Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2009, volume 27, pages 444 ^ 464

doi:10.1068/d1208

Taking people apart: digitised dissection and the body at the border
Louise Amoore, Alexandra Hall

Department of Geography, University of Durham, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, England; e-mail: louise.amoore@durham.ac.uk, a.e.j.hall@durham.ac.uk Received 31 January 2008; in revised form 12 November 2008; published online 8 April 2009

Abstract. The UK Home Office and the US Transportation Security Administration have made substantial recent investment in new Backscatter X-ray scanners to screen bodies at securitised border checkpoints. Promising to make the invisible visualisable, these devices project an image of a naked body onto a screen to identify concealed `risk'. Contemporary security practices which seek to fix identity at the border through biometrics, datamining, and profiling of which the `whole body scanner' is part have their genealogy in efforts in aesthetics and medical science to mine the body for certainties and reveal something of the unknown future. The scan is revealed as a simultaneous partitioning and projection, the body `digitally dissected' into its component parts, from which a specific, securitised visualisation is shaped. Drawing on the entangled histories of `body knowledge' in art, science, and anatomytheir techniques of abstraction and technologies of visualisationwe explore what light may be shed on the Backscatter scan and, more importantly, what ramifications this may have for a critical response. Challenges to the biometric border have tended to centre on surveillance, making appeals to privacy and bodily integrity. However, if border disclosures which `take apart' the body are more precisely understood as visualisations, then there are more fundamental issues than recourse to rights of privacy can counteract.

``Free of the prejudice of the infallibility of our senses and kept on continuous guard against the information they give, science searches for other means in the conquest of truth; it finds them in precision instruments ... . These devices penetrate the intimate functions of organs where life seems to exist in ceaseless motion.'' Etienne-Jules Marey (1878, page 382) ``The Rapiscan Secure 1000 is the most effective people screening solution available. The system produces high resolution images that enable the operator to easily identify concealed threat.'' Rapiscan Systems (2006, page 1) Introduction: backscattered bodies In 2005 the UK Home Office and the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) began trials of new X-ray devices for the screening of bodies at border checkpoints. Rapiscan System's Backscatter scanners appeared in terminal 4 of London's Heathrow airport and in Phoenix's Sky Harbor airport, producing screened images of passenger's bodies as they passed through security checkpoints. In the TSA's budget statement to Congress in 2007, special mention was made of the substantial investment in `whole body imaging' or `backscatter X-ray', with a statement that ``the technology produces an image to identify contraband secreted on an individual without subjecting them to an invasive inspection'' (TSA, 2007). In October 2008 the TSA announced the expansion of body scanning at US airports (TSA, 2008), and in the same month the European Commission moved to allow for the widespread introduction of similar scanners in airports across the EU by 2010 (European Digital Rights, 2008). Ultimately proposed, then, for use in major airports across Europe and the US, as well as in the London Underground system in the form of millimetre-wave technology

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(The Times 2005, page 4), Backscatter scanners hold out the promise of imaging the unseen, penetrating the surface, and making visible that which is hidden from view, opening up new visualisations of the unknown, potentially risky body, as well as new perspectives on its management. Backscatter scanners utilise `Compton scattering', a phenomenon by which the momentum and wavelength of x-rays change when coming into contact with matter, with lower energy rays recoiling from a surface or scatter point. Named after its discoverer, Arthur Compton (who won a Nobel Prize in 1927 for his achievements), Compton scattering was a key milestone in 20th-century physics, helping to establish the particle nature of electromagnetic radiation (Nobel Lectures, 1965). In the Backscatter scanner, the low-energy, excess, `scattered' radiation is harnessed to produce an image of a person on a screen. In contrast to medical X-rays, the Backscatter does not penetrate the skin, but `sees through' layers of clothing, distinguishing organic from inorganic matter to display a naked form onto a screen, to be viewed by the scanning operative (see figures 1 and 2). The outline of body parts, body hair, and genitalia is clearly visible on the screenshown in the TSA's promotional video alongside a concealed ceramic knife and detonator.(1) In contemporary security practice, Backscatter is but one illustration of the drive to ``visibilize the invisible'' (Stafford, 1993, page 17), as the historians of art and the body put the problem, to probe beneath what is immediately available to an observer's senses. Far from the promised `whole body image', the Backscatter scan is actually a

Figure 1. [In colour online, see http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d1208] Backscatter X-ray scanner. Image reproduced with the permission of the Transportation Security Administration, Office of Privacy Policy and Compliance Research Centre; http://www.tsa.gov./research/privacy/backscatter.shtm.
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Full video available at http://www.tsa.gov/assets/mov/backscatter.wmv

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Figure 2. [In colour online.] An image produced by Backscatter. Image reproduced with the permission of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre; http://mail.privacy.org/privacy/airtravel/ backscatter/.

composite of dissected elements of a body, pixelated by X-rays which are ``received by high resolution detectors and passed to advanced image processing software'' (Rapiscan Systems, 2006), then reassembled. The resulting image resembles a shadowy negative imprint of body contours (see figure 3) which can then be abstracted into what the TSA refer to as `chalk lines', reminiscent of those at a crime scene. The image viewed by the screening operative at the border checkpoint, then, is not a `copy', but an abstraction and a recomposition of the dimensions and densities of the body. Broken apart in this way, the unknown `threat' is made knowable and amenable

Figure 3. The modified images which are shown to the Transportation Security Officer during the Backscatter process male and female front and back views. Images reproduced with the permission of the Transportation Security Administration, Office of Privacy Policy and Compliance Research Centre, http://www.tsa.gov/research/privacy/backscatter.shtm.

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to intervention: freight vehicles are X-rayed at ports for the (live or dead) bodies of illegal immigrants; cargo container shipments are screened for explosives; subway passengers for concealed improvised explosive devices; young children are imaged by millimetre-wave technology at Amsterdam's Schipol airport. Yet, this quest to make the concealed interiors and surfaces of the body known to the `outside' is not at all novel: it is, in fact, an intrinsic part of the conjoined histories of visualisations of the body in fine arts and the medical sciences. The genealogies of body knowledge reveal precisely an imaging and imagining of the body via excavation of its component parts. In the medical sciences, as well as in the arts, where anatomical knowledge has influenced what has appeared in the field of vision, knowledge of the human body dissected, dismembered, displayed for expert viewinghas been thought to reveal something of the human soul itself, making the most intimate aspects of human life and motivation transparent. If we are to understand the implications of the embracing, in contemporary security practice, of the possibility of absolute identifiability via the body, whether by biometrics, body scans, or by forensic approaches to personal data, we cannot ignore the complex histories of taking apart bodies and subjects in order to see them and to know them. As art historian Jonathan Crary (1992; 2001) has argued, the way that we pay attention to particular bodies, objects, or phenomena is not self-evident, but is specific to situated practices of observation. Crary locates a critical historical moment in the 19th century, when perception was relocated ``in the thickness of the human body'', thereby making it amenable to management, and offering human vision as ``a component of machinic arrangements'' (2001, page 13). Certainly, the relation between human bodies and human vision, and the machinic arrangements for their visualisation and deployment, has become critical to current manifestations of border controls. Thus, the biometrics of iris scans, for example, have become an assumed identity `anchor' in the human body, and a prerequisite for fast-track security. Rapiscan X-ray boothsplaced alongside Heathrow's terminal 4 fast-track `MiSense' iris scanners are similarly predicated on the mapping of digitally partitioned images of body parts as part of a drive to ``fix people's identities'' as the Home Office paper ``Securing the UK Border'' puts it (Home Office, 2007, paragraph 1.4). It is precisely the fraught nature of the penetrating disclosures that are required at the border in the name of security that forms the focus of our discussion in this paper. Public concerns about the implementation of Backscatter have revolved around the `privacy risks' involved.(2) The USA's Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC, 2005) argues that Backscatter scans are ``equivalent to a `virtual strip search' for all air travellers'', and that the machines show ``extraordinary disregard for the privacy rights'' of passengers. Because privacy has occupied the primary political ground, debates about body visualisations at the border have centred on the distanciation of the observer and observed: screeners and their monitors are placed in booths or adjacent buildings so they see only the digital simulacra and not ``the identity of the real person''; `cloaking' technology is used so that images of some body parts are `screened out'; and images are anonymised until a `risk' is identified (New York Times 2005).
(2) Currently, the TSA proposes the Backscatter scan as a voluntary alternative to a `pat down' search for those who have been selected for secondary screening. However, the American Civil Liberties Union claims that the scanner will, in fact, be used as a primary search for random selectees and people flagged by watchlists, and it questions the continuing `voluntary' basis of the scan (ACLU, 2008). In Schipol, Heathrow, and Luton airports, body screening is being framed as a quicker and more convenient alternative to queuing for traditional security checks. The European Commission has insisted that body screening will remain voluntary, but the European Parliament has raised concerns that the Commission's plans will introduce significant new norms into airport security procedures, and have called for greater consultation (The Times 2008).

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As the image of the `potentially risky' body is abstracted from the personwhether this is by prescreened images of an iris or face, or by the screening of `whole bodies' so, simultaneously, other visualisations of the person are deployed, from multiple and fragmented databased information. Long before a physical boundary is reached, forensic data mining dissects an individual's behaviours and associations apparently identifying `hidden intent' and `suspicious behaviour' (Amoore and de Goede, 2005; Ericson, 2007; Sparke, 2005). It is the people identified for secondary searches, primarily through the projections that are produced from the fragments of their data, who are considered worthy of a `closer look' and are singled out for Rapiscan screening. The drive of Backscatter to know the fleshy body by breaking down and reassembling its mass collapses into the broader visualisation of the subject at the border via forensic approaches to personal data. In this paper we make a case for understanding techniques such as Backscatter through the genealogies of visualising that which is `out of sight' in aesthetic and medical science practices. Motivated by a concern to highlight, in the burgeoning literatures on biometrics, the almost complete absence of reflection on the metric of the bio that is at work, we focus on situated histories of knowledge. First, we trace other historical moments when the body has become a locus of anxiety and a domain to be mined for certainties. Renaissance and Enlightenment anatomical dissections fostered a form of knowledge that sought to know by reducing a body to its component parts. Second, we turn to the technologies of visualisation that record and project the body. Drawing on the intertwined literatures of art history and history of science, we ask how it becomes possible to visualise bodies in particular ways. What is thought to be gained or revealed from an intimate knowledge of abstracted parts of a corporeal whole? At the heart of our arguments is the observation that dissection and visualising, partition and imaging, are inextricable aspects of the same process, a process through which knowledge of some `whole' (body, individual) is thought possible. In what follows, though we differentiate our discussion of dissection from visualisation for analytical clarity, it is precisely the conjoined nature of the practices of taking apart and making visible that we emphasise. In the final section we reflect on the critical response to the implications of contemporary forms of body knowledge. Much of the critique of contemporary biometric screening at borders has centred on power as surveillance ``the garnering of personal data for detailed analysis'' as David Lyon (2003, page 1) puts itand it is the appeal to privacy that has dominated the politics of response. We suggest that border disclosures which `take apart' the body exceed surveillance and signal more precisely a visualisation or a particular visual knowledge of the body and subject. A critical response to the digitised dissection of bodies at borders which highlights its discriminatory potential, and which makes recourse to rights to privacy, rightly targets its deleterious potential effects, but threatens to leave its tendencies and assumptions intact. Just as the 18th-century physiognomists saw the workings of the human body to be secondary to a deeper knowledge of human essence and soul, so the contemporary security drive for body knowledge is motivated only superficially by the search for concealed weapons or contraband, and more profoundly by a desire to pierce the coverings of dress, status, or feigned identity in order to reveal something of the unknown future hidden within. Partitioning the world Backscatter, then, involves the systematic reduction of the body into its identifying traces, from which new composite projections can be made a form of what we term `digitised dissection'. Historically, dissection has made knowledge of the body and its

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interiority possible, implying a neutral practice of partitioning for inspection, but also the violent dismemberment of flesh. Jonathan Sawday (1995) traces a burgeoning fascination with anatomy to the European Renaissance, when writers, thinkers, and artists became entangled in what he calls a `culture of dissection'. `Artistic' and `medical' visualisations of the body were inseparable in 16th-century centres of Renaissance learning: anatomy was a required subject for artists, and lifelike wax and wooden sculptures of dissected bodies were displayed to the public (Benthien, 2002, page 45). Dissections in this era were important public events, sometimes lasting days, and the motifs of anatomy and flaying featured frequently in art, theatre, literature, and popular culture. This `culture of dissection' contained the beginnings of what would later become scientific rational enquiry, a particular way of understanding the world. Yet it also held within it a dark enthralment with bodily surfaces, depths, and interiors which later claims to objectivity and learning (with the 17th-century triumph of `science' in its modern sense) could not fully mask (Sawday, 1995, page 5). Illustrations of dissections from the 16th century show bodies happily participating in their own dissection, flaying their own skin to reveal their bodily interior. This ``willing self-presentation'' (Benthien, 2002, page 64) has been linked to the Calvinist doctrines of rigorous self-examination and exposure (Sawday, 1995, pages 110 ^ 111). This glad participation in disclosure mirrors contemporary `confessional' demands within border and visa regimes, where travellers are expected to reveal and `flay' their histories, identities, associations, and bodies to knowing expert eyes in the name of `safety' (Salter, 2006, page 181). The partitioning of the body in Renaissance anatomy theatres was allied to a broader partitioning of the world to gather knowledge: unpeeling the skin to reveal somatic secrets was an attempt to divine, demonstrate, and publicly reassert the social and moral order (Sawday, 1995, page 75).(3) Celebrated anatomists of the day, such as Andreas Vesalius, championed distinct and lasting ways of viewing the body, and also the world; removing the skin and naming what lay beneath was a revolutionary new way of `seeing' the body as layers and systems (Benthien, 2002, page 45; Cregan, 2007, pages 49, 54). Claudia Benthien argues that we still operate with the belief that ``knowledge of what is essential means breaking through shells and walls in order to reach the core that lies in the innermost depths'' (2002, page 7). Bodily dissection and the systems of knowledge it produces are always connected to the way in which this knowledge is inscribed. Early dissection practices evolved alongside the development of mechanical printing: the body's bloody density had to be made intelligible and communicable via conventions of representation that were shaped by the flat spatiality of the anatomical atlas, through which knowledge was disseminated (Waldby, 2000, page 91). Furthermore, explorations of the body mirrored the contemporary exploration of new territories. In a discussion of anatomy practices in Elizabethan England, Kate Cregan (2007, page 49) argues that dissection of the body was related to the emerging science of cartography; anatomisation and territorialisation were both practices of `unification and disintegration', and the violent, yet creative, conquering and mapping of territory was mirrored in the violent and creative abstraction and rebordering of the body and its systems within anatomic practices.
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Waldby (2000), Sawday (1995), and Cregan (2007) all note the historical links between medical knowledge, and penal and sovereign power. Between the 15th century and the 19th century dissections were traditionally performed on criminals, as extensions of their punishment. The demise of this widespread practice is part of the reconfiguration of the relationship between power, punishment, and spectacle described by Foucault (1977). Waldby (2000) notes, however, that the relation of anatomy to penal punishment continues: the subject whose body was frozen, sliced up, and scanned to produce the world's first three-dimensional, `virtual' anatomical `atlas' was a convicted and executed murderer.

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Anatomy, then, has always been a potentially violent `writing practice' through which flesh is disintegrated to extract knowledge and to generate ``reproducible and communicable traces''; contemporary digitisation and `virtualisation' of dissection continue this trend by writing flesh as digital code (Waldby, 2000, pages 89, 94). In this way, Backscatter is a specific, securitised medium through which flesh is made comprehensible, reforming a digitised whole from residue, recomposing a sense of solidity from calibrations of planes, crevices, and boundaries. This process retains partition and extraction at its core. In an age of bytes, pixels, and codes, dissection remains an inherently violent practice of translation that knows by `tearing apart' (Stafford, 1993, page 38). If the Renaissance response to bodily interiors was one of awe at the mapping of an unknown territory, then the confident burgeoning rationalist paradigms of 18thcentury Enlightenment art and science understood dissection more broadly as a paradigm ``for any forced, artful, contrived, and violent study of depths'' (Stafford, 1993, page 47). As `life' became the object of epistemological conquest in models of science and governance within biopolitics (Foucault, 2000, page 73), the body came to be imagined as a machine. This distinctly modern ``anatomical body'' (van der Ploeg, 2003, page 65) in turn became the subject of an intense and studied calibration and measurement (Sawday, 1995, page 32). Dissection was now not only a surgical probing, but a ``searching operation performed on a recalcitrant substance'', capturing perfectly the Enlightenment preoccupation with ``decoding, dividing, separating, analysing, fathoming'' bodies, beliefs, and ideas in order to attack ``the duplicity of the world'' (Stafford, 1993, page 47). All deceptive appearances could be brought to truth under methodical and meticulous analysis. Mathematical certainties and simplicity were sought in all areas of social, moral, artistic, and cultural life (Stafford, 1991, page 468), and the yearning for quantification and standardisation created new possibilities for calibrations of human physicality, behaviour, and interaction. It was an era obsessed by ``stripping away of excess by decomposition and fragmentation for the purposes of control'' (Stafford, 1993, page 47). More than anything else, it seems to have been a ``human yearning for rigidity'' and the ``longing for hard lines and clear concepts'' (Douglas, 1966, page 162) which absorbed Enlightenment rationalists in their endeavours to divide, classify, and categorise the world, its anomalies and regularities (Daston and Park, 1998; Park and Daston, 1981). These endeavours were bound up in an effort to secure a social and moral order. The era's ``fearful disdain of mixtures'' (Stafford, 1993, page 211) was the very product of the burgeoning ``habit of purity'' (Bowker and Leigh Star, 1999, page 300). It is, after all, in efforts to order the world that the anomalythe barbaric, the monstrous, the `incorrect'takes shape and gains meaning. Anatomy now sought to ``simplify, abstract, isolate and detach segments of the body in order to calculate incongruity'' (Stafford, 1991, page 116), leading to new taxonomies and interpretations of the human body. In the 18th-century science of physiognomy, epitomised in the work of Johann Lavater, was found a systematic attempt to `read' and categorise character and intent from the calculable features of the human anatomy (Stafford, 1993, page 107). This endeavour would be further developed in the phrenology of Josef Gall, whereby intellectual capacities could be discerned through the shape of the skull (Colbert, 1997, page xi). Stafford (1993, pages 103, 112) characterises these as `` `sciences' of the contingent'' and demonstrates the way in which efforts to locate in the planes of the body and face the `ideal' aesthetic measurements of national types (evidenced in the late-18th-century anatomical drawings of Pierre Camper) soon became entangled with efforts to compare the human body and to link anatomy with intelligence.

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The flesh `taken apart' by dissection has always been thought to hold the secret authority for moral, political, and social order and ways of classifying bodies. Thomas Laqueur (1990), for example, shows clearly how Renaissance anatomists were able to extract evidence from dissections to support the prevalent idea that female genitalia were inversions of male sex organs: bodily disclosures were made meaningful within existing regimes of knowledge. The Renaissance era saw little tendency to organise difference according to `race' (Hodgen, 1964); human diversity was largely made meaningful by delineations of religion and notions of civility (see Traub, 2000). Yet the Enlightenment science of anatomy sought more and more to find the hierarchies of an expanding empire within the variation of human bodies, and to encode them within categorisations of `race'. By the end of the 19th century, comparative anatomy had became a distinct discipline, championed by anatomists such as Georges Cuvier (Augstein, 1999, page 61) and the later physical anthropology of James Prichard (see Stocking, 1968). By the middle of the 19th century, Robert Knox's racial science had gained widespread scientific and popular influence, locating as it did immutable difference and biological determinism in the hierarchically ordered ``races of mankind'' (Stepan, 1982, pages 45 ^ 46). The efforts expended to distinguish and distance the ``Other'' within imperial discourse were multiple, forming a discourse of cultural knowledge through which different bodies were made knowable, as Edward Said (1978; 1993) has shown; anatomical knowledge was core to this location of difference. Renaissance and Enlightenment dissections and mappings of the body, then, reveal a set of violences, tensions, and racial categorisations which may be reconfigured within new technological interventions and epistemological frameworks, but which are never resolved. The mobilisation of digital dissection within contemporary security regimes continues the interplay between the desire for more refined partition and the conviction that, if only the somatic secret could be penetrated, certainty would be revealed. Sophisticated virtual imaging techniques that do not touch the body appear to realise the cultural ideal of full transparency of body and motive, a key ideal in security practice. Yet the apparently unmediated images of bodily interiors and surfaces flickering across our screens hides the simultaneous partitioning and projection which these images involve; far from being unmediated, these projections are reconstitutions, or reintegrations of parts. The abstraction and calculation of the body have, as the above history demonstrates, always been concerned with locating the `whole' within culturally mediated grids and taxonomies of difference, risk, and pathology. Just as the ontology of the informatised body is shifting contemporary understandings of physical integrity, personhood, health, and risk (Novas and Rose, 2000; van der Ploeg, 2003), so it is the intertwining of security practices with new understandings of the bodyno longer machine, or territory, but digitised information to be `read'that critical challenges must grapple with. The promise to build `anonymity' into technologies such as Rapiscan, in order to `protect privacy', does not address the violence involved in uncovering, breaking down, and writing the body into digital form. The body does not remain `untainted' (van Dijck, 2005, page 8) by being exposed, even if the data collection leaves its surfaces intact, and if `data', `body', and `identity' remain separated until risk is flagged by the scanners. As the director of EPIC puts the problem: ``what is at stake when prosthetic limbs, a prosthetic breast, scars from burns or an accidentwhen these are seen? Is this a question of human dignity?'' (4) The entanglement of bodily imaging and biometric probing with border security must advance with an acknowledgement that there are fundamental tensions involved when
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Interview with Marc Rothenberg, Director of EPIC, Washington, DC, 30 October 2007.

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we gaze upon the body's surface and its partitioned aspects. The `nakedness' produced from technological penetrations of bodily coverings at borders uncovers ``the defenceless being in its most elemental form'' (Benthien, 2002, page 99). Technologies which appear to leave the body surfaces intact may reduce the traditional associations with violence and spectacle, yet the spectacle simply mutates. Contemporary political terror, Allen Feldman (2004, page 347) argues, has a dual face: a visual fixation with `vivisectionist' violence evidenced in places like Abu Ghraib, combined with a contrasting ``unlimited capacity to technically sanitise the violent act''. Victims of this violence are either ``dismembered and somatically opened to history'' or else wholly erased, defaced of identity. Feldman reminds us that the process of rendering visible and capturing that visibility is never wholly separate from the desire to master, or humiliate, or make vulnerable. Backscatter, then, is a form of technological vivisection, a digitised dismembering, through which bodies are ``somatically opened'' and subjects erased simultaneously; the person is reduced to a transparency, like baggage, evacuated of vitality and materiality (Parks, 2007, page 194). Put simply, dissections have always ambivalently combined seduction with revulsion, violence with the promise of safety; and these aporia continue to haunt contemporary digitised dissections. Imaging the unseen If knowledge of the body has been assumed to reside inside, in an interior to be excavated and projected to the outside, then it is visual practices that have made this possible. ``How'', asks W J T Mitchell, ``did the visual acquire its status as the sovereign sense?'' (2005, page 265). There is little doubt, at least for theorists of visual culture, that, despite the inherent tactility of vision, it is visuality that has come to be represented as ``the most superior, most reliable'' of the senses (Bal, 2003, page 13). Thus, in ``eyewitness accounts'', in diagrammatic records, in the photographs that accompany text, it is the visual record that is regarded as objective and dispassionate, embodying an `inherent credibility' (Jay, 2002, page 269). Indeed, so potent is the historical visualisation of the world that, as James Elkins argues, there is a case for seeing the history of the visual as the history of imagingincluding graphs, charts, maps, notations, plans, scientific images of all sortsrather than the history of art per se (2001, page 4). Understood in this way, it is not only the images of bodies produced by scanning and screening practices that are part of the visual culture of contemporary security, but also the risk charts, screened algorithmic calculations, and integrated data diagrams that also participate in the visualisation of risky bodies by other means. Within a technology such as Backscatter resides a history of taking the body apart, but also of imaging the body which extends into multiple techniques of visualisation the recomposition of the scattered rays to produce a particular appearance of a solid body is just one graphical representation among many. The dominance of visualisation technologies in knowledges of the body is, at least in part, explained by the reification of the visual as a site of dispassionate and concentrated observation, apparently the least vulnerable of all sensory artefacts to ``subjective intrusion'' (Daston and Galison, 1992, page 82). Citing John Madden's 1958 Atlas of Technics in Surgery, for example, Peter Galison suggests the elision of surgical and artistic anatomical realism: ``Only those operations that were witnessed by the medical artist are depicted'' (1998, page 346). Only when the expert eye of an observer was present, could the technical procedures of medicine be accurately imaged and recorded. There is, however, a problematic history associated with the concepts of `objective' and `expert'. Behind historical drives to develop optical and visualising instruments was a preoccupation with removing the subjective interventions of the

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``meddling, weary observer'' in artistic representations for science (Daston and Galison, 1992, page 83). The Enlightenment anatomist's proclamation that an unimpeded view could uncover the truth was tempered by a mistrust of vision, which became subject to a ``vehement disproval of sensory ambush, fiction, and untruth'' (Stafford, 1993, page 366). The ``congenital sensory frailty'' of humankind (Stafford, 1993, pages 1 ^ 2) has required constant amendment by optical machines, instruments, and technologiesinnovations which have proliferated since the 18th century, each promising greater clarity and unmediated access. The struggle to get at the `hidden' picture encapsulated in Enlightenment visualisation techniques was not considered at the time to be a matter of `objectivity': this term only emerged in the 19th century. Rather, a `true' depiction of an object involved artistic and scientific intervention by a natural philosopher, ``whose genius vouchsafed the validity of the move to idealise and correct the unreliable appearance of the given'' (Galison, 1998, page 328). It was the mechanically produced images of the 19th century which brought the idealised notion of an `objective' image, where human interpretation was removed by rigorous self-discipline (Galison, 1998, page 329). Later, within 20th-century scientific discourse, the judgement and interpretative ability of the trained expert gained precedence; a specialist's ``practiced'' eye could gaze upon and interpret representations to ``perceive patterns where the novice saw nothing'' (Galison, 1998, page 337). It is precisely the productiveness of images, and their relationship to the `expert eye', that are bound together in the contemporary `reading' of border scans. The growing corpus of security professionals are key players in the government of mobility at the border and in technologies, not least where images such as those in Backscatter appeal to the expert eye. In contemporary homeland security practices, then, there is a reliance on technologised visualisations to augment and exceed human vision and to decipher the indisputable `electronic footprint' that people are believed to leave behind (de Goede, 2003). The use of Backscatter insists that the most faithful facsimile of the image of a person is to be found in X-rays scattered to produce a shadowy image or likeness of a body. This insistence finds parallels in the physiognomy of Lavater, which sought to detect ``hidden causes legible only by specialized interpreters'' through medical diagnostics that scrutinized people's appearance (Stafford, 1991, page 84). Lavater's expert reading of his subjects' silhouettes sought to probe ``their every passion, the seat of its residence, the source from which it flows, its root, the fund which supplies it''; by ``piercing through [all] coverings into his real character'' to visualise the ``foreign and contingent'' aspects of a person, he sought to ``discover solid and fixed principles by which to settle what the Man really is'' (Lavater, 1792, cited in Stafford, 1993, page 95). Note also, then, the appeal to visualising true character and behaviour, made by US Secretary for Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, more than 200 years later: ``We use this data to focus on behaviour ... . It allows us to move beyond crude profiling based on prejudice, and look at conduct and communication and actual behaviour as a way of determining who we need to take a closer look at'' (Chertoff, 2007). Like the physiognomist's silhouette, the 21st-century data shadow, expertly read, is thought to reveal the most hidden recesses of a person. In Chertoff 's speech on the use of airline passenger name records (PNRs), the data are offered as a means of visualising a person long before an actual physical border is reached. Forensic approaches to data mining in the war on terror are offered as a means of looking inside a hidden domain, prising a person apart in order to examine component bits and bytes of data which feed into wider screening, profiling, or identification calibrations. The aim is to conjure an image that can form the focus of our `vigilant visuality' (Amoore, 2007).

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Contemporary security projects of visualising risk and anomaly bear a striking similarity to previous attempts to locate deviance in bodies. Francis Galton's attempts in the 19th century to produce a physical `type' for identifying criminality and degeneracy involved the overlaying of multiple exposed photographs of criminals. This allowed a ``composite portrait'' to emerge, one which removed all need for fallible human judgement by utilising mechanised abstracting procedures: ``Murderers or violent robbers could ... be brought into focus so that the archetypal killer could appear before our eyes'' (Daston and Galison, 1992, page 103). The anthropometrics and criminal anthropology of Galton, and others such as Cesare Lombroso, appealed directly to the contemporary belief that hereditary degeneracy threatened the very basis of social orderideas which would crystallise in the eugenics movement (Pick, 1989). The effort to visualise deviant tendencies from abstracted bodies and to locate identifiability in the body's specificity led to the fingerprint identification method (pioneered by Galton) and the science of biometrics. The new digital abstractions at the border also generate `composite' projections, visualisations of risk which speak to the contemporary absorption with `the war on terror', but which resonate with previous projects. As new ways of visualising and knowing bodies become possible, so the credibility of older visualisations is shaken and altered. The 19th-century discovery of X-rays, for example, did not merely advance medical technologies of seeing and diagnosing: X-rays also challenged the credibility of subjective senses (sight, touch, hearing) in medical `imaginations of the interior body', shifting the gaze of the observer to one that externalises what is internal (van Dijck, 2005, page 5). The capacity of the medical practitioner's touchto take a pulse, measure a foetus, detect feverwas displaced by a new and dominant scopic regime. Contemporary drives to eliminate tactility in the observation of the body have similarly abstracted the visual from its relation with the other senses. ``On closer inspection'', writes Mitchell, ``all the so-called visual media turn out to involve the other senses, especially touch and hearing'' (2005, page 257). Visualisations cannot avoid their entanglements with other sensory practices. And yet, it is also clear that through the scopic regimes of modernism ``touch has been eliminated'' (Stafford, 1993, page 131): ``we are prohibited from touching'' (Mitchell, 2005, page 260); and ``the tactility of visuality is denied'' (Elkins, 2002, page 95). As all sensory data are folded into the visual, and thus become subject to the regimes of visuality, touch itself drops out of the possibility of knowing `other' bodies. Indeed, the Backscatter is offered commercially as ``hands off screening'', somehow distinct from an ``invasive pat-down search'' (Rapiscan Systems, 2006; TSA, 2007). Like the X-ray before it, Backscatter brings to the fore questions about bodily boundaries, between what is `public' and what is `private'. Early 19th-century X-ray technologies were believed to be able to visualise the ``secrets of the heart'' (van Dijck, 2005, page 93) and were associated with erotic revelation, as the (male) gaze penetrated (female) clothing and skin (see Cartwright, 1995). Similarly, discussions of Backscatter in the mainstream popular press have focused on its transgressive, titillating potential: it was described in the Daily Mail as ``a disturbing new screening system with the amazing and unsettling ability to strip the human body and reveal its most intimate curves'' (2006). More importantly, as the prohibition of touch further positions the visual realm as that of the distanciated observer the screener in the separate building; the closedcircuit television (CCTV) image read by algorithmic technology; the data-led decision on the border guard's screen so also, ultimately, the observer falls away, to be replaced by a calculation. In his account of 19th-century physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey's mechanically produced images of body movements, Joel Snyder insists on a

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careful reading of what happens when human sensory observations and illustrations are supplanted by mechanical monitors. Discussing Marey's sphygmograph (pulse writerdesigned to replace the conventional means of taking a pulse by touch) and in a critique of other accounts of scientific images of the body (cf Daston and Galison, 1992), Snyder does not see the sphygmograph replacing what was previously available only to the subjective human senses. Instead, he suggests that ``the displacements registered by mechanical monitors and traced by clockwork-driven inscribers fall outside the scope of human sensibility.'' ``Consequently'', he argues, ``they do not permit even the possibility of human intervention'' (1998, page 380). If Snyder is correct, then the implications for our argument here are considerable. If imaging machines now translate ``information that is simply not of the order of the visible'' into readable form (Richardson and Harper, 2006, page 7), and when the face-to-face visual profiling of people is apparently replaced by technological monitors, is the picture that is produced actually outside the scope of human intervention? Could it be, as Snyder suggests, that the move is to ``eliminate reliance on observational schemes that were incapable of resolving the details of swift displacements'' (1998, page 387). The scientific visualisation of the body, then, does not simply perform the objectivity of a distanciated eye but, perhaps more significantly, makes possible new ways of seeing which are not otherwise available. Technical optical enhancement does not simply make visible that which is normally invisible, but (through graphics of data readings) conjures ``that which would never be available to vision'' (Richardson and Harper, 2006, page 1). In the case of border scans, it is not that the observer or screener is removed to a remote booth, but that his or her very decision is replaced with a calculation already visualised. If this is the case, then contemporary visualisations of the body at the border propose a resolution that is both profoundly political and deeply depoliticising. They operate on and through dissected and finitely differentiated categories of people, and yet they never confront the political difficulties of that which cannot be seen or resolved. Instead they ``bring us into a domain we cannot see'' and they ``authorize us to make claims about what we see'' (Snyder, 1998, page 395). Just as the Backscatter deploys the residue or excess that is left over in a processquite literally that which is `scattered back'so visualisations of the body at the border, placed alongside other data traces and risk profiles, seek to capture that which exceeds the practice of looking itself. The histories of scientific illustration are replete with examples of techniques deployed to make visible, and to record, that which would otherwise be invisible. The practice of representing together multiple angles, planes, and perspectives of a single physical entitythe `assemblage' visual method appeared to produce new knowledge from the component elements. The `exploded view' of an architectural plan, an assemblage view of an organic structure in a botanical illustration, or engineering diagrams, offers ``attenuated lines'' and ``distant viewpoints'' (Elkins, 2001, page 18). These assemblage images of science of scattered and dissected component studies with careful measurements, weights, dimensions, and angles which are drawn into associationgive the appearance of a whole that can be viewed from all perspectives. Elkins, writing on the `geometricisation' of the scientific imaging of minerals, however, reminds us that these are not multiple perspectives on a single whole, but precisely projections of something that would not otherwise be seen. ``Projection subverts the viewer's capacity to understand [the] drawings as representations of three-dimensional objects'', writes Elkins, ``because it flattens and distorts forms without seeming to do so.'' What may seem like enhanced perspectives familiar, solid, life-like even are for Elkins ``unexpectedly compressed'', requiring ``mental expansion to correspond with our anticipations of perspectival convention'' (2001, page 21). Thus, the historical

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problem of translating the solid spatiality of bodily flesh onto the two-dimensional pages of the anatomical atlas is apparently overcome in the contemporary formby the virtualised, screened, and projected reconstructions of bodies. The pictorial scientific assemblage, then, as in Jacques Deleuze and Fe lix Guattari's assemblage, `holds together' multiple heterogeneous elements as though they were associated (1987, page 357). In order to be seen as a whole body, the images need to be `projected' and expanded, losing their perspective in the process. This visualisation of the invisible whole took on new dimensions with early 20th-century cinematic screening techniques. Cinematic projection is produced from fragments of visual data, individually isolated elements that are selected, differentiated, and reintegrated into a visual whole (Kittler, 1997). As in the scientific assemblages, gaps in perspective exist between the isolated fragments. These gaps are filled, though, with the projections of the observer, giving the impression of a seamless whole. A projected body, then, is effectively inferred from abstracted, partitioned, and compressed components. Joseph Pugliese (2006) argues that the space created by the ``retina lag'', as the eye apprehends these compressed fragments, is intensely political, possibly subject to ``a racially inflected regime of visuality [which] inscribes the physiology of perception'', producing a ``persistence of vision'' which results in misrecognitions of many kinds migrant workers for `terrorists'; friends and neighbours for `known associates'; Islamic youth groups for `training camps'. As Donna Haraway (1991, page 190) argues, all eyes, including technologically enhanced devices, are ``active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of seeing''; there are no unmediated images, only ``highly specific visual possibilities''. It is precisely the visualisation via dissection and projection, we suggest, that characterises the contemporary treatment of the body at the border. The combined scientific assemblage of component parts data, electronic fingerprints, iris scans, automated risk scores, pixilated body images and the screened projection of the resulting whole, appears to render the individual transparent to the external gaze. The US Air Transport Association's translucent `Clear Card', for example, as well as the UK's `Fast Track' glass screens within Heathrow's terminals, both represent the unimpeded vistas of the prescreened and transparent `trusted traveller': an apparently clear view that is afforded by integrated computer databases and biometric identification. ``The computer screen'', writes Anne Friedberg, ``is both a page and a window, at once opaque and transparent''. The multiple layers or ``windows'' of software appear to ``transform the screen surface into a page with a deep virtual reach to archives and databases, indexed and accessible with barely the stroke of a finger'' (2006, page 19). Understood in this way, the digitised and dissected fragments of a person that are produced, layer upon layer, via the windows of data images, scanned X-rays, screened profiles of past behaviour and transactions, give an illusion of seeing the depths of a whole person `without racial prejudice' (Chertoff, 2007). Like 19th-century scientific assemblages, the atomised elements are stretched, compressed, and reduced in order to project a whole that could not otherwise be seen. Abstracted pieces of a person are taken apart, drawn into association, and displayed together on the border guard's screen; inside databases to be stored for forty years; within algorithmic calculations of a person's `risk score' as though they could only ever belong together. The secret and the private What, then, are the implications of reading the contemporary technologised visualisations of the body at the border in light of the genealogy of corporeal dissection and imaging we have presented? What is at stake in framing digitised bodily disclosures as matters best addressed by recourse to `rights' and `privacy', as current critical

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challenges seek to do? The genealogy we have traced reveals contemporary somatic probing and visualisation at the border to be part of a longer history of `body knowledge'as a territory to be mapped, a container for unknown motives and secrets, a canvas from which character can be discerned. More specifically, the body has revealed itself as an entity from which order, certainty, and essence can be extracted, so long as the gaze is `objective', `expert', or `unimpeded'. We draw out here three key consequences of the arguments we have made. First, management of risk in the contemporary `war on terror', through excavations and dissections at the border, involves bodily (re)bordering processes, processes which threaten to slip away from contemporary political debate. We have shown that the history of dissecting and dividing the body is a history of boundaries, excavations, abstractions, and reborderings which seek to conceptualise and visualise a `whole' and so demarcate what is understood to belong to the self and what can be scrutinised `in public'. Thus, the debates about privacy and rights within screening and imaging practices reinvigorate the Western, modern view of an individual as sovereign possessor of selfhood, clearly embodied, and whose freedom comes from ownership of his or her person and capacities (Macpherson, 1962, page 3). It is from this distinctly Western and modern concept of personhood that terms such as `dignity', `privacy', `autonomy', `self-determination', and `freedom' make sense. Privacy, then, hinges on the idea that there is a sphere ``not of concern to others'', the invasion of which strikes at a person's autonomy (Lukes, 1973, pages 66, 133). The idea of `dignity' (often cited in rights-based critiques of scanning and screening technologies) is related to this idea of a private, autonomous self, but also to a more nebulous concept of human worth that exceeds any attempt at division or differentiation. According to Martha Nussbaum's neo-Stoic perspective (2001, page 359), this worth, at heart, asserts that all humans are fundamentally equalby virtue of their capacity for reason and should thus be treated with respectan acknowledgement of that equality. The stripping, exposure, and `writing' of a body involves violence, as we have seen, but also a reduction of the person. Previously unimaginable political interventions become possible with the reduction of people to `bare life' (Agamben, 1995), naked in real or metaphorical terms. Thus the demands for ever-more-penetrating bodily disclosures at borders strike at the heart of dignity in a way that is hard to pin down in debates about `acceptable' intrusions of privacy, or the use of data. Border scans bring into focus the collection of data as well as its subsequent use and circulation. The political contestation of bodily screening and visualising draws on conceptualisations of the private self which trace a `self-evident' boundary around the body, intrusion into which threatens `integrity' (van der Ploeg, 2003). Many of the privacy-based challenges to body-security interventions focus on the intrusiveness of gathering body data, where intrusiveness is related to the piercing of bodily boundaries or exploring bodily orifices. Irma van der Ploeg (2003, page 67) argues that running through these debates is ``a particular ontology dichotomy'' whereby ``integrity'' applies to the fleshy physical entity and ``informational privacy'' is presumed to cover all digital representations. In an era of informatised bodies, however, the distinction between materiality and representation is less distinct. DNA information, for example, is not a representation, but a trace of `body-as-data' from which a detailed profile could be generated. Technology, then, alters ``the boundary, not just between what is public and private information but ... between what is inside and what is outside the human body'' (van der Ploeg, 2003, pages 58, 70 ^ 71). Our delineation of the history of visualisation and dissection has revealed that the practices of corporeal dissection have intertwined with, and even facilitated, the emergence of the concept of the whole, distinct, and separate body and self to which `privacy' might relate; abstracted conceptualisations of

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whole bodies were made possible only through their disintegration. Just as art and science cannot be separated in early anatomy, so the histories of the partitioned body and the unified body are conjoined. The `scattered', digitised images of contemporary securitisation practices conjure a body that is no longer bounded fully by skin, but which is intimately intertwined with information systems. Backscatter is part of the proliferating visual practices through which risk is `stabilised' by technological enhancement (Feldman, 2005, page 204). We have argued that what is at issue in the visualisation of the `risky' subject is not only the potentially discriminatory `sifting' of mobilities, life chances, and possibilities at the border (Dodge and Kitchin, 2005; Graham, 2005; Lyon, 2003). Instead, we have argued for attention to be paid to the violent tendencies of these technologies, which emerge from the processes of abstraction and disintegration, and the effacement of personhood. When every passenger is reduced to ``a holographic composite ... of gestures, data and algorithms'' (Feldman, 2004, page 340), it is the normalisation of demands at the border (to unveil, confess, flay, expose) that forms part of the violence of the border scan. Second, the appeal to protect the individual's rights to privacy takes the body to be a sovereign territory that can be secured. In this specific sense, paradoxically it mirrors the homeland security state's claim to the right to conceal, and to draw exceptions in order to secure and to protect. And so, as philosopher of law Costas Douzinas reminds us, there is a difficulty for ``critical academics'' in ``reconciling their occasionally scathing theoretical critique of rights'' with the practice of ``radical lawyers who mobilize rights discourse to protect the underprivileged and oppressed'' (2002, page 380). There can be little doubt that some of the most significant political challenges to contemporary treatments of the body at borders are coming from critical lawyers, many of whom represent those people most subjected to racism, prejudice, and violence at the border (cf Hosein, 2007; Rotenberg 2003; 2007). For Douzinas, one possible critical route into this problem is to consider the appeal to rights of many kindsprivacy, bodily integrity, a private family life, freedom of expression to be one specific struggle for recognition, a legal claim to human identity. Because the liberal rights tradition, though, recognizes the `Man' in human rights only by abstractionand often collapses `man' with `citizen' (Arendt, 1958)the legal contestations we see tend to reproduce precisely the reduction that we have argued exists in digitised dissections at the border. Put simply, the abstractions that are made in the defence of people's rights to privacy, just as in the digitised imaging of the body, risk recognising only a facsimile of a person. The reduction of a person to their rights recognises, as Douzinas puts it, only ``a nonsubstantial, a thin personality, a public image that seriously mis-matches people's self-image'' (2002, page 397). This leaves people, as one of us has argued elsewhere, contesting the identification that is made of them, both in law and in security practice (Amoore, 2006). The demand for recognition cannot be substantially satisfied by a mode of privacy which stops at the surface of the skin, seeking coverings, veilings, legal entitlements, and ownership of personal data. As we have argued, the territory of the body is differently visualised over time, never residing strictly at the surface or the skin. Now, we are seeing a pervasive enmeshing of the body's interior and exterior, the spiralling out of images of the inside, and the incorporation of digitised images, data-based risk profiles, and biometric markers, as though these could make visible a `whole body'. What does the right to privacy or bodily integrity imply in this context? If the contestation of new border security techniques becomes a battle over the body's territory, we suggest that there is profound uncertainty as to what the limits of that territory may be, how it is bounded and enclosed. As the boundaries of the body and its multiple interiors become entwined with data profile images, risk scores,

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and other visualisations, can we meaningfully delineate the literal stripping down of the body in Backscatter techniques from the raw dissected data images that are stored alongside and used to identify invisible threats? Held together in an assemblage, as though they could only ever belong together, the pixelated fragments of the Backscatter image provide another layer for the ever-hungry integrated borders databases. Certainly the `nakedness' of the stripped-down man in the `rights of man' (Douzinas, 2002, page 398) is not politicized by the continual redrawing of a legal boundary. It is this redrawing that runs through most of the current appeals to privacy: ``the infringement on privacy must be proportionate to the security threat''; ``the collection and use of personal data must be transparent''; ``subjects must be informed if they are on a no-fly list''.(5) It is appeals of this kind that occupy what Jodi Dean has called ``counterpublics'' who become involved in ``an excessive sub-dividing that repeats the problems of boundary-drawing'' (2003, page 373). In contrast to a redrawing of lines, what is needed is a denser and more complex sense of privacyone that is capable of living with the political, the very difficulty and irresolvability of the problem of recognition, and one that interrogates the very drawing of the line itself. Finally, the contemporary visualization of the body at the border is not primarily one of surveillance, but of projection. As we have shown, the image is one that is projected forward in time, seeking to capture something or someone as yet invisible and unknown. As we have argued, and in contrast to the idea of the subject completely and wholly surveilled, it is well established in the literatures on imaging in the arts and sciences that projections rely upon the gaps in an apparent whole gaps that can never be recovered. Put simply, it is a series of misrecognitions that make it possible to claim singularly to have identified a person. If this is the case, then there is a fundamental problem for those who would challenge by demanding access to some kind of full picture. The gaps which are integral to the projected visualisation of a person the absolutely unrecoverable gapsare everywhere sought by those who would challenge: `this person is misidentified as a risk'; `we have the right to access the data that is held on us and to seek redress where it is inaccurate'; `access to the full picture of a person should be restricted to named agencies'. These are impossible claims because, although their authority is founded on individual rights, the subject of the projected body is a facsimile, an image, a digitised doppelganger. The demand that the body give up its secrets, that all must be `flayed' and disclosed at the confessional border (Salter, 2007), can never be politically unsettled by a mirror demand that the authorities disclose what they have seen. In many ways, disclosure is working on both sides of the relation the homeland security state seeking a means to make the invisible visualisable, and those who deploy privacy rights demanding access to, and protection from that which is seen. If the counterappeal to disclose the making of the projected body, then, fails to politicize the question of digitised dissections, what precisely would need to be contested? A reading of Douzinas would suggest that it is with the very misrecognitions, the ``projected false, inferior and defective images of self ''both within liberal legal traditions and, in our terms, in the identity-voracious security state that we should begin (2002, page 383). Inside the reductive claims to bodily integrity and personal privacy, Douzinas suggests that there is an occluded `real me', a complex and contradictory subject, whose actual experiences of violence and degradation are exceeded, and yet never fully recognised, by an abstract legal principle. The juridical claim to right of privacy contains a quite unique paradox. It makes a public demand for recognition from others, and yet it renders these private and retreats from the difficulties and
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Findings of the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party of the European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, Brussels, 26 March 2007.

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entanglements of politics in face of the other. A more complex and embodied sense of privacy, rather than incorporating difference into universal entitlement, would need to confront exactly the intractable difficulty of recognition of the other and by the other. Thus, for example, the question of what to do with the `noncitizen' who cannot appeal to the nationally framed privacy laws forever circles the juridical debate. A more nuanced sense of privacy would see that it is in the drawing of ever more finite and granular categories of bodies (and, therefore, categories of the private), that the very claim to citizenship is suspended. Conclusion: digitised dissections ``[Y]ou have all these complex policies and complex issues and the best way to put a brand on it is privacy ... . It's still very much an issue, it's still the fence being fought over, it's still the thing being negotiated ... [Y]ou've got to admit they're getting very, very clever at thinking these problems through, such as the privacy friendly data mining ... [I]t gets harder and harder to say this is a privacy invasion, how do you justify that when your opponents are becoming, in their privacy awareness, are getting more and more clever? ... [N]o human being is involved in deciding who and who is not a terrorist, it's all a computer, so not invading your privacy until you're flagged and then a human interferes.'' (6) For those involved in drawing `the battle line' for contesting the expansion of digitised security `solutions' at the border and beyond, the manner in which technologies such as Backscatter scans (as well as iris capture, data mining, and risk profiling) problematise `privacy' is a matter of real urgency. If the visualisation and visibility of the body at the border are `a question of human dignity', how can the indignity created at the border remain at the centre of critical challenges? Can contestation formulated around privacy encircle the potentiality of border scans, screenings, and projections, the demand for authentication, the precise metric of the bio that is at work? Is dignity secured by privacy? For some working in the field, a whole focus on the biometric (as identifier) leads away from the key issue: ``trying to make it more about the database than about the biometric'' (7) that is the retention, sharing, and use of data. Yet it is clear that processes of disclosure, visualisation, and projection of the body are key to contemporary securitised borders. As we have shown, the history of knowing the body via taking apart has always been a history of security or, more exactly, of securability. Within the public rituals of dissection from Renaissance anatomy theatres to contemporary digitised extractions lies the seductive idea of securing identity. If the visceral and bloody depths of the body could only be excavated to reveal true disposition and credibility, and if they could be expertly recorded and visualised, then identity itself could be rendered securable. Dissection practices, then, hold a potency derived from the promise of securability in an uncertain and capricious world. It scarcely matters whether the specific knowing of the body (and its `risks') by visualising its depths and recording its traces meaningfully `resolves' the problem of security. As in the genealogies of body knowledge we have discussed, it is the process of mapping of the territory of the body itselfthe classification of bodies or silhouettes into degrees of risk, normality, and deviance, the identification of a threatening presence at the border from abstracted aspects, the capacity to project a facsimile of a body forward in timewhich characterises contemporary digitised dissections and which drives their prominence in the public rituals of security. The `identity regime' that is emerging is of particular concern to those who have a local level concern with raising awareness
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Interview with Gus Hosein, Senior Fellow, Privacy International, London, 10 August 2007. Gareth Crossman, Director of Policy, Liberty, London, 10 August 2007.

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about the burgeoning use of biometric technologies. As one activist at the No Borders Camp 2007 (8) remarked, a critical preemptive language must be built around refusing identity and authentication regimes of all kinds: rather than simply resisting biometrics, there must be contestation built around a recognition of the ways in which people move and shift between the spacesspaces increasingly marked out by digitised identity authentication, data profiles, risk scores, and legalistic interventions around rights. The contemporary technologies that bring the body, its traces, and parts, into focus and the entanglement of these technologies with the politics of migration and securitysignal a decisive and novel direction and challenge. The contemporary visualizations of the body at the border operate on and through partitioned and finitely differentiated categories of people, and yet they are quite literally and physically removed from the political difficulties of decision. Where border agents view their screens from a distance, seeing not `real' people but data-based risk scores, chalk-line scans, algorithmic models, then where is a judgment actually made? What are the ethics of a decision taken on the basis of prescreened and visualised elements of data on a person? Certainly, as we have argued, and as the evidence from advocates and activists suggest, such questions pose new problems for the recourse to rights of privacy or human dignity. There are, of course, very real benefits to be gained through legal challenge, particularly for those most targeted or marginalised, but there is also something more at stake, a question of the way life itself is governed that is now in danger of slipping out of the debate. In this paper we have pointed to some of the difficulties that critical responses to technologies such as Backscatter must confront. Their logics can never be disrupted wholly by an appeal to surveillance or the shielding of the body from the surveillant ge de France, ``the gaze. As Michel Foucault declared in his late lectures at the Colle panopticon is completely archaic, the oldest dream of the oldest sovereign'' (2007, page 66). The newest dream of the youngest sovereign, then, is not one of disciplinary surveillance that ``concentrates and encloses'', but one of an apparatus of security that sees differential risks and normalities, ``opens up to let things happen'' (pages 44 ^ 45). While challenges to biometric borders and invasive imaging call up the sovereign territory of the body, border disclosures that take the body apart function as just such a security apparatus that transcends and transgresses corporeal territory. Digitised dissections, understood as visualisations that project fragmented and reduced elements of a person, are posing profound new questions of the political geographies of bodily boundaries and shifting the terrain for those seeking to challenge their governmental implications.
Acknowledgements. This research was carried out under the Contested Borders project (http:// www.contestedborders.org), supported by funding from the Economic and Social Research Council's Non-Governmental Political Action research programme (RES-155-25-0087). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Lived and Material Culture research seminar series at the Department of Geography, Durham University, October 2007; the `Engaging Objects' International Workshop at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, March 2008; and at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Boston, April 2008. Thanks to Marieke de Goede, Stephen Graham, and Michael Reinsborough for comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and also to the three anonymous reviewers. References ACLU, 2008, ``Backgrounder on body scanners and `virtual strip searches' '', American Civil Liberties Union, http://www.aclu.org/privacy/35540res20080606.html Agamben G, 1995 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA)
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Participant at Border Camp, near Crawley, UK, September 2007.

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