Phrenology's Futures: Datafication, Surveillance, and the Biometric Mundane

• In Event: 1555 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 3. Examining Inequality: Science and Tech as Solution or Snake Oil?

Abstract

In the last several years, a rash of ethically dubious academic studies and creepy commercial technologies have led commenters from across disciplinary and professional spectrums to claim that contemporary digital technologies are reviving the specter of two pseudosciences long considered dead and buried: phrenology and physiognomy. Popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, these knowledge systems claimed to “read” the character of a human based on physically evident characteristics like the shape of a forehead or the curve of a hip. Current iterations have tended to use machine learning to, for instance, identify someone’s sexuality or criminality from a facial photo. These developments are ethically unsound, but an alternative reading of phrenology and physiognomy’s supposed demise shows that the current crop of contenders for the disgraced crown are participating in a very clear biometric continuum from colonial practices to the present. It, in other words, is impossible to distinguish contemporary systems of reading the body to discover the soul from techniques of measurement that have long deployed race, sex, gender and class markers to organize the bureaucratic efficiency of organizing and distributing populations for circulation through sites of labor, incarceration, and hospitalization. This paper will track some of those connections in order to make the claim that the real threat of the “new” phrenology doesn’t come from specific instances of bad actors, but the interfaces between humans and institutions in the context of a technocapitalist, carceral “biometric mundane.”

Author

• Raymond Joshua Scannell, Graduate Center, City University of New York