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Global Insecurities
Bodies as Evidence: Security, Knowledge, and Power
From biometrics to predictive policing, contemporary security relies on sophisticated scientific evidence-gathering and knowledge-making focused on the human body. Bringing together new anthropological perspectives on the complexities of security in the present moment, the contributors to Bodies as Evidence reveal how bodies have become critical sources of evidence that is organized and deployed to classify, recognize, and manage human life. Through global case studies that explore biometric identification, border control, forensics, predictive policing, and counterterrorism, the contributors show how security discourses and practices that target the body contribute to new configurations of knowledge and power. At the same time, margins of error, unreliable technologies, and a growing suspicion of scientific evidence in a “post-truth” era contribute to growing insecurity, especially among marginalized populations.
Contributors. Carolina Alonso-Bejarano, Gregory Feldman, Francisco J. Ferrándiz, Daniel M. Goldstein, Ieva Jusionyte, Amade M’charek, Mark Maguire, Joseph P. Masco, Ursula Rao, Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Joseba Zulaika, Nils Zurawski
Contributors. Carolina Alonso-Bejarano, Gregory Feldman, Francisco J. Ferrándiz, Daniel M. Goldstein, Ieva Jusionyte, Amade M’charek, Mark Maguire, Joseph P. Masco, Ursula Rao, Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Joseba Zulaika, Nils Zurawski
256 pages, Paperback
Published November 30, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 21, 2019
I thought, picking it up, this would be a book exclusively about securitization of certain spaces following 9/11 l, but I’m actually super pleased how diverse the subjects were. Good stuff in here about biometrics and homeland security both home and abroad.
March 16, 2023
There is something deeply perverse about modernism, and it is best manifested in surveillance. From Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon in the 18th century to present-day biometric database and facial recognition, surveillance apparatuses study the human body with forensic aesthetics, flooding every corner of the private life with bright light, not to raise hope, but rather to deliver a future of security. As much as this future of security (or more precisely, security industry) is real, in terms of monetary investment in infrastructure, devices, and human police labor, it is a fiction, a fantasy to fix human life that, to use Foucault's words, “is never completely in the right place, that is destined to ‘err’ and be ‘wrong.’” The perversion of modernism as represented by surveillance, whether used for corporate or governing purposes (and these two aren't that separated after all), lies in the fundamental indifference to the objects it so thoroughly, hungrily, even passionately studies and manages.
Every bit, byte, or pixel of the human body is a prey that must not escape the network of deep knowing set by the predator. The query of how much of the weight of the security state falls on evidence, and what evidence is after all, is taken up by anthropologists who build this anthology to present the intimate encounters with security apparatuses adopted for, and tested on, political, economic, and religious borders across the globe. These essays share the concerns of injuries caused by the securitization of borders, both on land (e.g. the US-Mexico border) and in the water (e.g. the Mediterranean Sea), both contouring the nation and slicing through everyday work and living spaces, both present and speculative.
What is fascinating about evidence as a means to generating new relationship between knowledge and power is its association with the idea of truth. In the idea of truth, error or falsehood plays a crucial role not (just) to contrast what is true, but more importantly, to create an interplay of value between the true and the untrue. It is this interplay that gives rise to the infinity of the needs and narratives of eliminating or correcting the errors, which, paradoxically but unsurprisingly, is the very truth of human life. Such errors can be a physically or medically detectable deviation from what is perceived as “normal,” a behavioral divergence that is yet a “crime” (intentional civil disobedience or unintentional mistake), a sign of legal or national border transgression (refugees and compelled immigrants), so on and so forth. In other words, it is the purpose of building the fiction of truth and the norms that evidence from the vulnerable and injured Other serves.
As the anthology’s editors note, “the deployment of biometric registration reveals the intimate link between moral order and body inspection. The technological upgrading of the multilayered international borders causes innumerable physical and mental injuries and even death. The use of forensic evidence for recovering the stories of victims of specific political orderings, such as illegal border crosses or victims of mass killings, individualizes and sentimentalizes the memory of suffering. It offers avenues for families to mourn and cope with untimely death at the cost of sidelining broader political debates about ethical failure and unjust orders. Counterinsurgency tactics and the use of drones are defended by a discourse that celebrates death as achievement of intelligence. The rhetoric of the War on Terror justifies killing suspected bodies before they can articulate an alternative truth.”
The obsession with evidence has birthed various Prevention strategies. The slippage from past to future, which activates Prevention thinking, such as predictive policing and the War on Terror, is often left unchecked, and needs to be protected under the sentimentality of secrecy, in the process of producing a projected “reality” as truth, as in “We know so-and-so is hiding weapons of massive destruction, but to ensure the procedure of counter-terrorism, we can't tell you everything we know.” Driven by the perverse belief that there is truth (of insecurity) hidden from the light of surveillance, interrogators force their suspects into the (again!) infinity of Epimenides’s paradox, in which the lie about planned attacks on civilians made by the innocent inmate is the “truth” the interrogator wants to hear and the “reality” that he believes will only reveal itself through continued use of force.
Rather than a static, objective item showing a trace of an encounter of and in the past—though this misconception continues to prevail public opinion and therefore spares the security state from critical inquiry—bio-evidence should instead be construed as a device of truth-making that operates within the orbit of power and knowledge. As soon as the rhetoric of evidence transgresses the temporal border from the past and present to the future, there is no “enough” down the road. The horizon of securitization will extend contagiously and endlessly on the ground of both the proliferation of new/renewed embodied evidentiary errors and the Catch-22 situation of infinite fabrication of lies to make the fantasized “truth” sound truer.
Every bit, byte, or pixel of the human body is a prey that must not escape the network of deep knowing set by the predator. The query of how much of the weight of the security state falls on evidence, and what evidence is after all, is taken up by anthropologists who build this anthology to present the intimate encounters with security apparatuses adopted for, and tested on, political, economic, and religious borders across the globe. These essays share the concerns of injuries caused by the securitization of borders, both on land (e.g. the US-Mexico border) and in the water (e.g. the Mediterranean Sea), both contouring the nation and slicing through everyday work and living spaces, both present and speculative.
What is fascinating about evidence as a means to generating new relationship between knowledge and power is its association with the idea of truth. In the idea of truth, error or falsehood plays a crucial role not (just) to contrast what is true, but more importantly, to create an interplay of value between the true and the untrue. It is this interplay that gives rise to the infinity of the needs and narratives of eliminating or correcting the errors, which, paradoxically but unsurprisingly, is the very truth of human life. Such errors can be a physically or medically detectable deviation from what is perceived as “normal,” a behavioral divergence that is yet a “crime” (intentional civil disobedience or unintentional mistake), a sign of legal or national border transgression (refugees and compelled immigrants), so on and so forth. In other words, it is the purpose of building the fiction of truth and the norms that evidence from the vulnerable and injured Other serves.
As the anthology’s editors note, “the deployment of biometric registration reveals the intimate link between moral order and body inspection. The technological upgrading of the multilayered international borders causes innumerable physical and mental injuries and even death. The use of forensic evidence for recovering the stories of victims of specific political orderings, such as illegal border crosses or victims of mass killings, individualizes and sentimentalizes the memory of suffering. It offers avenues for families to mourn and cope with untimely death at the cost of sidelining broader political debates about ethical failure and unjust orders. Counterinsurgency tactics and the use of drones are defended by a discourse that celebrates death as achievement of intelligence. The rhetoric of the War on Terror justifies killing suspected bodies before they can articulate an alternative truth.”
The obsession with evidence has birthed various Prevention strategies. The slippage from past to future, which activates Prevention thinking, such as predictive policing and the War on Terror, is often left unchecked, and needs to be protected under the sentimentality of secrecy, in the process of producing a projected “reality” as truth, as in “We know so-and-so is hiding weapons of massive destruction, but to ensure the procedure of counter-terrorism, we can't tell you everything we know.” Driven by the perverse belief that there is truth (of insecurity) hidden from the light of surveillance, interrogators force their suspects into the (again!) infinity of Epimenides’s paradox, in which the lie about planned attacks on civilians made by the innocent inmate is the “truth” the interrogator wants to hear and the “reality” that he believes will only reveal itself through continued use of force.
Rather than a static, objective item showing a trace of an encounter of and in the past—though this misconception continues to prevail public opinion and therefore spares the security state from critical inquiry—bio-evidence should instead be construed as a device of truth-making that operates within the orbit of power and knowledge. As soon as the rhetoric of evidence transgresses the temporal border from the past and present to the future, there is no “enough” down the road. The horizon of securitization will extend contagiously and endlessly on the ground of both the proliferation of new/renewed embodied evidentiary errors and the Catch-22 situation of infinite fabrication of lies to make the fantasized “truth” sound truer.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews