Abstract
This is an excellent book, for reasons that go beyond what the reader might be led to expect from the title. To begin with, the book is a concise critical introduction to biometric technologies: their historical development, present and emerging configurations and uses, and the epistemological and ontological presuppositions underlying them. Not surprisingly, the analysis leans heavily on Foucault’s account of the emergence and logics of ‘biopolitics’ in the modern West.
What is surprising is, first, the richness, subtlety and perspicacity of the critical account Pugliese unfolds in a mere 179 pages of main text, and second, the degree to which the book ends up serving as one of the better introductions in existence (and there are many of them!) to Foucault’s thinking on biopolitics and biopower. Pugliese makes a very strong case throughout for the assertion that ‘[b]iometric systems . . . emerge as exemplary technologies of biopower’ (p. 8).
After a rich introduction, the first substantive chapter places present-day biometrics within a much longer genealogy of techniques for attempting to identify and categorize people through measuring aspects of their bodies. Here the first of a series of quite crucial messages is conveyed: there is nothing new, and nothing neutral, about biometrics. Biometrics are firmly situated in a long and mostly sordid history of attempts to ‘capture’ individuals for various purposes relating to control, exclusion and exploitation.
Now, as in the 19th century British colonies or French and Italian criminological musings where many biometric methods were pioneered, their credibility depends upon their positioned, interested, historically and geographically specific character being systematically effaced or hidden behind the image of ‘neutral’ technology.
Chapter 2 anticipates and destroys the defense that ‘now, through technology, all the politics has been removed’. Pugliese performs a brilliant dissection of the ways in which even the most ‘technological’ current methods have built into them an ineluctable ‘infrastructural whiteness’, a set of templates of ‘the normal’ implicitly based upon the appearance and behaviour of white, male, heterosexual and able-bodied individuals. This infrastructural whiteness is repeatedly revealed in failures to cope with individual bodies that diverge from the norm.
Additional unflattering continuities linking today’s purportedly neutral technologies with the past are unearthed in the following chapter, where the empirical focus is the US Department of Defense’s current initiative to develop ‘identity dominance’ in the context of the Global War On Terror. Analysis of walking gaits or of bodily posture in order to suss out individuals bent on hostile acts before they actually commit them may seem like science fiction. But, for example, Cesare Lombroso, 19th century Italian theorist of ‘criminal man’, turns out to have developed a scheme for differentiating the gait of ‘the criminal’ from normal walking styles.
Rich as Pugliese’s illustrations of Foucault’s thought are, he has no hesitation bringing in other thinkers where appropriate (Haraway, Barthes, Mbembe, Agamben and Derrida make appearances). Chapter 4 addresses the issue of identity fraud and imposture, and leads Pugliese to explore the underlying metaphysics of presence critiqued by Derrida, which again, he does with great subtlety and economy. In Chapter 5 again, on lie detection, Pugliese delves into the minutest details of the technologies, offering a political parsing of the semiotics of colours used to represent different levels of brain activity in lie detection MRIs, in order to expose the emptiness of claims to ‘unbiased’ and neutral procedures.
The Epilogue digs below the legibilities imposed by biometrics to demonstrate the survival of ‘somatic singularities’, the various ways in which the non-normative and illegible can and often does appear, wittingly or not, to disrupt biopolitical control. The materials gathered by Machsomwatch, an organization of Israeli women devoted to documenting the plight of Palestinians at West Bank checkpoints, on the illegibility of agricultural workers’ hands, and reports of self-harm in order to avoid detection by Eurodac databases monitoring the movements of refugees and asylum seekers within Europe, are particularly poignant.
It is refreshing to see a critical analysis at once so detailed and so fundamental. Perhaps this is a final way in which Pugliese’s admirable book illuminates and pays tribute to Foucault. One of the great sources for the wide appeal of the deceased philosopher was after all his unrivalled talent for perceiving matters of great historical significance in the finest filaments of everyday practices of power/knowledge. In this sense Pugliese’s text is a worthy heir and an innovative addition to the critical genealogical corpus.