Amoore Hall 2008 Taking People Apart

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` Free of the prejudice of the infallibility of our senses and kept on continuous guard

against the information they give, science searches for other means in the conquest

of truth; it finds them in precision instruments ... . These devices penetrate the

intimate functions of organs where life seems to exist in ceaseless motion.''

Etienne-Jules Marey (1878, page 382)

` The Rapiscan Secure 1000 is the most effective people screening solution available.

The system produces high resolution images that enable the operator to easily

identify concealed threat.''Rapiscan Systems (2006, page 1)

Introduction: backscattered bodies

In 2005 the UK Home Office and the US Transportation Security Administration

(TSA) began trials of new X-ray devices for the screening of bodies at border check-

points. Rapiscan System's Backscatter scanners appeared in terminal 4 of London'sHeathrow airport and in Phoenix's Sky Harbor airport, producing screened images of

passenger's bodies as they passed through security checkpoints. In the TSA's budget

statement to Congress in 2007, special mention was made of the substantial investment

in `whole body imaging' or `backscatter X-ray', with a statement that ``the technology

produces an image to identify contraband secreted on an individual without subject-

ing them to an invasive inspection'' (TSA, 2007). In October 2008 the TSA

announced the expansion of body scanning at US airports (TSA, 2008), and in the

same month the European Commission moved to allow for the widespread introduc-

tion of similar scanners in airports across the EU by 2010 (European Digital Rights,2008). Ultimately proposed, then, for use in major airports across Europe and the US, as

well as in the London Underground system in the form of millimetre-wave technology

Taking people apart: digitised dissection and the body

at the border

Louise Amoore, Alexandra Hall

Department of Geography, University of Durham, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, England;e-mail: [email protected], [email protected] 31 January 2008; in revised form 12 November 2008; published online 8 April 2009

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2009, volume 27, pages 444 ^ 464

Abstract. The UK Home Office and the US Transportation Security Administration have madesubstantial recent investment in new Backscatter X-ray scanners to screen bodies at securitisedborder checkpoints. Promising to make the invisible visualisable, these devices project an image ofa naked body onto a screen to identify concealed `risk'. Contemporary security practices which seekto fix identity at the border through biometrics, datamining, and profilingof which the `whole bodyscanner' is parthave their genealogy in efforts in aesthetics and medical science to mine the body forcertainties and reveal something of the unknown future. The scan is revealed as a simultaneouspartitioning and projection, the body `digitally dissected' into its component parts, from which aspecific, securitised visualisation is shaped. Drawing on the entangled histories of `body knowledge'in art, science, and anatomytheir techniques of abstraction and technologies of visualisationwe

explore what light may be shed on the Backscatter scan and, more importantly, what ramificationsthis may have for a critical response. Challenges to the biometric border have tended to centre onsurveillance, making appeals to privacy and bodily integrity. However, if border disclosures which`take apart' the body are more precisely understood as visualisations, then there are more fundamentalissues than recourse to rights of privacy can counteract.

doi:10.1068/d1208


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(The Times 2005, page 4), Backscatter scanners hold out the promise of imaging the

unseen, penetrating the surface, and making visible that which is hidden from view,

opening up new visualisations of the unknown, potentially risky body, as well as newperspectives on its management.

Backscatter scanners utilise `Compton scattering', a phenomenon by which the

momentum and wavelength of x-rays change when coming into contact with matter,

with lower energy rays recoiling from a surface or scatter point. Named after its

discoverer, Arthur Compton (who won a Nobel Prize in 1927 for his achievements),

Compton scattering was a key milestone in 20th-century physics, helping to establish

the particle nature of electromagnetic radiation (Nobel Lectures, 1965). In the Back-

scatter scanner, the low-energy, excess, `scattered' radiation is harnessed to produce an

image of a person on a screen. In contrast to medical X-rays, the Backscatter does notpenetrate the skin, but `sees through' layers of clothing, distinguishing organic from

inorganic matter to display a naked form onto a screen, to be viewed by the scanning

operative (see figures 1 and 2). The outline of body parts, body hair, and genitalia is

clearly visible on the screen shown in the TSA's promotional video alongside a

concealed ceramic knife and detonator.(1)

In contemporary security practice, Backscatter is but one illustration of the drive to

``visibilize the invisible'' (Stafford, 1993, page 17), as the historians of art and the body

put the problem, to probe beneath what is immediately available to an observer's

senses. Far from the promised `whole body image', the Backscatter scan is actually a

Figure 1. [In colour online, see http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d1208] Backscatter X-ray scanner. Imagereproduced with the permission of the Transportation Security Administration, Office of PrivacyPolicy and Compliance Research Centre; http://www.tsa.gov./research/privacy/backscatter.shtm.

(1) Full video available at http://www.tsa.gov/assets/mov/backscatter.wmv

Taking people apart: digitised dissection and the body at the border 445
http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d1208http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d1208


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composite of dissected elements of a body, pixelated by X-rays which are ``received by

high resolution detectors and passed to advanced image processing software''

(Rapiscan Systems, 2006), then reassembled. The resulting image resembles a shadowy

negative imprint of body contours (see figure 3) which can then be abstracted into what

the TSA refer to as `chalk lines', reminiscent of those at a crime scene. The imageviewed by the screening operative at the border checkpoint, then, is not a copy',

but an abstraction and a recomposition of the dimensions and densities of the body.

Broken apart in this way, the unknown `threat' is made knowable and amenable

Figure 2. [In colour online.] An image produced by Backscatter. Image reproduced with thepermission of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre; http://mail.privacy.org/privacy/airtravel/backscatter/.

Figure 3. The modified images which are shown to the Transportation Security Officer during theBackscatter process male and female front and back views. Images reproduced with the permis-sion of the Transportation Security Administration, Office of Privacy Policy and ComplianceResearch Centre, http://www.tsa.gov/research/privacy/backscatter.shtm .

446 L Amoore, A Hall


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to intervention: freight vehicles are X-rayed at ports for the (live or dead) bodies of

illegal immigrants; cargo container shipments are screened for explosives; subway

passengers for concealed improvised explosive devices; young children are imaged bymillimetre-wave technology at Amsterdam's Schipol airport. Yet, this quest to make

the concealed interiors and surfaces of the body known to the òutside' is not at all

novel: it is, in fact, an intrinsic part of the conjoined histories of visualisations of the

body in fine arts and the medical sciences. The genealogies of body knowledge reveal

precisely an imaging and imagining of the body via excavation of its component parts.

In the medical sciences, as well as in the arts, where anatomical knowledge has

influenced what has appeared in the field of vision, knowledge of the human body

dissected, dismembered, displayed for expert viewing has been thought to reveal

something of the human soul itself, making the most intimate aspects of human lifeand motivation transparent.

If we are to understand the implications of the embracing, in contemporary

security practice, of the possibility of absolute identifiability via the body, whether by

biometrics, body scans, or by forensic approaches to personal data, we cannot ignore

the complex histories of taking apart bodies and subjects in order to see them and to

know them. As art historian Jonathan Crary (1992; 2001) has argued, the way that we

pay attention to particular bodies, objects, or phenomena is not self-evident, but is

specific to situated practices of observation. Crary locates a critical historical moment

in the 19th century, when perception was relocated ` in the thickness of the humanbody'', thereby making it amenable to management, and offering human vision as `à

component of machinic arrangements'' (2001, page 13). Certainly, the relation between

human bodies and human vision, and the machinic arrangements for their visualisation

and deployment, has become critical to current manifestations of border controls.

Thus, the biometrics of iris scans, for example, have become an assumed identity

ànchor' in the human body, and a prerequisite for fast-track security. Rapiscan X-ray

booths placed alongside Heathrow's terminal 4 fast-track `MiSense' iris scanners

are similarly predicated on the mapping of digitally partitioned images of body parts as

part of a drive to ``fix people's identities'' as the Home Office paper ``Securing the UKBorder'' puts it (Home Office, 2007, paragraph 1.4). It is precisely the fraught nature of

the penetrating disclosures that are required at the border in the name of security that

forms the focus of our discussion in this paper.

Public concerns about the implementation of Backscatter have revolved around the

`privacy risks' involved.(2) The USA's Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC,

2005) argues that Backscatter scans are `èquivalent to a `virtual strip search' for all air

travellers'', and that the machines show `èxtraordinary disregard for the privacy rights''

of passengers. Because privacy has occupied the primary political ground, debates

about body visualisations at the border have centred on the distanciation of theobserver and observed: screeners and their monitors are placed in booths or adjacent

buildings so they see only the digital simulacra and not ` the identity of the real

person''; `cloaking' technology is used so that images of some body parts are `screened

out'; and images are anonymised until a `risk' is identified (New York Times 2005).

(2) Currently, the TSA proposes the Backscatter scan as a voluntary alternative to a `pat down'search for those who have been selected for secondary screening. However, the American CivilLiberties Union claims that the scanner will, in fact, be used as a primary search for randomselectees and people flagged by watchlists, and it questions the continuing `voluntary' basis of thescan (ACLU, 2008). In Schipol, Heathrow, and Luton airports, body screening is being framed as aquicker and more convenient alternative to queuing for traditional security checks. The EuropeanCommission has insisted that body screening will remain voluntary, but the European Parliamenthas raised concerns that the Commission's plans will introduce significant new norms into airportsecurity procedures, and have called for greater consultation (The Times 2008).



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As the image of the `potentially risky' body is abstracted from the person whether

this is by prescreened images of an iris or face, or by the screening of `whole bodies'

so, simultaneously, other visualisations of the person are deployed, from multipleand fragmented databased information. Long before a physical boundary is reached,

forensic data mining dissects an individual's behaviours and associations apparently

identifying `hidden intent' and `suspicious behaviour' (Amoore and de Goede, 2005;

Ericson, 2007; Sparke, 2005). It is the people identified for secondary searches,

primarily through the projections that are produced from the fragments of their data,

who are considered worthy of a closer look' and are singled out for Rapiscan screening.

The drive of Backscatter to know the fleshy body by breaking down and reassembling

its mass collapses into the broader visualisation of the subject at the border via forensic

approaches to personal data.In this paper we make a case for understanding techniques such as Backscatter

through the genealogies of visualising that which is `out of sight' in aesthetic and

medical science practices. Motivated by a concern to highlight, in the burgeoning

literatures on biometrics, the almost complete absence of reflection on the metric of

the bio that is at work, we focus on situated histories of knowledge. First, we trace

other historical moments when the body has become a locus of anxiety and a domain

to be mined for certainties. Renaissance and Enlightenment anatomical dissections

fostered a form of knowledge that sought to know by reducing a body to its component

parts. Second, we turn to the technologies of visualisation that record and project thebody. Drawing on the intertwined literatures of art history and history of science, we

ask how it becomes possible to visualise bodies in particular ways. What is thought to

be gained or revealed from an intimate knowledge of abstracted parts of a corporeal

whole? At the heart of our arguments is the observation that dissection and visualising,

partition and imaging, are inextricable aspects of the same process, a process through

which knowledge of some `whole' (body, individual) is thought possible. In what follows,

though we differentiate our discussion of dissection from visualisation for analytical

clarity, it is precisely the conjoined nature of the practices of taking apart and making

visible that we emphasise.In the final section we reflect on the critical response to the implications of

contemporary forms of body knowledge. Much of the critique of contemporary bio-

metric screening at borders has centred on power as surveillance ``the garnering of

personal data for detailed analysis'' as David Lyon (2003, page 1) puts it and it is the

appeal to privacy that has dominated the politics of response. We suggest that border

disclosures which `take apart' the body exceed surveillance and signal more precisely a

visualisation or a particular visual knowledge of the body and subject. A critical

response to the digitised dissection of bodies at borders which highlights its discrim-

inatory potential, and which makes recourse to rights to privacy, rightly targets itsdeleterious potential effects, but threatens to leave its tendencies and assumptions

intact. Just as the 18th-century physiognomists saw the workings of the human body

to be secondary to a deeper knowledge of human essence and soul, so the contempo-

rary security drive for body knowledge is motivated only superficially by the search

for concealed weapons or contraband, and more profoundly by a desire to pierce

the coverings of dress, status, or feigned identity in order to reveal something of the

unknown future hidden within.

Partitioning the worldBackscatter, then, involves the systematic reduction of the body into its identifying

traces, from which new composite projections can be made a form of what we term

`digitised dissection'. Historically, dissection has made knowledge of the body and its



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interiority possible, implying a neutral practice of partitioning for inspection, but also

the violent dismemberment of flesh. Jonathan Sawday (1995) traces a burgeoning

fascination with anatomy to the European Renaissance, when writers, thinkers, andartists became entangled in what he calls a `culture of dissection'. Artistic' and `medical'

visualisations of the body were inseparable in 16th-century centres of Renaissance

learning: anatomy was a required subject for artists, and lifelike wax and wooden

sculptures of dissected bodies were displayed to the public (Benthien, 2002, page 45).

Dissections in this era were important public events, sometimes lasting days, and the

motifs of anatomy and flaying featured frequently in art, theatre, literature, and popular

culture.

This `culture of dissection' contained the beginnings of what would later become

scientific rational enquiry, a particular way of understanding the world. Yet it also heldwithin it a dark enthralment with bodily surfaces, depths, and interiors which later

claims to objectivity and learning (with the 17th-century triumph of `science' in its

modern sense) could not fully mask (Sawday, 1995, page 5). Illustrations of dissections

from the 16th century show bodies happily participating in their own dissection, flaying

their own skin to reveal their bodily interior. This ``willing self-presentation'' (Benthien,

2002, page 64) has been linked to the Calvinist doctrines of rigorous self-examination

and exposure (Sawday, 1995, pages 110 ^ 111). This glad participation in disclosure

mirrors contemporary `confessional' demands within border and visa regimes, where

travellers are expected to reveal and `flay' their histories, identities, associations, andbodies to knowing expert eyes in the name of `safety' (Salter, 2006, page 181).

The partitioning of the body in Renaissance anatomy theatres was allied to a

broader partitioning of the world to gather knowledge: unpeeling the skin to reveal

somatic secrets was an attempt to divine, demonstrate, and publicly reassert the social

and moral order (Sawday, 1995, page 75).(3) Celebrated anatomists of the day, such as

Andreas Vesalius, championed distinct and lasting ways of viewing the body, and also

the world; removing the skin and naming what lay beneath was a revolutionary new

way of `seeing' the body as layers and systems (Benthien, 2002, page 45; Cregan, 2007,

pages 49, 54). Claudia Benthien argues that we still operate with the belief that ``knowl-edge of what is essential means breaking through shells and walls in order to reach the

core that lies in the innermost depths'' (2002, page 7).

Bodily dissection and the systems of knowledge it produces are always connected to

the way in which this knowledge is inscribed. Early dissection practices evolved along-

side the development of mechanical printing: the body's bloody density had to be made

intelligible and communicable via conventions of representation that were shaped by

the flat spatiality of the anatomical atlas, through which knowledge was disseminated

(Waldby, 2000, page 91). Furthermore, explorations of the body mirrored the con-

temporary exploration of new territories. In a discussion of anatomy practices inElizabethan England, Kate Cregan (2007, page 49) argues that dissection of the body

was related to the emerging science of cartography; anatomisation and territorialisation

were both practices of `unification and disintegration', and the violent, yet creative,

conquering and mapping of territory was mirrored in the violent and creative abstraction

and rebordering of the body and its systems within anatomic practices.

(3) Waldby (2000), Sawday (1995), and Cregan (2007) all note the historical links between medicalknowledge, and penal and sovereign power. Between the 15th century and the 19th centurydissections were traditionally performed on criminals, as extensions of their punishment. Thedemise of this widespread practice is part of the reconfiguration of the relationship between power,punishment, and spectacle described by Foucault (1977). Waldby (2000) notes, however, that therelation of anatomy to penal punishment continues: the subject whose body was frozen, sliced up,and scanned to produce the world's first three-dimensional, `virtual' anatomical `atlas' was aconvicted and executed murderer.



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Anatomy, then, has always been a potentially violent `writing practice' through

which flesh is disintegrated to extract knowledge and to generate ` reproducible and

communicable traces''; contemporary digitisation and `virtualisation' of dissection con-tinue this trend by writing flesh as digital code (Waldby, 2000, pages 89, 94). In this

way, Backscatter is a specific, securitised medium through which flesh is made com-

prehensible, reforming a digitised whole from residue, recomposing a sense of solidity

from calibrations of planes, crevices, and boundaries. This process retains partition

and extraction at its core. In an age of bytes, pixels, and codes, dissection remains an

inherently violent practice of translation that knows by `tearing apart' (Stafford, 1993,

page 38).

If the Renaissance response to bodily interiors was one of awe at the mapping of

an unknown territory, then the confident burgeoning rationalist paradigms of 18th-century Enlightenment art and science understood dissection more broadly as a paradigm

``for any forced, artful, contrived, and violent study of depths'' (Stafford, 1993, page 47).

As `life' became the object of epistemological conquest in models of science and

governance within biopolitics (Foucault, 2000, page 73), the body came to be imagined

as a machine. This distinctly modern `ànatomical body'' (van der Ploeg, 2003, page 65)

in turn became the subject of an intense and studied calibration and measurement

(Sawday, 1995, page 32). Dissection was now not only a surgical probing, but a

``searching operation performed on a recalcitrant substance'', capturing perfectly the

Enlightenment preoccupation with ``decoding, dividing, separating, analysing, fathom-ing'' bodies, beliefs, and ideas in order to attack ``the duplicity of the world'' (Stafford,

1993, page 47). All deceptive appearances could be brought to truth under methodical

and meticulous analysis.

Mathematical certainties and simplicity were sought in all areas of social, moral,

artistic, and cultural life (Stafford, 1991, page 468), and the yearning for quantification

and standardisation created new possibilities for calibrations of human physicality,

behaviour, and interaction. It was an era obsessed by ` stripping away of excess by

decomposition and fragmentation for the purposes of control'' (Stafford, 1993, page 47).

More than anything else, it seems to have been a ` human yearning for rigidity'' and the``longing for hard lines and clear concepts'' (Douglas, 1966, page 162) which absorbed

Enlightenment rationalists in their endeavours to divide, classify, and categorise the

world, its anomalies and regularities (Daston and Park, 1998; Park and Daston, 1981).

These endeavours were bound up in an effort to secure a social and moral order.

The era's ``fearful disdain of mixtures'' (Stafford, 1993, page 211) was the very product

of the burgeoning ``habit of purity'' (Bowker and Leigh Star, 1999, page 300). It is, after

all, in efforts to order the world that the anomaly the barbaric, the monstrous, the

ìncorrect' takes shape and gains meaning.

Anatomy now sought to ` simplify, abstract, isolate and detach segments of thebody in order to calculate incongruity'' (Stafford, 1991, page 116), leading to new

taxonomies and interpretations of the human body. In the 18th-century science of

physiognomy, epitomised in the work of Johann Lavater, was found a systematic

attempt to `read' and categorise character and intent from the calculable features

of the human anatomy (Stafford, 1993, page 107). This endeavour would be further

developed in the phrenology of Josef Gall, whereby intellectual capacities could be

discerned through the shape of the skull (Colbert, 1997, page xi). Stafford (1993, pages

103, 112) characterises these as `` `sciences' of the contingent'' and demonstrates the way

in which efforts to locate in the planes of the body and face the ìdeal' aestheticmeasurements of national types (evidenced in the late-18th-century anatomical drawings

of Pierre Camper) soon became entangled with efforts to compare the human body

and to link anatomy with intelligence.



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The flesh `taken apart' by dissection has always been thought to hold the secret

authority for moral, political, and social order and ways of classifying bodies. Thomas

Laqueur (1990), for example, shows clearly how Renaissance anatomists were able toextract evidence from dissections to support the prevalent idea that female genitalia

were inversions of male sex organs: bodily disclosures were made meaningful within

existing regimes of knowledge. The Renaissance era saw little tendency to organise

difference according to `race' (Hodgen, 1964); human diversity was largely made mean-

ingful by delineations of religion and notions of civility (see Traub, 2000). Yet the

Enlightenment science of anatomy sought more and more to find the hierarchies

of an expanding empire within the variation of human bodies, and to encode them

within categorisations of `race'. By the end of the 19th century, comparative anatomy

had became a distinct discipline, championed by anatomists such as Georges Cuvier(Augstein, 1999, page 61) and the later physical anthropology of James Prichard

(see Stocking, 1968). By the middle of the 19th century, Robert Knox's racial science

had gained widespread scientific and popular influence, locating as it did immutable

difference and biological determinism in the hierarchically ordered ``races of mankind''

(Stepan, 1982, pages 45 ^ 46). The efforts expended to distinguish and distance the

`Òther'' within imperial discourse were multiple, forming a discourse of cultural knowl-

edge through which different bodies were made knowable, as Edward Said (1978; 1993)

has shown; anatomical knowledge was core to this location of difference.

Renaissance and Enlightenment dissections and mappings of the body, then, reveala set of violences, tensions, and racial categorisations which may be reconfigured

within new technological interventions and epistemological frameworks, but which

are never resolved. The mobilisation of digital dissection within contemporary security

regimes continues the interplay between the desire for more refined partition and the

conviction that, if only the somatic secret could be penetrated, certainty would be

revealed. Sophisticated virtual imaging techniques that do not touch the body appear

to realise the cultural ideal of full transparency of body and motive, a key ideal

in security practice. Yet the apparently unmediated images of bodily interiors and

surfaces flickering across our screens hides the simultaneous partitioning and projec-tion which these images involve; far from being unmediated, these projections

are reconstitutions, or reintegrations of parts. The abstraction and calculation of the

body have, as the above history demonstrates, always been concerned with locating

the `whole' within culturally mediated grids and taxonomies of difference, risk, and

pathology. Just as the ontology of the informatised body is shifting contemporary

understandings of physical integrity, personhood, health, and risk (Novas and Rose,

2000; van der Ploeg, 2003), so it is the intertwining of security practices with new

understandings of the body no longer machine, or territory, but digitised information

to be `read'

that critical challenges must grapple with.The promise to build ànonymity' into technologies such as Rapiscan, in order to

`protect privacy', does not address the violence involved in uncovering, breaking down,

and writing the body into digital form. The body does not remain ùntainted'

(van Dijck, 2005, page 8) by being exposed, even if the data collection leaves its

surfaces intact, and if `data', `body', and ìdentity' remain separated until risk is flagged

by the scanners. As the director of EPIC puts the problem:

` what is at stake when prosthetic limbs, a prosthetic breast, scars from burns or an

accident when these are seen? Is this a question of human dignity?'' (4)

The entanglement of bodily imaging and biometric probing with border security mustadvance with an acknowledgement that there are fundamental tensions involved when

(4) Interview with Marc Rothenberg, Director of EPIC, Washington, DC, 30 October 2007.



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we gaze upon the body's surface and its partitioned aspects. The `nakedness' produced

from technological penetrations of bodily coverings at borders uncovers ``the defence-

less being in its most elemental form'' (Benthien, 2002, page 99). Technologies whichappear to leave the body surfaces intact may reduce the traditional associations with

violence and spectacle, yet the spectacle simply mutates.

Contemporary political terror, Allen Feldman (2004, page 347) argues, has a

dual face: a visual fixation with `vivisectionist' violence evidenced in places like Abu

Ghraib, combined with a contrasting ` unlimited capacity to technically sanitise the

violent act''. Victims of this violence are either ` dismembered and somatically opened

to history'' or else wholly erased, defaced of identity. Feldman reminds us that the

process of rendering visible and capturing that visibility is never wholly separate

from the desire to master, or humiliate, or make vulnerable. Backscatter, then, isa form of technological vivisection, a digitised dismembering, through which bodies

are ``somatically opened'' and subjects erased simultaneously; the person is reduced to

a transparency, like baggage, evacuated of vitality and materiality (Parks, 2007, page 194).

Put simply, dissections have always ambivalently combined seduction with revulsion,

violence with the promise of safety; and these aporia continue to haunt contemporary

digitised dissections.

Imaging the unseen

If knowledge of the body has been assumed to reside inside, in an interior to beexcavated and projected to the outside, then it is visual practices that have made this

possible. ` How'', asks W J T Mitchell, ` did the visual acquire its status as the sovereign

sense?'' (2005, page 265). There is little doubt, at least for theorists of visual culture,

that, despite the inherent tactility of vision, it is visuality that has come to be repre-

sented as ``the most superior, most reliable'' of the senses (Bal, 2003, page 13). Thus, in

`èyewitness accounts'', in diagrammatic records, in the photographs that accompany

text, it is the visual record that is regarded as objective and dispassionate, embodying

an ìnherent credibility' (Jay, 2002, page 269). Indeed, so potent is the historical

visualisation of the world that, as James Elkins argues, there is a case for seeing thehistory of the visual as the history of imaging including graphs, charts, maps, nota-

tions, plans, scientific images of all sorts rather than the history of art per se (2001,

page 4). Understood in this way, it is not only the images of bodies produced by

scanning and screening practices that are part of the visual culture of contemporary

security, but also the risk charts, screened algorithmic calculations, and integrated data

diagrams that also participate in the visualisation of risky bodies by other means.

Within a technology such as Backscatter resides a history of taking the body apart,

but also of imaging the body which extends into multiple techniques of visualisation

the recomposition of the scattered rays to produce a particular appearance of a solidbody is just one graphical representation among many.

The dominance of visualisation technologies in knowledges of the body is, at least

in part, explained by the reification of the visual as a site of dispassionate and

concentrated observation, apparently the least vulnerable of all sensory artefacts to

``subjective intrusion'' (Daston and Galison, 1992, page 82). Citing John Madden's 1958

Atlas of Technics in Surgery, for example, Peter Galison suggests the elision of surgical

and artistic anatomical realism: `Ònly those operations that were witnessed by the

medical artist are depicted'' (1998, page 346). Only when the expert eye of an observer

was present, could the technical procedures of medicine be accurately imaged andrecorded. There is, however, a problematic history associated with the concepts of

òbjective' and expert'. Behind historical drives to develop optical and visualising

instruments was a preoccupation with removing the subjective interventions of the



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``meddling, weary observer'' in artistic representations for science (Daston and Galison,

1992, page 83). The Enlightenment anatomist's proclamation that an unimpeded view

could uncover the truth was tempered by a mistrust of vision, which became subjectto a ` vehement disproval of sensory ambush, fiction, and untruth'' (Stafford, 1993,

page 366). The ` congenital sensory frailty'' of humankind (Stafford, 1993, pages 1 ^ 2)

has required constant amendment by optical machines, instruments, and technol-

ogies innovations which have proliferated since the 18th century, each promising

greater clarity and unmediated access.

The struggle to get at the `hidden' picture encapsulated in Enlightenment visual-

isation techniques was not considered at the time to be a matter of òbjectivity': this

term only emerged in the 19th century. Rather, a `true' depiction of an object involved

artistic and scientific intervention by a natural philosopher, ``whose genius vouchsafedthe validity of the move to idealise and correct the unreliable appearance of the given''

(Galison, 1998, page 328). It was the mechanically produced images of the 19th century

which brought the idealised notion of an òbjective' image, where human interpreta-

tion was removed by rigorous self-discipline (Galison, 1998, page 329). Later, within

20th-century scientific discourse, the judgement and interpretative ability of the trained

expert gained precedence; a specialist's ``practiced'' eye could gaze upon and interpret

representations to ``perceive patterns where the novice saw nothing'' (Galison, 1998,

page 337). It is precisely the productiveness of images, and their relationship to the

èxpert eye', that are bound together in the contemporary `reading' of border scans. Thegrowing corpus of security professionals are key players in the government of mobility

at the border and in technologies, not least where images such as those in Backscatter

appeal to the expert eye.

In contemporary homeland security practices, then, there is a reliance on tech-

nologised visualisations to augment and exceed human vision and to decipher the

indisputable èlectronic footprint' that people are believed to leave behind (de Goede,

2003). The use of Backscatter insists that the most faithful facsimile of the image of a

person is to be found in X-rays scattered to produce a shadowy image or likeness of

a body. This insistence finds parallels in the physiognomy of Lavater, which sought todetect ``hidden causes legible only by specialized interpreters'' through medical diag-

nostics that scrutinized people's appearance (Stafford, 1991, page 84). Lavater's expert

reading of his subjects' silhouettes sought to probe ``their every passion, the seat of

its residence, the source from which it flows, its root, the fund which supplies it'';

by ``piercing through [all] coverings into his real character'' to visualise the ``foreign

and contingent'' aspects of a person, he sought to ``discover solid and fixed principles

by which to settle what the Man really is'' (Lavater, 1792, cited in Stafford, 1993, page 95).

Note also, then, the appeal to visualising true character and behaviour, made by US

Secretary for Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, more than 200 years later:` We use this data to focus on behaviour ... . It allows us to move beyond crude

profiling based on prejudice, and look at conduct and communication and actual

behaviour as a way of determining who we need to take a closer look at'' (Chertoff,

2007).

Like the physiognomist's silhouette, the 21st-century data shadow, expertly read, is

thought to reveal the most hidden recesses of a person. In Chertoff's speech on the use

of airline passenger name records (PNRs), the data are offered as a means of visual-

ising a person long before an actual physical border is reached. Forensic approaches to

data mining in the war on terror are offered as a means of looking inside a hiddendomain, prising a person apart in order to examine component bits and bytes of data

which feed into wider screening, profiling, or identification calibrations. The aim is to

conjure an image that can form the focus of our `vigilant visuality' (Amoore, 2007).



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Contemporary security projects of visualising risk and anomaly bear a striking

similarity to previous attempts to locate deviance in bodies. Francis Galton's attempts

in the 19th century to produce a physical `type' for identifying criminality anddegeneracy involved the overlaying of multiple exposed photographs of criminals.

This allowed a ` composite portrait'' to emerge, one which removed all need for

fallible human judgement by utilising mechanised abstracting procedures: ``Murderers

or violent robbers could ... be brought into focus so that the archetypal killer could

appear before our eyes'' (Daston and Galison, 1992, page 103). The anthropometrics

and criminal anthropology of Galton, and others such as Cesare Lombroso, appealed

directly to the contemporary belief that hereditary degeneracy threatened the very basis

of social order ideas which would crystallise in the eugenics movement (Pick, 1989).

The effort to visualise deviant tendencies from abstracted bodies and to locate identi-fiability in the body's specificity led to the fingerprint identification method (pioneered

by Galton) and the science of biometrics. The new digital abstractions at the border

also generate composite' projections, visualisations of risk which speak to the con-

temporary absorption with `the war on terror', but which resonate with previous

projects.

As new ways of visualising and knowing bodies become possible, so the credibility

of older visualisations is shaken and altered. The 19th-century discovery of X-rays,

for example, did not merely advance medical technologies of seeing and diagnosing:

X-rays also challenged the credibility of subjective senses (sight, touch, hearing) inmedical ìmaginations of the interior body', shifting the gaze of the observer to one

that externalises what is internal (van Dijck, 2005, page 5). The capacity of the medical

practitioner's touch to take a pulse, measure a foetus, detect fever was displaced by

a new and dominant scopic regime. Contemporary drives to eliminate tactility in the

observation of the body have similarly abstracted the visual from its relation with

the other senses. ` On closer inspection'', writes Mitchell, ` all the so-called visual media

turn out to involve the other senses, especially touch and hearing'' (2005, page 257).

Visualisations cannot avoid their entanglements with other sensory practices. And yet,

it is also clear that through the scopic regimes of modernism ``touch has been elimi-nated'' (Stafford, 1993, page 131): ``we are prohibited from touching'' (Mitchell, 2005,

page 260); and ``the tactility of visuality is denied'' (Elkins, 2002, page 95).

As all sensory data are folded into the visual, and thus become subject to the

regimes of visuality, touch itself drops out of the possibility of knowing òther' bodies.

Indeed, the Backscatter is offered commercially as ` hands off screening'', somehow

distinct from an `ìnvasive pat-down search'' (Rapiscan Systems, 2006; TSA, 2007). Like

the X-ray before it, Backscatter brings to the fore questions about bodily boundaries,

between what is `public' and what is `private'. Early 19th-century X-ray technologies

were believed to be able to visualise the ``secrets of the heart'' (van Dijck, 2005, page 93)and were associated with erotic revelation, as the (male) gaze penetrated (female)

clothing and skin (see Cartwright, 1995). Similarly, discussions of Backscatter in the

mainstream popular press have focused on its transgressive, titillating potential: it was

described in the Daily Mail as `à disturbing new screening system with the amazing

and unsettling ability to strip the human body and reveal its most intimate curves''

(2006).

More importantly, as the prohibition of touch further positions the visual realm as

that of the distanciated observer the screener in the separate building; the closed-

circuit television (CCTV) image read by algorithmic technology; the data-led decisionon the border guard's screen so also, ultimately, the observer falls away, to be

replaced by a calculation. In his account of 19th-century physiologist Etienne-Jules

Marey's mechanically produced images of body movements, Joel Snyder insists on a



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careful reading of what happens when human sensory observations and illustrations

are supplanted by mechanical monitors. Discussing Marey's sphygmograph (pulse

writer

designed to replace the conventional means of taking a pulse by touch)

andin a critique of other accounts of scientific images of the body (cf Daston and Galison,

1992), Snyder does not see the sphygmograph replacing what was previously available

only to the subjective human senses. Instead, he suggests that ` the displacements

registered by mechanical monitors and traced by clockwork-driven inscribers fall out-

side the scope of human sensibility.'' ``Consequently'', he argues, ``they do not permit

even the possibility of human intervention'' (1998, page 380). If Snyder is correct, then

the implications for our argument here are considerable. If imaging machines now

translate ` information that is simply not of the order of the visible'' into readable

form (Richardson and Harper, 2006, page 7), and when the face-to-face visual profil-ing of people is apparently replaced by technological monitors, is the picture that is

produced actually outside the scope of human intervention? Could it be, as Snyder

suggests, that the move is to `èliminate reliance on observational schemes that were

incapable of resolving the details of swift displacements'' (1998, page 387).

The scientific visualisation of the body, then, does not simply perform the objectivity

of a distanciated eye but, perhaps more significantly, makes possible new ways of

seeing which are not otherwise available. Technical optical enhancement does not

simply make visible that which is normally invisible, but (through graphics of data

readings) conjures ``that which would never be available to vision'' (Richardson andHarper, 2006, page 1). In the case of border scans, it is not that the observer or

screener is removed to a remote booth, but that his or her very decision is replaced

with a calculation already visualised. If this is the case, then contemporary visual-

isations of the body at the border propose a resolution that is both profoundly political

and deeply depoliticising. They operate on and through dissected and finitely differ-

entiated categories of people, and yet they never confront the political difficulties

of that which cannot be seen or resolved. Instead they ``bring us into a domain we

cannot see'' and they `àuthorize us to make claims about what we see'' (Snyder, 1998,

page 395). Just as the Backscatter deploys the residue or excess that is left over in aprocess quite literally that which is `scattered back' so visualisations of the body

at the border, placed alongside other data traces and risk profiles, seek to capture that

which exceeds the practice of looking itself.

The histories of scientific illustration are replete with examples of techniques

deployed to make visible, and to record, that which would otherwise be invisible. The

practice of representing together multiple angles, planes, and perspectives of a single

physical entity the àssemblage' visual method appeared to produce new knowledge

from the component elements. The èxploded view' of an architectural plan, an assem-

blage view of an organic structure in a botanical illustration, or engineeringdiagrams, offers ` attenuated lines'' and ` distant viewpoints'' (Elkins, 2001, page 18).

These assemblage images of science of scattered and dissected component studies

with careful measurements, weights, dimensions, and angles which are drawn into

association give the appearance of a whole that can be viewed from all perspectives.

Elkins, writing on the `geometricisation' of the scientific imaging of minerals, however,

reminds us that these are not multiple perspectives on a single whole, but precisely

projections of something that would not otherwise be seen. ``Projection subverts the

viewer's capacity to understand [the] drawings as representations of three-dimensional

objects'', writes Elkins, ``because it flattens and distorts forms without seeming to doso.'' What may seem like enhanced perspectives familiar, solid, life-like even are

for Elkins ` unexpectedly compressed'', requiring ` mental expansion to correspond

with our anticipations of perspectival convention'' (2001, page 21). Thus, the historical



13/22

problem of translating the solid spatiality of bodily flesh onto the two-dimensional

pages of the anatomical atlas is apparently overcome in the contemporary form by

the virtualised, screened, and projected reconstructions of bodies.The pictorial scientific assemblage, then, as in Jacques Deleuze and Fe lix Guattari's

assemblage, `holds together' multiple heterogeneous elements as though they were

associated (1987, page 357). In order to be seen as a whole body, the images need to

be `projected' and expanded, losing their perspective in the process. This visualisation

of the invisible whole took on new dimensions with early 20th-century cinematic

screening techniques. Cinematic projection is produced from fragments of visual

data, individually isolated elements that are selected, differentiated, and reintegrated

into a visual whole (Kittler, 1997). As in the scientific assemblages, gaps in perspective

exist between the isolated fragments. These gaps are filled, though, with the projectionsof the observer, giving the impression of a seamless whole. A projected body, then, is

effectively inferred from abstracted, partitioned, and compressed components. Joseph

Pugliese (2006) argues that the space created by the ``retina lag'', as the eye apprehends

these compressed fragments, is intensely political, possibly subject to ` a racially

inflected regime of visuality [which] inscribes the physiology of perception'', producing

a ` persistence of vision'' which results in misrecognitions of many kinds migrant

workers for `terrorists'; friends and neighbours for `known associates'; Islamic youth

groups for `training camps'. As Donna Haraway (1991, page 190) argues, all eyes,

including technologically enhanced devices, are ` active perceptual systems, buildingin translations and specific ways of seeing''; there are no unmediated images, only

``highly specific visual possibilities''.

It is precisely the visualisation via dissection and projection, we suggest, that charac-

terises the contemporary treatment of the body at the border. The combined scientific

assemblage of component parts data, electronic fingerprints, iris scans, automated

risk scores, pixilated body images and the screened projection of the resulting whole,

appears to render the individual transparent to the external gaze. The US Air Transport

Association's translucent `Clear Card', for example, as well as the UK's `Fast Track'

glass screens within Heathrow's terminals, both represent the unimpeded vistas of theprescreened and transparent `trusted traveller': an apparently clear view that is afforded

by integrated computer databases and biometric identification. ``The computer screen'',

writes Anne Friedberg, ``is both a page and a window, at once opaque and transpar-

ent''. The multiple layers or ` windows'' of software appear to ``transform the screen

surface into a page with a deep virtual reach to archives and databases, indexed and

accessible with barely the stroke of a finger'' (2006, page 19). Understood in this way,

the digitised and dissected fragments of a person that are produced, layer upon layer,

via the windows of data images, scanned X-rays, screened profiles of past behaviour

and transactions, give an illusion of seeing the depths of a whole person `without racialprejudice' (Chertoff, 2007). Like 19th-century scientific assemblages, the atomised

elements are stretched, compressed, and reduced in order to project a whole that could

not otherwise be seen. Abstracted pieces of a person are taken apart, drawn into

association, and displayed together on the border guard's screen; inside databases

to be stored for forty years; within algorithmic calculations of a person's `risk score'

as though they could only ever belong together.

The secret and the private

What, then, are the implications of reading the contemporary technologised visual-isations of the body at the border in light of the genealogy of corporeal dissection and

imaging we have presented? What is at stake in framing digitised bodily disclosures

as matters best addressed by recourse to `rights' and `privacy', as current critical



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challenges seek to do? The genealogy we have traced reveals contemporary somatic

probing and visualisation at the border to be part of a longer history of `body knowl-

edge'

as a territory to be mapped, a container for unknown motives and secrets,a canvas from which character can be discerned. More specifically, the body has

revealed itself as an entity from which order, certainty, and essence can be extracted,

so long as the gaze is òbjective', èxpert', or ùnimpeded'. We draw out here three key

consequences of the arguments we have made.

First, management of risk in the contemporary `war on terror', through excavations and

dissections at the border, involves bodily (re)bordering processes, processes which threaten

to slip away from contemporary political debate. We have shown that the history of

dissecting and dividing the body is a history of boundaries, excavations, abstractions,

and reborderings which seek to conceptualise and visualise a `whole' and so demarcatewhat is understood to belong to the self and what can be scrutinised ìn public'. Thus,

the debates about privacy and rights within screening and imaging practices reinvigo-

rate the Western, modern view of an individual as sovereign possessor of selfhood,

clearly embodied, and whose freedom comes from ownership of his or her person

and capacities (Macpherson, 1962, page 3). It is from this distinctly Western and

modern concept of personhood that terms such as `dignity', `privacy', àutonomy',

`self-determination', and `freedom' make sense. Privacy, then, hinges on the idea that

there is a sphere ``not of concern to others'', the invasion of which strikes at a person's

autonomy (Lukes, 1973, pages 66, 133). The idea of `dignity' (often cited in rights-basedcritiques of scanning and screening technologies) is related to this idea of a private,

autonomous self, but also to a more nebulous concept of human worth that exceeds

any attempt at division or differentiation. According to Martha Nussbaum's neo-Stoic

perspective (2001, page 359), this worth, at heart, asserts that all humans are funda-

mentally equal by virtue of their capacity for reason and should thus be treated with

respect an acknowledgement of that equality. The stripping, exposure, and `writing' of

a body involves violence, as we have seen, but also a reduction of the person. Previously

unimaginable political interventions become possible with the reduction of people

to `bare life' (Agamben, 1995), naked in real or metaphorical terms. Thus the demandsfor ever-more-penetrating bodily disclosures at borders strike at the heart of dignity

in a way that is hard to pin down in debates about àcceptable' intrusions of privacy,

or the use of data.

Border scans bring into focus the collection of data as well as its subsequent use

and circulation. The political contestation of bodily screening and visualising draws

on conceptualisations of the private self which trace a `self-evident' boundary around

the body, intrusion into which threatens ìntegrity' (van der Ploeg, 2003). Many of the

privacy-based challenges to body-security interventions focus on the intrusiveness of

gathering body data, where intrusiveness is related to the piercing of bodily boundariesor exploring bodily orifices. Irma van der Ploeg (2003, page 67) argues that running

through these debates is `à particular ontology dichotomy'' whereby `ìntegrity'' applies

to the fleshy physical entity and `ìnformational privacy'' is presumed to cover all digital

representations. In an era of informatised bodies, however, the distinction between

materiality and representation is less distinct. DNA information, for example, is not

a representation, but a trace of `body-as-data' from which a detailed profile could be

generated. Technology, then, alters ``the boundary, not just between what is public and

private information but ... between what is inside and what is outside the human body''

(van der Ploeg, 2003, pages 58, 70 ^ 71). Our delineation of the history of visualisationand dissection has revealed that the practices of corporeal dissection have intertwined

with, and even facilitated, the emergence of the concept of the whole, distinct, and

separate body and self to which `privacy' might relate; abstracted conceptualisations of



15/22

whole bodies were made possible only through their disintegration. Just as art and

science cannot be separated in early anatomy, so the histories of the partitioned body

and the unified body are conjoined. The `scattered', digitised images of contemporarysecuritisation practices conjure a body that is no longer bounded fully by skin, but

which is intimately intertwined with information systems.

Backscatter is part of the proliferating visual practices through which risk is

`stabilised' by technological enhancement (Feldman, 2005, page 204). We have argued

that what is at issue in the visualisation of the `risky' subject is not only the potentially

discriminatory `sifting' of mobilities, life chances, and possibilities at the border (Dodge

and Kitchin, 2005; Graham, 2005; Lyon, 2003). Instead, we have argued for attention to

be paid to the violent tendencies of these technologies, which emerge from the processes

of abstraction and disintegration, and the effacement of personhood. When everypassenger is reduced to ``a holographic composite ... of gestures, data and algorithms''

(Feldman, 2004, page 340), it is the normalisation of demands at the border (to unveil,

confess, flay, expose) that forms part of the violence of the border scan.

Second, the appeal to protect the individual's rights to privacy takes the body to be a

sovereign territory that can be secured. In this specific sense, paradoxically it mirrors the

homeland security state's claim to the right to conceal, and to draw exceptions in order

to secure and to protect. And so, as philosopher of law Costas Douzinas reminds us,

there is a difficulty for ``critical academics'' in ``reconciling their occasionally scathing

theoretical critique of rights'' with the practice of ``radical lawyers who mobilize rightsdiscourse to protect the underprivileged and oppressed'' (2002, page 380). There can be

little doubt that some of the most significant political challenges to contemporary

treatments of the body at borders are coming from critical lawyers, many of whom

represent those people most subjected to racism, prejudice, and violence at the border

(cf Hosein, 2007; Rotenberg 2003; 2007). For Douzinas, one possible critical route

into this problem is to consider the appeal to rights of many kinds privacy, bodily

integrity, a private family life, freedom of expression to be one specific struggle

for recognition, a legal claim to human identity. Because the liberal rights tradition,

though, recognizes the `Man' in human rights only by abstraction

and often collapses`man' with `citizen' (Arendt, 1958) the legal contestations we see tend to reproduce

precisely the reduction that we have argued exists in digitised dissections at the border.

Put simply, the abstractions that are made in the defence of people's rights to privacy,

just as in the digitised imaging of the body, risk recognising only a facsimile of a person.

The reduction of a person to their rights recognises, as Douzinas puts it, only ``a non-

substantial, a thin personality, a public image that seriously mis-matches people's

self-image'' (2002, page 397). This leaves people, as one of us has argued elsewhere,

contesting the identification that is made of them, both in law and in security practice

(Amoore, 2006).The demand for recognition cannot be substantially satisfied by a mode of privacy

which stops at the surface of the skin, seeking coverings, veilings, legal entitlements,

and ownership of personal data. As we have argued, the territory of the body is

differently visualised over time, never residing strictly at the surface or the skin.

Now, we are seeing a pervasive enmeshing of the body's interior and exterior, the

spiralling out of images of the inside, and the incorporation of digitised images,

data-based risk profiles, and biometric markers, as though these could make visible a

`whole body'. What does the right to privacy or bodily integrity imply in this context?

If the contestation of new border security techniques becomes a battle over the body'sterritory, we suggest that there is profound uncertainty as to what the limits of

that territory may be, how it is bounded and enclosed. As the boundaries of the

body and its multiple interiors become entwined with data profile images, risk scores,



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and other visualisations, can we meaningfully delineate the literal stripping down of the

body in Backscatter techniques from the raw dissected data images that are stored

alongside and used to identify invisible threats? Held together in an assemblage, asthough they could only ever belong together, the pixelated fragments of the Backscatter

image provide another layer for the ever-hungry integrated borders databases.

Certainly the `nakedness' of the stripped-down man in the `rights of man' (Douzinas,

2002, page 398) is not politicized by the continual redrawing of a legal boundary. It is

this redrawing that runs through most of the current appeals to privacy: ``the infringe-

ment on privacy must be proportionate to the security threat''; ``the collection and use

of personal data must be transparent''; ` subjects must be informed if they are on a no-fly

list''.(5) It is appeals of this kind that occupy what Jodi Dean has called ` counter-

publics'' who become involved in ``an excessive sub-dividing that repeats the problemsof boundary-drawing'' (2003, page 373). In contrast to a redrawing of lines, what is

needed is a denser and more complex sense of privacy one that is capable of living

with the political, the very difficulty and irresolvability of the problem of recognition,

and one that interrogates the very drawing of the line itself.

Finally, the contemporary visualization of the body at the border is not primarily one

of surveillance, but of projection. As we have shown, the image is one that is projected

forward in time, seeking to capture something or someone as yet invisible and

unknown. As we have argued, and in contrast to the idea of the subject completely

and wholly surveilled, it is well established in the literatures on imaging in the arts andsciences that projections rely upon the gaps in an apparent whole gaps that can never

be recovered. Put simply, it is a series of misrecognitions that make it possible to claim

singularly to have identified a person. If this is the case, then there is a fundamental

problem for those who would challenge by demanding access to some kind of full

picture. The gaps which are integral to the projected visualisation of a person the

absolutely unrecoverable gaps are everywhere sought by those who would challenge:

`this person is misidentified as a risk'; `we have the right to access the data that is held

on us and to seek redress where it is inaccurate'; `access to the full picture of a person

should be restricted to named agencies'. These are impossible claims because, althoughtheir authority is founded on individual rights, the subject of the projected body is a

facsimile, an image, a digitised doppelganger. The demand that the body give up its

secrets, that all must be `flayed' and disclosed at the confessional border (Salter, 2007),

can never be politically unsettled by a mirror demand that the authorities disclose what

they have seen. In many ways, disclosure is working on both sides of the relation

the homeland security state seeking a means to make the invisible visualisable, and

those who deploy privacy rights demanding access to, and protection from that which

is seen.

If the counterappeal to disclose the making of the projected body, then, fails topoliticize the question of digitised dissections, what precisely would need to be con-

tested? A reading of Douzinas would suggest that it is with the very misrecognitions,

the ``projected false, inferior and defective images of self'' both within liberal legal

traditions and, in our terms, in the identity-voracious security state that we should

begin (2002, page 383). Inside the reductive claims to bodily integrity and personal

privacy, Douzinas suggests that there is an occluded `real me', a complex and contra-

dictory subject, whose actual experiences of violence and degradation are exceeded, and

yet never fully recognised, by an abstract legal principle. The juridical claim to right

of privacy contains a quite unique paradox. It makes a public demand for recognitionfrom others, and yet it renders these private and retreats from the difficulties and

(5) Findings of the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party of the European Parliament'sCommittee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, Brussels, 26 March 2007.



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entanglements of politics in face of the other. A more complex and embodied sense of

privacy, rather than incorporating difference into universal entitlement, would need to

confront exactly the intractable difficulty of recognition of the other and by the other.Thus, for example, the question of what to do with the `noncitizen' who cannot appeal to

the nationally framed privacy laws forever circles the juridical debate. A more nuanced

sense of privacy would see that it is in the drawing of ever more finite and granular

categories of bodies (and, therefore, categories of the private), that the very claim to

citizenship is suspended.

Conclusion: digitised dissections

` [Y]ou have all these complex policies and complex issues and the best way to put a

brand on it is privacy ... . It's still very much an issue, it's still the fence being foughtover, it's still the thing being negotiated ... [Y]ou've got to admit they're getting

very, very clever at thinking these problems through, such as the privacy friendly

data mining ... [I]t gets harder and harder to say this is a privacy invasion, how

do you justify that when your opponents are becoming, in their privacy awareness,

are getting more and more clever? ... [N]o human being is involved in deciding

who and who is not a terrorist, it's all a computer, so not invading your privacy

until you're flagged and then a human interferes.'' (6)

For those involved in drawing `the battle line' for contesting the expansion of digitised

security `solutions' at the border and beyond, the manner in which technologies such asBackscatter scans (as well as iris capture, data mining, and risk profiling) problematise

`privacy' is a matter of real urgency. If the visualisation and visibility of the body at the

border are `a question of human dignity', how can the indignity created at the border

remain at the centre of critical challenges? Can contestation formulated around privacy

encircle the potentiality of border scans, screenings, and projections, the demand for

authentication, the precise metric of the bio that is at work? Is dignity secured by

privacy? For some working in the field, a whole focus on the biometric (as identifier)

leads away from the key issue: ``trying to make it more about the database than about

the biometric''(7)

that is the retention, sharing, and use of data.Yet it is clear that processes of disclosure, visualisation, and projection of the body

are key to contemporary securitised borders. As we have shown, the history of know-

ing the body via taking apart has always been a history of security or, more exactly, of

securability. Within the public rituals of dissection from Renaissance anatomy theatres

to contemporary digitised extractions lies the seductive idea of securing identity. If the

visceral and bloody depths of the body could only be excavated to reveal true disposi-

tion and credibility, and if they could be expertly recorded and visualised, then identity

itself could be rendered securable. Dissection practices, then, hold a potency derived

from the promise of securability in an uncertain and capricious world. It scarcelymatters whether the specific knowing of the body (and its `risks') by visualising its

depths and recording its traces meaningfully `resolves' the problem of security. As in the

genealogies of body knowledge we have discussed, it is the process of mapping of

the territory of the body itself the classification of bodies or silhouettes into degrees

of risk, normality, and deviance, the identification of a threatening presence at the

border from abstracted aspects, the capacity to project a facsimile of a body forward

in time which characterises contemporary digitised dissections and which drives their

prominence in the public rituals of security. The `identity regime' that is emerging is

of particular concern to those who have a local level concern with raising awareness

(6) Interview with Gus Hosein, Senior Fellow, Privacy International, London, 10 August 2007.(7) Gareth Crossman, Director of Policy, Liberty, London, 10 August 2007.



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about the burgeoning use of biometric technologies. As one activist at the No Borders

Camp 2007 (8) remarked, a critical preemptive language must be built around refus-

ing identity and authentication regimes of all kinds: rather than simply resistingbiometrics, there must be contestation built around a recognition of the ways in

which people move and shift between the spaces spaces increasingly marked out by

digitised identity authentication, data profiles, risk scores, and legalistic interventions

around rights.

The contemporary technologies that bring the body, its traces, and parts, into

focus and the entanglement of these technologies with the politics of migration and

security signal a decisive and novel direction and challenge. The contemporary visu-

alizations of the body at the border operate on and through partitioned and finitely

differentiated categories of people, and yet they are quite literally and physicallyremoved from the political difficulties of decision. Where border agents view their

screens from a distance, seeing not `real' people but data-based risk scores, chalk-line

scans, algorithmic models, then where is a judgment actually made? What are the

ethics of a decision taken on the basis of prescreened and visualised elements of data

on a person? Certainly, as we have argued, and as the evidence from advocates and

activists suggest, such questions pose new problems for the recourse to rights of

privacy or human dignity. There are, of course, very real benefits to be gained through

legal challenge, particularly for those most targeted or marginalised, but there is also

something more at stake, a question of the way life itself is governed that is now indanger of slipping out of the debate.

In this paper we have pointed to some of the difficulties that critical responses to

technologies such as Backscatter must confront. Their logics can never be disrupted

wholly by an appeal to surveillance or the shielding of the body from the surveillant

gaze. As Michel Foucault declared in his late lectures at the Colle ge de France, ``the

panopticon is completely archaic, the oldest dream of the oldest sovereign'' (2007,

page 66). The newest dream of the youngest sovereign, then, is not one of disciplinary

surveillance that ``concentrates and encloses'', but one of an apparatus of security that

sees differential risks and normalities, ` opens up to let things happen'' (pages 44 ^ 45).While challenges to biometric borders and invasive imaging call up the sovereign

territory of the body, border disclosures that take the body apart function as just

such a security apparatus that transcends and transgresses corporeal territory. Digitised

dissections, understood as visualisations that project fragmented and reduced elements

of a person, are posing profound new questions of the political geographies of bodily

boundaries and shifting the terrain for those seeking to challenge their governmental

implications.

Acknowledgements. This research was carried out under the Contested Borders project (http://

www.contestedborders.org), supported by funding from the Economic and Social Research Council'sNon-Governmental Political Action research programme (RES-155-25-0087). Earlier versions ofthis paper were presented at the Lived and Material Culture research seminar series at the Depart-ment of Geography, Durham University, October 2007; the `Engaging Objects' International Work-shop at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, March 2008; and at the Associationof American Geographers Annual Meeting, Boston, April 2008. Thanks to Marieke de Goede,Stephen Graham, and Michael Reinsborough for comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and alsoto the three anonymous reviewers.

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