Max Liljefors

Mapped Bodies Notes on the Use of Biometrics in Geopolitical Contexts

“Mapped Bodies: Notes on the Use of Biometrics in Geopolitical Contexts” examines the role played by automated biometric technologies in migration control and in the so-called war on terror. Biometric methods such as automated fingerprint identification, iris scanning and facial recognition record microscopic bodily characteristics, computes patterns from them, and matches those patterns against already existing records in super-national databases. These technologies, we argue, are a telling example of a recasting of the relations between the body and state power, in which two current trends, the ‘biologization’ of the human being and the focus on security in the so-called war on terror, after 9/11 and subsequent terror attacks, are epitomized and combined. Starting from a visual culture studies perspective, this article discusses the negotiations of visibility and invisibility involved in biometrics, in connection to questions of power, subjectivity and citizenship. We draw on Vilem Flusser’s and Paul Virilio’s respective understanding of visual technologies as being ultimately ”blind”. We also draw on Emmanuel Levinas’ and Giorgio Agamben’s elaborations on the human face as an inherently ethical ”depth dimension” of interpersonal encounters, a depth we find at risk of becoming eclipsed by the biometric flattening of bodily topographies into abstract, encoded patterns. Ultimately, we argue, automated biometrics threatens to dissolve the bond between subjectivity and citizenship.

In Between the Human and the Animal: Subjectivity and Authority in Ann-Sofi Sidén's Queen of Mud Project.

This article explores the “question of the animal” in Swedish artist Ann-Sofi Siden’s project Queen of Mud, executed between 1988 and 2004. Queen of Mud revolves around a naked female creature, smeared from top to toe in wet mud, which interferes in human affairs and challenges thereby common assumptions about the human/animal divide and the human-animal continuum. By reading Queen of Mud over against three disparate but critical moments in modern reflection on animality – the Rainer Maria Rilke/Martin Heidegger “controversy” over the animal and the concept of the Open; John Searle’s philosophy of social ontology; and the memoirs of the German judge Daniel Paul Schreber, composed during his period of paranoia – I argue that the figure of the animal in Siden’s project simultaneously covers and manifests the incommensurability between bodily existence and societal mandate that defines the human subject. Throughout three distinct phases, the project gradually excavates the resistance of the body against being subsumed under societal determinations, and lays bare the emergence/emergency of corporeality as a fundamental threat against societal authority. While contested phenomena as xenotransplantation and cross-species genetic engineering may seem to cast the “question of the animal” today in purely biological terms, this article argues that it concerns just as much the demarcation that outlines a regulated sphere of societal inter-human relations. Animality is thus not understood as a threshold between the human being and other life forms, but as a divide within the human as a simultaneously corporeal and societal creature. (Less)