Biometrics, or The Power of the Radical Center

1. Biometrics: The Physiognomy of Modernity One of the key tasks of the humanities, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) wrote in his Arcades Project (1927–1940), was to follow the physiognomy of modernity, the “difference between this physiognomy and that of the eighteenth century.”3 Benjamin quoted Honoré de Balzac: “If God . . . has imprinted every man’s destiny in his physiognomy, . . . why shouldn’t the human hand sum up that physiognomy in itself, since the hand comprises human action in its entirety and is its sole means of manifestation?”4 Historically speaking, biometrics is grounded in the old, eighteenth-century physiognomy and a nineteenth-century system of collecting fingerprints. During the twentieth century the two were integrated into one and were digitized in the last two decades. Indeed, the current explosion of biometric images implies a number of relations: face to hand, image to action,