“One Unique You”: Passing and DNA-Testing as Ethnotechnological Apparatus

We understand passing in the double meaning of passing for someone or something else, but also passing through a border. The presupposition of this presentation is that the condition of possibility for passing and being mistaken or misrecognized relies on a conception of “identity” that functions as a property in the double meaning of what properly defines a subject and what belongs to this subject at the exclusion of someone else. We read this in the philosophical discourse of enlightenment where subjectivity is understood as sovereignty over the self, as self-possession; but also in the analysis of the slave codes by Cheryl Harris. Passing cannot exist without presupposing firm identities against the background of which someone or something does or does not pass. While identity categories tend to be essentializing, since they are grounded on the idea of property as a possession, we witness a trend to overcome this concept of identity for instance in intersectional discourse but also in the posthumanist discourse. What a human is in comparison to an animal or a machine has become increasingly contested. However, we will show that with genomic technology, among other kinds of identifying technologies—indeed, what technology does not serve the purposes of identification and targeting nowadays?—with genomic technologies, it becomes increasingly difficult to pass, to stay hidden, or to mask one’s identity. Especially for human beings targeted as undesirable—minorities, refugees, the unemployed—it becomes almost impossible to move beyond the borders of what comes to define an individual. All the newly-created technologies go in the direction of forbidding any kind of passing for or passing through. While new technologies are based on the principle of the identification of individuals, machines may slowly become the only beings able to pass for something else then what they are. Indeed, machines are allowed to pass for human like in the case of widely used chatbots replacing the workforce, but humans have to constantly prove that they are not machines like in the case of captcha identification procedures.