Global Information Landscapes and
Urban Transformations in Asia

Vienna, 20th - 22th of June 2005

Stefan Nowotny

Bio

Stefan Nowotny is a philosopher who lives in Vienna. He is a board member of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies and lecturer at the University of Lüneburg, (Institut für Kulturwissenschaften). From 2001 to 2003 he was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve (Centre de philosophie du droit), and is known for his participation in diverse theory and art projects as well as in various political initiatives, especially in migrant's contexts. Stefan Nowotny has published numerous essays on philosophical and political topics and is co-editor of several books.

Lecture

"Invisibly Seeing the Invisible" Spatial Order and Biometric Identification

Abstract

While the idea of the police establishing public order by "invisibly" penetrating the totality of social space has been familiar at least since the early 18th century, attempts of "seeing the invisible" have only been developed in the 19th century. They are part of an emerging "scientific police" as well as of an intensified administrative action which, at first, specifically applies to two kinds of dynamic social spaces: colonized spaces and the urban spaces of European cities. The development of biometric identification techniques such as fingerprint scans is a crucial element in this process: it turns the individual body into an archivable matrix of identity, thus allowing it to be controlled not only through direct measures of spatial inclusion/exclusion, but precisely as a moving body.