Unlike traditional state legibility—birth certificates, voter rolls—biometric systems encode political belonging directly into flesh. The fingerprint is not evidence of identity; it is identity. This represents a fundamental shift: from reading documents about bodies to reading bodies as documents. When manual laborers lose fingerprints to construction work, when elderly citizens’ irises cloud with cataracts, when disabled individuals cannot position themselves for scans—these aren’t technical glitches but political exclusions. The system renders them unrecognizable to the state itself.
This is not a theoretical problem, nor even a particularly exceptional one. I cannot use the fingerprint-recogntion feature on my phone, because my index fingerprints are usually too rough or worn down from using sandpaper.