Body &

Surveillance and Embodiment Society

2016, Vol. 22(2) 2857
The Author(s) 2016
Surveillance, Privacy Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
and the Making of the DOI: 10.1177/1357034X15625339
bod.sagepub.com

Modern Subject:
Habeas what kind of
Corpus?

Charlotte Epstein
The University of Sydney

Abstract
In this article I consider how our experiences of bodily privacy are changing in the
contemporary surveillance society. I use biometric technologies as a lens for
tracking the changing relationships between the body and privacy. Adopting a
broader genealogical perspective, I retrace the role of the body in the constitution
of the modern liberal political subject. I consider two different understandings of
the subject, the Foucauldian political subject, and the Lacanian psychoanalytic
subject. The psychoanalytic perspective serves to appraise the importance of hiding
for the subject effects of excessive exposure to the Others gaze. I conclude to the
importance of the subjects being able to hide, even when it has nothing to hide. By
considering these two facets of subjectivity, political and psychic, I hope to make
sense of our enduring and deeply political passionate attachment to privacy.

Keywords
biometrics, Foucault, governmentality, Lacan, political theory, privacy, property,
psychoanalysis, subjectivity, surveillance

I dont want to live in a world where there is no privacy . . . (Edward

Snowden1)

The experience of privacy is undoubtedly a deeply personal one. My

contention in this article is that it is also a deeply political one. The
global reactions to the 2013 surveillance whistleblowing affair, in

Corresponding author: Charlotte Epstein. Email: charlotte.epstein@sydney.edu.au

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/

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Epstein 29

which former US intelligence analyst Edward Snowden exposed the

depth and breadth of the US National Security Agencys surveillance
activities, provide only one recent expression of this widespread
sense that privacy is still considered vital to the proper functioning
of a democracy (see, for example, Jimmy Carters defence of Snow-
den in Wing, 2013). The Snowden affair revealed to the public what
the field of surveillance studies has been studying for some time, the
extent to which we are exposed to the eye of power. My focus in this
article is on the ways in which our bodies are increasingly laid bare as
a result of the spread of biometric technologies through the fabric of
our everyday lives; which constitutes an instance of the routinization
of surveillance characteristic of our contemporary surveillance soci-
eties (Surveillance Studies Network, 2006). Whether when travel-
ling (when we present our faces, fingers or bodies to be scanned
and photographed at the US borders), shopping (a recent manne-
quin created by an Italian company, Eyespy, contains a camera
embedded in the eye that collects data off shoppers as they
browse), holidaying (visitors at Disneyland Florida have their
biometric data collected upon entry), opening our personal com-
puters (one of IBMs models was secured by way of fingerprint
identification) or tagging our friends with Facebooks facial
recognition software, our bodies have increasingly become sites
of data collection fed into biometric systems. Moreover, the dif-
fusion of biometrics through our everyday lives increasingly
troubles the distinction between public and private spaces. This
blurring of the public/private boundary constitutes a key feature
of the surveillance techno-industrial complex that was starkly
brought to the publics attention by the Snowden affair.2
In this article I use this surveillance technology centred upon the
body, biometrics, as a prism for revealing the changing bodily con-
structs that underwrite our modern polities. To echo Erin Kruger,
Shoshana Magnet and Joost Van Loon (2008: 102) in the pages of
this journal, the body is what is at stake in the organization of rela-
tions between the state and the citizen in our modern democracies,
and in the way these are shifting under conditions of rising surveil-
lance. It is also centrally implicated in the debates around privacy and
data protection (van der Ploeg, 2012). The body serves to articulate
two different perspectives on the subject, the political subject on the
one hand, the member of the polity in classical political theoretical

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30 Body & Society 22(2)

terms, and the psychoanalytic subject on the other, understood in the

Lacanian sense as a speaking, desiring subject. To work through the
relationships between the body, the subject, surveillance and privacy,
however, is to work at the juncture of four fields, political theory, sur-
veillance studies, psychoanalysis and body studies. I thus begin with
some conceptual clarifications to explain how I navigate these differ-
ent fields and how I bring together these two perspectives to appre-
hend the contemporary subject of surveillance.

Some Methodological and Inter-disciplinary Considerations

The Subject
The subject, one of continental philosophys oldest concepts, is not
the individual. Nor is it the Deleuzian dividual that has been pro-
ductively mobilized to account for a range of interrelated contempo-
rary phenomena around the rise of surveillance; consumptive
practices; notably the quantified self; and big data, in terms of a rift
purportedly located between Foucaults disciplinary societies and
Deleuzes societies of control (see, for example, Amoore, 2014;
Lyon, 2014; Palmas, 2011: Whitson, 2013). Moreover, separating
out discipline from control has been a defining move in legitimiz-
ing surveillance as a discrete field of study (see Haggerty, 2006, and
more generally Lyon, 2006). Yet the perhaps somewhat hasty desire
to go-beyond Foucaults panopticon and its twin concept of dis-
cipline has also begun to be called into question within that field
(Caluya, 2010: 622; see also Elmer, 2012). Such a sharp distinction
is supported neither by Deleuzes text nor its context. Deleuze (1992)
coined the notion of control in a short postscript to his book on Fou-
cault, in order, not to replace, but to prolong and expand discipline.
Holding up these two concepts as dichotomous has come at the
expense of appraising the deeper continuities between them, and
the close imbrications between the two authors. In his critique of sur-
veillance studies post-panoptic turn, Gilbert Caluya (2010, 627)
rightly reminds us of the Foucauldian roots of Deleuze and Guttaris
concept of assemblages, taken up to appraise current surveillant
assemblages (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). But, most importantly,
it has somewhat distracted from the potential of discipline to ren-
der the subjecting effects of power, which are far from having been
exhausted, especially under conditions of ever expanding

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Epstein 31

surveillance. In fact, control did not nail a new, post-disciplinary

form of power. From the perspective of the analysis of power, which
was always the core purchase of the concept of discipline, discipline
is control as Mark Kelly (2015) succinctly put it, and Foucault used
the two words synonymously.
Surveillance societies, then, are quintessentially disciplinary
societies; the panopticon is still operational, and indeed continu-
ously enhanced by new technologies. The political theoretical per-
spective thus sets into critical relief some of the legitimizing
moves underpinning this Deleuzian, post-panoptic turn in the anal-
ysis of surveillance and consumptive practices, because of the
ways in which they have side-lined some of the specifically polit-
ical interrogations around power effects and the subjects agency.
Such interrogations require retrieving that older concept that pre-
cedes and supersedes the individual, the subject. Indeed the sub-
ject of surveillance has recently returned to surveillance studies,
specifically in its political analyses and After Snowden (Bauman
et al., 2014). Yet given the concepts older lineage in political the-
ory and philosophy, a return to Foucauldian panoptic thinking does
not limit us to a Foucauldian understanding of the subject (Gandy,
1993). The limitations of the Foucauldian subject on the question
of the subjects autonomy are well known. In Judith Butlers critique
(1997: 87), despite his insistence on resistance throughout his work,
and thus on some form of subjective agency, Foucault fell short
of locating the source of this resistance within the subject,
because of his reluctance to enter the subjects psychic space.
These shortcomings paved the way for the initial efforts to articu-
late the political understanding of a subjected subject with a more
agentic psychoanalytical understanding of the speaking, desiring
subject (see also Benjamin, 1988; Henriques et al., 1984; Povi-
nelli, 2006).3 This article brings this articulation of these two per-
spectives on the subject to the phenomenon of surveillance, in
order to examine the changing place of privacy in the surveillance
society.

Privacy
Surveillance scholars have held a deeply ambivalent relationship
towards privacy. On the one hand, privacy has been extensively

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32 Body & Society 22(2)

critiqued, as a historically constructed, narrowly Western, liberal

conceit. Privacy appeared to have revealed its limits; whether as a
policy tool, since it has done little to stem the relentless expan-
sion of surveillance, and intellectually, where it was seen to have
foreshortened the understanding of the range of surveillance prac-
tices and experiences taking shape before our eyes (Amoore,
2014; Gilliom, 2011; Lyon, 2003; McGrath, 2004; Stadler,
2001; Steeves, 2008; Whitson, 2013). On the other hand, privacy
regularly returns in surveillance debates, almost as a recurrent
necessity, and with the sense that there is no doing without it. Pri-
vacy is recognised as an international human right (Article 17 of
the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights). It
is defended as one of the touchstones of modern democracy (Ben-
nett, 2011; Regan, 2011). Privacy advocates emphasize its polit-
ical and social rather than merely individual value (Regan,
2011; Steeves, 2008), and its importance for political activism
(Bennett, 2011). As with democracy itself, as the saying (attrib-
uted to Churchill) goes, there is no other option. In Colin Ben-
netts words, as a concept, as a regime, as a set of policy
instruments, and as a way to frame advocacy and activism, pri-
vacy is not going to disappear (2011: 495).
This circular debate, where privacy is alternately rejected as a his-
torically contingent and limiting construct, then retrieved as indis-
pensable, is side-stepped by shifting to the language of the subject.
Indeed, the reticence towards privacy appears to be bound up with
conceptions of the sovereign individual that Deleuzes dividual was
mobilized to set into critical relief. Privacy critic Felix Stadlers tar-
get (2001: 121), for example, is the idea of privacy as a kind of bub-
ble that surrounds each person, or a personal space . . . under the
exclusive control of the individual . . . the informational equivalent
to the (bourgeois, if you will) notion of my home is my castle.
Instead, the subject brings into play a limited agency, politically
and psychoanalytically. The subjects ability to act in the polity is
shaped both enabled and constrained by the structures of political
subjecthood. The purchase of the psychoanalytic understanding, on the
other hand, is that it underscores the ways in which the subject is both
active and acted upon by unconscious processes (as opposed to the
psychological understanding, which tends to underplay the role of
the unconscious; see Henriques et al., 1984).

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Epstein 33

Desire and the Unconscious

That privacy is socially constructed is the starting point of this arti-
cle. This calls for a mode of enquiry well rehearsed in the field of
body studies, namely genealogy, understood as a history of the
present (Cohen, 2009; Crossley, 1996; Povinelli, 2006; Turner,
2012; Van Der Ploeg, 2003, 2012). Genealogies set into relief the
given-ness of bodies by showing how they are woven into social
and technological constructs. Here I use the genealogical perspec-
tive to examine the ways in which the body was mobilized in the
social construction of privacy. Precisely how the body became the
centre-point of these notions of privacy as a bubble thus comes
into focus. Only by excavating these origins can we fully appraise
why privacy resurfaces as a recurrent touchstone of contemporary
political life, or indeed the enduring strength of its emotive
appeal (Bennett, 2011: 485). It remains a public value (Regan,
2011) precisely because the attachment to privacy grows deeps
roots in the liberal democratic subjects constitution qua modern
political subject. The demand for privacy, then, is a political
demand, in the specific sense that it is bound up with the make-
up of the modern individual as a political subject.
But the passionate attachment to privacy, to borrow Judith But-
lers (1997) expression, also grows deep, indeed private, roots, in the
psychic as well as the political subject. Surveillance has begun to
draw increasing attention from psychoanalysts. They have begun to
explore, as practitioners, the effects of the new regimes of exposure
to which the individual is increasingly subjected (Ball, 2009). As
Kirstie Ball (2009) notes, subjectivity remains under-explored in sur-
veillance theory. Yet it casts a different light altogether on the para-
digmatic eye of power at the core of the surveillance dispositif. The
psychoanalyst Gerard Wajcman (2010: 47) analyses the effects of the
ubiquitous devouring eye of the surveillance society and the inva-
sion of the space of subjectivity this entails. Spatialization, in this
line of theorization, serves to capture a sphere of intimacy that is key
to the subjects self-constitution as an autonomous subject. In what
he calls over-watching society (societe de survoyance, a pun on
the French surveillance), Wacjman (2010: 446) thus sees a threat
to the subjects psychic intimacy taking shape; in the face of which
he advocates a right to the hidden, or even, indeed, a right to lie.

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34 Body & Society 22(2)

Desire and the structures of the unconscious are the twin concep-
tual pillars of Lacanian psychoanalytic thought and practice. Impor-
tantly, however, to explore the possibility that desire may be bound
up with privacy is not to set out to ascertain a generic human need for
it. Lacanian desire is very different from psychological notions of
need (see Henriques et al., 1984). Crucially, the subjects perspective
is front and centre, and carefully guarded in Lacanian psychoanalytic
practice. This is, in fact, one of the challenges in trying to conjoin this
perspective to a political, and thus collective, understanding of the
subject. Yet it also carries with it an ethos that is fundamentally com-
mitted to individual agency, to the diversity and creativity this
entails, and is thus incompatible with generalizations about human
needs.4 To understand, then, how Lacanians can talk of structures
without seeking to nail a generic need, a crucial distinction is needed
between structural thought, on the one hand, and, on the other, the
type of essentialist thought that underwrites the universalizing ges-
ture towards generic human needs (see Epstein, 2013, for an exten-
sive engagement with these differences). Instead, structures need to
be recovered as part of a deeply historical, localized, excavation of
what constitutes us as who we are today, collectively and individu-
ally; precisely what genealogy accomplishes. For structures can
offer suggestive (but not totalizing) schemas for making sense of
actions, positionings and affects; in addition to means to navigate the
individual and collective levels of analyses.

Outline
Weaving these different threads together around the body, in the first
part of the article, I retrace the making of the embodied political sub-
ject that lies at the core of our modern polities to its point of origin in
the 17th century (see also Cohen, 2009). Using two sets of legal
developments explicitly centred upon the body that culminated in
that century, the habeas corpus and the doctrine of the Kings Two
Bodies, I show how the body was placed at the core of an emerging
sphere of privacy, in the context of what Foucault (2009) has ana-
lysed as the regime of sovereignty that yielded the modern state and
its subject.
In the second part of the article, I show how the global diffusion of
biometrics both exemplifies and precipitates the generalization of the

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Epstein 35

surveillance society. This, for Foucault (2009), was emerging coex-

tensively with a new regime of power increasingly invested by the
modern state, alongside sovereignty, that he called a regime of gov-
ernmentality. What I do take from Deleuze here is, rather than a new
concept, an emphasis on letting the technology do the descriptive,
revelatory work. Hence I map what I call the biometricization of our
everyday lives, and show how the technology itself deploys the logic
of governmentality. I also show how it carries a new bodily construct,
that of the guilty body. This model of the body is increasingly repla-
cing that which was originally encapsulated by the habeas corpus,
and which continues to underwrite our modern political subjectivities
and, centrally, to explain the persisting unease experienced (by
some of us) at having to offer up our bodies for constant viewing.
I then contrast this political understanding of the subject with the
psychoanalytic one in the third and final part of the article. I consider
the role of the body in the making of the speaking subject by way of
Jacques Lacans analysis of the mirror stage. Doing so enacts two
major shifts. First, it turns from the subject being merely looked at
to a two-way scopic relationship between the subject and the gaze.
In the psychoanalytic perspective, second, the eye of power appears
as the gaze of the Other, upon which the subject is ontologically
dependent in ways I will explore. This draws out why the Others
gaze may hold so much power over the subject and thus why the
subject may want to remain sheltered from it.

The Role of the Body in the Making of Modern Democracies:

The Habeas Corpus
The body has, from the onset, played a central role in the constitution
of the modern polity. It was enshrined in one of liberal democracys
founding stones, the habeas corpus. Today a linchpin of many com-
mon law democracies, its origins lie buried in British history. These
origins tell an important story about the place of the body in the mak-
ing of the modern political subject. Present in medieval English cus-
tomary law since the 14th century, the writ was strengthened by the
revolutionary turmoil of 17th-century England, and entrenched by an
Act of Parliament in 1679 as the habeas corpus ad subjiciendum et
recipiendum. Its immediate purpose was to limit the authoritarian
excesses of the monarch in the context of an intense tug of war with

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36 Body & Society 22(2)

the parliament. Its significance, however, was that, enacted at a time

when the political order was being uprooted and founded anew, it
decisively settled the way power was allocated in the nascent modern
liberal state.

The Body as the Original Site of the Separation of Powers

The subjects body thus provided a site where the separation of
powers was originally sealed. The writ is an injunction by the leg-
islature to the executive branch of government to present (habeas)
the arrested body before the courts so as to trigger the judicial pro-
cess from establishing the legality of the arrest to settling the
sentence. The modern political subject is constituted by the three
forms of power passing through its body. Or, to put it in the manner
of Thomas Hobbess contemporaneous mythical account of the
origins of political order, what made natural man free was not
the extent to which he could roam about in the state of nature. In
fact, given the lurking dangers, he may have been possibly quite
restricted in his movements. It was rather that his body had not yet
come into contact with political power, only the brute force of other
animals (including humans). The modern political subject was born
at the point where his or her body was knotted into the political
order as the connecting point between three forms of sovereign
power (executive, legislative, judicial).
Exposing the body that lies in the foundations of the modern polity
reveals the constitutive ambivalence that inheres in the modern sub-
jects relationship to power. On the one hand, the body is posited by
the habeas corpus as the recipient of natural rights and the site for the
constitution of political freedom. It is where the curbing of absolutism
occurred, the original gesture that secured the power of the parliament,
thereby making democratic representative law-making possible. This
was done by pinning the presumption of innocence onto the body,
which removed the individual from the grip of a potentially abusive
monarchic power. By the same token, the body was recognized as
what the subject of the crown rightfully has (habeas, you have)
even when it has nothing, which was no small matter in a revolutionary
period where the components of citizenship and political representa-
tion were up for grabs, and where, in 17th-century England, property
provided a central paradigm for settling these questions (see

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Epstein 37

Mathiowetz, 2011). Indeed in the land-based peerage system that

underwrote the organization of the kingdom, property remained an
essential means to hold the power of the monarch in check. The writ
established the body as the subjects natural title, as it were, a basic
form of private property, upon which any encroachment by the public
authorities must be legally justified. Moreover, freedom acquired a
bodily definition, the ability to move unimpeded.
Via the paradigm of property, then, the body was sealed at the cen-
tre of an emerging sphere of personal freedoms, which took shape
simultaneously as the sphere of privacy. This body is both unim-
peded in its movement, and removed from the sovereigns gaze,
or, as Hobbes (1946: 237) put it, in secret free. That is, the non-
visibility of the body to the sovereign is, for Hobbes, a condition
of its ability to move unimpeded. Now, unimpeded bodily motions
are, for this materialist thinker (see also Cohen, 2009; Frost, 2008),
the very location of the subjects liberty. In other words, even for the
staunchest defender of sovereign power, the body held out of the
sovereigns sight is the linchpin of the political subjects (limited)
freedom, and thus the basis for her or his political agency. Hence the
sphere of personal freedoms and the sphere of privacy have been co-
extensive since the beginnings of the modern polity, and they are the
centre-point of the subjects political agency.
Herein lie the roots of the attachment to privacy, which still runs deep
through our current constitution, if the reactions to the Snowden affair are
anything to go by. The private, non-visible body remains a bastion of con-
testation and resistance, political and artistic. An expression of the latter is
the practice of the contemporary British street graffiti artist Banksy, who
has made remaining faceless a central pillar of his interventions in the
public space. Setting aside the question of the (necessarily individual)
assessment of the aesthetic merits of his art, this genealogical lineage,
in which the private body removed from the sovereigns gaze is the
grounding for our political agency in the very constitution of the modern
polity, may explain the resonance of his art (for some of us). What I am
suggesting, in other words, is that his practice strikes an old, indeed a gen-
ealogical chord in our political subjectivities.
This separating out from a public realm of a private domain centred
upon the body was further strengthened in 17th-century England by a
contemporaneous set of legal developments that revolved around the
body of the monarch rather than that of its subject. Drawing on Ernst

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38 Body & Society 22(2)

Kantorowiczs thesis, this period saw the consolidation of the legal

doctrine of the Kings Two Bodies, which distinguished increasingly
between the natural body of the monarch and his or her body poli-
tic. As Kantorowicz (1957: 20) underscores, although the search for
metaphors to conjure political unity was not uncommon across early
modern Europe in an era that was decisive to laying the foundations
of the modern state, this physiologic concept was a distinct contribu-
tion of English legal history. This rending of the two bodies reached its
high point in 1649, enabling the beheading of a king. Centrally,
Charles I was executed as a private person: his body politic, by virtue
of this splitting, remained unscathed, the repository of the unity and
continuity of the realm. The kings natural body alone was affected
by death or other bodily inflictions: Kantorowicz shows the extent
to which this naturalness was carefully written out of the monarchs
body over the course of the doctrines development (such that it could
never be under age, incapacitated, etc.). This dramatic episode of Eng-
lish political history thus further foregrounds the role of the body in
constitution of modern sovereign-subject relations.

The Body as the Site of Subjection

On the other hand, however, and to return to the body of the subject
rather than that of the monarch, a further facet of political subjectiv-
ity is revealed by the less often considered second half of the habeas
corpus. The body, by the writ, is presented in order to be subjected
(ad subjiciendum) to power (albeit a different branch thereof) and to
receive or be encrypted by (et recipiendum) a narrative or set of sig-
nifiers that make sense of its actions (and, from there, establish it as
guilty or innocent). The modern political subject, then, was made by
being subjected to power, and the body is the site where this takes
shape. This dimension is at the core of the work of Michel Foucault.
It is the pillar of his critique of (an also largely British) liberal
thought, which in upholding excessively the individual as a counter-
point to the state, and indeed in its neglect of the body, failed to
apprehend the individuals intimate relationship with power, which
Judith Butler (1990, 1997) has explored extensively in Foucaults
wake (see also Benjamin, 1988; Povinelli, 2006).
To sum up the duality that is constitutive of the modern political
subject, on the one hand, a modern democratic polity must have

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Epstein 39

(as per the imperative form of habeas) at its core free, private bodies,
with which, for example, to descend into the street and demonstrate
against the excesses of an authoritarian power. This still provides the
benchmark by which the democratic credentials of a state are gauged
today, as was revealed by the very different global reactions to Tur-
key and Brazils handling of popular demonstrations in the wake of
the Arab spring.5 On the other hand, the modern political subject is
founded via subjection. This, moreover, reaches deep into the indi-
viduals wants and desires. Foucaults reading of Thomas Hobbes
as one of the first thinkers of modern political subjectivity is instruc-
tive in this regard. Foucault (2009 [1978]: 73, my translation) writes:

What, indeed, was the sovereign . . . for Hobbes? [It was] the instance
capable of saying no to the individuals desiderata; the problem then
being how this no . . . could be legitimate and founded in this sub-
jects very own will. 6

A close reading of the habeas corpus augments Foucaults analysis by

showing that, in the regime of sovereignty that Hobbes holds in his
sights, and that provides the starting point of Foucaults excavation of
modern power, although the will of the subject is actively mobilized
in this relation with the sovereign, its body remains, nonetheless, still
somewhat removed from some of the modalities of subjection that
would develop subsequently. This is a body subjected to punishment,
but not yet discipline (Foucault, 1975). That it is also a bastion of pri-
vacy is precisely why it constitutes a privileged site for the deployment
of sovereign power, a power that works upon the body top-down, nega-
tively to mark or maim it (Foucault, 1975). So long as the subject has
its body, it may escape, challenge or even threaten (when that body
belongs to a powerful rival noble peer) the sovereign. This is what
changes fundamentally with the emergence of governmentality as a
new regime for the exercise of modern power that develops alongside
sovereignty, as I will explore with the example of biometrics in the next
section. There the body is no longer punished but instead fashioned
from within, via the will, by new modalities of a bottom-up, enabling,
productive power that progressively flattens out some of sovereigntys
founding underpinnings, notably the sphere of bodily privacy.
In the original covenant between sovereign and subject, the subject
forsakes a measure of liberty for the provision of security. Privacy

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40 Body & Society 22(2)

was not at issue. In the regime of sovereignty, the body was either
held (by the state), arrested and deprived of its liberty, or it was pri-
vate, inconspicuous and enjoying a de facto freedom from scrutiny,
to use Mark Andrejevics (2007: 6) expression. In the next section I
will show that this straightforward dichotomy regarding the body
held up (by the state) or held private (by the subject) is troubled
under governmentality. Moreover, the terms of the covenant have
changed: privacy, rather than liberty, is what security is exchanged
for today. Indeed privacy vs. security provided the binary with
which the Snowden affair has been framed. My suggestion here, add-
ing to Foucault and Butler, is that we are attached to our privacy as a
function of being a modern political subject founded in, and still
attached to, the old regime of sovereignty. This explains our unease
in the face of the increasing loss of privacy that our surveillance soci-
eties (which include but do not stop at the state) demand of us.
Foucaults historical distinction between sovereignty and govern-
mentality lays bare the background conditions of the making of the
modern political subject.7 It also makes sense of how the late-modern
political subject, against a trajectory of intensifying governmentaliza-
tion on the one hand, yet where modalities bound up with sovereignty
also endure, stands split at the very core of her political subjectivity. The
political subject today is rent, I suggest, between a regime of sover-
eignty where its subjectivity took shape, where the body stands at the
centre-point of its experience of privacy, and to which it may remain
attached; and, on the other, a regime of governmentality, wherein new
forms of subjectivity are being invested notably around surveillance
practices (see Ball, 2009). The latter, however, vehicle a different body
at their core: fully exposed, known, and measured; albeit free. In the
following section I will show how this model of the body has been
simultaneously generalized and normalized by the spread of biometrics
through our everyday lives. The technology will thus serve to exemplify
Foucaults diagnosis of panopticism as the background condition
against which the late-modern political subjectivities take shape.

Foucaults Nightmare: Biometricized Societies

Foucault identifies two new modalities of power under governmen-
tality, discipline and biopower. The unit of operation of discipline
is the individual body, whereas for biopower, it is the population

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Epstein 41

as a whole. Both modes of power are centrally operative in biometric

systems, which Kelly Gates (2011) aptly terms technologies of mass
individualization. A biometric is a measurement of a body part (such
as the eye, the fingerprint, the face) or a behavioural characteristic
manifested via the body (the voice, the keystroke). The body is thus
the technologys primary point of application. The biometric system
proper is constituted by matching this measurement against a vast
database of previously registered bodily data that yields, in biometric
parlance, identification (the matching of a body to a pre-registered
identity). The database, in turn, presupposes (or indeed creates) a
population. Biometrics thus provide an exemplar of what Foucault
(1975: 243) identified as the new physicality at play in modern
technologies of power, a power that no longer (merely) harms the
body yet increasingly targets it and configures it as both a single unit
and as an aggregate of information.
Historically, the recording of bodily measurements by the state is
coextensive with an industrializing, capitalist modernity whose rise
is at the core of Foucaults work. Developed as a police practice
especially in France, notably around the anthropometric system
devised by Alfred Bertillon, it was systematized across Europe and
beyond in the late 19th century (see Piazza, 2009). However, the
body thus subjected to measurements and recording was the body
of the criminal: the guilty body. What the biometricization of our
everyday experiences is effecting is a functional, de facto generaliza-
tion of this bodily model. This ignores political boundaries; not only
because it explicitly occurs on the borders, where biometrics have
become increasingly adopted as a technology of border control (see
Epstein, 2007, 2008; Gates, 2011), but also as a characteristic of the
technology itself. According to biometric engineering manuals,
which I have extensively analysed elsewhere, the optimal database
for the technology is the world population.8 In the remainder of this
section, I analyse the erosion of what I call a political space of inter-
iority, originally constituted, as we have seen, by way of the body,
and which characterized the regime of sovereignty.
The diffusion of biometrics through the fabric of our everyday life
has globalized the panopticon as a model of political and social orga-
nization in ways that far exceeded Foucaults vision. In Discipline
and Punish, where Foucault defines surveillance as a new modality
of state-cum-non-state power, he identifies the liberal thinker Jeremy

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42 Body & Society 22(2)

Benthams architectural model as having etched out the trajectory for

the development of modern power. This is a power that reached
beyond the state alone to encompasses new forms of surveillance that
harness the population as a capitalist resource as productive bodies
within a broader governmental logic geared toward ever increasing
productivity and efficiency. The purchase of Benthams model, for
Foucault, is that, with the watchtower standing at its core, it
expressed the fundamentally scopic nature of the new modern power
taking shape, the central importance of the depersonalized gaze to the
operation of discipline in shaping these productive bodies. Of its
underlying logic Foucault (1975: 243, my translation) writes that it
was ultimately intended to yield a surveillance network always on
high alert, a society wired through and through without any holes
or interruptions, which is then picked up and reverberates in
Deleuzes (1992) notion of modulation. Both are renditions of the
panoptic logic underwriting the development of these biometric sur-
veillance systems.
The history of the deployment of the technology mirrors the stages
of the development of Foucaults appropriation of the Benthamic
notion. Biometrics were first developed in the late 1990s2000s in
the context of closed-off spaces, Deleuzes (1992: 6) spaces of
enclosure. These were aimed to protect physical spaces on the one
hand, either of large corporations (big banks and financial institu-
tions) or consumer-oriented spaces (such as Disneyland Florida), and
virtual spaces (personal computers) on the other. Similarly, Foucault
(1975) retraced how the panopticon was first tried out in spaces that
were either closed (the prison, the factory, the school) or exception-
ally closed off (plague-ridden towns). Yet Foucaults analysis is
somewhat halting as it moves through these different spaces and
scales (notably the jump from plague town to prison in chapter 3),
warranting Deleuzes (1992) contribution, which sought to render the
serpentine fluidity or modulations underwriting these surveillant
logics.9 It is as though Foucaults analysis were missing something.
This something, I suggest, is yielded by considering the surveillance
technologies themselves.
Indeed Foucault coined the concept of panopticism to capture a
movement of generalization to all spaces, a logic working the weft of
the contemporary social fabric itself. Biometrics have provided one
such mechanism for this passage from enclosed spaces to society

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Epstein 43

at large. To draw briefly on a set of developments analysed elsewhere

(Epstein, 2007, 2008; see also Gates, 2011), a milestone here was
constituted by governments turning to biometrics to protect their bor-
ders, prompted by the USs adoption of the first 2005 biometric bor-
der protection system, known as the US-VISIT programme. This also
marked the take-off of the biometric industry as a multi-million glo-
bal security complex. The development of biometrics as a border
management technology thus exemplifies both the productivity of
governmental, disciplinary power and the conjoining of public and
private forms of population control that sets it into play.
Biometrics, then, have helped to precipitate the panopticism that
Foucault identified as a key expansionary dynamic of disciplinary
surveillance societies; a movement towards all-seeing-ness (pan as
all), a promise of complete transparency, where the individual is
completely readable, scannable, to state power via her body. Rachel
Hall (2009) has emphasized the new aesthetics of transparency that
have served to naturalize this generalized panopticon, notably
through the experience of travelling. Shoshana Magnet and Tara
Rodgers (2012: 2) have foregrounded the new ways of visualizing
the bodies that it has yielded, such as the body scanner. My argu-
ment is that, in the process, it has globalized a model of the body fully
exposed to power. This model is at odds with the earlier model that
lies at the core of modern sovereignty, which remains, I contend,
deeply embedded in our contemporary political subjectivities. This
explains the persisting unease experienced when we come into con-
tact with this power by presenting our digit or our body to be
scanned, however benign that power claims itself to be (for our own
good); the sense, as Magnet and Rodgers (2012) put it, of being
made to strip for the state.

The Wilful, Silenced Body

Key to the generalization of surveillance and, thus, of this model of
the guilty body it carries, is the voluntary participation of the subject.
Foucault first underlined that the effectiveness of disciplinary sur-
veillance lies in the extent to which its logic hooks into the subjects
will. More than a simple submission, the subjection by which the
modern political subject is constituted, as we began to see in the pre-
vious section, is properly a process of subjectivation: it moulds the

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44 Body & Society 22(2)

individuals very subjectivity. This is what is lost in Deleuzes con-

cept of control. For example, the proliferation of so-called fast-
track traveller schemes in airports around the world (Heathrow and
Sydney airport, to name a few) rely on the docile yet active involve-
ment of the subject. They require travellers to have volunteered their
bodily data ahead of travelling in order to enable automated identifi-
cation. The incentive for the traveller here replicates, and further nor-
malizes, the logics of the governmental state and those of the industry
itself (effectiveness and increased productivity). Normalization
occurs also in the desensitization effect that is wrought by having
to increasingly present our biometrics to enter spaces, including our
computers and phones. Of course, not everyone (yet) is comfortable
doing so. This unease, I suggest, taps into an old attachment to the
regime of sovereignty from which our political subjectivities hail,
in addition to any personal fear any of us may harbour. The fast-
track traveller by contrast is someone who no longer blinks an eye
(only presents it) at being exposed in her bodily details.
In fact, from the technologys point of view, the generalization of
voluntary participation has marked a turning point in the growth of
the biometric industry. Biometric engineering manuals thus distin-
guish two stages of development, that of negative enrolment, which
constitutes the non-voluntary collection of biometric data belong-
ing to the non-trustworthy in biometric parlance, which is to say,
criminal populations, compiled and handed over by the public
authorities. For example, in the early 2000s US troops used Afghani-
stan as a site for collecting the fingerprints of potential terror sus-
pects, which were subsequently fed into the vast database
underpinning the US-VISIT programme. Positive enrolment, by
contrast, marks what the industry considers to be the optimal stage
of development for the industry. This is the stage where productive
individuals voluntarily offer up their biometrics for the constitution
of the database. It signals the full acceptance of the technology, a nor-
malization that the commercial use of biometrics in consumer prod-
ucts such as personal computers only further accelerates. Analysing
the technology itself thus illustrates the extent to which the logics of
the technology, of the industry and of the governmental state conjoin
(see Epstein, 2007, 2008).
Although, for the purposes of this article, I have chosen to focus
centrally upon the relationship between the state and the subject

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Epstein 45

(both as citizen or non-citizen) and on one technology that is cen-

trally implicated in rewriting this relationship (biometrics), this all-
seeing-ness is a generalized condition of the regime of heightened
exposure characteristic of our surveillance societies, in which sur-
veillance increasingly runs also between subjects. These new forms
of horizontal surveillance have been extensively unpacked by sur-
veillance scholars (see for example Lyon, 2003) and through the lens
of other, more pertinent technologies (such as social media, see
Andrejevic, 2007).10 From the perspective explored here, these new
forms of surveillance only further compound the erosion of privacy
boundaries, leaving the subject increasingly exposed to the viewing
of other subjects and firms, in addition to the state. The specificity of
biometric technologies is that the bodys surface (face or finger-
prints) is the locus of the subjects being laid bare.
Moreover, and even while its will is implicated, the biometricized
subject is silenced. Identification is accomplished via the body. It
explicitly does away with the subjects speech. The body is authen-
ticated, in the industrys lingo, by being matched against the infor-
mation in the pre-recorded database. Whereas with the right to
remain silent, speech matters (it is intended so that the arrested sub-
ject does not incriminate herself through her speech), here, what the
subject says is irrelevant. In fact this language-less-ness is celebrated
as one of the technologys strengths. It is sold as the basis for its
expansion into the business of development, since biometrics can
provide an identification revolution in population management for
developing countries (see Gelb and Clark, 2013). Indeed, it does
away with former modes of identification that required language
skills (such as the signature); and, with these, with any requirement
of the neoliberal states to ensure access to these, and thus to
education.
The contemporary subject is increasingly having to reckon with
historically unprecedented levels of bodily exposure. In the next sec-
tion I explore ways in which this new regime of heightened exposure
impacts subjectivation (the shaping of the subject) by switching from
a Foucauldian perspective that underlines how the subject is being
watched, to a Lacanian perspective that draws out, instead, a two-
way scopic relationship between the subject and the gaze. I consider
what is revealed when the eye doing the watching, so to speak,
appears, not merely as the eye of power, but as the powerful gaze

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46 Body & Society 22(2)

of the Other. This methodological shift from apprehending the late-

modern subject at a collective, political level, to an individual, inti-
mate level entails a shift in the meaning of privacy, from a political
sense, where it is tightly bound up with freedom and property, to an
intimate sphere, where privacy comes to mean simply remaining hid-
den from view. The body remains central to both senses of privacy.

Lacans Mirror and the Subjects Penumbra

The Lacanian perspective provides a scheme for grappling with why
and how the panoptic gaze may be so powerful for the subject. It can
thus also help us understand the subjects passionate attachment to
privacy, that is, why being able to remain hidden may matter to the
subject. Not (necessarily) because it has anything to hide, but
because of how it functions qua subject. A certain penumbra is the
subjects habitual dwelling place; that is, non-transparency, to self
and to others, is a condition of being able to become and to continue
to function as an autonomous subject. Before I consider how Lacan
helps us appraise the subjects attachment to privacy, two caveats are
required by my shift in level of analysis, from the political to the psy-
chic subject.
The first caveat, at the risk of repeating an important point, is that
mine is not an essentialist quest for a universal human need. My
focus is upon a historically situated, post-Victorian subject (to bor-
row Foucaults term), whose subjectivity has been shaped by this
particular symbolic, sovereign order wherein the sphere of privacy
has been pinned onto the body in ways we have seen, and which has
also constituted the conditions of knowledge production in which the
psychoanalytic subject was discovered and theorized. But, second,
this historicizing precaution is still not enough, in so far as any talk
of needs still gestures towards a generalization, albeit a now histori-
cally contained one, that would seem to flatten out the infinite multi-
plicity of individual subjects embodied experiences before the gaze,
which is fundamentally at odds with the psychoanalytic ethos. Even
post-Victorian subjects have very different thresholds of tolerance to
being exposed to the panoptic eye, with some minding it very little.
Hence my strategy is simply to juxtapose, to the regime of exposure
explored in the previous section, the structure of reflexivity that
Lacan maps out with his analysis of the mirror stage.

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Epstein 47

What this draws out is that the subject needs the Others gaze,
first and foremost to reveal itself to itself. Self-recognition is the
mechanism underpinning reflexivity; hence the basis for autono-
mous agency. Yet this primordial relation to self is mediated by the
Other.11 Crucially for our purposes, this mediating instance that
connects us to ourselves, so to speak, is first experienced by the
child as an embodied gaze, that of the watchful caretaker or mother.

Misrecognition as the Condition of Possibility for Self-knowledge

The mirror stage triangulates the subject-in-the-making (the child), its
bodily image, and the gaze of the primary caretaker. It foregrounds the
crucial orthopaedic (as Lacan, 1977a: 5 put it) functions performed
both by the image of the body and the Others gaze in first putting the
subject together. It marks the moment of the childs acquisition of an
I and a sense of its bodily discreteness; of that which underpins its
capacity to become an autonomous subject (the agency of the Ego;
Lacan, 1977a: 2). Up until this point, for the child, whose biological
underdevelopment, and thus extreme vulnerability, Lacan underlines
(other species can walk or crawl at birth), its body and that of its
mother are one. The moment when the child links the body it sees
reflected in the mirror to the signifier with which the mother names
that body as its own triggers the acquisition of autonomy.12 The pri-
mordial mechanism of self-recognition thus hinges upon this three-
point hooking, by which the signifier, received from the (m)Other,
attaches the subject to its bodily image; and beyond, to the Symbolic
Order (the order of the Other), where the subject will be able to take up
its place as an autonomous person, and from which the signifier orig-
inally hails. The body thus constitutes the site for the subjects acqui-
sition of both its sense of its unity and of its social agency.
Yet, crucially, the Others gaze is the medium of this relation to self.
Moreover, Lacan shows that the primary mechanism of reflexivity is
in fact one of misrecognition. Indeed, what the subject recognizes in
the mirror, via its bodily image, is not the subject as a(n) (un)whole but
rather its I, what earlier Freudian theory termed the Ego. Eluding
the neat unified image reflected in the mirror is the subjects other,
invisible, half, the unconscious. The analysis of the mirror stage thus
leads Lacan to restate the function of the Ego. It is the instance that
serves both to hold the subject together and provide that centred

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48 Body & Society 22(2)

consistency necessary to subjective life. But it is also what hides the

subjects original splitting. Hence misrecognition constitutes the
ego, the illusion of autonomy to which it entrusts itself so as to
become an autonomous subject (Lacan, 1977a: 7). But Lacan goes
further. This founding misrecognition is in fact the condition of pos-
sibility of the subjects being able to grow into and know the world.
Knowledge (connaissance) is predicated on misrecognition (mecon-
naisance), on mis-knowing oneself (me-connaissance in French:
knowledge of self). Thus as Lacan firmed up in his 1951 restatement
of his initial 1949 lecture, misrecognition, the alienation of the sub-
ject into imaginary identifications pinned onto the body, is nothing
short of the condition of possibility for human knowledge.

The Psychic Play of Appearances and Disappearances

The psychic life of this autonomous, albeit split and misrecognized sub-
ject, is characterized by a complicated game of appearances and disap-
pearances. Two instances where this surfaces are, first, in the subjects
relation to the Symbolic (Lacans other term for the order of the Other).
There, as Lacan (1977b: 72) famously put it, the thing must be lost in
order to be expressed. The subjects experience, in its immediate, raw
form its affects, sensations, emotions, in all their idiosyncratic charge
is lost as it is mediated into words and thereby entered into symbolic
circulation. This loss is the price of symbolization, of being able to con-
vey the thing at all. For anything to be articulated, to self or another,
requires that it be mediated by words that belong to everyone, words that
hold generic meanings and are thus fundamentally ill-fitted to that
unique and immediate impulse that led the subject to want to speak in
the first place. Symbolization, then, the very process of mediation, is
this fitting or rather squeezing into pre-circulating signifiers (the treas-
ure chest of signifiers is another term Lacan uses for the Symbolic). It
can never fully capture the richness, the texture, the vibrancy of the sub-
jects individual embodied experience. The loss or disappearance of
the thing is the price the child has to pay to step into the Symbolic and
become an autonomous, self-aware subject.13
Objet a, second, points to another place for the ongoing play of
appearances and disappearances punctuating the subjects psychic
life. Objet a is the unconscious object-cause of desire. It is that which
drives the subject who knows that it is driven by something, but does

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Epstein 49

not know exactly by what. This penumbra of unknowing-

knowingness, to characterize the space of the unconscious, is where
the subject regularly dwells with its objet a. It is also why, I suggest,
it needs to be able to remain unexposed to gazing Other(s). Objet a
is a relic from an earlier stage in the subjects make-up, a trace in the
unconscious of that uninterrupted one-ness with the m(O)thers body,
a phantasmatic remainder of that lost unity. Objet a drives desire
because it functions as the promise of being what the subject needs
to regain that completeness. It is like a piece of the subject that fell off,
and whose falling is what has left the subject inexorably split. As Sla-
voj Zizek (2005: 33) put it, it is a piece of flesh that the subject has to
lose if he is to emerge qua subject in the first place. Moreover, the
sudden appearance of object a (or its avatar: objet a itself marks a per-
manent absence) causes what Lacan captured as the aphanasis, or dis-
appearance of the subject. In Zizeks words (2005: 77):

in aphanasis, the object a is no longer extracted, it acquires full pres-

ence in consequence, not only does the symbolic texture which con-
stituted my reality disintegrate, but the very phantasmatic kernel of
my enjoyment is laid open, and thus comes under attack. Perhaps,
in a sense, there is no greater violence than that suffered by the subject
who is forced, against his or her will, to expose to public view the
object a in himself or herself.

As we saw in the previous section, the will is a sticky thing, and is hard to
locate in the currently developing regimes of heightened bodily expo-
sure. No doubt a marked distinction still remains between being laid
bare against ones will, and the forms of voluntary participation that
marshal the subjects will towards ideals of efficiency, security and
even sociality. Yet, even if aphanasis is one of the more acute moments
of subjective life, I suggest that what Zizek captures is a generalized,
surreptitious violence that inheres to the experience of being exposed.
From here, the question I pose in order to begin to appraise the
conditions of the formation of the subject under contemporary
regimes of heightened exposure is: given that losing oneself in the
(m)Others gaze is an original and ongoing constitutive condition
of subjectivity and human knowledge; given, moreover, that being
exposed is potentially a dangerous place for the subject, what hap-
pens to the mediating function when the gaze to which we are
exposed becomes the silent, ubiquitous, disembodied gaze that is

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50 Body & Society 22(2)

being normalized today? The question is pressing in a context where

the increasing deployment of surveillance practices and technologies
is being justified in the name of the subjects protection or indeed
as being what we want in order to remain safe. The sense of safety, I
suggest, may actually be threatened by the erosion of privacy.
Privacy, the common story line runs, is crucial for individual auton-
omy (see for example Schneier, 2014).14 This is also what has been thor-
oughly deconstructed by scholars who are rightly wary of the liberal
ideals of autonomy that it conjures, and aware of the ways in which pri-
vacy is mobilized in the narratives that the autological subject, to bor-
row Elizabeth Povinellis (2006) expression, spins about itself as the
imaginary basis for an autonomy that may, in the end, be largely imagin-
ary too. But this scholarly weariness also ends up falling out of synch with
the persistent expressions of an enduring passionate attachment to pri-
vacy that regularly reverberate throughout the polity, whether in opinion
polls that repeatedly register citizen demands for privacy in many coun-
tries, or in the more extreme risks taken by whistleblowers such as
Edward Snowden to denounce its erosion. Plumbing the depths of the
psyche draws out what perhaps these critical interrogations have missed,
a sense of what privacy does for the subject, qua psychoanalytical sub-
ject, and not just as a political subject or citizen. The passionate attach-
ment to privacy, then, may constitute an attachment to the conditions
of psychic life itself. Privacy looks very different once we appreciate, not
only that the subject is inherently non-transparent to her- or himself, but
that she or he is constantly entangled in a play of appearances and disap-
pearances with regard to what she or he wants, and who she or he is. Yet,
to be caught in this psychic play is not to lack subjective autonomy. To the
contrary, it is a condition of being agentic in the first place, to act in
the world. Thus, while we must remain careful not to enshrine privacy
as the bastion of autonomy, the psychoanalytic perspective also draws out
a more complicated relationship between privacy and agency, and that
privacy may have its place within the subjects very capacity to act and
to resist the normalization of surveillance.

Conclusion
Privacy advocates and lawyers have long underlined the extent to
which a functional democracy can be measured by the strength of its
legal provisions protecting the individuals privacy. My purpose in

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Epstein 51

this article was to tease out something deeper, namely, not just why
privacy laws are a normative ideal, but rather why we may be passio-
nately attached to privacy, as a function of how we are constituted
qua subjects. To this end, I retraced the role of the body in the making
of the modern subject, in its political and psychic locations succes-
sively. On the political plane, I considered how, in the context of
an emerging modern sovereignty, the body was constituted in
17th-century England as a bastion of privacy in the making of the
modern political subject by way of the habeas corpus. I then
appraised the ways in which this bodily construct was brought into
question by the rise of governmentality, and the deployment of new
technologies of surveillance centred upon bodies, such as biometrics.
I showed how it harboured at its core a different model of the body:
exposed, measured, silenced and presumed guilty until validated as
productive by the technology. This biometricization, however, does
not merely happen at our expense; rather, it occurs with us and for
us: by way of a Foucauldian analysis of the workings of modern
power, I showed the ways in which the modern subjects will is
actively mobilized in the deployment of this bodily model. In short,
we want to be able to travel faster (or to have our PC secured); and,
on some level, giving up our biometrics is a cost we (or some of us)
are prepared to incur in order to be able to do so. Yet, on another
level, this continues to jar with our sense of the importance of our
bodily privacy, to which we (some of us) are also still deeply
attached as a function of being modern political subjects. I then
showed other ways in which privacy may matter, by switching from
a political understanding of subjectivity to a psychoanalytic one. This
cast the gaze to which we are exposed in a different light, no longer
just the eye of power, but that of the Other upon whom we constitu-
tively depend to come to ourselves in the first place. This explains, I
suggest, why and how we are deeply wedded to privacy on both of
these levels, the political and the psychoanalytic. To the calls of pri-
vacy advocates, then, I would add that privacy is not merely a sign of
a healthy democracy, it is necessary to how we function as subjects.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the members of the Surveillance & Everyday Life
Research Group at the University of Sydney, to Martin French and

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52 Body & Society 22(2)

Gavin Smith, Dean Mathiowetz, Fleur Johns and three anonymous

reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Notes
1. Quoted in Caldwell, (2013) At Last Snowden is Causing a real sense
of outrage, Financial Times, 27 June 2013, accessed 28 July 2013.
2. In two ways: first, it brought awareness to the extent of the privatiza-
tion of the surveillant state. In 2013, 70 percent of the US governments
intelligence budget was spent on private companies (Ludlow, 2013).
Snowden himself was employed by one such company, Booz Allen
Hamilton. Second, the Snowden affair revealed the complicity of pri-
vate companies such as Google or Facebook in the states intelligence
gathering (Caldwell, 2013).
3. Foucaults limitations are not resolved by turning to Deleuzes (1992:
6) man of control (or dividual), whose agency is reduced to being a
placeholder in a chain of digits.
4. Deleuzes understanding of desire is unhelpful here. Developed in
rejection of the psychiatric institution (rather than of psychoanaly-
sis), it has largely remained inoperative; unlike Lacanian desire,
which is supported by over half a century of practice. It is also
deeply problematic theoretically in the way it misapprehends both
the subjects agency and the role of language, which are fundamen-
tally imbricated.
5. As Ayse Zarakol (2011) shows, being modern is what is at stake for
the Turkish state; and what provided the grid through which its demo-
cratic credentials were called into question in the wake of its repression
of the 2013 citizen occupation of Taksim square, not least because of
the unfavourable comparison with the Brazilian states reaction to
unrests around the same time.
6. Hobbess sovereign, here, is not to be conflated with the executive.
Hobbes captures something that lies deeper, a foundational unity
undergirding the political order at large (see Epstein, 2013, for an
extensive development). With Hobbes we are switching registers alto-
gether, out of the liberal focus on the separation of powers.
7. Importantly, Foucault underscores that regimes of sovereignty and
governmentality remain coextensive. That is, sovereignty does not
simply disappear with the rise of governmentality, and thus continues
to inflect our subjectivities. Elsewhere I have shown (contra Butler)
that sovereignty has in fact been revitalized by the turn to biometrics
at the borders (see Epstein, 2007).

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Epstein 53

8. Technically, the larger the database, the more efficient the technology.
When the US adopted biometrics it also imposed biometrics on
friendly countries as a condition for continuing to partake in its Visa
Waiver Program (see Epstein, 2007, 2008).
9. The movements of the serpent are set in contrast to those of the plod-
ding mole of the spaces of enclosure, which could in fact be those of
Foucault himself in such spaces.
10. Biometrics and social media have recently come together in attempts
by Facebook to expand into biometrics (through the purchase of bio-
metric companies). This has not, however, been considered one of the
more successful applications of biometrics.
11. The Other (le grand Autre) captures all at once the social order, the
locus of language (also the Symbolic), and, in the early life of the
subject, the mother (or primary caretaker). Lacans key contribution
was to draw out how these dimensions (of the (m)Other) are co-
extensive in the subjects layering. Crucially, the mother in Lacan
designates a symbolic rather than a biological function: the primary
carer. I use (m)Other to capture the multiple dimensions of the Other
(from the mother to the Symbolic Order).
12. Lacan, here, kept the scheme of the mirror to honour the Freudian line-
age, since Freud first discovered the mechanism by observing his
grandson playing with a mirror. It need not be a mirror per se, but
rather anything (such as the carers voice) that enables this reflective
looping to take place.
13. That stepping into is what is foreclosed to the psychotic subject, who
remains unable to attach to the Symbolic at all, and thus locked into
their solipsistic world, at great expense of suffering.
14. For example, in an interview, the self-proclaimed privacy researcher
Bruce Schneier of the Harvard Berkman Institute declared: Privacy is
about individual autonomy. Its about presenting yourself to the world.
Its about being in charge of what you say about yourself and what you
reveal about yourself. When were private, we have control of our per-
son. Transcript available at: http://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/
13/data_and_goliath_bruce_schneier_on (accessed on 23 March 2015).

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Charlotte Epsteins scholarship lies at the intersection of International

Relations, Political theory and surveillance studies. She is the author of The
Power of Words in International Relations, Birth of an Anti-Whaling Dis-
course (2008, MIT Press) and has published pieces in, amongst others,
International Organisation, the European Journal of International Relations,
International Political Sociology, Global Environmental Politics. She is an
Associate Professor in the department of Government and International
Relations at the University of Sydney.
This article is part of a special issue of Body & Society on Surveillance
and Embodiment: Dispositifs of Capture, edited by Martin French &
Gavin JD Smith.

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