Problematics of sight

So, what does thinking about borders in this way offer us? Certainly, it illustrates the different ways that a gaze is being imposed by the border. But more than this, it calls our attention to certain normative concerns that warrant redress. In the discussion that follows I briefly illustrate some of these. This section will draw heavily on the writing of Foucault, who detailed how the state views its subjects. Here, data-centric bordering practices are very much in line with his concerns about state rationalization.

What does it mean for a state to be rational? Broadly, it is the management of a state by scientific principles, designed to maximize the state’s capacity to control the totality of its subjects and distinguish between them as individuals. The rational state embodies various processes of differentiation, whereby discrete items are distinguished and categorized, and institutionalization, or the process by which the state takes on the role of regulator, organizer - overseer. Starting in the 16th century, the state began to institutionalize the individuating capacity of Christianity, resulting in what Foucault calls “pastoral power”.⁶ This process, bent on the individuation of subjects, carried through into the 18th century, with religious vestiges increasingly being replaced by secular forms of authority (and especially policing) (Foucault, 1980b: 334-335). The idea that the state shepherds - and polices - its population is recognizable. It is what we now take self-evidently to be government.

Returning to the notion of individuation, we might say that at the same time as the rational state seeks to control its population, it also seeks to establish modes of control at the individual-level by conditioning and creating subjects (Foucault, 1980b: 331). What are the mechanisms by which this form of power turns humans into subjects? They are what Foucault calls “dividing practices” in which "the subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others. This process objectivizes him" (Foucault, 1980b: 326-327). Examples of such division in his work are familiar: Madness and sanity; illness and health, etc. These binaries are ways in which heterogeneous subjects can be grouped, separated and controlled - to which we can now add risky and non-risky.

To achieve this end, the rational state targets the body - manifest today in the state’s pursuit of biometrics. Foucault calls this biopolitics, or “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power" (1978: 1). The biopolitical subject is one who can be effectively filtered into categories of safe and risky - and who can self-categorize. This, for Foucault, is the essence

Ways of seeing (the border) 145 of the state’s power; the power to turn rough, ungainly subjects into smooth manipulable ones. To do this, the government normalizes its subjects. This process comes out clearly in his discussion of discipline:

Discipline, of course, analyzes and breaks down; it breaks down individuals, places, time, movements, actions, and operations. It breaks them down into components such that they can be seen, on the one hand, and modified on the other ... and finally, on the basis of this, it establishes the division between those considered unsuitable or incapable and the others. That is to say, on this basis it divides the normal from the abnormal. Disciplinary normalization consists first of all in positing a model, an optimal model that is constructed in terms of a certain result, and the operation of disciplinary normalization consists in trying to get people, movements, and actions to conform to this model.

(Foucault, 1978: 57)

This discussion of individuation brings to the fore the problem of risk, which repositions the unknown as the greatest threat to the system - even over and above the substance of the threat itself. This is the nature of being risky - riskiness is an undefined state, except for what it is not (namely normal; safe). It is an anticipated thing, a state to come. But it can never be predicted, because the real risk is unknown. To this end, Foucault makes an interesting contrast between law and discipline, where law leaves room for that which is unknown; for discipline, what is unknown is precisely the least allowable: "In the system of the law, what is undetermined is what is permitted; in the system of disciplinary regulation, what is determined is what one must do, and consequently everything else, being undetermined, is prohibited’’ (Foucault, 1978: 46). Thus, while in the sphere of law, one is innocent until guilty; in the sphere of discipline, one is guilty until innocent.

With this frame in mind, we can then return to the use of data in bordering practice and ask: What type of citizen — and subject — does data produce) Its practical aim is normalization - it uses the processes of filtration and profiling to police what it considers to be normal behavior and penalize deviance. This role is built into data design. John Torpey, in his The Invention of the Passport, explains the imprisoning nature of passport-identity as follows:

Passports and other documents authorizing movement and establishing identity discourage people from choosing identities inconsistent with those validated by the state.... In this regard, people have to some extent become prisoners of their identities, which may sharply limit their opportunities to come and go across jurisdictional spaces.

(Torpey, 2000: 166)

Put another way, such documents condition the subject by structuring what we consider to be the rational, or natural way of things.

Given this state-imposed normalization, how do we understand it as a harm? The most thorough treatment of the harms of classificatory schemes comes out in the writings of Pierre Bourdieu on distinction. For him, categorization is what makes possible cognition and selfhood but also self-restriction. This internalization of boundaries leads people to self-restrict from certain goods because they believe "that’s not for the likes of us”. These people are consistently "defining themselves as the established order defines them" (Bourdieu, 1984: 471). The concern is that data forces people into patterns of identification, conditioning who they can be according to the state-imposed norm. This instantiates the harm of both non- and misrecognition (Taylor, 1994: 25-26). Harms to identity of this sort are an ethical concern. It is through our identities that we come to feel ourselves to be fulfilled and free.

Another harm of the Big Data view of the person can be expressed as a form of invasion, the permeation of our innermost boundaries - what is often expressed in the language of privacy, sometimes thought of as the right to be "let alone”, or to defend the private sphere from the public one (ACLU, 2014: 16-17). This stipulation of a boundaiy is impoilant. We need to feel that there is a sense of external restraint - a frontier, the inside of which is our safe home, even if these categories themselves are fictitious. But in many ways, data has collapsed the boundaiy between state and subject. In the creation of many data worlds, and data-doubles that reside within and constitute the person, there is no form of meaningful escape from the experience of being monitored by the state.

But these new forms of “border sight” do not merely shape the subject; they also restructure the meaning of citizenship. Data technologies segment people not based on membership in a polity but on risk scores. Certainly, filtration is nothing new and in fact corresponds to what we would expect to see at a border whereby distinction is made between citizens and aliens. The more interesting development comes in terms of internal surveillance, or the distinction between citizens, and the distinction of wanted and unwanted travelers irrespective of citizenship. For example, trusted traveler programs segment travel according to a two-track system of passage: Movement for the global “good” and security checks for the “bad”. These risk determinations are citizenship-blind: An Arab-American might face greater difficulty entering the US at JFK than a British business traveler. Peter Graham, a Director of IBM’s global division, puts this in relief:

In the long term we think the travel experience could be very different and border controls more efficient. The business traveller who flies most months would be a member of their nearest airport’s frequent traveller scheme. They would pass through most airports almost without stopping until they reached the aircraft, facilitated by the Airport and the Airline. The foreign business traveller who comes to Europe regularly would have a Biometric Residence Permit and when using it would go through the same light touch process as a European citizen.

(Graham, 2013)

Data filtration turns people into de facto non-citizens, even if they are de jure citizens. In doing so, it severs the political meaning of citizenship from its legal basis, further depleting its normative core.

This argument builds upon numerous other critiques of citizenship, especially those linking travel and class - such as notions of "SUV citizenship” or "Gulfstream citizenship” (Sparke, 2006: 156; Lyon, 2009). Indeed, trusted traveler programs do not merely enable security stratification, but can be linked to class privileges, as they let members "park closer to the departure hall and use fast check-in counters” (Jain, 2011: 31). In these circumstances, what matters is not that you are a citizen, but what kind of citizen you are. This follows Zygmunt Bauman’s observation that the global era is based on the ability of states to distinguish variable rights of mobility based on the distinction between tourists and vagabonds (1998). Didier Bigo picks up on these themes, especially how third-world travelers are always already suspect due to their potential to become immigrant and are thus evaluated as “virtual invaders” (2005: 62-63). Louise Amoore points out the trade-off between security and freedom at the core of contemporary citizenship, such that individuals "verify a credible and secure identity and trade this for mobility" (2008: 28).

This type of class analysis of citizenship and global mobility highlights the part of the story with which we are familiar - citizenship is not class-blind. What is of interest is that new forms of data-filtration add an element - risk -that cannot be reduced to class. Indeed, the greatest enemies of the state are frequently the wealthiest: The risk-rating produced by an Arab-American with links to wealthy Islamic charities is not identical to the class-profiling we have come to expect with non-white Americans in general (or immigrants in Europe).

This amounts to a discrete challenge to citizenship. It is now manifest (what was perhaps always known, but more invisible) that there are graduated scales of citizens. Never is this more evident than at the border - especially, paradoxically, for the traveler entering his or her own state. What determines whether you are “welcomed” at the border is not your passport, it is the complex constellation of codes and content that lies within. Returning to the thesis of this chapter, to understand why this is true and what it means one must think carefully about what the state is looking for. In other words: How the state “sees” its citizens.