Description
Facial Recognition technologies (FRTs) can be viewed as sensorial appendages of the state which act to engender and widen the breadth and depth of surveillance capacities, shaping policing subjectivities and concomitant punitive aspirations. The automatization of ‘labour of seeing’ with FRTs opens questions regarding the processes of recognition and production of ‘legible-citizen subjects’. The article seeks to make two inter-related theoretical interventions with respect to the use of FRTs in shaping distinct forms of recognition in the Global south. The first intervention unpacks ‘practices of seeing’ tethered to the dynamics of what is seen, how it is seen and who has the power to see.The second intervention addresses the ‘processes of knowing’ through which knowledge is constructed and validated by FRTs. The intertwinement between ‘politics of seeing’ and ‘processes of knowing’ embodied in facial recognition technology shapes ‘regimes of visibility’ which engenders new ways of seeing and being disciplined into legible subjects. By drawing on the empirical case of the use of facial recognition technology during the Delhi riots in 2020, the paper seeks to further the understanding of the violence undergirding these visual technologies that shape our understanding of shifty, deviant, unstable and unruly bodies.
