Tercer nivel: Comprensión criterial

History is not the progress of universal reason. – Hubert L Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (1983: 110)

History, in short, is what separates us from ourselves and what we have to go through and beyond in order to think what we are.

– Gilles Deleuze (1995: 95)

Introduction

In Chapter One, I situated the thesis’s historical investigation of biometrics and racism within the literature of biopolitics of security and biopolitical racism. Through my literature review on topics pertinent to the thesis, I also identified the limits of their approaches and the need for further investigation in two respects: a greater concrete historicisation of biopolitical relations between biometrics and racism; and greater attention to a non-Western context, which the present study focuses on the context of Japan. In particular, I argued that one of the main conceptual issues in existing debates on biometrics vis-à-vis racism lies in an apparent static and historically continuous understanding of race and racism – i.e., the problem of white supremacy in the structure of biometric technologies. The problematisation of racism exclusively in terms of the infrastructure of biometrics (Pugliese 2010) is limited in the scrutiny of biopolitical racism because its scope of problematisation is confined within the technologies that areracially coded rather than conceptualising the process of biometric identification itself is racial coding in biopolitical terms (i.e., an act of

demarcating populations in security terms). In this chapter, I will establish the thesis’s methodological stance that can overcome such a conceptual separation between biometrics and race and that articulates the inextricable relations between biometrics and race, namely, the production of racial knowledge through biometrics, biometric identification as a form of racialisation in each given context. I will establish this from Foucault’s historical approach.

As this chapter’s epigraph from Deleuze encapsulates, Foucault’s historical approach is to explicate both the problems of history and the importance of history as a method to overcome these problems. My discussion in this chapter aims at providing the exposition of how Foucault’s historical approach problematises conventional, and possibly even existing critical, accounts of the history of biometrics and racism and how it can overcome these issues. There are three particular methodological propositions of Foucault that I will draw on for the formation of this thesis’s methodology: an archaeological critique of the history of science; a genealogical scrutiny of power, knowledge, and subjectivity; and a dispositif as the site of analysis.

As for Foucault’s archaeology and genealogy, commentators have attempted to distinguish the difference between archaeology and genealogy and to articulate the limits of Foucault’s archaeology (for example, Davidson 1986; Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983; Han 2002). The distinction, however, is not always clear, not least because Foucault himself retrospectively uses the term genealogy to describe his earlier works that were initially described as archaeological (Foucault 1998a: 294; 2001: 283). Also, in one of his last interviews in the 1980s, Foucault – who by this stage was proposing an “historical ontology of ourselves” – describes archaeology as a method and genealogy as a design within a single study (Foucault 1997a: 315; 1983: 237).

While I do not undermine the differences between and the developments from archaeology to genealogy, for the purpose of this thesis I will not choose between archaeology or genealogy but, following others’ suggestion (Davidson 1986: 228; Elden 2001: 114; Gutting 1989: 271; Koopman 2013: 30), understand them to be complimentary. In particular, I will attempt to integrate Foucault’s archaeological critique of the history of science and genealogical scrutiny of power, knowledge, and subjectivity for the thesis’s study of racial government.

The first section of this chapter discusses Foucault’s archaeology of science and shows how an archaeological method allows us to problematise the history of biometrics. In the second section, I will move on to Foucault’s genealogical question of identity and the relations between power and knowledge, which explicates the problem of the identity called ‘race’ as such. The first two sections will constitute the thesis’s methodological foundation, constituting the ways that the thesis approaches the history of biometrics and that of race and racism in relational terms. If the main focus of these sections is to problematise the history of biometrics and that of race and racism, the last section aims to propose what may be called the dispositif of race as the thesis’s analytical site. Following Foucault’s concept of dispositif, I will suggest that the dispositif of race – consisting of both discursive and non-discursive practices of racial subjectification – would allow us to articulate, and problematise thereby, racial government through biometrics. An analysis of a dispositif then advances the realm of discourse analysis that earlier poststructural approaches to international studies had adopted (see Chapter One).19 By proposing an analysis at the level of dispositif, the thesis’s methodology is designed to articulate not just how the idea of

19 _{For discourse analysis in the field of studies of race and racism, see David Theo Goldberg} (1998: chapter 3).

race is discursively constructed in security terms but also the ways in which the discourse of race is correlated to security practices of biometric identification.