh is political metaphor in which fleshly sociality is profoundly levelling. As a result, it challenges meliorist reforms that aim to protect the ‘vulnerable’ from the worst effects of social inequality , including the current distribution

of wealth. A political ethic of embodied intersubjectivity requires us to consider fleshly interconnection as the basis of a democratic sociality, demanding a rather more far-reaching reassessment of national and international institutional arrangements than political vocabularies that rest upon extending

altruism. Relatedly, it provides a new basis for thinking about the sorts of institutional arrangements necessary to acknowledge social fleshly existence, opening up ‘the scope of what counts as relevant’ (Shildrick, 2001: 238). For example, it

allows a challenge to current conceptualizations that construct attention to the ‘private sphere’ as compensatory rather than as necessary (Beasley and Bacchi, 2000: 350). We intend to pursue the relationship between social flesh and democratic governance in future papers.

The means by which we understand the metaphorical interactions of bodies influences the way we act in the world. So, instead of viewing the portrayal of bodies as a fixed substance in the material world, we prefer the ethic of social flesh which sees the world as interconnected by both social communication and flesh. [Beasley and Bacchi, “Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future Beyond trust, care and generosity—towards an ethic of social flesh,'” 2007, 289-291]While we concur in the postmodern renunciation of foundational fixity in relation to biology and society, we reject the tendency to slip into highlighting endless fluidity or to perceive acknowledgement of embodied sociality as

necessarily heralding a return to biological/structural fixity. To note the specificity of the body, of bodily differences, to reject the portrayal of bodily matter as simply lying doggo in

the face of the inscriptive pen of the social/symbolic, is not to embrace bodies as asocial or to accept the notion of a ‘material realm’

(distinct from an immaterial one?) as somehow foundational and fixed. Butler’s emphasis on plasticity seems to us not as useful here as the less heroic emphasis on contextually

constrained variability and complexity we find in modernist sociological and cultural constructionism (Jackson, 2001; Bordo, 1998), as well as in postmodern-inflected writings by corporeal feminists and feminist political

philosophers concerned with bodily materiality and its social devaluation (Rothfield, 1996; Diprose, 1994, 2002; Young, 1990, 1997; Flax, 1983). The notion of social flesh as a political ethic invokes a certain terrain of epistemological debate , and one which operates across the supposed divide between modernist and postmodern frames of

reference (see Beasley, 2005). In this debate we situate social flesh as a vocabulary that tenaciously holds on to the sensuous fleshliness of sociality as a means to invoke an acknowledgement of interconnection and mutual reliance and the political implications of this . Evidently the epistemological terrain does not just involve a question of content but also the function of social flesh as a contingent

ethics, its function as a political intervention. The constitution of social flesh as a political intervention produces three further relevant features, in terms of metaphor, method and proposals regarding democracy. Political metaphor

As we noted in the Introduction, this paper presumes a role for theoretical concepts and debate in political praxis. The languages of trust/respect, care, responsibility and generosity are clearly intended as political interventions. Precisely because we have some doubts about these languages, the practices with which they are linked, and the political

ideals they enunciate to symbolize imagined political futures, we propose the notion of social flesh as an alternative language. We mentioned earlier Colebrook’s view that we generate concepts to transform social life (2002), but

such a perspective requires a little more clarification. Along with Drucilla Cornell we suggest that there is an important role for the Ideal in political thinking

(2005), a role for the creation of a political imaginary which acts as a counterfoil to the self-evident, ‘natural’ status of dominant

neo-liberal political understandings and practices . As Diprose puts it, the development of this political ideal is aimed at ‘a justice that is not yet here’ (2002: 14),

allowing us to imagine other future social landscapes and how we might work towards them . In this context, we

unapologetically propose the concept of social flesh as a political language, as a political metaphor. Trust and care writers, in particular, would perhaps constitute their vocabularies as referring to actual existing practices and might

be alarmed by any reference to metaphor as inappropriately implying that all we need worry about is words. However, social flesh – the notion of embodied interconnection – is certainly as firmly an expression of existing social practices as the more narrowly conceived languages of trust and care. Additionally, as we have already noted, trust and care writers clearly do see their languages as interventions in the political arena, and thus their

languages may also be viewed as political metaphors. The point here is that most often the function of such vocabularies as political metaphors is not spelled out. Lakoff and Johnson state in this regard that, while metaphor is usually understood as a poetic device or rhetorical flourish, it is on the contrary pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is

fundamentally metaphorical in nature. The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to

other people. . . . If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor. (1980: 3) Lakoff and

Johnson are at pains to point out that, because the metaphorical ‘concepts we live by’ are normally more or less automatic rather than highly conscious and deliberate, interrogating such metaphors makes them explicit and consequently provides an insight into how we live . We would add that the connections between metaphor and sociality do more than reveal that metaphor is not a purely cognitive issue . Instead metaphor appears as an engaged sensuous process involving bodies and actions in the world and between people . Metaphor is thoroughly political in other words,

even if individual metaphors differ in their associations with and mobilization of the social. In this setting, interrogation of metaphorical concepts is not just significant in considering the way in which we live presently, as Lakoff and

Johnson suggest, but also offers a means considering the way in which we might live in the future. Social flesh is a political metaphor intended to challenge the adequacy of dominant neo-liberal and the several alternative understandings of social life considered in this

paper, in order to both reconfigure how we see that social life and to allow us to imagine it otherwise .

Everyday life and forms of governance, including policy, rely upon an assumed metaphorical vocabulary, upon political concepts concerning values and views of the good, upon what Foucault describes as a certain ‘problematization’ (1991: 86; 1985: 115). Neoliberalism may thus be considered as ‘an ethos

or ethical ideal’, articulating a political knowledge, a ‘politics of truth’ (Dean, 1997, in Larner, 2000; Lemke, 2000). To contest the dominant metaphorical vocabulary requires the development of an ‘other’ political vocabulary . In common with Bessant et al. we believe in the value of ‘political talk’. We create and use words ‘to make things happen’ (2006: 16, 18–19). In countering neo-liberalism’s ‘politics of truth’ as the naturalized dominant form of knowledge/power , we aim precisely to refuse the constitution of ‘real’/’material’

and ‘conceptual’ as distinct realms that divide practices embodiment from metaphor-discourses and by contrast

enjoin their interplay. Such a perspective is necessarily democratic since acknowledging the pervasive and everyday connections between the ‘real’/material and conceptual knowledge challenges the institutional authority of expert conceptual knowledge and resists the exclusion of ‘lay’ perspectives (Williams and Popay, 2005: 123). Clearly, as this instance suggests, the account of social flesh as a political metaphor evokes practical implications, and so we turn to methodological and democratic considerations.

AT:

At: Historical Analysis Turn this argument: just because we don’t directly create a historical analysis,

doesn’t mean that we don’t participate in one. The truth is that we track biopolits as… (use a card from below)

Biometrics was established by Western scientists to demarcate non-white bodies as “other” and “degenerate,” legitimizing colonization and spreading internalized racism among minority groupsNishiyama 14 (Hidefumi, PhD Candidate in the Department of Politics and International Studies at University of Warwick and has a BA in Sociology and Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a MSc Sociology (Research) from London School of Economics, “Towards a global genealogy of biopolitics: race, colonialism, and biometrics beyond Europe,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2015, volume 33, pages 335-336, HC)

Contemporary (post)colonial studies have advanced Foucault’s articulation of biopolitical racism by identifying an important and inextricable relationship between the emergence of modern racism and colonialism (Rasmussen, 2011; Stoler, 1995). The emergence of eugenics and the theory of degeneration that Foucault refers to for his articulation of modern racism are in fact hardly separable from colonial practices. For example, the colonial racialisation that had been articulated by Arthur de Gobineau and other social Darwinist scholars— incorporated into the discourse of the Pan-German League—can explicate an impact of colonialism on internal state racism in Nazi Germany

(Rasmussen, 2011). Moreover, the term ‘eugenics’ itself is arguably born of colonial strategies: Francis Galton, Darwin’s

cousin who coined the term ‘eugenics’, articulated racial differences under the discourse of civilisation in the context of colonialism, for example, in his 1869 book Hereditary Genius. It was also Galton (1892) who proposed a biometric technique—namely, fingerprinting—to inscribe racial knowledge (see also Cole, 2002). Galton’s fingerprinting was by no means

exceptional; in fact, the biometric articulation of racial knowledge was prevalent among 19th-century racial scientists who constantly used biometrics to diagnose the ‘abnormality’ or ‘degeneracy’ of colonial bodies (Pugliese, 2010).These accounts of the constitutive role of colonial subjugation are significant in the context of Foucault’s relative silence on the role of colonialism in his articulation of biopolitics, but the

operation of 19th-century colonialism should not be reduced only to such European racial othering. European colonisation in the 19th century did not simply entail dichotomous racial subjugation; modern racism should not be reduced to a binary strategy that inscribes the civility of Europeans and the barbarism of European colonial others . It also entailed the generalisation of

norms of modern European race thinking beyond the context of its colonisation. The biopolitical strategy of modern racism was not a

singular phenomenon, just as 19th-century colonialism was not a singular phenomenon. Rather, they were plural and multiplied, which made non-European modes of colonisation—such as that in Japan—possible.

Whiteness has a historically instituted power that underlies technology like biometrics #infrastuctural whiteness #historical contingency of whitenessPugliese ‘7

[Joseph Pugliese; “Biometrics, Infrastructural Whiteness, and the Racialized Zero Degree of Nonrepresentation,” 108-110]

In “The Light of the World,” a chapter committed to disclosing the manner in which the racial category of whiteness informs the technologies of photography and film, Richard Dyer argues that “[a]ll technologies are at once technical in the most limited sense (to do with their material properties and functioning) and also always social (economic, cultural, ideological).”_ He then proceeds to track the manner in which “photographic media and, a fortiori, movie lighting assume, privilege and construct whiteness” (White, 89). Focusing on the complex interplay of various technological elements, including film stock, different types of lighting, and camera apertures, Dyer shows how technologies of photography and film “were developed taking the white face as the touchstone” (White, 90). In the process, he explains why, for instance, in school photos “the black pupils’ faces look like blobs or the white pupils have theirs bleached out” (White, 89). I want to transpose Dyer’s illuminating analysis of the racialized, spe- cifically white, elements that inform the technologies of photography and film to the imaging

technologies of digital facial scans and finger scans. Before I proceed down this track, however, I want to problematize Dyer’s concep-

tualization of whiteness. Throughout his book White, Dyer deploys a con- cept of whiteness that is predicated on a totalizing, ahistorical, and essen- tialized understanding of the category. This is succinctly encapsulated in Dyer’s

argument that what he “is studying [is] whiteness qua whiteness . . . whiteness itself” (White, 4). As I have argued elsewhere,

in deploying such a totalizing and ahistorical conceptualization of whiteness, he proceeds to range freely across a wide spectrum of historical contexts, genres, and media, and, in the process, generates an anachronistic schema in which, for example, a fifteenth-century painting by Giovanni Bellini participates in the same symbolic articulation of whiteness as does Sylvester Stallone in Rambo._ In the discursively

untenable move of situating, under the ahistori- cal rubric of “whiteness,” a Bellini painting in a politically and ideologically

equivalent relation to Rambo, Dyer effectively erases that complex geneal- ogy that marks the fraught relationship of Italian

immigrants to the category of whiteness in the United States. In examining whiteness in contemporary biometric technologies, I want to pose whiteness in infrastructural terms, that is, as an element that is indissociable from the effective operations of a particular technology. In posing whiteness as infrastructural, I am not suggesting that this racial category is some sort of ahistorical and essentialized datum, what Dyer terms “whiteness qua whiteness”; rather, I will argue that whiteness be read in terms of a racial category that is historically situated, marked by the specificity of particular media and technological apparatuses, and cali- brated by identifiable discourses, laws, and conventions. In talking of an infrastructural whiteness, I will be drawing attention to the very

structurality of its infrastructure; in other words, I want to bring into focus what effec- tively gets “invisibilized” when technologies are represented as ideologi- cally neutral “conduits” of data rather than ideologically inflected construc- tors of knowledge. If whiteness is to be invested with any power, it must be capable of a potentially infinite process of situated, historical repeatability. Couched in Derridean terms, Dyer’s conceptualization of “whiteness qua whiteness” is “in itself divided and multiplied in advance by its structure of repeatability.”_ Viewed in strictly rhetorical terms, the figure of diacope (repetition of a word [whiteness] with one word [qua] in between) constitutes its logic of signifi- cation, as it already underscores its (infra)structure of repeatability and its openness to alterity with every instance of transposition/iteration across diverse media and contexts. In other words, the very qua of whiteness, its assumed essence, is dependent upon “its structure of repeatability,” where its every iteration entails that “something new takes place.” I stage this brief deconstruction of Dyer’s essentialized

concept of whiteness not in order to indulge in a series of rhetorical flourishes but to underscore the manner in which the power of whiteness resides in the fact that it is never, because of its very structure of repeatability, essen- tially identical to itself. In not being strictly identical to itself, while simulta- neously being capable of potentially infinite iterations, whiteness can be seen to be invested with a power historically to mutate, adapt, and, in the process, arrogate different technologies, bodies, races, and ethnicities in its situated repetitions. If this colonizing flexibility, and imperial inventive- ness, constitutes the power of whiteness as a racial category, then it also exposes whiteness to risk. Precisely in not being identical to itself because of its (infra)structural iterability, whiteness risks dissolving those very pli- able borders that enable its “flexible positional superiority,” to draw on a Saidian turn of phrase. This marks, in other words, the urgent need always to put in place legislation (for example, the White Australia policy_), laws (for example, the “one drop” of black blood rule in the United States_),

and other regulatory mechanisms designed to control and govern its categori- cal purity in the face of historical forces and agents that may attempt to contest, contaminate, and miscegenate its illusory pristine status.

AT: Settler Colonialism Specificity DA (link turn) - the normalization and segregation of bodies via biometrics was used to justify appropriating native land – dismantling how state power functions via biometrics key to addressing specific instances of violence ie sovereignty claims and authenticity testingPugliese ’12 (Joseph Pugliese; Biometrics: Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics pp. 43-44)

Operative here is a test that both produces race, through the invasive dermographic inscription of the anthropologist's thumbnail across the body of the subject, and racialised subjects, through the resultant identification of the subject's racial "blood quantum." Race is here scientifically produced through the deployment of an apparatus of

knowledge (anthropometry); through the mobilisation of an observational method (the clinical gaze, calculated to remain neutral and scientifically detached in the face of the objectified subject of inquiry ); through the deployment of a disciplinary code of normativity (which sets the colour-gauge for the normative reaction of skin that has been inscribed by the anthropologist's thumbnail); and, finally, through the application of techniques of verification (the visible chromatic effects of a dermographic inscription, once measured against the normative colour-gauge, will disclose hidden "blood quanta"). The question of race is here literally and symbolically resolved through a form of writing on the body with the stylus of the anthropologist's nail, producing an intextuated body, literally a racial dermography that can only be decoded by

the scientist. Hrdlicka's (1939, 39) test is premised on the notion of "markedly differing circulatory or blood reaction in the fullbloods and in those with white admixture." "White" blood, in this biopolitical schema, will tell. Whiteness, in keeping with its position at the top of the evolu-tionary hierarchy, is invested with a more sensitised quality ("the skin reac-tion will be more durable") against the more muted and dusky effects of the non-white "fullbloods." As such, as Hrdlicka (1939, 39) concludes, "this test is both easy and decisive, for legal as well as scientific purposes." There is more at stake, however, in Hrdlicka's test than the production of race and racialised subjects. As absurd as Hrdlicka's test might appear in a contemporary light, it is in fact fundamentally constituted by an historically contingent scientific logic or rationality, what Foucault (2003, 55) would term the "rationality of technical procedure." The rationality of technical procedure that underpins this test also invests it with the politico-juridical status that enables it to be put to work on behalf of the colonial state, the U.S. Department of Justice in particular, and its biopolitical laws. This anthropometric test must be seen as a scientifico-legal technique of domina-tion producing instrumentalised subjects that are, in turn, subjugated to the biopolitical laws of the state. Situated within the U.S. history of biopolitical regimes of racial segregation based on "blood quantum" lines, the "legal purposes" to which Hrdlicka alludes, refer to the U.S. government's admin-

istration of Native American lives and land under the General Allotment Act or Dawes Act (1887). The General Allotment Act formally legislated Native American identity on the grounds of biological racism through its construct of "racial blood." The separation of "fullblood" from "mixed blood" Native Americans that this Act enabled was used in order to deter-mine the allotment of tribal lands

according to "blood quantum standards." As Paul Taylor (2008, 146) notes, the "blood quantum" segregation of Native Americans played a crucial role in the colonial expropriation of Indian land: "Since whatever land was left over could be sold, there were substantial economic interests to be served by finding as few j` fullblood'] Indians as possible." Hrdlicka's test for "blood quanta" had its equivalents in the Australian colonial context, where white anthropologists worked in the service of the biopolitical state in order to identify and segregate "mixed blood" Indigenous children from "full bloods." Working in the field, and deploying another set of anthropometric technologies, including colour filters that, once placed against the skin of the subject, scientifically determined their "blood quantum" status,

Australian anthropologists were instrumental in the state production of colonial assimilation and the resultant Stolen Generations (see Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families 1997). Aboriginal and Tones

Strait Islander children of mixed parentage were, under this bio-political program, forcibly removed from their parents and placed either in State-run homes or farmed out in conditions of servitude to white domestic households or pastoral stations. Once again, one of key colonial effects of this devastating biopolitical program was to reduce the number of Indigenous claimants to their expropriated land.

AT: Framework Confining the resolution only re creates the same discourse that reinforce the hierarchal status quo stannard (matt, Department of Communication and Mass Media University of Wyoming “Portraying the Ruling Class: Argument Fields and the Material Antecedents of Policy Debate” https://web.archive.org/web/20010214083809/http://debate.uvm.edu/stannard300a.html)

The repetition of particular discursive rituals reinforces normative assumptions behind those rituals and, in turn, strengthens the institutions upon which they are modeled. For Foucault, these normative assumptions are reinscribed upon consciousness through their rhetorical performance. As Ronald Greene states, "(t. Fo)he ability of rhetoric to generate a 'publicity effect' implicates the materiality of rhetoric in a process of surveillance." The "surveillance" is a metaphor for the enforcing norms of discourse. Enforcement occurs through the subject's assumption of responsibility for the reproduction of discourse and its concomitant ideology Foucault writes that the speaker who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he (sic) makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation which he simultaneously plays both roles: he becomes the principle of his own subjection. Thus, as Greene puts it, the rhetoric of reasoning is a kind of human technology, critical to the organization of governing institutions and their norms. As a field, which draws its norms from a more materially powerful field, the debate community generates an argumentation aligned with competing dominant discourses. Dominant classes, over-represented in the state apparatus, utilize media and scholarship to define the terms of social problems, which they then (discursively) proceed to solve. In policy debate, teams rhetorically draw upon dominant class media and scholarship to define problems which, hypothesizing the use of legal and political tools, they then purport to solve. The similarity between the two is, of course, skewed by the competitive and "utopian" nature of debate. Frequently, debaters propose plans and speculate on outcomes that go against conventional wisdom. Robert Rowland's important prioritization of debatability over "realism" chronicles the cognitive separation of policy debate and conservative conceptions of "the community." But Rowland does not address this as a political separation. Neither he, nor other debate scholars, asks why the "real world" is limited in the way it is. Instead, he is concerned with making debate slightly less bound by realism than the dominant discourse of the policy field upon which it draws. Although "it is important that the debate process have application to the real world," lest it "become a modern version of the second sophistic," Rowland concludes that realism "is logically subordinate to debatability." But the primary purpose of this subordination is pragmatism, not criticism. Rowland writes that in argumentation it is primarily the

pragmatic goals that matter . . . (it) is the means to the end of problem-solving; it has no intrinsic nature aside from fulfilling this pragmatic purpose. What Rowland, perhaps unconsciously, guards against is the idea that debate can be critical of the blind spots of policy making. To guard against this, he invokes the very pragmatism that characterizes dominant discourse. Without a more radical notion of the "real world," debate remains uncritical: the aspects of the Second Sophistic Rowland's own analogy warns against. In policy debate theoretical assumptions guide hundreds upon hundreds of rhetorical and logical gestures in a manner similar to the very specialized, often ritualistic, guiding assumptions of legal practice. Law legitimizes class rule when it successfully mediates political conflicts. It adopts and refines an internal logic whose utilization hides law's external ties to privileged classes. Legal and political discourse provides a mystifying mass of problems and principles, constantly moving "within, and moved by, [law's] relation to the problems posed for it by the social structure." Its chief rhetorical device, however, is also its device of materialization, policy making. "The history of law is the history of this relation as it is mediated by the legal profession, the legislature and the law enforcement agencies." Marxist legal critic Nicos Pulantzas offers an institutional critique that synthesizes the rhetoric and the materiality of law. Law as declaration organizes consent. Its representative rhetors offer it as the only desirable, material reality available to the oppressed, thereby reproducing this ideology in the consciousness of all actors, administrators and the administrated. ...although law places an important (positive and negative) role in organizing repression, its efficacy is just as great in the devices of creating consent. It materializes the dominant ideology that enters into these devices, even though it does not exhaust the reasons for consent. Through its discursiveness and characteristic texture, law-regulation obscures the politico-economic realities, tolerating structural lacunae and transposing these realities to the political arena by means of a particular mechanism of concealment-inversion...The dominated classes encounter law not only as an occlusive barrier, but also as the reality which assigns the place they must occupy. This place, which is the point of their insertion into the politico-social system, carries with it certain rights as well as duties-obligations, and its investment by the imagination has a real impact on social agents. Policy debate is certainly an "investment by the imagination" in the field of policy making. The consent to the inevitability of institutional directives serves to socialize the debater into the norms of a class-divided society. The argumentation skills learned in competitive debate are often touted as tools for eventual critical advocacy in students' post-debate lives. Gordon Mitchell, however, has argued that theories of such empowerment are lacking. Similarly, the advent of the "kritik" or critical analysis in policy debate has been offered as an alternative to pragmatic policy advocacy. However, the very novelty and strength of the "kritik" stems from the accepted normalcy of policy making as the ruling paradigm for evidence-based debate. Both critical analysis and advocacy outside of debate remain at the margins of the activity, a reproduction of the marginalizations of such analysis and advocacy in the larger society. Critics might blame debate's inability to empower students on its ontological commitment to objective truth, binary oppositions, and rationalism. Again, these are ideas rather than

structural realities. The misappropriation of rationality and truth by disproportionately powerful institutions makes the ideas of rationality and truth more convenient targets than are their material antecedents. It is easier for critics to attack the notion of truth itself than to attack the distortion of truth-seeking methods by ruling institutions. Deference to these institutions and their appointed experts is still a central feature of traditional argumentation and debate. Moreover, reliance on mass media sources, the journals of elitist think tanks, and public relations-manufactured press services all serve to construct a particular possibility of argument in policy debates. The advent of electronic research databases has exacerbated this conservatizing tendency since most of these databases are mainstream in content. To summarize, I am suggesting that discursive inequalities and marginalized identities are not the only objects of criticism in policy debate. These problems are symptoms of the reproduction of the policy field, a field which, in its institutionalized materiality, produces and contains both inequality and marginalization. The field of policy debate is a ritualized and enhanced reproduction of this larger material institution. Debaters are taught, through pedagogy and reward, drawing from policy literature and traditional (uncritical) notions of governing, to imitate the ruling class. Inequality and marginalization are part of the structure governing such imitation.

AT: Black Nihilism

Sexton Indict Sexton epistemology is erroneous and prevents inter-sectional progress by erasing the history of modern racial ideas through the concept of monoracialitySpickard 9 (Paul, professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (review)”, American Studies, Volume 50, Number 1/2, Spring/Summer 2009, pp. 125-127 – Project Muse)With Amalgamation Schemes, Jared Sexton is trying to stir up some controversy. He presents a facile, sophisticated, and theoretically informed intelligence, and he picks a fight from the start. His title suggests that the study of multiraciality is some kind of plot, or at the very least an illegitimate enterprise. His tone is angry and accusatory on every page. It is difficult to get to the grounds of his argument, because the cloud of invective is so thick, and because his writing is abstract, referential, and at key points vague. For Sexton (as for the

Spencers and Gordon) race is about Blackness, in the United States and around the world. That is silly, for there are other racialized relationships. In the U.S., native peoples were racialized by European intruders

in all the ways that Africans were, and more: they were nearly extinguished. To take just one example from many around the world, Han Chinese have racialized Tibetans historically in all the ways (including slavery) that Whites have racialized Blacks and Indians in the

United States. So there is a problem with Sexton’s concept of race as Blackness. There is also a problem with his

insistence on monoraciality. For Sexton and the others, one cannot be mixed or multiple; one must choose ever and only to be Black. I don’t have a problem with that as a political choice, but to insist that it is the only possibility flies in the face of a great deal of human experience, and it ignores the history of how modern racial ideas emerged.

Methodology IndictThe logic of social death replicates the violence of the middle passage by locking blackness into a subjecthood of devastation and cutting black bodies off from pursuing a politics of belongingBrown 2009 – professor of history and of African and African American Studies specializing in Atlantic Slavery (Vincent, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf)But this was not the emphasis of Patterson’s argument. As a result, those he has inspired have often conflated his exposition of slaveholding ideology with a description of the actual condition of the enslaved. Seen as a state of being, the concept of social death is ultimately out of place in the political history of slavery. If studies of slavery would account for the outlooks and maneuvers of the enslaved as an important part of that history, scholars would do better to keep in view the struggle against alienation rather than alienation itself. To see social death as a productive peril entails a

subtle but significant shift in perspective, from seeing slavery as a condition to viewing enslavement as a predicament, in which enslaved Africans and their descendants never ceased to pursue a politics of belonging, mourning, accounting, and regeneration. In part, the usefulness of social death as a concept depends on what scholars of slavery seek to explain—black pathology or black politics, resistance or attempts to remake social life? For too long, debates about whether there were black families took precedence over discussions of how such families were formed; disputes about whether African culture had “survived” in the Americas overwhelmed discussions of how particular practices mediated slaves’ attempts to survive; and scholars felt compelled to prioritize the documentation of resistance over the examination of political strife in its myriad forms. But of course, because slaves’ social and political life grew directly out of the violence and dislocation of Atlantic slavery, these are false choices. And we may not even have to choose between tragic and romantic modes of storytelling, for history tinged with romance may offer the truest acknowledgment of the tragedy confronted by the enslaved: it took heroic effort for them to make social lives. There is romance, too, in the tragic fact that although scholars may never be able to give a satisfactory account of the human experience in slavery, they nevertheless continue to try. If scholars were to emphasize the efforts of the enslaved more than the condition of slavery, we might at least tell richer stories about how the endeavors of the weakest and most abject have at times reshaped the world. The history of their social and political lives lies between resistance and oblivion, not in the nature of their condition but in their continuous struggles to remake it. Those struggles are slavery’s bequest to us.

Solvency Extension: Embracing mere existence allows for a politics predicated on love and friendship which affirms the humanity of other apart from politicized identity categoriesEnns 7 (Diane, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy and Peace Studies, McMaster University, “Political Life Before Identity”, Theory & Event 10:1, Project Muse)While this mere existence does not constitute an enviable condition for Arendt, she betrays some ambivalence towards it. She protests that inalienable human rights and the dignity that they confer, must be independent of human plurality and remain valid even for those expelled from the human community (OT 298). Whether it is possible, Arendt states, to articulate a sphere of human rights that is above the nation, guaranteed by humanity itself, is open to question. She argues that some kind of organized political community is necessary for all human individuals, yet nevertheless commits herself to thinking about the possibility of rights guaranteed by this naked condition of life beyond law, rights and polities -- for human rights must remain valid for mere existence, she states, the right to have rights must be guaranteed by humanity itself (OT 298). Thus while she considers naked life to pose a great danger to the common, political world -- it perhaps threatens our political life in an even more terrifying way than the wildness of nature once threatened man-made cities -- and even asserts that the production of such mere

existence forces people into conditions of savagery and barbarism (OT 302), she alludes to the potentially affirmative conditions of this status when she relates it to love and friendship: This mere existence, that

is, all that which is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love , which says with Augustine, "Volo ut sis (I want you to be),"

without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation. (OT 301) In Agamben's notion of bare life, we again find a certain ambivalence; one that I will argue can only be understood in the context of a revised understanding of the meaning of politics. Like Arendt in the above passage, Agamben

opens his series of texts on political life, community and sovereign power, by referring to a singular relationship between mere existence and love. He writes that "love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is."28 It is this "being-such" that is always hidden when we consider relations of belonging to this or that property or class. In other words, when we think of an individual as defined by this particular identity or that, as black or white, male or female, Muslim or Christian, what is denied or hidden is this being-such with all of its predicates. What happens in friendship and love that alters the tendency (and sometimes the imperative) to simplify and essentialize the identity categories to which we belong? In

friendship we cease to see the other as white or as black, as gay or straight, able or disabled, female or male. At least, we are aware of these particular identifying categories of a companion, but exist in relation with him or her in a state of "forgetfulness" of, or "indifference" to, this reduction to one singular category. It is when pushing a wheelchair-bound friend into an airport and noting with annoyance the infantilizing treatment to which one's intelligent and dignified friend is subjected by well-intentioned airport employees, that she becomes disabled. This is not to deny the unique obstacles her disability places before her on a daily basis, but to acknowledge how devastating this lack of the state of forgetfulness can be, as the loved one with all of her predicates becomes reduced to one identifiable category. In using such terms as forgetfulness or indifference, I am attempting to find a language to describe this effect of loving or seeing the other with all of her

predicates, her being such as it is -- an "I want you to be" without reason. It isn't blindness to disability, color, or gender, but recognition of and appreciation for the bare existence or life of the other, against which the skin color, genitalia or degree of muscle coordination responsible for designating us as this or that identity become relatively insignificant. Insignificant for the love we bear him or her, which is not the same as saying insignificant in the sense that another's struggle to live with dignity in the face of discrimination is ignored.

The neg’s individualized call for self-overcoming disenfranchises those made victims of institutional oppression – the ghettoization of urban minorities requires collective action that attacks social and economic barriers to becoming. Stark, 1995 [Barbara, Professor of Law @ Hofstra Law, “Urban Despair and Nietzsche’s ‘Eternal Return:’ From the Municipal Rhetoric of Economic Justice to the International Law of Economic Rights,” Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, 28.2, pgs. 207 – 213]

What if Americans knew that the next thirty years would merely repeat the preceding cycle? What if we knew that the "empowerment zones" proposed in the 1990s would be no more effective than the "enterprise zones" of the 1980s or the "model cities" and the "war on poverty" of the 1960s?72 What if we knew that the stories of abuse and neglect, of broken promises and broken lives, would be repeated every generation?73 What if we knew that our children's lives, like our own, would be spent in violence and hardship?74 Who would not succumb to what Cornel West describes as the "nihilism that increasingly pervades black communities"?75 As Professor West explains: Nihilism is to be understood here not as a philosophic doctrine that there are no rational grounds for legitimate standards for authority; it is, far more, the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness. The frightening result is a numbing detachment from others and a self-destructive disposition toward the world.76 In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche77 challenged the notion of historical progress and the hopefulness embedded in that notion, as well as the idea of any "rational grounds for legitimate standards for authority." His doctrine of the eternal return posited time not as linear progression, but as a cycle:78 The shepherd ... bit with a good bite. Far away he spewed the head of the snake—and he jumped up. No longer shepherd, no longer human—one changed, radiant, laughing^2 Nihilism is overcome by affirming that the only meaning is the meaning that we create: I taught them to work on the future and to redeem with their creation all that has been. To redeem what is past in man and to re-create all "it was" until the will says, "Thus I willed it!—Thus I shall will it!—this I called redemption and this alone I taught them to call redemption.83 Although Nietzsche scholars and other philosophers offer wide-ranging interpretations of the eternal return,84 Richard Rorty's explication of self-overcoming is the key here: The drama of an individual human life, of the history of humanity as a whole, is not one in which a pre-existing goal is triumphantly reached or tragically not reached. . . . Instead, to see

one's life, or the life of one's community, as a dramatic narrative is to see it as a process of Nietzschean self-overcoming. The paradigm of such a narrative is the life of the genius who can say of the relevant portion of the past, Thus I willed it,' because she has found a way to describe that past which the past never knew, and thereby found a self to be that which her precursors never knew was possible.85 The idea of self-overcoming or self-invention—"finding a way to describe the past which the past never knew*86—is familiar to most Americans.87 It happens all the time in United States politics and law.88 Americans only notice it when it is done clumsily and the strings show, as they did, for example, when President Bush claimed, "We won the Cold War." For the urban poor, however, self-overcoming is problematic. First, the African-American urban poor cannot opt out of what Professor West describes as "a system of race-conscious people and practices."90 Second, partly because of racism, self-overcoming is necessarily a collective activity for the urban poor. Professor Bell Hooks has observed: "[N]o level of individual self-actualization alone can sustain the marginalized and oppressed. We must be linked to collective struggle, to communities of resistance that move us outward, into the world."91 In the 1960s, the civil rights movement explicitly drew on the independence movements of the formerly colonial Third World states,92 a larger "community of resistance that [moved them] outward into the world." In the 1990s, the urban poor can reaffirm that link by claiming the international human rights already won for them by the larger "communities of resistance" of which they are—and have always been—a part. By doing so, they can find "a way to describe that past which the past never knew and [find themselves] to be [that] which [their] precursors never knew was possible."93

Exts/Extra Cards:

Ext: (inherency?) Harms occurring in the squo The US uses biometric technology as a means of securitizing beyond the border, effectively deploying “epistemic, empirical and scopic” violence.Puliese ‘5

[Joseph Pugliese; “In Silico Race and The Heteronomy of Biometric Proxies: Biometrics in the Context of Civilian Life, Border Security and Counter-Terrorism Laws,” The Australian Feminist Law Journal, 28-30]

In an extraordinarily prescient text, written on the cusp of the World War II, Levinas lucidly articulates a vision that, symmetrically, prefigures the contemporary US imperialist subject driving such operations as the Biometrics Automated Toolset and the War on Terror,' its 'Axis of Evil' and its unilateral slogan 'You are either with us or against us': The bourgeois admits no inner divisions... [s]he is concerned about reality and the future, for they threaten to break up the uncontested equilibrium of the present where sIhe] holds sway [ou il possede]. [S]He is essentially conservative, but there is a worried conservatism. The bourgeois is concerned with business matters and science as a defense against things and all that is unforeseeable in them. [Her/]His instinct for possession is an instinct for integration, and [her/]his imperialism is a search for security. [S]He would like to cast the white mantle The director of the CIA, Porter Goss, in an address to employees at the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, speaks of this drive to peace through war: 'Our nation is at war. It's a cold fact. I wake up every morning thinking that...I go to bed every night thinking, "What did I do today to help us advance the war?" I hope it's the same thought you have.1' 00 The US and its allies advance their 'white mantle of internal peace' through a war of terror designed to subjugate the antagonism of an other who intransigently refuses to comply with the unilateral violence of the imperialism of the same. The US Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, enunciates the violent dynamics of this imperial search for security through the deployment of war: 'Outlining a series of initiatives implemented to make the country more secure…Ridge said the reason terrorists have lashed out in Iraq and elsewhere is not because the United States is failing in its efforts to defeat terrorism, but because it is succeeding. "These successes remind us why we fight," he said, "because every single victory in a faraway land makes us safer here at home."' The attenuating fable of the 'faraway land' serves to relegate the lived reality of the lands in the violent grip of US imperial war, Iraq and Afghanistan, to the status of innocuous myth. The imperial scope of this search for security manifests itself in the colonising outward sweep of the US military: ' "That's why," ' explains Ridge, ' "we work so hard to extend our zone of security outward. So that our borders are the last line of defense, not our first line of defense. And that's why we built security measures that begin thousands of miles away". ' 0 2 Articulated here is the doctrine of 'Manifest Destiny,' recast in terms of imperially securing other lands as geopolitical 'buffer zones' for the US nation-state.¶ The imperial subjugation of the other knows no limits in its search for security: 'our'¶ border is always already established through the violent arrogation of the other's space; thousands¶ of miles away, in the faraway land of the undifferentiated other who is always already 'our' enemy, "our' enemy because other, 'our' first line of defense is 'their' zone of violence, war and insecurity.¶ The 'white mantle' of imperial propaganda, however, will designate this violent space as the¶ crucible of democracy and freedom; in the words of President George Bush: 'as freedom takes¶ root in Iraq, it will inspire millions across the Middle East to claim their liberty as well. And when¶ the Middle East grows in democracy and prosperity and hope, the terrorists will lose their¶ sponsors, lose their recruits, and lose their hopes for turning their region into a base for attacks '03¶ on America. 1¶ In the violent exercise of imperialism in search for security,

biometric technologies have¶ been assigned their particular roles in order to establish, in the words of the director of the CIA, 'a truly global capability... with more eyes and ears everywhere.'104 Lieutenant Colonel Kathy De¶ Bolt, Deputy Director of the Army Battle Laboratory at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, explains the aims and goals of the biometric system that is being developed in order to realise this truly global capability of eyes and ears everywhere: the Biometrics Automated Toolset - 'Any place we go into - Iraq or wherever - we're going to start building a dossier on people of interest to intelligence.... We're trying to collect every biometric on every bad guy that we can. ' In the desire to establish a biometric archive on 'every bad guy' 'everywhere' is encapsulated the dream of an imperial disciplinary machine that will automatically individuate the face of the other. Lieutenant Colonel Kathy De Bolt elaborates: 'When they come into our checkpoints, we can say, "You're this bad guy from here".'106The self-evidence of the 'bad,' the imperial reach of the 'everywhere,' and the unerring system of capture that biometric systems promise - all signify the delusional search for security through the relentless exercise and deployment of violence: epistemic, empirical and scopic. Iraq or wherever, the imperial machine of state will generate geopolitical and racialised signs of infinite substitution that will supply the ground for a biometric inventory of 'every bad guy' 'everywhere.'

Ext: General impact:Normative identities such as able bodied, white, and cisgender are used as origin points to classify bodies into schemasBrowne ‘13

[Dr. Simone Browne; “Dark Sousveillance: Race, Surveillance, and Resistance,” a talk given on December 9, 2013, hosted at the Graduate Center, CUNY by the Digital Praxis Seminar and the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsMFdiLsqbg, 26:08-33:51, video published March 21, 2014; transcribed by Ameena Ruffin]

Simply put, biometrics is the idea that the body will reveal the truth about the subject despite the subject’s claim. So the idea that I might say my name is Rob Ford, but my body—whether it’s my DNA, my fingerprint, my iris scan, or

some other piece or part of my body will reveal my true identity. So with the concept of digital epidermalization, I’m suggesting here that biometrics research and development continues to rely on certain practices of what I’m calling prototypical whiteness, as well as prototypical maleness,

prototypical able-bodied-ness, prototypical youthness, as well. This speaks to the ways in which biometric information technologies are sometimes inscribed in racializing schemas that see certain bodies privileged, or

at least whiteness might be privileged or lightness in some of these enroll measurements and enrollment processes. So I’m going to look here at a few findings in research and development coming out of the biometric industry to kind of make sense of this for you all in the audience because I think that these research and

development publications tell us a lot about industry concerns and specifications and they also tell us a lot about who these technologies, or what kind of bodies these technologies, are designed to suit best. And so one such study examined how facial recognition technology could be employed in a multi-ethnic environment to classify facial features by race and also by gender—yes that’s Will Smith right there. So a technology like this could be applied, for

example, in shopping malls, casinos, amusement parks, or something like the photo-tagging application that

might be used in Facebook or so. So the authors of the study found that, when they programmed the gender classification system generically for “all ethnicities,” the system was “inclined to classify Africans as males and mongoloids as females.” So the racial nomenclature of “mongoloid” is seemingly archaic, I know, but not uncommon in some of the R and D coming out of this industry. With this gender classification system, what happened here is that Black women were read as male most of the time and Asian men were read as female most of the time with this particular study. In this way it mirrored earlier pseudoscientific racist and sexist discourse that sought to define racial categories and gender categories in order to regulate these artificial boundaries that can never be fully maintained. Think here

of the Black woman as surrogate man or the feminized Asian man. Interestingly, in this particular study, the gender classifier was made ethnicity specific for the category African and they found that images of the African female would be classified as females 82% of the time and while that same African classifier would find images of Asian females 95% of the time and for what they call “Caucasoid” females 96% of the time. This is a study that came out around 2010. These kind of languages of “Caucasoid,” “Mongoloid” as well. So meaning that with this particular female classifier when its calibrated to detect Black women, African classifier’s better suited as classifying Asian women as well as Caucasian women or White women. So using actor Will Smith’s face as a model for generic Black masculinity, the study’s

authors are left to conclude that “the accuracy of gender classifier on Africans is not as high as on ‘Mongoloid’ or ‘Caucasoid’.” Another study—I’m going to talk a little bit about failure to enroll—this came out in 2009 a Nikon camera, and the idea that some bodies fail to enroll in these technologies. And these things change once these failures reveal themselves and sometimes through twitter and public ways like this. In another study we can see how epidermalization—and what I

mean by that is the imposition of race on the skin—is present, for example, in comparative testing with control

groups with higher failure to enroll rates than others. The study states—I’m just going to read. This is a popular quote that’s often used in people that research biometric technologies, but it says here: “Elderly users often have very faint fingerprints and may have poorer circulation than younger users. Construction workers and artisans are more likely to have highly worn fingerprints to the point where ridges are nearly nonexistent. Users of Pacific Rim/Asian descent may have faint fingerprint ridges, especially female users.” What his quote is telling us is that the elderly; people who come in contact with corrosive or caustic chemicals, such as mechanics, or nail technicians, or manicurists, often have unmeasurable fingerprints. Think of message therapists too, or people that have heavy hand-washing n their job like nurses or people in the healthcare profession. This should lead us to ask questions about can these technologies be calibrated to determine gender and race or class differentiation. In the same study that I just quoted, the authors note that facial scan technology may produce higher failure to enroll rates for very dark skin users because of the quality of images provided for the facial scan system by video cameras are often optimized for lighter skinned users. So what research and development is telling us is that certain technologies come to privilege whiteness, or at least lightness in the ways in which they are lit in the enrollment process, or at least how some bodies are lit in the enrollment process. So you can see the logic of prototypical whiteness operating here and also with this Canon camera—I’m sorry, Nikon camera. With this the possibilities of racializing surveillance are revealed. This is especially so in facial recognition technologies calibrated only to find matches from within specific racial and gender groupings leading to higher failure to enroll rates for some groupings. So the application of surveillance technologies in this way leads to questions concerning the idea that “Can gender and race, which are social constructs, be specified by these technologies or programmed so ?” And also, “How do transgendered people fit within this algorithmic equation?” So they are unaccounted for in the algorithm. These research and development reports and articles make clear there’s a certain assumption that with these technologies that categories of gender identity and race are clear-cut and that a machine can be programmed to assign gender categories or what bodies and body parts “should signify.” Such technologies can then possibly be applied to determine who has access to movement and stability and to other rights. So given this there’s important questions that I think need to be asked, such as: How do we understand the body once it’s converted into data? What are the underlying assumptions with surveillance technologies such as passport verification machines, facial recognition software, and fingerprint template technology? Well there’s the notion that these technologies are infallible, that they’re objective, and that they are based on mathematical precision without error or bias on the part of the computer programmers who calibrate the search parameters of these machines or on the part of those who read these templates to make decisions.

The categorization of characteristics in the form of data leads to the ignoring of gender and other social inequalities #social sorting #disability #biopower Saltes ‘13

[Natasha Saltes; “‘Abnormal’ Bodies on the Borders of Inclusion: Biopolitics and the paradox of Disability Surveillance,” Surveillance & Society, 2013, 65-66]

The pervasiveness of surveillance and its inherent discriminatory characteristic of identifying and classifying

certain individuals and groups as ‘risky’ have given rise to the notion of ‘surveillance as social sorting’. According to Lyon, surveillance as social sorting centres ‘on the social and economic categories and the computer codes by which personal data is organized with a view to influencing and managing people and populations’ (2003: 2). It is the process of predicting and preventing risk by classifying subgroups of society deemed to pose a threat (Lyon 2003). Lyon attributes social sorting and ‘digital discrimination’ to the prevalent use of networked technology (2003: 8) and the ‘rising attention paid to the body itself

as a source of surveillance data’ (2007: 55). The concept of social sorting and the emphasis on the body as a source of data is especially relevant in the context of disability surveillance in that the collection and documentation

of information about the body reduces people with impairments to ‘impaired bodies’ and further still to ‘impaired data’. The data double therefore can become ‘disabled’ in much the same way as the individual insofar as it is not perceived, viewed, monitored and treated equally as ‘non-impaired’ data doubles.

The data double itself may include biometric details or other forms and fragments of information that allude to or signify the embodiment of impairment. The implication of this is that the ‘abnormality’ of the body is extended to the digital and what serves to mark , label and stigmatize the body in the physical environment now has the ability to mark , label and stigmatize the body digitally. Referring to electronic patient records (EPR) as an example of the digitalization of the body, van der Ploeg considers the data they contain to be ‘extended forms of “unique

identifiers”’ due to the personal information they contain, including biometric data’ (2003: 62). The increased use of biometric identifiers in EPRs (as well as

in other contexts such as immigration) are superimposing traditional forms of identifiers such as name and birth date as they are considered a more reliable representation of identity (van der Ploeg 2003). In challenging the gendered neutrality of surveillance, Monahan argues

that representations of data render ‘a disembodied and highly abstract depiction of the world’ by removing social context (2009: 286). Monahan contends that surveillance systems ‘artificially abstract bodies, identities and interactions from social contexts in ways that both obscure and aggravate gender and other social inequalities’ (2009: 286). He considers the embodied consequences that arise from surveillance practices that operate on a ‘level of abstraction’ (2009: 286). Building from Monahan’s argument on the socially de-contextualized collection of data and applying it to disability surveillance provides a useful means with which to contextualize the consequences of conducting disability surveillance within a biomedical perspective. A useful starting point is to consider the ways in which certain surveillance strategies such as biometric technologies separate the social from the body. Biometric technologies operate by capturing physiological markers of bodies

including fingerprints, face or voice recognition, iris and handwriting authentication. The data produced by the body is then used to verify identity (Maddern and Stewart 2010). However, biometric systems do not only verify identity, but they also play a significant role in assigning identities. This is worth considering in light of the government’s reliance on biometric data, which stems from the belief that biometric technology is infallible (Maddern and Stewart 2010).

Ext: racism impactBiometric technologies are calibrated to the norms and parameters of white bodies, thereby physically and rhetorically otherizing those outside of whiteness. Pugliese ‘7

[Joseph Pugliese; “Biometrics, Infrastructural Whiteness, and the Racialized Zero Degree of Nonrepresentation,” boundary 2, Summer 2007, 114-116]

This racialized zero degree of nonrepresentation must not be viewed in terms of some mystifying technological

“anomaly” or “glitch.” On the contrary, I would argue that particular biometric technologies are infrastructur- ally calibrated to whiteness—that is, whiteness is configured as the univer- sal gauge that determines the technical settings and parameters for the visual imaging and capture of a subject. I will draw on the term calibration

as it effectively encapsulates the three key levels of signification that inscribe the operation of whiteness in biometric technologies. On one level, to calibrate a technology is “to graduate a gauge of any kind with allowance for its irregularities .”__ As universal

gauge, whiteness is the absolute stan- dard within certain biometric technologies, targeting the capture of white subjects but also allowing for a degree of white variations in skin tone and color—that is, allowing for a certain range of “irregularities” that may fall outside this standard . These “irregularities,” however, are circumscribed within a clearly delineated zone of whiteness and its various chromatic variations. Outside of this diffuse, gray-scale

zone of whiteness reside non- white subjects who are literally beyond the pale. As I have demonstrated, this degree of allowance literally cuts off when biometric imaging technolo- gies are confronted by subjects whose biometric details—for example,

their dark skin color—are so “irregular” as to fall outside the technical parame- ters set for image capture . Here the

term irregular graphically illustrates the disciplinary power of the white gauge in determining the normative standards of imaging technologies. In such instances, nonwhite subjects, in literally failing to appear before the biometric system

despite their physical presentation, are dispatched to the outer limits of nonappearance, to the zero degree of nonrepresentation. Calibration perfectly resonates with this imaging economy in that it is a term that effectively belongs to the lexical set of camera settings: a camera operator has a repertoire of calibrations at hand when filming; these calibrations operate at the level of lighting, aper- ture, and lens focus. On

another level, the process of calibrating a technology means not only to establish “a set of graduations or markings” but also to generate a “classification .” __ The calibration to whiteness of biometric[s] systems, in

other words, not only determines the universal gauge of these imaging technologies, it also implicitly reproduces the legendary racial system of classification and hierarchy that places whiteness at the apex followed , in a graduating scale, by Asians and blacks.__ Within Western economies of visual representation, this racial hierarchy has systemically guaranteed the nonrepresentation of nonwhites within a wide spectrum of visual media, including film and television. Finally, the semantic core of calibration is derived from the term caliber. Caliber refers to a “degree of social standing or importance, quality, rank; ‘stamp,’ degree of merit or importance .”__ In the context of the calibra- tion to whiteness of

biometric technologies, the term caliber underscores questions of power and hierarchy that inflect the physical settings of imag- ing technologies, as whiteness assumes the gauge of “merit or importance” that determines who may or may not be visually captured within the calibrated zone of representation . I have spent some time here unpacking the infrastructural calibration to whiteness in facial-scan technologies in order to interrogate ongoing, doctrinal assertions in the scientific literature that biometric technologies are to be celebrated because of their objectivity and impartiality in process- ing racial and ethnic subjects. For example, Woodward et al. argue, The technological impartiality of facial recognition . . . offers a sig- nificant benefit for society. While humans are adept at recognizing facial features, we also have prejudices and preconceptions. The controversy surrounding racial profiling is a leading example. Facial recognition systems do not focus on a person’s skin color, hairstyle, or manner of dress, and they do not rely on racial stereotypes. On the contrary, a typical system uses objectively measurable facial fea- tures, such as the distances and angles between geometric points on the face, to recognize a specific individual. With biometrics, human recognition can become relatively more “human-free” therefore free from many human flaws. The “technological impartiality” of facial recognition can be main- tained only by continuing to invisibilize the infrastructural calibration to whiteness that inscribes specific facial-scan systems. Contra Woodward et al., I would argue

that this calibration to whiteness constitutes simply another example of racial “prejudice and preconception” in that it biometri- cally discriminates between white and nonwhite subjects. The

untenability of arguing that facial recognition systems “do not focus on a person’s skin color” is graphically exemplified when one considers that it is precisely a nonwhite subject’s skin color—specifically, the

degree of epidermal and chromatic saturation to blackness—that will determine whether he or she will be situated outside the operating parameters of a biometric system’s image-acquisition zone (of whiteness), despite its inbuilt “allowance” for chromatic “irregularities.” The consequent invocation of “objectively mea- surable facial features” and “the distances and angles between geometric points on the face,” put forth by Woodward et al. in order to prove their argument for technological impartiality,

clearly resonates with the lan- guage of such discredited nineteenth-century racist scientific disciplines as anthropometry, craniology, phrenology, and so on (as racializing and racist disciplines all predicated on the so-called objectivity of geometry in the measurement and classification of human bodies ). In the discourses of the sciences, whenever the specter of race is evoked, inevitably the discourse of mathematics, specifically of geometry, is mobilized in order magically to transcend the prejudices and preconceptions of the observer that are in danger of contaminating their object of inquiry. Through this sleight of hand, the human elements that labor to construct the racialized software of biometric systems are effectively effaced, leaving a “human-free” geometry to carry out its impartial scanning of subjects.

Nonwhite bodies are not recognized or represented by biometric technologies. This nonrepresentattion ensures racial homogeneity and the denial of knowledge and power.Pugliese ‘7

[Joseph Pugliese; “Biometrics, Infrastructural Whiteness, and the Racialized Zero Degree of Nonrepresentation,” boundary 2, Summer 2007, 121-124]

The fact that certain nonwhite subjects “may stand in front of a facial-scan system and simply not be found”

(Biometrics, 66) situates these individuals within a nonlocus (they are no place, even as they occupy a particular spatiotemporal location) constituted, digitally, by a zero degree of nonrepresentation. This zero degree of

nonrepresentation operates at both literal and metaphorical levels. Literally, despite the corporeal presence of a subject, there appears to be no subject as far as the facial-scan system is concerned; metaphorically, the nonwhite subject is reduced, within the binary logic of biometric algorithms, to a negative: in pixel values,

black- ness is, predictably, equivalent to the negative degree of zero, where whiteness is inscribed with the positive value of one (“Pixels with value one and zero are called white and black respectively”__). Viewed in this context, nonwhite subjects are marked by a failure of the very animating logic of the visual image, as they fail to possess, in Barthesian terms, any “indexicality” or “evidential force”;__ rather, they do not even appear in their appearance before the facial-scan device, and therefore they are neither present nor can they be represented. And I am aware that I am deploying here, in the context of digital imaging technolo- gies, a seemingly anachronistic term in drawing upon “indexicality”—as a term exclusively used to describe predigital, analog imaging technologies (for example, analog photography traces the light that emanates from an object onto a chemically treated film,

generating an analogous or indexical presentation). Yet, I would argue that despite the fact that digital imaging constructs images out of numerical codes that may have no indexical or causal relation to the photographed object, the very logic of biometric tech- nologies designed to identify or verify subjects is still predicated , in theory if not

software practice, on establishing a type of analogous or indexical, and thus evidentiary, relation between subjects who are scanned and their stored templates . This racialized FTE inflects not only established biometric technolo- gies such as finger- and facial-scan systems but emergent biometrics such as the iris scan. Iris-scan systems are designed to create templates based on the imaging of a subject’s

iris. Yet, as Nanavati et al. explain, “Locating the iris-pupil border can be challenging for users with very dark eyes , as

there may be very little difference in color as rendered in the technology’s 8-bit grayscale imaging” (Biometrics, 80). I would argue that there is encoded in the phrase “users with very dark eyes” a racialized group of nonwhite subjects . This is made evident when this

phrase is juxtaposed against scientific literature dedicated to isolating, within the domain of for- ensic pathology, for example, distinct “racial” characteristics for the sake of body identification: “The eye colour is useful in the Caucasian race (negroid and mongoloid races virtually all have brown irises).”__ The “problem” that some subjects’ irises may have “very little difference in color” to help with the task of differentiation resounds with all the force of that Caucacentric cliché that

laments that black and Asian faces all look alike, as they seem to possess very little congenital markers of difference. Once again, the old colonial “problem of racial homogeneity,” and the seeming “uniformity in the colour of hair, eyes, and complexion of the Indian races” (SI, 71), is actively at work here. Nanavati et al. proceed to elaborate on one of the “potential limi- tations of iris-scan technologies”: “the ability to locate distinctive features in very dark irises. Iris-scan technology is based on 8-bit grayscale image capture, which allows for 256 shades of gray; features from very dark irises may be clustered at one end of the spectrum” (Biometrics, 37). This “one end of the spectrum” is analogous to what

Thandeka, in another context altogether, aptly terms the “non-white zone.”_0 Transposed to the context of biometric technologies, the nonwhite zone is constituted by a racialized color spectrum that falls directly outside a digital grayscale image-capture system calibrated to whiteness. Within the parameters of this system, very dark irises literally fall beyond

the grayscale pale. What becomes apparent when discussing the ongoing racialized infrastructural dimensions of these technologies is the manner in which they so clearly reproduce the binarized racial zones of the larger Cauca- centric culture. I have already drawn attention to the ontological/epistemo- logical racial split, and their attendant economies of knowledge/labor, that these new digital technologies reproduce. I want to elaborate on this split by resignifying Thandeka’s concept of the nonwhite zone in the

context of biometric technologies. Biometric technologies such as the finger scan, facial scan, and iris scan are to be found throughout institutions and businesses primarily con- cerned with securing physical and/or symbolic access to important sites and/or information. As such, biometric technologies have the power to de- termine who may or may not enter and access critical sites of knowledge/ power . The calibration to whiteness that inscribes the infrastructure of some of these biometric technologies functions, when situated in this context, to reproduce the type of stratified physical and symbolic zones of racialized exclusion that continue to pervade such multiethnic, multiracial nations as the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. In the context

of everyday life, this digital segregation divides into the three fundamental categories that constitute the practical application of biometric systems—it can preclude a subject in terms of gaining “logical access to data or information,” “physical access to tangible materials or controlled areas,” as well as identifying or verifying “the identity of an individual from a database or token” (Biometrics, 144). The racialized prac- tices of segregation that I have been discussing dovetail perfectly with what David Lyon, in his analysis of surveillance post-9/11, terms “digital discrimi- nation,”

which “consists of the ways in which the flows of personal data— abstracted information—are sifted and channelled in the process of risk assessment, to privilege some and disadvantage others, to accept some as legitimately present and reject others,” and this is “increasingly done in advance of any offence. ” It is precisely in this context of hypersurveillance of targeted racial- ized subjects that I would argue against naïve celebrations of the type of failure of biometric representation that I have addressed. At a recent con- ference, for instance, after the delivery of a version of this essay, a number of responses from the audience argued that it was a good thing that cer- tain subjects seemingly escaped the imaging capabilities of some biometric technologies. Biometric noncapture of a subject’s image was viewed as a type of positive loophole or escape clause from contemporary systems of identification and surveillance. As I have attempted to demonstrate, this view entirely disregards the critical question of equity of access within civic spaces/institutions and the manner in which FTE systemically precludes particular racialized subjects from accessing both physical sites and knowl-

edge/power. Moreover, I term this celebration of failure of representation [is] as “naïve” precisely because it is predicated on a liberal-humanist under- standing of contemporary systems of surveillance, where the question as to whether one gets visually imaged or not remains merely a question of choice. I would argue, on the contrary, that visual surveillance, in the con- text of omnipresent closed-circuit television, automated teller machines, and other related technologies, is always already at work.

Ext: Harms to Trans BodiesBiometrics seeks to calcify identity, forcing it into a static position that doesn’t allow it be fluid between time and points of being. Currah & Mulqueen ‘11

[Paisley Currah and Tara Mulqueen; “Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Transgender Bodies at the Airport,” 12-15]

If the current securitization of identity at the U.S, airport is effectively organized around ensuring who passengers are not, biometrics holds out the promise that a passenger’s identity can be affirmatively established and so makes the link between identity and identification secure. Biometric technologies involve capturing unique information about a particular individual’s body or behavior—fingerprints, gait signatures, iris patterns, facial structure, voice patterns, DNA, for instance—and digitizing that information, storing it, and retrieving it to compare against the information extracted on the spot from the body of the individual presenting herself for identity verification. As the “‘missing link’” between the immateriality of information flows and networks, and the materiality of individual embodied existence,” van der Ploeg writes, these technologies “informatize the body” by transforming it into “a machine readable identifier” (2009: 86-87; see also Magnet 2011; Puar 2007: 175). In the quest for perfect information, then, policymakers imagine that the body itself will not just provide, but actually be the perfect piece of information. Of the possible epistemological sources of human identity—what one is (a body), what one says about oneself (a narrative), what one does (a performance), and what one has in hand (a token)—it is the is-ness of the body that reigns supreme in the quest for perfect information (Ajana 2010). Documents may be fraudulent, individuals cannot be trusted to vouch for themselves or to maintain a consistent presentation of self, but the body, it is assumed, cannot be forged and does not lie. Most significantly, while the body might age, succumb to disease and injury, its core elements are thought to be stable over time. What verifies legal identity, or “reidentification” in the lexicon of philosopher Marya Schechtman, is the “sameness of body” between one time and another (1990: 71).

Biometrics’ falsely assumes gender as a permanent identifying attribute of the body which disregards the unique of trans identityCurrah & Mulqueen ‘11

[Paisley Currah and Tara Mulqueen; “Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Transgender Bodies at the Airport,” 12-15]

At the time of writing, the TSA has not yet installed biometric technologies for routine passenger identity verification. But, according to a joint press release by the Department of Homeland Security, which houses the TSA, and the Department of State, “the next generation of international travel documents—e-passports that contain a contactless chip to which biometric and biographic information is written—will further strengthen international border security by ensuring that both the document is authentic and that the person carrying an e-passport is the person to whom the document was issued” (Department of Homeland Security 2006). Plans are afoot to offer biometrics for flight crews and airport personnel, and for frequent travelers as well.¶ However, there is one piece of biometric data, we suggest, already in use at the airport: gender. In an examination of debates about the criteria for gender reclassification on New York City birth certificates, Currah and

Moore have shown how gender operates as a biometric identifier in the eyes of vital statistics officials (2009: 114, 124). While one’s classifi- cation as M or F on identity documents is not a unique identifier , as most pieces of biometric data are

understood to be, the assumption that the classification of M or F is a permanent feature of the body

underlies the rationale for its use in identity verification. Identity is not simply a matter of who one is but also what one is: “the question ‘who is this person?’ leaches constantly into the question ‘what kind of person is this?’” (Caplan and

Torpey 2001: 3). As an apparently permanent attri- bute of the body, one’s gender classification is shared with too many others (about half the population normally) to be used to verifty who one is, but it can help, it is assumed, to determine who one is not. That gender is an essential piece of information to collect is made clear in the TSA’s rationale for including it in the Secure Flight program. When the Department of Homeland Security asked for public comments on the proposed program in 2008, one person or organi- zation suggested that the TSA “eliminate the gender requirement . . . and instead require passengers to submit information regarding their ethnicity, race, or national origin.” TSA officials responded by pointing out that “many names are not gender neutral. Additionally, names not derived from the Latin alphabet, when translated into English, do not generally denote gender. Providing information on gender will reduce the number of false positive watch list matches, because the informa- tion will distinguish persons who have the same or similar name” (Department of Homeland Security 2008: 64034).¶ While the individual who submitted the comment certainly might have meant that gender need not be a metric of identity at all— and it is odd and somewhat suspect that this individual or organiza- tion saw race or ethnicity as a better piece of data—the TSA apparently did not ever consider leaving a passenger’s gender classification out. As officials made clear in the rationale above, that M or F needed to be included in the identification details was never in doubt: its response focused on how that piece of information would best be ascertained— indirectly through associations with names or directly through requir- ing disclosure.¶ But the Secure Flight program does not just use the M or F on the identity document to screen passengers against the no-fly lists and to eliminate false positives. If this were all that happens, gender would not be deployed as biometric data, as unchanging information from the body. It would, instead, share the same epistemological status as one’s name and date of birth, the other pieces of lexical information gath- ered: provisionally useful but ultimately unattachable to an individual body, resting instead on a “giddy spiral” of other identity documents. In fact, TSA agents do use gender as a fixed piece of biometric information about an individual, one that can be checked against the passenger in front of them. That is, the security apparatus does n ot just require the M or F on the document to be compared with information in govern-

ment watch lists; at the airport, the TSA agent looks at the M or F on the passenger’s identity document, looks at the passenger, and then decides if the M or F corresponds to the passenger. Again, as biometric information, one’s gender classification cannot be used to verify iden- tity, to allow an agent to say with certainty who one is. But it can and is used to make a

decision about who a passenger is not. In the case of some transgender people at the airport, sometimes who the passenger is not is: herself.

The deployment of gender through security mechanisms constitutes the securitization of gender that seeks to stabilize and objectify the identities of transgender people.Currah and Mulqueen, 11

[Paisley Currah is Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Tara Mulqueen is from Birkbeck, University of London, Law Department, Graduate Student, "Securitizing gender: Identity, biometrics, and transgender bodies at the airport," Social Research, 2011, 17-21.]

What complicates the passage of a transgender individual through airport security is that her identity is not obvious in the way it is expected to be by the TSA. A

United Nations human rights special rapporteur pointed out that “counterterrorism measures that involve increased travel document security, such as stricter procedures for issuing, changing and verifying identity documents, risk unduly penalizing transgender persons whose personal appearance and data are subject to change” (United Nations

2009: 19). Yet, the transgender experience at the airport is more than just an exception. The biometric use of gender should not be seen as just a policy decision that , however unjustly, limits the freedom of a very small minority of individuals. It also shows how particular notions of gender come to be stabilized through their incorporation into larger systems of

organization and control. In actuality, how gender is defined in any particular context depends not on what one might think gender is, but on what it does in that context: there is no unitary notion of gender to which an individual simply does or does not conform. It is not only “personal appearance and data” that change, but the very concept of gender. In shifting our analysis this way, we can, following Deleuze, ask a more productive set of

questions: “in what situations, where and when does a particular thing happen, how does it happen, and so on? A concept, as we see it, should express an event rather than an essence” (1995: 14). As an event, the concept of gender is bound to the particular context in which it occurs, whether it be the airport, the doctor’s office, or the courtroom. Likewise, there is no coherent, singular state authority policing gender definition, but different authorities: indeed, “the state is just as messy and diffuses a concept as gender” (Currah forthcoming). That different state actors dispersed across the U.S. federal system of government have different requirements

for changing gender markers on identity documents illustrates this point. Sometimes genital surgery is required, sometimes not. But instead of fixating on what

gender “really” is, how it ought to be defined, we might see these arbitrary and conflicting rules for gender reclassification in another light: not as perplexing contradictions but instead as expressions of different state projects: one centered on recognition, the other on distribution. The concept of assemblage, from Deleuze and Guattari, provides one way of understanding how the contingent, chaotic, and epistemologically ungroundable concept of gender can be deployed in security mechanisms as if it were a tangible hard fact. Assemblages can be understood broadly as “functional conglomerations of elements” in which each element gains meaning in its relation to the others in the assemblage (Currier 2003: 203). The security assemblage at the airport is a convergence of many parts, from technologies and security strategies to bodies and social norms ; it is, like the airport itself, “a messy system of systems, embedded within numerous networks and social spheres” (Salter 2008: xiii). The airport security assemblage prevents certain individuals and materials from reaching the plane, while it also allows the maximum number of people to pass through unrestricted, so as not to inhibit the

“flow of commerce” (U.S. GAO 2010: 10). Gender can be seen as one of many “flows” or “forces” that come into the assemblage: it is not invented in the airport assemblage, but reconfigured by it in specific ways. As Haggerty

and Ericson explain, flows “exist prior to any assemblage, and are fixed temporarily and spatially by the assemblage” (2000: 608). In the context of an ever more uncertain and unknowable world of possible risks, gender anomalies are cause for heightened suspicion and scrutiny. Gender, in the security assemblage at the airport, is deployed as a biometric, a piece of data tied directly to the body. This “securitized” variant of gender, operationalized in the assemblage, is more than just a norm from which transgender individuals constitute an exception. As Currier points out, “a self-identical body (or object) cannot be identified prior to, or outside of, the field of encounters that articulate it within any specific

assemblage;” instead, through the assemblage, something new or “other” is created (2003: 331). At the airport, the “something other” for gender is what we are calling its securitization. The securitization of gender is doubly useful in conceptually grasping what happens to gender at the airport. Following Rose’s observations about the

“securitization of identity,” we have used “securitization” to describe how gender becomes an object of state (and increasingly private and privatized) surveillance through the two TSA programs. In that sense, the “security” in securitization reflects forms of control associated with sovereign power—barriers, bans, prohibitions, punishments,

searches by uniformed personnel, interrogations. But identity in general and gender in particular are also securitized in another sense— as a form of risk management, as techniques for “governing the future ” (Valverde 2007: 163). Risk management is not only a central mechanism of governmentality, but also of capital. In fact, it may be that the financial analogy is the most apt here. In finance, securitization involves the bundling of disparate pieces of debt into financial instruments. And what is debt? Debts are obligations, promises to repay at some point in the future.

Securitization is, as Randy Martin explains, “the future made present” (2007:18). In the security systems assembled by the Transportation

Security Administration, the disparate identities/bodies/ documents that fall under the rubric of gender are provisionally stabilized into objects that will hold steady over time—a promise of identity as future sameness. The TSA recommends that transgender people, especially transgender people “in transition,” carry letters from their doctors. These letters generally affirm the genuineness of the individual’s attachment to the new gender, and, in doing so, become forms of security. Likewise, the evidence required to change the gender classification on an identity document—typically affidavits from physicians

— attest to the permanence of the new gender in the future . Just as the securitization of debt attempts to turn promises about the future into tangible commodities in the present, the securitization of an individual’s gender tries to render uncertainty about the future more predictable. Foucault pointed out in a 1978 lecture that to manage contingency, “the temporal, the uncertain . . . have to be inserted within a given space” (2007: 20). Security is

comprised of spatial arrangements that create a milieu that can manage or lessen the impact of whatever unpredictable events the future holds. While identity as being, as narrative, as process, is a temporal category, the body—in our case the gendered body—is figured as spatial, something that can be known by the presence or the lack of certain configurations of flesh. To pass through airport security without issue, an individual’s gender is securitized by attempting to turn the body into not such a source of information but a promise about the present and the future. As individuals flow through the systems of surveillance and control in the airport, transgender people—with their incongruous

and unexpected histories, documents, and bodies—often find themselves in the uncomfortable interstices between spatial and temporal registers, between stasis and change, between what one is and what one says or does .

Ext: Ableism impact The use of biopolitics submits non-normative bodies to surveillance and subjectification to the category of “disabled.” This subjectification to categories is then used to not only dehumanize but oppress these individuals Nguyen ‘15

[Xuan Thuy Nguyen, Mount Saint Vincent University; “Genealogies of Disability in Global Governance: A ‐Foucauldian Critique of Disability and Development,” Foucault Studies, June 2015, 76-77]

The implicit assumption on which the definition of disability in the terms of DALY relies, that is, the implicit assumption of DALY according to which disability is an

opposite of health, manifests what Campbell calls “ableism.”43 Ableism is an organising framework rooted within a specific historical condition. As a conceptual tool, ableism transcends levels of governance, constructing norms through the structure, procedure, institutions, and values of civil society. Located within complex genealogies of knowledge that emerge in the

modern context, ableism operates through concrete systems of knowledge. These systems of knowledge operate in global institutions as ways of governing the disabled population through the biopolitics of health . As a management technology in neoliberal governance , DALY constructs the biomedical model of disability through the government of the population’s health that is constitutive of forms of power . DALY

modes of surveillance, exercised by the state and local institutions, reinforce technologies of self governing, as the ‐ individual’s health status becomes a condition for the measurement of his or her productivity in a neoliberal state. This process of objectification and subjectification makes the individual subject to, and dependent on, the institutional treatment of disability as a category of illness, objectified through the existence of impairments. The government of impairment, through the constructions of DALY, exemplifies how neoliberalism has governed the populations in the global South by constructing disability as medical, psychiatric, and behavioral problems; furthermore, DALY can be theorised as an instrument of global health that

constructs knowledge about individuals through its biomedical, technical, and economic rationalities , that

is, an instrument of global health whose forms of knowledge construct ableism through a normative belief that impairment is inherently negative. Thus, impairment should be ameliorated, and where possible, cured or eliminated.44 In fact, the rationalities of the GBD and DALY, as shown, illuminate this ableist ideology. Within modern capitalist societies, a deep seated assumption works to eliminate so called disorder or imperfection‐ ‐ . Thus, the problems taken to be associated with impaired bodies must be monitored and controlled through the institutional objectification of diseases and illnesses. Impairment—within this global and local cartography of health surveillance—is seen as an opposite to the ideal image of healthy population, and thus, must be corrected or removed in order to maintain the stability of the capitalist social order. The biomedical model in governing public health reflects the dominance of the “individual pathology,” a rationality of development in the government of health and disability in the development context.

Biopower is a means of control. Biometrics is a biopolitical tool for the norm to establish [clarify what is meant by “problematization of life’”].Maguire 12

[Mark Maguire, Visiting Assistant Professorship in the Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, “Biopower, racialization and new security technology,” Social Identities, September 2012, 605]

Biopower, then, is does not offer an all-encompassing and totalizing concept but rather a powerful tool with which to begin to investigate human life as a site of problematization, an object of political thought and the subject of

technological interventions (see Rabinow & Rose, 2006, p. 198). From this starting point, it is possible to get closer to understanding the how life was problematized in the late nineteenth century by scientists and administrators and the ways in which biometric security offered useful knowledge for the government of individuals and populations. Biometric technologies offered identity verification at the level of the individual in a world in which bodies and populations were configured by racial thought. While overt racial theory has largely disappeared from contemporary scientific projects in this field, a survey of biometrics in the contemporary moment shows the remarkable persistence of racialization in security discourse today . From

the theatres of war in which biometrics are used to ensnare bad guys, to efforts to join up affective computing with surveillance technology, the concept of biopower provides a starting point from which to investigate the ways in which security assemblages are imbricated with processes of racialization, and investigate the ways in which seemingly post-racial science is also being folded into governmental calculations . Biopower involves statistics, profiles, a multitude of useful knowledge, monitoring, surveillance, and the ordering of space; birth and death rates sciences concerned with biosocial creatures and technologies that seek to identify individuals both have as their object life itself.

Biometrics is ableist and leads to exclusion by classifying disabled bodies as abnormal, unhealthy, and carrying risk.Saltes ‘13

[Natasha Saltes; “‘Abnormal’ Bodies on the Borders of Inclusion: Biopolitics and the paradox of Disability Surveillance,” Surveillance & Society, 2013, 55-56]

Surveillance Studies has made significant contributions to discussions on human rights by documenting practices of discrimination based on characteristics such as race (Poudrier 2003; Glover 2008, 2009; Browne 2012), gender (Monahan 2009; Koskela 2012), and class (Gilliom 2001; Maki 2011). Yet surveillance practices associated with the embodiment of impairment and the experience of disability have been largely ignored. This omission is perplexing given the emphasis that Surveillance Studies places on the normalizing technologies of power used to monitor, control and regulate behaviours and mobilities of certain bodies. The absence of a discussion on impairment and disability in Surveillance Studies is also curious given the prominence accorded to the monitoring and regulation of the body in relation to social norms in the work of Michel Foucault. While Foucault has examined the biopolitical arrangements through which health and welfare of the population is advanced, there is a dearth of literature that examines the connection between impairment, disability, surveillance and biopolitics. To date,

the research agenda of leading disability scholars have explored the myriad ways people with impairments are subjected to social exclusion, inequality and oppression and how these practices are framed within biomedical perspectives of disability (see, for example, Oliver 1990a, 1990b; Rioux and Valentine 2006; Barnes and Mercer 2010;

Oliver and Barnes 2012). Few have ventured toward an analysis of how the biomedical perspective of disability is used to rationalize biopolitics and to sustain a surveillance regime that excludes people with impairments . This paper seeks to address this gap by introducing the concept of ‘disability surveillance’. Building from a widely accepted definition of surveillance

proposed by Lyon (2007), I define disability surveillance as the practice of collecting, documenting, monitoring and classifying personal data that pertains to the embodied characteristics and attributes of impairment. In order to avoid conceptualizing disability surveillance in purely disempowering terms, my aim is to highlight the ways in which surveillant practices oscillate between biopolitical practices of social control that exclude people with impairments in order to prevent perceived economic ‘risk’ and practices of counting and classifying people with impairments in order to promote rights. I argue that this paradox stems from contradictory and inconsistent definitions of disability used by various sectors of the Canadian government. When disability surveillance is carried out in ways that pathologize and exclude people with impairments in order to limit access to resources and/or citizenship, disability tends to be defined in terms of a functional limitation and people with impairments are seen as those with non-normative bodies that pose a ‘risk’. Disability surveillance that operates on perceived notions of risk are carried out under biopolitical rationalizations that aim to promote the health and prosperity of the population through social sorting processes that involve identifying and categorizing ‘abnormality’ through the collection of medical data. In identifying the operation of biopolitics in Canadian immigration policy, I look specifically at s. 38(c) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, commonly referred to as

the ‘excessive demand clause’, as an exclusionary mechanism of power that denies immigration applicants with certain health conditions and impairment on the presumption that they would impose undue costs on health and social services. I also look at the ways in which

biometric technology at the border contributes to the experience of disability by assigning the identity of ‘abnormal’ to people with impairments who do not conform to the system’s ableist design.

Disability is constructed as the antithesis of the normalized body.Saltes ‘13

[Natasha Saltes; “‘Abnormal’ Bodies on the Borders of Inclusion: Biopolitics and the paradox of Disability Surveillance,” Surveillance & Society, 2013, 56-58]

The first task in providing a discussion of disability surveillance is to provide a definition of disability. In recognizing that disability has contested and nuanced meanings (c.f. Finkelstein 1980, Oliver 1990a, 1990b; Shakespeare and Watson 2001; Tregaskis 2002; Thomas 2002, 2004; Reeve

2002; Galis 2011), I offer a definition of disability that takes multiple perspectives into account and propose that disability is an experience that emerges from the intersection of physical, sensory, and/or cognitive difference or impairment with social interaction and processes that result in exclusion, discrimination, disadvantage, marginalization, segregation, or oppression. As a relational experience, disability is ontologically, spatially, temporally, materially, discursively, culturally, socially, politically and economically contingent

(c.f. Kitchin 1998: 343 and Thomas 2002: 47). It is prudent to mention that while my understanding of disability does not deny the embodied experience of difference and impairment or the role the body plays in the experience of disability I do not define disability in terms of a functional limitation . This is important to note given that disability scholars continue to disagree on the extent to which the body and impairment should be considered in defining disability.

For the scope of this paper, my intention is not to provide an overview of these competing views, but rather illustrate how ‘disability’ came to be understood within a normative paradigm as an ‘abnormality’ and the implications this has for people with impairments. Debates surrounding definitions of disability have raised questions as to appropriate language and terms. The term ‘people with disabilities’ is considered ‘people first language’ and is widely used in an effort to emphasize the individual rather than the ‘disability’. However, some disability scholars reject this term. Barnes and Mercer (2010) prefer to use ‘disabled people’ to distinguish ‘“impairment”, as a medically classified biophysiological condition, from “disability”, which denotes the social disadvantage experienced by people with accredited impairment’ (11). Yet, for some, this term is also problematic. To identify as a ‘disabled person’ is to identify as a member of an oppressed group (Lawson 2001). Shakespeare and Watson point out that some people with impairments do not identify [A]s disabled, either in terms of the medical model or social model. They downplay the significance of their impairments, and seek access to a mainstream identity. They do not have a political identity because they do not see themselves as part of the disability movement either. (2001: 20) In an effort to avoid conflating ‘disability’ with ‘impairment’ and in recognizing the complexity surrounding identity politics, I use the term ‘people with impairments’ to refer to individuals with body difference or body variation that result in functional limitations or are perceived by

others to result in functional limitations. Although I define disability as a relational experience to describe the intersection of the body with the social, and not to refer to functional limitation, I use the term ‘disability surveillance’, rather than ‘impairment surveillance’, to emphasize the paradoxical outcomes and purposes wherein some surveillant practices directed toward people with impairments produce the experience of disability while other surveillant practices are carried out in an attempt to prevent the experience of disability. The emergence of a positivist understanding of ontological normality can be traced back to the nineteenth century and attributed to the work of two key statisticians. In the 1830s, Adolphe Quetelet extended the law of error principle to the body by proposing the concept of the ‘average man’. The implication of Quetelet’s work was profound in that it provided the discursive and statistical backdrop from which the concept of the ‘norm’ emerged. The statistical process of relating individuals to others can perhaps best be illustrated through the principle of the normal distribution. According to the normal distribution principle, the majority of the population should fall below ‘the arch of the standard bell-shaped curve’ (Davis 2006: 6). Individuals with attributes that diverge from the arch are therefore considered ‘abnormal’. However, in recognizing that not all traits that deviate from the arch are undesirable and that some are actually preferable, Sir Francis Galton modified the bell curve in such a way that it would reflect a ranking of desirability (Davis 2006). Following the work produced by

Quetelet and Galton, the idea of the body as that which can be compared, measured and improved spurred the widely held notion that there is a ‘normal’ way of being. The genesis of normal was further reinforced by

the rise of capitalism marked by industrialization and urbanization and a shifting mode of production. In an economy organized around factory work that required able bodies, disability came to be understood as a functional limitation defined in terms of a deficit or defect and understood through comparative measures as an abnormality that presents a burden to society (Finkelstein 1980; Thomas 2002; Oliver and Barnes 2012).

The social response was that of segregation through institutional arrangements and medicalization geared toward treatment and rehabilitation (Finkelstein 1980; Thomas 2002; Oliver and Barnes 2012). In his critique of the

medicalization of disability, Oliver (1990a) argues that ‘[t]he whole medical and rehabilitation enterprise is founded upon an ideology of normality and this has far reaching implications for treatment. Its aim is to restore the disabled person to normality, whatever that may mean’ (under ‘The Medicalisation of Disability’). By the twentieth

century, the biomedical perspective of disability gained widespread acceptance and while it has since garnered notoriety by disability rights advocates and proponents of the social model, it continues to be the dominant approach with which disability is defined and understood by various branches of government and institutions.

Ext: Solvency[racism impact specific] Biometrics leads to racism and codifies the biopolitical project – academic discussion is keyRabinow and Rose 3 [(Paul Rabinow, Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley; and Nikolas Rose, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science) “THOUGHTS ON THE CONCEPT OF BIOPOWER TODAY”]

At the turn of the new century, however, race is once again re-entering the domain of biological truth. At a certain moment, when it became clear that humans shared over 98 percent of their genome with chimpanzees, and that inter-group variations in DNA sequences were greater than intra-group variations, it appeared that genomics itself would mark the terminal point of biological racism (perhaps even species-ism). But this humanitarian dream proved to be short-lived. A new molecular deployment of race has emerged seemingly almost inevitably out of genomic thinking. Critics denounced the model of a single genome that underpinned the Human Genome Project, fearing that it would establish a white male norm. The first move here was cast as ethical: as the initial proposer of this work, Luigi Cavalli-Sforza put it ito explore the full range of genome diversity within the human familyi and ito help combat the widespread popular fear and ignorance of human genetics and O make a significant contribution to the elimination of racismi (Micharek 2000: 5-6). Despite the critics, this effort to ensure the recognition of diversity in the framing of scientific truth as an essential dimension of genomic knowledge was later adopted by the Human Genome Project (HUGO) and funded by the European Community (from 1992) and later the United States Federal government National Institute for Health