The Past Perfect Promise of Facial Recognition Technology
Last updated: July 30, 2008
Author
ACDIS Occasional Paper series
June 2004
Full text [PDF]Summary
This paper explores the rich web of cultural practices and ideas associated with facial recognition technology in the pre-9/11 world. Following Raymond Williams and other scholars studying the historical emergence of media technologies, the author's aim is to restore intention to the process of research and development of facial recognition technology. This effort requires rescuing it from post-9/11 technostalgic narratives and recapturing some of its history.The author discusses late nineteenth-century ancestors to biometrics, early research on machine recognition of faces in the 1960s, and the growing state and private interest in the technology during the 1990s. The early emergence of face recognition as part of the state surveillance apparatus and as marketed, commercially available products takes place in the post-Soviet/post-cold war decade of the 1990s. Its arrival on the scene happens alongside and in relation to the spread of the Internet and computer networking, neoliberal economic policies like the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement and the 1996 Telecomm Act, and the enormously publicized public-private competition to map the human genome, creating a universal digital representation of human essence.
Biometrics embody a digital mode of representing the body, and techniques of digitalization are enlisted to lay a particular claim to truth about the relationship between the body and identity. The aim is to automate the process of connecting bodies to identities, and in some cases, to distribute that identified body across computer networks for specific purposes; namely, to control access—access to the benefits of citizenship, to the national territory, to information, to computer networks themselves, to transportation systems, and to specific spaces of consumption and safety. Facial recognition and biometrics must be located firmly within their historical and cultural context of emergence, with particular attention to the ways these technologies are being enlisted both symbolically and programmatically in the effort to reproduce and redefine the nation-state (namely the United States) and its considerable authority in the postcold war, post-9/11 period.