In 2001, Phil Agre famously argued that “Your Face Is Not a Barcode.” Yet, biometric identification and digital payment have seemingly become co-constitutive since then. After their integration into payment infrastructures, fingerprinting, face recognition, and iris scans have been adopted unevenly. Nevertheless, they already play a significant role in the everyday usage of digital monies around the world. Consequently, mobile media devices have become key mediators of what is termed a “repersonalization of money.” Smartphones and smartwatches now serve both as ‘contactless’ payment gadgets and mobile media, integrating former infrastructures such as payment cards (Giessmann 2026) and the mobile phones’ humble SIM cards into appified wallets.
In my 4S contribution, I aim to theorize the contemporary relationship between biometrics and 21st century digital payment technologies in a historically grounded way. In networked accounting, every non-cash payment transaction depends on a threefold relation of identification between accounts, bodies and personhood. But what has driven, and continues to drive this identificatory imperative to fuse an account, a body, and a person? How does this methodological individualism of ‘capturing the economic subject’ relate to a political economy of identification? “[W]e mobilize empirical materials so as to make a set of theoretical points,” wrote Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol (2000: 255). In my talk, I will follow their methodological advice, and draw on Western- und non-Western examples symmetrically.
- Agre, Philip E. (2001). “Your Face Is Not A Bar Code: Arguments Against Automatic Face Recognition In Public Places”, Whole Earth 106, (Winter 2001), 74-77.
- de Laet, Marianne, and Annemarie Mol (2000). “The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology.” Social Studies of Science 30, no. 2, 225-63.
- Giessmann, Sebastian (2026). Das Kreditkarten-Buch: Geschichte und Theorie des digitalen Bezahlens. Berlin: Kadmos.
