The ‘Body-graph’: Reading the Body as an Ab-

solute Signature
Anders Albrechtslund
Aalborg University
HCI Research School
Department of Communication
Kroghstraede 3, office 5.214
9220 Aalborg East
Denmark
E-Mail: alb@hum.aau.dk
Web: http://anders.albrechtslund.net

Abstract
This paper offers an ethically, philosophically and sociologically founded study of emerging body surveillance
technologies and practices. The focus of the study is the transformation of the body into a source of information
made possible by developments in technologies such as biometrics thus making biotechnology and information
technology come together.
Traditionally, and, of course, to a large extent today, a third party object is needed to verify the identities of peo-
ple. A passport is an example of an object authorized by a third party, in this case the state, which verifies the
identity of a person. With emerging body surveillance technologies the third party object is made redundant. The
information needed for identification is provided by the body itself, which accordingly becomes a ‘password’.
This coupling of biology and information constitutes important changes not only for identification purposes, but
also for concerns relating to the replacement of personal characteristics with the availability of certain bodily
features in contexts such as employment and insurance. The Human Genome Project (HGP) is another example
of the body’s transformation into a veritable source of information. HGP aims at building a complete database of
the location and chemical sequence of all human genes, and as a consequence the body is constituted as a read-
able ‘text’.
In this paper, I will map and study ethical, philosophical and sociological changes that appear in the wake of
body surveillance technologies, and a number of questions will be raised: What are the ethical consequences of
the shift in medical awareness from treatment to prevention? Will it lead to undesired sociological consequences
(e.g. discrimination) if employment strategies and insurance policies are based on genetic predicaments as the
body’s ‘tacit testimony’ rather than for instance acquired qualifications and interviews? These and other critical
questions will be pursued relating to the ‘body-graph’, that is the rise of the body as a readable and absolute
signature.

Introduction
One of the most prominent aspects of the academic surveillance debate today is the changing and in-
creasing monitoring of the body. Especially, the developments in biometrics and the recent political
willingness to implement new ways of keeping the body under surveillance have been followed by
intense discussion. Biometrics is derived from the Greek words ‘bios’ (life) and ‘metron’ (measure)
and it is defined as the science and technology of authentication, often in the context of verifying
someone’s identity, and this is done by measuring the psychological and behavioral features of the
person in question (Wikipedia, 2005a). However, body surveillance transforms the body into a source
of information, and in this way biotechnology becomes a form of ‘information’ technology, which
raises a number of questions.

1
 In this paper I will study the transformation of the body by emerging surveillance technologies
into information. The study will be ethically, philosophically and sociologically founded and it will
proceed in the following way: Firstly, the role of the body in the philosophical tradition will be dis-
cussed, and the line of thought will be followed to the twentieth century, where the body has come into
focus, in part as the seat of embodied or disembodied subjectivity and, in part, as the object of surveil-
lance; secondly, the characteristics of body surveillance will be studied, and the Human Genome Pro-
ject (HGP) is discussed as a way of constituting the body as a ‘document’ of data that can be a read-
able ‘text’; thirdly, selected ethical aspects of the bodily reconstitution will be presented and dis-
cussed, including the dream of the perfect human being, various sociological consequences such as
discrimination, and, finally, the problem of identity theft in relation to biometrics.

The body: forgotten and rediscovered

René Descartes’ (1596-1650) is often considered the first modern thinker, since his philosophical work
provided an adequate framework for the natural sciences, but his importance for the history of phi-
losophy is equally significant. The infamous separation of body and soul, res extensa and res cogitans,
constitutes a major turn in philosophy, and moreover, this separation has in effect led to a focus on
consciousness and a disregard of the body. Rationalist as well as empiricist traditions have adopted the
focus on consciousness, which has been predominant in philosophy until the previous century. In the
twentieth century, the analytical and the continental traditions have continued the occupation with
philosophy of consciousness, however, in both traditions the body has been ‘rediscovered’.

Phenomenology and the body: bodies in technology

Especially within the phenomenological tradition the body has become a focal point and phenome-
nologist’s including Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Maurice Mer-
leau-Ponty (1908-1961) have contributed to this change of focus (cf. Husserl, 1977, Heidegger, 1977,
Merleau-Ponty, 1976). Nevertheless, the focus on the body was slow to catch on, and the ‘body turn’
did not grow to be a broadly appreciated shift until the later Husserlian manuscripts, posthumously
published in the Husserliana series, became widely known. After Husserl’s death the manuscripts were
deposited in Leuven to form the Husserl-Archives, and from World War II they have been available to
scholars. One of the scholars who studied the manuscripts from early on was Merleau-Ponty, and he
was clearly inspired by Husserl, especially in his work Phénoménologie de la perception (1945; Eng-
lish translation Phenomenology of Perception, 1962). This is indicated by the agreement between the
Husserl research of recent decades and Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl, which in his time was
considered – at best – willful. In this sense Merleau-Ponty was ahead of his time, and he certainly
anticipated the focus on the body within phenomenology and across a wide range of academic fields as
seen in recent years.
The main philosophical thread of Merleau-Ponty’s work, especially the early part, can rightly be
named a phenomenology of the body (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 1976). However, it is not to be understood as
a study of the body as a phenomenon in itself, but as an attempt to overcome the traditional under-
standing of the body as an object being opposed to the subject of the self; according to Merleau-Ponty
the body is both object and subject. It is as ‘lived body’ that body and consciousness is mediated and it
is thus necessary to distinguish between a biological level and a phenomenological level. From a bio-
logical perspective, the body is an organic system that works according to mechanical principles. As
such, the body is a place for the events of nature, whereas a phenomenological perspective reveals the
body as the place where consciousness is manifested through human actions. Merleau-Ponty is thus
able to move on from problems concerning the speculative non-existence of the external world and of
other minds.
An example of contemporary phenomenological studies that are inspired by Merleau-Ponty is
the work of Don Ihde (b.1934). His recent book, Bodies in technology (2002), explores the body as a
cultural and sociological phenomenon. In the book Ihde introduces a distinction between two aspects
of human embodiment, which he names ‘body one’ and ‘body two’. The first type of embodiment,
body one, is similar to Merleau-Ponty’s situating of subjectivity in the body. Besides the perceptual

2
aspects of embodiment, Ihde stresses the sociological and cultural aspects. Body two is thus to be un-
derstood as a sociological and cultural marking of body one, and embodiment as the human presence
in the world is given a specific context such as gender, etc. With this, Ihde introduces aspects of the
body that Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and others have been occupied with and that is a predominant
theme within culture and gender studies. It must be emphasized that body one and body two are as-
pects of the body and they are, as such, inseparable; we are our bodies and we are bodies in a techno-
logically constituted world, as Ihde concisely puts it (Ihde, 2002:138). That we are bodies in technol-
ogy refers to two circumstances: Firstly, that our embodiment perceptions are technologically medi-
ated and, secondly, that technology itself plays an important role in the formation of our ideas about
technology, our ‘technofantasies’ (Ihde, 2002).

Sociology and the body: bodies in cyberspace

Parallel to the renewed philosophical interest in the body, as described above, others have discussed
the ‘disappearance’ of the body (cf. Lyon, 2001). This is, of course, in contrast to the ‘body turn’ in
phenomenology, including Ihde’s work on bodies in technology, and to a number of other academic
disciplines. However, the analysis behind the two apparently opposing conclusions is to some extent
the same. Ihde’s phenomenological study of the body in a technologically constituted world focuses
on human embodiment, where sociological studies, including David Lyon’s (b.1948), of human rela-
tions and technology have reached the conclusion that information technology leads to human disem-
bodiment.
The sociological studies conclude that the technology ‘gets in the way’ of the body, so to speak,
because technological mediation creates spatial and temporal distance. For example when two people
are communicating by email then they are separated in both space and time, since they may be in front
of computers that are divided by a great distance as well as the communication interval from the first
person to the second can be of considerable duration. Of course, this is also true for correspondence by
‘old-fashioned’ letters, but the sheer pervasiveness of information and communication technologies
makes the ‘disappearance’ of the body into a general problem of modernity (Lyon, 2001:15). Also
technologically mediated communications such as Instant Messaging (IM) and Internet Relay Chat
(IRC), which at least almost can overcome the temporal barrier, are examples of modern disembodi-
ment. Interestingly, the disappearance of the body is compensated in different ways such as smiley
symbols while chatting and for instance live teleconferencing. Likewise, signatures and social security
numbers have become important substitutes for the body and bodily gestures such as handshakes.
These attempts to make the body reappear in the technologically mediated lifestyle is also what fuels
modern surveillance. The attempt to reproduce the once visible bodies through the gathering of frag-
mented information is characteristic of electronic surveillance (Lyon, 2001:15-16).
In my opinion, the two seemingly conflicting conclusions, the phenomenological embodiment
and the sociological disembodiment, do not represent a proper disagreement. It is rather a question of
different layers of interpretation, since a phenomenological analysis focuses on the body as the seat of
subjectivity and the place for experience – even in a technologically constituted world – whereas a
sociological analysis focuses on technology as a representation that hides the body. However, both the
phenomenological and the sociological analyses express a tendency of modern thinking to put the
body to the center of attention – either as embodiment or disembodiment.

Comeback of the body and biometrics

Across seemingly very different academic disciplines the body has become an important theme. This
has especially brought about a renewed interest in the phenomenology of the body as a steppingstone
to a wide range of other themes, and this is indicated by a number of anthologies in recent years that
have the body as pivotal point (e.g. Berdayes et al., 2004, Proudfoot, 2003, Welton, 1998). This
broadly founded interest in the body has also resulted in new attention towards the philosophy of Mer-
leau-Ponty, which is evident in the mentioned anthologies. However, the inspiration goes both ways;
phenomenological studies of the body are influenced by other academic approaches to the body. A

3
keyword in this field is, of course, ‘interdisciplinarity’, and Ihde’s phenomenological work, in particu-
lar the most recent, is an example of this type of research.
After the tragic events of September 11, 2001 in New York City and Washington, D.C., the
body has come into focus in yet another way. The USA, England and many other countries in the
world have emphasized biometrics as one among other key defenses against international terrorism.
This is, of course, not to say that biometrics only has to do with state-of-the-art science and technol-
ogy; biometrics is a traditional way of authenticating dating many centuries back. As early as the four-
teenth century biometrics was used by merchants in China, distinguishing children by their palm prints
and footprints on paper with ink, and in Western culture biometrics was introduced in the late nine-
teenth century, when fingerprints was established as a way of identifying convicted criminals1 (NCSC,
2005). Even though fingerprinting remains the dominant and preferred method, it has been comple-
mented in the last decades of the twentieth century with other biometric practices such as iris and ret-
ina scanning as well as voice and facial patterns.
Biometric practices are advancing rapidly, because scientific and technological developments
facilitate a number of different methods at budget costs. Today, in the beginning of the twenty-first
century, about ten distinct biometric methods exist with varying levels of security of which no combi-
nation, nonetheless, reaches one hundred percent (NCSC, 2005, Wikipedia, 2005a). The technical
conditions for the implementation of biometrics in a wide range of contexts seem to be present, but a
lack of political will to carry out the necessary policy has slowed down the process. This reluctance is,
of course, due to the notorious privacy problems that follow with biometrics. The most well-known of
these problems has to do with identity theft, but a number of other concerns have surfaced that relates
to sociological problems, e.g. discrimination. However, the terrorist attacks in the USA, and later on in
other parts of the world, have accelerated the political process of implementing biometrics. This is not
to say that developments in biometrics have only taken place as a consequence of the terror attacks;
the logic of scientific, technological and societal development would very likely have brought about
the new biometric practices although at a slower pace.

Body surveillance: from pass to word

Another interesting aspect of sociological disembodiment appears in connection with the role of sur-
veillance technologies and practices aimed at the body. This focus on the body does not relate to the
discussion of phenomenological embodiment that considered the body as the seat of subjectivity,
rather these technologies and practices bring the body to the center of attention as an object. But how
does body surveillance relate to disembodiment? It would seem that the theory of disappearing bodies
is difficult to maintain when it comes to body surveillance, but on closer inspection this is not the case.

The ‘disembodied body’

David Lyon discusses the apparent paradox of disappearing bodies and body surveillance in his book
Surveillance society: Monitoring everyday life (2001), and he writes about this problem: “The answer
to this preliminary puzzle is that embodied persons are no more in view in body surveillance than they
are in the world of digital surveillance. Abstract data pertaining to or derived from bodies is all that is
sought for biometric- or DNA-based surveillance” (Lyon, 2001:70). Lyon’s point is that body surveil-
lance is not actually about the body as the site of humanity, “[c]onsciousness, souls, sociality, or what-
ever else may be thought to make up human beings” (Lyon, 2001:70), it is rather about the body as a
source of information.
Body surveillance implies an important development of the body from ‘site to source’, as Lyon
puts it (2001, 2003). More precisely, the body has developed from not only being that, which should

1
In fact, the first type of biometric authentication was developed by a Parisian anthropologist and police desk
clerk, Alphonese Bertillion, who developed a method of body measurement (named ‘Bertillionage’ after him).
However, this biometric practice was soon abandoned, because it was discovered that many people share the
same body measurements, thus, this method of authentication could not stand alone (NCSC, 2005).

4
be identified – often by a third party object – to also being the source of this identification. It is a shift
from having something (e.g. passport or driver’s license) to being something (measurable body parts,
patterns and behavior). Surveillance is thus no longer only a matter of visibility of the body; biomet-
rics goes under the skin to verify a person’s identity, making personal statements and third-party iden-
tifiers less important or even redundant to authentic identification. It is in this sense that surveillance
technologies and practices can produce a ‘disembodied body’, since the ‘sociological’ body, which
Lyon hints at, still has disappeared; in this case it is not the technology that ‘gets in the way’, but the
‘biometric’ body, that is, the body as an objectified source of information.

The Human Genome Project

One of the most interesting and most comprehensive enterprises in body surveillance today is the Hu-
man Genome Project (HGP). The ambition of this enormous endeavor is to map the location and
chemical sequence of all human genes in order to build a complete database of information from the
human body. Of course, many benefits are anticipated from the mapping and identifying (cf. Wikipe-
dia, 2005c) and among them are the commercial development of inexpensive and user-friendly genetic
test in order to detect illnesses such as breast cancer, blood clotting, cystic fibrosis and liver diseases.
Moreover, it is anticipated that the interpretation of the genes eventually can lead to cures for cancer
and e.g. Alzheimer’s disease. Other expected gains include the potential for biological scientists to
share and benefit from each others work in that they can access and search the HGP-database on the
Internet and learn what colleagues have written about specific genes. In the long term, interpretations
of the genetic database might give new insight into the theory of evolution, since similarities and dif-
ferences between human genes and those primates and mammals closest to us can be studied more
closely.
In a broader perspective, a number of changes that goes beyond medical and scientific benefits
can be anticipated with a fully developed and thoroughly interpreted HGP. It is quite conceivable that
the information retrieved from the body will lead to a change of focus from treatment to prevention.
This is, of course, a great advantage within medicine, since prevention is obviously better than cure,
and information about genetic predispositions facilitates timely intervention. However, the shift from
treatment to prevention can also lead to further changes; it is possible that an additional shift in focus
from prevention to perfection could take place. This seems to be a natural further step in the logic of
body surveillance, because why not improve and perfect the body if we have the information and the
means ready at hand? I will return to this question in the following part of the paper.

Reading the body

As HGP aims at building a complete database of the location and chemical sequence of all human
genes, the consequence is that the body is reconstituted as a readable ‘text’ (cf. Ploeg, 1999). In this
case and in the context of authentication and identification the body has literally become a password;
the penned autograph is today the ultimate symbol of authentication, but in the future we may find that
the absolute signature is the ‘body-graph’, that is, the unique features retrieved by body surveillance.
Many interesting consequence can be expected with the change from pass to word, so to speak,
that is, not only the shift from an external to internal source of authentication of identity, but also the
constitution of the body as something that can be interpreted or ‘read’. One important aspect of this
change is that biotechnology and information technology come together in a way not previously seen,
because biotechnology construes the body as a ‘document’ of data – a ‘book of the body’ – that is
open for interpretation. Of course, the most obvious reading of the body is as a bivalent code – without
letters, words and numbers – but other readings are possible that go beyond the body as just a code or
pass for something that can either be correct or incorrect. The body can be read as a concept of human
perfection; just as well as a concept of human perfection can be read into the body.

5
Surveillance ethics: dangers of reading body
Body surveillance has, similar to other forms of surveillance, given occasion to a number of concerns,
and a few of the most prominent of those will be presented and discussed in the following.

The perfect human being

The prospect of body surveillance going from treatment via prevention to perfection has given rise for
widespread concern. It is argued that body surveillance is a veritable ‘slippery slope’ leading towards
ethical problems and issues of social control similar to those concerning the theory of eugenics. While
eugenics was an influential social policy in the early part of the twentieth century, it is today mostly
associated with Nazism and other totalitarian ideologies. Even though eugenics has been stigmatized,
it still has a few distinguished proponents, who have recently spoken in support of different versions
of moderated eugenics (Wikipedia, 2005b). The ethical concerns, if not obvious, are based on the as-
sumption that eugenics and totalitarianism cannot be separated, and that this development of body
surveillance include the potential for social control and discrimination, and that the theory is generally
incompatible with the ideals of a democratic society.
Other concerns have to do with so-called ‘transhumanist’ ideas. The basic philosophy of trans-
humanism is to improve human conditions by overcoming the intrinsic limitations of the human body
(and mind) with the use of science and technology (cf. WTA, 2003). This undoubtedly attractive goal,
however, raises a number of concerns that are similar to the ones mentioned in connection with eugen-
ics2. Although transhumanism has a self-conception of going beyond humanism, even approaching
posthumanism, the basic philosophy still seems to assume an essentialist understanding of human be-
ings; how can we improve human conditions without having a conception of the perfect human being?
We may not all share this conception – it might be a personal concept of perfection – but it is only
dreams of something better that can fuel the pursuit of improvement. Having a concept of the perfect
human being and having the means to obtain this ideal seems to beg for a practical realization. To
carry out such a project will no doubt meet very critical scrutiny, but the possible next step will be
even more controversial, because if we try to achieve perfection, why not also eliminate the imperfect
human beings? This is, of course, to push the idea to its extremes, and this classic eugenics philosophy
is to my knowledge not a point of view shared by anyone in the academic debate, but it seems, none-
theless, to be a possible direction of thought consistent with the basic philosophy, and it is certainly an
issue for transhumanist ethics.

Social sorting and discrimination

Body surveillance has also given cause for ethical concerns of a sociological nature such as social
sorting and discrimination. This is because body surveillance, despite being different in many regards,
is used similarly to other forms of surveillance, namely for identification and categorization, “to sort
and classify, to determine eligibility, to qualify and to disqualify, to include and to exclude” (Lyon,
2001:70). Such uses of information retrieved from the body are found in many different sectors, and a
prominent one of these in today’s society is the workplace. Especially in North America, body surveil-
lance has been implemented as an important part of the corporate culture, where random drug and
alcohol testing as well as genetic screening and monitoring are widespread. The purpose of these tests
can be the worker’s susceptibility to diseases, including breast, ovarian, colon, thyroid, eye, kidney
and skin cancer, or it can be to determine workers’ medical response to the work environment.
However appropriate and beneficial such body surveillance practices might be, there is another
side to the story. The results of the screening and monitoring might be used for discrimination, and it
might even discourage workers, for one reason or another, to undergo these tests. The point is that the

2
Transhumanists specifically rejects the eugenic social policy of the early twentieth century (cf. WTA, 2003),
however, transhumanism is compatible with ‘neo-eugenics’ or ‘voluntary eugenics’. These are theories that want
to improve humans, but only on a completely voluntary basis, and proponents of such theories thus disassociate
themselves with the totalitarian ideologies of ‘classic’ eugenics.

6
same tests, which enable people to find out that they suffer from a serious disease and to seek treat-
ment in time, might be used for discriminatory action, such as holding back promotions or even dis-
missal in the workplace (Lyon, 2001:79). A possible shift in employment strategies and e.g. insurance
policies to be based on genetic predicaments as the body’s ‘tacit testimony’ rather than for instance acquired
qualifications and interviews will be an ethically worrying development. Relating to the discussion of the
perfect human being in the preceding part, it is likely that the idea of pursuing a dream of the ‘perfect
worker’ can emerge as a future step in corporate culture.
The workplace is an example of ethical issues of a sociological nature, but similar problems
have arisen in many other areas, and there seems to be a mutual exchange of body surveillance tech-
nologies and practices between different sectors, which then happen to share the same ethical prob-
lems.

Biometrics and identity theft

Most well-known of the ethical concerns relating to body surveillance is probably the danger of iden-
tity theft. This grave problem is, of course, known from the breaching of privacy in other contexts,
such as stolen credit card numbers and the leaking of customer or consumer information. The motives
for stealing someone’s identity are many ranging from gaining access to finances to illegal immigra-
tion or even terrorism. Needless to say, the consequences of identity theft can be very serious for the
victims, and it is therefore a normal practice to install a number of safeguards in such systems.
When it comes to body surveillance the risks of identity theft are significantly reduced, since
e.g. biometrics is considered a much safer type of surveillance. Often, a combination of a number of
biometric parameters are even considered to be an absolute authentication of identities thus making
impossible any kind of fraud, including identity theft. This supposedly impenetrable security arrange-
ment has possibly contributed to the insignificant level of safeguards that has been developed in the
wake of body surveillance technologies and practices. However, unlike most other kinds of identity
theft, biometrics makes possible irreversible consequences for the victims, so adequate safeguards are
of the utmost importance. It seems that the greatest danger of body surveillance technologies and prac-
tices is actually the widespread perception of them to be an absolutely secure type of surveillance; the
combination of nearly absolute security and potentially irreparable damages is an important issue to
confront within surveillance ethics today.

Conclusion
It can be concluded that body surveillance technologies and practices are contributing to changes that
reach much further than developments in science and technology. The complex scientific, technologi-
cal and societal process of change has brought about issues of an ethical, philosophical and sociologi-
cal nature, and they must be dealt with as such. Some of these issues are genuinely new while others
are well-known, but what they have in common is that they are unavoidable and very important to deal
with in our technologically constituted world. Moreover, some of the most important problems are
hidden in the most promising and seductive dreams, such as the pursuit for the perfect human being,
while others stand out and are the subject of much scrutiny and concern. Therefore, it is a central task
for computer and surveillance ethics to uncover the problems of body surveillance technologies and
practices as these are developed and implemented. However, ethics is also about finding constructive,
sound ways to deal with emerging problems, and should the present paper contribute to this endeavor
then my ambitions has been fulfilled.

Author presentation
The author (b.1975) holds a master’s degree in philosophy (2003) from the University of Southern
Denmark, and since February 2005 employed at Aalborg University as a Ph.D. candidate. Research
interests include philosophy of technology, surveillance studies and computer ethics.

7
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