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Measuring the Mobile Body
New border and surveillance technologies are being lauded for their accuracy and fairness. But how ethical can forced identification be? Late nineteenth-century enthusiasts of pinning down the ‘born criminal’ enlisted scientific advances to sinister ends. Might biometric data processing that registers migrants entering the EU risk a similar transgression of human rights today?
While branding had been widely used in Europe and North America on convicts, prisoners and enslaved people, evolving ideas around criminality and punishment largely led to the abolition of physical marking in the early nineteenth century. On this basis, they enumerated a list of so-called ‘stigmata’ or physical regularities found in the body of the ‘born criminal’ While this notion is widely discredited today, the underlying method of classification based on massed data characteristics still exists. The aim, then, should be not to call for more accurate or “fair” skull measurements to shore up racist models of intelligence but to condemn the approach altogether.’ Put differently, techniques of classification and quantification cannot be divorced from the socio-political contexts they are tasked to verify and vouch for.
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