The ‘Body-graph’: Reading the Body as an Ab- solute Signature

This paper offers an ethically, philosophically and sociologically founded study of emerging body surveillance technologies and practices. The focus of the study is the transformation of the body into a source of information made possible by developments in technologies such as biometrics thus making biotechnology and information technology come together. Traditionally, and, of course, to a large extent today, a third party object is needed to verify the identities of people. A passport is an example of an object authorized by a third party, in this case the state, which verifies the identity of a person. With emerging body surveillance technologies the third party object is made redundant. The information needed for identification is provided by the body itself, which accordingly becomes a ‘password’. This coupling of biology and information constitutes important changes not only for identification purposes, but also for concerns relating to the replacement of personal characteristics with the availability of certain bodily features in contexts such as employment and insurance. The Human Genome Project (HGP) is another example of the body’s transformation into a veritable source of information. HGP aims at building a complete database of the location and chemical sequence of all human genes, and as a consequence the body is constituted as a read-